A rchive Date
[ 05-06-2000 ]
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[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Mass Media ]
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[They seemed like good ideas at the time
By GEORGE JONAS
Toronto Sun
December 30, 1999
The eminent writer Paul Johnson - author, among other important books, of Modern Times and A History of the Jews - published an essay earlier this month. In it Johnson argues that although our epoch is commonly thought of as the "American Century," it has really been the "Jewish Century."
He writes that the three men "whose ideas had done most to shape" our times, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein, were Jews.
Marx, Freud, and Einstein were indeed Jewish, and it may be respectably argued that their ideas have influenced this century more than anyone else's. In fact, many people suggested this before Johnson, right down to the parlour-game level. I think there are other contenders for the top three (Charles Darwin, for one) but ideas aren't in a horse race, and it doesn't matter what a photo-finish would show if they were.
Accepting that Marx, Freud and Einstein gave us the most influential ideas of the century, it seems to me there's still something more interesting to note about them than that they were all Jews (or male or European or heterosexual, which they also happened to be). Another thing they had in common characterizes our times in a much more profound way.
Marx proposed a theory of economics and history which turned out to be entirely erroneous. This is so universally accepted by now that one doesn't need to waste too many words on it.
Freud was closer to the truth when he intuited a substratum of brain activity influencing people's behaviour beneath the level of conscious thought, but the structures and mechanisms he attributed to them belonged to the realm of art rather than science. Yet Freud presented his notions of "ego" and "id" as if they were body parts, not metaphors.
Freud himself may have known that psychoanalysis was a system of faith rather than medicine. In a 1933 lecture he remarked: "I do not think our successes can compete with those of Lourdes. There are so many more people who believe in the miracles of the Blessed Virgin than in the existence of the unconscious."
As Johnson puts it in his essay: "Freud may have been a bad scientist, but he was certainly a stylist and neologist of genius."
Maybe so, except Freud and his followers presented themselves as men of science, not as inventors of allegories. Whatever they were as wordsmiths, they held themselves out to be healers - and as healers they were little better than charlatans.
Einstein "erred," if one can call it that, in an entirely different way.
His theories of relativity replaced Newton's angular universe with flawless scientific insight, but, as Johnson points out, his work had the effect of "encouraging the concept of relativism in areas of human behaviour on which his actual theory had no bearing." This gave rise to moral relativism, ultimately serving as a justification to totalitarian politicians from Lenin to Hitler - much to Einstein's horror. But then Einstein was also dismayed by the atomic bomb, a much more direct consequence of his scientific discoveries.
There's no doubting the three thinkers' influence. Intellectual fashion prescribed especially Marx and Freud in heavy doses.
The French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in his 1972 book, Anti-Oedipus, that, in Europe, "[o]ne had to be on familiar terms with Marx, nor let one's dreams stray too far from Freud."
Although the two orthodoxies weren't necessarily complementary, they often seemed to affect the same personality types. As the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge remarked once in conversation with Canadian newspaper owner Conrad Black: "The world is suffering from an enormous infestation of Marxists quoting Freud, and Freudians quoting Marx."
Ultimately the most remarkable thing about the three men whose ideas have shaped our century isn't that they were Jews, but that they were wrong.
They were wrong to varying degrees, with Marx being wrong about almost everything. Freud was probably right in his intuition about the unconscious and wrong only in his science - i.e., the mechanisms he described and the therapies he propounded. Einstein wasn't wrong in his theories of relativity, only in what others extrapolated from projecting them onto a moral and social screen.
Still, it's hard to escape the conclusion that if the most influential ideas of our century have been false, partly or totally, directly or indirectly, there must be something fundamentally amiss with our century. The second proposition simply follows from the first.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com. Jonas, author and producer, appears Thursdays
 World Fact Book (CIA))]
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