On Reading Philip Rieff or How Tough Sociology Can Help Us Understand Us

     It has long been a conviction of mine that too many people are too much shaped by their everyday world and they do not realize how much. Human cultures have a way of so becoming the atmosphere we take into our lungs that we lose sight of the truth that sometimes the air is poison. For some it is a slow death by breathing.
     Os Guinness, Peter Berger, Max Weber, and Jacques Ellul have assisted me in checking the toxicity levels, and now I need to add another--Philip Rieff. Truthfully, he is the most challenging in both the way he writes and at times what he says. Sometimes what he says is difficult to mentally grasp and other times I fear I understand him all too clearly. 
     Rieff is best known for his superlative scholarship on the life, writings, and influence (helpful and destructive) of Sigmund Freud. Rieff is one of those rare contemporary authors who is conversant with ideas and authors well beyond the bounds of his area of expertise. Reading Rieff is a full education in that one encounters Rieff's reflections and connections with cultural history, literature, the arts, philosophy, and the social sciences. In the Sacred Order/Social Order series, printed by the University of Virginia Press the reader meets a more aphoristic Rieff. I was reminded of certain writings by Friedrich Nietzsche in style much more than content. 

     Among the many keen insights from Rieff, his assertion that we have moved through three successive cultures is central. The present culture war, which is the third culture is characterized by a radical skepticism and disdain for authority beyond the diminished autonomous person. This culture (not really a culture) contends vigorously against the second culture's sense of identity grounded in transcendence.  

     I remember once reading that Max Weber was asked why he thought about social reality with such depth and intensity considering it often lead him to a state of depression.  Weber responded, "I want to see how much I can stand." Reading Rieff is a bit like this, especially if Rieff is correct in his diagnosis of our social and cultural ills. On the other hand, knowing such problems may assist us in overcoming.

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