© Michael Lacewing
To lerance, critical faculties and false needs
NEW IDEAS AND CRITICAL FACULTIES
John Stuart Mill argued that tolerance will encourage new ideas to be introduced into
society and it will encourage people to think about their lives more reflectively, thus
developing their critical faculties. New ideas require an atmosphere of tolerance, because
people can be tempted to dismiss what is new out of hand. Tolerance enables people to
develop new ideas without fear of being immediately rejected, and it allows new ideas to
spread through society.
With the constant challenge of new ideas, we will be required to think, to reflect, not
only on the new ideas, but on the views we already hold. To take another view seriously
demands that we justify our own view against it. An intolerant society involves the
rejection of other points of view without thought. Tolerance creates an atmosphere in
which people are required to think.
FALSE NEEDS AND REPRESSIVE DESUBLIMATION
The terms ‘false needs’ and ‘repressive desublimation’ come from a discussion in Herbert
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (esp. Ch. 1 and Ch. 3) of the state of ‘advanced industrial
society’. He argued that technological progress, instead of leading to greater freedom, has
created less freedom. It is, however, ‘a comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic
unfreedom’. People are kept happy by rising standards of living and economic progress,
which society manages very well. It is a paradoxical situation, people are happy but not
free.
Why not free? Because every aspect of society in terms of means-end rationality, where
the ‘end’ is more technological and economic progress.
Independence of thought, autonomy, and the right to political opposition are being
deprived of their basic critical function in a society which seems increasingly
capable of satisfying the needs of individuals through the way in which it is
organized.
We have lost an inner dimension to ourselves, the rational reflection that rejects how
things are. Because we are happy, it seems unreasonable to reject and attack the structure
and organization of society that has made us happy. We are becoming unable to think
differently.
Society, then, comes to define what we need in terms of what will contribute to progress:
social controls exact the… need for the production and consumption of waste; …
the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at
administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands
and gadgets.
Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in
accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate
are false needs. We feel we need these things, but the sense of needing them is a product
of a society seeking only technological and economic progress.
Repressive desublimation
As a result, there are so few ‘experiments of living’ that really seek to strike out; those
that do – that look ‘dangerous’ or really ‘different’ – are held up as images to be
consumed, not as challenges to the system of consumption. Mass communication blends
art, politics, religion and philosophy with commercials. Everything becomes a
commodity, and this deprives it of its meaning as an alternative to the life of
consumption.
Higher culture was critical of society, alien, opposite, transcendent. So it drew our
attention to what society was not, to other possibilities for how to find meaning in life.
This made us unhappy, but we were conscious of the gap between reality and possibility.
The gap was bad, but the consciousness was good and necessary for social change. Now
we don’t understand higher culture in this challenging way, but as a taste or image,
something to be bought and sold, discarded as the fashion passes. Its truth has been
replaced by technological, economic, means-end rationality. We don’t see it as an
alternative to this way of thinking, as an argument for some things being valuable for
their own sake. We have lost our consciousness of how things might be different.
Despite this, we have become more satisfied. Marcuse calls this ‘repressive
desublimation’. (His theory draws on the ideas of Sigmund Freud.) ‘Higher’ culture
derives its motivation and its energy, according to Freud and Marcuse, from our drives,
in particular our sexual drives. Because it is socially unacceptable to have sex wherever,
however, whenever we want, this energy is redirected into forms of creativity. The
frustration, however, emerges once again in the challenge to society from higher culture.
So in sublimation, we remain conscious of society’s repression of our drives.
As higher culture has become commodified, we have gained more satisfaction, both
from technological and economic progress, but also sexually. Sexuality is much more
free, more daring and uninhibited than it used to be, but also, therefore, much more
limited – it expresses itself just as sex, not as creativity. This is ‘desublimation’, but it is
still repressive, creating false needs and undermining our ability to think. The system
makes us happy, why conduct an ‘experiment in living’? The satisfaction we get weakens
the rationality of protesting against society.
Tolerance
How does tolerance fit into all this? In fact, at no point does Marcuse say that tolerance
contributes to the problem. The system may, however, generate something we may
mistake for tolerance. As society absorbs all the challenges to it, what emerges is ‘a
harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexist
in indifference’. Peaceful coexistence sounds like tolerance, but technological progress
has produced indifference: Everyone signs up to economic progress, jobs, some form of
capitalism; what does it matter what else they think?
This is not tolerance, but the inability to take seriously critical challenges to society. So a
genuinely tolerant society – one in which autonomy is encouraged, real difference can
flourish, many lifestyles are genuinely possible – will not create false needs and repressive
desublimation. Perhaps our society is not genuinely tolerant, but an imitation, a fake.
I think Mill would sympathise with much of this, as he too wanted to free thought and
action from the tyranny of public opinion. Despite Mill’s argument from diversity, says
Marcuse, ‘Under the conditions of a rising standard of living, non-conformity with the
system itself appears to be socially useless’. We need to find new forms of freedom,
freedom from the economy, freedom from politics we can’t control, freedom of thought
from the influence of mass communication, the abolition of ‘public opinion’.