The topic of this book thus resembles, in a way, that of Civilisation and Its Discontents (1930), except that my conclusions differ greatly from Freud’s. Indeed, the conflict between what men instinctively like and the learnt rules of conduct that enabled them to expand – a conflict fired by the discipline of ‘repressive or inhibitory moral traditions’, as D. T. Campbell calls it – is perhaps the major theme of the history of civilisation. It seems that Columbus recognised at once that the life of the ‘savages’ whom he encountered was more gratifying to innate human instincts. And as I shall
...more
