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of excessive idealism risk falling ill of it. They are the slaves of a particularly brutal master.
Human beings, Freud remarked, are both more and less moral than they think they are. If
they are too neurotic about morality, they will be less moral in a more important sense of
the term, less able to live a richly self-fulfilling existence. If the United States could be a
little less moral, it would be greatly to its advantage. In fact, the nation might become more
moral by being less so. It is partly because the country is so much in the grip of certain
high-minded doctrines that it sometimes behaves so shabbily. It is ready to sacrifice the
lives of small children in foreign lands to its own spiritual certainties.
What is negative, then, is whatever stands in the way of the will. And this, as we have
seen, includes the amorphous matter that the will seeks to reduce to order. This is why
one of the most materialistic civilisations on earth harbours a secret hostility to the mater-
ial. Mary Baker Eddy, founder of that quintessentially American creed, Christian Science,
thought the material world was an illusion. Many Americans are in this sense natural-born
Buddhists. Yet the doctrine of mind over matter, which accounts for so much in American
culture, is strangely self-refuting. It sees the mind as independent of material circumstance,
but fails to recognise that this belief is itself shaped by material conditions. From the Pil-
grim Fathers to Pepsi-Cola, America has had good material reasons for moulding the earth
to its desires. It is not, of course, the only nation to have done so. Mastering Nature is a ne-
cessity for any civilisation, whatever the more dewy-eyed kind of eco-warrior might think.
Unless we build some sea walls pretty quickly, Bangladesh may be lost without a trace in
some years' time, along with a lot of other places. Diabetics who inject themselves with in-
sulin are seeking to overpower a Nature that has spun out of control. So are engineers who
lord it arrogantly over the natural world by building bridges to stop people from drowning.
When it comes to blowing up meteors about to strike the earth, a spot of civilised violence
does nobody any harm.
Yet violence is not always in the cause of civility. Freud acknowledged that Eros, builder
of cities, involves a good deal of aggression. But he also thought that this violence could
easily get out of hand. Lurking inside the drive to create and construct was his old enemy
Thanatos, or the death drive. The very forces that make for civilisation can also reduce
it to chaos and barbarism. Freud would thus have had no problem in understanding what
happened not long ago in Iraq, as well as in many other spots where the American eagle
has landed and unsheathed its claws. To save the world, you may have to destroy it.
Weak Flesh and Willing Spirits
The world-crushing will is part of America's Puritan legacy. Yet if the United States is such
a puritanical nation, how come there are so many strip joints around? What is one to make
of a county in which clubs and bars stay open all night while people go to bed at 9 p.m.?
This is not as contradictory as it appears. For one thing, revelling in the flesh is simply the
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