Civilization and Its Discontents - Cahpter 3

Sigmund Freud
Civilization and Its Discontents (Chap. 3)

OUR discussion of happiness has so far not taught us much that is not already common
knowledge. Nor does the prospect of discovering anything new seem much greater if we go on
with the problem of why it is so hard for mankind to be happy. We gave the answer before, when
we cited the three sources of human sufferings, namely, the superior force of nature, the
disposition to decay of our bodies, and the inadequacy of our methods of regulating human
relations in the family, the community, and the state. In regard to the first two, our judgment
cannot hesitate: it forces us to recognize these sources of suffering and to submit to the inevitable.
We shall never completely subdue nature; our body, too, is an organism, itself a part of nature, and
will always contain the seeds of dissolution, with its limited power of adaptation and achievement.
The effect of this recognition is in no way disheartening; on the contrary, it points out the direction
for our efforts. If we cannot abolish all suffering, yet a great deal of it we can, and can mitigate
more; the experience of several thousand years has convinced us of this. To the third, the social
source of our distresses, we take up a different attitude. We prefer not to regard it as one at all; we
cannot see why the systems we have ourselves created should not rather ensure protection and
well-being for us all. To be sure, when we consider how unsuccessful our efforts to safeguard
against suffering in this particular have proved, the suspicion dawns upon us that a bit of
unconquerable nature lurks concealed behind this difficulty as well—— in the shape of our own
mental constitution.

When we start to consider this possibility, we come across a point of view which is so amazing
that we will pause over it. According to it, our so-called civilization itself is to blame for a great
part of our misery, and we should be much happier if we were to give it up and go back to
primitive conditions. I call this amazing because——however one may define culture ——it is
undeniable that every means by which we try to guard ourselves against menaces from the several
sources of human distress is a part of this same culture
.
How has it come about that so many people have adopted this strange attitude of hostility to
civilization? In my opinion, it arose from a background of profound long-standing discontent with
the existing state of civilization, which finally crystallized into this judgment as a result of certain
historical happenings. I believe I can identify the last two of these; I am not learned enough to
trace the links in the chain back into the history of the human species. At the time when
Christianity conquered the pagan religions, some such antagonism to culture must already have
been actively at work. It is closely related to the low estimation put upon earthly life by Christian
doctrine. The earlier of the last two historical developments was when, as a result of voyages of
discovery, men came into contact with primitive peoples and races. To the Europeans, who failed
to observe them carefully and misunderstood what they saw, these people seemed to lead simple,
happy lives——wanting for nothing ——such as the travellers who visited them, with all their
superior culture, were unable to achieve. Later experience has corrected this opinion on many
points; in several instances the ease of life was due to the bounty of nature and the possibilities of
ready satisfaction for the great human needs, but it was erroneously attributed to the absence of
the complicated conditions of civilization. The last of the two historical events is especially
familiar to us; it was when people began to understand the nature of the neuroses which threaten
to undermine the modicum of happiness open to civilized man. It was found that men become
neurotic because they cannot tolerate the degree of privation that society imposes on them in
virtue of its cultural ideals, and it was supposed that a return to greater possibilities of happiness
would ensue if these standards were abolished or greatly relaxed.

And there exists an element of disappointment, in addition. In the last generations, man has made
extraordinary strides in knowledge of the natural sciences and technical application of them, and
has established his dominion over nature in a way never before imagined. The details of this
forward progress are universally known: it is unnecessary to enumerate them. Mankind is proud of
its exploits and has a right to be. But men are beginning to perceive that all this newly-won power
over space and time, this conquest of the forces of nature, this fulfilment of age-old longings, has
not increased the amount of pleasure they can obtain in life, has not made them feel any happier.
The valid conclusion from this is merely that power over nature is not the only condition of human
happiness, just as it is not the only goal of civilization’s efforts, and there is no ground for
inferring that its technical progress is worthless from the standpoint of happiness. It prompts one
to exclaim: Is it not then a positive pleasure, an unequivocal gain in happiness, to be able to hear,
whenever I like, the voice of a child living hundreds of miles away, or to know directly a friend of
mine arrives at his destination that he has come well and safely through the long and troublesome
voyage? And is it nothing that medical science has succeeded in enormously reducing the
mortality of young children, the dangers of infection for women in childbirth, indeed, in very
considerably prolonging the average length of human life? And there is still a long list one could
add to these benefits that we owe to the much-despised era of scientific and practical
progress——but a critical, pessimistic voice makes itself heard, saying that most of these
advantages follow the model of those ““cheap pleasures”” in the anecdote. One gets this
enjoyment by sticking one’’s bare leg outside the bedclothes on a cold winter’s night and then
drawing it in again. If there were no railway to make light of distances, my child would never have
left home, and I should not need the telephone to hear his voice. If there were no vessels crossing
the ocean, my friend would never have embarked on his voyage, and I should not need the
telegraph to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing the mortality of children,
when it is precisely this reduction which imposes the greatest moderation on us in begetting them,
so that taken all round we do not rear more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene,
while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for sexual life in marriage and
probably counteracted the beneficial effects of natural selection? And what do we gain by a long
life when it is full of hardship and starved of joys and so wretched that we can only welcome
death as our deliverer?

It seems to be certain that our present-day civilization does not inspire in us a feeling of wellbeing,
but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether in earlier times people felt any happier
and what part their cultural conditions played in the question. We always tend to regard trouble
objectively, i. e., to place ourselves with our own wants and our own sensibilities in the same
conditions, so as to discover what opportunities for happiness or unhappiness we should find in
them. This method of considering the problem, which appears to be objective because it ignores
the varieties of subjective sensitivity, is of course the most subjective possible, for by applying it
one substitutes one’’s own mental attitude for the unknown attitude of other men. Happiness, on
the contrary, is something essentially subjective. However we may shrink in horror at the thought
of certain situations, that of the galley-slaves in antiquity, of the peasants in the Thirty Years’’
War, of the victims of the Inquisition, of the Jews awaiting a pogrom, it is still impossible for us to
feel ourselves into the position of these people, to imagine the differences which would be brought
about by constitutional obtuseness of feeling, gradual stupefaction, the cessation of all
anticipation, and by all the grosser and more subtle ways in which insensibility to both pleasurable
and painful sensations can be induced. Moreover, on occasions when the most extreme forms of
suffering have to be endured, special mental protective devices come into operation. It seems to
me unprofitable to follow up this aspect of the problem further.

It is time that we should turn our attention to the nature of this culture, the value of which is so
much disputed from the point of view of happiness. Until we have learnt something by examining
it for ourselves, we will not look round for formulas which express its essence in a few words. We
will be content to repeat [11] that the word culture describes the sum of the achievements and institutions which differentiate
our lives from those of our animal forebears and serve two purposes, namely, that of protecting
humanity against nature and of regulating the relations of human beings among themselves. In
order to learn more than this, we must bring together the individual features of culture as they are
manifested in human communities. We shall have no hesitation in allowing ourselves to be guided
by the common usages of language, or, as one might say, the feeling of language, confident that
we shall thus take into account inner attitudes which still resist expression in abstract terms.
The beginning is easy. We recognize as belonging to culture all the activities and possessions
which men use to make the earth serviceable to them, to protect them against the tyranny of
natural forces, and so on. There is less doubt about this aspect of civilization than any other. If we
go back far enough, we find that the first acts of civilization were the use of tools, the gaining of
power over fire, and the construction of dwellings. Among these the acquisition of power over fire
stands out as a quite exceptional achievement, without a prototype; [12] while the other two opened
up paths which have ever since been pursued by man, the stimulus towards which is easily
imagined. By means of all his tools, man makes his own organs more perfect——both the motor
and the sensory——or else removes the obstacles in the way of their activity. Machinery places
gigantic power at his disposal which, like his muscles, he can employ in any direction; ships and
aircraft have the effect that neither air nor water can prevent his traversing them. With spectacles
he corrects the defects of the lens in his own eyes; with telescopes he looks at far distances; with
the microscope he overcomes the limitations in visibility due to the structure of his retina. With
the photographic camera he has created an instrument which registers transitory visual
impressions, just as the gramophone does with equally transient auditory ones; both are at bottom
materializations of his own power of memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at
distances which even fairy-tales would treat as insuperable; writing to begin with was the voice of
the absent; dwellings were a substitute for the mother’s womb, that first abode, in which he was
safe and felt so content, for which he probably yearns ever after.

It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical
inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal
kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless
infant——0 inch of nature!—— is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in
his fairy-tales. AH these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal
conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed
unattainable to his desires——or forbidden to him——he attributed to these gods. One may say,
therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near
to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that
ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some
respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so
to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on
him and they still give him trouble at times. However, lie is entitled to console himself with the
thought that this evolution will not come to an end in A. D. 1930. Future ages will produce further
great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now. and will increase man’s
likeness to a god still more. But with the aim of our study in mind, we will not forget, all the same,
that the human being of today is not happy with all his likeness to a god.

Thus we recognize that a country has attained a high level of civilization when we find that
everything in it that can be helpful in exploiting the earth for man’’s benefit and in protecting him
against nature——everything, in short, that is useful to him——is cultivated and effectively
protected. In such a country, the course of rivers which threaten to overflow their banks is
regulated, their waters guided through canals to places where they are needed. The soil is
industriously cultivated and planted with the vegetation suited to it; the mineral wealth is brought
up assiduously from the depths and wrought into the implements and utensils that are required.
The means of communications are frequent, rapid, and reliable; wild and dangerous animals have
been exterminated, the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers. But we demand other
things besides these of civilization, and curiously enough, we expect to find them existing in the
same countries. As if we wished to repudiate the first requisition we made, we count it also as
proof of a high level of civilization when we see that the industry of the inhabitants is applied as
well to things which are not in the least useful and, on the contrary seem to be useless, e. g., when
the parks and gardens in a town, which are necessary as playgrounds and air-reservoirs, also bear
flowering plants, or when the windows of dwellings are adorned with flowers. We soon become
aware that the useless thing which we require of civilization is beauty; we expect a cultured people
to revere beauty where it is found in nature and to create it in their handiwork so far as they are
able. But this is far from exhausting what we require of civilization. Besides, we expect to see the
signs of cleanliness and order. We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country
town in the time of Shakespeare when we read that there was a tall dung-heap in front of his
father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and call it ““barbarous, ““ which is the opposite of
civilized, when we find the paths in the Wiener Wald littered with paper. Dirt of any kind seems to
us incompatible with civilization; we extend our demands for cleanliness to the human body also,
and are amazed to hear what an objectionable odour emanated from the person of the Roi Soleil;
we shake our heads when we are shown the tiny washbasin on the Isola Bella which Napoleon
used for his daily ablutions. Indeed, we are not surprised if anyone employs the use of soap as a
direct measure of civilization. It is the same with order, which, like cleanliness, relates entirely to
man’s handiwork. But whereas we cannot expect cleanliness in nature, order has, on the contrary,
been imitated from nature; man’s observations of the great astronomical periodicities not only
furnished him with a model, but formed the ground-plan of his first attempts to introduce order
into his own life. Order is a kind of repetition-compulsion by which it is ordained once for all
when, where and how a thing shall be done so that on every similar occasion doubt and hesitation
shall be avoided. The benefits of order are incontestable: it enables us to use space and time to the
best advantage, while saving expenditure of mental energy. One would be justified in expecting
that it would have ingrained itself from the start and without opposition into all human activities;
and one may well wonder that this has not happened, and that, on the contrary, human beings
manifest an inborn tendency to negligence, irregularity, and untrustworthiness in their work, and
have to be laboriously trained to imitate the example of their celestial models.

Beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of
civilization. No one will maintain that they are as essential to life as the activities aimed at
controlling the forces of nature and as other factors which we have yet to mention; and yet no one
would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters. Beauty is an instance which
plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we
cannot tolerate in civilization. The utilitarian advantages of order are quite apparent; with regard
to cleanliness, we have to remember that it is required of us by hygiene, and we may surmise that
even before the days of scientific prophylaxis the connection between the two was not altogether
unsuspected by mankind. But these aims and endeavours of culture are not entirely to be explained
on utilitarian lines; there must be something else at work besides.

According to general opinion, however, there is one feature of culture which characterizes it better
than any other, and that is the value it sets upon the higher mental activities——intellectual,
scientific, and aesthetic achievement—— the leading part it concedes to ideas in human life. First
and foremost among these ideas come the religious systems with their complicated evolution, on
which I have elsewhere endeavoured to throw a light; next to them come philosophical
speculations; and last, the ideals man has formed, his conceptions of the perfection possible in an
individual, in a people, in humanity as a whole, and the demands he makes on the basis of these
conceptions. These creations of his mind are not independent of each other; on the contrary, they
are closely interwoven, and this complicates the attempt to describe them, as well as that to trace
their psychological derivation. If we assume as a general hypothesis that the force behind all
human activities is a striving towards the two convergent aims of profit and pleasure, we must
then acknowledge this as valid also for these other manifestations of culture, although it can be
plainly recognized as true only in respect of science and art. It cannot be doubted, however, that
the remainder, too, correspond to some powerful need in human beings——perhaps to one which
develops fully only in a minority of people. Nor may we allow ourselves to be misled by our own
judgments concerning the value of any of these religious or philosophical systems or of these
ideals; whether we look upon them as the highest achievement of the human mind, or whether we
deplore them as fallacies, one must acknowledge that where they exist, and especially where they
are in the ascendant, they testify to a high level of civilization.

We now have to consider the last, and certainly by no means the least important, of the
components of culture, namely, the ways in which social relations, the relations of one man to
another, are regulated, all that has to do with him as a neighbour, a source of help, a sexual object
to others, a member of a family or of a state. It is especially difficult in this matter to remain
unbiased by any ideal standards and to ascertain exactly what is specifically cultural here. Perhaps
one might begin with the statement that the first attempt ever made to regulate these social
relations already contained the essential element of civilization. Had no such attempt been made,
these relations would be subject to the wills of individuals: that is to say, the man who was
physically strongest would decide things in accordance with his own interests and desires. The
situation would remain the same, even though this strong man should in his turn meet with another
who was stronger than he. Human life in communities only becomes possible when a number of
men unite together in strength superior to any single individual and remain united against all
single individuals. The strength of this united body is then opposed as right against the strength of
any individual, which is condemned as brute force. This substitution of the power of a united
number for the power of a single man is the decisive step towards civilization. The essence of it
lies in the circumstance that the members of the community have restricted their possibilities of
gratification, whereas the individual recognized no such restrictions. The first requisite of culture,
therefore, is justice—— that is, the assurance that a law once made will not be broken in favour of
any individual. This implies nothing about the ethical value of any such law. The further course of
cultural development seems to tend towards ensuring that the law shall no longer represent the
will of any small body——caste, tribe, section of the population——which may behave like a
predatory individual towards other such groups perhaps containing larger numbers. The end-result
would be a state of law to which all——that is, all who are capable of uniting——have
contributed by making some sacrifice of their own desires, and which leaves none——again with
the same exception——at the mercy of brute force.

The liberty of the individual is not a benefit of culture. It was greatest before any culture, though
indeed it had little value at that time, because the individual was hardly in a position to defend it.
Liberty has undergone restrictions through the evolution of civilization, and justice demands that
these restrictions shall apply to all. The desire for freedom that makes itself felt in a human
community may be a revolt against some existing injustice and so may prove favourable to a
further development of civilization and remain compatible with it. But it may also have its origin
in the primitive roots of the personality, still unfettered by civilizing influences, and so become a
source of antagonism to culture. Thus the cry for freedom is directed either against particular
forms or demands of culture or else against culture itself. It does not seem as if man could be
brought by any sort of influence to change his nature into that of the ants; he will always, one
imagines, defend his claim to individual freedom against the will of the multitude. A great part of
the struggles of mankind centres round the single task of finding some expedient (i.e., satisfying)
solution between these individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the
problems of man’’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture
or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable.

We have obtained a clear impression of the general picture presented by culture through adopting
the common view as to which aspects of human life are to be called cultural; but it is true that so
far we have discovered nothing that is not common knowledge. We have, however, at the same
time guarded ourselves against accepting the misconception that civilization is synonymous with
becoming perfect, is the path by which man is ordained to reach perfection. But now a certain
point of view presses for consideration; it will lead perhaps in another direction. The evolution of
culture seems to us a peculiar kind of process passing over humanity, of which several aspects
strike us as familiar. We can describe this process in terms of the modifications it effects on the
known human instinctual dispositions, which it is the economic task of our lives to satisfy. Some
of these instincts become absorbed, as it were, so that something appears in place of them which
in an individual we call a character-trait. The most remarkable example of this process is found in
respect of the anal erotism of young human beings. Their primary interest in the excretory
function, its organs and products, is changed in the course of their growth into a group of traits
that we know well—— thriftiness, orderliness, and cleanliness——valuable and welcome
qualities in themselves, which, however, may be intensified till they visibly dominate the
personality and produce what we call the anal character. How this happens we do not know; but
there is no doubt about the accuracy of this conclusion.

Now, we have seen [13] that order and cleanliness are essentially cultural demands, although the
necessity of them for survival is not particularly apparent, any more than their suitability as
sources of pleasure. At this point we must be struck for the first time with the similarity between
the process of cultural development and that of the libidinal development in an individual. Other
instincts have to be induced to change the conditions of their gratification, to find it along other
paths, a process which is usually identical with what we know so well as sublimation (of the aim
of an instinct), but which can sometimes be differentiated from this. Sublimation of instinct is an
especially conspicuous feature of cultural evolution; this it is that makes it possible for the higher
mental operations, scientific, artistic, ideological activities, to play such an important part in
civilized life. If one were to yield to a first impression, one would be tempted to say that
sublimation is a fate which has been forced upon instincts by culture alone. But it is better to
reflect over this a while longer. Thirdly and lastly, and this seems most important of all, it is
impossible to ignore the extent to which civilization is built up on renunciation of instinctual
gratifications, the degree to which the existence of civilization presupposes the non-gratification
(suppression, repression, or something else?) of powerful instinctual urgencies. This cultural
privation dominates the whole field of social relations between human beings; we know already
that it is the cause of the antagonism against which all civilization has to fight. It sets hard tasks
for our scientific work, too; we have a great deal to explain here. It is not easy to understand how
it can become possible to withhold satisfaction from an instinct. Nor is it by any means without
risk to do so; if the deprivation is not made good economically, one may be certain of producing
serious disorders.

But now, if we wish to know what use it is to us to have recognized the evolution of culture as a
special process, comparable to the normal growth of an individual to maturity, we must clearly
attack another problem and put the question: What are the influences to which the evolution of
culture owes its origin, how did it arise, and what determined its course?

Footnotes:

11 Cf. The Future of an Illusion.

12 Psycho-analytic material, as yet incomplete and not capable of unequivocal interpretation,
nevertheless admits of a surmise——which sounds fantastic enough—— about the origin of this
human feat. It is as if primitive man had had the impulse, when he came in contact with fire, to
gratify an infantile pleasure in respect of it and put it out with a stream of urine. The legends that
we possess leave no doubt that flames shooting upwards like tongues were originally felt to have a
phallic sense. Putting out fire by urinating—— which is also introduced in the later fables of
Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’’s Gargantua——therefore represented a sexual act with a man,
an enjoyment of masculine potency in homosexual rivalry. Whoever was the first to deny himself
this pleasure and spare the fire was able to take it with him and break it in to his own service. By
curbing the fire of his own sexual passion, he was able to tame fire as a force of nature. This great
cultural victory was thus a reward for re framing from gratification of an instinct. Further, it is as
if man had placed woman by the hearth as the guardian of the fire he had taken captive, because
her anatomy makes it impossible for her to yield to such a temptation. It is remarkable how
regularly analytic findings testify to the close connection between the ideas of ambition, fire, and
urethral erotism.

13 Cf. ““Character and Anal Erotism”” (1908), Collected Papers, II; also numerous contributions
to the subject by Ernest
Jones and others.