Jameswmiller's Blog

I’m realizing that the Western culture has redefined some long-held concepts of the self in a way that I think is changing history.

Plato compared the person to a charioteer guiding two horses.  One horse is the passions, the other is the moral impulse, and the charioteer must guide them to work together.  Freud similarly divided the self into a trinity: id, ego, and superego, with the superego providing a similar guiding force that manipulates the others.  And of course, philosopher Bruce Lee: “the scholar keeps the warrior in check.”

Always the self has been seen consisting of divergent drives, with a moral conscience serving as the driver or parent or best part of the self.  Through most of history, reason was the defining factor of the imago dei.  But we have overturned the concept of the self, and the ramification have yet to play out.

Now the most valuable element of the self is the id, the impulsive self, the uninhibited drive.  We give praise for candor more than diplomacy, and ultimate value is placed on “authenticity,” or sincere exposure of one’s most primitive and unchecked drives.  Raw sexuality, in life and literature, is seen to be truthful, and inhibition is merely a repressive hangover.  The free in free speech means free from responsibility, whereas its originators meant free from tyranny.  Moral conscience or discretion is puritanical, left over adolescent phobia, repression, authoritarian.  The superego is unrealistic and judgmental and must be overcome.  It is the repressive, hypocritical, control freak of a teacher who simply doesn’t understand the nature of the teenager.

The whole move is founded on the assumption that humanity at its core is pretty good.  It’s the return to Rousseau.  It is worlds apart from the Pauline theology of the first three chapters of Romans, which asserts without caveat that humanity at its core can’t do good.  It exalts the original self and dismisses original sin.  The current perception of the self is, among other things, unchristian.  It is the ultimate patricide of the moral conscience.

Here are the consequences.  If the superego is removed, the self loses hope.  Always before the moral conscience gave the self direction, even if the direction was unreasonably idealistic.  Nonetheless, the self had something to work on and somewhere to go.  If the fundamental human drives are, because of their authenticity, baptized, then the self is complete.  It has been made pure.

All of our anxieties come from the fact that we proved ourselves too good for Eden and now want back in.  Liberal optimism is again extending to contemporary America the apple.