Cultural conservatives face a time when it is not simply a
question of debating the nature of our culture on some commonly agreed
foundation. It is a time when we face the complete transformation of our
culture into an anti-culture.
Perhaps
one of the most confusing aspects of this present age is the sheer speed with
which unquestioned orthodoxies—for example, the nature of marriage, or the
tight connection between biology and gender, or the vital importance of free
speech to a free society—are either crumbling before our eyes or have been
completely overthrown. If cultural conservatives are to respond to these
changes, it is not enough to address each of them as isolated, discrete
phenomena. We must first understand them as symptomatic of deeper cultural
pathologies; and that requires a broader theoretical framework that sets the
iconoclasm of today in the context of wider, deeper, social and cultural
changes.
One thinker who can help us with this is
Philip Rieff. Rieff is today justly famous for his 1966 book, The Triumph of the
Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. With this remarkably prescient
analysis of how personal, psychological well-being would become the primary
purpose of life, Rieff spoke more truth than he could possibly have
anticipated. The world in which we live today, where everything—even biological
sex—is to be subordinated to how we feel inside, was barely conceivable in
1966. Today it is hard to imagine a world where the therapeutic is not
normative.
Yet Rieff’s significance as a cultural
critic is broader and greater than his analysis of Psychological Man, and it is
here where he can help address that question of why we now have so much
cultural iconoclasm of such speed and intensity. The key text is his
posthumously published trilogy, Sacred Order/Social
Order, where he reflects on the emerging culture of
the West in a way that helps to clarify why our age subverts so much those
institutions, beliefs, and practices that have traditionally defined Western
civilization. The reason, Rieff argues, is a seismic change in how our society
justifies its beliefs and practices, a change hundreds of years in the making
whose results are now arriving thick and fast in the public square.
Sex, Religion, and Civilization
To grasp the underlying thesis of Sacred Order/Social Order, it is first helpful to
understand something of Rieff’s debt to Sigmund Freud. Rieff was a scholar (and
admirer) of Freud. His first major work was Freud: The Mind of the
Moralist (1959), and his cultural criticism reveals
debts to the psychoanalyst at several key points.
First,
Rieff agrees with Freud that civilization is the result of a trade-off. For
human beings, sex is the key to happiness; but if all human beings indulged
their sexual instincts as they wished, there would be total chaos. Civilization
therefore involves repressing and redirecting sexual urges so that people can live
together in relative harmony.
Nobody will enjoy perfect happiness—hence the “discontents” in the title of
Freud’s famous essay, Civilization and Its
Discontents—but more people will enjoy more happiness for
longer than in a world of sexual anarchy. All that repressed sexual energy will
go into cultural projects, such as art, music, and commerce.
We might summarize the implications of this
by saying that, for Freud (and subsequently for Rieff), civilization is defined
by what it forbids, particularly in the sexual realm. Culture is defined by
that set of institutions, practices, and beliefs that inculcate and transmit
these prohibitions from one generation to the next.
This leads to Rieff’s second debt to Freud
in the realm of cultural criticism: the role of religion. For Freud, religion
was an illusion. That is not primarily a statement about its metaphysical
truth—though Freud was himself an atheist. Rather, it means that religion
fulfills a specific purpose. It offers a picture of the world that grounds the
prohibitions that constitute civilization in a transcendent order of being. For
example, the Ten Commandments in the Bible are designed to reflect the
character of God. They are therefore not presented as arbitrary, and they
possess authority, not because they reflect the immanent concerns of Jewish
culture, but because they are spoken by a creator and redeemer God.
Sacred
and Social Orders
In Sacred Order/Social Order, Rieff offers a historical
scheme for categorizing cultures in light of these basic insights. Rieff calls
these First, Second, and Third World cultures. First Worlds are characterized
by a variety of myths that ground and justify their cultures through something
that transcends the immediate present. These might be the tales of the gods and heroes in the Iliad or the Norse sagas, the philosophy of Plato,
or the mythic stories of origin found in Native American societies. Whatever
their specific content, what they share in common is that they make the present
culture accountable to something greater than itself. Rieff says that a belief
in fate is perhaps the key here.
Second Worlds are characterized not by a
belief in fate but by faith. The
great examples would be Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, where cultural codes
are rooted in the belief in a specific divine and sovereign being who stands
over and above creation, and to whom all creatures are ultimately accountable.
First and Second Worlds are similar in that both set their social order upon a
deeper, even sacred, order. It is the Third World that represents a decisive
rupture on this point.
Third
Worlds are characterized by their repudiation of any sacred order. There is nothing in a Third World
beyond this world by which culture can be justified. The
implications of this are, according to Rieff, comprehensive and catastrophic.
First, because of their rejection of a sacred order, Third World cultures face
an unprecedented challenge: that of justifying themselves on the basis of
themselves. No culture in history, Rieff notes, has ever done this
successfully. It is a fool’s errand that ends in cultural collapse:
No culture in history has sustained
itself merely as a culture, however attractive and authoritative. Cultures are
dependent on their predicative sacred orders and break into mere residues
whenever their predicates are broken. That is the main reason why our late
second cultures and early thirds are increasingly unstable.
Living in a Third World Culture
To
return to our initial question—why is so much traumatic cultural change
occurring with such rapidity and intensity today—we can helpfully apply this
scheme to our current context.
The proliferation of identities and the consequent chaotic militancy of
identity politics is inextricably related to the collapse of the sacred, to the
demolition of any transcendent metaphysical basis on which a coherent social
order might be founded. Even the question of “What is human nature?” becomes
something impossible to answer with any degree of certainty or consensus.
Rieff also notes that Third Worlds are
marked by scorn for the moral codes on which Second Worlds are based. They turn
these into matters of scorn, and vice comes to be regarded as virtue, a message
pressed with vigor by Third World cultural elites whose dominant attitude to
any semblance of a sacred order is one of mockery, cynicism, and irony. Perhaps
the Rolling Stones capture the Third World cultural mood best: “Now that every
cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.” That neatly summarizes Rieff’s
description of a dying society. The name of the song from which those lyrics
come? “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Third
World culture is, of course, the culture of the Psychological Man and the
therapeutic quest for well-being that Rieff so brilliantly described in his earlier works. If
there is nothing beyond this world for which to strive, or by which we are held
accountable, the gravitational pull toward personal happiness as the purpose of
life becomes irresistibly strong, and the rationales for repression become
increasingly weak.
Again, we might apply this therapeutic
aesthetic to our current context. What is the increasingly thin foundation on
which today’s sexual codes are built? Mere consent. It is
not the intrinsic nature of the individual sexual act that renders it
unacceptable today. Rather, it is whether those involved are willing
participants. Negotiating personal desire, and not objective moral judgments,
has become the ethical order of the day.
This
leads to a second point: Third Worlds inevitably tend toward individual,
personal hedonism. That means
that the purpose of sex will be transformed, and the taboos surrounding it
abolished. Abortion is emblematic of this. It shatters the idea of sex as
having a teleological purpose in reproduction, and it removes evidence of past
sexual activity. All that is really significant in the act of intercourse is
the moment of sexual encounter and the instant of passing pleasure it provides.
This hedonism undermines the prohibitions on incest, homosexuality, and any
other kind of sexual coupling one cares to imagine. It furthers the idea that
such taboos are arbitrary at best, and thus ripe for abolition.
The Anti-Culture and Its Deathworks
Given that Rieff believes cultures to be
defined by what they prohibit, particularly in the sexual realm, the Sadean
vision of the Third World as one of the abolition of sexual codes, of
“forbidding to forbid,” has far-reaching significance. Indeed, it leads Rieff
to call this type of culture an anti-culture. Its
purpose is not to transmit beliefs and practices from one generation to the
next. Its purpose is quite the opposite: to shatter past values and to engage
in the constant revolutionizing of beliefs and behavior. While all First and
Second World cultures acknowledged the reality of transgression, in the Third
World transgression becomes the norm. In fact, given that it is forbidden to
forbid, the very concept of transgression ceases to have any stable meaning.
There
are two other distinctive pathologies of the Third World that we see all around
us and that Rieff argues are unprecedented. First: the cultural elites,
committed to the Third World project, are essentially proponents of
anti-culture. In the past, elites worked to transmit the sacred order/social
order from generation to generation. Not anymore. Iconoclasm is cool and
liberating
Second, this iconoclastic destruction of
the older culture is conducted by means of the characteristic “cultural”
production of both latter-day Second Worlds and nascent Third Worlds: the deathwork. A deathwork is something that takes the
idioms of the Second World and subverts them in a way that destroys the very
foundations on which the social order was built. Examples he gives include the
photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, Serrano’s Piss Christ, and
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. All in their different ways mock the
values of religion while proposing nothing of any great significance to replace
it.
A good example of how this plays out in
our world is provided by the fate of the concept of sexual modesty. In a Second
World, debates about modesty would concern its definition and limits, because
the concept itself is grounded in a higher authority. In a Third World, that
foundation has gone, and the concept itself is therefore not simply to be
revised but rather to be abolished. This is achieved via various means: for
example, the prevalence of pornography and the constant ridiculing by the
elites of those ideals that originally gave sex meaning and significance, such
as chastity, self-control, monogamy, and so on.
If we truly want to understand not just
the individual symptoms but the underlying causes of our current cultural
chaos, we should ponder Rieff’s later works. His approach to culture gives us
insights into much of what is happening around us in terms of its content, its
speed, and its intensity. The adulation of iconoclastic figures such as rock
stars, the constant sneering at traditional Second World beliefs and social
practices in movies and on television, and the popularity of the vulgar, amoral
anarchy of reality TV—these all represent aspects of the Third World and its
deathworks and anti-culture. Even the cynical irony with which many of us are
tempted to view the world is a deathwork. And that is depressing because it
shows the depth of the problem. We live at a time when it is not simply a
question of debating the nature of our culture on some commonly agreed
foundation. It is a time when we face the complete transformation of our
culture into an anti-culture.
Rieff’s approach is not without its
problems of classification. For example, is militant Islam—of the kind
represented by Islamic State—an example of a Second World sacred order or a
deathwork? In other words, is it seeking to ground culture on the transcendent?
Or is it trying simply to smash the culture that exists? Perhaps it is a form
of Fascism in religious garb, as some have cogently argued.
Either
way, Rieff’s basic insights seem sound, and there is no doubt that the overall
picture is bleak. Cultural conservatives (in the true and literal sense of the
term) are not engaging opponents with whom they simply disagree about the
content of culture. They disagree with them on what exactly culture is: either
it is something grounded in a sacred order or it is something free-floating and
up for grabs. Those are incommensurable positions. If Rieff is right, the
prospect for improvement is minimal. As Nietzsche’s Madman pointed out many
years ago, if you unchain the earth from the sun, you end up plunging into
total darkness.
About
the Author
Carl R. Trueman teaches in
the Calderwood School of Arts and Letters at Grove City College, PA. He writes
regularly for Modern Reformation and for First Things.
