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civilization and under the governance of a pleasure principle developed
by this civilization. What this would look like is difficult to predict.
But it is at least an open question, all gloomy critics notwithstanding,
whether the pleasure principle is not now celebrating undreamt-of
triumphs in The Brave New World of T.V. Murphy. And whatever
view we take "in the long run," when, in Keynes' phrase, we'll all be
dead, it is undeniable, I think, that the very technological and historical
conditions which make it possible for us to envisage an age of abundance,
freedom, and love will and must influence the cultural face of this
future . It is surely a safe lesson of history that a great many other
factors, beside the self-regulating mechanisms that may (or may not)
unfold within the instincts, will condition man's passage to a new world.
Thus the aesthetic dimension cannot bridge the crucial gap either–
if for no other reason than that society is not a work of art. We can
never wipe the canvas clean and start all over again as much as we
dream of it; we can never remake ourselves or history out of entirely
new cloth. The prophetic visions of rebirth, resurrection, and the new
life in eternity are, ultimately, illusory phantasms, born of an undying
faith in the omnipotence of thought and nourished by the romantic
longings of the perennial child in man.
5
By contrast, Freud's recogni–
tion of an ineluctable ambiguity in man's quest to master nature, social
relations, and himself appears much more "realistic" in that it is based
on a sober estimate of the record of human history and personal ex–
perience verifiable in our own lives. This recognition, as we have seen,
did not prevent Freud from taking a stand against surplus repression
and alienation; but it did save him from saying that the historical am–
biguity of man and his culture would ever be resolved permanently.
For that we not only know too little-but too much.
Ambiguity runs as a persistent theme through the structure of
Freud's thought. Culture is an ambiguous, unstable compound just as
the ego is an ambiguous, precarious organization. Mental health and
normality are flexible, relative, and ambiguous terms, not clear-cut
propositions dividing the children of light from the children of dark–
ness.
A
fortiori,
the notions of a "good" life or a "good" society are
5 There is, of course, the phenomenon of genuine religious conversions; but
their effects are notoriously neutral in the balance sheet of history. They are
usually confined to the individual- in which case he is "reborn" as a new man
"within,"
i.e.,
either participates in the social scene as before or becomes an
outcast from society (guru, hermit, monk) . On the other hand, when religious
conversions have changed the course of history (as in the case of Constantine,
Mohammed, or Luther), the "dialectic of civilization" has not been affected
by them.
