Getting Past Freud

CONSERVATIVES have always had a problem with Freud. Liberals have not. “When I read Freud,” said the playwright, “the scales fell off my eyes.” Conservatives experience Freud as a charlatan; artists experience him as a revelation.

Freud’s psychology may seem to conservative Americans as a sudden, unlooked for outburst from Europe. But his psychology is a natural synthesis of Kant’s conscious ego, Fichte’s creative ego, Hegel’s stage theory of consciousness, and Schopenhauer’s theory of repression. The key link in this chain is Fichte, because he isolates a key component in the development of human knowledge: humans.

How does knowledge come into the world? Descartes thought that knowledge came from the scientist making logical inferences from known, indubitable facts to a necessary theory. But Fichte showed that facts infer nothing. It is the free imaginative act of the scientist that creates a new theory. And that act comes from impulse: “All our thought is founded on our impulses,” he wrote. Living a century after Fichte, could Albert Einstein have developed special relativity without bold leaps of impulse and imagination?

Of course Fichte’s discovery applies not just to scientists but also to artists, writers, and playwrights. In the nineteenth century Fichte’s ideas electrified a whole generation of them. In the twentieth century Freud’s ideas drove the whole artistic culture. Freud taught the young artist to regard his dreams as a holy font of impulse welling up from the unconscious id. And let him beware of repressing the unconscious impulse; that would make his creative soul sick with neurosis.

For the middle-class conservative, this all seemed crazy. Western religion emphasized the importance of commandments and covenants; democratic capitalism demonstrated the primacy of the rule of law, the sanctity of contract, and the value of cooperation and compromise. How could the untrammeled creative ego be reconciled with the rules? Surely it could not. And so conservatives brushed Freud aside.

But rejecting German psychology means going back to the psychology of Locke and Hume. All of that, any German will tell you, ended when Kant awoke from his dogmatic slumber over 200 years ago. Without an answer to the call of Freud conservatives cannot hope to graduate from their successes in politics and economics and start to influence the modern conversations in the arts and the humanities. Conservatives need a psychology that can meet and beat the insights of Fichte and Freud on creativity, an intellectual system that can reconcile conservative rules and tradition with liberal creativity and then go one better.

Fortunately, such a theory already exists. Developed by American psychologist Clare Graves in the 1960s and 1970s, it was published as Spiral Dynamics by Don Beck and Christopher Cowan. It’s a stage theory developed from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and brightened up with a bit of color. (Link here for more details.) Here’s how it tells the story of the American Dream.

America’s immigrants, “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” arrive in the city barely able to function in the new land. They are “impulsive red,” knowing only power and powerlessness. Powerless victims, the impulsive reds spiral downwards until they find salvation in the life of rules, the One True Way, living as “purposeful blue” in the world of the enthusiastic Christian and the respectable middle class. But the children of the middle class want a little adventure. Finding that life in safe suburban Scarsdale a hell they discover that they can change the rules a little and treat life as an adventure. They become “creative orange,” playing the business game or the arts game to win the glittering prizes. But children of inventive entrepreneurs reject the hero’s journey of creativity. They choose instead the inner journey of spirituality and long to cooperate and share rather than create and compete. They become “communitarian greens.” Beyond green, of course is “integral yellow” where the compassionate conservative, shall we say, comprehends all the levels below and understands that each stage “transcends and includes” the ones before it. Above this ridge, of course, new peaks will rise.

The way to understand the power of this system is to put it to work. The enquiring mind might wonder whether it is a good idea for the welfare state to treat everyone as an impulsive red victim. Might not the red victim rise out of squalor to purposeful blue competence with a little tough love, say a time limit on welfare benefits? In the matter of education, might not a red immigrant mother choose a education in blue discipline for her children while the college professor might choose an education to encourage orange creativity and green cultural enrichment? And might we not respect the choice of each?

With a psychology like this conservatives can get past Freud and win the culture war.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

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