240 Ideals in the Modern World
occasionally be an admirable quality to Freud, but it is not central
to the struggles of Self.
To Freud, what is called courage is usually based on illusion.
Why do men rush over the trench toward emplaced machine guns,
ready to meet death? Freud, like every civilized person, was shocked
and horrifi ed by the First World War. No one understood its cause
when it erupted— and a survey of current historians suggests that
no one knows its origins to this day. What George Steiner called
Eu rope’s long Sunday after noon— civilized, calm, decorous, and
(alas) rather boring— turned rapidly into hell on earth. Why did the
men leap up and over the trench? Freud has an answer: the narcis-
sistic illusion. They believed that they, unlike all the men around
them, would never die. All of us are convinced, on some level
below the reach of reason, that we are extraordinary and will never
leave the earth. “We know no time when we were not as now,” as
Milton’s Satan says. The individual knows of no time when he was
not pre sent, on the scene, and, for all purposes, the center of the
world. The idea that we will in time not be “as now” is untenable to
us, to the degree that we are ruled by our narcissism. And when is
self- love as strong as it is in youth, when the soldier goes off to war?
As Freud says in his “Thoughts on War and Death”: “What we
call our ‘unconscious’— the deepest strata of our minds, made up
of instinctual impulses— knows nothing that is negative and no ne-
gation; in it contradictions coincide. For that reason it does not know
its own death, for to that we can give only a negative content. Thus
there is nothing instinctual in us which responds to a belief in death.
This may even be the secret of heroism.” Freud goes on to say that
in the commonplace view of heroism, the individual takes in the
dangers manifest before him and overcomes his fear. He is willing
if need be to sacrifi ce himself for the general good. But really,
Freud says, most so- called heroes defy danger under the belief that
“Nothing can happen to me” (SE.XIV, 296).