Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & BarrelhouseWylie, Philip
Philosophy
Opus 21: Descriptive Music for the Lower Kinsey Epoch of the Atomic Age, a Concerto for a One-man Band, Six Arias for Soap Operas, Fugues, Anthems & Barrelhouse
Wylie, Philip
Authors -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Patients -- Fiction; Philosophy -- Fiction
For psychology--though a thousand Presbyterian and Roman Catholic
practitioners of its minor branches may not admit it--and though ten
thousand better psychologists lie their faces black--has already put
a period to orthodox religion. The old astronomers did away with the
old cosmology for all the churches. The new investigators of awareness
have done away with the ancient theologies and "moral" systems as
completely--whether it takes the people a generation or a thousand
years to find it out. Psychology is the scientific investigation of
what man calls awareness and of what prompts him that he is unaware
of. As such, it inevitably must analyze and resolve all man's beliefs,
religions, faiths and the mechanisms of them, as well as his politics,
his economics, the motives of his arts, his morals, ethics and sex
manners. Why should anybody be surprised that science, turned finally
upon man's inner self, should disclose different shapes from those
held real by Stone Age man, barbarians, and a few later millenniums of
men who decree that they are Christian but act more viciously than any
beast?
The disavowing psychiatrists, opportunist weaselers or men who do not
see that their science has set philosophy aside, will be historically
remembered. Their acts will prove the shocking superstitiousness
of the twentieth century and--in some cases--represent the public
persecutions, the subjective witchburnings, which show this era to be a
continuum of the Dark Ages.
As I said earlier, a smug people cannot even find the motive for asking
if a science of psychology exists, let alone what it has learned.
And we Americans are probably the most self-satisfied people who
ever appeared. The whole world starves, brawls, perishes around us.
Our own philosophy of progress is leading us to swift, continental
exhaustion--to the resourcelessness of our own progeny. Yet we believe
we are doing right and thinking rightly--a great, good, wonderful,
near-perfect nation.
It will take generations of disaster to crack the hull of such
preposterous self-satisfaction. Only through despair and amidst ruins,
in all likelihood, will men discover that humility which may lead to
the honest assessment of man's vanities, his insane traditions, pompous
faiths, patriotisms, and excesses. But there is not much use talking
about it or trying to explain. Knowledge cannot fend where the people
refuse to know.
"Did you ever raise dogs?" I asked Yvonne.
She had been quietly eating lobster bisque--glancing at me from time to
time while I reflected and while I ate, too. She nodded. "Several."
"Then you've noticed that pups behave in every single way that would,
in people, be called sinful, immoral, and perverse."
"That's the nastiest thing I ever heard in my life! How could animals
be perverted!"
"Did I say they were? I merely said--or tried to--that dogs exhibit all
the same curious activities your Professor Kinsey found abundant in
human behavior."
"They do not!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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