Critical Blindness

Freud ranks among the great critical minds of the modern era. He did not take our conscious beliefs at face value, recognizing that they often reflect unconscious desires. “One thing only do I know for certain,” he wrote in Civilization and Its Discontents, “and that is that man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness—that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with argument.”

Freud was, I think, correct. We tend to argue passionately, not dispassionately, and that leads us to emphasize the evidence that supports the conclusions we want to be true. John Henry Newman said as much, although unlike Freud he did not commit the fallacy of equating what we desire with self-serving illusions. We are made for truth, thought Newman, and if our desires are well-formed and properly directed, we’ll end up wishing for the happiness of knowing and living in accord with the truth.

In any event, it was reflecting on Steven Pinker’s sharp attack a few years ago on a proposed revision to the Harvard core curriculum—it would have required students to engage religious questions—that made me think of Freud. Freud was convinced that things are hidden below the surface, and he saw his scientific work as showing the instinctual sources of religion, culture, and morality. His deepest wish, it seems, was to live without illusions, especially without the illusions of religion. I suppose Steven Pinker has the same wish, as do Richard Dawkins and many of the so-called New Atheists. Fair enough. One wishes for what one wishes.

Yet, a now forgotten but quirky and insightful book by the venerable Notre Dame professor of literature John S. Dunne, The City of the Gods, helped me see something hidden below the surface of this apparently high-minded critical project. It seems not to have occurred to Freud that his wish to live without illusions may have been so powerful as to have clouded his reason and infected his arguments about wish fulfillment. After all, his strong desire to live without illusions will, according to his own theory, have the effect of conjuring illusions—illusions of illusions, if you will—that provide him with something to debunk and unmask.

The tendency of the New Atheists to conjure caricatures of Christianity that they can destroy with their arguments suggests that the same dynamic of wish fulfillment holds for them as well. And not just for them. Our postmodern professoriate manages to find racism, patriarchy, and oppression everywhere. They do so with such sure ease that I find myself wondering if they are in the end, as Freud warns, using the rhetoric of critical thinking to support their illusions—illusions in this case arising from an intense wish to be critically and morally superior.