https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/07/the-tortoise-and-the-hare-of-modernity-reconsidered/
Hares do not countenance irrational impediments such as “taboos.” Their response to the tortoises who deploy them is a mixture of loathing, hysteria, and contempt. But as a wise man put it, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”
Not to be overly paradoxical about it, but the names Donald Trump, Adam Schiff, and Jerry Nadler will not appear in this essay. Like you, I am weary of that shrill and unproductive static. Let us, then, take a brief holiday and consider a different sort of problem, a problem that stands behind—admittedly pretty far behind—that static I mentioned and which we might do well to think about. Let us, for lack of a better phrase, call it “Modernity and Its Discontents.”
No educated person in the English-speaking world can hear that phrase and fail to think of the memorable English title that James Strachey gave to Freud’s late masterpiece: Civilization and Its Discontents. Pressed to give a single word summary of what Freud concluded about those Unbehagen, those “discontents,” one could do worse than offer the brief imperative “No.” “Sad is eros, builder of cities,” W. H. Auden wrote, and that sadness, Freud thought, followed inevitably from the basic instinctual denials that made civilization possible.
“Modernity,” it will be pointed out, is not quite, or perhaps I should say “not hardly,” coterminous with “civilization.” If pressed to give a one-word précis to describe the Unbehagen in die Modernität, I might venture to suggest that it centrally involved the diminishment, the attenuation, the abandonment of that imperative denial that Freud analyzed.
Unfortunately, the loss or—more to the point—the active repudiation of “no” does not necessarily get you to any positive “yes.”
That’s the idea, of course: that by kicking over the traces, by saying “no” to all those inherited constraints, habits, structures, customs, prejudices, and dispositions that made us who we are, we thereby emerge into a glorious sunlit upland in which we enjoy the cities but dispense with the sadness.
The reality has been somewhat different. George Orwell gave dramatic expression to one set of differences when he noted that “For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire.”
