Depression: The Neuronal Trauma, or, the Rise of the Proletarian Cogito
Where authentic pre-modern society was almost destroyed by modernity, through “the shift from the organic Whole to Universality” (that is the self-contained, self-sufficient little towns and villages with their own unique culture where brought into the modern integrate and dependent nation state and then finally the capitalist system based on a type of rationality, science, capital accumulation, and a “global secular order”), “Postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity but its fulfillment: in the postmodern universe, pre-modern ‘leftovers’ are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome by progress towards a fully secularized modernization, but as something to be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe—all traditions survive, but in a mediated ‘de-naturalized’ form, that is, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen ‘lifestyles.’” In other words, all the pre-modern religious superstitions that modernity tried and failed to wipeout are now being destroyed by postmodernity by turning them into de-contextualized life choices. This means that in the postmodern world it is ok to believe in creationism and be a biologist; believe in God and be a natural scientist, etc. The fundamental difference between compelled and unchosen pre-modern beliefs and today’s lifestyle choices is the lack of compulsion. Without the compulsion to believe; without our willingness to die for our beliefs, our “authentic” identity is very fragile compared to the system’s universality. It is important to understand that there is compulsion everywhere so it is not a matter of better or worse compulsion; it is better thought of as a question of more or less livable compulsion.
One particular example is in the conflict between China and the Tibetan Buddhism’s similarity to the European development of religious toleration. First consider the drama that in August 2007, “the Chinese State Administration of Religious Affairs passed ‘Order Number Five,’… which covered ‘the management measures for the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibetan Buddhism.’ This ‘important move to institutionalize the management of reincarnation’ stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate—in short, it prohibits Buddhist monks from reincarnating without government permission: no one outside China can influence the reincarnation process, and only monasteries in China can apply for permission.” Žižek claims that early modern Europeans did similar things. He cites “The Peace of Augsburg in 1555, the first step towards the Pease of Westphalia, which…declared the local Prince’s religion to be the official religion of a region….however when a new ruler of a different religion took power, large groups of people had to convert. The first big institutional move towards religious tolerance in modern Europe thus involved the paradox of the same type as the Chinese Order Number Five: religious belief, supposedly a matter of the individual’s innermost spiritual experience, is to be regulated at the whim of a secular prince.” This means that China is in fact supporting religion. China has seen that religion, properly managed, can support social harmony which is one of its overriding concerns. But there is a further plot twist as the Dalai Lama dealing with China’s order chose a modern response.
“In November 2007, in reaction to the announced Chinese legislation, the Dalai Lama proclaimed that his successor would probably not be chosen by reincarnation but by more modern democratic means: he suggested that some kind of representative religious body like the conclave in the Vatican should select his successor. This time, it was the Chinese government which counter-attacked by defending reincarnation as the method of choice, accusing the Dalai Lama of abandoning ancient Tibetan traditions because of vested political interests.” Note the irony: the Dalai Lama, the head of state of a theocracy arguing for an untraditional modern democratic method of succession; and the Chinese communist atheistic government defending a traditional religious method of succession (which the Cultural Revolution tried and failed to stamp out).
The Chinese government, as it moves into the postmodern world, is relying less and less on punitive totalitarianism tools and techniques and is rather using the tools and techniques of capitalism to thwart the Tibetan people’s traditional lives. “[W]hat the media images of brutal Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceals is the much more effective American-style social-economic transformation: within a decade or two, Tibetans will be reduced to the same status as that of Native Americans in the United States. It seems that the Chinese Communists have finally learnt the lesson: what is the oppressive power of secret police, prison camps, and Red Guards destroying ancient monuments, compared to the power of unbridled capitalism to undermine all traditional social relations?
“Perhaps we find China’s reincarnation laws so outrageous not because they are alien to our sensibility, but because they spell out so openly the secret of what we are all up to. Are not the Chinese doing only what all ‘civilized’ governments do: respectfully tolerating what they do not take quite seriously, while trying to contain its possible political consequences through legislation?” Consider how the Canadian government is dealing with First Nations claims. It would seem that all the evils in the world can be viewed as our own reflection.
Interlude 4. Apocalypse at the Gates
In this interlude Žižek uses the meaning of Freud’s notion of the primordial father to compare the events of the Josef Fritzl house and the film the Sound of Music, to show a depressing truth about humanity. In Totem and Taboo, Freud gives his account of the origin of religion and the incest taboo in the myth of the killing of the primordial father by his sons who wanted sexual access to the women of the tribe. The primordial father, who used to protect his children, was then elevated to a god by his frightened children as a sort of appeasement for their patricide. The work has been widely discredited as a work of anthropology but Žižek claims that it was never meant to be looked at as anthropology. Freud was a psychologist. The book should be looked at as “libidinal fact, a fact about ‘psychic reality,’ which accompanies ‘normal’ paternal authority like its obscene shadow, prospering in the murky depths of unconscious fantasies”.
The Josef Fritzl case is about a father that imprisoned his daughter, Elisabeth, under his house and fathered several children with her while keeping a “normal” family in the upper part of the house. “what makes his reign so chilling is precisely the way his exercise of power and his usufruct of the daughter were not just cold acts of exploitation, but were accompanied by an ideologico-familial justification (he did what a farther should do, protecting his children from drugs and other dangers of the outside world), as well as by occasional displays of compassion and human consideration (he did take the sick daughter to the hospital, for example). These acts were not chinks of warm humanity in his armor of coldness and cruelty, but expressions of the same protective attitude which led him to imprison and violate his children.”
Many people in other parts of the West, perhaps in embarrassment at how close to home Fritzl hits, tried to link the affair to Austria. However, “one should just be aware that the excessive violence of the ‘primordial father’ assumes in every particular culture certain specific fantasmatic features. Instead of the silly attempts to blame Josef’s terrible crime on Austria’s past or its excessive sense of orderliness and outward show, we should rather link the figure of Fritzl to a much more respectable Austrian myth, that of the von Trapp family immortalized in The Sound of Music – another family living in a secluded castle, under a father’s benevolent military authority protecting them from the evil outside world, and with the generations strangely mixed up (Sister Maria, like Elisabeth, of a generation between the father and the children). The kitsch aspect is relevant here: The Sound of Music is the ultimate kitsch phenomenon, and what Fritzel created in his basement also displays features of a realized kitsch family life: the happy family getting ready for dinner, the father watching TV with the children while mother prepares the food. However, one should not forget that the kitsch imagery we are dealing with here is not Austrian but belongs to Hollywood and generally to Western popular culture….
“Ludicrous as The Sound of Music is, as one of the worst cases of Hollywood kitsch, one should take very seriously the sacred intensity of the universe of the film, without which its extraordinary success cannot be accounted for: the power of the film resides in its obscenely direct staging of embarrassingly intimate fantasies.” Consider one more representative example: the advice the nun gives Maria who is hiding in the nunnery from her feelings for Baron von Trapp: Climb every mountain.
The depressing conclusion is that we are actually or potentially as bad as anyone on earth and we constantly support bad (perhaps even evil) policies regularly. We all suffer from small variations of the same psychic baggage and it manifests itself uniquely in each and every one of us.