Phillips: Darwin's Worms

Phillips, Adam: Darwin's Worms; Basic Books, New York, 2000

I really enjoyed this book.  As I read it, I kept thinking that what Phillips was saying seemed so true, that what he was concluding about Freud and Darwin's contributions to our knowledge of the world we live in and our lives themselves was so insightful and made so much sense.  His discussions of the importance of their work helped fill in some of the lacunae that kept tripping me up as I would read these texts - the sense that I'm missing so much and because I'm missing it, I can't see the big picture.  Phillips' take on the state of our knowledge about the world so far, for me was invigorating and, to use a trite expression, 'life-affirming'.

In his prologue, Phillips asks

How could it be possible that we were only natural creatures, but that nature was felt to be insufficient for our needs?  Either nature must be in some (old-fashioned) sense evil, or we have misconstrued our needs.  [pg 15]

He goes on to say that Darwin and Freud showed us that nature doesn't take sides and that "there was nothing now that could promise, or underwrite, or predict, a successful life."   "Nature seemed to have laws but not intentions, or a sense of responsibility."  This reminds me of a Stephen Crane poem I used to like to think about in my teens:

A man said to the universe:
"Sir, I exist!"
"However," replied the universe,
"The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation."

Phillips writes that both Darwin and Freud were sceptical about the perfectibility of Man, a theory that despite having been brought up Catholic and despite an interest in Buddhism and Eastern religions, I've never really believed in, nor have I aspired to perfection.  That's not to say that I don't think that 'improvements' can't or shouldn't be attempted but that a goal of perfection is not even worthy of being aspired to.  Phillips writes that for both Darwin and Freud "we are the animals who seem to suffer, above all, from our ideals" [pg 17].  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, Byron spoke about one of the versions of the Prometheus myth where Zeus kept making forms of humans but not embuing them with life because they weren't yet perfect.  Then Prometheus interfered and brought humans to life, gave us fire imperfect as we are - and by so doing, prevented us from being perfect, prevented Zeus from perfecting us.  Of course, had Zeus perfected humans, they wouldn't have been us; or we aren't them.  Phillips says that by our constant striving after knowledge, perfection, goodness etc, we are denying ourselves "the pleasure of reality" [pg 18]. I think Lawrence would have somewhat agreed with that - with his celebration of sex, nature, simplicity; and with his rejection of industrialization and class.

Phillips speaks about how

reality was a viable term for [Darwin and Freud]: that they used the word to do something.  Because, as a concept, it was a synonym for nature, it was rarely ironized by them. [pg 18]

That's a far cry from today where if you ask someone what the word 'reality' means to them, they are, sadly, most apt to talk about 'reality TV", an ironic if not oxymoronic term for 2013.  According to Phillips "If there are laws of human nature, some of them at least are of a peculiarly recondite logic." [pg 21]

The fact that we want to survive and reproduce, and the fiction that we desire in the way Freud describes, tells us remarkably little about how we should live.  Indeed, it tends to ironize prescription (when it doesn't render it cynical). And yet, of course, Darwin and Freud furtively prescribe in their writing through what they praise.  Their morality resides in their celebrations, as much  as in their dismay: where they find beauty is where they find happiness... [pg 22]

All along, some people have looked to animals, for their differences and for any commonality with humankind, to try and make sense of the world and of what it is to be human.  "...it is by comparing ourselves with other 'sentient beings' that we can find the proper place for our experience. [pg 22]

The word 'sublime' has been used alot in the texts we've been reading since Christmas, those from the 1600s on.  I didn't have a complete sense of what the authors meant when they used it - usually to describe Nature.  Phillips provides the best explanation I've read.

the experience of the sublime was essentially that which was beyond the making of sense: it was about what overawed us.  Whatever was in excess of a person's capacity for representation - whatever threatened our belief in our languages - was sublime... [pg 24]

 Phillips writes about Freud's 1916 paper 'On Transience' which Professor Zaslove sent us before his lecture on Freud.  I was fully in Freud's camp on this, that it is the transience of things that give them if not all their value, at least increased value.  In Saturday's discussion about Frankenstein, we were talking about his desire to solve life and death, to figure out how to prevent death - and I began to think about what life would be like if we were immortal.  I can't see how we would enjoy anything.  If we had eternity to do, try, experience anything and everything we could think of, what would be the point of any of it, what would be the joy or the excitement of any of it.  Freud intimated "there were two kinds of people: those who can enjoy desiring and those who need satisfaction."

I see this duality of perspective in my work.  We have to deal with death and loss of pets - and I've had to go through this personally with my own pets as well as with family members and their pets, and countless times with clients.  There are some people who in the midst of grief when they lose a pet say that they don't know if they will ever get another pet as it's too hard.  For myself, I can't think that way.  I'm very cognizant of the arc of having a pet and that they will get sick, and they will eventually die - I deal with this every single shift I work - but I can't let that overshadow all else.  I can't think about having a pet, enjoy taking them for a walk or curling up with a purring contented cat, and in the midst of that let myself be oppressed with thoughts that some day they will die and I will be sad.  That day will come and I will be sad - excruciatingly sad - but that is the reality.  I have no desire to avoid it by opting out.

The individual person, like the species of which she is a member, is going nowhere discernible (or predictable), and nowhere in particular. But this is not so much a cause of grief as an invitation to go on inventing the future.  As Darwin and Freud discover more and more about the powers of the past - about how the present is continually being rushed by the past - they also realize one simple fact: that the past influences everything and dictates nothing. [pg 29]

This last phrase, to me, is all you ever would need to know to be a counsellor or psychoanalyst. Yes - you will be affected by what has happened to you in your past BUT you are not bound by it, it does not define you, it dictates NOTHING.

For Darwin it was a simple matter of biological imperatives - survive and reproduce.  For Freud there was the complicating factor of man's desire for happiness - and "their unhappiness shows that they are divided against themselves." [pg 30]

Once happiness matters - and happiness entails the pleasures of justice as inextricable from the pleasures of sexual satisfaction; the possibilities of kindness made sufficiently compatible with a sense of aliveness - so-called biological functions become moral questions. [pg 31]

In my work for Veterinarians Without Borders (not to say that I don't think about this at home in Canada as well) I end up thinking alot about humans, animals and the environment, the "One World" concept we are [finally?] starting to accept.  Darwin wrote "I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the co-adaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life..." 4th Chapter.  Phillips goes on to write: "Beauty and complexity are self-evidently good, and they can be found now in the co-adaptation of the ecological system." [pg 38]  "Nature is astonishingly prolific, but it is a prodigal process going nowhere special, sponsored by destruction and suffering." [pg 40]

Phillips looks to a particular aspects of each man's work to say something about life.  For Darwin, it was his work on the lowly earthworm.  For Freud, it is the reasoning behind his hatred about biographers.  They were men grappling with the state of knowledge in the 19th century.

In their writings we see religious traditions and sensibilities struggling to transform themselves into secular, scientifically informed ways of life. pg 116

He asks some tough questions in his epilogue. "Since a natural world is a world of continuous change and therefore continuous loss, how and why does loss matter?"  pg 117  He writes about their discoveries leading them to a secularized world, a world that no longer needs, that no longer can use, a god to give it meaning; and states "The risk was that life could be seen as an enormous waste; the pain of existence would not only be without justification, it could be without compensation. "  pg 117

There was so much I liked about this book and this author.  Who could resist an author who would write, I assume non-ironically, "given the conventional iconography of worms"? [pg 41]  One analogy I didn't agree with however was when Phillips compared Darwin's "side attack" on the status quo, through his observations about the role and importance of the common earthworm, with "middle-class fears of unionizing".  Philips suggests Darwin was intimating [pg 59] that "there may be parallels and analogies in the social hierarchy; that those at the bottom can do perfectly well what those at the top claim for themselves." While this may have held some truth 100 years ago, in 2013, the middle-class assuredly includes unionized workers, or said another way, you won't find many unionized workers in the ranks of the poor.  Said yet another way, the middle-class are not at the top, and the unionized worker is by no means at the bottom of any societal hierarchy.  If anything this hierarchy, in the 21st century, remains more gender-based, not worker's class-based.

In the section on Freud, with his odd fear of biographers, Phillips writes

It is not merely that we might be endangered by people's assumed knowledge about us, or our assumed knowledge about them - as in racist or sexist fantasy - but that it is misleading to assume it is knowledge that we want or that we have of people, any more than it is knowledge that we get from listening to music.  pg 74

 Phillips expounds a bit upon Freud's theory of a death wish, something I've never read up on.  He says that our life story:

this cosmic death story is in two acts. First, at no definable moment, and by no describable agent or process, 'The attributes of life were at some time evoked in inanimate matter by the action of a force of whose nature we can form no conception.' [...] And then for equally mysterious reasons ... the next thing happened...  'For a long time, perhaps,' he writes, 'living substance was thus being constantly created afresh and easily dying, till decisive external influences altered in such a way as to oblige the still surviving substance to diverge ever more widely from its original course of life and to make ever more complicated detours before reaching its aim of death.' pg 79

Freud believed that we intellectually wish to live but that we instinctively wish to die, but to die our own way.  Phillips asks "Indeed, what is narrative about if it is not about objects of desire and the detours and obstacles and dangers entailed in their acquisition?" pg 83

...it is as if there are two kinds of life stories going on inside us.  From the point of view of the death instinct - that Freud is inclined to regard as the omniscient narrator - my life is a story about dying in my own fashion.  From the point of view of the life instinct, of Eros, more life is being sought and sustained.  pg 84

 "To be or not to be, that is the question"  Shakespeare, yet again, blazed a path we are still following.

'Instincts and their transformations are at the limit of what is discernible by psychoanalysis.' [pg 91]

Phillips writes that for Freud biographies were 'spurious and misleading' accounts of a life whereas psychoanalysis shows that a person's account of their own life is what should be relied on.  I don't know that I would agree at all, given the vagaries and unreliability of memory not to mention the impact of perspective.  I don't think there is any true or complete summary of a life - even if, as in these times of recording every moment and posting it online, an entire life were recorded and played back.

Lives dominated by impossible ideals - complete honesty, absolute knowledge, perfect happiness, eternal love - are lives experienced as continuous failure. pg 115

Phillips says that Darwin and Freud "press us to think of our lives as more miraculous than our deaths; our death is inevitable, but our conception is not."  pg 128

Habit, like bad science (or prejudice) creates an illusion of predictability; it keeps things the same by turning a blind eye to difference.  Darwin, Notebook 1839

This really resonates with me as I've always been someone very comfortable in habit and often made uneasy by the prospect of change.  Freud added to Darwin's insights about the constant state of change and adaptation (and co-adaptation) by bringing humankind's internal life into the mix, along with the external world, saying we also have to adapt to the internal world of desires, memory, repressions etc. Thinking of change as the normal state of affairs, not just something that occurs but as the main truth of life, as the most important factor in our lives and as the one we need to accept if not embrace, is an exciting way to think about things.

Discussion: Thoreau and Freud

Our Thoreau discussion was led by Kirsten.  I read this short essay and while I felt agreement with some of what Thoreau had to say, about standing up for what you believe in, about not supporting entities (even if this means your government) that are carrying out actions you believe are wrong but I was left floundering somewhat by Thoreau's omission of any attempt to define conscience, to describe how this would work in reality.  I realize he was living in a very different time, less than a century after the American states, including Massachussetts, had been involved in a revolution to force independence from Britain.  Revolt against your government in this context would likely have been seen in a more acceptable and necessary light.  But Thoreau was a smart and thoughtful man and I would have thought he would have contemplated more stable situations and what future roles of democracy, conscience and individual rights and responsibilities might entail.  Kristen was helpful in giving us some background about Thoreau including his adherence to transcendentalism with its belief in the innate goodness of the human being.  I'm not sure that I'm as sanguine as Thoreau was.  I believe that there is innate goodness in human beings but I also believe (as did Freud) that there is innate aggressiveness and my worry in allowing individuals complete freedom is that those who contain more aggressiveness, allowed to run riot, can very easily and quickly with - mankind's technological and strategic abilities - come to dominate the more innately 'good' humans and certainly to oppress the weaker members of any community.

Kristen sent out a good set of questions but we only had a chance to discuss the 1st one - and even then it was a topic that we could have discussed for an entire day:

1. How do we determine what is right?  What are the rights of the individual vs the rights of society?

We live in a society which currently does not nurture a conscience in its citizens, instead it encourages obedience.  People may take actions based, they claim, on their conscience but at what point does their right to obey their conscience end?  My mind immediately went to the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr quote that "The right to swing my fist ends where the other man's nose begins."  But a determination of 'harm to others' is not always as clearcut as in Wendell Holmes' quote.  We had a brief discussion about how to define conscience.  Examples brought up were conscientious objectors to the Vietnam war draft - where conscience was defined on the basis of adherence to religious tenets or teachings.  Society seemed willing to concede the overriding dictates of conscience if it was backed up by the practice of an accepted religion but in the absence of a religious foundation for conscience or in a current western world where religion holds less sway on society, where is conscience defined?  We discussed certain actions that may be sanctioned or even prescribed by religion and/or cultural norms: honour killings, genital mutilation, Christians objecting to abortion clinics (with varying levels of force reaching all the way up to sniper killings of doctors).  Thoreau doesn't explicitly state this but he was focused on the rights and obligations of the individual and for Thoreau, as for Wendell Holmes, the right of an individual to follow his conscience ends where harm to another might begin.

Thoreau was a fan of less government.  How do we make government more responsive to the needs to the people it governs?  Decentralization of government is one way of having a more flexible government with potentially less oppression of individuals (or potentially oppression of fewer individuals).  Switzerland would be one example of a country with a more decentralized government, with its various cantons.

It was an interesting discussion but we ran out of time to really dissect into what is conscience and how do we determine what someone's conscience is?  It was time to move onto Civilization and its Discontents, as postulated by Freud.

Dr. Jerry Zaslove led the discussion on Freud's text Civilization and its Discontents.  Dr. Zaslove has been studying Freud and the field of psychoanalysis for decades.  He spoke a bit about Vienna, the birthplace of psychoanalysis, where Freud lived for most of his life.  He had sent us a few texts including one containing Freud's views on capital punishment, and provided a handout on Ritual Psycho-Analytic Studies by Theodor Reik.  Zaslove made the point that the word civilization in the context of this book is probably not the best word.  Culture would have been more apt.  Freud (and Thoreau) are trying to understand the institutions that mankind had developed and how they have come to create such problems for individuals.

Freud is a modern step along a long pathway we've been following from the time of Copernicus through the the Enlightenment (Rousseau, Darwin, Nietszche, Kant, Thoreau etc) to a more modern era, one in which we may not need a state but we do require  a Social Contract.  Freud's method involved psychoanalysis, and the cornerstone of psychoanalysis is repression and the unconscious.  Freud saw psychoanalysis as a dynamic way of assessing the human mind rather than a static set of descriptors of symptoms.  Yet language is the main tool of psychoanalysis.  For someone new to the field, the jargon is a big barrier - not only to understanding but also because many of the words are sound cliched.  Interestingly, Professor Zaslove has been working on an analysis of psychoanalysis and aesthetics: aesthetics as a way to alleviate the suffering that civilization or culture causes to individuals.  Chapter II offers ways of coping with the unhappiness of life.  3 ways.  Deflection, intoxication or .....
Freud was influenced by Darwin and the concept of development and some of Freud's totemic concepts.

Dr. Zaslove briefly defined some of the language associated with psychoanalysis:

• Neuroses - where the ego is divided against itself
• Psyche - from the german means soul or spirit - the inner location of the body
• repression - in the german means repulsion, pushing away
• sexual - phases of the development of the human animal i.e.: adolescence, having a love object, Eros
• cathexis - one part of the mind is occupied by another part of the mind - almost militarily
• civilization - group or mass psychology - the energy of a group
• Id - place of non-conscious drives
• Ego - the self or "i"
• Super-ego - the over 'I' or meta-'I' - stands above the "I"; free association
• transference 
• obsession or compulsion - qualities of the human psyche

Zaslove described some of the influences at the time:

A time of revolutions and counter-revolutions
Archaeological investigation into ancient civilizations
Class system, industrialization - Freud was pessimistic whether these would change - persisent ruling class
City states such as Vienna are undergoing changes and stresses
Growing middle-classes - increased neuroses

One technique used in psychoanalysis is to try and understand emotions through memory and Zaslove briefly mentioned Mimesis in people.  Neurosis is a key issue in individuals as well as in society.  To Freud neurosis is not an illness, it's a consequence in the development of the mental life as a child, where it finds itself divided against itself.  The child has all these undifferentiated drives.  Each child will attach itself to an object (mother, father, grandparent or other caregiver).  The neurosis is the coming into existence of consciousness.  The human animal doesn't do this automatically, it does it via love and touch and by creating a picture .  The healthy self, in an effort to keep itself together, creates an imago, of that which has been lost or that which can be attained in the future.  The resistance or conflict arises when the child realizes that it won't achieve this image.

Civilization and Its Discontents is an anti-platonic book.  It's a book about where we are now (100 years ago) - about modernity.  It's a developmental psychology, it assumes the individual is capable of development.

Freud: Civilization and its Discontents

Freud, Sigmund: Civilization and its Discontents, Tr. David McLintock; Penguin Modern Classics, St. Ives 2002.

These week we are reading a work of Freud's and an essay of Thoreau's.  Knowing only the most minimal and banal information about each of these (Freud as psychoanalyst with a fixation on the Oedipus complex and blaming the mother for any difficulties in an individual's life; and Thoreau as a simple-living backwoods philosopher who wrote Walden) I didn't immediately see a connection between the 2.

The book of Freud's we are reading is about Civilization, something I have never spent much time thinking about but, if pressed, would probably have said is a good thing.  I had a hard time with the introduction as it plunged me immediately into the deep end of psychoanalytical jargon and concepts, territory unknown to me.  I immediately found myself floundering in the murky depths of concepts about the anal eroticism of young human beings, primitive sniffing men on all fours and the repression of olfactory stimulation when mankind evolved from all fours to standing erect, discussions of the id, ego and super-ego, Eros, the totemic phase, and oceanic feelings.  I was having a hard time relating this to civilization but once I got into Freud's text itself, I found much there to make me think and reflect.

Freud's discussion was a bit challenging for someone lacking any previous knowledge of his earlier works (this text being written in 1929 and Freud lived from 1856 to 1939).  What was interesting to me is what I've been exposed to, via books and media culture (TV, movies etc), during my lifetime of western society's reaction to Freud's findings during the remainder of the 20th century (and now into the 21st century).  I found his discussions (about the exigencies of civilization, the role of religion, the conflict between the individual and society) were really thought-provoking and made me want to read more in this area - though what I really wanted to read, being lazy, was a text from some learned person assessing mankind and society in the 21st century in a manner similar to Freud's processes in the late 19th and early 20th century.  I was very curious, as I read about sexual repression, the constraints civilization imposes on an individual's appetites or drives, the importance of various innate human drives, about what this now looks like for someone growing up in the 21st century.

Freud writes quite a bit about why mankind may have developed and submitted to civilization.  In return for increased security (controlling nature, decreasing risk of physical harm including starvation, exposure to the elements, mitigating against intra-species aggression etc), mankind had to give up or constrain basic human pleasure-seeking drives, most notably for Freud (and according to him, man - though it is not always clear to me when Freud means "Mankind" and when he means "man") the drive for sexual gratification.  

[...] Civilization designates the sum totals of those achievements and institutions that distinguish our life from that of our animal ancestors and serve the dual purpose of protecting human beings against nature and regulating their mutual relations. [pg 27]

Communal life becomes possible only when a majority comes together that is stronger than any individual...The replacement of the individual by that of the community is the decisive step towards civilization."  "Its essence lies in the fact that the members of the community restrict themselves in their scope for satisfaction [...] The next requirement of civilization is justice. [pg 32]

Much of mankind's struggle is taken up with the task of finding a suitable...accommodation between the claims of the individual and the mass claims of civilization. [pg 33]

What has occurred since Freud wrote this text, is a large body of research on animals, animal behaviour, animal societies, interactions, learning etc - and I'm fascinated by what we have learned about mankind vs the animal kingdoms in the last 100 years.

Freud goes on to discuss civilization and writes on pg 39 how, though women "1st laid the foundations of civilization with the claims of their love," men are set the difficult task of maintaining it and forced to "sublimate their drives," given that women have "little aptitude" for this and indeed soon resent men's distraction from their "duties as a husband and father."

Again, in the year 2013, almost 1/2 century since the early days of 'women's lib', I would really like to read a modern take on this from someone who has studied Freud and his field over the past few decades.  One jarring note, from a perspective 100 years later than when Freud was writing, lay in a footnote to Section IV where he notes:

... erotic relations are so often associated with a degree of direct aggression, quite apart from the sadistic component that quite properly belongs to them.  Faced with such complications, the love-object will not always be as understanding and tolerant as the farmer's wife who complained that her husband no longer loved her because he had not beaten her for a week.

Freud looks at several tactics mankind has experimented with to try and cope with the realities of civilization.  I found it interesting to read his opinion of communism, given that we read The Communist Manifesto just last week.  Freud writes about communism and the contention that mankind's "nature has been corrupted by the institution of private property." [pg 49]  He contrasts this with Christianity's grandiose and, Freud maintains, impossible commandment to 'Love thy neighbour as thy neighbour loves thee.'  Freud states that communism's attempt to redress inequality by abolishing private property rights and rights of inheritance don't take into account the 'natural' inequalities that will always occur due to varying genetic physical attributes and innate and unequal mental abilities.  Freud writes that:

Aggression was not created by property; it prevailed with almost no restriction in primitive times, when property was very scanty. [pg 50]

Freud considers aggression "an indestructible feature of human nature."

It was also interesting, on pg 50, to read Freud's comments about one outlet for mankind's natural aggression which is found within small tight cultural units, where aggression is directed outwards to outsiders.  Freud calls this the 'narcissism of small differences.' pg 51

As a scientist I enjoyed Freud's simple description of the goal of science.

...What we strive for in scientific work - a simple answer that neither neglects nor does violence to the facts.

In Part VII Freud speaks about internal controls that civilization instills to curb mankind's innate aggression, such as guilt and the need for punishment.  I'm sure I could pick up almost any book from the pantheon of literature and find this as one of the themes in the book.

Professor Zaslove sent along various extracts to consider as we read Freud this week.  One of these contained some responses Freud had communicated to Theodor Reik in 1926, when asked by Judge Emil Desenheimer of a Germanic Supreme Provincial Court for his views on capital punishment.  Freud raised the issue of 'talion' as an early legal principle, a term I'd never heard of.


According to Britannica Online Encyclopaedia: Talion:  A talion is a legal principle originating back in Babylonian times and in Palestine, based on the "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" concept.  The law makers in those times, and extending through the early Roman times and occasionally resurfacing in the middle ages, felt that the punishment should more literally match the crime.  Eventually the injured party could also choose to be compensated financially instead.  The Latin term was lex talionis.

Reading about it in Britanica Online, it made me think of my recent trip a couple of weeks ago to Todos Santos Cuchumatan, in northwestern Guatemala.  I've been there yearly since 2009, working on a canine population and rabies control project for Veterinarians Without Borders Canada.  It's a Mayan community which has been able to maintain a strong sense of identity and culture and resist the pace of change experienced elsewhere in the last century.  Though I'm seeing changes even in just 4 years, due to the availability of cellphones and the internet, it is still quite traditional.  This year we had one team member interviewing some of the people in the community.  One interesting thing to come out was a different concept of justice.  I knew that the municipal leaders spend much of their time mediating property disputes and other areas of conflict but one woman's story really brought it home to me.  Most of the dogs in Todos Santos, owned or otherwise, run loose in the community.  One woman told us that her dog, while running loose, had got into her neighbour's house and had eaten some of the neighbour's food.  The neighbour complained to the municipality and asked to be compensated for her loss.  The decision, and this was not deemed unusual by the community, was that the dog-owning woman had to either poison her dog or else pay a significant amount to the neighbour to make up for the lost food.  Being poor, the woman had to poison her own dog, something she is still heart-broken over months later.  This to me is an odd way of dispensing justice but it seems to fit with the ancient concept of 'talion'.

Freud seems to have a pessimistic tone in his book.  Having recently experienced WWI in the decade prior to this book being published, Freud must have been disillusioned about the earlier bright promise of civilization and the industrial revolution.  The aggression, territorialism, brutality and carnage that occurred during the war would have seemed an enormous fall from the civilized heights promised by the advances of the 19th century.  In this book Freud proposes that mankind may 

gradually carry out such modifications in our civilization as will better satisfy our ... demand for a form of life that will make us happy with[out] allowing so much suffering, which could probably be avoided. [pg 52]

In the year 2013, I'm finding it hard to judge whether civilization/culture or society have advanced in a desirable way from where we were at the beginning of the 20th century or whether we have lost our way.  This is probably a significant factor in my decision to embark upon this Master's program and explore the works of bright people over the preceding centuries and up until today.  I'll see if I'm able to come to any decisive conclusion 4 years hence.