{"id":6695,"date":"2016-03-29T23:28:56","date_gmt":"2016-03-30T03:28:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/?p=6695"},"modified":"2016-06-28T13:44:26","modified_gmt":"2016-06-28T17:44:26","slug":"instinctual-scapegoat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/2016\/03\/29\/instinctual-scapegoat\/","title":{"rendered":"Instinctual Scapegoat"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The turn of the twentieth century saw the end of the Victorian Era in Europe, and the disciplines of literature, natural science, philosophy, and psychology spearheaded a backlash against formerly dominant middle class ideals. The psychologists Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund Freud studied conditioned reflexes and human instinct, bringing into question mans\u2019 own agency, and thus his ability to marshal infinite progress. Freud\u2019s \u201cCivilization and <em>Die Weltanschauung<\/em>\u201d was written in the waning days of World War I in 1918. The piece, much like the world at that time, sought peaceful rationality in the wake of violent chaos. According to Freud, the biggest threat to man\u2019s intellect was religion, which both inhibited thought and threatened the objectivity of science. Religion seeks control over the \u201csensory world,\u201d just as science does, but religion employs the \u201cwish-world\u201d within each person to harness this control. ((Freud,\u00a0Civilization &amp; Die Weltanschauung, 1918)) Man should remain faithful to reason rather than religion, Freud asserted, because \u201creason\u2014is among the forces which may be expected to exert a unifying influence upon men\u201d ((Freud,\u00a0Civilization &amp; Die Weltanschauung, 1918)) \u2014an attractive prospect for those who had witnessed four years of bloody war.<\/p>\n<p>The influence of World War I is further seen in Freud\u2019s work through his discussion of human aggression. Freud claimed that man is naturally aggressive and that this aggression is the biggest impediment to the evolution of civilization. His emphasis on instinct is not surprising given the context of his writing; attributing the horrors of World War I to an instinctual element of man was easier than blaming moral failings and poor decisions. Freud ends his piece with the statement: \u201cevolution of civilization may therefore be simply described as the struggle for life of the human species.\u201d ((Freud,\u00a0Civilization &amp; Die Weltanschauung, 1918)) Freud himself had just witnessed conflict that feasibly could have actualized the extinction of the human species and his explanation for this conflict was the inescapable aggression of man.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The turn of the twentieth century saw the end of the Victorian Era in Europe, and the disciplines of literature, natural science, philosophy, and psychology spearheaded a backlash against formerly dominant middle class ideals. The psychologists Ivan Pavlov and Sigmund &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/2016\/03\/29\/instinctual-scapegoat\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2790,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[110560],"tags":[125686,94228,12771],"class_list":["post-6695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hist107-archive","tag-civilization-and-die-weltanschauung","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-world-war-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2790"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6695\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/quallsk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}