Ambivalence: the Pros and Cons

My favorite Groucho Marx line has always been “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Basically, I want to be a contrarian when I grow up. In The Secret Language of Birthdays, the description of those born on November 4th (my birthday) is “The Provocateur.” It is safe to say that this very blog exists so that I can practice at contrarian provocations. But since the truest words ever spoken were “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV,” in real life the closest I get to Groucho is “Whatever it is, I am both for it and against it.”

Having constructed an entire life out of ambivalence, I would say that the most interesting thing about the condition is that, far from being undecided, ambivalence is the state of being doubly decided. Sometimes this means that my ambivalence charades as Groucho’s contrarianism. For example, when confronted with outspoken atheism I can only think how obnoxious the ill-founded certainty in materialism is in the face of the stupefying mystery that anything exists whatsoever. But when confronted with religious piety I find my thoughts turning towards a) natural selection and b) how much more I’d rather watch a college basketball game than go to church/synagogue/meditation hall etc. This presents a façade of “Whatever it is, I’m against it” consistency, but is in fact the thoroughly inconsistent condition of being both for and against religion at the same time that I am for and against scientific secularism.

It should come as no surprise that this ambivalent Episcopalian ended up with a devout Jew, which arrangement protects me in equal parts from 1) my religion, 2) her religion, and 3) the absence of religion, while exposing me to each. Along these same lines, in my professional life I work hand in glove with management, while remaining an active member of the line worker’s labor union. And while my personal beliefs about human behavior are grounded almost entirely in a Freudian psychodynamic model, in my professional practice I am a strict behaviorist. The topography of my everyday world becomes: the ayes had it, but when and for how long?

So, by way of a possible explanation of ambivalence, and given that I am off the clock and we are deep in the weeds of my personal beliefs, Freud. Note the precise word Freud uses in his landmark 1923 essay, The Ego and the Id, to describe the change that takes place in a boy once his Oedipus complex takes hold:

“… until the boy’s sexual wishes in regard to his mother become more intense and his father is perceived as an obstacle to them; from this the Oedipus complex originates. His identification with his father then takes on a hostile colouring and changes into a wish to get rid of his father in order to take his place with his mother. Henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent.” (emphasis added)

But perhaps the die isn’t merely cast for a complicated relationship with mon pere, as Freud goes on to explain that “The super-ego retains the character of the father.” It does so because the super-ego is essentially established in the father’s image:

“The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting this same obstacle within itself. It borrowed strength to do this, so to speak, from the father, and this loan was an extraordinarily momentous act.”

So if, connecting the dots, “henceforward his relation to his father is ambivalent,” mustn’t we also recognize that henceforward his (my) relation to the dominant element of his (my) very own psyche, the super-ego, is also fundamentally ambivalent? And if religion, workplace hierarchy, and theory qua truth are the worldly elements which carry much of the super-ego’s water in re authority, then it should come as no surprise that, as noted above, my predominant stance to each of the three is one of ambivalence.

Freud consistently held that humanity’s foremost problem can be found in our inclinations and instincts towards aggression. If he was wrong about everything else he ever said, he was indubitably quite right about this. (We don’t have religion because he was wrong, we need religion because he was right. We need somebody to command us to love our neighbors as ourselves.) But let’s suppose that Freud was also right about the super-ego:

“It is remarkable that the more a man checks his aggressiveness towards the exterior the more severe- that is aggressive- he becomes in his ego ideal (super-ego)… the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s (super-ego’s) inclination to aggressiveness against his ego.”

I.e., if you love your neighbor as yourself, you become your own worst enemy.

Unless, that is, you slip out the back door as your super-ego comes gunning for you through the front. Under threat, human beings have two basic choices: fight or flight. And since you have as much of a chance in a brawl with your super-ego as you did as a toddler against your dad (“As the child was once under a compulsion to obey its parents, so the ego submits to the categorical imperative of its super-ego,”), you are left with the options of submission to the aggression (“Thank you sir, may I have another” by way of an unflagging towing of whichever party line is carrying the super-ego’s water), or flight. Ambivalence, I would suggest, is exactly the latter.

We all hear what we want to hear. And, it seems, the super-ego is no different. Ambivalence trades in the paradox of being simultaneously for and against the very same thing, whereas the super-ego’s common coin is that all too familiar binary oppositional pairing: “You’re either with us or against us.” So while I very well know that I am both for and against e.g. religion, there is no receptor on the super-ego’s brain for that particular agonist, if you will. Under such circumstances, like everyone else the super-ego hears the part that it wants to hear, that, in this case, I am for religion, and, satisfied of my obeisance, leaves me the heck alone.

I say my prayers every night, try, and fail, to love my neighbor as myself each day, because I really am for religion. This is, apparently, enough for my super-ego. But I also walked out of church eighteen years ago and (almost) never looked back; dutifully escorting my wife to shul on Shabbos or Passover is just a reenactment of walking out of church, not because I’m going to synagogue instead of church, but because it is, taking inspiration from my favorite Raymond Chadler novel, something of a long goodbye. So, I really do want nothing to do with religion (although, as the saying goes, goodbye is not always goodbye).

I am ambivalent. I am a paradox. I am free. Or as free as it gets on the lam.

There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (and the Price of Lunch is Your Free Will)

An old sign, commonly posted in public indoor spaces in the days when all men wore hats, read “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must.” This sign captures the reality of what we like to call free will. Like it or not, Freud’s breakthrough conception of the superego impinges significantly on free will, that notion that human beings are free at all times to choose. What Freud realized is that rather than roaming the range of existence freely like wild buffalo we are much more like cattle, free to graze as we choose within the given confines of our surrounding fences. Given the superego, the notion of free will must be replaced by what I would call zones of autonomy. And it is only because free will is shrunk down to zones of autonomy that we are collectively able to enjoy the fruits and protections of civilization. In essence, to participate in civilization is to be not free. This cost of doing business for the venture, civilization, which makes human existence possible is a steep price indeed. As always, you get what you pay for. The message at the core of Freud’s lasting philosophical statement, Civilization and Its Discontents, can be boiled down thusly: In order for civilization to function, it’s participants must sacrifice free will; this sacrifice makes us all neurotic.

One may sacrifice one’s free will to civilization in one of two ways. Minus the superego, whose emergence in the individual is never certain and is the result of what is best described as a moral education, the individual’s free will is almost inevitably curtailed by the state, whose “justice system’s” true function is to assure the ongoing viability of civilization in the form of the state. Those who exercise free will in opposition to the will of the state soon find this free will demarcated by prison walls (or, it is important to note, in the case of defiance of the state’s economic necessities via failure to manifest marketable skills, banishment to the varieties of Siberia that include urban slums). Paraphrasing Alcoholics Anonymous, stomping grounds of many a soul who has chosen free will over the law, the path walked without the superego will lead you to one of three places: jail or other institutions, hospitals, or your grave.

Conversely, if one is the recipient of a modicum of moral education, the thoughts and behaviors necessary for the smooth functioning of civilization are encoded in one’s psyche as the superego. The particulars of the superego will vary by individual depending upon the vagaries of his or her moral education. But you will always know if the superego is present and functioning effectively in the individual if he or she is generally managing to stay out of trouble. Those individuals who get into trouble due to the dictates of conscience, see Martin Luther King Jr. or the Berrigan brothers as examples of those jailed for acts of civil disobedience, have the most advanced superegos of all, and as such pose no true threat to the ability of civilization to function. In fact, those burdened with outsized superegos are perhaps the most important contributors to society of all, for by imbuing civilization with a semblance of justice they tamp down the collective neuroses resulting from the loss of free will. Just as in Animal Farm where all animals are equals, and some are more equal than others, in civilization, where none of us are free, some of us are less free than others. And they are irrefutably the best of us.

One of the superego’s craftiest maneuvers is in allowing us the appearance of free will in everyday life. As long as our thoughts and behaviors remain within the boundaries set for us by our respective superegos, we are free to think and do just as we please. I am free to go to the movies with my free time on Sunday mornings, or play tennis in the park. Countless little decisions are made by the individual from the seat of agency, the ego, each day. The sheer mass of choosing that accumulates from these unnumbered choices feeds the illusion of free will; if I am free to choose in this infinite variety of everyday moments I begin to have the emotional satisfaction as if it were the case that I am free to choose at all times. This effect likely keeps us all sane.

But what I am really experiencing are life choices made within the boundaries of my zones of autonomy. If one had an exceptionally rigorous moral education, the ferocity with which one’s superego wields the only weapon it needs, guilt, may discipline one well enough such that the great majority of one’s time is spent in the zones of autonomy, thereby amplifying the illusion of free will for the most moral among us. But while not all of us give in to the temptation to put our foot up the ass of our obnoxious neighbor, we all at least think of putting a well deserved foot up this neighbor’s ass. And because the superego monitors thoughts, and not just actions, we are all inevitably subject to its recriminations in the form of guilt.

And if you doubt the power of guilt to shape behavior, then it is time to take a long hard look at what is keeping you out of trouble. I have a close friend who I have known since childhood. I can vouch for the comprehensive nature of her moral education, which was of the progressive social justice Christian variety. She shared with me that what shapes her behavior is embarrassment. For example, she was recently embarrassed by a server at a local restaurant, and emphatically stated to me that she will never set foot back in the establishment, even though they have an amazing wine selection, because of this incident. Understanding embarrassment as simply being made to feel guilty for one’s behavior, it is clear that the feeling of guilt was so powerful for my friend that she will likely never again engage in the behavior that, rightly or wrongly, led to the feelings of embarrassment/guilt. But an even greater witness to guilt’s potency is the fact that she can’t even return to the scene of the “crime.” The restaurant will always be the site where she drowned in guilt. It is submerged forever.

I am certainly not immune to this. At work recently I was “embarrassed” by a colleague who happened to be coming down the stairs in the stairwell when I exited the stairwell via the door on the landing. I was in a funk that morning and didn’t notice that she was headed for the door in my wake, so I failed to hold the door for her. When we made it to the office she announced to anyone who would listen how “some people” were so rude that they couldn’t hold the door for those behind them (and yes, I did gently confront her- I am getting better at this kind of thing). Whether or not I deserved this rebuke or not, and for what it’s worth my wife gives me a free pass after hearing my version of events, my superego certainly took notice. I now wait approximately forty-seven seconds after opening any door before passing through, on the off chance that someone else might appear out of the ether and need me to hold the door for them. I am tempted to start wearing a doorman’s uniform to work. All that to say that when the superego talks, people listen.

Wittgenstein said “You can mistrust your senses, but you can’t mistrust your beliefs.” If you are blessed with a superego (and I do mean blessed; remember the alternatives), it functions as the ultimate belief which can’t be mistrusted. The superego bounds one’s choices in the same way that death bounds life. You can ignore the superego just as we often ignore death. But, like death, the superego inevitably comes knocking. Inevitably because the last time I checked nobody was perfect. And the superego demands nothing less than perfection.

So what does it mean for us that “Gentlemen may remove their hats, all others must,” i.e. those of you with superegos may choose to follow civilization’s dictates, and we’ll lock the rest of you up? The first step forward is always to get real about just where you actually are. As long as we cling to illusory notions of free will we shall remain lost in a fantasyland made out of the denial of our most profound existential dilemma. The dilemma common to every human being, male, female, etc., is that to enter through the gates of civilization, as we all must (language acquisition alone guarantees this entry), is to irrevocably forego free will in exchange for that shabby impostor I call the zone of autonomy. Every one of us is Meatloaf singing “I’d do anything for love, but I won’t do that.” And then we all do precisely that. What else is there to do?

Freud is a hero because he refused to flinch in the face of this defining existential dilemma. He saw no way out, and so he took none. His philosophy, and Freud was first and foremost our greatest psychological philosopher, owned this central problem of being human. He showed us exactly where we actually are, and he died a pessimist.

Unlike genius brother Freud, I am just folks. But like Freud, I too will someday die. And while I have begun to face the need to own where we humans actually are, I hope not to die a pessimist. There is a popular Buddhist book titled The Wisdom of No Escape. Freud showed us that there can be no escape from our shared dilemma. I turn to Buddhism to learn the wisdom inherent to this place we can not leave. I told my wife tonight that I believe that Buddhism is the “religion of last resort”, which is English for “the wisdom of no escape.” Pardon me while I remove my hat.

Take out the papers and the trash (in the same trash bag)

Nothing assuages the guilt of consuming mass quantities like putting a heaping bin of recyclables out by the curb for pick up, secure in the knowledge that one’s assortment of Suave family-size shampoo bottles, Diet Mountain Dew two-liters, Prego jars (It’s in there!), and all the sundry paraphernalia of comfortable modern living are not headed to the landfill, and are, as such, surgically excised from one’s conscience. And this is exactly why, if you hope to save the Earth, you must stop recycling RIGHT NOW. Step away from the government-issued blue plastic recycling bin, and put the empty can of Manwich down (sidebar to my wife: how ’bout some sloppy joes, hon?).

Because recycling ultimately has nothing to do with saving the Earth, and everything to do with guilt. Recycling is, at its core, a response to the guilt accrued by those participating in the aggressiveness of industrialized, consumerist lifestyles. A few words from Freud will help us to grasp the link between recycling, guilt, and the human aggressive drive. As to aggression, Freud stipulated in his clearest philosophical work, Civilization and Its Discontents, that aggression is the gravest challenge facing humanity: “The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction.” (p. 154) Today this aggression most prominently manifests under the cover of everyday life, in the form of a consumerism that is entrenched and pathological. Unchecked, this consumerism threatens to transform us into the Uroboros; we will literally eat ourselves until we are gone. Of course, the Uroboros traditionally symbolizes the beginning of a new cycle, or re-creation. The risk we now take is that the re-creation will be an Earth without humans, or at least, without human civilization.

Fortunately for us humans, there is a psychic mechanism, guilt, which acts as a brake on the destructive bent of the aggressive drive: “The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains a mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city.” (p.121) Or, perhaps, not so fortunately, as the nature of this mechanism, guilt, led Freud to remark: “What a potent obstacle to civilization aggressiveness must be, if the defense against it can cause as much unhappiness as aggressiveness itself!” (p.151) For Freud, the price we pay for civilization, this constant torment of guilt, constant in the sense that one is punished by the superego as much for one’s thoughts as one’s actions, is criminally high. But in lieu of a post-apocalyptic Mad Max lifestyle, I’ll keep my civilization and happily pay the guilt bill.

So, how to keep the civilization? We, meaning those of us in the industrialized west, must simply consume radically less. Of course, this message is already out there, and the statistics supporting it are easy to find on a variety of websites. Just one example among many, greenlivingtips.com reports that “12 percent of the world’s population lives in North America and Western Europe and accounts for 60 percent of private consumption.” Put simply, no matter what else we do about climate change, population growth and other assorted dangers, it won’t matter a bit if industrialized, consumerist peoples do not radically reduce their rates of consumption. If we don’t consume very much less, we will die, or our children or their children will.

So we should all be recycling, right? Recycling means that less stuff gets consumed, which has to be a good thing if the path to salvation is by way of consuming less stuff. The catch is that recycling impacts our pathological urge to consume in the wrong direction, by “liberating” the aggressive drive from its natural keeper, guilt. Of late recycling has been linked in a triad formula of reduce-reuse-recycle, which begins to acknowledge the limitations of recycling alone. But those limitations are not the real problem with recycling, or reducing and reusing for that matter. Our way of life, and recycling’s true relationship to that way of life, are the real problem. That way of life depends upon constantly increasing consumption, and we have stepped up to the plate like Barry Bonds on steroids. One example plucked from many: from 1973 to 1993 per capita consumption in the United States rose 45%, according to John Cunniff in the Seattle Times on 9/19/93. Continuing the engorgement could not occur without recycling.

We know that we are killing the Earth by consuming it. Al Gore is here to make sure we know this. The dykes holding back aggressiveness have burst under a tidal wave of consumption. This onslaught of aggression in the guise of shopping and eating has triggered our natural response, guilt. The burst in recycling of recent years, according to treehugger.com only 23% of Americans now don’t recycle (a number they still find appallingly high), is representative of nothing else but a seismic shockwave of guilt. We are killing the planet and we know it, but instead of changing our way of life we deal with our guilt by putting our recycling on the curb. Recycling is but a ruse to fool the superego, thereby extinguishing the psychic pain of guilt. Of course, the price of fooling the superego is preventing it from doing its job, which, sans recycling, would be to ramp up the guilt until we changed our destructive ways. But by recycling, we have pulled the wool over the eyes of the superego in order to have our cake and eat it too. But when the cake is gone there will be nothing left for anyone to eat. (In recycling, we are remarkably like the teenage female who engages in anal sex to avoid the guilt of losing her “virginity”. She, like us, is simply trying to fool her superego, yet she has engaged in a sexual act unrivaled in heat and intimacy, with all of the attendant physical and emotional consequences. In fooling her superego she has dispensed with the most effective prophylactic of all: guilt as guarantor of abstinence, or at least some reasonable facsimile thereof.)

So enough with the recycling. If our way of life depends on consuming mass quantities, let’s figure out how to change our way of life. This kind of radical change won’t seem so radical in a few years when, to mix metaphors, it’s time to pay the environmental piper and the shit truly hits the fan. The sooner we start the less painful it will be, but there is going to be a great deal of pain, one way or the other. Let’s just hope that the pain is constructive, like anxiety from a guilty conscience. But I assure you I will feel no guilt tonight when I throw my can of Dr. Pepper in the regular trash bin.