A different view
At the mid-point of the twentieth century there was an idea that the progressive worldview was heavily influenced by the theoretical revolutions of four geniuses of prior decades: Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein.
Darwin revolutionized our conception of the natural world; Marx of the social sphere; Freud of the psyche and culture; Einstein of the physical world.
Darwin led directly to Freud. It turns out, he said, that humans are animals.
We can’t imagine it now, but it was a revelation. People’s heads had been very much in the clouds during the centuries when the Judeo-Christian ideology was dominant. The latter gave a sense that humans are different; being created in the image of God and having souls, we are, if not quite god-like, certainly above “mere animality.” After Darwin dispelled that notion, Freud theorized about the consequences. His ideas seemed to help explain about the never-ending warring and sociopathology and psychopathology: our instinctual drives were an anarchic force as we tried to be civilized.
So a progressive of 1924, let’s say, would be inclined to agree with what Trotsky wrote in that year: “Three basic tragedies beset humankind: hunger, sex, and death.”
In this context, for simplification, a reference to “sex” represented the instinctual drives in general. Acknowledgment of such was considered an exemplary expression of a more-sophisticated progressivism. Early socialism tended to be utopian in the worst sense of the word. At the New York Socialist Scholars Conference of 1966 Trotsky’s biographer, Isaac Deutscher, explained:
“We no longer maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling against the predicaments that are of humanity’s making and that humanity can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies — hunger, sex, and death — besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labor movement have taken on. In fighting against social inequality and oppression we fight also for the mitigation of those blows that nature inflicts on us. Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these. And if our nature remains aggressive, socialist society will provide immeasurably greater and more varied opportunities for sublimating the instinctual drives and turning them to creative uses. Even if socialist man may not be quite “free from guilt or pain,” as Shelley dreamed he would be, he may be still “scepterless, free, uncircumscribed.” The average member of socialist society may yet rise, as Trotsky anticipated, to the stature of Aristotle, Goethe, Marx, who, whatever their sexual instincts and aggressive drives, embody some of humankind’s highest achievements so far. We do not see in socialist man evolution’s last and perfect product, or the end of history, but in a sense only the beginning of history. People may indeed feel the Unbehagen, the unease and discomfort, that civilization imposes upon the beast in us. Moreover, this may be the most essential of our own inner contradictions and tensions that will impel us to evolve further and scale heights which are beyond our current imagination.”
Sophisticated stuff. But it very much goes along with the modernist progressive idea that people “have risen” from a dumb, primitive, brutish state where human life was dominated by instinctuality — and as we strive for the “higher-ness” of civilization, we face the special issue of contending with the disruptive, intemperate challenges of the sexual and aggressive drives, as per Freud.
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A different view is that we lived just fine in our tribes and villages, with little in the way of hunger; with abundant expressive opportunities and full cultural richness. We had to contend with the challenges of the sexual and aggressive drives all along, but humans are creative and our handling of instinctuality was not inferior, pre-civilization. Perhaps it was no better, but, also, maybe it was no worse.
There are no particular heights to scale. We really never needed to rise or advance or ascend.
To the extent there’s truth to this very alternative worldview, it pretty much undermines that of twentieth century sophisticated modernist progressives. Marx and Freud were interesting thinkers who had important insights in limited areas, but they’ve been quite knocked off the genius pedestal.
