It’s not news that we live in a moralistic, judgmental age. Critics on the right, like philosopher Allan Bloom, once complained about the flaccid relativism of progressives who preached tolerance as the highest virtue. Nowadays, they rail against “The Great Awokening” and, in a surprising reversal, call on the government to control what is taught in universities or read in libraries. Where critics on the left used to build coalitions to improve the minimum wage or reduce unemployment, now they can be found making sure everyone is using the appropriate language to refer to ethnic groups or individuals. Left and right accuse each other of being overly judgmental; what they agree on is that social media is making the problem worse. Yet even if we choose to blame the algorithms for accentuating the pleasures of outrage, we should remember that the genealogy of cancel culture goes back a very long way; scapegoating has, of course, biblical roots.
Mark Edmundson examines the psychological dimensions of today’s judgmentalism through a Freudian lens. In his earlier book, “The Death of Sigmund Freud,” he showed how resolute, and resolutely secular, Freud was in the face of his demise — be it Nazi threats or terminal cancer. Edmundson, a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia, is an engaging writer, whether he is describing Freud as heroic ideal, football, reading, teaching or, as part of his discussion in this latest volume, the politics of his students. His tone is friendly yet incisive, more conversational than academic.
In “The Age of Guilt: The Super Ego in the Online World,” he turns to the psychoanalytic concept of the superego to understand why so many are obsessed with judging themselves and others. Human beings are fundamentally divided, according to Freud: We are ambivalent creatures who want things we are afraid to want. Freud introduced the idea of the superego in the 1920s to describe how one part of our personality judges other parts. The superego is an internalized authority that at once holds us to a standard we are incapable of meeting and punishes us for our deficiencies. When we torture ourselves with self-recrimination or simply feel guilty for not living up to our aspirations, it’s the superego at work. The online world offers a way to displace this work by satisfying the desire for judgment with social media outrage. Instead of punishing oneself, one can share one’s judgments and be “liked” for having high, or at least crowd-approved, standards. Living online, one can master group morality and be mesmerized by physical perfection. The internet is “the great enforcer of super-ego socialization.”
Today, there are so many opportunities to get away from nasty self-judgment by judging others. Canceling strangers in highly performative ways, we show ourselves to be not so bad. Online living facilities this. “When you deploy the super-ego in the world, you gain some temporary relief,” Edmundson writes. “You judge and you judge, and for a while it seems that your sins have been forgiven.” He doesn’t spend much time on forgiveness and its difficulties in contemporary culture. For that one might want to read, say, Wilfred M. McClay, on the paradoxes of a culture of guilt without a path for redemption. Edmundson takes the psychoanalytic route that aims to make us more aware of our conflicting values and desires in hopes that awareness will bring us some relief and make us more tolerant of others. Psychoanalysis teaches that our desires will always be in tension with one another and that rather than try to resolve those tensions — through faith, for example, or obedience to authority — we must learn to live with them. Instead of trying to erase internal tension through violence or submission, we should learn to accept that we are imperfect creatures whose needs cannot be fully satisfied. “It is a blessing to the self,” Edmundson writes, to “think of ourselves as always and forever unfinished. We’ll never coincide with the glowing, super-ego-approved image in our mind.”
Having set up a psychoanalytic framework, “The Age of Guilt” moves on to brief consideration of a range of topics of contemporary interest: psychopharmacology, identity, patriarchy, race. Brief, disconnected chapters are meant to show how “super-ego” culture produces modes of behavior that wind up being counterproductive, or just mean and nasty. To escape our own feelings of guilt, we attack others, or we douse ourselves with what Freud called “palliative measures” just to feel less. Edmundson, who must be a gifted teacher, believes that by making his readers and his students aware of how we get in our own way, we will change our ways. Perhaps we can learn to live with our internal conflicts and achieve a measure of autonomy without so much judgment.
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Unfortunately, the last section of “The Age of Guilt,” titled “Embrace the Ideals,” takes a very odd turn away from the Freudian effort at increased freedom through deeper, if incomplete, self-understanding. In Edmundson’s final dozen or so pages, he abandons psychoanalysis to introduce three ideals (Homer’s Hector, Plato’s Socrates and the Gospel’s Jesus) that can “displace the super-ego … by going above it.” In other words, Edmundson has a super superego to offer us. As Freud cautioned, however, “man’s judgments of value follow directly his wishes for happiness — that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.” Rather than take Edmundson’s wish list of ideals as new forms of consolation or seeds of aspiration, readers may prefer to linger with the unfinished, flawed selves that he describes so well in the rest of his insightful book.
Michael S. Roth is president of Wesleyan University. Among his recent books are “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech and Political Correctness on College Campuses” and the forthcoming “The Student: A Short History.”
The Age of Guilt
The Super-Ego in the Online World
By Mark Edmundson
Yale University Press. 164 pp. $26
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