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PARTISAN REVIEW
systems of psychology and ethics, telling you what human nature is
like and what it ought to be like, and devising a hard-and-fast division
of sheep and goats-with sanctions for being a goat. And the definition
of good and bad is backed by the claim to be able to prove that it is
Right to be Good and Wrong to be Bad.
A genuine and natural humanist to my mind would be a person
who thought that human beings have it in them to work out a reason–
ably happy way of living on this planet; that means recognizing both
their gifts and their limitations and so finding out what is possible for
them as individual people. But most people who call themselves hu–
manists spend their lives trying ideologies and finding them wanting.
They too are often anxious and guilty because they do not love actual
human beings all the time or as much as they love Humanity; they
hunger and thirst after Righteousness, they miserably want to be Good.
In practice, all the ideologies tell us that we are miserable sinners
with no health in us unless we join their side. Among those which, in
the '30s, asked for both our money
and
our life, the systems of Marx
and Freud were pre-eminent.
It
was difficult not to join one or the
other and some people tried to belong to both, and no doubt some
patients of these rival treatments for social guilt contracted schizophrenia.
That browbeating is aimed at breast beating, that what looks like
the appeal to reason is really the appeal to the sense of sin, and is
thus no more and no less cogent than blackballing at a club, is perhaps
more obvious in the case of Marxism than of Freudianism. The first
of these ideologies is mainly concerned with social guilt, the other with
neurotic guilt. Both are systems of diagnosis and treatment, but hardly
cure, for it appears that both of them aim at canalizing and making
use of the guilt rather than alleviating it.
All Marxist intellectuals who have resigned from the bourgeoisie
want, or are supposed to want, to be at least honorary members of the
working class or even to be completely merged; in fact to be born
anew. This last they can never achieve either unaided, or even by spe–
cial grace from Lenin or Stalin; their bourgeois conditioning has left
them with an ineradicable taint of Original Sin. And so the moral
anxiety remains; the benefits of the therapy are only leasehold, they
are never yours outright. Similarly with Freudianism. I single out psy–
choanalysis because during the period to which I am referring it was
more influential than any of the other systems, its ideological effect was
more marked; although all the systems proposed some sort of objective
norm in which you had better enroll, I do not remember meeting any
psychotherapist of any school who was able to state his theory tenta-
