By Julia Steiner
In today’s digital age, online discourse plays a pivotal role in shaping public opinion. As algorithms create echo chambers, they amplify extreme views, fueling the rise of cancel culture and online outrage. In his 2023 book The Age of Guilt: The Super-Ego in the Online World, Mark Edmundson, Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, delves into how Sigmund Freud’s concept of the super-ego offers a lens through which we can better understand the dynamics of modern digital culture.
The idea of the super-ego, in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, is defined as the ethical component of the personality that provides the moral standards by which the ego operates. Essentially, it functions as one’s inner critic, judging both oneself and others. In the preface of The Age of Guilt, Edmundson references Adams Phillips, who, in an essay on self-criticism, imagined what it would be like if the super-ego attended a party. In Phillips’s scenario, when the super-ego arrives at the party, he criticizes everyone and bores them to death. But in today’s world, Edmundson imagines that the super-ego would be the life of the party, pointing fingers at people for committing speech crimes and riling up the crowd.
How do we face this judgmental, self-righteous super-ego that has adopted the internet as a forum for cruelty? Edmundson seeks to understand and respond to this problem in The Age of Guilt, and even suggests how it could be transformed into an affirmative power. Phi Beta Kappa’s Book Awards Committee members noted: “Edmundson’s The Age of Guilt takes the reader on a daring and ambitious ride to make sense of the ‘sickness’ he sees present in the digital and virtual spaces of the internet,” calling it “worth the read” for its “insistence on something more than the ‘dark’ doom of a traditional Freudian surrender to the realization of ‘a force that judges and condemns lives in us all’.”
The Age of Guilt has also received positive critical reception from other scholars. Joshua Hall, a lecturer in English at the University of San Diego and a program coordinator at the university’s Humanities Center, wrote in the Los Angeles Review of Books: “In an era of internet saturation, The Age of Guilt offers a salutary good, a critical look at contemporary culture with an eye toward changing it for the better.” Similarly, for the Washington Post, President of Wesleyan University Michael S. Roth wrote that “Edmundson . . . is an engaging writer, whether he is describing Freud as heroic ideal, football, reading, teaching or, as part of his discussion in this latest volume, the politics of his students. His tone is friendly yet incisive, more conversational than academic…Insightful.”
Edmundson’s The Age of Guilt was a finalist for Phi Beta Kappa’s Christian Gauss Award, which honors outstanding books in the field of literary scholarship or criticism. Established by the ΦBK Senate in 1954, the award honors the late Christian Gauss, the distinguished Princeton University scholar, teacher and dean who also served as President of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Writer Julia Steiner graduated in May 2024 from Tufts University. She majored in international literary and visual studies with minors in French and history. In April 2024, she was inducted into the Delta of Massachusetts chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.