Freud and Marx

I've been reading some people from the 1940s early 1950s. Academics for the most part. None of them are Freudians or Marxists and they are not the sort of people much inclined to be true believers in anything. Freud and Marx come up because they are the sort of thing that came up in intellectual conversation back then.

It's fascinating because there was more than enough evidence that both were wrong at the time and yet both held this sort of sway. And it slowly became obvious that the power of both thinkers was more of a superstition than a rational belief. It was reading Watson that it jumped out at me. It would be hard to imagine someone less sympathetic to the idea of dream analysis than Watson and yet there is something of doth protest too much about his writing. Watson can't quite shake the superstitious feeling that dreams might have some terrible significance. That they told us about a whole secret world of experience that could rise up and swallow us.

It's the same with Marx. People knew enough to see that this too was pseudo-scientific claptrap but the thing they couldn't shake was the belief that there was some sort of moral retribution coming. These people had lived through the depression and WW2 and they couldn't shake the fear that everything was going to fall apart. They feared Marx the same way modern rational people can't hear some apocalyptic prediction based on some ancient Mayan calendar and worry that just maybe this might just be right.

And then there are—as there always will be—those who hope that it all falls apart. It's pretty easy to see this in those who embraced the "hermeneutics of suspicion" in the 1970s and 1980s. Quite the opposite of what the term would suggest, in practice the belief is based on a naive superstition that what they don't like wasn't solid. And the faith extends to the entire modern left now. These people looked at every family and saw alcoholism, incest and affairs because that is what they really wanted to believe. And thus the incredible anger at someone like Sarah Palin. That a  way of life persists in spite of their faith it would crumble isn't just disagreement to them it's heresy.

Going Pomo

Okay, this is one of my weirder thought chains.

I was watching Gilligan's Island and was inspired to Google The Wellingtons, the group that sings the theme song. They were a Kingston Trio-ey sort of group who had all sorts of brushes with fame. And at one point they appeared on the show itself as part of a band called "the Mosquitos" and intended to be a Beatles parody. Anyway, the Beatles were the future and they weren't.

But if we follow through the ascending levels of coolness beginning with bands like the Four Freshmen there is a continuity. You get all these clean-cut groups like the Freshmen, Preps, Lettermen then they are replaced by folk groups like The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary and so forth and then they are replaced by the Beach boys and the Beatles and the Mamas and the Papas. Looked at from the distance what you notice is not the discontinuity but the continuity. All these bands were built on close harmony singing.

And they pretty much had to be as each group of young people came along and learned close harmony singing because that was what you did only by the time they hit the age to be performers the groups they had emulated were no longer cool. They couldn't invent new musical techniques, so they put on new clothes and played electric guitars instead of acoustic and adopted attitudes that were a little more cynical.

The continuity running from Modernism to Postmodernism is Marx, Freud and Nietzsche. They get used in different ways. The modernists really believed Marx had described the mechanisms of economics and history, they really believed that Freud had explained the workings of the mind and they really believed that Nietzsche had explained the birth of tragedy. Somewhere along the line the evidence that all three were unprovable nonsense rather than legitimate theories became so overwhelming that it could no longer be willfully ignored.

And then along comes Postmodernism to say, hey we don't have to give up on this technique we just have to dress it up differently and be a bit more cynical in our attitudes. We don't have to believe in the new truths these guys were so hopeful of finding but we can still accept the destructive side of what they did.