Humanism's Slavish Mythology

It is clear that the rule of "tolerance" in such western nations as Canada has come to mean no free speech or no sharing of free thoughts. In such an Orwellian milieu, truly "some animals are more equal than others." Looking for the roots of such humanistic self- annihilation of freedom, we must as usual look to what started the downward spiral: the procrustean movement from human dignity born of the Judeo-Christian notion of humanity, imago dei, into the narrow, sordid, Freudian paradigm of humans as talking animals, the product of the mindless, arbitrary mechanism of evolution.

As friend and teacher Gil Bailie has noted and with whom I fully agree, there is nothing wrong with the idea of natural selection per se. It is only when we come to give it an overarching dominion for meaning that evolution is out of its depth. As with science itself, evolution does not begin nor claim to answer questions beyond what can be studied by the empirical method. Worse yet, casting out the world view of the biblical faiths unwittingly opens the door to ancient mythological world views: our human default pagan posture toward the world and ourselves.

So trying to apply Freud theory to the meaning of human beings and culture is like applying the mechanical applications of an automobile exhaust manifold to marriage, parenthood, or the Holy Eucharist. The paradigm buckles and folds because it is being called on to do what it never claimed it could do.

Yet this is precisely what has happened in the west, largely by pols and commissars and ministers riding the presuppositions of science, not realizing they are ushering in not only a diminished and fractured form of civilization but a more violent, brutal, and slavish mythology As Gil Bailie says,

... the thing about it [Freudian mythology] being another mythology, at the heart of which is Greek mythology, at the heart of which is violence , is something which Girard touches on in the same context, where he says, “Victimage mechanisms remain fundamental to any kind of mythology.” So there is always going to be some victim expelled, something expelled, in order to make this system have meaning. And what is expelled is the biblical revelation. That is why the theory ginned up by Freud and Jung and Eliade and Joseph Campbell, et al., were really a harkening back to systems of the primitive sacred as a refuge from the revelation that was overtaking them, which is coming right out of the biblical tradition.

The revelation about the sacrificial or scapegoating nature of conventional religion and culture, and the revelation about the mimetic structure of subjectivity. And so we can now see, or will pretty soon be able to see, that so many of these theories that presume to be a great improvement on the old, moribund Judeo-Christian tradition were in fact an attempt to hide from the revelation that was coming from that tradition and overtaking all the modern presumptions. And it’s still happening in our day.

So Freud’s move from the biblical tradition to Greek myth was a perfect replica of the defining maneuver of Western humanism. And it reproduced the familiar combination of initial enthusiasm and eventual despair [nihilism] that each of humanism’s endless revivals always repeat. Remember: Guy LaFort described [cited in the previous tape] the ‘successful’ psychoanalysis in these terms: “The patient and the analyst have reached the same point of mutual disillusionment when they call it quits. There is no longer any transcendence involved, and the best sign of a completed analysis is the patient’s lack of gratitude.”