Carl Jung has some advice for our troubled times, which consists in spiritual reform, in other words, the oppressed of this earth need a good dose of spirituality for their salvation. Thus, he said in the wake of the second world war:
"Everything possible has been done for the outside world: science has been refined to an unimaginable extent, technical achievement has reached an almost uncanny degree of perfection. But what of man, who is expected to administer all these blessings in a reasonable way? He has simply been taken for granted. No one has stopped to consider that neither morally nor psychologically is he in any way adapted to such changes. As blithely as any child of nature he sets about enjoying these dangerous playthings, completely oblivious of the shadow lurking behind him, ready to seize them in its greedy grasp and turn them against a still infantile and unconscious humanity. (...) The question remains: How am I to live with this shadow? What attitude is required if I am to be able to live in spite of evil? In order to find valid answers to these questions a complete spiritual renewal is needed. And this cannot be given gratis, each man must strive to achieve it for himself. Neither can old formulas which once had a value be brought into force again. The eternal truths cannot be transmitted mechanically; in every epoch they must be born anew from the human psyche." Source: http://www.cgjungpage.org/articles/wishardhist.html Notice the completely tautological reasoning in Jung's argument: human beings have to change, but, it is not explained HOW they should change, everyone has to do that for themselves, he says, and therefore, you cannot say anything more about that. Of course that is true, but then we have neatly abstracted from humans as social, cooperative beings, from social change, for social practice, from technology and science, from political power, and we wind up saying that eternal truths must be re-implemented in specific contexts. And of course "eternal truths" are only as good as the skills of the researcher who claims to discover them. As for myself, I would not trust Jung for a cent in that respect, and indeed I would reject eternal truths in favour of time-bound truths. The point is rather that in our search for eternal truths, we end up with a hypostatis in the present, we eternalise what exists now, the status quo, and we are effectively back to the feudal dispute between Galileo and the church. We can, of course toss around clever analogies and symbols endlessly, but that just distracts from the real problems. And that is WHY those analogies and symbols get tossed around by the ideologues. But that just makes problems even worse, because we end up not knowing what to focus on anymore. In case you didn't know, Carl Jung had a flirtation with the Nazis, although he refused to psychoanalyse Hitler when asked. Here you had an expert on the human soul, who neither clearly foresaw and analysed the Nazi phenomenon beyond a dim realisation something was going wrong, did not fight it actively, and did not realise that world war 2 would produce more psychological problems and psychiatric cases than existed ever before. That is really interesting, because that means that someone could in principle help a few hundred patients in therapy, being only vaguely aware that social, political and economic events could create millions of nutcases in the future. And then you get these people who prattle that a social "science" is impossible, only a "social engineering". Whereas, if that was really true, we would need to invent such a science ! As regards the currently favourite "expert" in America - when the Republican candidates were asked to name their favorite political philosophers, Mr. George W. Bush replied: 'Christ, because he changed my heart.' Asked to elaborate, he said: 'Well, if they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain'. 'When you turn your heart and your life over to Christ, when you accept Christ as the Savior, it changes your heart. It changes your life. And that's what happened to me.' In other words, you can be President of the United States of America without having to explain yourself. I guess that, once again, we will have to wait for the memoirs, i.e, the explanation of why we were correct is projected into the future. I have Hilary Clinton's memoirs here, actually, and the title of the second to last chapter sums up the end of all bourgeois wisdom: "DARE TO COMPETE". As for me, I'm off to have a shave. And for some old wine in a new bottle, if only I had some. Jurriaan
