I have a feeling that when I’m older and reflecting on my experience as a young man, there will be a vital point in the story when I exclaim, “And then I found The Feminine Mystique!” It’s bewildering to consider that the work — which launched the modern feminist movement almost 20 years before I was born — could relate in any significant way to my own life. In fact it’s more than just significant; the application to and explanation of my own life is monumental. But I’m not alone there. I think Friedan’s work applies to our entire society. My new theory is that many of the forces affecting women in the ’50s and ’60s now affect both genders equally.

I’m only halfway through the book, so I can’t summarize the entire thing yet. I’m trying to get in the habit of posting little bits as I read, instead of trying to cover the whole whopper once I’m done. (That’s been difficult since I’ve realized I’m kind of like an Ent — those tree-like creatures from Lord of the Rings. Treebeard’s saying went something like, “It takes us a really long time to say anything at all, so we don’t say anything unless it’s worth taking a really long time to say.”)

About a month ago, I found a copy of Mere Christianity lying around my family’s house and decided to poke through it. I was only vaguely familiar with the work, but I soon learned that it was originally given as a series of radio addresses in England during WWII. The goal was to “educate” people about Christianity in a time of warfare, since many in England had never learned about the religion, and the country as a whole was short on hope. I skipped to Chapter 4 in Book 3, entitled “Morality and Psychoanalysis,” since I’m very interested and fairly well-educated in psychology. After a brief mention of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Lewis poses that Christianity and psychoanalysis share the common goal of “putting the human machine right.”

He then makes an example of homosexuality to illustrate what is normal versus abnormal behavior, and what are rational versus irrational feelings. He says that “what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove abnormal feelings” (p. 90). In fact this is far from the truth. Psychoanalysis is concerned with neuroses that arise when fears and desires are repressed into the subconscious. Psychoanalysis would never hope to turn someone from homosexuality to heterosexuality; it would uncover the repressed homosexual urges hidden beneath the conscious mind of a heterosexual. The point of psychoanalysis — and modern psychology in general — is to help people feel better and lead more fulfilling lives, not to make them “normal.”

Coincidentally, I’m currently reading Man And His Symbols (edited and co-authored by Carl Jung), and I just came to a passage that illustrates this point. Jung explains how, while “the surface of our world seems to be cleansed of all superstitious and irrational elements,” this is not actually the case. “Skepticism and scientific conviction exist in him side by side with old-fashioned prejudices, outdated habits of thought and feeling, obstinate misinterpretations, and blind ignorance” (p. 86) But I’m straying from my desired topic, so I must return to Lewis.

After suggesting that psychoanalysis could cure a homosexual or a person who has an “irrational” fear of war (forgive me for not knowing how fear of war could ever be irrational), Lewis says it becomes a question of morality. The fact that he equates a soldier’s bravery with Christian morality is one issue. But then he continues to explain that free will allows people to choose, and subsequent life choices “are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself” (p. 92). I mentioned this to my brother, and he informed me that this is the basis for every role-playing video game (i.e. – RPG) ever made; the character’s decisions add up over time to create a being that is essentially good or bad. We both had a laugh over this, but I shuddered with fear over the next point is Lewis’ statement.

Lewis argues that morality is relative, which as a concept has some truth in it, but not the way he presents it. It goes like this: If a person who is basically “bad” commits a good act, it’s a much greater event than if a basically “good” person commits the same good act. On the other hand, if a “good” person commits a sin, it’s much, much worse than if a “bad” person carries out the same sin. This is supposedly because bad people cannot discern right from wrong. Concerning our actions, he says that “the bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters” (p. 93).

How this translates in my mind is to justify an act such as the Holocaust; in other words, it was okay for Hitler to run a Nazi government and commit mass genocide, because he was a “bad” person and was not equipped to make choices based on Christian morality. That example is too rough for you? Then consider it this way, once again how I interpret it. Lewis’ argument puts obedient Christians in a bind, for they want to believe that they are “good,” and for a good person to commit even the slightest sin is much worse than anything that a “bad” person could do. And above all else, Christians want to be admitted into heaven when they die, so they must always be concerned about their actions and feel guilty for their sins. Those high up in the Christian organization, or powerful leaders with ties to the church, can get away with being “bad” people, making unsound choices and committing acts of horror, because they have the excuse of being incapable of moral choice.

As Lewis puts it: “That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it” (p. 91). That Christianity (nor any other religion) has not fixed the dilemmas of the human individual or its civilization is a fitting enough closing to Lewis’ flawed statement. We need to develop a better explanation for why we are how we are. Since I have read Freud extensively and I am getting further into Jung’s work, I’m confident that psychology will provide the most fulfilling answers in that regard. Now the real problem is getting people to think critically about a document of indoctrination like Mere Christianity.

I just finished listening to the audiobook version of God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. While the subject material is quite controversial, Hitchens’ approach is not. He focuses much less on vague concepts like faith and belief, and much more on the real-world concerns surrounding religion. Hitchens concedes that he pays respect to all customs and religions, and has entered many churches, synagogues, and temples without reservation. However, he is very clear about his stance on religion. He calls it a “babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge, as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs.” He starts off with three main points:

1. Religion and churches are all man-made entities
2. Ethics and morals are independent from faith and cannot arise from it
3. Religion is both amoral and immoral

Hitchens then runs through many true examples of the pitfalls of religion before branching into discussions of metaphysics and philosophy. I’ll share with you some of my favorite sections. Hitchens tears the Mormon religion limb from limb, asserting that 25,000 (twenty-five thousand) words in the Book of Mormon were copied directly from the Old Testament of the Holy Bible. An additional 2,000 words were taken from the New Testament. And yet Joseph Smith supposedly transcribed the text from golden plates delivered from God by an angel. Given that Mormonism is one of the largest religions to be created in America, it’s a shame that Hitchens doesn’t discuss the joke that is Scientology (I think I’ll save my own comments on that subject for another blog post).

My other favorite section explains the Catholic Church’s friendly treatment of Hitler’s Nazi regime. At one time, the Papacy even celebrated Hitler’s birthday. Then after WWII, the Vatican used its power to provide passports and funding for Nazi leaders to flee to South America. But these two examples are merely the most humorous, and not nearly representative of all the evil that religion has caused on earth.

Naturally, a book like this would be lacking without any mention of psychology and literature. Hitchens does reference Freud on a few occasions. Freud said that religion cannot free human beings of their fear of death. Likewise, Freud apparently said that religion is inevitable until mankind stops fearing death and breaks its tendency for wishful thinking, neither of which is extremely probable. Hitchens claims that “philosophy steps in where religion fails, just as science and medicine for alchemy, and astronomy for astrology.” But his main suggestion for deriving moral behavior without religion is essentially to obey karma. Hitchens suggests that the saying “treat others as you would wish to be treated” can be taught to children and requires no violence, massacres, or sadistic behavior.

Hitchens is one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve ever come across. The extent of his intellect makes itself clear throughout the book. The book succeeds most at explaining all the disgusting behavior that religion has promoted and allowed. But obviously any one book isn’t going to convince the world that all current religions are outdated and irrelevant (as Bill Hicks would often say). Still, Hitchens says that a new enlightenment is necessary. He condones “the study of literature and poetry for its own sake and for the greater good of mankind.” He also commends the unrestricted pursuit of scientific discovery and the utilization of widespread information on the Internet.

And that, of course, is why I write on this blog.

Aside from The Outsider and Tropic of Cancer, the other life-changing book I read this year (yes, it’s been a big year of reading discoveries) was Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. I actually heard about it last fall, when I bought a large book on Stanley Kubrick as a Christmas present for my brother. The author of the Kubrick book was semi-obsessed with Brown’s work, and he would reference it when writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Given my semi-obsession with those films, I had no choice but to get Life.

Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”

“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”

This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.

As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)