Bruce Lerro – Radio Free

Matriarchy, Witchery and the Great Goddess

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 14:47:41 +0000

A Heart-Felt Story

In the beginning men and women lived in harmony and peace. We were once one with nature and there were few differences between us in social power or wealth. Women had a special place in early tribal societies: their motherhood was revered, they held positions of authority, and they practiced forms of magic centered on the worship of a monotheistic Goddess. Figurines of Goddesses have been discovered, proving there was once a great women’s religion. At the end of the Bronze Age, hunters and pastoralists from Central Asia invaded these peaceful societies creating social hierarchies, wars, and the beginnings of male dominance. All of this was later sanctioned by the worship of otherworldly, transcendent male deities that eventually coalesced to become a monotheistic God. The Goddess was discredited and went underground, being kept alive in later years by peasant communities in the magical practice of witchcraft. Today the Goddess has resurfaced as a focus of women’s spirituality.

These are the claims about history and social evolution made by many Neo-Pagan or spiritual feminists. To be sure, not all people associated with the Goddess movement believe all of these claims. However, the summary above is probably a fair one, in that each of its elements is repeated in the writings of nearly all of the movement’s leaders. How plausible are these contentions in the light of anthropology, archaeology, macrosociology, political science, world history, mythology studies, and comparative religion? Were there once matriarchies or matrifocal societies? Does reverence for goddesses go all the way back to the Paleolithic Era? Can all or most of the figurines found by archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and others be classified as goddesses? If, in our society, a male god goes with male dominance, is it fair to infer that if we find evidence of goddesses in the ancient world this must indicate female dominance or at least the high status of women? Was motherhood revered in ancient societies? Is all magic goddess-centered? Is all witchcraft synonymous with goddess reverence? Were ancient tribal societies peace-loving before being invaded? Does the movement from polytheism to monotheism involve a battle among male gods, or between male and female gods? Here is a summary of the Goddess movement’s claims.

Common Claims or Assumptions Made by the Goddess Movement

There were once matriarchies or matrifocal societies
All or most of the figurines discovered by archeologists are goddesses
Goddess reverence goes all the way back to the Paleolithic Age
All magic is synonymous with goddess reverence
All witchcraft is synonymous with goddess reverence
Ancient People revered a monotheistic goddess
Motherhood is the leading function of goddesses
There is a direct connection between the presences of goddesses in ancient societies and the prosperous material status of women
The rise of institutionalized male dominance was caused by invasions of pastoral nomads
Tribal societies were peace-loving before being invaded by patriarchal societies
The movement from polytheism to monotheism involved battles between male gods and female goddesses

In addition to addressing these contentions about history, it is important to make explicit the underlying values of the Goddess movement. I agree with Philip Davis (1998) that the Goddess movement is part of a larger Romantic movement that began during the Renaissance and sustained itself through the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the twentieth century. I will paint as sympathetic picture as I can of the Romantic movement’s perspective on the world.

The Goddess movement is generally critical of Western-style political centralization and the globalization of the human community because Western civilization is not now and never has been truly democratic. The movement’s members tend to believe that all state societies, even those predating capitalism, serve the interests of the wealthy. They do not believe that real democracy can ever work when power is centralized. Furthermore, they resist attempts to universalize different groups of people into a universal humanity because this grouping in the past has, in practice, excluded many groups from the wealth they produced because of their class, race, or gender. At the same time, the movement is generally critical of the competitive values of capitalism and is suspicious of the preoccupation with material wealth, the accumulation of commodities, and high technology. Finally, the Goddess movement is critical of science as a way of knowing because, while proclaiming to be neutral, it actually serves the interests of the elite classes by providing the methodological base by which technologies of war may be built. For these reasons, the movement looks to the political organization of pre-state societies as a model for participatory democracy, pre-capitalists ways of conducting economic relations, and pre-scientific ways of knowing how the world works.

Because the Goddess movement often contrasts the values of tribal societies with those of state societies, it must also challenge the way world history has been presented. According to the Goddess movement, the dominant social order has placed a value judgment on social evolution by claiming that it constitutes “progress”. This means that the more complex societies are, the more they have improved life for everyone. Because the movement challenges this assumption, it must either try to revise history as written or, in more extreme cases, claim that the struggle to discover an objective history is futile. Here the Goddess movement joins forces with the extreme relativism of the Postmodernists, who say that one version of history is as good as another, and that competing ways of knowing about the past are equally relevant. One common approach is to fuse the study of history with mythology. Much of the work of the Goddess movement vacillates between the attempt to revise views of what really happened in history, and the effort to reinterpret history based on ancient mythology. For obvious reasons, this latter strategy garners little sympathy from those historians that aspire to using a scientific methodology.

The system of industrial capitalism has impacts not just on the economy and political structure of societies, but also on their sacred traditions, their ideas about non-human nature, and the collective psyche or mentality of the people. The Goddess movement believes that there is a direct connection between the nature of the perceived sacred sources and the manner in which people treat the natural world. The movement’s members believe that an otherworldly, transcendental God, because he is out of the world, neglects this world and effectively colludes with elites who exploit and pillage the natural world. Conversely, when sacred sources are understood as immanent and worldly, nature is more likely to be treated with respect. According to spiritual feminists, the distant sky-god acts as if he were an absentee landlord. If Goddess advocates are skeptical about centralization and globalization in the political world, they will take the same attitude toward the spiritual world. Rather than believing in a universal monotheistic deity, many people in the Goddess movement prefer a decentralized polytheism, though this is a bone of contention within the movement, as we shall see.

Patriarchal religions and atheistic non-believers have tended to use mechanistic metaphors to describe nature. The Goddess movement rejects the idea of nature-as-machine and believes that nature is alive, that the world is an organism. Even in patriarchal religions nature is often conceived of metaphorically as “mother”. The Goddess movement builds on this theme, viewing human beings and the rest of the animal kingdom as part of “her” body. Just as nature is not separate from sacred sources, so humanity is not separated from other creatures. Other animals are at least the equals of humans and we humans have no business trying to get away from nature or to improve her with scientific techniques. We need to merge with, or get back to, nature. There are also implications for our sense of time. One symptom of humanity’s problems, according to Goddess advocates, is our linear concept of time. This has caused us great problems in understanding how change occurs. Nature, for the Goddess movement, works in cycles. For humanity to merge with nature we would need to understand society and our individual lives as following the cycles of nature. Because the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature must be immanent, people do not need mediators and specialists to interpret sacred experience. We are all explorers together with no need for chaperones.

There are two kinds of nature—external and internal. Our bodies are an internal, microcosmic slice of the external macrocosm of nature. This has deep psychological implications. For the Goddess movement, rationality, analysis, planning, and striving to be objective are the psychological skills an individual uses to dualize or separate our bodies from the rest of nature. These rational skills lead to other dualisms: God vs. nature, nature vs. society, society vs. the individual, and the mind vs. the body. These separations are partly responsible for the problems of the modern world.

It is the non-rational part of the psyche—the part of the mind that synthesizes rather than divides—that is the true source of wisdom. The emotions, sensuality, intuition, and spontaneity are understood as virtuous. The Goddess movement believes that women have these skills more than men do and, generally speaking, though they would probably not claim this explicitly, most members act and talk as though women are inherently better than men.

There are at least two tension points which are worth pointing out. While the Goddess movement opposes traditional female roles and supports experimenting with being simply more human, there is a tension between those who want to develop the skills that men have traditionally been encouraged to claim, and those who want to elevate traditional female skills as inherently superior to male skills.

There is also a tension between the value of innocence in contrast to the value of experience. For the most part, the Goddess movement values experience over innocence but, in their contrast between tribal and state societies, they tend to romanticize tribal societies as innocent and uncorrupted. In the first chapter, I criticized the theory of progress as a way to understand history. Taken in its extreme, New-Age form, the Goddess view of history is a degeneration theory of social evolution. Instead of suggesting, as progress theorists do, that the further we go in history the better it gets, this theory argues that the earlier in time we go the better it gets. A summary chart of these Romantic values follows:

List of Twenty One Composite Values of Ancient Goddess Supporters

SOCIAL STRUCTURES

Simple, pre-state societies are an ideal to strive for (small is beautiful).
Complex, large societies are inherently bad, because they are impersonal.
Innocence is more noble than experience when it comes to social evolution.
What comes earlier in time must be better. Tribal societies are the ideal.
Material wealth, objects/commodities and technology are likely to be corrupting influences.
Science is alienating, cold, unfeeling and doesn’t address what is important in life.
Cooperation and communalism are better than competition as a way to organize social life.
Modern society perpetrates a false unity of humanity, ignoring gender, ethnic and class inequalities.
Myth is at least as important as history.
Historians reduce myth to illusionary or naive history. Support of a real “people’s history,” while retaining the value of mythic stories as a valuable sacred activity.

NATURE/SACRED

Spirit is immanent in nature and the individual rather than transcendent and separate from nature. Nature is all there is. Behind nature there is only more undiscovered nature.
There are many goddesses and gods – polytheism – there is no single source which “unites them all.*
Nature is understood as an organism, rather than a machine.
Goddesses are inseparable from female physiology: menstruation and childbirth.
Neither organized religion nor atheism provide meaningful answers to the big questions of life.
Other animals are at least the equal of or superior to human beings.
Human beings should merge with nature. We have no business thinking or trying to improve her.
Generally, sacred communion is experiential and not mediated by secular or sacred authorities based on faith.
Change happens in cycles, rather than linearly.

PSYCHOLOGY

Emotions, sensuality, intuition and the non-rational are at least as good as reason or empiricism as ways of knowing.
What is subjective and personal is better than impartiality and striving to be objective.
Spontaneity is more in touch with what matters in life than planning.
Experimental gender roles are better than traditional male and female roles.
When it comes down to it, women are inherently better than men.

* There is a counter-argument which claims that there is a single goddess.

According to Goodison and Morris (1998), the controversy between the supporters of Goddess theory and those who dismiss it is made worse because the two sides do not speak to each other. Those who support the theory are non-specialists, artists, psychotherapists, Neo-pagans, and amateur historians. They accuse academics—archaeologists, ancient historians, and anthropologists—of intentionally ignoring evidence of a powerful female presence in ancient history. This supposed intentional hiding or overlooking of evidence of the Goddess is usually described as being part of a male conspiracy to hide real history. Contemporary specialists in relevant fields ignore the Goddess claims, dismissing them as too far-fetched to take seriously. They also suspect that the movement is motivated by an ideology of feminist reform that attempts to rewrite history in the service of that ideology.

Defining Matriarchy

Victorian anthropologists, in attempting to understand the past, sometimes proposed the existence of tribal societies in which women were at least the equals of men. Part of the feminist movement has latched on to these claims to show the relativity of “patriarchal” institutions today. However, before we address specific arguments, we need a working definition of the term “matriarchy. Both the words patriarchy and matriarchy share the same suffix—archy, from the Greek –archos, which means “rule by.” Therefore, in simple terms patriarchy means the rule of men over women in the areas of technology, economics, politics and religion, art, science. To be consistent with the meaning of the suffix, matriarchy would have to be the reverse of patriarchy—i.e., the rule of women over men in these areas. Matriarchy would mean the control of technological, political, and economic power—the right to control production and distribution beyond the household. Women would have the military power to force men to go along with social policy, and they would control the myths by which the society lives. Have societies with these characteristics actually existed? Presumably, if they have, we should look for evidence among the Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, the Neolithic horticulturists, and the Bronze-Age agricultural states.

Before proceeding, it is important to refine our definitions of patriarchy and matriarchy a little further. It is highly unlikely that any sociologist (man or woman) would define patriarchy or matriarchy as referring to “all men” or “all women.” In the case of rank and stratified societies, there is no question that those in power are men. However, the percentage of men with political, economic and technological power is small. The rest of the male population—the middle classes, the working class artisan and peasant men—are subordinate to them. All men have some privileges over women but privilege is not the same as power. A refined definition of patriarchy therefore would be, the power and control exercised by a few men over all women and most men throughout the infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of society, with all men having some privileges over all women. If we want to be consistent with what we know of patriarchal rank and stratified societies, then a matriarchy would be defined as the power and control exercised by a few women over all men and most women throughout the infrastructure, structure, and superstructure of society, with all women having some privileges over all men. Virtually everyone familiar with the evidence archaeology, anthropology, and history agrees that matriarchies have never existed.

What are the implications? If women did not once dominate in the sacred, political, and economic dimensions of society, does this mean that patriarchies have always existed? The hidden assumption of those who ask us to choose between matriarchy and patriarchy as the mode of dominance in ancient societies is that rule over others was always the case. We are simply asked to choose whether it was women or men who were doing the ruling. But in hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies everyone was doing the ruling. This means that these societies were neither matriarchal nor patriarchal.

If matriarchy is simply defined as the reverse of patriarchy, then the notion of its prevalence in early societies is fairly easy to dismiss. However, some sectors within the pagan-feminist community have defined matriarchal societies differently, calling them “matrifocal.” What they mean by this is the existence of egalitarian political and economic relations between men and women in material culture and the predominance of a Goddess or goddesses in sacred culture.

Most anthropologists, archaeologists, and macro-sociologists agree that hunting-and-gathering and simple horticultural societies were politically and economically egalitarian. Here Goddess advocates are on solid ground. But Goddess advocates confuse the issue by insisting that the superstructure of these societies was characterized by reverence for goddesses. This presumed predominance of goddesses, together with a presumed reverence for motherhood, seem to be the major justifications for calling these societies “matrifocal.”

Positive Conclusions

There are at least five positive conclusions to be drawn from the Goddess theorists and their claims with regard to history. First, they are right to point to a time in history when gender relations were politically and economically equal. Second, some of the figurines found by Gimbutas are likely to have been goddesses. Third, goddesses had many positive functions in Bronze Age societies, more than they did once the universalistic religions emerged. Fourth, the practice of magic, including goddess magic, long predated the rise of the great religions. Fifth and last, tribal societies did not engage in mass killings the way state societies did.

Negative Conclusions

In most other instances, however, as we have seen, the Neo-pagan goddess theorists overstate their case or are simply wrong. First, there have never been any matriarchal societies, as we have defined “matriarchy.” This does not mean that all ancient societies were patriarchal: tribal societies were neither patriarchal nor matriarchal. Second, many of the figurines discovered were probably not goddesses; some were male, some were non-gendered, and some were used as dolls, toys, or lucky charms. Third, there is no good evidence for goddess reverence going all the way back to the Paleolithic Age. It is more likely that it began in the Bronze Age.

In terms of sacred practices, while all goddess practices were magical, magical practices were not tied necessarily to goddesses. Magic was conducted with earth spirits, totems, and ancestor spirits long before goddesses came on the scene. Correspondingly, while some elements of witchcraft have existed in all ancient societies, witchcraft was practiced in Paleolithic and Neolithic societies before goddess reverence emerged.

Further, the goddesses within Bronze Age societies were polytheistic, not monotheistic. There was never a single monotheistic Great Goddess who was regarded as presiding over all of society. Further, motherhood was not the leading function of goddesses. While goddesses had many functions, motherhood was not a leading one. This is because most ancient societies did not think much of motherhood.

In addition, there was no direct relationship between reverence for goddesses and high material status for women. At the time Bronze Age civilizations appeared, goddesses already had subordinate status, and this justified the low status of women in these societies. In the Iron Age, with the rise of the great religions, the status of women improved slightly despite the marginalization of goddesses. In societies that can be characterized as egalitarian (hunter-gatherer and simple horticultural societies) there were no goddesses. Therefore, so far “matrifocal” means egalitarian relations between men and women in material culture and the predominance of goddesses in the sacred dimension, ancient societies were not matrifocal. Women’s positive material and sacred status have never coexisted within the same society. When women lived material lives more or less on a par with men—in foraging and simple horticultural societies—the evidence for goddess reverence is absent. When goddesses emerged in agricultural states, women’s material status had already deteriorated (with the exception of queens and priestesses who constituted an insignificant proportion of the population).

The rise of institutionalized male dominance was not caused by pastoral invasions, but rather by processes internal to pre-state societies. Tribal societies were far from peace loving. Their homicide rates and frequency of war were greater than in Bronze and Iron Age State civilizations, in which institutionalized male dominance emerged. Last, the transition/crisis from polytheism to monotheism did not involve conflict between gods and goddesses, but rather between male gods. Table 1 presents these conclusions in chart form.

Goddess theorists either have not studied the anthropological literature fully (reading selectively), or they believe that there was such a thing as matriarchal dominance, at least in the sacred realm, as a kind of article of faith. In the case of child-rearing, it is generally admitted that this was the province of women, but Goddess theorists have projected romanticized notions of motherhood back in time. As a whole, motherhood and child rearing were rarely if ever held as sacred activities in the ancient world. To the extent that male dominance in tribal societies is admitted, it is generally attributed to external sources—male-dominated herders or patriarchal colonialists attacking hunter-gatherers and simple horticulturists—rather than seen as emerging from within societies.

I call Goddess theorists “idealists” because they generally try to explain changes in material institutions—ecology, technology, the economy, and politics—from changes in spiritual beliefs, from the Goddess to the God.

Holding Out the Olive Branch

In denying most of the historical claims of the Goddess movement my intention is descriptive, not proscriptive. I am arguing not for what ought to have happened in gender history, but what is likely actually to have happened. It is certainly comforting and inspiring to believe that there was a time when women were respected in all areas of cultural life. If that were the case, it would be easier to believe that women can again achieve full equality with men in all aspects of society today and in the future. Even if most of the historical claims of the Goddess movement are mistaken we still can use the myths and rituals of pagan people to help build our future. More women have a better life today, at least in industrialized societies, than they ever did in agricultural states when goddesses first arose. The improvement in the life of most women in industrial societies is a solid basis for making a closer connection between women’s material and sacred status in the future. To me, that project offers the best prospect for achieving the Goddess theorists’ ultimate aims.

This article is a summary of a thirty page chapter I wrote from my book Power in Eden: The Emergence of Gender Hierarchies in the Ancient World.

Critique of the Goddess Movement Model of Ancient History

Neopagan Matriarchy,

Goddess Claims

Neopagan Marxist Claims

Christian Progress Implications

(which are not being implied)

There were once matriarchies

Tribal societies were neither

matriarchal nor patriarchal

Patriarchies have always

existed

All female figurines found were

Goddesses

Some figurines were goddesses,

Others’ gods, non-gendered dolls,

Toys or lucky charms

Figurines were erotic toys for

Pagan heathens

Goddesses go all the way back

to the Paleolithic

Spirits, totems and ancestor

spirits preceded all goddesses

and gods

(goddesses and gods are

products of stratified

agricultural states)

There was God before there

were goddesses

All magic was Goddess

centered

While all goddess reverence is

magic centered, not all magic

is goddess centered

Religion preceded magic

Magic is degenerate religion

All witchcraft is Goddess

centered

While goddess

practitioners use magic

witchcraft has been used

w/o references to goddesses

All goddess practitioners use

witchcraft

Goddess practice was

monotheistic

With the exception of modern

feminist Neopaganism,

goddess reference was

polytheistic – only male gods

were monotheistic

Monotheism was the original

sacred form

Motherhood was the leading

function of goddesses

Goddesses had many public

functions which were more

important. Motherhood not as

important in hunting and

gathering societies

Fatherhood was revered

There is a direct correspondence between the presence of goddesses and high material status of women

There is a connection between the perceived source of resource supply and the gender of the source, not between sacred status and the status of women.

Women have always had a second class identity

When goddesses were present, the status of women was low. When earth-spirits, totems or ancestor spirits were present, women were roughly equal to men

Invasions by pastoralists caused institutionalized male dominance

Institutionalized male dominance was caused by processes internal to chiefdoms and agricultural states before the invasions of pastoralists

Institutionalized male dominance has always existed

Pre-state societies were peaceful

All pre-state societies were violent

Most were warlike

There were few warless societies

Wars are caused by male aggression

The movement from polytheism to monotheism was between gods and goddesses

The emergence of monotheism was played out mythologically between male gods rather than between and female goddesses

Goddesses had no power in mythology

The post Matriarchy, Witchery and the Great Goddess first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Building Bridges between Vygotsky and Marx

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 30 May 2025 15:00:41 +0000

From Promiscuity to Polyamory

In the early 1970s I joined a community organization called Radical Psychiatry in Berkeley, California. The purpose of the group was to help people in the community who were suffering with moderate to severe mental problems so they did not have to go to a traditional psychiatrist or use drugs. As I recall, these community meetings were once or twice a week for a couple of hours for each meeting. The staff was organized as a collective and this collective had its own weekly meetings to discuss how the public meetings were going. Pretty much all the members of the collective were committed to socialism.

However, an added dimension to the collective was the members’ commitment to “polyamory”. This meant any romantic relationships that were formed had to be open. Both men and women could have more than one sexual relationship at a time while attempting to maintain a loving relationship with each partner. As socialists, we wanted to “smash monogamy” as a form of bourgeois property relations. I first attended the Radical Psychiatry meetings as a member of the community and came, in part to work on my own problems but also because I found what they were doing interesting. Since there was no formal training necessary to be a member of a collective, any member of the community could be asked to join the collective, after the collective had deliberated about it. After a couple of months of attending 10-15 community meetings, I was asked to join. I was flattered and also hot to trot with some of the women in the collective so I easily accepted.

Later on in this article I will tell you how the use of the word “polyamory” instead of “promiscuous” was used to define what we were doing and helped me to participate in the collective’s sexual relations in a more meaningful way. The change in the word meaning to promote both individual and group development will also be a key to understanding how Vygotsky attempted to create parallels between his own psychological theory and Marx’s theory of political economy. I will analyze this story further on in this piece once the tracks of Vygotsky’s theory are laid down.

Orientation
Goodbye to cutting and pasting
When the Russian Marxian, Lev Vygotsky first started out in psychology, he said he didn’t want to contribute to the field by cutting and pasting quotes from the theories of his Marxian masters. He wanted to use Marx’s method to write his own version of Capital for psychology. My article is an attempt report how his efforts turned out. To do this I will rely on three books. Vygotsky and Marx edited by Carl Ratner and Daniele Nunes-Henrique Silva; An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity by Andy Blunden and Vygotsky’s own Thought and Language. Following the lead of these authors, I claim that there is a parallel between Marx’s attempt to understand capitalism through the “cell” of the commodity and Vygotsky’s attempt to understand psychology through the cell of new word meanings.

I What is Marxist psychology?
Capitalist categories
How would we know a real Marxian psychology when we saw it? For one thing, it would include the major categories in Marx’s work and draw out their psychological implications for individual and social psychology. Marx’s categories for capitalism include at least the following:

impact of crises of capitalism
impact of finance capital
alienation
reification
the class structure and relations
private property
wage labor
impact of commodity production
Llfe under socialism

Psychological categories

The categories above would be applied to the typical topics within psychology:

Darwinian evolutionary psychology
how the brain works
personality theory
development throughout the life span
sensation and perception
emotions
thinking processes
states of consciousness
what motivates people
how people learn
how people remember
social psychology
cross-cultural psychology
psychopathology
therapy

Let us take an example of a controversy within psychology: how does the brain function? Carl Ratner points out the issue is whether the brain is localized in prefigured brain centers (modules) with unique neurophysiological properties or whether the cortex is a general flexible unspecified processing apparatus on which psychological function can be processed from any location. General information processing of psychological features are cultural in nature, origin, formation and function. Evidence is on the side of general processing which would be consistent with Marxism.

How Does the Brain Function?

Localized brain center with unique neurophysiological processes	What does the brain do?	Cortex is generalized unspecified processed apparatus
Biological	Theoretical orientation	Sociocultural

What is Cooperative learning?
Vygotsky argued that the leading edge of learning did not happen inside people’s heads. It begins in the social relationship between people in cooperative learning. The sites can be at work, at play or in school The cooperative activity must be meaningful, recursive, with a specified goal and a division of labor. Vygotsky called this first stage the zone of proximal development. In the second stage the cooperative learning becomes internalized and available for the individual to act on independently in terms of specific projects and goals. Ratner writes that the intellectual process of internalization enables the logical operations of reasoning to operate like analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization and abstraction. The third stage learning is when the individual applies it again to the social world but on a more global scale than they did in stage one. This includes more extended relations across space and time as well as to think more complexly. This will be illustrated in the example below. I call these stages “local interpersonal”, “internalization” and global interpersonal.

An example of the three stages of cooperative learning
Here is an example. A father, Antonio, teaches his son Jules how to bag cookies. In the beginning the father takes the hardest part of the baking process like breaking and mixing the eggs whereas his son might get out all the ingredients and pour milk into a measuring cup. Gradually over the next two or three weeks the father will cede the more difficult parts to his son. This beginning process is called the zone of proximal development. Now let’s say Antonio plays a learning trick on his son. He tells Jules he has to run to the store to get some food for dinner. He tells his son to proceed and they will finish when he gets back. But Antonio stays out longer in the hopes his son will finish the job. It turns out that Jules does finish. Since his son has gone through the whole process of baking the cookie himself, he has now internalized the skill of baking cookies. He can make cookies by himself if he wants to.

Now Antonio tells Jules that the neighborhood he lives on is having a garage sale in a couple of weeks. He wants his son to make cookies for the sale. Baking cookies for a garage sale involves social skills on a higher order than just baking cookies for his domestic household. Now he has to:

calculate how large a volume of cookies needs to be made
bake many more cookies
bake a larger variety of cookies
develop the rhetorical skills necessary to convince garage sale browsers to buy the cookies

Later on in this article I will show how Jules’ learning meaning of the new words “neighborhood” “probability” and “perspective” assisted him in completing Vygotsky’s third stage of learning.

The legacy of Soviet psychology
Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev developed what they called “socio-historical psychology” for many years in what was then the Soviet Union. Their work has been passed on to the next generation which included Ilyenkov, Mikhailov, Lektorsky, Galperin and Davydov. Socio-historical psychology is the most developed expression of Communist psychology in the world. For political reasons coming from both inside and outside the Soviet Union, Western radicals did not build on this tradition. Instead, they tried to build a Marxian psychology from scratch. But as Ratner tells us it is impossible to engage with Marxist psychology while disregarding this 65-year-old social-historical tradition.

Beyond eclecticism
The Frankfurt School, other so-called Western Marxists and radical feminists saw fit to initiate building a Marxist psychology from scratch either because of ignorance of Vygotsky and his comrades or because they considered that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Marxist. Instead, they eclectically cobbled together a hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, radical gender theory, constructionism and postmodernism and then added selectively from the young Marx without understanding the limits of their eclecticism.

Eclecticism juxtaposes various approaches together including multiple contradictory principles or assumptions. Eclectics attempt to combine the parts of two or more systems that are heterogeneous and diverse. As a Vygotsky follower, Carl Ratner says, the tail of one system is placed against the head of another and the space between them is filled with the trunk of a third. Eclecticism papers over antagonistic elements, as it throws together different systems.

Eclecticists violate a principle of science which is logical coherence and the law of parsimony. The logic of sciences holds that a wide variety of empirical and theoretical issues should be commonly explained by a few core, self-consistent principles. Instead of eclectically combining incompatible systems together we must first tease out the essential incompatibility of systems such as Freudianism, constructivism and radical gender theory with each other first before comparing them to Marxism. Also, Vygotsky’s non-Marxist followers have been eclectic in using Vygotsky’s concepts. These eclectics have ignored, denied and distorted the Marxist system of Vygotsky’s concepts. See my article Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology Part II

II Marx’s Method For Analyzing Capitalism

Philosophy of internal relations
Marx had a special way of understanding socio-history that he learned from Hegel which Bertell Ollman described as the “philosophy of internal relations”. According to Ollman, the philosophy of external relations (in his The Dance of the Dialectic) reality is conceived of as being essentially static and change is only attended to when things bump into each other or into us with sufficient force to have an impact. What externalists take to be things, are from the internalist viewpoint, processes and relations. For externalists, while the whole may be comprised of parts, it is nothing more than the sum of their parts. Internalist contend that:

reality is change and stasis is derivative (processes rather than things)
not only are the wholes more than the sum of their parts
whole is found in the parts

Marx’s internalist orientation allowed him to uncover the details of the multiple internal relations between capital, labor, value, credit, interest, rent, money and wages as part of a web of dialectical relations.

Marx’s methodology
According to Ollman, Marx’s methodology encompasses six components

a commitment to a materialist ontology
an epistemology comprised of several subcomponents
- perception (sensory output, mental and emotional activity)

- abstraction

- conceptualization of what is abstracted into new or redefined concepts (surplus value, labor power, commodity, credit)

- an orientation that socio-historical context must be part of all explanations

the laws of dialectics operating in capitalist society via the concepts uncovered as a result of abstraction and analyzed through the study of history both backwards and forwards

the intellectual reconstruction of what is uncovered through inquiry, where the results of the analysis are unified for the understanding of the researcher in notebooks (as found in Marx’s Grundrisse)

the exposition of the results of the analysis for others to comprehend ( in Marx’s Capital)

praxis, which unites theory to political practice, which feed backs to a political theory for understanding reality more deeply

When Marx turns to psychology, his starting point for understanding consciousness is the world itself. Humans engage this reality through human species activity, labor and verbal language which is socially created. Consciousness is a product of social labor on one hand and verbal language on the other. Consciousness can exist before and without labor and verbal language.

Marx’s use of the germ cell
Ratner informs us It wasn’t until microscopes became powerful enough to reveal the microstructure of organisms that Schleiden and Schwann were able to formulate a cell theory of biology in 1839. According to Andy Blunden, Goethe sought to utilize this idea in his study of botany. He insisted on proceeding from the whole (the cell) to the parts. Just as every part is connected to a whole, the whole is in every part of the cell. As Goethe proposed, the foundation for the understanding of a complex whole such as an organism is the discovery of its’ cell form. Furthermore, this whole is a concrete unity. Principals are not something behind appearances but are contained within appearances. This is different from an abstract unity built from a common ancestor, built into a general category. For Hegel the earthly figure of Napoleon was a concrete unity of the spirit of history. For Marx the concrete unity of the commodity is the cell of capitalism

Commodities for Marx is the cell of a capitalist society
Marx searches for the cell of capitalist society when he writes Capital. He found it in the production of commodities. These commodities produce a conflict between use value and exchange value. He then unfolds from an analysis of these contradictions within this single cell the entire process of capitalist society from its private property to its evolution, from industrial to finance capital, its concentration of capital to its globalization process to its terminal crisis.

III Vygotsky’s Method
Vygotsky wants to write his own Capital
Vygotsky thought it was fundamental to submit the founding categories of traditional psychology to the same methodological processes Marx used in the study of the category of political economy. Regarding this movement in relation to psychology, Vygotsky says he wants to write its own Capital. What does this mean? For Vygotsky psychology must aim to study the complex unit of a cell, like Marx. We must not begin by searching for the most fundamental atomic building blocks like sensations, perceptions, impressions like the empiricists do. Vygotsky called these “elements”. Instead, he wanted to find the cell for psychology.

So what is the cell for a Vygotskyan psychology that is equivalent to the relationship between commodity capitalism in economics? There are three levels down we have to go to discover that:

in the most macro psychology we have verbal language
at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
a microcosm in new word meaning

Dualism between mechanists and holists
Before Vygotsky, there had been a split in psychology between physiologists who approached the field as if psychology were a branch of the natural sciences and those who saw psychology as a branch of the human sciences having little to do with the body. In the 2oth century this split in psychology was demonstrated between behaviorists who denied the existence of consciousness and saw psychology in terms only of reflexes and conditioned responses. On the other hand, empirical psychologists like Wilhelm Wundt studied the mind by means of introspection. There were other holists like the Gestaltists who studied perceptual wholes with no roots in evolutionary biology. But the physiologists, behaviorists, the introspectionists and Gestaltists all had one thing in common. They accepted the separation between the subjective and the objective worlds. Vygotsky argued that the subject matter of psychology should be consciousness (or the mind). But the link between the human subject and social object in consciousness was through human practical activity theory in laboring.

Consciousness, tools, and signs
According to Vygotsky, reality cannot be grasped by human consciousness passively. It is by using the socio-cultural tools and signs given to us by previous generations in history that problems are solved. It is through solving these problems in collaboration with others that people become self-reflectively conscious. The root meaning of consciousness is, after all, “together knowledge”. To master and capture reality requires a system of mental processes which grow when humans are engaged in work. It is human work which acts as a mediator between human beings and nature. However, in order to work we have to talk each other. One of the great benefits of verbal language is that we can talk about the past and future. So in work we can pool our experience that we learned in our past practice and we can debate the future about how, what and where we work next. The most essential function of language is to enable us to work together. Charles Sanders Pierce further classified signs according to how they are connected to their object by index, icon or symbol.

Speaking and thinking
Vygotsky pointed out that speech develops in two directions:

in its communication use
in its self-reflective function

Vygotsky claimed that if he could understand the relation between thinking and speaking he could create a paradigm for all domains of psychology. He writes that thought and speech had different roots. There is pre-intellectual speech (babbling) and pre-verbal thought (utterances). Only with the mastery of verbal language does speech become cultural and thought become verbal. The mastering of verbal language creates an active dialectic between what you have to say and what you think.

An Example of the dialectic between thinking and speaking

When I was first teaching an Introduction to Psychology class I tried to think logically about how to present the order of the topics to my students. First, I think about the history of the field, then the difference in theoretical schools of psychology and lastly about research methods (how we know what we know). However, I learned that when I teach the subject (the speaking part) I would lose about one-third of the class if I taught the subjects in this order. I have to speak in teaching rhetorically. I start with what people I know students are spontaneously interested in. First, psychopathology, then personality theory. “Why are people crazy, especially my cousin Phyllis?” For personality theory, “how can I understand my fights with my boyfriend? We seem to have different personalities.” Only later on when people have their curiosity satisfied they might become interested in the history of the field, the theoretical schools and even research methods. As a result of teaching, I reorganized how I thought about teaching.

Word meaning as the unity between speech and thinking
In 1934 Vygotsky came to the conclusion that the central cultural artifact through which people appropriated the culture of the community was not just through tools, as Marx emphasized, but through the verbal language that was mastered. From him spoken word and its meaning was the cell of a unity of speech and thinking. However, we cannot talk about the meaning of the word taken separately. Word meaning is linked up to a sign system that involves the whole of verbal language.

Where is the word meaning? For Voloshinov, a Marxian philosopher of language, meaning does not reside in word, nor the psyche of the speaker nor in the psyche of the listener. Meaning occurs as the result of interaction between speaker and listener as they cooperate in working and planning. But this word meaning is relative not only in working, but cooperative learning at school and in playing. Below is a summary.

An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The cookie sale
Let’s return to our example of a father teaching his son how to bake cookies. In Vygotsky’s third stage of social learning we said that the dad needed to teach his son to think on a larger scale in order to prepare for the cookie sale during the block garage sale. Up to now, the son, Jules, only learned to bake cookies for his domestic household. In order to prepare for the cookie sale in the neighborhood the boy has to learn what a neighborhood means. Neighborhood is not an easy word to define. When the boy asks, the father may tell him the name of the neighborhood or he might show him a map of the major cross-streets of the neighborhood. Jules also has to consider that many more people may come by his cookie stand who he has not dealt with before. How many? “Well”, Antonio says “it depends on many things – weather conditions, like if it’s cold or warm, how well the garage sale is advertised and the quality of the stuff offered at the sale. The best we can do is think in terms of probability.” Since Jules is too young to understand the practical application of probability, Antonio will have to do the figuring.

The third issue involved Jules’ capacity to take perspective into account. Jules may have to learn what perspective means. He has to move beyond his egocentric preferences for his favorite cookies. Then Antonio may ask Jules how many other kinds of cookies there are besides the chocolate ones he likes that exist. Antonio encourages his son to make 4 other kinds of cookies besides chocolate. Jules will learn that even though he does not like those cookies, making cookies he doesn’t like will make him some money. He learns “perspective”. So “neighborhood”, “probability’ and “perspective” are new word meanings that are critical to expanding his cooperative learning skills.

An example of a revolutionary changes in word meaning:
The term rhetoric in teaching my classes
As I said earlier In my learning process as a teacher, I learned over the years what students liked and didn’t like in terms of subject matter through trial and error and I made my chronological adjustments accordingly. Little did I know that the secrets of how to persuade students to learn was a part of a much larger field that was 2000 years old. If someone would have told me there was a field called rhetoric, I would have shrugged my shoulders. The word meant nothing to me. In fact all my associations with rhetoric were negative. Rhetoric was:

form without content
bombast of a demagogue
talk without action

But when I discovered the field of rhetoric through teaching a critical thinking class I discovered the deeper meaning of rhetoric. This new word, rhetoric, made me consciously apply principles that I was only groping for before. This one word was a key to understanding 2000 years of theorists from the Sophists to Aristotle, to Quintilian, Cicero, Sheridan, Campbell, Whately, Perelman, Toulmin, Burke, and Walton. This one word, rhetoric, when deeply understood opened up a new meaning for me as a teacher and improved my work. Keep in mind my learning of this new word was not just to satisfy a curiosity of mine. It not only deepened my thought process, but I discussed it in my critical thinking classes. I also used it in the practical critical activity of teaching in all my classes.

An example of a revolutionary change in word meaning:
The term “polyamorous” in radical psychiatry
When I first heard the world polyamorous discussed in Radical Psychiatry, I really didn’t understand it. I thought their rules about being non-monogamous as a kind of “socialist promiscuity” might be justified through anthropology by some Marxists. But as I got involved with a couple of women at the same time, I came up against both the facts of how liberating it was to satisfy lusts and how difficult it was to overcome jealousy. What the community was doing was the first stage of Vygotsky’s cooperative learning. The whole concept of Radical Psychiatry was in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. We were all struggling and some of us were doing better than others.

Our collective meetings also became therapy sessions for some members needing to process sexual engagement with unresolved conflicts while others offered support. It was a very deep experience to attempt to love someone even though I knew they were also dating someone else. I loved those women in a way that I loved no other woman I have dated with a monogamous agreement. However, the relationships were very unstable and it took a lot of emotional work and processing to keep them afloat. Nevertheless, the meaning of the new word polyamory used in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development took me and many others to new dialectical heights for however a short time it lasted.

I stuck with polyamory for about three months. I stopped because the time it was taking to process feelings of jealously became more work that I wanted to do. I didn’t drop out of the collective, but I stopped trying to have sexual relationships with the women in the collective. What I have since come to see is that sexual jealousy has deep roots in evolutionary psychology and those predispositions are not going away any time soon. What we were doing in Radical Psychiatry was a great experiment, but in order to overcome evolutionary psychology would take at least a generation of socialist support at regional or even national levels. It can’t easily be done successfully on a local level in a few months or even years. A new generation must be taught polyamory early in life in order for it to gain a foothold.

The relationship between Vygotsky’s three stages of learning and new word meanings
Earlier I said that there are three phases of cooperative learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. How do new word meanings fit within each of the stages as given in my three examples? In the example of the learning situation of cooking-making between Antonio or Jules, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal. That is because Antonio understood all the new word meanings of neighborhood, probability and perspective. The new word meaning was internalized by Jules through the process of making cookies at a larger scale for the garage sale. We don’t know how well he mastered the higher level social situation because I never addressed the results of the cookie sale.

In the case of my teaching, there was no new word meaning in the local interpersonal stage because I was just learning how to teach and unconsciously figuring it out by trial and error. However, as part of preparing for a course in critical thinking I internalized a new word “rhetoric” and its history. I didn’t really have a global interpersonal stage with the term rhetoric because I just applied what I had learned to deepen how I taught my existing classes. An example of global interpersonal would have been to have used my knowledge of rhetoric to give lectures at the Seattle Atheist church which I have done recently.

Lastly, in the case of Radical Psychiatry the new word meaning, polyamory, was present in the local interpersonal stage of learning because the entire community was attempting to develop new sexual relationships. The whole community was in the first stage of the zone of proximal development. As for internalization it was not realistic to expect anyone to have internalized the word polyamory so that they could practice it gracefully. There were too many Darwinian sexual selection habits to overcome. The same is true for moving polyamorous practices to larger scale communities. It will be the task of socialist societies in the 21st and 22nd centuries to address whether this is a visionary way to conduct socialist romances.

Conclusion
I began my article by discussing what a Marxist psychology looks like. First, I named the typical categories Marx used in his criticisms of capitalism and then I identified various subheadings of the field of psychology. I applied Vygotsky’s theory to areas of learning, social psychology, and sexuality. Specifically, my examples included cooperative learning in cookie-making, the use of rhetoric in teaching and my attempts to engage in polyamory as a member of a community of Radical Psychiatry in the early 1970s.

A big part of my article centers on the comparisons and parallels between Marx and Vygotsky’s methodology. An important key in investigating Marx’s method is to avoid eclecticism. Marxist psychology began in the Soviet Union with Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev and any attempt to improve it by the Western psychology must start with them, and not throw together an eclectic hodge-podge of psychoanalysis, the radical gender theory, constructionism or postmodernism. The second methodological starting point for Marx was to analyze capitalism by using a “cell” concept, which for Marx was the commodity. Vygotsky followed Marx, but wanted to find the “cell” for psychology which was rooted in:

macro psychology in verbal language
at the mesocosm in the dialectic between thinking and speaking
a microcosm in word meaning

For Vygotsky:

the word-meaning is a unit of analysis for the relation of thinking and intelligent speech
thinking and speech together with work, play and school is the microcosm of consciousness

Lastly, I built a bridge between how these new word meanings interacted with Vygotsky’s three stages of learning: local interpersonal, internalization and global interpersonal. I applied how word meanings played out in my examples of cookie-making, teaching techniques and building a polyamorous community in Radical Psychiatry.

What’s missing within Russian Marxist psychology?
In his great book, Problems in the Development of Mind Vygotsky’s comrade Leontiev gave a wonderful example of how a Marxist theory of the mind’s relationship to reality would work in a hunting and gathering society. However, none of the Russian theorists painted a full-fledged picture of how Marxian psychology would apply to all psychological topics listed at the beginning of my article. Secondly, the theory did not contrast how it would work generally with individuals living in a capitalist society and generally how it would work on people living in a socialist society. In the case of the latter it is understandable given the political tensions existing in Russia with Stalin wanting to control the field of psychology. Can you imagine the reception of the state if any of these psychologists tried to make a dialectical critique of the Soviet Union as a socialist society? Lastly, socio-historical psychology must integrate its findings with evolutionary psychology. Socialists can no longer run screaming away from evolutionary psychology by claiming it is biological reductionism in order to continue to be scientifically relevant.

The post Building Bridges between Vygotsky and Marx first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Beyond Socialist Purity

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 10 May 2025 15:20:20 +0000

Orientation
International political economy at a crossroads

As most of you know the world economy is peppered with fault lines. On one hand we have the rising in the East of a new economic block, the BRICS nations and their friends. On the other hand, in the West we have a rapidly declining Yankeedom and its European vassals on. What are socialists in the West to do with this malestream, this great turning point? Is it not clear whether to support BRICS or not? After all, the BRICS countries have only one clear socialist country and two countries that are Hindu fundamentalists (India) as well as a theocracy (Saudi-Arabia). So does it make sense for socialists to support Russia, India, and Saudi-Arabia that are conservative politically? This article proposes that Western socialists need to give up their purist ideologies and accept that while the BRICS countries may be lacking in socialist policies domestically,they still should be supported because of their international attempts to follow Marx and Engels’ exhortation to “develop the productive forces”. This means striving to create material abundance through technological innovation.

Who am I
I am no academic socialist nor am I a red diaper baby. In fact, reading and school for me were mutually exclusive opposites. When I was a young adult I couldn’t stand reading and dropped out of community college. I only started to care for reading after I left and began hitchhiking across the country. Because I am self-educated, I did not have the benefits of being systematically educated in all the different schools of socialism, what socialist organizations were like and where and how socialism was applied all over the world. So I eclectically dabbled with books and organizations. I eventually found my way and this article is the result of conclusions I’ve come to after 50 years. Twelve years ago my partner and I started our own website and Facebook page which now has 10,000 followers. We each work 20-25 hours per week in various aspects of this work. Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism is our baby!

What do I Mean by Socialist Purist?
By the term socialist purist I mean someone who holds out for the most extreme, utopian form of socialism, whether it is defined by Marx, Engels, Lenin or an anarchist hero like Kropotkin. For Leninists socialism means no capitalism with the state which controls all economic transactions, the society is classless and does not use any currency. For the anarchists the ideal is no state, no capitalism, no classes and no money. If actually existing socialism has any of these things it is treated, not as part of a long process of development, but as a sign of a) betrayal of the party or a bureaucracy (Trotskyists) and b) corruption or some kind of pollution from the original source. That source is most often treated like a bible. It is more or less the same as the old ruling law in Louisiana that if a person had 1/32 of what was considered African American blood, they were considered black.

China
If I support China, I will be told that China isn’t really socialist or communist. If the state-controlled enterprises compose 60% of the Chinese economy I will be told that the 40% of the economy that is in private hands matters more. It will also be pointed out that in China strikes are outlawed and independent labor unions are illegal. I would prefer that strikes in China were legal and workers were allowed to form unions. There are labor unions in China but under the auspices of the state. Also, there are plenty of strikes in China. But for the purists this is enough for the entire country to be dismissed as a socialist project. For me it is not. Where do the purists get their definitions? I will be told that Marx and Engels defined socialism and communism in a particular way and that is the definition we should work with despite the fact that the definitions were intentionally sketchy and they were written over 150 years ago. If I point out China’s great work on the Belt and Road Initiative of building infrastructures and harnessing energy all over the world, I would be told they are still deriving a profit from them. Profits are bad! From anarchists for whom all states are bad, I will be told that China is really just continuing Western imperialism. For anarchists, helping to develop the productive forces in another country is nothing more than a “debt trap”. For them all capitalist and state socialist societies are imperialist the moment they engage with a country on the capitalist periphery.

Russia
There is no country in the world which has been more brutally and tenaciously demonized than Russia and that was so before, during and after the Russian Revolution. If we post a story on our website or social media pages about the Russian economy now being the fourth strongest in the world, we will be told by Trotskyists or Social Democrats that Russia is, after all, a capitalist country, as if that should end all discussion. Anarchists will tell me that Putin is a dictator. These folks don’t understand that Russia has at least four or five parties and that in the last election, Putin’s party got 49% of the vote and the Community party got 20%. I will be told by other purists that much of Russia’s spending is on its own and others’ military, not so much on producing goods and services for a better life for its citizens. The anarchists will tell me that anarchists and other dissidents are rotting away in Russian prisons. For them it doesn’t seem to matter that Putin has 80% approval ratings and Russia has built up its domestic economy even more since US sanctions. For socialist purists, the fact that Russia has been investing in the northern Arctic Silk Road which will increase trade in regions that have not been connected seems not to matter to them. The domestic economy is first and geopolitics is second. I believe the reverse to be true.

The International Proletarian Revolution Around the World at the Same Time

For anarchists any power at a national level is against socialism. So what do they advocate? An international revolution of workers’ councils that overthrows all states and is linked up locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. How realistic is this? As we stand now in the history of the United States we have never had a general strike that encompassed more than one local state. If we face this fact it is ludicrous to propose that workers’ councils are going to spontaneously arise, spread across an entire country then link up to other countries until the whole system is global. Doesn’t it seem ridiculous to assume this is going to happen in the near future? In Europe, the English, French and German heads of state are hated. Germany is de-industrializing, the French and English living standards have declined, still we have yet to see a general strike among the working classes of all countries that can drive them from power. It has struck me that:

Since these European rulers are all bitterly against Russia;
Russia possesses that cheap natural gas which could improve working class living standards; and
the working classes could unite against their rulers and demand to have cheap Russian gas shipped to them.

How likely is even this semi-continent alliance? Unfortunately, not very. It has taken the rulers of states and capitalists roughly 300 years to convince people that their nation-state deserve more loyalties than their previous loyalties to provinces, principalities, regions and city states. How likely are the citizens today to give that national loyalty? Marx and Engels naively thought that workers would give up their fatherland for the international loyalty of the working class. All socialists found out the hard way through the results of two world wars that workers of the world uniting is not something workers across states have any intention of doing. So whether we like it or not, the real fight for the foreseeable future is between the rulers of capitalist states and their working classes. That is the best we can do for now and in the near future.

World-Systems Theory and the Long View of Capitalism
In Giovanni Arrighi’s great book The Long Twentieth Century, in world systems terminology, over the last 500 years capitalism has jumped all over the world from Italy, Holland, England and to the United States. Each ‘hegemon’ has ruled from between 220 to 100 years before its decline. In every case when the hegemon has fallen it has been replaced by a country on the capitalist semi periphery. The United States has been in decline for over 50 years. What’s next? Well, China certainly qualifies as a semi-periphery country that is still rising. But something much deeper is going on. Not only China, but all the other BRICS countries – Russia, India, Iran and Saudi Arabia have been in the semi-periphery world system. Can it be that after 500 years in Europe, we are witnessing the world economy shifting from the West to the East? It certainly looks that way. Every member of BRICS is a country on the capitalist semi-periphery.

The Rise of BRICS
I celebrate the emergence of a block of anti-imperialist countries that have broken away from the Anglo-American Empire. China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent India have resisted using the dollar as a world trade currency. Further, they have insisted on using their own local currency in trade transactions. With the exception of China Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia are capitalist countries, but their commitment has not been primarily to make a profit on war or forms of fictious capital such as stocks, bonds, derivatives or stock options as does the United States. Following the Chinese great Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) these countries have traded with each other in exchanges of energy systems, infrastructures such as roads and trains as well as in agricultural products and military defense.

The BRICS economic agreement between Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was established as an alternative to the imperialist World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. This breakaway movement is growing stronger by the day as the United States and the rest of the West sinks into decay. As a socialist I support this breakaway movement even if it is not explicitly socialist. In answer to my support of BRICS, I will be told that most of its members are capitalist and that socialism can never come from it. So how is socialism supposed to come about?

Nationalism as a Revolutionary Force in a BRICS Dominated World

For traditional socialists, nationalism has been the enemy. After all, historically it keeps workers from uniting with other workers around the world and it propagandizes them into aligning with the capitalist class rather than their own class. These are all reasons to be against nationalism. But the problem in today’s world is that we are fighting against a global capitalism that sets up continental systems such as the European Union which is organized to encourage the free flow of capitalism across the entire European continent. The EU does big business for the European capitalist class, a kind of Bilderberg economic union. The EU has no working-class representation. In my opinion, it is an advance for the working class of nation states to fight for independence from this European parasitic organization.

Conservative parties are moving towards nationalism – socialists are not

The problem for socialists is that in Europe and other parts of the world the traditional conservative parties have taken positions of supporting the nation-state against the European Union and are not anti-Russian. This includes Le Pen in France, the AFD in Germany and Orban in Hungary. Sadly, to my knowledge there is not even an intermediate scale socialist party in Europe that has taken a nationalist stance. So am I advocating support of these conservative parties?

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt in the 21st century
In order to align ourselves with the current BRICS program we badly need a new political spectrum, one that leaves behind the current linear version. On this topic, please see my article of 2 ½ years ago which is still highly relevant. As I said in my article, Are Socialists Going to let Neoliberals Define Fascism: Why the Linear Political Spectrum is Bankrupt this spectrum must be:

inclusive of many more combinations than the communism-liberalism-conservative, fascist and libertarian, linearly strung out;
economic as well as political;
must account for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
decentered so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable under certain conditions. This means that all political tendencies would have to be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices;
the spectrum must be flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia or between India (fundamentalist) and China and
not limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

BRICS Leads the Way in Revolutionizing the Linear Political Spectrum

This is where things get messy. If we follow the lead of China, Xi Ping does not form alliances based on loyalty to socialism. He is committed to building communism but has formed alliances with a Hindu fundamentalist nationalist in India and with the theocratic state of Saudi Arabia. Putin is no socialist yet his strongest ally is to a country that wants to build communism. Modi, a right-winger is ok doing business with communist China. Cuba and Venezuela would be happy to do business with any of the BRICS countries whether they are socialist or not. So what united these BRICS countries that might make socialists of the West support them?

They are anti-imperialist.
They are anti-war.
They are anti-finance capital.
They want to develop the productive forces of the world.

Importance of Technological Innovation
Let me develop the last point. In the Communist Manifesto Marx spent a good deal of time praising the capitalist system for developing industry – building railroads and factories and upgrading the standing of living for the middle classes and parts of the working class. These are the very activities the BRICS countries are engaged in now. In Marxian terms, what is so good about this? It is based on the idea that socialism must be founded on abundance. It means increasing the ratio between freedom and necessity. This means maximizing productivity while decreasing the numbers of work hours. For me this is a more important goal to fight for even if internally the countries of BRICS suffer from class, race and gender inequalities.

Siege Socialism
Typically in the West, when socialist countries are compared to capitalist countries they are criticized in terms of standard of living, varieties of political parties and freedom of expression. In the first place, socialist countries should be measured in comparison to what these countries were like before the socialist revolution. Capitalist countries have had 300 years to develop themselves unopposed after they defeated feudalism. Socialist countries have had a little more than 100 years to develop yet they have done so in spite of constant capitalist attempts at sabotage, assassinations and betrayal. It is way too soon to make sweeping generalizations about the viability of socialism. In fact, based on the last 35 years of the “triumphant” West, when we look at the world around us, it is capitalism that is either is in deep trouble or has failed.

Secondly, capitalist critics fail to understand that Western concepts of freedom are not shared around the world. What matters to working-class people most is the ability to read and write, have low-cost health care and free education. In terms of housing, socialism either provides low-cost housing or makes it possible for people to buy their house outright. Socialist countries like China and Cuba have a higher percentage of home ownership than the United States. As far as the variety of political parties, I can well understand that the socialist leaders who have come to power may be extremely cautious about allowing many political parties to form. When we consider the ability of capitalist spies to turn alternative parties into organs of counter revolution, the concerns of socialist leaders is completely understandable. The best book I know which makes a case for actually existing socialism, is Michael Parenti’s Blackshirts and Reds.

Throwing Down the Gauntlet
What’s wrong with anarchism?

I do not share the criticism of anarchists by Marxists and or Marxist-Leninists. For the most part they were not “petite bourgeois individualists.” Most of the 19th and 20th century anarchists were working classpeople who were very influential during the revolutions in Russia, 1917-1921, and Spain, 1936-1939. I respect many of their leaders from Bakunin to Louise Michel to Kropotkin to Malatesta, to Emma Goldman and to Buenaventura Durruti. However socialism must be based on abundance, not scarcity. Many anarchists don’t believe material abundance is a necessity. For those anarchists who support material abundance, a decentralized economy is not going to deliver the goods. A kind of promethean socialism requires some state centralization coordination of the distribution of water, heat, gas and electricity and other infrastructural projects.

Following Pannekoek and Gorter I agree that workers’ councils should be the micro unit of a communist society. But local workers’ councils plans for production need to be linked up regionally and then nationally. Centralization is necessary but it must be open so that there is a dialectical relationship from workers’ councils to the top and from the state back down to the bottom. Anarchists are hostile or cynical about centralization. The way political organs are organized today, a political body has to be a state in order even gain recognition. What do anarchist expect to do? Dismantle the entire state system founded at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648? It’s completely unrealistic.

Secondly, anarchism and workers’ councils have always been hostile to parties. The heart of politics is to steer, to develop social policy. Workers’ councils or radical unions cannot be solely economic organizations. Whatever their production goals they have to be coordinated by social needs outside of work. This includes consumer groups with community needs, family needs, social and psychological needs where there is an ongoing dialectic in which plans are first made and monitored. Political parties are necessary for both directing our future and learning from our past.

Lasty, there needs to be room for markets. As many of you know markets are much older and much different than capitalist exchange. They go all the way back to horticultural societies and even existed among complex hunter-gatherer societies. Markets will continue to exist among small traders who do not hire workers for wages. The possible relationship between workers’ councils, the state and markets is well laid out in David Schweickart’s book After Capitalism.

What is Wrong with Stalinism
By themselves workers can only achieve trade union consciousness (more money and better working conditions)
I do not share Trotskyist evaluations of Stalin as some kind of bureaucratic madman implying that Trotsky wanted more party democracy. Neither do I share anarchist dismissal, not only of Stalin, but also equating Stalin, Lenin and even Marx as all authoritarian. My criticism of Stalin as a political leader can be broken down into the following parts. As far back as 1905 with the founding of the Bolshevik party, they claimed that left to their own devices working class people can attain only a trade union consciousness. They ignored what the workers did during the Paris Commune which went way beyond trade union consciousness. Workers created revolutionary organs of self-management without much, if any, input from any socialist or socialist parties at the time. This leads me to my second criticism.

This is that the Communist Party, not just Stalin, but also Lenin never trusted the workers’ councils that formed in Russia. They did not trust workers’ own creativity. “All power to the Soviets” was a slogan the Bolsheviks used before they came to power. After that the factory committees in the cities and the self-organization of the peasants were treated as rivals rather than comrades. In addition, Stalin actively destroyed workers’ councils during the Spanish revolution when he saw he could not control them. Devoted Leninists will state that it was the war against Western capitalist parties that forced the communist parties into a narrower, heavy-handed approach. I agree with this up to a point, but I don’t think it could explain all the more repressive behavior. The anarchists have every right to despise the Communists for what happened to them and their comrades.

The limits of vanguard parties
Marx and Engels never talked about vanguard parties. In fact, they made fun of the secret revolutionary societies of August Blanqui. However, it makes sense to me that a secret party was necessary in Russia in the early 20th century, a society without even a liberal party, no constitution and a monstrous secret police. But Leninist parties that continued to build vanguard parties that operated under relatively liberal stable conditions in the West, where a legal party was possible and political activity could be public is just mechanically holding onto a theory that longer fits in Western conditions. In their hands Leninist theory became a dogma.

The scholastic treatment of the sciences and philosophy

There were a number of areas where dialectical materialism became dogmatic rather than scientific. I will mention two. In anthropology, Marxist-Leninist, with or without Stalin preserved Marx and Engels’ stage theory of social evolution for 100 years in spite of real empirical data from anthropologists that challenged Marxism. There were new stages of simple and complex horticulture societies that came between hunter-gatherers and the emergence of the state. In addition, slavery and feudalism were not universal stages of social evolution. Also, in the field of psychology, the communist psychology of Vygotsky was banned in Russia for 20 years. One his most creative followers, Evald Ilyenkov was forbidden to publish and was harassed to the point of committing suicide.

Every school in the history of philosophy was crammed into the categories of objective idealism, subjective idealism or materialism. See my article which shows philosophy can be grouped into six different schools: Out on a Limb With Dialectical Materialism. Lastly the various schools of 20th century philosophy are crudely labelled based on whether the school of philosophy – pragmaticism, logical atomism, analytical philosophy – was for or against imperialism. In addition to which class the school represented. This was the case even if the school of philosophy never made any political statements.

Lastly it was very short-sighted for Stalin to insist on controlling all communist parties of the world in the service of Russia. In the case of the United States, the American Communist Party lost many opportunities to move the Yankee working class towards communism because the American communist leaders were never allowed to adapt communist theory to their own conditions. It makes complete sense to me that on a world scale, smaller communist parties should defer to the party that had achieved state power. But that doesn’t mean the party that achieved state power should dictate the strategies and tactics of countries with different political and economic conditions. We need a mass socialist party, not a secret vanguard party.

What Stalin did right
Internationally Stalin was a great politician. For 25 years the Communist Party outfoxed the entire Western world of the United States, England, France and Germany that were all in cahoots to destroy state socialism in Russia. Also the Communist Party practically single-handedly defeated the Nazis. Nationally Stalin raised the standard of living for workers and peasants compared, not to Western societies, but under the conditions of that existed under the czars until the Revolution.

There are issues that in the West Stalin is regularly attacked about:

the treatment of peasants on the collective farms;
the famines in Russia;
the notion that Stalin was a dictator;
that Russia operated in totalitarian way and
the political trials of the 1930s.

Ludo Martens in his book Stalin: Another View, talks about each of these issues and exposes the typical Western ideology about this. It is important to remember that the statistics about the collective farms and famines were mostly written by CIA agents. Further, Martens does not take the position of idealizing everything that Stalin did. He simply presents facts that show Western propaganda as either wrong at worst or exaggerated at best.

So What are Messy Transitions?
The world of BRICS is a messy world. As I said before, China is the only country moving in a clear socialist direction. It has to work with two right wing countries – Hindu fundamentalist India and a theocracy in Saudi Arabia. Russia and Iran are clearly locked in with China but they are not socialist. Secondly, there is the class struggle going on within BRICS countries. None of these countries are supporting radical labor unions so the class struggle will go on within BRICS. Thirdly, workers cooperatives are a growing but small movement around the world. They represent potential dual forms of power. It is unclear how the heads of the BRICS countries will deal with worker co-ops as radical forms of economic exchange. Fourthly there are the ecological problems of extreme weather, accumulation of toxins, desertification and species extinction that the human species face. BRICS countries will deal with this in various ways. Lastly, there is the collapsing empire of the United States whose ruling class will fight to the death to keep it from slipping even to a minor power status. It will take all the ingenuity to navigate in, around and through this ruling class before it takes down half of the world with them.

Over many years organizations such as the United Nations have developed world programs for abolishing poverty and world hunger, increasing political participation and many other improvements. Those plans continue to gather dust because the world capitalist class is dead set against them. These plans can be potentially put into practice by some of the more progressive members of BRICS. In short it will be a messy bitches’ brew for the next century. We socialists have to accept messes and attempt to be more dialectical, not only in how we deal with the messes but also the bitterness of all socialists groups to each other.

Cooling Out the Socialist Family Feuds

For the past 170 years socialist groups have fought each other bitterly, sometimes justified and sometimes not. But we might do better if we understand each other as having various tensions that were there from the beginning, specifically:

What is the role of the state?
What is the role of a socialist party?
What is the role of self-organizing workers? and
What is place of markets?

To begin with, Leninists of all types need to face the fact that they don’t have the answers to everything. In fact, workers’ councils have shown that workers are far better at co-creating than they have been given credit for. On the other hand, anarchists and Council Communists need to come to terms with the fact that the state is a necessary part of socialism and for socialists to compete with capitalism on a world scale, some infrastructural industries require a state. In addition, council communists and anarchists cannot exist by themselves in economics organizations with no party. We need socialist parties to navigate political direction. Lastly, both anarchists and Council Communists need to appreciate that what the USSR, Cuba and Venezuela have achieved with their population is to be admired, not just criticized.

Finally, all these groups have to respect what the social democratic parties in the Scandinavia countries achieved domestically, at least before the rise of neoliberalism. They made some real improvements domestically for the populations in terms of standard of living, wages, health care and housing. On the other hand Social Democrats internationally should be roundly condemned for actively or passively not standing up to the imperialist powers of the West with a sense of international solidarity with other socialist countries against capitalists. Finally, while Social Democrats have given far too much power to capitalists domestically in their own country, they have also shown that local markets can be productive contributors to socialism and that markets are not synonymous with capitalism.

What is the Opposite of Purity?
Throughout this article I have criticized socialist purity. But the opposite of purity is enmeshment. In psychological terms, enmeshment is a process by which a person cannot easily tell where their boundaries end and another’s begin. The worst example of enmeshment politically are the actions of the social democratic parties of the world since the end of World War II. They allowed themselves to become entangled with capitalism. Their boundaries were enmeshed. They couldn’t tell the difference between domestic socialism and international imperialism

The worst example of socialist enmeshment is the Democratic Socialists of America. This organization for 60 years has been devoted to “moving the Democratic Party to the left”. In reality the Democratic Party has been moving right despite whatever interventions they’ve made. The Democratic Party has continuously moved to the right, today being a center-right party. Yet the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of American continue to support the Democratic Party. Today it is difficult, if not impossible to tell the difference between Social Democrats and left liberals.

Conclusion
I began my article by defining what I meant by socialist purity. I said it could apply to both the anarchist as well as the Leninist left – Trotskyists, Stalinists or Maoists. At the end my article I said that the opposite of socialist purity was socialist “enmeshment”. It is the Social Democrats in Europe and the Democratic Socialists in the United States that are the best example of this. I pointed out examples of socialist purity in attitudes towards two countries, China and Russia. I argued why BRICS holds the best hope for a socialist future and I based this partly on World Systems Theory of the history of capitalism. I pointed out the Utopian nature of the wish for a workers’ revolution all over the world at the same time. I argued that based on how they behave today, workers fighting for socialism within their nation-states is the best we can do. I also claimed that these days nationalist loyalties in the West is an advance against regional institutions like the European Union on the one hand or global institutions like the IMF or the World Bank on the other. I proposed that nationalism is an advance, whether it comes from countries such as Cuba or Venezuela on the left or European nationalists on the right including Le Pen’s party in France, the AfD in Germany or Orban in Hungary.

I attempted to be dialectical in weighing both anarchism and the varieties of Leninism for their pros and cons. I defended what has been called siege socialism against the purists, using Michael Parenti’s book Black Shirts and Reds and Ludo Martens book, Stalinism: Another View as two sources.

For over 50 years I have drawn from some very unlikely bedfellows. Some of these groups I joined and some I was on the periphery of and only knew them from their writings:

beginning with historical anarchists culminating with Murray Bookchin (2 years);
The Situationists of Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord culminating in Pannekoek and Gorter’s council communism (3 years);
National Caucus of Labor Committees (NCLC) converging in Lyndon Larouche’s book Dialectical Economics (1 year). More recently I’ve been influenced by William Engdahl, Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung, also in the Larouche orbit;
world-systems theory following the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Giovanni Arrighi;
communist psychology of the Soviet Union whose main practitioners were Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev. Also one year’s involvement with Social Therapy founded by Fred Newman and Lois Holtzman in New York City;
in 2000 the anti-war movement headed by ANSWER (8 years);
the Occupy movement from 2011-2012;
the founding of our own organization Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism from 2012 to today; and
one year with anarchists from Olympia Assembly and the Industrial Workers of the World.

The post Beyond Socialist Purity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive nor Forget

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 06 Apr 2025 17:12:28 +0000

Orientation

Christianity’s sinister past against Paganism
The very first commandment in the Bible says “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me”. These Pagan Gods are claimed to be either unreal or false. Pagan statues were therefore fair game to be destroyed or desecrated. The story of the Christian destruction of the Greco-Roman Pagan world has been told by Robin Lane Fox in Pagans and Christians; Jonathan Kirsch, God Against the Gods; Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of The Classical World and Helen Ellerbe, The Dark Side of Christian History. There is no secret about the horrible Inquisition of the Catholic Church against heretics such as Bruno and Galileo. Lastly, feminists have made us very aware of the burning of the witches, both in Europe and in the United States in Salem Massachusetts although there is controversy over how many women were killed.

The variety of ways Pagans react to Christianity’s sinister past
How do Neo-Pagans react to these historical events? As we might expect there is a full spectrum of reactions. The more militant feminists see all the monotheist “Religions of the Book” as their enemy, not just Christianity. The whole of “patriarchy” is the problem. Z Budapest and Monica Sjöö are examples of the more militant type. These heavy hitters do not want to make nice with Christianity and mix Paganism with any monotheistic beliefs or rituals. At the other extreme there are those Neo-Pagans who want to fight for Paganism to be included as a world religion and join the Parliament of the World’s Religions. Michael York’s book Pagan Theology is an example of this. In the middle there are Neo-Pagans who are basically Pagans but want to eclectically draw selectively from aspects of monotheist religion of the liberal type. River and Joyce Higginbotham in their book Pagan Spirituality are examples of this.

Where are we going?
Part of this article is a defense of militant Neo-Paganism against the more compromising positions. I say Pagans should be anti-Christian. Neo-Paganism will be compared to Christianity across thirty categories. The second part of this piece is about why Neo-Pagans should also be anti-capitalists. I will compare Neo-Paganism to capitalism across the same thirty categories. I will close this article by showing the close relationship between monotheism and capitalism across thirteen categories.

The Fundamental Opposition Between Neo-Paganism and Christianity
Patriarchal foundations of Christianity
Suppose we give the more compromising Neo-Pagans the benefit of the doubt for the sake of argument and let’s say we should forget the monstrous history of Christianity and try to work out a relationship with Christianity in the present. What this doesn’t consider is that Christianity is diametrically opposed to Paganism on ontological and epistemological grounds. For one thing, Paganism has had long historical periods in which it was centered in societies which were matrifocal though not matriarchal. It’s true that Poly-Theism existed in patriarchal societies as well, but there has never been a monotheistic society in which there was a matrifocal organization of descent or residency. Monotheism has been fundamentally opposed to gender equality.

Transcendental Nature of God
Secondly, the Pagan tradition has a history of the gods and goddesses as immanent in the world. Nature creates and recreates herself from within, without any extra-cosmic “butt-inskies” intervening. Nature is sacred. Christianity, on the other hand is foundationally a transcendental religion. Its God is above and beyond other worldly beings and sucks the sacredness out of the world. God shoots his wad before time and creates the world in a single act over seven days. But this leads to contradictions since God has to intervene periodically into history to fix what he botched.

Nature is imperfect and passive
God creates nature, nature does not create God. Nature is fallen and passive and receives its marching orders directly from God. Humanity is given the job of having dominion over nature. Nature is marginalized, a distraction at best, a temptress at worst.

God demands worship and obedience
Whether in animism or polytheism in all Paganism, reciprocity between humanity and the earth spirits, totems, ancestors, goddesses and gods, reciprocity is the name of the game. The gods and goddesses are not all-powerful and all-knowing and are somewhat dependent on humanity. This is the basis of magic. They are hardly in a position to demand obedience. For Christianity, God is worshipped. To worship is a one-way relationship going from humanity to God. God does not want nor need reciprocity. God acts arbitrarily in the case of the Jews and the Protestants. He causes suffering yet has to answer to no one.

Christian understands opposites as dualistic, mutually exclusive
For Pagans, all the spirits, totems, ancestors, gods and goddesses have strengths and weakness. There are no beings that are all good or all bad. For Pagans opposites are polar, they can turn into each other, creating new emergent synthesis. Christianity, on the other hand, creates absolute opposites of an all-good God who is all powerful, knowing and loving. But Christianity creates another being which is absolutely evil – Satan. Because of this Christianity has a difficult time providing guidance for human life which is too complex to be put into absolutist blocks.

God of Christianity is a warring, jealous, intolerant god
It is certainly true that there have been wars in animistic and polytheist societies, but these societies never went to war over religion. Neither were these sacred sources intolerant of each other. In general, when Pagan societies encountered other spiritual beings, they either tried to see the commonalties with their beings or simply added them to the pantheon. Their philosophy was kind of “the more the merrier”. The entire history of Christianity, on the contrary has been marred by religious wars between monotheist religions, intolerance of heretics, persecutions and fanaticism of witches that has no parallel in Paganism.

Christianity understands humanity has fallen and is in need of faith
There is no such thing as original sin in Paganism. People certainly have failings but as individuals. However, there was no mark of failure that condemned the entire species. In addition, Paganism was an experiential religion. People practiced magic and sometimes it seemed to work and sometimes it didn’t but no faith in the sacred powers was required. The goddesses and gods had to be persuaded or lured but the reciprocity made faith meaningless and irrelevant. For Christianity we have the Adam and Eve tale of original sin. Humanity was cursed and was lucky to be alive. God could do whatever He wanted and humanity was expected to have faith that in the end God would show some mercy.

Most Christianity must hollow out intermediate beings

Pagan loyalties are both close at hand and far away. Furthermore, there is rarely a hierarchical relationship among sacred beings. There are earth-spirits, totems, ancestor spirits, culture heroes, goddesses and gods and each covers an expanding range of responsibility. However, gods and goddesses don’t tell earth-spirits or ancestors what to do. They each exist in an expanding plurality. In the case of Christianity, not only is there a hierarchical relationship between God and humanity, but God must wipe out all Pagan intermediaries in the extreme case of the Protestants and the Jews. For them it is the human individual, God and the Bible. Catholicism does allow intermediaries such as angels or saints, provided they are subordinate to God.

Christianity aspires to spiritual imperialism
Pagan societies at the tribal level have always been local and decentralized. Polytheistic state civilizations have been centralized politically but there is not a single centralized Pagan tradition in those societies. Usually, the peasants practiced their own kind of “earth magic” while those in the cities practiced a more urban polytheism. But even the rulers of polytheistic state civilizations did not proselytize their religion or send out missionaries. If they conquered other societies, they simply expected the subjugated population to respect their gods and goddesses while pretty much leaving subordinated groups alone to practice their own traditions. It is Christianity that began to proselytize once it gained state power, sending out missionaries in the hopes of converting everyone worthy of becoming Christian. Just as for Christians, God is imagined to be everywhere in the spiritual universe, so Christianity on earth must also be everywhere conquering the entire globe.

Table 1 contains a more exhaustive list of contracts between Paganism and Christianity. I have drawn this list from Jordan Paper’s book The Deities are Many.

Christianity as a slave religion of sick weaklings filled with resentment

At least among philosophers, I can’t think of a stronger critic of Christianity than Fredrich Nietzsche. He famously announced that “God is dead”. Unfortunately, some have interpreted this as meaning Nietzsche was some kind of atheist. Given Nietzsche’s love of the Greeks and what he imagined as early German Pagan culture, he should have said, “God is dead. Long live the gods!”. Nietzsche rightly criticized Christianity as a slave religion, a religion of a “domesticated animals, herd animals, a sick animal”. When we look at the history of Christianity it has been a history of followers, and a religion that justified oppression for the overwhelming period of its history. What did he mean by a calling Christians sick animals? Many things. For one it is a religion of passivity, a religion that gets its followers used to meekly following orders rather than seeking out spiritual experience, as he said, dancing on the slopes of Vesuvius. Christianity attempts to get people used to pining for pie in the sky waiting for them when they die.

It is also sick because it is a religion which makes a virtue out of being weak. Nietzsche says somewhere I love to see those without any claws making a virtue out of being clawless while condemning health and strength as a vice and something to be stamped out. Nietzsche said that Christian parasites in power make an ideal out of whatever contradicts self-preservation, pleasure, joy and most everything we Neo-Pagans stand for.

Nietzsche discussed resentment as the psychology of Christians. The psychology of resentment makes a virtue of wishing ill on other people while envying what they have. Nietzsche had no patience with Buddhism’s attempting to starve out desire or meditating it away. He thinks it is far braver to have like a Centaur’s desire without the desires having us. We supersede our desires; we don’t transcend them. To transcend means to be above and superior to our desires, being beyond and fundamentally unlike them. On the other hand, to supersede desires is to fully indulge them yet wanting more, and having wings to ride them into a higher dimension. Nietzsche saw Christianity as a war of the botched against the fit. A war of slander against the here and now. Any creature who would need faith and prayer is corrupted by the virus of Christianity.

I hope I have convinced you Neo-Pagans that I have made a good case that we need not wander into Christianity imagining they have something we lack. Both historically, ontologically and epistemologically it is against everything we stand for. I will now take on objections from Neo-Pagans who want to take a softer line.

What can Christianity Possibly Offer Neo-Pagans to Make Us Think Twice?

An identification with western esoteric vs exoteric spirituality

Some Neo-Pagans might say that militant Neo-Pagans are too extreme. For one thing, there are liberal Christians who would themselves criticize the history of Christianity and be sympathetic to Neo-Pagans. New Age spirituality makes a distinction between esoteric and exoteric spirituality. They contend that at their best, all world religions are good and all the world religions take different paths to the same end. This commonality across religions is known to only the few, and this comparative understanding of religion is called the perennial philosophy or esoteric spirituality. Transpersonal psychologist and comparative religion scholar Ken Wilber in his books Up from Eden and Sex, Ecology, Evolutionexemplify this esoteric vs exoteric spirituality. The Theosophy of Madame Blavatsky and the Anthroposophy of Rudolph Steiner are more historical examples.

On the other hand, exoteric religion is the religion of the masses. It is the leaders of exoteric religions who are responsible for all the religious wars between the religions of the book as well as Catholic and Protestant attacks on Paganism. So esoteric New Age spiritualists hold out the olive leaf to Neo-Pagans, welcoming us in. Why not take the leaf? For one thing the perennial philosophy is a synthesis of universalistic religions which include Eastern religions/philosophies like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism. They are all patriarchal religions and as I have tried to show the Pagan world view is diametrically opposed to them.

Furthermore, those who support the perennial philosophy are people from upper middle-class backgrounds. This is only about 10% of the population. In the United States 14% do not identity with any religious heritage. The overwhelming majority of middle-class and especially working-class people – 75% of the population – identify with either the moderate or fundamental spectrum of monotheism. So, the characteristics of monotheistic Christianity on the right side of Table I are accurate for most Christians.

Pragmatic considerations of a lack of stable public space
In addition, we militant Neo-Pagans have to admit that we do not have any public space for regular practices. At least in Yankeedom, there are no Pagan temples in which we can hold rituals and ceremonies. The Unitarian Universalists now offer Neo-Pagans a free space to use in the church and be part of it. It is tempting, yet for militant Neo-Pagans there are class issues. The Unitarians are among the wealthiest of the Protestant churches in the United States. For militant Neo-Pagans who are socialists – whether anarchist or Marxists – mixing with the upper classes raises contradictions. The problem of lack of stable public space means that for those who are not solitary Pagans, at the local level covens will continue to be held in private homes. At a regional level, while conferences and seasonal festivals have been very successful in state parks and private campsites, we still have no place to call home.

Legal protection
In the United States, Neo-Paganism has flourished from the late 1970s to today. For the most part we have been left alone by the Catholic, Protestant and Zionist authorities. However, all these religions have seen a decline in their numbers. At least one of the reasons for this is people, especially women, have left it for Neo-Paganism. Especially in the era of Trump 2.0, Neo-Pagans have good reason to fear a new kind of persecution from Catholic and Protestant fundamentalists. This is why some Neo-Pagan groups want to apply for legal status to protect themselves from harassment. But militant Neo-Pagans are concerned that preoccupation with legal standing will conservatize the movement and drain its radical, in-your-face edge way of life. In addition, living in a steeply declining civilization such as the United States, economic and political insecurity can make life much harder for Neo-Pagans that it has already been.

Civil disobedience
A more militant approach is to organize now to prepare for an attack rather than waiting until it happens and then operating in reactive mode. The more radical wing of Paganism such as Starhawk’s Reclaiming group has lots of experience with organizing Pagans into political protests using the methods of civil disobedience. These strategies and tactics could be transferred to standing-ready groups in dealing with Christian nationalists. Neo-Pagans would do well to make alliances with atheists and secularist groups such as Freedom from Religion. This group is very well organized and consists of lawyers and lay folk who defend the Constitution against Christian nationalists who try to cross the line in the separation of Church and state. They have a monthly newspaper and hold conferences once or twice a year.

Armed conflict

As citizens of the United States, we are allowed to bear arms. Most of the time people think of this as something individuals do. But there is nothing to help Pagan groups protect themselves against Christians collectively if they are attacked. Usually, liberal Pagans get nervous with talks about group arming. Also, people think that this kind of thing is inherently a right-wing activity that might be associated with the Nordic Paganism, some of whom have a racist orientation. However, there is another left-wing organization called Redneck Revolt which is anti-racist and appeals to working-class whites who are Socialists. They believe in protecting working-class people collectively. Read here for more information about them. There is certainly a lot to learn from them in applying their organizational skills to Neo-Pagan circumstances.

What I have said so far is that Neo-Pagans should keep their distance from Christianity for theoretical reasons and practical reasons. But suppose you continue to object. Ok, I will make one concession

A twelve-step program for Christians to join the Neo-Pagan community

In my opinion some Neo-Pagans are far too accommodating of former Christians who want to jump on the Neo-Pagan bandwagon. They should be required to go through the equivalent of a 12-step program in order to have a chance at being part of a Neo-Pagan community. They should be required to read at least two books about the history of what Christianity has done to Pagans, one for the ancient world and one on Christian attacks on witchcraft. As part of their initiation, they should be required to respond a list of questions. The third process they should enact is to write down the history of any harm they might have done to Neo-Pagans in the past including any high-school encounters. The fourth is to, as much as possible, track those people down who have been harmed and make amends. Next, as part a public ritual they should make a public apology to the entire Neo-Pagan community. Finally, they should be given some volunteer work within the Neo-Pagan community to do such as making phone calls, mailing newsletters or driving equipment around to Pagan events. This would relieve the burden from committed Neo-Pagan leaders who are probably overworked and underpaid for the time they put into their organization.

Table 1 Paganism vs Monotheism (Christianity)

Paganism	Category of comparison	Monotheism (Christianity)
Matrifocal cultures developed polytheism	Matriarchy vs patriarchy	No matrifocal cultures ever developed monotheism No record of a monotheistic Goddess theology until contemporary feminism
Never celebrated celibacy	Place of celibacy	Catholic and Buddhist priests are celibate
Many truths	Tolerance	Single truth can produce intolerance. No grey areas
No heresies. Experiential	Heresies	Based on creeds – heresies prevalent
Generally, the gods and goddesses are not jealous of each other	Jealousy	Yahweh is jealous
No	Persecution	Yes. Ex-communication Christianity went from a persecuting minority to a persecuting majority
No	Fanaticism	Yes. Destroying the Alexandrian library, smashing of idols (Protestants)
No wars over beliefs	Wars	Religious wars over beliefs
Cyclic	Time orientation	Linear time
Sacred	Earth and nature	Marginalized – desacralized
Ongoing creativity in time and space	How frequently is creativity used	Creative in a single act before time
Many directions: horizontal	Directions	Single vertical direction Heaven above, Hell below
No original sin other than human selfishness	Original sin	Yes. Inheritor of Adam and Eve’s sin
Opposites are polar and change into each other	The Nature of opposites	Dualistically separated and going in opposite directions
No. All gods and goddesses have their pros and cons	Distribution of virtues and vices	God absolute god Satan absolute evil
Reciprocity, respect, reverence	How is the sacred engaged	Worship, obedience
Looked down upon Wealth is land based – foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists	Place or misplace of commerce	Made room for it Originated among Greece, Phoenicians. Herders
		Christianity spread in port cities In Turkey
		Islam spread along the caravan routes of Central Asia
		Catholics in Venice
No proselyting, no missionaries	Outreach	Proselytizing, missionaries
Decentralized – Paleo-Pagan Centralized – Meso-Pagan Decentralized – Neo-Pagan	Coordinated effort	Centralization once they had power
Local, regional at most	Spatial reach	Global, everywhere
Ancestors are very important among horticulturalists (reverence)	Place of the ancestors	Not very important
Social situations when the family was embarrassed	Shame vs guilt	Guilt was not group focused Individual God Guilt is continuous and unending
Gods are not all-powerful or all-knowing	Degree of power	God is all powerful God knows all
Meaningless and irrelevant	Faith	Meaningful, necessary and relevant
Mediums are ongoing and a way of life – women About past, present and future	Intermediaries	Only under extraordinary events Prophesy – men About the past
No origin. World is eternal cyclic, steady state	Origin of universe	World has origin Big bang
Myths change over time	Stability of myths	Myths are fixed and unchanging over time
Tricksters, playful and prevalent	Place of trickers	These stories exist in West they are not numinous. They can be associated with evil as with horror — or cartoon characters Deities that are numinous – are serious about sobriety

Neo-Paganism vs Capitalism
Merchants and artisans are not capitalists
In this section I will give many reasons why Neo-Paganism should want nothing to do with capitalism. But does this mean Neo-Pagans should be socialists? Yes, but I will not make the case in this article. Many Neo-Pagans are justifiably cautious about socialism if they think socialists want the state to be in charge of all economic exchanges. They fear socialists will deprive them of their livelihood. After all, many Neo-Pagans have found their new identity from inhabiting Neo-Pagan bookstores. The owners of these bookstores and occult magic stores are merchants. Furthermore, a solid core of Neo-Pagans are artisans who make jewelry, craft calendars and make sculptures of gods and goddesses.

From our point of view merchants, artisans and craftsmen are not capitalists. Markets and artisans existed all the way back to simple horticulture societies long before capitalism existed. Industrial capitalism is the private ownership of natural resources, methods of harnessing energy, tools and power settings (politics) where decisions are made about what to produce and how to produce it. These forms of capitalism include agricultural capitalism (slavery), industrial capitalism, finance capitalism and military capitalism. It is these that Neo-Pagans should be against. But how is capitalism the deadly enemy of Neo-Paganism?

No reciprocity and infinite exploitation
The heart of Neo-Paganism is that the relationship with the sacred powers is reciprocation. It is the basis of sympathetic magic. Our relationship is based on respect and reverence between us and our totems, ancestors, gods and goddesses. The gods and goddesses do not take and take and take. That would lead to breakdown. But under capitalism there are no lawful expectations that capitalists must give back. They are free to exploit as much as they can get away with. It is true eventually capitalism cannot go on this way and the results are either economic depressions or revolutions. So, workers are in the long run sometimes compensated. But this happens socially, unconsciously. It is not something that is built into the system of capitalism by capitalists. Workers may be reciprocated but in spite of capitalists.

Capitalist idolatry
In spite of Christian propaganda, Pagans do not idolize our gods and goddesses. Sacred powers are generally understood as fluid, moving and changing. We don’t treat these sacred powers in a Platonic way where spirits are essences, Platonic ideals which are frozen and changeless. In Neo-Paganism there is little in the way of reification, in which gods take on a life of their own, where the tools or objects used are reified. It is true that some of the more superficial tendencies in Paganism might reify magical tools and treat them as ends in themselves. But this is true of any common superstition, not unique to Paganism.

However, the entire capitalist system is based on idolatry of commodities and money. In the first volume of Capital, Marx talks about the idolatrous relationship between workers and the commodities we make. Instead of commodities being used as means to consume and improve life, we reify commodities until they become ends in themselves. We become enslaved to our commodities and live through the possession of them. As Marx says, things are in the saddle. Commerce is unhinged and everything is for sale.

Secondly, money becomes a fetish instead of a means to gain commodities. In the merchant phase of capitalism, money is used as a medium to facilitate the exchange of commodities. But under the industrial phase of capitalism money changes from a means to an end to an end in itself. Money is invested in commodities, not to use the commodities but as a means to make more money. Money becomes fetishized as capital. These reifications can be tracked in our language as when we hear phrases like “money talks’ or “let your money grow” as if money were a part of organic life. Lastly, under finance capital, capital is used to make more capital and becomes completely unhinged from social life. Derivatives and stock options are reified monsters who dictate social life. The stock markets are the houses of idolatry where the traders pay homage to Mammon.

Capitalism is imprisoned in dualistic opposites
As I said in the section on monotheism opposites, Neo-Paganism understands opposites as polar, as turning into each other and as mutually co-creative. Under capitalism opposites are understood as mutually exclusive opposites:

Workers vs capitalists
Capitalists vs communists
Hardworking, thrifty, shrewd capitalists vs lazy, ignorant workers

But more importantly, capitalists do not understand the contradictory nature of their system. They image their system can go on forever. Capitalists image that their significant problems about every seven years are “businesses cycles” which are self-correcting. They deny that capitalism has accumulating contradictions, which past a certain point will either degenerate into a lower order or be transformed into a higher system, a qualitative leap. As Rosa Luxemburg once said, “it’s either socialism or barbarism”. Marxist crisis theorists present various ways in which the system will end. David Harvey in his book The Seventeen Contradictions of Capitalism lays this out beautifully.

Capitalists Must Destroy Intermediaries
As I said earlier in our discussion of spiritual intermediaries, for Pagan intermediaries are welcome and they expand seemingly without limit and without a hierarchical relationship between them. At the origin of capitalism, merchants had to compete with feudal economic exchanges which cut across political intermediaries such as kingdoms, provinces, principalities and city states. Over the last 500 years capitalist used nation-states to hollow out or eliminate these political intermediaries. They used the nation-state to climb under, around and through kingdoms and provinces so that capitalist exchanges through coined money was the only game in town. Then under global capitalism the organization of societies into nation-states becomes hollowed out so that whole continents (the European Union) began to undermine nation-states.

Capitalist have overreach in spatial scale
As I said earlier, Paganism’s spatial reach is decentralized and local. Capitalists, however know no spatial limits. It first expands into nation-states but when it runs into problems in making a profit within its home nation-state it expands beyond it. There are problems within nation-states either because there is competition between capitalists in other nation-states or because its domestic workers are getting more organized to fight exploitation through unions or revolutions. They keep expanding across the globe, subjugating societies as they grow toward imperialism.

Exploitation of Nature
Just as capitalists know no limit in the exploitation of other societies, so in the biophysical world it exploits nature without limits. The result of ecological pollution is extreme weather, desertification of lands, species growing extinct, feedback systems in nature that run amuck. Instead of replenishing and repairing, we hear capitalists treating the consequences of their attack on biophysical nature as “externalities” which they see as separate from economic exchange.

Please see Table two for a full comparison between Neo-Paganism and Capitalism at the end of this article.

Table 2 Neo-Paganism vs Capitalism

Neo-Paganism	Category of comparison	Capitalism
Matrifocal cultures developed polytheism	Matriarchy vs patriarchy	Continues patriarchy with some presence of feminism
Never celebrated celibacy	Place of celibacy	Doesn’t supply celibacy No money to be made from it
Many truths	Tolerance	Cannot tolerate any socialism in the world system
No heresies. Experiential	Heresies	Yes. Heterodox economists who are isolated are rarely department heads
Generally, the gods and goddesses are not jealous of each other	Jealousy	Capitalists jealous of competing economic systems
No	Persecution	Yes. Of its own working class and the oppressed workers’ and peasants’ western imperialism
No	Fanaticism	Ideology of private enterprise Ideology of capitalism
No wars over beliefs	Wars	Wars against non-western countries and against socialism
Cyclic	Time orientation	Linear, especially after the industrial revolution. Time clocks, 14-hour days
Sacred	Earth and nature	Exploitation of nature. Pollution treated as “externality”
Ongoing creativity in time and space	How frequently is creativity used	Ongoing but unconscious collective creativity of workers
Many directions – horizontal	Directions	Vertical – class struggle between capitalists and working class
No original sin other than human selfishness	Original sin	None
Opposites are polar and change into each other	The nature of opposites	Dualistic: Mechanistic materialism vs idealist subjectivism
No. All gods and goddesses have their pros and cons	Distribution of virtues and vices	Capitalism has virtues – hardworking, thrifty, shrewd Socialist have vices Lazy, want something for nothing
Reciprocity, respect, reverence	How is the sacred engaged?	No reciprocity – infinite exploitation
Looked down upon Wealth is land based – foragers, horticulturalists, agriculturalists	Place or misplace of commerce	Unhinged commerce everywhere
Not a virtue	Suffering	No value in suffering Strive for hedonism
No. Earth spirits, rivers, gods and goddesses are moving	Idolatry	Yes. Commodity fetishism Stock market – money talks

No proselyting, no missionaries	Outreach	Capitalist imperialism covers the globe
Decentralized – paleo-Pagan Centralized – MesoPagan Decentralized—Neo-Pagan	Coordinated effort	Both decentralized competition Monopolistic corporate centralization
Local, regional at most	Spatial reach	Global, everywhere
Ancestors are very important among horticulturalists (reverence)	Place of the ancestors	Elderly not respected No ongoing homage Youth culture
Social situations when the family was embarrassed	Shame vs guilt	Guilt for working class for not becoming wealthy
Gods are not all powerful nor all knowing	Degree of power	Capitalists do have absolute power of monotheism, but they have oligarchic power
Meaningless and irrelevant	Faith	Faith in “business cycles” and market corrections that the system will never crash
Mediums are ongoing and way of life – women are primary – About past, present and future	Intermediaries	Prophets intervene with market corrections and Federal Reserve interest fluctuations
No origin. World is eternal Cyclic, steady state	Origin of universe	Steady state capitalism imagined to go on forever Capitalism at the beginning Adam Smith “truck and barter”
Myths change over time	Stability of myths	Myths do not change – American dream possible for everyone
Trickers, playful and prevalent	Place of trickers	Yes. Market is unpredictable and not subject to law
Inner – immanence	Source is inner or outer	Transcendence – Fictitious finance capital, otherworldly with no investment in real goods or infrastructure

Commonalities Between Christianity and Capitalism

Both are patriarchal but capitalist systems had to deal with waves of feminism in the last 200 years.
Each are intolerant– Christians of Pagans; capitalists of socialism
Each have heresies – Christianity has religious heretics, witches; under capitalism, heterodox economists who are opposed to mainstream economics
Both Christianity and capitalism have wars — religious wars between Christians and Muslims and capitalist wars against other capitalism nations; imperialist wars against their colonies; economic wars against socialism
Both Christians and capitalists see nature as subordinate – Christianity says humans have dominion over nature whereas capitalists exploit nature
Both Christians and capitalists hollow out intermediaries. Christians want to eliminate earth spirits, totems, ancestor spirit, goddesses and gods. Capitalists marginalize intermediate decentralized political bodies such as provinces, principalities, kingdoms and city states in favor of nation-states
Spatial reach is global – proselytizing missionaries are all over the globe

Capitalist imperialism is spreading everywhere. Just as God is everywhere, capitalism is everywhere

Both have a linear sense of time. Under capitalism with the invention of clocks, wrist watches, and time cards during the industrial revolution
Both have a dualistic sense of mutually exclusive opposites
Christianity or capitalism depreciates and marginalize the ancestors. Under capitalism there is youth culture to replace respect for the elders
Both require faith. Christianity in an arbitrary and unpredictable god; capitalism in “business cycles’ and “market corrections” which explain away capitalist crises
Divine intervention – unpredictable appearances of prophets in the case of Judeo-Christianity; Federal Reserve for capitalist interventions
Value of transcendence – for monotheism a god who is above, before and beyond the world. For capitalism, finance capital – money made on money without any involvement in the production of goods and services

Conclusion

The purpose of this article is to persuade Neo-Pagans to take a more militant stance against both Christianity and capitalism. I began with a brief discussion of how Christianity persecuted Pagans both at the end of the Roman empire as well as in early modern Europe with both the Catholic Inquisition and the witch hunts in Europe and in Salem Massachusetts in the US. I identified eleven ways in which Christianity and Paganism are diametrically opposed to each other in irreconcilable ways. I then presented three objections more compromising Neo-Pagans might make in arguing I am being too hard on Christianity. I rebutted them but gave them the benefit of the doubt in claiming that any ex-Christians who want to join Neo-Pagan circles should have to undergo a kind of 12-step program before they are allowed in.

In the second half of my article, I turned my attention to the relationship between Neo-Paganism and capitalism. I began by addressing the concerns Neo-Pagans may have in my opposing capitalism. I point out that being against capitalism does not mean I am opposed to Neo-Pagan bookstores, occult supply stores or artisans selling their work. These are market transactions. Markets have existed throughout much of history long before capitalism. Capitalism is a much more all-encompassing and controlling economic system that is way beyond exchange between merchants. I then named six ways in which capitalism is fundamentally opposed to Neo-Pagan ways of life.

In the last part of my article, I briefly identify thirteen ways which Christianity and capitalism share in common. What is unstated is what is the relationship between Neo-Paganism and socialism? For that I direct the reader to my book The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism: Why Marxists Need Neo-Paganism.

You can also find some of my articles in the “Perspective” section of our website Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism.

The post Militant Neo-Pagans Neither Forgive nor Forget first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Neoliberal Micro-Psychology vs Communist Macro-Psychology

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 14 Mar 2025 20:31:17 +0000

Author Bruce Lerro, Co-Founder and Co-Organizer for Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article I contrasted sixteen ways in which communist macro-psychology differs from liberal micro-psychology as it is practiced in the United States. I described communist psychology in action in the field of eating habits and the impact of advertising on the public’s emotional life. I discussed the reasons why my readers might have a difficult time appreciating what communist psychology has to offer and I used the science fiction book Flatland as an analogy to show that using communist psychological concepts is like living in the third dimension of a two-dimensional world of capitalist micro-psychology.

In Part II of my article, I will describe how even when communist psychology books are translated from Russian into English, they are unconsciously or consciously distorted or censored by those Ratner calls neoliberal psychologists to fit better with the structure and dynamics of capitalism. As an example of macro-cultural psychology in this article I will also use an example of how capitalism is connected to mental illnesses, specifically in schizophrenia and the pressure to be thin.

What is Neoliberal Activity Theory?
As many of you know, neoliberalism in the field of economics and politics hit the United States and England full-force with the election of Reagan and Thatcher. It was characterized by economic policies designed to hollow out of the technological infrastructure, attack unions and the wages of workers. Neoliberalism is also connected to the rise of transnational, financial capitalism. It would appear that these conditions would breed a kind of pessimistic psychology with individuals seen as more or less determined by socio-structural forces. But that did not happen in the field of psychological activity theory in the United States. In fact the opposite happened.

It was in early 1980s that Vygotsky’s work was brought to the United States thanks to the educational psychologist Michael Cole. But Cole’s presentation of Vygotsky’s work played down the fact that Vygotsky was a communist set on building a Marxist psychology. Instead, Vygotsky’s interest in learning, education and his work on “defectology” (social education of blind and deaf children) was emphasized. The main problem is that neoliberal psychologists want to eclectically use Vygotsky’s work in education while either intentionally or unintentionally leaving out the fact that Vygotsky and his colleagues were trying to build a communist psychology. Ratner writes that this is akin to writing about Darwin and holding conferences about his ideas yet never exploring his concept of evolution. As American psychologist Carl Ratner writes:

Eighty years later, under much less social pressure, and with many more resources, contemporary activity theorists have generally regressed from the limited concrete emphasis in Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev’s theories. (Page 240)

In addition, almost as a reaction formation to the hard neoliberal economic times, these psychologists emphasized the active nature of individuals in relation to social structure (with a romantic conception of individuals as free as birds – see image at beginning of article). For example, they selected peer group cooperative learning as opposed to learning through an individual instructor. They emphasized language and conversations in cooperation as opposed to Leontiev’s emphasis on collective tool use. Neoliberal Vygotskians were more interested in the cooperative settings of school and play and less in work settings. Some of them caught the postmodern bug and questioned scientific objectivity as the ultimate aspiration of psychologists.

The Fear of Macro-Cultural Psychology
Ratner points out that in world neoliberal psychology the subjects of consumer capitalism, commodification, alienation, exploitation and ideology are never mentioned in their leading journals on culture. For example, he tells us these subjects are not mentioned in the 17-year history of Michael Cole’s journal Mind, Culture and Activity, supposedly sympathetic to Vygotskyan work. Neither did these subjects ever appear in the Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology over a period of forty years. The Handbook of Cross-Cultural Psychology mentions the word capitalism twice in 850 pages. Ratner explains that the most famous social psychology text ever, The Social Animal, never once mentions social class. There is a neglect of macro social factors involved in mental illness – for example the link between psychological depression and capitalist economic instabilities (to be covered shortly). Why is this? Drug companies want patients to use their products and not question the economic system that might be ultimately the reason these patients have these problems. Ratner says that every one of the authors of DSM manual’s sections on mood disorders and schizophrenia had financial ties to drug companies

Qualifications About Micro Neoliberal Psychology
These journals and books fail to discuss in detail exploitation, alienation, commodification, ideology, mystification, hegemony or social class. Social class is rarely mentioned, yet research proves that it affects mortality, diseases, opportunities, privileges, health care, literacy, vocabulary and working memory. Neoliberal psychology admits that the micro-level reflects effects of these macro events, but it does not reveal the power and depth of macro cultural factors in their full complexity which go beyond the level of face-to-face interaction. Neoliberal psychologists sometimes acknowledge the effect of exploitation – poverty, stress, anxiety, prejudice – but they attribute them to factors other than an exploitive political economy. For example, instead of blaming the political economy of capitalism we hear of the “corruption of individuals”, “rotten apples”, “rogue criminals”, “greedy businessmen” or “disturbed individuals”. These are all vices of individuals. Structures get away scot-free. Lastly, it is not enough that cross-cultural psychologists point out that most Americans have more individualistic self-concept and North Koreans have a collectivist orientation. It is necessary to analyze the political character of the individualistic self-concept.

Macro-Cultural vs Micro-Cultural Activity Theory

Socio-historical activity theory says it is a collectivist, mediated and object-oriented activity system which is the prime unit of analysis. Secondly, the activity system is always a community, not a dyad or triad. Thirdly, contradiction has a central role as sources of change and development. In other words, conflict in real objective systems is the mother of change. Fourthly, these activity systems get transformed over long periods of historical time – centuries. Lastly, it is collective-creative activity such as new inventions like the printing press, the telescope and the microscope, qualitative changes that drive psychological changes in the individual. An example is the need for merchants to develop insurance policies for their ships that led to the emergence of formal operational thinking among 17^th century merchants and scientists.

In the case of neoliberal theorists of Vygotsky it is the local group, not the collective which is the mediated form of activity. The collective institutional framework in which activity takes place – whether the society is feudal, capitalist or socialist – is ignored. Secondly, the places where Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development takes place are usually among peers. If teachers are involved, they are teaching in a permissive way and less in a way wherein the teacher takes the lead. Thirdly, liberal Vygotskians usually don’t pay much attention to the changing historical contexts in which activity takes place. In the macro activity case, Luria conducted studies shortly after the Russian Revolution about how peasant life psychologically changed as peasants were introduced to the industrialization process. He tracked how peasants’ sense of perception, cognition and personality were transformed. Neoliberal activity theorist rarely delve into the history of activity in their own country. Fourthly, in liberal theory contradictions are not usually understood as opportunities for transformation. They are seen as problems that need to be worked out to re-achieve stability. They might also be dismissed as the products of faulty reasoning. Lastly, activity theory is not often presented as having undergone major changes due to the phases of capitalism, the invention of the telescope, microscope or changes in industry. Rather, activity engagements might be contrasted to before or after the internet, Facebook, texting or Twitter.

Micro Cultural Activity Theory reduces the activity process to simple, small, personal, casual, apolitical and spontaneous interactions. But as Ratner says, whole societies are not re-formed on the model of someone helping a neighbor turn off the gas. The telecommunications industry does not operate by individuals broadcasting from their home radios. The macro conditions of the Wall Street 2008 crash and what bankers got away with cannot be understood by a cooperative meeting between an individual client and their financial planner.

Individuals do not spontaneously categorize artifacts with personal meanings. If they did there would be no commonality to individuals’ psychology. Each would imbue artifacts with different idiosyncratic meanings. Terms like “cultural factors” and “cultural context” are lifeless abstractions that exclude the political and economic driving forces that design and maintain these factors in the face of competing intersections for other classes. The term “context” obscures the active way capitalists and their politicians create context and make and structure our behavior in the service of their political interests. Without these macro institutions, Ratner points out that there would be tremendous slippage in micro interactions from the first dyad to the last – as studies of rumor transmission document. Macro-institutions already inform any micro social interactions and hold them together.

Micro-cultural psychologists treat verbal language and symbolic culture as at least equal to the material culture of work. In macro-cultural psychology work is the center of human activity and symbols and language were first used to assist the work process. Language and symbols do not arise spontaneously. Lastly, micro-cultural psychologists do not pay enough attention to the existence of the core, periphery and semi-periphery nations in the world-capitalist system. Countries in each of their zones had unique political economic institutions that produced a unique psychology. Grouping these societies as individualist or collectivist tells us nothing about their political economy. Collectivist societies can be tribal or agricultural and this kind of collectivism is very different from the collectivism of socialist societies. So too, there were some individualist selves in the commercial civilizations of the Minoans, Phoenicians and Carthaginians. But this proto-individualism is a far cry from the individualism of industrial capitalist societies.

Examples of Neoliberal Micro Cultural Psychology in the Workplace
Ratner argues that Barbara Rogoff redefines society in novel, abstract terms such as a list of scattered, abstract “community routines”. There are no exploitation, alienation, market forces, profit motives, commodification, bureaucracy or ideology at all here. Here “culture” is a surface mix of bedtime stories, trips to school, and show-and-tell narratives. Rather than mention social class she called them depoliticized terms like “participation status”. So the only difference between the president from Exxon Mobil and a migrant peasant are positions in a conversation. Life imprisonment, coal mining, working in a slaughterhouse, and the obliteration of one’s country by an invading army is a no more than a “format”.

Jann Valsiner engaged in a conceptual watering down of social reality by re-naming “cultural factors” to “social suggestions”. So being terminated from your job, having your country invaded, being imprisoned, having your pension cancelled are “social suggestions”. Ratner adds we cannot remake the Federal Reserve Bank by altering a few words. Neither can the institution of slavery be abolished by changing a word such as calling it “racism”. There need to be workers’ self-organization and strikes to have a chance for a deep change. Valsiner and Litvinovich claim that individuals continuously changed culture through the simple act of dialoguing. It takes a lot more than conversations to do that.

Another problem for these neoliberal micro-psychologists is that subjectivity and psychology are treated as dichotomous to culture rather than dialectically related with macro culture as the leading edge. Culture is treated as a tool that an individual decides how and when to use. The current purposes of the participants always seem to trump established macro cultural structures. Micro-cultural psychologists define social life in whatever area seems to be within our personal control as individuals. Ratner says this is like looking for a lost key under wherever the streetlight is. Micro-cultural psychologists “zoom in” on individuals so much that they lose sight of mega social conditions that inform them. Consequently, the individual appears to be acting on his or her own because these larger conditions have been cut out of the picture.

For example, in the case of Abu Ghraib the torturers seem to be acting on their own and the state of military elites are only too happy to blame working class soldiers. However, Ratner tells us, when we zoom out we see that entire chain of command encouraged the guards. Six hundred military and Blackwater personal were on hand to abuse 460 Iraqi detainees. This was a spontaneous eruption by the personal decision of 600 six hundred soldiers. The neoliberal micro-psychologists theory would seem to think so.

Lastly, any attempt at objectivity is looked upon skeptically by many micro-cultural psychologists who insist on glorifying their subject’s subjective experience as the subject matter of psychology. Any objective interpretation that superseded theirs and critically evaluates subjective experience as possibly being due to illusions, short-sightedness or narcissism is condemned as elitist and coercive because it does not emanate from the individuals themselves. Ironically, a denial of objectivity traps people more because it tells them that nothing outside of them is really going on.

See the table at the end of the article below to view the contrasts between macro-cultural activity theory and micro-cultural liberal theory.

Example of Macro-Cultural Psychology Regarding Mental Illness
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia has been defined as the disorganization of thinking processes, emotional states and the inability to plan and carry out actions. But for macro-cultural psychology this state is not separate from the conditions of modern life. Ratner quotes T.S. Eliot as saying that in modern life there is also a separation between thought, emotion and sensation and a failure to reach what he calls a “unity of sensibility”. The symptoms of schizophrenia – withdrawal, highly idiosyncratic and abstract patterns of thinking and behaving and a preoccupation with hidden meanings – bare an unmistakable congruence with the broad social relations and concepts of capitalism (individualism, privacy and privatized meaning).

Ratner points out that catatonia was not described until after 1850. Even more telling is the absence of schizophrenia, at least of the chronic, autistic form, either in medical books or general literature prior to the 19^th century. Detachment, being naïve, cynicism, subjectivism and other psychological mechanisms of mental illness were not spontaneously constructed by mental patients. Psychological constructs emerge from macro-level forces that are widely known in a population. They were reported on by novelists and in painting styles of the time.

Ratner says that the experience of the individual feeling worthless is also historically recent. It used to be in the past that under Christianity an individual felt guilty from a sense of sinfulness. But with the relative decline of religion in the 19^thcentury, personal inadequacies were less hinged to religion and more simply a personal problem, a self divided against itself.

But this “divided self” emerged only in the late 19^th century in conjunction with the increased number of roles the individual was expected to play. In earlier times individuals might be conflicted between the soul and the body, but the individual was still pulled in only two directions. The 19^th century marked a new conception of different selves or personalities within one individual. The extreme case of this is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), but there were also reports of multiple personalities within a single individual. Psychological processes generally have followed changes in the history of capitalism. In the activist 1960s the psychic disorders were linked to social factors like poverty and migration. In the lean and mean times of neoliberalism these social factors disappear and the social environment shrinks to the nuclear or extended family, which is blamed for almost everything.

Tyranny of bodily slenderness
In the worst case scenario it appears that disorders like anorexia or bulimia are simply sudden eruptions of pathology that don’t have any social rhyme or reason. More socially oriented psychologists might say these disorders have something to do with advertising or movies that want women to be thin. Evolutionary psychologists will point out that a desire to be thin goes against evolutionary psychology principles and tell us that convincing adult women to be thin will sell a lot more products than showing voluptuous women on the cover of magazines. This is because after a couple of children, most woman naturally become voluptuous and there are more limits on the products that advertisers can sell them. Evolutionary psychologists call the intervention of advertising into Darwinian sexual selection “evolutionary mismatches”. All these points have some merit but they still ignore capitalism.

Here is what Ratner has to say about this:

Slenderness is represented in sleek thin light consumer products such as cell phones, flat panel televisions and thin, lightweight laptop computers. It is reflected in architecture that emphasizes sleek lines and sharp angles… Slenderness symbolized as agility and the ability to move and change directions quickly, free of encumbrances, independently. These attributes are important to modern capitalist society.

What kind of capitalism is this? Why, it’s finance capitalism, liquid capital. Ratner continues:

The investor is nimble in shifting his capital to maximized profit. The employer is nimble in anticipating production demands and increasing or decreasing his or her labor supply to prepare. The manager is nimble in shifting work to low wage areas and shifting suppliers to lower costs.

Sleekness and slimness represent nimble capital. They represent finance capital on a psychological plane. Anorexia or bulimia is like a crisis in finance capital visited upon psychological disorders. On the other hand, overweight or even voluptuousness is antithetical to these sleek qualities. Ratner says it is slow, ponderous, inertial, regulated and weighted down. Hence it is looked down upon. There certainly are Darwinian reasons for rejecting corpulence, but that is not the end of the story. What does full body or voluptuousness represent in the field of capitalism – industrial capitalism – in which capitalists invest in infrastructure, repair, goods and services? It is heavy capitalism.
So:

Sleekness = finance capital

Voluptuousness or chubbiness = industrial capital

Since we are living in the heyday of neoliberal finance capital it would make complete sense that being overweight is looked down upon just as investing in industry is something neoliberal capitalists in Yankeedom don’t want to do.

Ratner concludes:

Sleekness does not require waiting, preparing, thinking or training. It is always moving to a new location, getting away, diversifying, expanding horizons and novelty… The tyranny of slenderness that defines the female body is an element of the general lightness of being…This is the cultural root of eating disorders.

On the other hand:

In collectivist society life is slower, more integrated, more committed more encumbering with considerations for a large community. One sticks around, consults with others, sacrifices for others, accedes to others, supports others over the long hall.

This is why in collectivist societies there is little in the way of eating disorders except for perhaps within the upper middle classes. On the other hand, a hunter-gatherer may look at an anorexic person in the United States and wonder, “has there been a famine”?

Historical Underpinnings of Macro-Cultural Psychology

In reviewing the history of macro-cultural psychology Ratner says the first theorist was Abu Al-Biruni, a Muslim scholar who conducted an extensive ethnology of Indian psychology and mentality in 1017. In the west tenets of macro-cultural psychology originated in the cultural movement in Germany in the 1770s. They considered the texts of Moses, Homer and Plato not to be the wisdom of an individual sage but the expression of a nation’s achievement at a particular stage in its cultural development. They wanted to understand the collective development of the human mind in society, a process these scholars came to describe as culture. Herder and Vico were interested in this.

The term Völkerpsychologie was coined by Wilhelm Humboldt at the turn of the 19^th century. Its use was continued by Wilhelm Wundt in his cross-cultural psychology writing. Another cornerstone was the historical school known as Annales. It arose in France in the 1920s under the leadership of Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Febvre was interested in how the impact of the printing press affected sense ratios. Henri Corbin studied the history of smell (The Fowl and the Fragrant), hearing (Village Bells) and the impact of the sea on perception (The Lure of the Sea). Philippe Aries, as many of you know, studied the history of childhood.

Macro-cultural psychology has a promising history, but it was taken to new heights by communist psychologists in Russia in the 1920s and 1930. Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev left us a rich legacy. It is up to us to keep Vygotskyan psychology communist and not let it become watered down and truncated by neoliberal micro-cultural psychologists, however well-intentioned they may be.

Macro-Cultural Communist Activity Theory vs Micro-Cultural Neoliberal Activity Theory

Macro-Cultural Activity Theory	Category of Comparison	Micro-Cultural Neoliberal Theory
A collective, macro artifact mediated and object oriented activity is the primary analysis in work. School and play are secondary. Class is emphasized	Scale of interaction	Limited to local interactionThe macro-framework is ignored The activity is limited to school and play Work and class relations are ignored
Authorities, then peers	Who drives new learning?	Anti-authoritarian emphasis of local interaction of peers They understate the hierarchical settings in which people work
Activity systems take shape and get transformed over lengthy periods of time	Temporal duration	The variations in activity over the long historical settings are ignored
The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development. In medicine the conflict between holistic and western medicine. played out in doctor vs patient fights over medications.	What is the place of contradiction?	Contradictions are seen as temporary problems to be smoothed over in a quest for equilibrium or understood as logical inconsistencies which are amended by formal logic
Activity moves through long cycles of qualitativetransformation including the printing press, telescope, microscope, capitalist boom and bust cycles or the rise of industry	Historical place of technology	They might contrast activity theory before the rise of the internet, Facebook, Instagram or text messaging but not usually before that
Collective work with tools is the central activity which makes us human. Symbols and language are derivative	Relationship between tools and verbal language	Symbolic culture and verbal language co-construct cooperative learning Importance of conversations
Is aware of how international power hierarchy in the world system impact psychology	Place in the core, periphery or semi-periphery of the capitalist world system	Cross-cultural psychology is somewhat aware of it but not rooted in political economy “Individualism vs collectivism” is about it.
Agency is a biproduct of macro culture and sets the tone for both freedom and necessity	Structure and agency	Is afraid of structure Treats structure as automatically reifying Glorification of “agency” is independent and resisting structure
Ratner, Tulvistie	Theoreticians	Valsiner, Shweder, Rogoff, Gergen, Harré
Realism All psychologies are not equal Some explain more than others	Ranking of psychologies	Pluralistic Relativism Says there are many psychologies but they are not ranked—
Evolving, relative objectivity	Place of objectivity	Anti-objectivity Subjectivity
Scientific knowledge is superior to common sense knowledge of other groups	Place of science relative to other groups	The knowledge of scientists is not superior to the knowledge of other groups (Gergen)

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 07 Mar 2025 17:45:03 +0000

Orientation
This article is about the differences between the micro psychology of liberals and the macro psychology of communists. Differences include: how society and the individual is configured; the impact of capitalism on personal life; how the mind-body relationship is conceived; how the objective and subjective worlds are integrated; how politics impacts personal life and how research should be conducted. These differences are not self-evident or easy for liberals to understand. In order to attempt a breakthrough, I describe the story of Flatland, Edwin Abbot’s great 1884 science fiction book of why two dimensional beings on Flatland fail to understand the Spaceland dimension of some of its creatures. I’ve included a link to a video of the story. This will conclude Part I.

In Part II we will discover that even when liberals find out about the Russian activity theory led by Lev Vygotsky, they interpret him in a bourgeois fashion. By this I mean they focus on educational reform and play, rather than work, while ignoring social class, exploitation, alienations as well as what an anti-capitalist individual might look like. To explore both parts of this article will referring to a great book by Carl Ratner: Macro Cultural Psychology: A Political Philosophy of Mind. In my opinion more than any other individual in the United States Carl has remained the most uncompromising in presenting the communist psychology of Vygotsky to the Yankee public.

Hard Facts About Political Economy in Mordor
The US has the highest percentage of children living in poverty in the industrial world – 23% and climbing. We have the second highest infant mortality rate among wealthy countries. Mordor has the highest incarceration rate in the world (spending is three times the amount that is spent on education). We are something like 125th in the world of 200 countries in literacy. American Association for the Advancement of Science discovered that one third of American’s population believes that human beings have existed in their current form since the beginning of time. In absolute numbers we easily have the highest obesity rate in the world. We have a political party, a party that imagines itself as liberal, complicit in the production of genocide in Palestine while propping up dictators the world over. The highest paid individual in John McCain’s presidential campaign during the first half of October 2008 was Sarah Palin’s traveling makeup artist. Her salary was higher than McCain’s chief foreign policy adviser. The so-called program “War on drugs” program does nothing to stem the use of drugs in the US. The 400 wealthiest people in the world own as much wealth as the poorest 400 million.

Sixteen years after the near collapse of the global financial system, the US Congress still has adopted no new rules to re-regulate financial institutions. The financiers and politicians who created the financial implosion of the early 21^st century have foisted greater harm on the US than all the country’s enemies. Why aren’t these problems fixed? We have no mass political party that might address these problems in a systematic way. We have political debates that are sponsored by a private organization, Commission on Presidential Debates. No other political parties are allowed to participate unless the two major parties agree.

In a Degenerating Society the Need for Propaganda is Essential
The ruling powers try to rationalize and legitimize their power by inventing ideologies that paint them as more capable and harder working than they really are. One part of their ideology is that there is no ruling class as a social formation. Class is simply the position that separate individuals occupy as a result of their individual competencies and effort. The “free market” is infinitely flexible, open to all comers. In this capitalist ideology there is no relationship between social classes. Capitalists appear to acquire their wealth as a completely separate process from what workers do or don’t do. What is really going on is that upper class wealth is dependent on their exploitation of the working class in the form of surplus value.

The ruling class does not invent its ideology by itself. The upper middle class perpetuates the ideology not only in economics, but in philosophical, artistic and scientific fields. Presidents of community colleges work for capitalists to dampen the expectations for working class students. Their commission institutes are specifically charged with developing ideological tools for legitimizing capitalist practices such as the RAND Foundation. Also on the ground floor is the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. All three hire intellectuals to do their bidding by giving talks and writing papers and books. These institutions play hard ball. For example, the RAND corporation installed its academic agendas through the leadership of RAND intellectuals who were by then in powerful university administrative positions. Thomas Schilling was one of the key figures in established rational choice theory, probably the most direct enemy of communist psychology.

Propaganda supporting individualism such as social contract theory has kept social scientists from solving complex social problems by refusing to understand these problems as structural and due to capitalism. Instead, the psyches of individuals are blamed. It enlists a massive social apparatus to block the truth and reality of exploitation as the real source of most psychological problems today.

Being mystified by this propaganda does not mean people are blind to every aspect of society. It only means they do not fundamentally understand how their society works. They are ignorant of the following deep issues of how power is distributed: the infrastructural relationships between the Deep State and particular political regimes; how capitalism operates and why it gets into crises roughly every seven years. The Mordor public, whether liberal or conservative, may know about lobbying, corruption, lying and cheating. They may be aware of inequality, poverty and discrimination. However, propaganda keeps them from not understanding the basis of these, or how these problems are interrelated and macro cultural in both form and content. Propagandists do not have to directly intervene in an institution in order to bend it to its will as Stephen Lukes points out in his third dimension of power. Furthermore, these propagandists can commit evil and be agents of oppression without themselves being perverted, sadistic or psychotic.

Consumer Psychology
Ratner writes that consumer spending accounts for 70% of Mordor’s GDP. For capitalists, it is vitally important for the population to not only consume a great deal but to do so quickly. He writes that for capitalists, the natural cycles of growth of animals are too slow for the profit motive so cows are fed hormones to speed up that growth. Fish are also farmed in conditions that speed their growth. The same is true for people. Capitalists do not want people to eat according to when they are hungry. This takes hours to peak. Instead, the act of eating has to be decoupled from hunger and coupled with fun because no other consumer activity can be performed as continuously as eating. We cannot wear new shoes all the time, but one can eat food every hour when watching TV, going to the movies or attending ball games because they require the rapid turnover to generate profit. It includes getting to work faster, working faster and spending money faster when these same workers consume.

Wholesome food takes a long time to digest, and afterword the person is sated and has no desire for more. Added to the headaches of capitalists, some wholesome food can be cheap to buy and generates low profit. On the other hand, junk food is digested quickly and its fat, sugar and salt provide instant gratification without real satiation while stimulating new cravings. Ratner refers to Jules Henry’s book Culture Against Man who uses the adjective “pecuniary” to describe various aspects of consumer psychology. Pecuniary is synonymous with commodified. Furthermore, enjoyment and desire have to be shifted from use to acquisition. For many consumers the process of shopping becomes more enjoyable than using the product. Many compulsive consumers never use the products they buy. We can go window shopping and browse catalogues and ads without any particular object in mind. Obsessive shopping can become a pathology. One researcher, H. Dittmar found that compulsive shoppers have a larger discrepancy between their present self and their ideal self than others.

Sensationalism is rampant in modern culture, in popular music, in entertainment with car crashes, special technical effects and plenty of sexual suggestion. There is minimal, trivial content with little character development or substantive plot. Sensationalism offers no continuity between people and product. Throw-away products are deliberately designed for the short term and wear out quickly. They are unrepairable and replaced by new purchases. Capitalist intervention into the emotional life of the consumer with advertising campaigns is fueled by mass market psychologists. Capitalists can’t admit what they are doing to anyone else, let alone to themselves so they invent a theory that is the opposite of what they are doing.

A rational choice theory of economics ignores the emotional and sexual appeal of the advertising industry that posits the consumer as having a natural rationality where you know what you need, you gather information and weigh the pros and cons of purchasing. Rational choice theory was developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Rational choice theory is a mainstay of bourgeois ideology because it construes society as an outcome of interpersonal negotiations. It is the mother of contemporary individualistic social theory, one of whose forms is micro-cultural psychology

Why Can’t We See Through The Hard Facts of Political Economy, Propaganda and Consumer Psychology?
In order to penetrate below the surface of capitalist society and analyze what is going on, we need a communist psychology which requires more than a liberal or conservative understanding of what is what is happening in the political economy. Understanding communist psychology requires:

understanding infrastructural and structural dynamics of capitalism that are invisible to the naked eye;
understanding that these factors may contradict common sense. Because reality is complex and expanding we cannot experience its totality through sense impressions. We must use sense impressions to infer and deduce unobservable properties of reality on which science is based;
understanding society as a kind of verb in motion, not a noun, an unchanging thing.

Carl Ratner gives three examples from the sciences which show that they have to move beyond their senses and beyond common sense in order to make new discoveries.

Astronomy is concerned with the immense, broad system of factors beyond the earth that bear on earth and bring it into being. Just as the characteristics of earth are unintelligible if one doesn’t understand the astrophysics of the sun, other planets, distant galaxies and the big bang, so characteristics of psychology are unintelligible without first understanding macro-cultural factors.

Secondly, Darwin could have never discovered how species evolved from changing environmental circumstances if all he had to go on was the plant and animal life in Britain in the 19th century. He had to travel half-way around the world to discover fossils of plant and animal life thousands of years old. He needed the geological work of Lyell in order to familiarize himself with ages much larger than human history to begin to understand the gradualness of bio-evolutionary change. He had to refuse the easy and infantile explanations of theologians who could not imagine that matter was self-organizing and not a passive lump molded by the will of God.

Lastly, in the atomic structure of steel beams:

Cultural factors in psychology may be analogized to atoms in steel: they are constituents which areinvisible to the naked eye, are difficult to accept from the perspective of common sense. Looking at a steel beam it seems inconceivable that it is composed of atomic particles which are in motion…. Macro cultural psychology is analogous to atomic science in revealing constituents that are invisible to the naked eye, …macro cultural psychology changes our way of understanding psychology just as fundamentally as atomic theory changes our way of understanding steel beams.

Macro cultural psychology is also like unseen distal sun in Plato’s cave. Everyday life in capitalist society with its villains and heroes in the movies, sports, music and politics are like the shadows cast by the sun’s light on the back of the cave. When we get involved in the puppet show of the shadows on the wall we ignore the capitalist sun that is responsible for the whole show. People act on the basis of their needs, interests, aims, passions and thoughts based on the shadows on the wall in the hopes of achieving satisfaction. However, behind these subjective experiences lies a macro cultural, political economic logic of the sun that structurally patterns them unconsciously in particular ways to remain focused on the puppet show rather than the light behind them.

From Flatland to Spaceland
Another way to capture the difference between liberal psychology and communist psychology is to imagine that each inhabits different dimensions of reality. In his mathematical science fiction book Flatland Edwin Abbot tells a story of life in the two-dimensional plane of Flatland. The people on Flatland take their world as self-evident. The higher functioning ones get around quite well just as working or middle-class people get along in capitalist society. What they don’t understand is that there is a third dimension of height. By accident, one of the Flatland inhabitants is visited by someone from the third dimension which is called Spaceland. The third dimensional being can get along in the two-dimensional world, just as communists can get along in a capitalist world but their full life is more complex, living in the third dimension.

When the three dimensional being tells the Flatlander (a square) about the existence of Spaceland, the Flatlander is cynical. Finally the Spacelander challenges the square to ride with him into the dimension of height. The Flatlander is both frightened and delighted to find the real existence of Spaceland. In our time, the Flatlander being drawn into Spaceland would be like a Flatlander living through a socialist revolution. The square returns to Flatland to proselytize about the existence of Spaceland but he finds their resistance to the existence of Spaceland remains entrenched. Below is the link to a 30-minute video about the story.

What is Macro Cultural Psychology?
From the political to the economic to the psychological
Infrastructural macro cultural psychology posits that psychology is rooted in political and economic institutions that are neglected by neoliberal psychology. They include the state, the army, the stock market, the Catholic Church, corporate farms, banks, pharmaceutical companies, the healthcare industries, capitalist media and their impact on psychology. From this flow capitalist relations like commodification, alienation, surplus value, consumerism, class structure and possessive individualism. Lastly, these influence the familiar psychological expression such as emotion, perception, motivation, reasoning, self, sexuality and the senses. Interpersonal relations must be congruent with these macro factors if they are to function effectively. Whenever people express themselves psychologically, they mostly express and promulgate macro cultural factors embodied within it. Vygotsky writes that mental structures are inseparable from a social structure and that there is a social structure designed just for psychology.

Invisible levels in deep time beyond the senses
For macro cultural psychology nature is both outside and inside us. Culture mediates both outside and inside. Macro culture mediates our external interactions with nature (earthquakes, food sources, trees, animals, air, water, oil) and it mediates our internal relation to our own biology (our hormones, sense organs, motor organs, and cortical processes). This structure is invisible, yet implicit and outlasts the lives of the individuals who shape it. Macro culture imposes constraints as more than a mere sum of individual acts as claimed in liberal micro psychology.

Macro cultural factors cannot be known or managed by sensory impressions by themselves. One cannot see or hear the full dynamics of the stock market or a transportation system over time and around the world. Culture and communication are the most immediate bases for mental and psychological life. Without the symbolic duplication of objects over deep social space and time there would be little freedom to imagine variations in our choices. The freedom to imagine new things is a cultural product. Far from stifling imagination and freedom, macro culture provides the mechanism for making anything in culture psychologically possible. In Ratner’s conical model, every phenomenon is a complex of three qualities:

its own distinct quality (family as a distinct institution);
the qualities that are imparted from structural forces such as the state, laws, educational practices;
the political economy – the stability of the stock market, as work opportunities and the cost of goods and services.

All layers of macro culture are not equal. The economics of manufacturing are more influential in society than painting or sculpture. For example, automobile production employs hundreds of thousands of workers. In its success or failure, it affects the steel, oil and transportation industries.

Beyond mind-body problems
Ratner argues that the so-called the mind-body problem of how the physical body-brain produces mental life is the wrong way to frame the origin of consciousness. It is culture that produces the mind, not brain circuitry. If nature is world one and culture is world two, consciousness/psychology is world three. Culture does not influence some primordial consciousness and then adds certain extrinsic elements to it. Rather, culture forms consciousness. A major difference between human and animal cognition it’s that animals perceive relations of observable features of immediately present entities (first order relations). With the exception of chimps dolphins, ravens and crows, for humans, the socio-cultural world mediates their relations. For the rest of the animal kingdom, present sensuous relations are all there is.

Interpersonal micro relations vs interpenetrating macro relations
Neoliberal micro psychology finds it roots in the social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. It assumes that individual relations with society are associative, contractual and voluntary. Furthermore, society is confined to sensual relations between people in Everyday life. Macro cultural psychology is grounded in the interpenetrating, interdependent relations of Hegel and Marx. It assumes individual relations with society are organic, necessary and involuntary. Society includes not just personal relations in everyday life, but structures and networks beyond sensuous interpersonal relations that impact an individual whether we like it or not.

For neoliberal capitalist psychology, psychological functions evolve on the individual level in order to realize individual agency or expression. For neoliberal psychology agency is usually touted as independent of macro culture – as expressing the individual resisting culture or recasting culture in more fulfilling personal terms. But this championing of individual agency breaks down. A good example of why this doesn’t make sense is early advertising campaigns to get women to smoke. Women’s “agency” did not create the demand to smoke out of personal choice. It was the macro culture of advertising agencies that began and sustained the process. Micro cultural society ignores macro cultural socialization such as various types of propaganda which are necessary to spread common cultural psychological signification throughout the population. Interpersonal socialization would be too fragmented and idiosyncratic to accomplish this massive, common socialization.

Overcoming Conventional Methodology
From idealism and mechanism to political practice
It is important not to restrict macro cultural psychology to conventional methodology. We should not conceptualize macro principles to terms that are amenable to simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations. But how are the objective and the subjective integrated? Because in liberal micro psychology the objective and the subjective are kept separate, their studies always are either overstressing the objective, resulting in mechanism or reification, such as behaviorism. The other possibility is they overstate the subjective which results in idealism, like humanistic psychology. In macro cultural psychology, the ultimate integration of the objective and the subjective is collective political practice of a party, union, or social movement in which individuals engage in attempting to change the world. This practice enriches and changes the objective world while transforming subjective experience. This collective political practice avoids the twin dangers of mechanism and idealism, reification and subjectivism.

Individualism in liberal micro psychology research methods
Individualism in research methods are designed to validate subjects by:

allowing them to speak freely;
accepting their point of view uncritically;
renouncing systematic interview and analytical methods that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity;
ignoring cultural pressures that constrain the spontaneous subjectivity.

A central political issue in capitalist society as in all class societies is exploitation. Micro liberal psychology avoids the reality of exploitation marginalizing by:

reducing it to personal meanings;
interpersonal negotiations;
discourse symbols;
fragmenting it into variables.

Macro Cultural Psychology Qualitative Research

A phenomenon’s function is revealed when it answer at least these four questions:

why it exists in the sense of why it is necessary for that particular constellation of elements;
what role the element plays in the capitalist or socialist system;
what it reciprocally contributes to the system;
why the system needs it.

Ratner identifies primary questions for research which include:

How can it conceptualize these elements as parts of a system?
Which system are they part of?
What are the other elements of this system?
How do they depend upon and support one another?
What features do each element acquire through its role in the system?
How are the elemental features distinctive to or particular to this system?
How might the features of the elements change if they played different roles

in this system or if they were transposed to a different system?

What kinds of methods must be used to elicit answers to these questions?
What kinds of probing questions must we ask to extract these answers?

Please see Table 1 at the end of Part I for a summary of the differences between micro and macro cultural psychology.

Let us close out Part I of this article with a discussion of the emotions.

Macro Origin of Emotions
The starting point of human emotions is not internal private experiences based the individual’s private history. These emotions are already always housed in macro cultural emotions. Ratner names love of country, anger at capitalists or racial minorities, hatred of socialism, national shame, dejection about political trends, fear of economic depressions, fierce loyalty to professional baseball, football, basketball or hockey teams or devotion to certain kinds of music or dance. Anger that culminates in violence exists on the macro cultural level in the form of a working-class person who fought in wars has PTSD and is homeless. Other working-class people are competing for jobs and whose union is not treating them well. Others face low wages and lack of medical benefits. These macro cultural emotional states are environmental, not outside private emotions. The macro-cultural environment is already inside of psychological private states.

Personal and interpersonal behaviors do not exist on their own. What appears to be individual behavior is only the immediate, apparent appearance that masks a deeper macro culture of emotions as a window into it. The same is true of memory. Personal memories are embedded in collective memories that involve systematically remembering favorable aspects of political life while forgetting other events as a result of political propaganda. These unify people whether they are based on reality or illusions. Whether individuals are conscious or not of having been internalized, these collective memories are the soil for private in which memories to grow or die.

It used to be thought in the 50s and 60s that advertising propaganda influenced people in a very heavy-handed way, implying the public was passive (Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders). Then it was found by Michael Schudson in his book Advertising, the Uneasy Persuasion that people were less snowed by advertisers than researchers thought. What I want to bring to your attention is the way advertisers directly impact the public emotions by fragmenting emotional experience during a television program.

Advertisements are strategically placed immediately before or after an intense emotional scene. This emotional fragmentation is built into the formatting of television scenes. One must wait for the ad to pass in order to complete the emotion. It does not permit long, continuous development and resolution of our emotions (168-169)

Ratner says this emotional format is recapitulated by people in their personal relationships. Individuals get used to experiencing fragmented emotions because cell phones, text messages, Twitter and Instagram break up a full emotional expression. Ratner says that individuals get so used to this that grow uncomfortable with extended continuous emotional responses.

Coming Attractions
“But” you might say, “I’ve heard of this Vygotsky you speak of. He worked in the field of cooperative learning and developed something called the zone of proximal development. So Vygotsky’s communist ideas are here in the United States.” The problem is this assumes that the communist ideas of a theorist can be directly translated into a capitalist society with no distortion, exaggeration or even censorship. In part two of this article, I will show 11 differences in how Vygotsky is interpreted by those whom Ratner calls “neoliberal” Vygotskyan psychologists.

Differences Between Micro and Macro Cultural Psychology

Macro Cultural Psychology	Category of Comparison	Micro Cultural Psychology
Socialist	Political, economic orientation	Liberal
Organic, interdependent and necessary	What are social relations?	Associative and independent Social contract theory, voluntary
No – they are the result of historical processes which outlive the individual	Are social relations visible?	Yes. Sensual and interactive rise and fall within local culture
Massive, political, social institutions such as transnational corporations, and psychology have those characteristics	What is culture?	Primarily interpersonal, face-to-face interactions, then psychology would have those characteristics, not the characteristics of the political economy.
The state, stock market, mass media, the military	Ultimate subject matter	Parent-child relations, teacher child relations,
Surplus value, exploitation, alienation, social class, reification, ideology	Presence of capitalist phenomena	These are rarely mentioned
Culture creates individuals	Relationship between culture and individuals	Individuals exist first, then create culture
No problem Culture creates the mind, brain-circuitry does not	Mind-body problem	Mind-body problem of how the physical body/brain produces mental life
Psychological relations are indirect, mediate social relations to stimulus Personal comes later	Are psychological relations immediate and natural or not	Psychological relations are direct, immediate, natural and personal responses to stimulates
Macro-cultural socialization; political, economic, religious propaganda Macro psychology is an emergent extrinsic, exogram that transcends idiosyncratic individuals	How common cultural socialization is spread	Interpersonal socialization is too fragmented and idiosyncratic to achieve this massive common socialization. Slippage form the first dyad to the last—as studies of rumor indicate
Politics integrates the objective and subjective	How objective and subjective are integrated	No political integration Danger of mechanism or idealism
Imagining new things are the result of cultural processes	Where imagination begins	In the psyche of individuals
Qualitative questions are complete, deep connected over time and space that go beyond present fragmented behavioral observations	Methodology	Conventional, quantitative Simple, superficial, fragmental statements on a questionnaire or fragmented behavioral observations
Attempts to explain the variation	What cultural psychology attempts to do	Describe psychological variations in different cultures
Explains their synthesis of culture and psychology though a parsimonious set of unobservable but real constructs	How to explain diverse phenomenon	Explain culture and psychology as separate and distinct
Dialectical model of interdependence with each element impacting the others and permeating everything. It explains the organic relation between culture and psychology.	Causation	Atomistic model of causation independent variable causing dependent variables Each element is separate and qualitatively independent. They come together only momentarily
Realism Postulating unobservable cells, atoms, germs, gravity and genes before the microscope could detect them is more objective than sensory observation and has more explanatory and predictive power than empirical facts	Philosophy of science	Positivism What is immediately observable, measurable and testable. Sensory observation Empirical facts

The post Neoliberal Micro Psychology vs Communist Macro Psychology first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Ungrateful Lying Upstarts

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 18:50:59 +0000

Orientation
Situating my article

Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.

In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization

Western claims about their place in world history

Charles Martel’s victory over the Saracens at the battle of Tours and Poitiers 732 CE
Europe pioneers the medieval agricultural revolution 600-1000 CE
Italian pioneers long-distance trade and early capitalism. Italy the leading global power 1000 CE
European crusaders assert control over the Islamic Middle East Post 1095 CE
Italian Renaissance and scientific revolution 1400-1650 CE
China withdraws from the world, leaving a vacuum filled by Europeans 1434 CE
Guttenberg invents the movable metal-type printing press 1455 CE
Bartolomeu Diaz is the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope 1487-88 CE
European Age of Discovery and the emergence of early Western globalization Post 1492 CE
The Spanish plunder American gold and silver bullion post 1492 CE
Da Gama makes its first contact with “primitives” and isolate Indian people 1498 CE
The Europeans defeat the Asians and monopolize world trade 1498-1800 CE
European military revolution 1550-1660 CE
First industrial miracle happens in Britain 1700-1850 CE
British industrialization is the triumph of domestic or self-generated change 1700-1850 CE
Commodore Perry opens up isolated Tokugawa Japan 1853 CE
Meiji Japan industrializes by copying the West 1853 CE
Britain reverses its trade deficit with China in the 1820s CE
Opium wars and unequal treaties force open and rescue China’s “backward” economy 1839-1858 CE

Stopping Eurocentric thinking in its tracks
You might not suspect that European goods were considered inferior both in terms of quality and price by Easterners. Public health and clean water were more advanced in China than in Europe. By 1800, as much as 22% of the Japanese population were living in towns, a figure that exceeds Europe. Even as late as 1850, the Japanese standard of living was higher than that of the British. In conclusion, Europe invented very little for themselves. The only genuine innovations that they made before the 18^th century were the Archimedean screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

Countering the Eurocentric Myth of the Pristine West
John M. Hobsons claims in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are:

The West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalization ever since 500 CE.
The East was more advanced than the West between 500-1800 CE. It wasn’t until 1800 that the West first caught up with and then surpassed China.
The East and South were not only not passive bystanders, but in the overwhelming number of cases, they were the initiator of technological, economic and even cultural change.
The West did initiate new inventions and ways of life but only beginning in the 19^th century.
It was also in the 19^th century that the West began its denial of Eastern and Southern influence.
This denial of pioneering role of Western leadership in world history requires a revisionist history of virtually the whole world of the last 1500 years.

Eurocentric Propaganda Maps
Eurocentrism has multiple sides to its denial, neglect and outright lying about its place in world history. One piece of black propaganda can be seen is in the ways its maps are constructed. Hobson points out that on the realistic map, the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the Northern hemisphere. And yet in the Mercator map the landmass of the North occupiers 2/3 of the landmass. Secondly, while Scandinavia is about a third of the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on a map. Lastly, Greenland appears almost twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of Greenland.

Placement of National and Regional Formations in World History Textbooks
I remember my textbooks on world history. While they might start with Africa and Asia, the chapters were relatively short. But as soon as we got to Europe there are long chapters on technology, economics, politics and philosophy. It might not be until the end of the book than the rest of the world is reintroduced again. It’s as if there was no interaction going on between the West and the rest of the world between the time of the Greeks and the 20^th century.

Orientalist and Patriarchal Construction of the West vs the East
The West is presented as a dynamic, ingenious, proactive, rational, scientific disciplined, ordered, self-controlled, sensible, mind-oriented, scientific, paternal, independent, functional, free, democratic, tolerant, honest, civilized morally and economically progressive (capitalist), parsimonious, and individualistic.

On the other hand, the East (China, India and the Middle East) and the South (mostly Africa) is conceived of as unchanging, imitative, ignorant, passive, irrational superstitiously ritualistic, lazy, chaotic, erratic, spontaneous, emotional, body-oriented, exotic, alluring and childlike. Furthermore they are dependent, dysfunctional, enslaved, despotic, and intolerant. They are presented as corrupt, barbaric, savages, who are morally regressive economically stagnant, indolent, cruel and collectivist. Ten Western social scientists from the 19^th century down to the present have accepted these dualistic stereotypes. It is out of these extremely unjust characterizations that the myth of the pristine Western development was born.

Hobson writes that there is no dualist more extreme in categorizing the East and West than Max Weber. See Table 1 below.

Table 1 Max Weber’s Orientalist View of the East and the West

Occident Modernity	Orient tradition
Rational public law	Ad hoc private law
Double entry bookkeeping	Lack of rational accounting
Free and independent cities	Political/Administrative camps
Independent urban bourgeoise	State controlled merchants
Rational bureaucracy	Patrimonial despotic state
Rational science	Mysticism
Protestant ethics and the emergence of the rational individual	Repressive religions and the predominance of the collective
Basic institutional constitutions of the West are fragmented civilizations with balance of social power between all groups and institutions	Basic institutional constitution of the East is a unified civilization with no social balance between groups and institutions
Multi-state system of nation-states	Single state system – empires
Separation of the public and private	Fusion of public and private

The Western Falsification of the World Before 1500 CE

Furthermore, standard picture of the world before 1500 is presented by Eurocentrism as:

the world mired in stagnant tradition;
a fragmented world divided between insulated and backward regional and; civilizations governed by a despotic states, mainly of the East.

This concept was consciously reconstructed by Eurocentric intellectuals in the 19^th century so that first Venice and later Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and Britain were represented as the leading global powers in the post 1000 period. Please see Table 2 for Hobson’s rebuttals

Table 2 The Status of World Civilizations before 1500

Eurocentric Myths	Hobson’s Rebuttals
Major regional civilizations were insulated from each other	Persians, Arabs, Africans Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a global economy
Political costs were too high to allow global trade	Globalization in the East was a midwife if not the mother of the Medieval and Modern West
There was an absence of capitalist institutions credit, money changes, banks, contract laws	There was plenty of commercial activity among Muslims and Chinese before 1500
Transport technologies were too crude to be effective	Use of camels 300-500 was more cost effective than horses
Trade in the East was only in luxury goods	Mass consumer products in China and the Middle East. Africans imported beads cowries, copper and copper goods, grain, fruits and raisons, wheat and later on, textiles which were mass-based goods, not luxuries
Global flows were too slow to be of consequence	Transcontinental trade pioneered by Islamic merchants reached from China to the Mediterranean
Global processes were not robust enough to have a major reorganizational impact	The rise of Tang China (618-907), the Islamic empire (661-1258) and North Africa 909-1171) were plenty robust
There was no iron production in the world prior to the British	Muslims dominate the Europeans in iron production and in steel production until the 18^thcentury. China as well

The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization
Middle Ages and the Islamic state
We are now in a position to compare the Western claims of civilization and what happened when the East and South are given their due. First, much greater than the victory of Charles Martel, between 751-1453 there was the Arab victory in the Battle of Talas which established Islamic domination in West Central Asia. In addition, the Ottoman Turks took over Constantinople in 1453. Nine hundred years before the Europeans developed an agricultural revolution, the Chinese pioneered many technologies that enabled the European agricultural revolution of the 18^th and 19^th centuries.

There was no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the 18^th century and the advanced agriculture of China after the 4^th century BCE (57)

Technology of the agricultural revolution

The basic technological ingredients of the medieval agricultural revolution were:

watermills
windmills

heavy moldboard plough which created drainage furrows;

new animal harnesses
iron horseshoes

Contrary to Eurocentric historians, none of these technological innovations were pioneered by Europeans. Either it was diffused to the West by the East, or Westerners innovated after the Eastern raw materials made them available. For example, Hobson tells us the plough entered Eastern Europe through the East from Siberia in the 9^th century. The collar harness was clearly pioneered by the Chinese in the 3^rd century CE. The invention of the stirrup really came from India in the late 2^nd century and the Chinese bronze and cast-iron stirrup in the 3^rd century. Other inventions adapted from China included the rotary winnowing machine and seed drills. Some of the revolutionary rotational crops used by the British in the 18^th century were being used by the Chinese some 12 centuries earlier.

Italian Trade
Hobson’s central claim is that virtually all the major innovations that lay behind the development of Italian capitalism were derived from the more advanced East, especially the Middle East and China. The Italians might have been pioneers of long-distance trade that established merchant capitalism in Europe, but not on a world scale. The Italians were late arrivals to an Afro-Asian led global economy. The globalization enabled the diffusion of Eastern inventions to enable the development of a backward West. Neither did the European Crusades assert control over the Islamic Middle East. They remained dependent on the Islamic Middle East as well as Egypt. One last point about the Italians. Six-hundred years before the Italian Renaissance of 1400-1650 there was an Eastern and Islamic Renaissance which was the foundation for not only the Western Renaissance, but the scientific revolution of the 17^th century.

Eastern origins of the financial revolution
Italians did not invent the bills of exchange, credit institutions, insurance and banking. Sumerians and Sassanids were using banks, bills of exchange and checks before the advent of Islam, although it was the Muslims who took these early beginnings the furthest. In the West, single entry bookkeeping was the most widespread use right down to the end of the 19^th century. The Italian traders only began to use mathematics to replace the old abacus system once the Pisan merchant Fibonacci relayed eastern knowledge in 1202.

The Eastern Renaissance
Arab scholars drew heavily on Persian and Indian as well as Chinese sources on medicine, mathematics philosophy theology, literature, and poetry that lay the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. It’s true that Leonardo Fibonacci, wrote a book rejecting the old abacus system in favor of the new Hindu-Arabic system. However, by the beginning of the 10^thcentury all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Ibn al-Shatir of the Maragha school develop a series of mathematical models which were almost the same as those developed 150 years later by Copernicus in his heliocentric theory of the heavens.

The Eastern origins of the navigational revolution
The foundation of the navigational revolution was the astrolabe and mariners’ compass. The compass could be used even in cloudy weather when the stars were covered. These breakthroughs allowed Europeans to take to the oceans. However, most of them were invented and all were refined in the East. It was the Muslims who undertook all the major innovations.

Qualification about Italy
This is not to say that Italy was unimportant to the fortunes of European commerce. However, Venice prevailed over its rival Genoa not because of its so-called ingenuity but because of its lucrative access to the East via Egypt and the Middle East. Italians played a vitally important role in spreading commercialization through Christendom (not the world). According to Hobson, the belief that Italy was important or the development of Europe in the medieval period seems reasonable. But the notion that Italians pioneered these inventions is a myth

The Myth of the European Age of Discovery
When we examine the so-called European Age of Discovery we find that that over 1,000 years before Bartolomeu Diaz circled the Cape of Good Hope the Arabs sailed around the Cape and into Europe. The Chinese did so in the 9^th century and in the third century the “primitive” Polynesians and Indians sailed to the Cape and the East Coast of Africa.

Chinese ships were striking in both their size and quantity. In the 8^th century some 2,000 ships were working on the Yangtze. It can be safely said that the Chinese were the greatest sailors in history. For nearly two millennium they had ships and sailing techniques far in advance of the rest of the world that comparisons are embarrassing. (58)

As for the Portuguese, they borrowed Islamic innovations in mathematics in order to work out latitude, a longitude relying on the Islamic tables developed by an 11^th century Muslim astronomer. The European age or the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Asia” turns out to be retrospective Eurocentric wishful thinking

The myth of Spanish gold ruling the world
As for the globalization of the economy in the 15^th century, one thousand years ago, the Afro-Asian age expanded to a globalized market while not choosing to initiate imperialism. In the late 15^th century, the Spanish plundered New World civilizations for their gold and silver. But 40 years before this, the Chinese initiated a silver currency and provided a strong demand for European silver.

India Was not isolated
It is said that Vasco Da Gama made the first contact with Indian civilization which is presented as isolated. However, John Hobson tells us India was not isolated but had trading contact with the rest of Eurasia. In fact, Indians were economically superior to their Portuguese discoverers. Furthermore, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic and maybe Black African science and technology provided the basis for Portuguese ships and navigation.

China and the Ming Dynasty

When we turn to China, we hear the common claim that China withdrew in 1434, inexplicitly renouncing an opportunity to compete with Western imperialism. Supposedly they left a gap which the West filled. But the truth is China maintained its power as a world trader all the way from 1434 to well into the 19^th century (1840). Hobson tells us that:

The original documents were distorted by the Chinese state in an attempt at being seen as maintaining a Confucius-like isolationist ideal. It was clear that one way or another Chinese merchants continued their extremely lucrative trading with or without official sanctioning. Many European scholars had been therefore easily seduced by the rhetoric of the Chinese state. (63,70)

One typical myth of Chinese state was that in true oriental despotic form, they crushed all capitalist activities. The reality is that the system was simply too large and the state too weak to be able to set up a command economy. The second myth is that the Ming state only dealt with luxury commodities. The truth, according to Hobson is that the majority of textiles produced in India were aimed at mass markets.

Hobson says half the world was in China’s grip. China could have had the greatest colonial power 100 years before the great age of European exploration. They simply were not interested in imperialism (nor are they today). China was the most powerful economy between 1100 to 1800/1840. Even as late as roughly 1800-1850, Chinese population growth rates increased at a phenomenal rate and would only be matched by Britain after its industrialization.

China and the printing press
As for the Gutenberg printing press and the movable mental type printing press, the Chinese had this by 1095. In addition, the Koreans invented the first metal type thirty years before the Guttenberg press. By the end of the 15^th century, the Chinese published more books than all the other countries combined. Even as early as 978, one of the Chinese libraries contained 80,000 volumes. It was exceeded by the holdings of some of the major Islamic libraries. It was only in the 19^thcentury that the European printing press became faster than its Asian counterparts.

Myth of European pioneering of a military revolution
Before the military revolution, swords, lances, mace and cross-bows were used in warfare. These were replaced by gunpowder, guns and cannons. Much has been made about the European military revolution between 1550 and 1660. But at most, 700 years before this between 850-1290, the Chinese developed all three that underly that military revolution. While the Europeans eventually took these military technologies further, (certainly by the 19^th century) the fact remains that without the available advances from the East, there would have been nothing to have been taken further. It was the Jesuits who persuaded Europeans to face the fact that gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing all were invented in China.

England drug-dealing opium
Lastly we turn to the relationship between the British and the Chinese. Up until 1820, the Chinese matched the British industrially and it was the British who had a trade deficit. Eurocentric historians congratulate the British in reversing its trade imbalance, not bothering to mention the way they did that was by pushing opium. Even radicals like Marx and Engels looked the other way when the British “opened up” China, rescuing it, according to Marx and Engels, from Oriental despotism. There is a slight problem according to Hobson. Since as far back as 850 China has been open to world trade and achieved great economic progress long before the British had any industrialization of comparative commercial relations.

Respect for China until the 19^th century
Many Enlightenment thinkers positively associated with China and its ideas including Montaigne, Leibniz, Voltaire, Wolf, Quesnay, Hume and Adam Smith. Voltaire’s book in 1756 has been described as the perfect compendium of all the positive feeling of the time in Europe about the Far East. Martin Bernal reminds us that no European of the 18^th century (before 1780) could claim that Europe had created itself.

Britain as a late developer of the industrial revolution
For Eurocentric historians, the British genius was responsible for the industrial revolution unaided by anyone else, non-Europeans especially. But almost 2,000 years earlier, the Chinese had developed industry.

The first cast-iron object dated from 513 BCE. Steel was being produced by the 2^nd century BCE. China produced 13,500 tons of iron in 806, some 90,400 tons by 1064 and as many as 125,000 by 1078. Even as late as 1788 Britain was producing only 76,000. Chinese iron was not confined to weapons and decorative art but to tools and production. All this was made possible by the breakthroughs in smelting… and the use of blast furnaces. It was the assimilation of what the Chinese had built that made possible the industrial revolution in Britain. Further, the industrialization process was made possible not by some independent British know-how but through the exploitation of multiple African resources. (51-53)

The steam engine, pride of the British industrial revolution, was antedated by the Chinese as early as 1313 CE. The cotton industry, Hobson says, was the pacemaker of British industrialization. But here too, the cotton industry first found its home in both China and India centuries earlier.

Japan industrialized before England
When we turn to Japan, we find that Eurocentric historians agree that the Meiji empire underwent a powerful industrialization process, but they imagine that the process happened late, after 1853. Furthermore, it was only through Commodore Perry “opening up” the isolated Tokugawa Japan that industrialization began. But little did they know that Tokugawa Japan was tied to the global economy ever since 1603! Independent Tokugawa development provided a starting point for the subsequent Meiji industrialization. In other words, Japan was an early developer of industry, even before the industrial revolution in Britain.

English Racist Identity in Justifying Imperialism

In my article The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers I went into great detail about the Eurocentrism, paternalism and racism that is involved in Western international relations theory. This described how Westerners convinced themselves of their superiority over the East and South. I will just briefly add George Fredrickson’s two kinds of racism, implicit and explicit in the eightieth and 19^th centuries. Implicit racism occurs in the 18^th and first half of the 19^th centuries. Its foundation was cultural, institutional and environmental. People were not conscious of practicing it and their way of expressing imperialism was to imagine they were on a civilizing mission. They had a “Peter Pan” theory of East as childlike, alluring and exotic.

In Britain after 1840 there was a new kind of racism which Fredrickson called explicit. Here the criteria for this “scientific” racism was genetic or physical characteristics of the Easterners and Southern civilizations. This racism was overt and conscious, and the superiority of the West was understood as permanent. Their ways of justifying imperialism were a mixture of optimism and pessimism. It was optimistic in its Social Darwinist mentality of subjugation at the hands of the superior British. However, it was also pessimistic because the English feared contact with other races might contaminate the Westerners.

Evolution of Western Identity 500 CE to 1900 CE
Westerners also divided societies into civilized (British, Germany) barbaric (China, India, Japan) and savage (Africa). Each type had a skin color, temperament, religion, climatic character, type of government, self, manner of thinking, ontogenesis, social and political legitimizing and social pathology.

Table 3 The Construction and Consequences of Western Identity

Time Period	Western Identity	Eastern and Southern Projections	Western Appropriation Strategies
500-1453	Constructed as Christendom	Hostile and evil threat Islamic Middle East and Persia	Attacking Islam through the first round of the Crusades
1453- 1780	Increasingly as the advanced West	Ottoman Turk as hostile and barbaric threat	Attacking Islam through the second Crusades initiated by da Gama, Columbus
		Africans and indigenous Americans considered as pagans or savages ripe for exploitation and repression	Appropriating bullion and circulating through global silver recycling process Slave trading and commodification of labor
1780- 1900	Superior and carrier of advanced civilization	Either inferior or evil savages or barbarians	Slave trading in Britain and US
			Appropriation of Asian and African land, labor and markets through formal and informal imperialism

How Then Did Contingency Enable The Rise of the Oriental West?
The prominent anti-Eurocentric scholars Kenneth Pomeranz and James Blaut emphasize contingency (the fortuitous accident) as the critical factor in the rise of the West. The West was lucky that:

The more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonize Europe.
The Mongols turned to China – not Europe.
Mongols delivered both goods and Eastern resources.
The Muslims were not interested in conquering Western Europe.
The Spanish stumbled on the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance.
The Native Americans had inadequate immune systems.
African slaves had adequate immune systems.
The East Indian company happened to be in India at a time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord

Conclusion
I began this article by situating it within two previous articles I wrote showing how narrow International Relations Theory is cross-culturally in the exclusion of the Eastern and Southern civilizations from its theoretical understanding of world events. Embedded in this theory was Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. In this article, thanks to John M. Hobson’s book Eastern Origins of Western Civilization I show how in 19 areas of its history Western claims to superiority and leadership in relationship to science, technology, world trade, military weaponry, industry the West was dependent on the East from the 5^th to the 19^th centuries. It only clearly took the lead around 1840.

So how did the West first deny its dependency and then insist on its superiority over the civilizations it once depended on? I begin by pointing out how on a microlevel its propaganda can be experienced in the areas of map-making and textbook construction. I name Max Weber as the historian with the most extreme hostility to the East and South in his study of Eastern and Western civilizations. I identify eight European myths about the status of world civilizations at the dawn of the modern West, 1500 CE. I then comb through the West’s dependency on Islamic, Chinese, Indian and African civilizations from 500 to 1900 BCE. I close my article by showing the extent to which the West did become more powerful was based on luck more than skill.

So what does this have to do with the world today? It has been clear to me through my study of political economists and world historians that the West has been in decline since the mid 1970s and as China, Russia and Iran are rising along with BRICS. My article attempts to show that the rise of the West has not been a glorious 500 year trek, beginning with the Renaissance or two thousand year triumph beginning with Greeks. It has been a short 130-year history which is ending. The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history with the wind at its back and is returning to its long historical prominence today.

The post Ungrateful Lying Upstarts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Ungrateful Lying Upstarts

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 30 Nov 2024 17:19:35 +0000

Orientation
Situating my article

In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers, I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Western claims about their place in world history

Charles Martel’s victory over the Saracens at the battle of Tours and Poitiers 732 CE
Europe pioneers the medieval agricultural revolution 600-1000 CE
Italian pioneers long-distance trade and early capitalism. Italy the leading global power 1000 CE
European crusaders assert control over the Islamic Middle East Post 1095 CE
Italian Renaissance and scientific revolution 1400-1650 CE
China withdraws from the world, leaving a vacuum filled by Europeans 1434 CE
Guttenberg invents the movable metal-type printing press 1455 CE
Bartolomeu Diaz is the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope 1487-88 CE
European Age of Discovery and the emergence of early Western globalization Post 1492 CE
The Spanish plunder the gold and silver bullion of Indigenous Turtle Islanders post 1492 CE
Da Gama makes its first contact with “primitives” and isolate Indigenous people 1498 CE
The Europeans defeat the Asians and monopolize world trade 1498-1800 CE
European military revolution 1550-1660 CE
First industrial miracle happens in Britain 1700-1850 CE
British industrialization is the triumph of domestic or self-generated change 1700-1850 CE
Commodore Perry opens up isolated Tokugawa Japan 1853 CE
Meiji Japan industrializes by copying the West 1853 CE
Britain reverses its trade deficit with China in the 1820s CE
Opium wars and unequal treaties force open and rescue China’s “backward” economy 1839-1858 CE

Stopping Eurocentric thinking in its tracks
You might not suspect that European goods were considered inferior both in terms of quality and price by Easterners. Public health and clean water were more advanced in China than in Europe. By 1800, as much as 22% of the Japanese population were living in towns, a figure that exceeds Europe. Even as late as 1850, the Japanese standard of living was higher than that of the British. In conclusion, Europe invented very little for themselves. The only genuine innovations that they made before the 18th century were the Archimedean screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

Countering the Eurocentric Myth of the Pristine West
John M. Hobsons claims in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are:

The West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalization ever since 500 CE.
The East was more advanced than the West between 500-1800 CE. It wasn’t until 1800 that the West first caught up with and then surpassed China.
The East and South were not only not passive bystanders, but in the overwhelming number of cases, they were the initiator of technological, economic and even cultural change.
The West did initiate new inventions and ways of life but only beginning in the 19th century.
It was also in the 19th century that the West began its denial of Eastern and Southern influence.
This denial of pioneering role of Western leadership in world history requires a revisionist history of virtually the whole world of the last 1500 years.

On the other hand, the East (China, India and the Middle East) and the South (mostly Africa) is conceived of as unchanging, imitative, ignorant, passive, irrational superstitiously ritualistic, lazy, chaotic, erratic, spontaneous, emotional, body-oriented, exotic, alluring and childlike. Furthermore they are dependent, dysfunctional, enslaved, despotic, and intolerant. They are presented as corrupt, barbaric, savages, who are morally regressive economically stagnant, indolent, cruel and collectivist. Ten Western social scientists from the 19th century down to the present have accepted these dualistic stereotypes. It is out of these extremely unjust characterizations that the myth of the pristine Western development was born.

Hobson writes that there is no dualist more extreme in categorizing the East and West than Max Weber. See Table 1 below.

Table 1 Max Weber’s Orientalist View of the East and the West

Occident Modernity	Orient tradition
Rational public law	Ad hoc private law
Double entry bookkeeping	Lack of rational accounting
Free and independent cities	Political/Administrative camps
Independent urban bourgeoise	State controlled merchants
Rational bureaucracy	Patrimonial despotic state
Rational science	Mysticism
Protestant ethics and the emergence of the rational individual	Repressive religions and the predominance of the collective
Basic institutional constitutions of the West are fragmented civilizations with balance of social power between all groups and institutions	Basic institutional constitution of the East is a unified civilization with no social balance between groups and institutions
Multi-state system of nation-states	Single state system – empires
Separation of the public and private	Fusion of public and private

The Western Falsification of the World Before 1500 CE

Furthermore, standard picture of the world before 1500 is presented by Eurocentrism as:

the world mired in stagnant tradition;
a fragmented world divided between insulated and backward regional and; civilizations governed by a despotic states, mainly of the East.

This concept was consciously reconstructed by Eurocentric intellectuals in the 19th century so that first Venice and later Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and Britain were represented as the leading global powers in the post 1000 period. Please see Table 2 for Hobson’s rebuttals

Table 2 The Status of World Civilizations before 1500

Eurocentric Myths	Hobson’s Rebuttals
Major regional civilizations were insulated from each other	Persians, Arabs, Africans Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a global economy
Political costs were too high to allow global trade	Globalization in the East was a midwife if not the mother of the Medieval and Modern West
There was an absence of capitalist institutions credit, money changes, banks, contract laws	There was plenty of commercial activity among Muslims and Chinese before 1500
Transport technologies were too crude to be effective	Use of camels 300-500 was more cost effective than horses
Trade in the East was only in luxury goods	Mass consumer products in China and the Middle East. Africans imported beads cowries, copper and copper goods, grain, fruits and raisons, wheat and later on, textiles which were mass-based goods, not luxuries
Global flows were too slow to be of consequence	Transcontinental trade pioneered by Islamic merchants reached from China to the Mediterranean
Global processes were not robust enough to have a major reorganizational impact	The rise of Tang China (618-907), the Islamic empire (661-1258) and North Africa 909-1171) were plenty robust
There was no iron production in the world prior to the British	Muslims dominate the Europeans in iron production and in steel production until the 18th century. China as well

There was no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the 18th century and the advanced agriculture of China after the 4th century BCE (57)

Technology of the agricultural revolution

The basic technological ingredients of the medieval agricultural revolution were:

watermills;
windmills;
heavy moldboard plough which created drainage furrows;
new animal harnesses; and
iron horseshoes.

Contrary to Eurocentric historians, none of these technological innovations were pioneered by Europeans. Either it was diffused to the West by the East, or Westerners innovated after the Eastern raw materials made them available. For example, Hobson tells us the plough entered Eastern Europe through the East from Siberia in the 9th century. The collar harness was clearly pioneered by the Chinese in the 3rd century CE. The invention of the stirrup really came from India in the late 2nd century and the Chinese bronze and cast-iron stirrup in the 3rd century. Other inventions adapted from China included the rotary winnowing machine and seed drills. Some of the revolutionary rotational crops used by the British in the 18th century were being used by the Chinese some 12 centuries earlier.

Eastern origins of the financial revolution
Italians did not invent the bills of exchange, credit institutions, insurance and banking. Sumerians and Sassanids were using banks, bills of exchange and checks before the advent of Islam, although it was the Muslims who took these early beginnings the furthest. In the West, single entry bookkeeping was the most widespread use right down to the end of the 19th century. The Italian traders only began to use mathematics to replace the old abacus system once the Pisan merchant Fibonacci relayed eastern knowledge in 1202.

The Eastern Renaissance
Arab scholars drew heavily on Persian and Indian as well as Chinese sources on medicine, mathematics philosophy theology, literature, and poetry that lay the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. It’s true that Leonardo Fibonacci, wrote a book rejecting the old abacus system in favor of the new Hindu-Arabic system. However, by the beginning of the 10th century all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Ibn al-Shatir of the Maragha school develop a series of mathematical models which were almost the same as those developed 150 years later by Copernicus in his heliocentric theory of the heavens.

The myth of the European Age of Discovery
When we examine the so-called European Age of Discovery we find that that over 1,000 years before Bartolomeu Diaz circled the Cape of Good Hope the Arabs sailed around the Cape and into Europe. The Chinese did so in the 9th century and in the third century the “primitive” Polynesians and Indians sailed to the Cape and the East Coast of Africa.

Chinese ships were striking in both their size and quantity. In the 8th century some 2,000 ships were working on the Yangtze. It can be safely said that the Chinese were the greatest sailors in history. For nearly two millennium they had ships and sailing techniques far in advance of the rest of the world that comparisons are embarrassing. (58)

As for the Portuguese, they borrowed Islamic innovations in mathematics in order to work out latitude, a longitude relying on the Islamic tables developed by an 11th century Muslim astronomer. The European age or the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Asia” turns out to be retrospective Eurocentric wishful thinking

The myth of Spanish gold ruling the world
As for the globalization of the economy in the 15th century, one thousand years ago, the Afro-Asian age expanded to a globalized market while not choosing to initiate imperialism. In the late 15th century, the Spanish plundered New World civilizations for their gold and silver. But 40 years before this, the Chinese initiated a silver currency and provided a strong demand for European silver.

India was not isolated
It is said that Vasco Da Gama made the first contact with Indian civilization which is presented as isolated. However, John Hobson tells us India was not isolated but had trading contact with the rest of Eurasia. In fact, Indians were economically superior to their Portuguese discoverers. Furthermore, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic and maybe Black African science and technology provided the basis for Portuguese ships and navigation.

China and the Ming Dynasty

The original documents were distorted by the Chinese state in an attempt at being seen as maintaining a Confucius-like isolationist ideal. It was clear that one way or another Chinese merchants continued their extremely lucrative trading with or without official sanctioning. Many European scholars had been therefore easily seduced by the rhetoric of the Chinese state. (63,70)

China and the printing press
As for the Gutenberg printing press and the movable mental type printing press, the Chinese had this by 1095. In addition, the Koreans invented the first metal type thirty years before the Guttenberg press. By the end of the 15th century, the Chinese published more books than all the other countries combined. Even as early as 978, one of the Chinese libraries contained 80,000 volumes. It was exceeded by the holdings of some of the major Islamic libraries. It was only in the 19th century that the European printing press became faster than its Asian counterparts.

Myth of European pioneering of a military revolution
Before the military revolution, swords, lances, mace and cross-bows were used in warfare. These were replaced by gunpowder, guns and cannons. Much has been made about the European military revolution between 1550 and 1660. But at most, 700 years before this between 850-1290, the Chinese developed all three that underly that military revolution. While the Europeans eventually took these military technologies further, (certainly by the 19th century) the fact remains that without the available advances from the East, there would have been nothing to have been taken further. It was the Jesuits who persuaded Europeans to face the fact that gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing all were invented in China.

Respect for China until the 19th century
Many Enlightenment thinkers positively associated with China and its ideas including Montaigne, Leibniz, Voltaire, Wolf, Quesnay, Hume and Adam Smith. Voltaire’s book in 1756 has been described as the perfect compendium of all the positive feeling of the time in Europe about the Far East. Martin Bernal reminds us that no European of the 18th century (before 1780) could claim that Europe had created itself.

The first cast-iron object dated from 513 BCE. Steel was being produced by the 2nd century BCE. China produced 13,500 tons of iron in 806, some 90,400 tons by 1064 and as many as 125,000 by 1078. Even as late as 1788 Britain was producing only 76,000. Chinese iron was not confined to weapons and decorative art but to tools and production. All this was made possible by the breakthroughs in smelting… and the use of blast furnaces. It was the assimilation of what the Chinese had built that made possible the industrial revolution in Britain. Further, the industrialization process was made possible not by some independent British know-how but through the exploitation of multiple African resources. (51-53)

English Racist Identity in Justifying Imperialism

In my article The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers I went into great detail about the Eurocentrism, paternalism and racism that is involved in Western international relations theory. This described how Westerners convinced themselves of their superiority over the East and South. I will just briefly add George Fredrickson’s two kinds of racism, implicit and explicit in the eightieth and 19th centuries. Implicit racism occurs in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Its foundation was cultural, institutional and environmental. People were not conscious of practicing it and their way of expressing imperialism was to imagine they were on a civilizing mission. They had a “Peter Pan” theory of East as childlike, alluring and exotic.

Table 3 The Construction and Consequences of Western Identity

Time period	Western Identity	Eastern and Southern Projections	Western Appropriation Strategies
500-1453	Constructed as Christendom	Hostile and evil threat Islamic Middle East and Persia	Attacking Islam through the first round of the Crusades
1453- 1780	Increasingly as the advanced West	Ottoman Turk as hostile and barbaric threat	Attacking Islam through the second Crusades initiated by da Gama, Columbus
		Africans and indigenous Americans considered as pagans or savages ripe for exploitation and repression	Appropriating bullion and circulating through global silver recycling process Slave trading and commodification of labor
1780- 1900	Superior and carrier of advanced civilization	Either inferior or evil savages or barbarians	Slave trading in Britain and US
			Appropriation of Asian and African land, labor and markets through formal and informal imperialism

How Than Did Contingency Enable The Rise of the Oriental West?
The prominent anti-Eurocentric scholars Kenneth Pomeranz and James Blaut emphasize contingency (the fortuitous accident) as the critical factor in the rise of the West. The West was lucky that:

The more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonize Europe.
The Mongols turned to China – not Europe.
Mongols delivered both goods and Eastern resources.
The Muslims were not interested in conquering Western Europe.
The Spanish stumbled on the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance.
The Native Americans had inadequate immune systems.
African slaves had adequate immune systems.
The East Indian company happened to be in India at a time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord

Conclusion
I began this article by situating it within two previous articles I wrote showing how narrow International Relations Theory is cross-culturally in the exclusion of the Eastern and Southern civilizations from its theoretical understanding of world events. Embedded in this theory was Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. In this article, thanks to John M. Hobson’s book Eastern Origins of Western Civilization I show how in 19 areas of its history Western claims to superiority and leadership in relationship to science, technology, world trade, military weaponry, industry the West was dependent on the East from the 5th to the 19th centuries. It only clearly took the lead around 1840.

So how did the West first deny its dependency and then insist on its superiority over the civilizations it once depended on? I begin by pointing out how on a microlevel its propaganda can be experienced in the areas of map-making and textbook construction. I name Max Weber as the historian with the most extreme hostility to the East and South in his study of Eastern and Western civilizations. I identify eight European myths about the status of world civilizations at the dawn of the modern West, 1500 CE. I then comb through the West’s dependency on Islamic, Chinese, Indian and African civilizations from 500 to 1900 BCE. I close my article by showing the extent to which the West did become more powerful was based on luck more than skill.

The post Ungrateful Lying Upstarts first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 01 Nov 2024 16:03:07 +0000

Orientation
What is politics?

Nine Questions for Determining What is Politics
In Part I of my article Seven Theories of Politics I posed ten questions for narrowing down what the range for defining what is politics.

Temporal reach

How far back into human history does politics go? Does politics go back to pre-state societies? Or does politics begin with state societies? Is politics possible before there were political parties?

Cross species scope

Is politics confined to the human species or does it ooze into the life of other species? If so, which ones? If politics crosses species, is it social species that are political? Is it possible to have animal societies which are social such as lions or wolves, but not political? Does a species need to be social to be political? Is being social a necessary but not sufficient condition for politics? Is being social a necessary and sufficient condition for politics? Or is being social neither a necessary nor sufficient condition? In other words, is it possible for a non-social species to have political relationships?

How much does evolutionary biology impact politics?

At a macro level, how does natural adaptation impact human politics? In terms of men and women, how much does sexual selection determine politics? At the micro level, how much do genetics and brain chemistry determine the level and the interest and skill in politics? Or is politics primarily a creature of the socio-historical level of reality?

Spatial reach

Where does politics take place? Many political scientists limit politics to what is taking place within states. Is that casting the net too narrowly? Can there be politics through discussions in private space? Is it politics when I get into a discussion about the viability of capitalism while I am at the unemployment line waiting for my check? Are there politics within families? Are there politics between lovers? Or are politics only about public affairs?

Am I being political if I ask my partner if she wants to go to the movies and propose a movie and she agrees to both proposals, is spontaneous agreement political? Suppose she said she wants to go to a movie but prefers another movie. We debate about it, and one of us persuades the other. Has the discussion become political? Suppose you and I are riding bicycles. We reach a crossroads where we have to decide whether to turn left or right. We each want to go in a different direction. Is the process of deciding this political?

Political agency

Who does politics? Is politics done only by politicians? If I argue with my neighbor about police brutality in my neighborhood, are my neighbor and I political beings in this discussion? Do I become political only when I vote on the issue in the next election? Do I become political when I bring police brutality to a town hall meeting next month? Or is the only person who is political the mayor who decides whether or not to make it part of his platform for his campaign next month?

What is the relationship between politics and power?

Can you have politics without having power? Can you have power without having politics? If power and politics are related, in what way? Are politics and power interchangeable? Is one a means to another? Is power the means and politics is the end? Is politics the means and power the end?

Politics, force and coercion

Let’s go back to this movie issue. Suppose Sandy has been drinking, and in the past she has been bad-tempered to her partner. She starts drinking while they are deciding on a movie. Sandy’s partner starts worrying and gives in to the movie Sandy wants to watch prematurely to avoid the risk of being yelled at. Is that politics?

This example is a small slice of a larger issue: what is the relationship between politics and force or the threat of force? Is violence an inherent part of politics or is politics what you do to win someone over without being violent? Some political theorists like Bernard Crick say that politics is the art of compromising when you know you cannot get what you want. Others say that the whole political system is based on violence because the entire class system is based on exploitation and force. All attempts to change things must come up against this militaristic force which protects the rulers. Some say that the only force is political and that the state is the ultimate political actor because it has, in Weber’s words, a monopoly on the means of violence.

Interdisciplinary span of politics

How (if at all) is politics related to economics? What is the relationship between technology and politics? Does the economy dictate politics? Does politics determine economics? Does technology determine politics or does politics determine technology? The same question could be asked about religion or mass media.

What, if any, is the relationship between theories of politics and political ideologies?

Is there a relationship between a consistent set of answers to these questions and whether you are a liberal or conservative? How will the answers of social democrats, communists and fascists be different than that of either anarchists on the left or libertarian capitalists on the right?

As it turns out, the field of cross-cultural politics I will be discussing gives very narrow answers to these questions and therefore leaves a great deal out.

Temporal reach – narrow, starts with class societies and leaves out tribal societies
Cross-species – narrow, limits it to the human species
Is politics biological? Narrow, politics is limited to the social, psychological
Spatial reach – narrow, limited to what happens in states
Political agency—limited to what politicians do, no one else
Relationship between politics and power, wide, used interchangeably
How is politics related to force or coercion? Narrow, understates force
Interdisciplinary span of politics – narrow, it excludes economics
Theories of politics and ideology -narrow, it tries to make politics scientific and above ideology

In Part II of my article, I identity seven theories of politics:

Old Institutionalists

Civil Republicans

Weberian political sociologists
Marxian political scientists
Rational choice theorists
Radical feminists
Bio-evolutionary

All the answers comparative politics gives to those questions primarily come from two schools, the old institutionalists and rational choice theorists. They pretty much leave out the other five schools.

Connection to past articles
About three years ago I wrote four articles about the ideological nature of political science. One article Anti-Communist Political Science: Propaganda for the Capitalist State was primarily about political science as it is practiced in the United States (not Europe). The second article, Invasion of the Body Snatchers connects political science to neo-classical economics and shows how both support each other while blocking out an integrated approach called political economy. In my third article Dictatorship and Democracy I expose how Mordor political scientists were quite interested in dictatorships both in Europe and even within the United States in the 1930s. On the other hand, their interpretation of democracy was thin and lacked any subsistence. Lastly, my piece Totalitarian Anti-Communism showed the manipulation of the use of the word “Totalitarian” from the 1930s into the late 20th century. However, there is one topic that I did not cover in much detail and that is the subject of comparative politics. I did discuss it a bit in the last part of my first article but not in any depth. I would especially like to write about it now because while the field of comparative politics is not taken seriously outside the United States because its political manipulation is well-known, it still serves as propaganda for war and imperialism within the United States. It is as part of Yankee self-propaganda that discussing the field of comparative politics is still worth an analysis.

Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics
Sources for my criticisms of comparative politics are as follows. Ronald Chilcote wrote a very good criticism of comparative politics from a Marxian point of view. He was especially good at exposing the ideological nature in the field. For example he pointed out the connection between the social sciences and the CIA. Ido Oren was also really excellent at showing the connection between modernization theorists and the promotion of US foreign policy. Michael Latham’s book Modernization as Ideology reveals how modernization theory was behind JFK’s international anti-communist program, Alliance for Progress. Lastly, Irene Gendzier’s book Development Against Democracy explains how the word “development” was used by comparative politics involved in foreign policy to railroad countries on the capitalist periphery away from socialist and communist transition programs.

Where are we going?
In this article I will show eight foundational problems with comparative politics:

Its characterization of capitalist societies as democratic;
Its characterization of states as governing rather than ruling;
Its relative exclusion of propaganda from political communication in the West;
Its ignoring the presence of how capitalism undermines political relations;
Its ignoring of the Secret Service and the rest of deep state in political decision-making processes;
Its blanket characterization of socialism with authoritarian;
Its neglect of anarchism as a legitimate part of socialism;
Its treatment of nation-states as autonomous and not determined by alliances and between larger, more powerful states and transnational capitalists.

Oligarchies vs Democracy

Those of you who were unlucky enough to take a political science class might have been exposed to a cross-cultural version of the same thing. I refer to the field of comparative politics. The first thing that struck my eye in looking at the table of contents of a college textbook on comparative politics was the different types of rule. According to mainstream theorists, there are only two kinds of rule, democratic and authoritarian. The United States and Western Europe are deemed “democratic” whereas Russia, China and Iran are deemed authoritarian.

The unpopularity of democracy in the West until the 20th century
One problem with this formulation is that it fails to address the unpopularity of democracy in Yankee history itself, not only among conservatives but liberals as well all the way to the end of the 19th century. In the 19thcentury when liberalism really took hold as a political ideology, liberals were not interested in democracy, and considered it “mob rule”. Most industrialized countries did not have the right to vote at the end of the 19th century. Back then farmer populist parties and socialist parties took their democracy seriously, bringing economics into it. The result was a “substantive democracy” championed by Charles Merriman and Charles Beard in the 1930s. But the rise of fascism and communism had shaken liberal confidence in the natural sympathy between democracy and capitalism. So in the 1940s Joseph Schumpeter introduced a weakened form of democracy as simply the circulation of elite politicians that people choose between. The procedural democracy of Robert Dahl of the 1950s involved choosing between these elites through voting. There was nothing about economics.

In his book Strong Democracy, Benjamin Barber distinguishes “thick democracy” from the “thin democracy” of Dahl. My point is by the standards of thick democracy few if any Western countries are democratic. To call them democratic serves the ideological purposes of cold warriors and their desire to fight communism. Since democracy is a loaded virtue word, and authoritarian is a loaded vice word, a cold war opposition between the two is built into the entire field of comparative politics.

How many parties make a democracy?
What is striking is the criteria for what constitutes democracy when it comes to political parties. For comparative politics, a single party rule constitutes authoritarian rule. But the addition of just one more party, as in the American political system, we suddenly then have a democracy. Countries with many parties including most of Europe are also constituted as democracies. Aristotle argued that there were 3 forms of rule – monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. Oligarchy is the rule of the few. Given the actual nature of who controls the elections in the United States, it is most reasonable to say the United States and Western Europe are oligarchies, ruled by the ruling class, the upper class and the upper middle class. Taken together this is about 20% of the population, hardly a democracy. In the United States most of middle class, working class and poor have no representation and yet the country is called democratic.

One party – authoritarian

Two parties – democratic

Many parties – democratic

In other words, the difference between one and two parties is greater than the difference between two parties and many parties. In fact, the implication of those who defend the two-party system is that having many parties can be confusing and unwieldly. So we wind up with the two parties of the United States as a kind center of stability. This is so despite the fact that for about the last 50 years, forty percent or more people in the United States do not vote. Is this a sign that democracy in the United States doesn’t work? Not at all. Those who don’t vote are dismissed as ignorant, apathetic or pathological in some way. The reason people don’t vote is simply because neither party represents their interest is never present. When voting tallies are presented, the number of people who don’t vote is rarely presented. Voting tallies are presented like 50% vs 49% for the two parties as if that constituted all the people who could have voted. In fact, in the actual tallies the winning party gets 30% of the vote. The loser gets 29%. What is ignored is the highest tally: 40% who don’t vote. This is democracy? What we have here is an oligarchy. But in comparative politics, democracy is not a process that actually exists but a self-congratulating ideology for the ruling capitalist oligarchs who control both parties.

Governing vs Ruling
In comparative politics, “governing” is a taken for granted term for Western capitalist societies. “Ruling” is saved for countries suspected of not being democratic, like “authoritarian” countries. I prefer to take the governing word very seriously as it is used in cybernetic systems. Governing in cybernetic systems means steering a system which includes goals, communication within the system, adaptation to the environment, feedback systems which allow for adjustment and few forward system which results in planning. The human heart is a “governor” of the human body. By these standards the only type of society in which there was governing was the egalitarian politics of hunting and gathering societies. Simple horticulture societies in these societies decision-making was collective. They adapted and moved when the ecology dictated a change.

For the last 5,000 years, complex political systems had rulers. This means that political goals were rarely carried out, communication systems were blocked and muddled by self-interested bureaucracies. Adaptations to the environment were slowed down by the machinations of the short-term thinking of ruling classes. Feedback systems were ignored such as extreme weather and pollution. Feed forward mechanisms were clogged by myopic ruling classes who couldn’t think three months ahead – if that. In Joseph Tainter’s book The Collapse of Complex Societies he describes how inept the ruling classes can be. Calling complex societies “governing” is ridiculous when compared to hunting and gathering societies which prevailed for 90% of human history. We are ruled by oligarchies and this should be reflected in any political field that considers itself scientific.

The Exclusion of Propaganda from Political Communication in the West
In part, the reason we have the illusion of democracy and a governing class rather than rulers of an oligarchy is because of Western propaganda. There are many textbooks describing propaganda in the West. If you like videos more than books, check out Adam Curtis’ documentary, The Century of the Self. This video demonstrates how 100 years of psychological propaganda in the person of Edward Bernays and the brainwashing in the work of Ewen Cameron controlled the Mordor public. Despite this, the only mention of propaganda in my comparative politics textbook is when it comes of “authoritarian” regimes. No surprises here.

Comparative Politics Ignores Capitalism
Following the tradition of Mordor social sciences, just as political science excludes economics while neoclassical economics ignores politics, comparative politics ignores the economic system of capitalism when it discusses Western politics. They ignore economic exchange and act as if politics was merely system of law, voting, institutional systems of bureaucracies and foreign policies. Without saying so, countries that count as “democratic” have capitalist exchanges. The field of comparative politics theorists act as if there was a natural, unremarkable relationship between capitalism and democracy. But as Rueschemeyer, Stephens and Stephens have described in their book Capitalist Development and Democracy, it was not the capitalist merchants that brought representative democracy to the West, but the working class. Capitalist economic exchanges should be foundational to understanding political systems. Yet in my comparative poetics textbook that I’m reading, “political economy” is buried in the last chapter of the book.

Two reasons why capitalism should be included in politics
Capitalism should be foundational to politics because countries that have counted as politically “underdeveloped” have become so because of capitalist imperialism, as Gunder Frank pointed out decades ago. At the same time capitalist societies should be foundational to politics because it was under capitalist crisis that fascism emerged. The political ideology of fascism can never be understood without its roots in capitalism. There has never been fascism in human history before capitalism and there has never been fascism without the presence of capitalism.

The Deep State and International Pressure Groups are not Included in the Decision-making Processes of Politics

Supposedly, democratically elected leaders of political parties govern their populations by carrying out “the will of the people”. I am countering this by saying these politicians represent the will of the oligarchs who rule over people. But the oligarchs do not just use political leaders to carry out their will. Besides capitalists that politicians have to answer to, there are agencies such as the FBI, the CIA as well as international pressure groups such as AIPAC, Five Eyes, and NED. None of these groups are mentioned in my comparative politics textbook as involving political decision making. The textbook on Political Psychology in International Relations writes as if political leaders make decisions for their nation by themselves. It is only in “authoritarian” societies that bureaucracies, revolutionary factions and terrorist groups come into play that constrain the decision-making will of the official political leaders.

Authoritarian Politics is Synonymous With Socialism

When it comes to the West the field of comparative politics ignores the fact that its ruling oligarchy is run by capitalism. However, they have no problem declaring that authoritarian politics goes with a socialist “command economy”. Western countries that became socialist, such as Sweden and Norway, are presented as socialist democracies only because the presence of a market or capitalism. This made the naturally socialist authoritarian states more democratic.

Most military dictatorships are capitalists

Advocates of comparative politics ignore the fact that military dictatorships are often attempts by capitalists to hold on to power in the face of socialist uprisings. Most dictatorships are not socialist, but capitalist installations. In the case of socialism, the textbook cases that are trotted out are the old Soviet Union, Cuba or China. These countries have oligarchies as well. But whether or not they are more authoritarian than the capitalist West is much more complex than it first appears. Theories of comparative politics play down or ignore the relentless international class war any socialist system has to endure on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis at the hands of the heads of state in the West along with their capitalist rulers. Capitalists in the West act as if the whole world is their private property. They treat any elected national leader (even if not a socialist) who has the nerve to set their own agenda for international trade as an enemy. All socialist leaders have to treat most any oppositional party in their country as potentially a tool of international capital. The extent to which socialist countries are authoritarian has a great deal to do with the pressure they experience from international capital.

What about “totalitarian”?

Fortunately, this Cold War vice word is now internationally discredited. However, the use of the term totalitarian to characterize socialist or communist countries, leaves out at least the following. If we grant that Sweden and Norway were once socialist, there has never been a socialist country with an advanced technology, communication systems, or advanced science. These societies have never had the ability to control the messages sent out to the population so that people were all thinking the same thing at the same time due to centralized control of propaganda. It is only advanced capitalist countries that have the capacity to do this. For example, Mordor’s media has roughly five corporations that all send out the same propaganda message in the case of Israel. People are severely punished by the police for supporting the Palestinians. All third parties in Mordor are blacked out. They cannot get into the “debates”. My point is that because of its control over mass media, capitalist control of the state is much closer to real totalitarianism than anything Stalin or Orwell ever dreamed up. The Soviet Union and China are poor countries. Their communist parties have no centralized control over their entire nation state. Peasants in both countries made up their own mind as to what was happening. Only in Mordor do you hear the same anti-working-class slogans against health care, or “welfare queens” from New York to San Francisco, from Houston Texas to Missoula in Montana. This is the power political propaganda holds to be internalized by people who imagine they are making up their own minds.

Comparative Politics Ignores Anarchism as Part of Socialism
The claim that all socialism is authoritarian ignores the 180-year history of the anarchist movement and its leaders from Proudhon to Bakunin to Malatesta, Kropotkin, to Lucy Parsons, Emma Goldman to Durruti. Anarchism was no intellectual movement. It was followed by thousands of people who fought in and out of labor unions and in the Russian and Spanish revolutions. This negligence on the part of comparative political theorists is ironic given that anarchism at its best is the purist form of democracy – direct democracy. If comparative political theorists understood the scale that the anarchists organized during the Spanish revolution of 1936-1939, they would be ashamed to think that what goes on in Western societies has anything to do with democracy, at least comparatively speaking.

Comparative Politics Ignores the International Pressures Within Larger States or Alliances Between other States

Comparative politics acts as if political decisions begin and end at national borders and with only official political leaders. But today’s nation-states have formed alliances with other nation-states. They have agreements about where they or won’t all act together. In the West we have the alliance of United States, England and Israel. None of those countries enacts a political decision by themselves. The same is true with China, Russia and Iran. Nation-states are interdependent, not independent actors.

Conclusion

I began this article with nine foundational questions of what politics is. I described how narrowly the field of comparative politics is in answering these questions. Then I identified seven theories of politics and showed how each of the seven theories of politics answers these nine questions differently. As it turned out, the field of political science uses only two of the seven theories: old institutionalism as rational choice theory.

Then I embedded within this article other articles I had written about how anticommunist domestic political science and neoclassical economics are in their studies and how international political science (comparative politics) is in carrying on that tradition. After that I named eight areas in which comparative politics are weak, including:

Its propagandistic use of the word “democracy”. I claim that no state society on this planet is democratic. They are oligarchies.
Its propagandistic use of the world governance. I identify with a cybernetic definition of governance, using the heart as an example. With this as criteria, no state system in the world governs a society. They all rule, not govern.
Comparative politics over-emphasizes the use of propaganda in “authoritarian” societies while barely even mentioning propaganda in capitalist ruling oligarchies.
Comparative politics does not successfully integrate capitalism into the comparative systems it analyzes . One textbook tacks it on as a last chapter.
Comparative politics ignores the power of the institutions of the deep state and transnational capitalists in determining the decision-making capacities of politicians.
Its treatment of the term “authoritarian” is more or less synonymous with socialism. It plays down the existence of socialism in Scandinavian countries and communal councils in Venezuela.
Lastly, the use of the term “totalitarian” to depict Soviet Union, China and Cuba is completely false. In the case of the Soviet Union and China they were too poor to have a centralized state that could reach down to every peasant village and bombard them with propaganda. The foundation for this totalitarian state is a centralized media apparatus, mass transportation, a country that was electrified. Paradoxically it is Mordor’s control over its mass media where we see the closest approximation to totalitarianism.

The post Cross-Cultural Comparative Politics first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:55:52 +0000

International Relations (IR) theory fails to deliver on one of its key promises, specifically to produce positivist, value free analysis. What we encounter in the vast majority of international theory is the provincial or parochial normative purpose of defending and celebrating the ideal of the West in world politics. IR theory can no longer be represented as positivist, objective or value free.
~ John M. Hobson

Orientation

In 1981, Eric Jones wrote a very powerful book called The European Miracle: Environments, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. He was not alone in claiming there was something unique about Europe compared to the rest of the world. Though I doubt it was his intention, his work perhaps unintentionally supported a Eurocentric, paternalistic, racist orientation of a Wren theory which claimed to explain world politics. This is called International Relations Theory which claimed to be positivist, objective and value free. International relations theory is so deeply embedded in Western triumphalism that it has failed to notice that the West has been losing to China, Russia and Iran for the last 20 to 30 years. International relations theory barely understands that this has happened and it has no theory to explain it. What we are witnessing today is a “Eurasian Miracle.”

In my article “Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival,” I identify five international relation theories: Neocon Realists; Neoliberal Globalists; Liberal Institutionalists; Constructivists and World-Systems Theorists. Most of my criticism in that article was leveled at the first three theories for their inability to account for the rise of China, Russia and Iran and the whole multipolar world. In this article, following the work of John A. Hobson in his book “The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics,” I point out a good reason for this is because of the Eurocentric nature of Neocon Realists, Neoliberal Globalists and Liberal Institutionalists theory. However, Hobson’s criticism of Eurocentrism does not stop there. He argues that even left-wing theories like constructionism and world-systems theory are guilty of Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, not only because it takes different forms, but that some of these are even anti-imperialist. The conventional contrast of a Eurocentric or racist conception of imperialism from a constructivist and Marxist point of view is too simple and Eurocentrism is too deep.

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

savagery (hunter-gatherers);
barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Supposedly Europeans hoped that all societies would want to become civilized. But when societies of the East and South did not aspire to this, they were labelled either savages or barbarians. However, some historians and anthropologist thought it was their duty (white man’s burden) for the savages and barbarians to see the light. This led to paternalism.

An example of well-intentioned paternalist Eurocentrism: Rawls
John Rawls believed that his liberal vision has genuinely universalist criteria that do not offend cultural sensibilities of non-Western people. He was interested in culturally converting Eastern people rather than containing them as in Western liberal realism.

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
the globalization myth; and
the theoretical great traditions myth.

Hobson’s 2nd claim is there are six types of imperialism which are laid out over 250 years. His third claim is that Western racism was not always triumphant but was based on fear of what would become of Europe if Easterners and Southerners of the world got the upper hand. Lastly, I close out with theories that are exceptions to the rule and are not Eurocentric or paternalistic and with a minimum of racism.

Hobson’s implicit claim is that without “the rest” there might be no West. The West was not an early, but a latedevelopment. This topic will be covered in my future article based on another of Hobson’s books, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

Six Eurocentric Myths of International Relations Theory
Hobson tells us the conscious or unconscious moral purpose of IR is to be a defender and promoter of Western Civilization. The key of disciplinary assumptions that are presently revered as self-evident truths really are largely Eurocentric myths. As stated above, these include the above myths.

The noble identity foundation myth: Whig and progress theory of history
International Relations Theory has embedded in a Whig an interpretation of its intellectual history. Whiggish means that the past is reorganized to make it seem that the present was the only possible passage that could have led to contemporary life. The Whig theory of history has the theory of progress embedded in it. The theory of progress claims that the later in time we go in social evolution the better societies get in material wealth, less labor, higher morality and happiness.

It is a now conventional assumption that the discipline of International Relations was born in 1919. Supposedly, it had a moral purpose to finding ways to solve the universal problem of war. This now conventional view was originally constructed by E.H. Carr in his classical text The Twenty Year’s Crisis (1946).

Contrary to this convention, IR theory did not appear all of a sudden after WW I out of the head of Zeus. It continued from its pre-1914 roots which were neither positive, objective nor value free. Rather they were paternalist, Eurocentric and intentionally or unintentionally racist. There are deep continuities that the 1919-1945 period of international theory has with the pre-1914 period of international theory. The Eurocentric racism and paternalism that underpinned it had been forged in the previous century. In addition, there is a continuum of imperialism that goes all the way back to the middle of the 18th century. Thirdly, there was an explosion of anti-colonial resistance. What were colonists resisting – those noble Western powers that colonialized them. In this larger scheme of things, the end of World War I was not the only game in town. As positivists, what Neocon realists and liberal globalists ignore is that the noble identity myth can also be a ideological justification for Eurocentrism, capitalism, racism and imperialism. The four stages are of Hobsons history if International relations include:

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

This myth was that the between the wars IR theory was dominated by liberal globalists who searched for a new cooperative global order as a reaction to the Neocon realism of World War I. It was characterized as a harmonious and optimistic theory because it stands for peace. But as Hobson points out, interwar international theory was not monopolized by idealism or liberalism because it also exhibited a vibrant racism realist stream that emerged after 1889, especially in the world of geopolitical theorists, Ratzel, Mackinder, Mahan and others.

IR claims to be positivist with a value free epistemological base. This has been challenged by African-American Marxists Ralph Bunche, WEB Dubois and CLR James. They say that when viewed through a non-European lens, the vast majority of international theory produces a parochial or provincial analysis of the West that can masquerade as if it were universal. Further, the imperialist aspect of interwar idealist theory has not been widely noticed among modern IR scholars. Realist and so-called Liberal Idealists were united by the concern to restore the mandate of Western civilizational hegemony in one guise of another.

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

These debates include the controversy between realism and idealism in the interwar period between history and scientism in the 1960s and between positivists and post-positivists in the 1990s. The first two appear as if these were great qualitative struggles, but like with Republicans and Democrats in Mordor, all parties have far more in common than they have in differences. The struggle between positivists and post-positivists are real but it are presented in too stark a manner. There were post-positivists as far back as the 1960s and those political scientists who were more statistical and quantitative also go back to the 50s and 60s. In other words that debate did not begin in the 1990s as IR theorists claim but thirty years earlier. In spite of these differences, there is consensus of virtually all parties concerning the politics of defending and celebrating Western civilization in world politics. These theories supported the Western powers. Their differences were small compared to the paternalism, racism and imperialism that they all shared.

Sovereignty vs anarchy myth
The sovereignty vs anarchy myth claims that in International Relations Theory all states are sovereign. But because there is no world-state the relations between nation-states are characterized as anarchistic. In the first place, IR theory limits which nation-states are considered sovereign to European countries. Eastern and Southern states are not considered sovereign because they lack the proper Western European credentials such as voting systems, more than one party, and capitalism. The school of Realism operates with universalist analytical principles that supposedly apply to all states regardless of how 2nd class some states are treated in practice. The problem for IR theorists is that the post the 1648 era there had been a proliferation of international imperial hierarchies, which were comprised of a series of single sovereign colonial powers, many of which were not nation-states. Its supposedly universal and ideologically unbiased principles of state-centrism sovereignty directly contradict its practice. For example, in 1878 the conference in Berlin divided Africa between European imperial powers. These sovereign states had colonies.

Furthermore if by anarchy they mean disorder, the relationship between sovereign states without a world state is by no means disorderly. There are shifting alliances between states rather than a Hobbesian war of all single states against each other. Secondly, to characterize this disorder as “anarchy” reveals either complete political bias or ignorance of anarchism as a respectable political tendency on the socialist left. Anarchism has involved thousands of people in many countries around the world since the late 1840s. It has had some success in the Paris Commune, the Russian and especially the Spanish revolutions. To characterize this as disorderly is an unforgivable omission from theorists who claim to be political scientists.

The globalization myth
The myth is that globalization has only recently (the last century) become an issue for international theorists. But to Hobson’s own surprise in his initial research, in many areas including some though not all realists, international theorists since 1760 have placed considerable emphasis on globalization. In his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization,Hobson points out that there were globalizing trade networks of, Africa, West Asia, India and China as far back as 500 CE.

The theoretical great traditions myth
IR theorists are no different than those who initiate artistic or spiritual movements in their search for origins. All political, artistic or spiritual movements seek to find their origins in the deep past rather than the recent past. In the IR traditional textbooks realism is claimed to go back to Thucydides in the ancient world and then forward to Hobbes and Machiavelli to culminate in Waltz, Gilpin and Mearsheimer via Carr and Morgenthau. But each of these theories are not air-tight. In fact IR theories mix with other theories within a given moment in time and each theory changes internally due to changes in history.

Defining Imperialism and Anti-imperialism International Theory
Hobson claims that the vast literature on imperialism and anti-imperialism generally lacks conceptual precision. Here Hobson confront two broad definitional approaches:

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Most of modern Eurocentric international theory embraces a narrow definition and allows for considerable wiggle room when confronted with a charge of imperialism. It sees Eurocentrism and imperialism as distinct. You can be Eurocentric and not imperialist and conversely imperialist without being Eurocentric. At the other extreme, by contrast, post-colonial theorists seek to completely shut down this wiggle room by assuming that being Eurocentric is inherently imperialist and imperialism is always Eurocentric.

In table 1 I have a divided a spectrum of imperialism throughout history into 6 types. The three types on the left accept that they are imperialists and don’t apologize for it. The theories on the right deny they are imperialists. The theories on the left are formal empires, while the theories on the right are informal liberal empires. The people in the last cell are the theorists of various types of imperialism. The cell above it include the nature and justification of their mission. The names of the theorists are not important for now, but some of the more famous ones might be familiar to you. The importance of this table are not the theorists but rather the systems of justification, none of which are value free, universal and objective.

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

In Table 2 below, one interesting but expected difference between liberalism and Marxism is that liberals see imperialism as benign. J. A. Hobson and John Stuart Mill see imperialism is benign at an international level, but Cobden, Bright and Angell see imperialism as benign at a national level. The fact that Marxists thinks imperialism as coerced rather than benign should not come as a surprise to anyone. Traditional International Relations Theory sees liberal internationalism and classical Marxism as the antithesis of imperialism. However, John Hobson’s main point is what Marxism and liberals have in common. They all agree that:

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

It is these four points that show how deep Eurocentrism of all Western theories, even Marxism. These are the type of deep assumptions, hundreds of years old the keep Western theorists of world politics that the BRICS world of the East is bypassing them.

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

Here are some further examples of Eurocentrism. In the 19th century, even when IR theory was sensitive to interdependence, it wasn’t world interdependence. Rather it was interdependence among the civilized states of Europe. Outside of Europe there was no recognition of interdependence. Eastern societies only got recognition once they became colonies or only if these countries were at war with Europe. It is something like calling the ultimate baseball playoffs “the World Series” even when it only includes the United States.

At the same time, the Eurocentrists had no problem imagining war with the East if it was profitable. But when it came to the civilized states of Europe, war was seen as unprofitable. Also, as we shall see later, racist theories bemoaned Europeans fighting because this would result in the depletion of the white race. Colonial annexation was entirely appropriate when it come to Europe’s relation with the East. The East has conditional agency, such as Japan during World War II. However, the East cannot take the lead in historical development without being predator (as in the Yellow Peril).

As for the Global South, (Africa) for it to be a respectable civilized state, Western core countries took a page out of Calvinism and insisted that these “savage societies” have a duty to develop their land productivity (meaning agriculturally) and abandon their primitivism (hunting and gathering). Non-Western politics, whether they be monarchies without constitutions or the egalitarian political consensus societies of hunting and gathering, are not recognized as sovereign. It was representative bourgeois state politics that was the “civilized” norm. As late as 1993 Paul Johnson said most African states are not fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence and the violence of human degradation they bring are a threat to the stability and peace as well as an affront to our moral sense. As of today Zionist Israel has massacred over 200,000 Palestinians. Yet there is no call from the United Nations (controlled by the West) to intervene in this “failed state”.

European imperialists hide their protectionist policies. As Friedrich List remarked, once imperialists have attained their summit of greatness, they kick away the ladder by which they climbed up in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up afterwards behind them.

Both the US and Britain industrialized on the back of extremely protectionist regimes and only turned to free trade once they arrived at the top of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, the imposition of free trade on developing countries by Britain after 1846 and the US after 1945 prevents Third World states from using tariffs to protect the infant industries. The projection of “free trade” by Americans…constitute an economic containment strategy to keep the Third World down.

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Karl Marx’s paternal Eurocentrism and the political necessity of the Western civilizing mission
Marx appears to have had little appreciation for the complexity of ancient Chinese and Indian civilizations. For him China and India were the home of “Oriental Despotism”. The East could only be emancipated from its backwardness by the British colonialists. India stands outside world history and China was understood as a rotting semi-civilization. Believe it or not, for Marx, opium wars were emancipatory for China. Without British intervention there would be no future emancipatory socialist revolution. Imperialism was an instrument for both political progress and a requirement of global primitive accumulation. Was the result of British colonization Chinese emancipation? No, it was a century of Chinese humiliation (1839-1949). The imperialist engagement with China did not lead to order but to massive social-dislocation. The various Chinese revolutions were in part stimulated by a reaction against the encounter with the West.

For Marx and Engels, the East could belatedly jump aboard the Western developmental plane as Hobson says as “The Oriental Express”. It could participate in the construction of world history. But they could never lead the train in a progressive direction. They only had conditional agency. The Western states on the other hand had hyper-sovereignty. Sadly, Hobson says there hasn’t been much effort to reconstruct Marx’s theory along non-Eurocentric lines in traditional Marxism.

Lenin has no theory of Eastern emancipation
According to Hobson, Lenin says the East is inherently incapable of self-development. Lenin discusses how the period of free competition within Europe was succeeded after 1873 with the rise of cartels which intensified after 1903 into full-fledged monopoly capital and finance capital. But the causes of the crisis lay in the West whether underconsumption (Hobson) or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (Marx and Engels). There was no mention of resistance in the colonies. Lenin discussed the right of self-determination of nations, but those nations would never influence the West or provide leadership.

World-systems theory
Wallerstein
Immanuel Wallerstein was heavily criticized by Robert Brenner and other classical Marxists for overstating the interdependence of trade and hierarchy between societies and understating the class struggle within societies. But he maintains his traditional Marxian orientation in emphasizing the dynamics for the evolution of the world-system clearly in the Western part of the world. The West represents the civilized world, the core countries. The second division in the world is occupied by the regressive redistributive world empires in Asia. Division three of the world system is occupied by primitive reciprocal mini-systems found in North America, parts of Africa and Australasia (savage societies in the 19^thcentury parlance).

World-empires mainly in Asia saw their state structures weakened while their boundaries underwent a forced contraction and the surviving mini-systems of North American, Caribbean and Australia underwent wholesale destruction.

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Other world-systems theorists like Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase Dunn suggested that the world-system didn’t consist of just a core and a periphery but consisted of a semi-periphery which may or may not be Western. They argued that when core Western countries experienced crisis and decline, it was the semi-periphery countries that provided a new resource which allowed them to become a new core.

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

To be fair, both a sympathizer and an arch-critic of World-Systems theory, Andre Gunder Frank accused Wallerstein of Eurocentrism in his writings culminating in hisbook Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. The work of Janet Anu-Lughod Before European Hegemony was so very powerful in showing the advanced state of non-Western trade networks between 1250 and 1350 CE.

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

Watson’s analysis starts out with typical Eurocentrism with the Westphalian origins of European international society. He emphasizes the uniqueness of European restlessness and exceptional turbulence. Dynamic and enterprising as it is, it is contrasted to the closed or isolated world of Asian cultures. The rise of the West is located in Weberian liberalism, neorealism and Marxism. Watson’s unusually explorative book The Evolution of International Society moves from the Italian city-state system and then proceeds with the emergence of sovereignly at the Westphalia conference by way of the Renaissance and the Reformation to arrive at the balance of power in 1713 at Utrecht. Yet he does talk about Eastern developments as reacting back on Europe as in a dialectical way. What the East contributed from the West included:

the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Most interesting is that many anti-imperialist racists argue against imperialism because it brings the white race in racially fatal conflict with the contaminating influences of non-white races. The impossibility of Eastern progressive development renders the Western civilizing mission all but futile.

Charles Henry Pearson: the decline of white supremacy and the barbaric rise of the yellow peril
Charles Henry Pearson (1830-1894) achieved immediate fame with the dire prophesy that he issued for the white race in his book National Life and Character, a Forecast. He argued that white racial supremacy was being superseded by very high levels of predatory Eastern agency. But in Pearson’s racist imagination it is the white West that has been fated to remain within its stationary limits while the yellow races are destined to expand and triumph over the higher whites. The barbaric threat also came from within as a result of the socialist states’ preference to prop up the unfit white working classes and from without via the Yellow Peril were all leading to deterioration.

James Blair and David Jordan

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the topics.

It serves to affect a degeneration of the physical and intellectual energy of the Europeans. He gives an example of that as the Philippines lie in the heat of the torrid zone which he called natures asylum for degeneration. Benjamin Kidd argued though we in Europe have the greatest food-producing regions of the earth, we want to administer the tropic from a distance. The white races needed to wake up because the topics will lure them to their death. Kidd wanted to absolve the West of its home-grown liberal imperial guilt syndrome. His key concern about colonizing the tropics was the degenerative impact that the climate would have on white imperialists.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

The Oriental is of the past. They have not progressed for centuries. The Easterner hates progress. He contends that the constitution of China is said to not have been changed for thousands of years. One the other hand, the West is progressive, energetic and intolerant of the very thing which is the East’s most marked characteristic, indolence. The two races should never amalgamate.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

Jordan argues that warfare selects the best or fittest elements of the civilized white race to go out and fight, but in so doing leads to a reduction in the numbers of the fittest element as they lose their lives in futile colonial wars. Meanwhile the infirm and cowardly and feckless stay home, away from the battlefield. Some defensive racists were against the war between white countries so they could preserve white unity.

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

Eurocentrism and racism do not always deny non-white race’s agency. The climax of eugenics reflected not the moment of supreme white confidence but an acute sense of anxiety regardless the future hegemony of the white race. For Stoddard, globalization is a real threat. The greatest threat to white racial existence lies

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

The white races are under siege and disunited within their inner sanctum excavated by the Trojan horse of Western liberalism. Stoddard takes the notion of predatory Eastern agency beyond Mahan and Mackinder. He wants to call out the hubris of the white race. He is nervous and panicked about the Japanese victory over the white Russians in 1905. Further, rise of communism dealt a cruel blow to white racial unity. He is afraid of the white wars in which the best white stock would be lost on the battlefields. The white need to retreat from their imperial bases in Asia and leave the land to yellow and brown rule.

Madison Grant
Grant claimed colonialism weakens the white races. The Nordic race is unable to survive south of the line of latitude on white Virginia because of the detrimental impact of the hot climate. Nordics must keep away from the native population for fear of racial contamination from the sun’s actinic rays. Grant says the rapid decline in the birthrate of native white Americans is gradually withdrawing from the scene, abandoning to these aliens the land which they once conquered and developed. The man of the old stock is being crowded out.

Patrick Moynihan
In Patrick Moynihan book Pandemonium, he explores a Malthusian logic in predicting the demographic doomsday scenario at the hands of the Eastern Hordes as does Paul Kennedy in his book Preparing for the 21^st Century. For them, the greatest challenge to world order in the coming century is the rising relative demographic gap between West and East. Western civilizations will have stable or declining populations and would be swamped by the East and the South. While Malthus in his day did not prevent a rising demographic to Europe from the East, by the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries these became a staple of much of racist Western thought.

Huntington and Lind on demographics
In the work of Huntington and Lind a close parallel can be drawn between their work and the racist imperialist thinker Mahan. But an even closer link can be found with CH Pearson’s National Life and Character, a Forecast; Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920); Clashing Tides of Color (1935). In Huntington’s book The Clash of Civilizations (1996). The roots of the barbaric threat that the Chinese and Muslims pose for the Western Civilization are located within a neo-Malthusian framework. It begins with the Eastern population explosion. This surplus population is problematic because it will seek to flood into the heartlands of the West.

For Huntington and Lind, non-Western societies were increasingly becoming the movers and shakers of their own history and of Western history. This meant in their ability to economically develop as well as resist imperialism. Lind writes that with the break-up of the Soviet “empire” the West’s great right flank will almost certainly be endangered as the Islamic republics will seek to join their Muslim brothers. Islam will be at the gates of Vienna as either immigrants or terrorists. Domestically multiculturalism in the West today is a “political virus” for it serves to boost the vitality of foreign cultures within the West.

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

First, their Western International Relations Theory history has hardly been a positivist value free theory. It oozes Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. Secondly International Relations Theory only dimly perceives that these theories are not 100 years deep, starting after World War I, but have a 250 year history as Table 3 below shows. Thirdly, table 3 shows over 50 theorists over that 250 years, thus cementing a deep ideological commitment to “the rise of the West”. Those international theorists who have really understood that the East and the South are not merely passive recipients of the wisdom of the West but are themselves innovators. These theorists are isolated and could be counted on two hands.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

The post The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 08:55:52 +0000

Orientation

What is Eurocentrism?
Hobson’s claim that there two steps in Eurocentric big-bang theory of world politics:

Europeans single-handedly created a European capitalist international state system through their pioneering and exceptional institutional genius.
They export their civilization to remake the world in their own image through globalization, imperialism or hegemony.
To add to this, Eurocentrism claims the Eastern and Southern part of the world had no independent status. There was no East or South big bang. In the West the various movements of the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution or socialism were purely Western. The East and South either helped out or they were left behind. With rare exceptions. Eastern and Southern parts of the world system never led Western development.

What is paternalism?
Historians of the modern West sought to explain social evolution. In doing so, they divided societies into three stages:

savagery (hunter-gatherers);
barbarism (horticultural and agricultural states) and
civilization—industrial capitalist societies

Yet there are five key Eurocentric dimensions of his theory:

All well-ordered hierarchical societies must exhibit a separation of church and state (this will not work for Muslims).
Imposition of free trade (free trade can only work with wealthy societies).
Governed by a liberal law of peoples (teaching Eastern women to have less babies won’t work if they are being blocked by the IMF and the World bank from industrializing.
Eastern states receive only conditional sovereignty because they are classified as despotic states and “failed” states are deemed uncivilized.
Developed societies have a duty to assist burdened societies (paternalism).

Hobson’s claims

Hobson’s explicit claims are first that International Relations Theory contains six myths:

the noble identity and foundational myth of the discipline;
the positive myth of International Relations Theory;
the great debates myth and reconceptualizing the clash of IR theories;
the sovereignty or anarchy myth;
the globalization myth; and
the theoretical great traditions myth.

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism and scientific racism
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism

The positive myth of IR of theory of liberalism as emerging between the wars

The great debate myth and reconceptualizing the idea of the clash of IR theories

Narrow Eurocentric
Expansive postcolonial

Table 1 The Definitional Continuum of Imperialism, Past and Present

Definitional Consensus Most coercive definition Accept they are imperialists	Definitional Controversy Least coercive definition Deny they are imperialists
Formal Empire	Informal liberal empire

Tributary relations, political containment conquest of barbarism

National civilizing mission/cultural
conversion

Civilizing mission, via international government
protectorates

Anglo-Saxon hegemony

To protect, duty to prevent, duty to assist concept of democracies

Universalization

of Western civilization and global empire of liberal democratic peace

Gumplowicz, Ward, Mahan
Mackinder,
K. Pearson, Hitler, Von Treitschke, Kidd, Spykman
Haushofer

Cobden, Bright, Angell, Mill, Marx, Reinsch,
W.Wilson

Hobson, Buell, Woolf
Krasner, Fukuyama

Gilpin
Kindleberger Kagan, Brzezinski,
Cooper, Ignatieff

Slaughter, Ikenberry, Wheeler, Risse, Finnermore Rawls, Held
Nussbaum

Friedman, Wolf, Russet, Owen

Eurocentric Imperialism: Liberal and Marxism

The East can be characterized as “barbaric oriental despotism”
The capitalist peripheral countries (Third world) are savage, anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Western agency is always pioneering, learning nothing from the rest of the world
Eastern agency even at its best is conditional, always learning from the West

Table 2 Paternalistic, Eurocentric. Institutional Imperial Concepts of World Politics

Marxism	Left Liberal	Liberal
Marx	Mill and Hobson	Cobden, Bright, Angell
Coerced national civilizing mission	Benign international mission	Benign national mission
East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism	East as barbaric Oriental Despotism
South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature	South as savage—3rd world anarchistic societies residing in a domestic state of nature
Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency	Pioneering Western agency
Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency	Conditional Eastern agency

A Century of Marxist Eurocentrism

Arrighi and Chase-Dunn

Exceptions to the rule Gunder Frank, Abu-Lughod

Exceptions to the Rule Outside of Marxism: James Watson

the Italian city-state system was dependent on Eastern trade;
financially cheques, bills of exchange, banks and commercial partnerships which had been pioneered in the Islamic and pre-Islamic Middle-East;
overseas expansion which began in 1492 was only possible with the navigational and nautical techniques that were pioneered by Chinese and especially Muslims; and
Industrialization, centerpiece of “British genius” was significantly enabled by Chinese innovations that stem back several millenniums.

Further, Watson analyzes in considerable detail many non-Western political formations prior to 1648.

Western Fear of Eastern and Southern Power

Jordan’s defensive social Darwinist racism was a pacifist’s eugenics. It had three components:

The white race cannot survive in the topics.

The second anti-imperialist argument concerned the perils of immigration.

Anti-war because the fittest white people would get kille

To summarize the threat from the East:

Domestic white barbaric threat – unfit working class
Racist interbreeding threat – contamination
Tropical climatic threat
Threat of European wars depleting the white race

The crisis of Western self-doubting and deep anxiety was reflected in a host of books which included:

Spengler’s Decline of the West (European Institutionalist) (1919,1932)
Madison Grant’s the Passing of the White Race (1918)
Lothrop Stoddard The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy (1920)
Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930)

Stoddard

in colored immigration problem
a demographic explosion

Conclusion
The purpose of this article is to expose the theoretical blockages to the West’s understanding that they are being left beyond by the multipolar world of BRICS.

Table 3 Eurocentrism, Paternalism and Racism in International Theory 1760-2010

1760-1914 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Cobden/ Bright, Angell, Hobson, Mill, Marx	Ant-paternalism Smith, Kant
Scientific racism	Offensive racism Ward, Reinsch, Kidd, Mahan, Mackinder and von Treitschke	Defensive Racism Spencer, Sumner, Blair, Jordan, CH Pearson, Ripley, Brinton
1914-1945 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalism Wolff, Zimmern, Murray, Angell	Anti-paternalism Subliminal Eurocentrism Laski/ Brailsford, Lenin, Bukharin
Scientific racism	Offensive Racism	Defensive racism
	Wilson, Buell, Kjellen, Spykman, Haushofer, Hitler	Stoddard, Grant, E. Huntington
1945-1989 Subliminal Eurocentrism	Paternalism Gilpin, Keohane Walz, Bull, Watson	Anti-Paternalism Carr, Morgenthau
1989-2010 Manifest Eurocentrism	Paternalist Rawls, Held, Nussbaum, Fukuyama	Anti-paternalist World-system theory, Cox
	Offensive Eurocentrism Kagan, Cooper, Ferguson	Defensive Eurocentrism SP Huntington, Lind

Below is the Conventional linear narrative of Liberal great tradition:

From 1760 to 1816 there is classical liberal internationalism of Smith, Kant and Ricardo.
From 1830 to 1913 classical liberal internationalism continues in the work of Cobden, Bright, JS Mill and Angell.
Between 1900 to 1945 the emphasis switches to interdependence theory of liberal institutionalism of Hobson, Wilson, Zimmerman and Murray.
Between 1989 and 2010 liberal cosmopolitanism is embodied in the theories of Fukuyama, Held and Rawls.

The Table 4 below shows Hobson’s very different breakdown of liberalism, calling it “paternalistic imperial liberalism”.

See Table 4 Hobson’s history in international Liberalism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Table 5 shows that history of realism has also been filled with political activity about as far from positivism as one can imagine.

See Table 5 Hobson’s history of international realism on Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

Lastly Hobson charts the history of Marxism from 1840 to post 1989.

With classical Marxism of Marx and Engels between 1840-1895. Hobson calls it explicit imperialism which is paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1910 and the 1920s classical Marxism continues with the work of Lenin, Luxemburg, Hilferding and Bukharin which Hobson characterizes as anti-imperialist, but a subliminal anti-paternalist Eurocentrism.
Between 1967 and 1989 although World-Systems Theory differs from classical Marxism with its emphasis on conflicts between states more than class struggles within states, it shares the same combination of anti-imperialist, subliminal, anti-paternalist Eurocentrism of the Marxists of 1910-1920. The same is true for Robert Cox’s Gramscian hegemony theory.
In the post 1989 period we find in the work of Giovanni Arrighi and Christopher Chase-Dunn a continuation of anti-imperialist, anti-paternalist emphasis on Europe, but both are more willing to grant autonomy to non-Western countries. If Eastern or Southern countries occupy what both call the capitalist semi-periphery of the world system. Arrighi’s last book was called Adam Smith in Beijing, showing his interest in China as the new global hegemon
In the same period It is in the work of Andre Gunder Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod that we finally theories that challenge any Eurocentrism or paternalism. Gunder Frank has always contended that World Systems Theory is Eurocentric and claims, as Hobson argues in another book that Europe only surpassed China after 1800. His book Re-Orient claims, correctly I think that the new Asian Age is on the horizon.

The post The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 01 Oct 2024 15:00:49 +0000

Field of Dreams

When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. The bases are loaded and there are two outs. Then I swing and hit the ball – tsssssch! As Mel Allen was saying in my head “there is a high fly ball deep to right center. The center fielder is at the track. It is going, going, gone”. Then I would trot around the bases. As I got older, I played a great deal of hardball and I hit home runs, but never quite experienced the situation I imagined when I was seven until the end of my playing days.

Coming Through the Hole in the Fence
Around the same time, my father used to take me across the street in the woods to play catch and bat. It was a good scene because the weeds would always stop the ball from going too far. In addition, I always hit with a tree in back of me so that if my father’s pitches were outside the strike zone or I missed or fouled it back, the tree stopped it. Then about a year later my father initiated me into the mysteries of the multiple baseball fields at Jamaica, Queens High School. Officially you had to go through a gate way at the end of the field to get in. But the local kids weren’t having it. They used cutting wires to pry open a hole in the fence. My father and I climbed through the fence and set up. He would pitch to me even though we only had one or two balls. If I hit it past him, he had to get it. But as happens often in these kind of situations, other kids or even adults are around, size up the situation and volunteer to catch or play the field. Willie came by and volunteered to be a catcher. He was an older kid, maybe 14, and looked like he could be a soccer player from South America. If I hit a ball past my father, I would run around those imaginary bases again. My father would retrieve the ball and throw it to Willie to try to get me out at the plate. Willie would make believe he missed the tag or the throw so I could hit a homerun. I was at the age where I couldn’t quite figure out if this was intentional not. Even then, I appreciated his kindness

Geographical Constraints of Choose-up Games in the Corner
Our house was only 2 long blocks away from Jamaica High School so I went past the school for many reasons other than baseball. One time I noticed in the distance a group of kids playing baseball in the corner of the park. The actual baseball field for high school games was only part of the park. Surrounding the field was a track and beyond the track was a corner where the kids were playing. The “bases” were old rags of some sort that were laid out maybe 60-70 feet apart (as opposed to the official high school field which was 90 feet apart). These distances were decided long before I began to play. In part it was determined by the fact that our throwing arms weren’t strong enough to make a throw from third base to first, or short to first with the bases 90 feet apart. Also, the pitcher’s mound was only about 45 feet from the plate as opposed to 60 feet for the same reasons.

Adapting to Inadequacies in Numbers and Positions
Our games never had 18 players. Mostly we had maybe 10 or 12. That meant that any kid who wanted to play could. We would adapt our rules to accommodate them. For example, we might decide that right field was in foul territory to shorten the distances to be covered by the outfielders. In addition, we might only have one outfielder to cover center and left. That wasn’t a big deal because most of us were not strong enough to hit it to the outfield. If you hit one on the other side of the high school track it was a home run. In right field there was large tree. As we got older and could hit the ball to the outfield more consistently and the right fielder had to play the ball off the trees. If someone hit a fly ball into the trees and the right fielder could catch the ball bouncing off the trees the batter was out. Needless to say, no one wanted to play right field! The pitcher and the catcher were not specialized positions. The catcher might not even be on the team on defense. It might be a player on the offensive team that was just backing up if the batter missed the ball or it was too far out of the strike zone. While the pitcher was on the defensive team, there were no balls and strikes. The pitcher’s job was to just get the ball over the plate so everyone could hit. There was no standing around. If you struck out it was because you missed the ball on the 3^rd strike after either missing or fouling off the first two. Our fields had pebbles and sometimes rocks in the infield. There were many bad hops, but you just took it in stride. In the outfield you had to look out for potholes, mole hills and gravel.

Choosing Up Sides
Choosing up sides was an opportunity to feel proud or humiliated depending on when you were picked. The best players were usually the ones who picked the teams. The better players were chosen first and players with less skill picked later. In those days, Brendan and Owen were two of the best as was Tony Cirillo and I. We could all hit homeruns. Tony and I played shortstop on opposite teams. The shortstop position was usually the best fielder on the team and got the most action. Tony had a great arm. My arm was average but I covered a lot of ground. Brendan and Owen were close friends and always wound up on the same team. I don’t know why. They were both big guys and it might have been the case that we were too afraid to get them on opposite teams. How was it determined who picked first? Well, some neutral player would hold a bat out and grip it tightly. One of the guys who wanted to be captain had three chances to kick the bat out of their hands. If they were successful, they got to pick the first player

Culture and Class
Most of these kids were working class Irish and Italian. Here is a list of the players I remember. Brendan Rice, Owen Brennan, Chris Green, Tony Circillo, James (Head) Circillo, Abe Circillo, Ronnie Christian, Billy Smolin, James Sheehy, Georgie Robles, Bernard Rubino, Evan Munkmeir; Danny Mettines , Billy Insulman, Kenny Lowe, and Frankie Majori. Once in a while a tall lanky guy would slither thorough the hole in the fence on his way to the library. What was odd was that this guy (I think his name was Luke) wanted to be the Pope. As you can imagine, he was mercilessly teased. We’d say “there goes the Pope!”. Our neighborhood was very unusual. Within an area of about a mile and a half we had three social classes represented. From Parson’s boulevard to Jamaica high was a working-class area. The closer you got to 168th Street the houses were lower middle class attached houses. Our block, 168th Street was middle class. I would say there was subliminal tension between us around social class which I will get to later.

What to do About Close Plays
Those adults and kids who were involved in Little League have no idea how easy they had it. The teams had coaches who determined who was going to play what position, and they had umpires who determined who is safe and who is out on close plays. In the sandlots we had to figure this out for ourselves. For us the captains determine the battling order and the positions. But the captain of a team was the first among equals. By a long process of trial and error we learned who was the best in each position so the captain barely had to say a word about who was going to play where. Also, the players themselves got to know who was a weak and a strong hitter and they would self-organize themselves accordingly. No one kept personal records of performances. We just knew what the score was and what inning we were in. To this day I cannot imagine how we kept track of close plays at home, first, second or third base. Our arguments were never technical or legal. They were always matters of who beat the throw and who didn’t. What was interesting as I remember it, is the arguments never lasted very long. We just wanted to keep playing. Our games were usually high scoring so a game was usually never determined by a single call.

The Passing of a Comet: Danny Mettines
My father never liked the kids I played ball with. He grew up very poor. His mother raised seven kids and they were “on the dole”. He was an artist who rose out of poverty to become a commercial artist. We lived in a middle class neighborhood (one square block) and he was afraid my baseball friends would be a bad influence on me. He was always trying to get be to play for church teams as an alternative. I never gave up my friends but I did play on one church team in grammar school. I could never get enough of baseball. At St. Nicholas of Tolentine the teams were organized with the names of native American tribes – The Mohawks, Algonquins, Iroquois, Cheyannes. One day the Mohawks showcased a pitcher who was a real phenom, Danny Mettinis. Danny just towered over us in terms of skill. As a left-handed pitcher he could strike out anybody. As a first baseman he could scoop the ball out of the dirt and do splits to sweep up errant throws from the infield. Danny ran like the wind and as a hitter he could hit the ball 100 feet further than any one else. He wasn’t a big guy but he was built like a tank. He was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. I prayed that he’d never find out about our games in the corner, but that day came.

When Danny came to participate in our games, he revolutionized the existing hierarchy. Brendon, Owen, Tony and I were all knocked off of top ranking. Danny was in a class by himself. Danny was a lefthanded power hitter who would not only hit balls into the trees but over them. He would regularly hit homeruns over the track. It was hard to lose a game if Danny was on your side. Danny was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. You didn’t want to get on his bad side.

For the Love of the Game: Joe Austin
On the actual playing field of Jamaica high, sometimes games and practices would be going on that were not connected to the actual high school baseball team. The players were older, maybe 15-17 years old. The person who was coordinating their practices was an old guy who I eventually came to know as Joe Austin. Joe was an ex-minor league baseball player who worked with kids in the neighborhood and eventually took them into leagues. Joe had skills way beyond any coach I had seen. If you happen to go to a baseball game early and watch the infield and outfield practices, that was the routine Joe would go through with his players. He would provide bats and balls for the players and when they were old enough to go into leagues, he would buy the uniforms. Joe worked at night in a brewery and then five days a week he would take the bus from his house on Sutfin Blvd about a mile to 168th Street. He would then walk 4 blocks to the field carrying bats, balls and gloves in a duffle bag. He was on the field from about 9AM to 3PM. When he went into leagues he named his teams Irish names. Like the Lepricons leprechaun? , Blarney Boys and Shannons.

When Joe thought we were old enough, he started coming to our choose-up games in the corner. He was not pushy at all. He provided bats and balls for us regularly and offered to umpire our games. This was a great relief for us as time wasn’t wasted arguing. He started to make lineup cards for us that he would draw on the back of a paper lunch bag. When we got a little older, maybe 11 or 12, he moved us to another part of the high school park, which had more room. Then he offered to pitch for both sides. This was a boom for us because he got the ball over the plate virtually all the time which speeded up the games. Joe had skills that in retrospect no other coach could ever come close to let alone match. He started to pitch us knuckleballs and curve balls us to get us used to hitting pitches other that weren’t straight. He also worked with kids who seemed to want to become pitchers and he taught them not only to throw curves, but sliders, screwballs, and forkballs. One kid, Joey Fitzgerald made it as far as the Mets farm system. Little did we know Joe was grooming us to be his next team, the Emeralds.

“Yaw wanna play ball, play ball! Ya don’t? Get the fuck off the field”
Joe always welcomed new players so that once we transitioned to a bigger field, more boys came to play. Now the teams each had 9 players on a side. We were bigger, stronger and we could hit the ball further. Younger kids started coming including Jesse Braverman (with whom I’m still friends), Joey Fitzgerald, Bobby Saca, John Brennan, Ritchie Ames. While Joe was very inclusive, he was also very demanding. Once you started playing in the games, Joe expected you to be there every day. Some of the guys I started with stopped coming to the choose-up games probably because they got tired of it. Their skills had leveled off or they got involved in other activities (some activities like drugs or stealing cars). But one player, a catcher by the name of Davey Heckendorn, made a conscious choice to stop playing, told everyone about it and he paid for it.

One day Davey came to the field with someone I had never seen before. I later found out his name was Joe Trapp. Davey started to cry as he announced he wouldn’t be coming anymore. His music teacher told him that if he continued catching, he would ruin his hands by digging the balls out of the dirt. Joe Trapp and David Bernstein were there to support him. As I recall, Joe cursed him out for quitting. If you can imagine what a response was like from a group of 15 predominately Italian or Irish boys hearing this, it wasn’t pretty. We mocked him for crying and I’m sure we threatened Joe and David with a good beating for even daring to come to our turf again. I spoke with him years later, and this is the first topic we discuss. In retrospect, this was one of many miserable things I did as a 12-13 year old.

The lazy hazy days of summer pick-up games with Joe
In spite of the intensity that Joe demanded I would say the two years we spent on the big field were the happiest of all my 13 years of baseball. I loved playing against people I knew and because there were no crowds, uniforms, bells or whistles it was easy to relax. During the course of a summer’s day we would have two games. One in the morning, starting about 9:30 and one after lunch. After the first game I would rush home for lunch, eat quickly and then run back to the field. As I remember it, we let Joe pick the teams instead of us choosing up. Joe had a very good sense of how to pick combinations of players who would make the teams evenly matched. As I recall it most of our games were close. I switched over from shortstop to second base because as the field was larger I couldn’t make the throw from short to first very easily. I started secretly keeping records of my hitting statistics – batting average, homers, RBIs, doubles and triples. Because we were bigger now and could hit the ball further the outfield became more attractive to play rather than a sentence of banishment.

Poetry in motion
One of my favorite activities was having Joe hit fungoes to me in the outfield. He would stand at home plate and I would be stationed in center field. With the wave of his hand, he would motion to me to run from center to right center. He would hit the ball to me perfectly, neither too far to make it uncatchable nor too easy where I would stand still and wait for it. I always had to catch it on the run. Then he would motion me to run to left-center back to right center field and the same thing would happen, back and forth for maybe 30-45 minutes. I loved to fact there was no fence to worry about crashing into. Playing the outfield really developed my arm so by the time I started playing that position I developed a really strong arm. Also, I was a very fast runner but you would never know it with me playing second base. Playing center field, I could utilize my speed to the max. I loved center because, like shortstop, it’s a position where you see the whole field at once.

Joe had nicknames for some of the players. He called me “Lash LaRue” after a movie he had seen where the cowboy used to strip a gunslinger’s gun out of his hand with a whip. Because my arm was pretty wild in center field when it was still developing, my throws home were often way off. He once yelled at me, “hey Lash, the backstop is 18 feet across. Do you think you get that shotgun within that range? I never took it personally. I was flattered that I had enough standing for him to tease me.

Crossing the Rubicon
We did not always just play games among ourselves. Occasionally we would get a challenge from a group from another neighborhood to play a game. The game was not slow pitch. It was with pitchers pretty much throwing fast balls as hard as they could with someone calling balls and strikes. These games were harder for everyone because we had to hit pitches coming at us at much greater velocity. Some of our better players stopped coming. Billy Smolin and Bernard Rubino didn’t return. Tony Circillo stopped being the power hitter he was, but hung on as a pitcher. Brendon Rice was not a good hitter once we switched to fast pitch but continued as a catcher. Chris Green and I made the transition as did Danny.

Our entry into organized leagues as the Emeralds
It was in 1961 when I was 13 that Joe moved us to play on the actual Jamaica High School field. It was around the same year that Joe prepared us to play in the Queens-Nassau League. We stopped playing pick-up games and when we were together it was strictly infield and outfield and batting practice. Joe bought all uniforms. He never made any cuts (telling players they didn’t make the team). I think in our first year we had close to 30 players on our team. I believe it was in 1962 that we had our first team. The league had players that could be up to the age of 17. Our oldest players were 14. Joe wanted to play in a league with older players because the competition would be good for us. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. Before we got into the league, we knew that we were much better than kids our own age. But playing against teams with players who were 2-3 older than we were was demoralizing. I think in the first year in the league we were 4-16. The next year we did better. I think we played about .500 ball. Our last year in the league we thought we could compete for the championship. I think we won more than we lost but we never won anything.

A taste of the East Side kids
Our team was a rough team, kind of like the East Side kids. We got into some fights with the other teams and probably the organizers of the league warned Joe. When we played occasionally in the suburbs we could feel the class tensions and this would carry over to Joe and his relationship with the other players. Joe would coach first base. Sometimes he’d get into razzing with opposing teams’ first baseman. One time
Joe told me to spike the first baseman. I said no. Joe took me out for a pinch runner.
Our team did not have good team spirit. We teased each other almost as much as we teased the other team.

Who’s in and who’s out?
Soon before our first year in the league two players we had never seen before started to come to our practices: Mark Kenny, Ronnie Gerreki. They were not from our neighborhood and naturally enough that challenged the existing pecking order. As I recall Mark Kenney’s father talked to Joe about taking Mark on the team. His father had professional aspirations for Mark and his father knew Joe would develop his talents. I think the same thing happened with Ronnie. Both Mark and Ronnie were very good. Probably the only player we had better than they was Danny. But there was a problem. Mark played short-stop and Ronnie played second. What was going to happen to the existing people we had to play short and second?

There were a number of tension points. One was the fact that Mark and Ronnie did not come up from the ranks. They just appeared, so naturally those who played with Joe for years would feel pushed aside. I was a good hitter and Joe still wanted me in the line-up so he moved me into center field where I had been practicing for a year or two. But we already had a center fielder, Frankie Majori. I was a much better hitter than Frankie and so because of me, Frankie was on the bench. This caused tension between some of Frankie’s friends and I who were also on the team. This was amplified by class conflicts. Frankie, Brendan and Bernard were working class. I was middle class and they knew it because they knew where I lived. I started to feel more isolated than I ever had.

My distance from others on the team was aggravated by the differences in where we went to school. Many of the Emeralds were also playing ball for Jamaica High School, a working class public school. My parents did not want me to go to Jamaica High. It was too rough and they thought I would get a better education at a Catholic school. So instead of going to a high school with my friends which was 2 blocks away, I was shipped off Holy Cross High School, three or four miles away. I was very angry at my parents for this and I had a major rift with my them that never really healed completely. Meanwhile the players who went to Jamaica high noticed my absence and probably concluded that I was spoiled, being shipped off to a private school. After I got home from school in high school, I would walk over to Jamaica High to watch my old friends play, hoping to find some solidarity and imagining I was in center field there. But my old friends rarely acknowledged me. I was an outsider. After a while I stopped going. It was too painful. I never even tried out for the Holy Cross baseball team. I hated going there and didn’t want to spend any extra time there.

My father coming to my games
Despite my father’s disapproval of Joe and the Emeralds, he came to the games. From his point of view it was a natural thing to want to watch your kid play ball. But with rare exceptions, none of the kid’s father’s came to the game, so he stuck out like a sore thumb. In addition, being Italian he would yell when I did something well. It was humiliating. I asked him not to come but he didn’t, telling me that the other kids were jealous because their fathers didn’t come to the game. He didn’t understand that for a 15-year-old teenager living in the United States in the early 1960s, the last thing they wanted was to be seen with their parents. One time we had a Saturday afternoon game in which the field we were supposed to play on was waterlogged by the previous days of rain. I got word that we would switch fields. I called my father to tell him not to come to the waterlogged field and that we were playing somewhere else. He asked me where, and I made believe I couldn’t remember it. Well, I was very happy to know I wouldn’t have to deal with him for a day. However, when I stepped up leading off the game in the new location, Tony Cirillo says to me from the bench, “hey Bruce, guess who’s here?”. It was my father, who must have made some phone calls and found the field.

My performance
I didn’t do nearly as well as I did in the pick-up games. In my three years with the Emeralds I think I hit about .260 or so. I was a streak hitter and better with runners on base. I was a good left-handed drag bunter so Joe translated that as my being a good leadoff batter. I wasn’t. I didn’t like taking pitches and my main goal was to get my cuts in. In retrospect, my best position was batting fifth, after Mark and Danny. That way I could hit with runners on base. The only reason I liked hitting lead-off was I would come to the plate more. Our home field was the 201^st Street field which had a short rightfield fence. It was a great experience to hit a ball over the fence and trot around the bases. Until then if I hit one deep over the outfielders I had to run it out as it was it was an inside the park homer. I hit some homers but I also had bad streaks. I once struck out six times in a double-header, four in the first game and two in the second. By the end of the game, Jesse’s brother Roger was pointing out what I was doing wrong in front of a small crowd. He meant well, but it was humiliating.

By my seventeenth birthday my time with the Emeralds was up. I either had to find a new team or stop playing. I had been playing ball for 10 years and wouldn’t know what to do with myself, so I played on. I played three more years, one with the Dukes in South Zone Park; one was with a team in Forest Hills and one with a team from South Jamaica. I will focus most on my crazy year with the Dukes. I learned more about myself and life than I ever dreamed of in all my years with Joe. I had to face my shadow side.

From Joe Austin to Ray Church and the Dukes
The shadow side of my baseball life
In all my years with Joe I was a very good player all around. I could hit for power, I was a very good center fielder, I had a good arm and I was fast. I started every game and finished every game That meant I could count on:

never being pinch-hit for;
never pinch-hitting;
Never being pinch run for
never pinch running; and
never going into the outfield for defensive purposes

Doing any of these things was a sign you were not a complete player and only had part-time status. Yet when I played for Ray Church, I had to learn to accept all these roles. But what I found was that as I rose to the occasion and in the process formed at deeper relationship with a coach that I ever dreamed of.

Who was Ray Church?
Ray Church was no Joe Austin. He could not hit fungoes like Joe. He couldn’t curse like Joe and he never played minor league baseball. I later found out the Ray worked at the LaGuardia airport in some administration capacity, he had been in the Air Force, and like Joe, he was single. What Ray had that Joe didn’t have was he was natural psychologist and social psychologist. Ray was very even-tempered and he seemed to have emotional relationships with most of players who were all about 17-18 years old. Ray was about 45 years old. My friend Jesse who used to represent Joe at the league meetings told me that Ray had coached the South Ozone Park Dukes for many years.

My introduction to Ray and Dave Laney
Dave Laney was a well-built, good looking, tall Irish kid with a mass of bleached blond hair and a red face. I never knew whether his face was red because he had been surfing or drinking. I later found out it was both. I played against Davey when I was with Joe. He was a good left-handed pitcher and first baseman with power. One day he showed up at our Jamaica high field to pitch informal battling practice. I didn’t know why he was here, given South Ozone park was about five miles or so from Jamaica. However, Joe remembered him, let him pitch to us and Dave fit right in. I happened to be hitting well in batting practice and remember hitting everything he threw – line drives. I hit one over the wall. The next pitch he just rolled in like he was bowling. “Try to hit that one” he said. We had a good laugh. I liked his spirit. So I asked him about playing for the Dukes. As if he had rehearsed ahead of time he gave me Ray’s phone number. It was only later that I suspected that Ray had sent him over to recruit me. Anyway, two days later I called Ray and asked him if I could play for him. He said “any one of Joe’s boys can play for me”. I asked him when the first practice was and we were off.

From center field to the bench
I got a late start in the Spring of 1968. The snow was slow to dry and so I wasn’t able to work out with Joe as I usually had (his “Spring training” began March 15^th). Also I had put on some 10 pound, possibly from drinking in the woods with friends. We had some practices but I was struck by how rudimentary the practices were compared to Joe. However, the players were very good. The Dukes started me in center field but after three games or so I think I only had one hit. Meanwhile a center fielder named Wally Shultz was tearing up his high school league hitting .500. So, by the fourth game Wally was in center and I was on the bench. Ray seemed to understanding how disheartening this way for me. Without too much prodding sitting in his car after a game I blurted out how my father was driving me nuts, trying to control me. Before the next game Ray, came to pick me up along with some other guys and drive us to the field. I invited him to come in and meet my parents, which he did. Soon after he told me how much he understood about my situation of being controlled after meeting my parents.

As the season went on I played some of the time but never constantly. The players were much more supportive of me than anything I had experienced with Joe and all the guys I grew up with. One thing I noticed is that whenever I started a game I was never pinch-hit for, even if I wasn’t doing well. I think Ray understood that would be more painful for me to start and be taken out than not starting at all. Ray had a couple of coaches who were more impatient with me than Ray and I felt Ray was defending me.

One time after another fight with my father, I called Ray and asked him to come get me. He did and we spent a long time talking at his house until about 1 in the morning. I was becoming more and more attached to him and the more I wanted to show him I was a better player than what I had shown so far.

I hit a pinch-triple
That summer I had been working at UPS unloading trucks. I dropped a 50-pound box on my foot so my toe was bandaged for a while. However, I didn’t want to miss our night game we were playing so I went to game. I could still hit but I couldn’t run very fast. In about the 8th inning of a game, Ray told me to pinch hit for a player. The first pitch was a high fastball which I fouled back. I thought to myself I would have creamed that in any other year but this one. Well, lo and behold the pitcher threw me the same pitch. This one didn’t get away from me. I tomahawked to straight away center. It must have been 100 feet over center fielder head. I lumbered around to third with triple. Ray called time out and took me out of the game for a pinch runner. This was so weird. I had never been pinch-run for before. But then again, I probably never pinch hit before starting to play with Ray. After the game I sat in Ray’s car crying. I was so happy I contributed something. We hugged.

A late inning defensive replacement
A little later in the summer when my foot healed and I lost the weight I had gained I found myself still on the bench. In the eighth inning of a game in which we were barely ahead, Ray called on me to replace Al Locaccio, a catcher who was only in left field because we needed his bat in the line-up. I hated left field because there was so little room to run. However, I was in no position to move Walley Shultz out of center. The field we were playing at was Rosedale. This field was notorious for fog. So sure enough, a right hand batter hits a long high drive towards me but curving foul. I keep on running into and through foul territory. I lose the ball in the fog but then it comes out of the fog and I snag it. I must have been 50 into foul territory. Our bench explodes with cheering. Mike Dunn, the other coach who was sympathetic to me looked at Ray in disbelief. Ray taps his forehead with his finger three or four times. I am fighting back the tears.

Ray confides in me he is gay
My relationship with Ray was obviously deepening. He invited me to his place on Friday nights a couple of times just to visit. I asked him questions about himself because I thought it was selfish of me to keep the focus on myself. He told me he wasn’t looking forward to going to his sister’s house on Sunday because they kept asking him when he is going to get married. He then said something to me like, “Bruce, I have to tell you something. I’m gay.” I didn’t have an adverse relation other than sympathy for the situation he was in with his sister. I asked him why he didn’t just tell her. He said he wasn’t ready to do that. It would send shock waves through his family. I understood. I was very pleased that I built up a relationship with him such that he didn’t have to say “don’t tell anyone”. He just knew I wouldn’t. I was proud of that.

Pinch hit double and score the winning run
We were a pretty good team and at the end of the year we were in contention to go to the playoffs. Maybe we were about 12-8. Our game was being played at my old 201^st street field where I played with the Emeralds. In our last game which was to determine if we were going to the playoffs or not I came up to pinch hit to start off the bottom of the 9^th inning of a game that was tied. Before I stepped to the plate Ray motioned to me to come towards him where he was coaching third base. He looked me straight in the eye and said “look, this is your turf. Act accordingly”. I went back to home plate looked it him. He always gave me a sign to hit line drives, and not to try to hit everything out of the park. I stepped in. The first pitch was a fastball right down the middle. I blasted it over the right field fence and over the Long Island Railroad tracks for a ground rule double (it wasn’t a homer for reasons I won’t go into.). As I look my lead off second, I noticed that instead of pitching from a stretch, the pitcher went into a full wind-up. I broke for third. I got such a great jump I was less that 10 feet from third base when Sandy Ameroso lined a single to right. It reached the right fielder in two hops. I paid no attention to any signals from Ray, I just instinctively thought I could beat the throw. I turned on the jets and slid safely underneath the throw which reached the catcher on a hop. Our dugout exploded from the bench to greet me at home. It was hard for me to cry in front of other boys. They didn’t seem to understand what I was crying about. But coach Mike Dunn and Ray knew what I was crying about.

Our end of the year party
Every year some sandlot baseball teams have a dinner in which the coaches give speeches and awards to the players. I was sitting at a table with one of some of the players I felt closest to. Since I batted .206 for the season, I was confident I wouldn’t be standing up for anything. So along with many other 18-year-old boys at a table, I started to drink. I was never much good at holding my liquor so after 3 beers I was pretty high and the room seemed foggy. Then out of the fog I hear my name. “For sportsmanship award, Bruce Lerro”. What the fuck” I think to myself. I don’t even know what the award is for. The people at my table already started laughing at the prospect of me walking to the front of the room. As I was making my way to the front, Ray, said “and to present him with this award, the only and only, Joe Austin” Now, Joe himself was known to drink a bit and it seemed like he too had been drinking. I got the trophy and wobbled back to my table. the players at my table were fighting off laughing until I was respectfully seated. Then they burst out full flush.

My happy ending with my Forest Hills team
I was done with the South Ozone park Dukes because I was too old. So the next year I hooked up with another team in Forest Hills Queens. I had a very good year with this team. I played center every game and I hit consistently throughout the year. But the climax came at the end of the year when we made the playoffs. This section has been taken from my article Facing the Music: Religion, Nationalism and Sports Have Enchanted the Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t

Making my dreams come true
In 1968 our team from Brooklyn got into a playoff game at Victory Field which was one of the fanciest fields around. My girlfriend, Rose Nuccio, let it be known to me that this was the last time she was coming to my games. Sunday was her only day to sleep in. “Besides” she said, “you are 0-8” (referring to my performance in the last two games.) She brought her sister Miriam along with her for this game. In the top of the first inning, I was up with two guys on base and two outs. The left-handed pitcher, Rick Honeycutt, threw me a high inside curve ball.

“Tshrush”! I tomahawk the pitch and the ball really does head for the right center field fence just like in my fantasy 13 years ago. As I watch the ball head for the fence time and space seem to contract. It’s as if I were in my backyard 13 years ago. The ball lands on the tennis courts on the other side of the fence scattering everyone. I am so out of it that as I make my rounds of the bases, I miss first base. The coach has to get me to touch the base. As I round second, I see Rosie and Miriam jumping up and down screaming like two young Italian gals will. The look on Rosie’s face as our eyes met was like a melting ray of sunlight that united our eyes. I missed third base, too. Finally, as I headed for home most everyone on our team came out to home plate to meet me. It was as if we won the World Series. I disappeared in a mass of teammates at the plate.

A thirteen year life cycle is complete dialectically. I returned to my fantasy of thirteen years ago, on a higher level, deeper, richer more real. I tell this story in my Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric class to point out the Propagandistic power of Sports. There is rarely a dry eye in the house.

The post Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Collective Creativity of Workers

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 09:41:57 +0000

Orientation

Summing up Part I

My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from the other workers. But then I show how romantic theories of art get in the way of seeing creativity as also a collective process rooted in history. I discuss the creative process of the artist, but then close by following Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller in demanding that an artist’s whole life should be a work of art.

What’s ahead?

We are now ready to discuss creativity at the macro level of workers. Like sleeping giants for the last 5,000 years workers have been unconsciously shaping and reshaping society. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.But then with the rise of caste and class societies, collective creativity in labor became unconscious and alienated. The magical rituals of egalitarian societies that united all the arts in the service of magic is undermined. What happens is:

all the magical preparations that involve the arts – mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, song, dance – become separate fields and secularized;
the arts are used as a handmaiden and supporter of the monotheistic religion; the Catholic Church’s use of painting, sculpture and music are used to praise an otherworldly god.

But then I describe how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary situations where workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils. Ultimately, in communist society all the arts will be joined again in communist magical activity which will include the merger of the sciences and the arts in the service of communist planning, the development of high technology which allows us to do more and more with less and less. Unlike in tribal societies where creativity was mostly collective, in communist societies creativity will be conscious at both the individual and group level.

Creativity as Collective Activity

Labor as human species activity

In order to earn a living in our environment and solve problems the human species has to work. Work involves collective-creative cooperation in the process of deciding on a means of subsistence, making and using tools, harnessing energy, dividing up the work and sharing the resources if successful. Labor is the totality of collective human energy, both physical and mental, which is expended on reproducing society, hence reproducing human beings. It is creativity beyond how an individual lives their life. The problem is that this is unconscious collective-creativity.

Co-creation of the socio-sphere

Labor creates and sustains human society. Over tens of thousands of years the activity of working and using up resources over generations has introduced creative changes onto the surface and depths of Earth. This socio-sphere is like a film, a social membrane which has also developed over generations. The socio-sphere overlays and interacts with the biosphere. The earth is our collective canvas that we have been painting for the last 100,000 years. We are thus self-transforming beings. By the practical transformation of the world through working we find ourselves changed, we find ourselves in a new world, a world of our own making, a world which invites us to satisfy new needs, desires and powers. Let me briefly review:

the reproduction of the human species is a collective-creative activity, labor, which is largely unconscious;
human labor creates a new level of evolution beyond the biosphere, human society, a “socio-sphere”;
this socio-sphere is the collective canvas of humanity, but so far we have been painting behind our own backs, as if sleepwalking.

From society to history

Human social institutions are shaped and in turn shape the biosphere, but as society changes over time, it can no longer simply be understood as an extension of biological evolution. The “aging” process of society becomes human history which developed its own processes and laws that are not reducible to the biosphere. History-shaping includes periods when particular means of subsistence were dominant—hunting-gathering, horticulture, agriculture, industry. These ways of life come into being as creative strategies to ward off population pressure and a resource depletion crisis.

Human practice

History is the story, the ongoing saga, the odyssey of the marriage of society’s actions and consequences upon the rest of nature over time. This is called human practice, which is partly conscious and partly unconscious, and contains these ingredients:

those collective actions which we consciously design and succeed at, such as roads or buildings which last;
those collective actions which we consciously design and fail at, such as a rocket ship which fails to leave the launching pad or a bridge which collapses;
collective endeavors which are unconscious but which have consequences which accumulate behind our backs. For example, the long-term effects of shabby health-care, education and housing on the productivity of a society.

The historical unconscious

It is this last dynamic that we can speak of as the historical unconscious. This is a result of a series of collective actions which slip beyond our attention span and over which we lose control. The collective sleep walk is our everyday work-life. We become unaware of the effect of our collective actions or inactions upon the production of history. We are like painters who are too close to the canvas to see what we are doing.

There are social institutions which produce a kind of collective defense mechanisms – ideologies. These go with the suppression of this historical unconscious. This is where history is presented as something other than the collective creative activity of the average individual working and breeding. Either taken together or taken separately, here are some examples:

history is the story of political institutions that appear to have a life of their own;
history as the story of spectacular events or the work of extraordinary people;
history is exclusively about the past.

In the first case, behind the institutions and the upper class and upper-middle class elites who embody these institutions are the countless laboring actions which provide the food and other necessities that provide those classes with what they need to govern. Without the work of the lower classes, these institutions would cease to function. The second proposition assumes that only vivid and unusual events created by extraordinary men make up history. Everyday events and the average person who makes them stand outside of history. The third proposition ignores that history is always being made in the past, present and future. It ignores the possibility that groups can intervene in history by using what is known about the past to change the future. In fact, we cannot shape history. We either shape it consciously or it is shaped unconsciously.

Creativity as matters of scale

Summing up: creativity can be expressed as matters of scale as:

the particular objects (paintings, sculpture, writings) or performances (dance, music) of individuals;
the lives of individual people;
the collective creativity of history shaping of the entire human species.

The Alienation of Collective Creative Activity in Class Societies

So how did it come to be that the collective creativity of humanity, labor in shaping history and the lives of individuals were not connected to creativity and the only activity associated with creativity was the arts?

Egalitarian hunting and gathering societies and participatory magic

In egalitarian hunting-gathering and in simple horticultural societies, collective-creativity – labor – was collective and conscious. People decided together what the means of subsistence was, what the division of labor would be, how long they would work, what tools they would fashion and how the fruits of their labor would be distributed.

At the same time, before going out to hunt, gather plants or cultivate them preparation was needed. Magical rituals were undertaken to increase the chances of success. Most, if not all the activities which we now associate with art including mask-making, drawing, music, dance and theatre were once magical rituals. In the beginning both arts and crafts were in the service of magic, and magic was in the service of transforming the world.

Chiefdoms and pristine states

As hunting-gathering societies and simple horticultural societies became more complex commodity production emerged. Alongside arts and crafts in the service of ritual, we now have arts and crafts as secular activities in the service of commodity production. With the emergence of state civilizations 5,000 years ago, there is a split between conscious and unconscious creativity. Conscious creativity is channeled into three social arenas.

economic and political collective managerial decisions of the ruling class over social policy;
religiously in the collective construction of myths and rituals by a priest or priestess caste;
religiously in the alienation and projection of the collective-creative activity of humanity into the plans and actions of gods and goddesses;
artistically in that a class of artists and artisans emerge who produce profane objects not only for public sale, but objects which for ideological support, as for example, monumental architecture for the ruling class. A second group of objects is in the service of conspicuous consumption by the ruling class.

Fall of magic and the rise of religion

With the fall of magic and the rise of monotheism, art ceases to be a collective-creative activity and becomes the act of isolated and rarefied individuals who prostitute themselves to religious authorities. Art becomes a wandering ghost, with a methodology but without an ontology.

Capitalist Societies

At the same time, the work of the lower classes becomes alienated, more or less mechanized and unconscious. In other words, the work itself contributes to the creative reproduction of society. But because the lower classes do not participate in the design and implementation of social policy, because they do not reap the full fruits of their labor (most of it is given over to the ruling class and its minions) their part of the creative contribution to society appears alien. The lower classes become unconscious of the full weight of what they produce. They merely perceive their work as something that reproduces their own life and the life of their family, rather than for the whole of society.

Making History Collectively Consciously

There is a kind of collective creativity which surfaces periodically in our society and sometimes sustains itself alongside the social unconscious. These activities are harbingers of what collective creative activity might look like in a post class society. The first kind is the spontaneous response of groups of people to natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes and swarming lizards. These collective actions are more or less reactive to circumstances and they dissipate when the catastrophic events have subsided. We will call this “historically conscious” collective creativity. There is another kind of collective-creative activity which is ongoing and designed to change history. This is the collective-creativity of social movements. Marx called this practical critical activity. I will also call this “historically self-conscious creativity”.

People in natural disasters

The following is a description of a personal experience I had with others during a snowstorm. The setting is New York City in the early 1960’s. I am 15 years old. It is the dead of winter in January and about 3:30 in the afternoon. It has been snowing for days. Upon leaving high school I see that the snow drifts have smothered all traffic. Things seem eerily still. In the distance I see something moving. Someone is coming towards me, waving for me to meet him. My fleeting reservation fizzles in the face of the starkness of these extraordinary circumstances. He asks me to help him push his car to the side of the road. As we begin, I notice that we have been joined by two or three others who spontaneously pitch in. When the car is safely pushed to the side of the road, we proceed to help the latest arrivals dig their cars out. More people come along. They suggest we all shovel out the entire street, since then we will all have access to the main road. Since I don’t have a car, this is not relevant to me. Still, I am caught up in the moment and what under normal circumstances I wouldn’t do in the name of individual self-interest, I find myself doing anyway. We organized ourselves into little groups and worked into the night

What is happening here? I am hustling about, shoveling here, pushing there. I have long since forgotten about eating. I feel as if I’m regressing in time, as if I were 8 or 9 years old. My adolescent posturing has wilted and, in its place, seeps an adventurous joy of plotting and scheming with playmates long ago. But this time, instead of “let’s pretend” fantasies, the snow and the storm invite us to actually change reality.

As this street-clearing project takes shape, we relax a little. Strangers are laughing and joking. Grateful neighbors are out in the street. Some offer hot chocolate and a hardy fire to war up by. Someone throws a snowball at me from across the street. A man in a three-piece suit ducks behind a car to avoid retaliation. How bizarre! But then this whole episode suggests something forbidden, not of this world. Time seems to have stopped. Since no traffic is moving, the street is ours to do anything we want with the piled-up snow, from sleigh-riding to castle-building to snowball fights. Kids come out of the houses and begin sleigh riding. Some are carrying ice skates on their way to a frozen pond three blocks away.

Both in process and result, we have created the seeds of a new social life. The labor of clearing the street, digging out cars, chopping ice was a spontaneously organized collective activity, achieved without coercions from authorities nor with the carrot of wage labor as a consolation. But some nameless abdication, we have inherited some hidden recess in the Himalayas.

Sometime around 7:00 pm the snow has stopped. The snow plows are out and traffic has begun to move. People acknowledge their exhaustion and car pool for rides home. But I don’t want this to end! I no longer have a material foundation to house the exuberance I felt that has begun to rapidly dissipate. I felt joy with those people in the wild snow, but the snow has been tamed. What do I do with the joy? Under what social conditions could I feel this way again? Will I ever feel this way again? Rarely have I despised the prospect of “normal life” as much as I did then. It is as if the freshly plowed street was like the sun beating on my face, early in the morning, awakening me from an enchanting dream.

On that twilight winter’s day, social life itself seemed as pliable, as impressionable as a slab of clay or a blank canvas. In our collective actions – shoveling snow, pushing cars, chopping ice – we experienced a creative process similar to what the individual artist lives through from the beginning to the end of a single painting – inspiration, a flurry of activity and finally a new artifact or situation. Our snow shovels were our paints and brushes, and the street, that microscopic chunk of social terrain, was our canvas. Society turned out not to be an impenetrable aggregate of frozen institutions, but a vast network of activities whose future is open-ended.

Under normal circumstances it is hard not to think of social institutions as solids rather than liquids, as nouns rather than verbs, as things rather than processes. Just as a fan revolving at maximum speed does not reveal how the individual rudders are connected or even visible, so too, the macroscopic “social fan” of life under normal times whirls too quickly and over too vast a terrain (an entire country) to display its structural components, the collective creativity of people working to produce the life of social institutions. It is as if the snow storm clogged a small corner of the rudder long enough for its constituent elements to become detectable.

Social movements

The second kind of collective creative activity is more assertive. Instead of reacting to extraordinary circumstances, social movements are on-going rather than sporadic and they are, at least in some cases, dedicated to creating extraordinary social conditions. These movements aspire to actively change the course of history.

Let’s take a very small, simple example. Let’s say a group of neighbors call a meeting to combat the rise of drugs and prostitution in their neighborhood. In order to address the problem, these people must meet more than once if to have a chance of being successful. Phone calls need to be made, petitions drawn up, house to house calls made, flyers designed, meetings with local neighborhood mediators scheduled and a system of vigilance set up. This endeavor involves collective creative activity. Like all creative actions there comes a point where the work they have done is tested by the larger community response including, the surrounding neighborhoods, the dealers, the prostitutes, their Johns and the police.

The reactions of these groups affect the future plans that these neighbors made. Resistance calls for one set of plans while a positive response calls for another. Other neighbors might be indifferent, the police ignore the problem, but a local socialist politician is supportive and willing to work with them. Just as an artist will alter the subject matter of his work, together with the color scheme or medium in response from the public, so too this community of neighbors will develop new plans and theories based on their practice. Social movements can be reformist (as above) or they can be revolutionary. In some cases, social movements seize power and transform the economic and political relations. This is the highest form of historically self-conscious collective-creative activity.

Workers’ councils

Especially in the last 150 years, there erupted a series of attempts to take over social life without capitalists, or without the state. These “workers’ councils” arose out of irreversibly critical situations in the existing order. In some situations, they emerged alongside the state, creating a “dual government”. When the state fell, some workers’ councils spread over a wider terrain. During the Spanish revolution they reached as much as 1/3 of the country. In some cases, they not only governed without the state but in places they abolished the local currency and began their own system of exchange. These experiments took place during revolutionary processes when the official authorities lost power but before their power was regained. The organization of this world and the experiences that participants experienced must have been beyond their wildest dreams. These movements lasted as briefly as 3 days (the Seattle General Strike) or as long as 3 years (the Spanish revolution).

Like most social movements, these councils began by simply reacting to the abuses of the existing order. Workers wanted higher wages, better working conditions, most justice. But once the authorities lost power, these workers found themselves doing far more than they bargained for. Though these workers’ councils were inventive and festive, like all creative activity it was productive and it contained its own collective discipline. In Spain, following the failure of Franco’s coup in 1936, at least one third of the country was self-managed with better productive records than the overthrown government. This was done in the middle of a civil war!

The internal organization of the councils expressed the creativity it was demonstrating in the world. They were organized in an anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic manner. The workshop of the councils, the foundation from which all decisions were made, was the general assembly. Whatever resolutions resulted were carried out by mandated delegates who had no independent power of their own (unlike representatives who, once elected have power to make their own decisions). They merely carried out decisions already made in the assembly. Secondly, these delegates were often rotated so that no one got too comfortable being a permanent authority. Lastly, the delegates were immediately revocable. This means that any abuses of power were grounds for immediate termination. There were little state bureaucratic procedures or the political red tape where population had to wait until the next election.

In both their amazing coherence of their social management capacities and the profound change in the quality of their interactions, these experiments were truly “out of this world”. In fact, the depiction of what happened to the participants runs into the same problems that any mystic or artist or anyone who has had a peak experience has when they try to describe what happened to them. How do you describe an experience which seems almost that it is on another plane of reality than the language of the existing order.

Where did they occur? Workers’ councils have dotted the globe in at least the following countries:

The Paris Commune of 1871
The St. Petersburg Soviet of 1905
The Russian Revolution of 1917
Short-lived experiments in Poland, Italy, Germany and Bulgaria between 1917-1920
The Seattle General Strike of 1919
The Spanish Revolution of 1936 (for most of the first year and then on and off until 1939)
The Hungarian Revolution of 1956
The French General Strike of 1968
The Chilean Revolution 1970-1973

Workers’ councils today exist in hundreds of factories in Argentina and are present in an embryonic form in workers’ cooperatives around the world. Let us look at how the metamorphosis begins.

The Paris Commune: From Reacting to Collective Creativity

In order to envision how these workers councils begin, we will combine the descriptions from the Paris Commune of 1871 with the French General Strike of 1968. The Paris Commune emerged at the tail end of the Franco-Prussian war. It began as a patriotic movement at odds with its government which it felt was conducting the war in a half-hearted manner. In 1870 while the army was called to the front, the National Guard was called on to defend the fortifications in Paris.

The war fever that now gripped the city generated a patriotic demand that all citizens be armed. Within a few weeks, there were over 130 new battalions, making a total of some 300,000 Parisians in the National Guard. ‘No one could call himself a citizen’ it was being said “unless he had a rifle’. The cry was for more arms, and the authorities were forced to distribute hundreds of thousands of weapons to those flocking to join the newly formed battalions. (Steward Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 1871, 21).

Here we have an armed, but so far merely patriotic population. The change from this to a social revolution began on March 18, 1871:

Thiers [then the head of the government] sees the armed workers of Paris as his main obstacle to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Bismarck {head of Prussia]. He decides to send ‘loyal battalions to remove the cannons… the operation starts successfully in the early hours of the morning…but the operation has been bureaucratically and inefficiently planned. The necessary gun carriages don’t arrive to remove the captured guns. The crowd begins to grow. Women, children, old people mingle with the troops…Some …start talking to the guard. When General Lecomte, losing his head, orders his troops to fire, it is already too late. The soldiers refuse to fire, turn their rifle butts up…soldiers and civilians have fraternized…the soldiers who have deserted their regiments shouted to them to surrender, but they stayed in the saddle, and continued to spur their horses on furiously…’cut the traces’…The crowd let out a great cheer…the women closest to the cannons, to which they had been clinging to for half an hour took the knives that the men passed down to them from hand to hand…the maneuver was carried out amid joyful laughter and cheering. The artillerymen were carried off by their mounts and found themselves cut off from the guns and surrounded by groups of people inviting them to fraternize. They were offered flasks of wine and meat rolls… They were soon won over to the side of the rebels. The cannon had been retaken. . (Steward Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 1871, 63).

Two points are worth mentioning. First, revolutions begin when situations get desperate enough to where formerly indifferent or hostile groups recognize they have more in common with other groups than they had first suspected. In this case the soldiers, who were supposed to be loyal to their commanding officers. But in reality, most soldiers are working class. They have more in common with the people in the streets than with their officers. When a critical mass of soldiers refuses to follow orders, it undermines and limits what loyal soldiers can do. From the disarming of these solders the next logical step is the building of the barricades. For a portrayal of this we turn to the French general strike of 1968.

Here with the help of cars, billboards, railings, torn off branches, trees, as well as cobblestones, the first serious barricades went up…(Singer, Daniel Prelude to Revolution, 127) anything could serve the purpose… a neighboring building site was a real treasure. The most precious find there was an air hammer, which, once mastered made it possible to open up the streets wholesale. The paving stones then went from hand to hand…people were coming down with sandwiches, drinks, chocolate.” (139-140).

Whereas yesterday social life appeared as this alienated series of exchanges out of the control of most everyone, for days, weeks, months and even years in some places, these alienated institutions revealed their true nature as malleable institutions dependent on the continued alienated activity of workers for their very life. When social life stops their true origin in labor reveals itself. When social life resumes without these institutions people begin to grasp how superfluous capitalists and the state really are to social production and reproduction.

Seattle, 1919

The Seattle strike of 1919 was different than other strikes. The ship workers did not simply shut everything down and limit themselves to a set of demands. They used the strike as a stepping stone for starting things up under their own management. Additionally, the strikers organized themselves to provide essential services in areas not under the direct control of the strikers, such as taking care of hospital laundry, getting milk to babies, and collecting wet garbage. They didn’t stop at controlling their own factories or buildings. They related to the entire city as if it was theirs. Just as Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued, in expanding the terrain of their management they gradually learned how the city is run:

The strikers were at once brought face to face, with the way in which the whole community, including their own families, is intrinsically tied together… if life was not to be made unbearable for the strikers themselves. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 280).

Here are some of the achievements of the milk wagon drivers who:

…established through their own organization thirty-five neighborhood milk stations all over the city…The stations were announced as open from nine to two., but the milk was always gone before noon. The amount handled increased as the days went on until about 3,000 gallons were handled in various stations. The first day the supply ran noticeably short…but by the third day…the irregularities were ironed out and the supply was more adjusted to the need. (Root and Branch: The Rise of the Workers Movements, 254-255).

The most intense and complex re-organization fell to the provision trades, charged with feeding the strikers:

Some 21 eating places were opened in various parts of the city. The food was cooked in large kitchens…and then transported to various halls where it was served cafeteria style …(R and B, 256-257)…Locations had to be found, numbers of diners estimated, food purchased, equipment borrowed or bought, transportation problems solved. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 127).

The resolution of these problems depended upon an improvised community of people who probably barely knew each other, without the benefit of any pre-existing organization and in open hostility to all established authority. There were delays in the opening day of this “feeding depot” for many reasons:

…there was no corps of dishwashers to keep up the meager supply of dishes until the waitresses union, assisted by patrons, leaped into the breach…By the second day however, the difficulties were much reduced and meals began to appear with regularity. (R and B 256-257)…By the last day of the strike, 30,000 meals a day were served without a hitch. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 128).

In summary,

…the machinery of the strike, so hastily arranged…was astonishingly successful bogging down in only a few spots. Initial mistakes were quickly corrected. No one starved or lacked heat; no children had to do without milk: no sick or injured were denied hospital care. (Robert Friedheim, The Seattle General Strike, 126).

Commonalities between natural disasters, social movements, workers’ councils and artistry

Both kinds of history shaping – reactions to natural disasters and consciously planned as in social movements – require the spirit of the arts and those who make them. Art, like all forms of creativity, has its feet in both worlds. On one hand, it is an expression of what is possible. On the other hand, it reproduces and justifies the old world. But the highest form of art does not represent reality, or even make pictures of the world to come. Artists must supersede art itself and use artistic talents in the planning, together with others, the world to be built. Henry Miller sensed something like this when he wrote:

One has to pass beyond the sphere and influence of art. Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant, it merely points the way…All art will one day disappear…and life itself will… definitely and for all time usurp the field… (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, 162).

History of Conscious and Unconscious Creativity

I would like to close by summarizing the place of creativity in the human species, both at the individual and collective levels, at the micro world of individual development and the macro world of history.

Bio-social, historical foundations

First, creativity in general was a survival strategy that human beings use in competition with other species for resources. Second, we built an envelope around the earth, a “socio-sphere” first locally then regionally, then nationally and finally globally. Third, there is the building up of a thickening crush of human history as human societies change over time.

Creative and conscious creativity in egalitarian societies

There is conscious collective creativity involved in the production, circulation, distribution and consumption of goods. There is also conscious collective creativity involved in magical rituals for hunting and planting societies and these magical activities include all the arts, including mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, singing and dancing.

Unconscious creativity in caste and class societies

This appears in the alienated labor of peasants and workers in Bronze Age, Iron Age civilizations as well as feudal societies and industrial capitalist and socialist societies.

Conscious creativity in caste and class societies

This exists in the economic and political design and implementation of social policies by elites—priests, priestesses, aristocrats and merchants. Secondly, in the religious construction of myths and rituals by priestly castes. Third, in the religious projection of creativity out of humanity in the forms of the activity and characteristics of gods and goddesses in the work of priest and priestesses. Further, there is a sacred and secular realm in individual creativity of men and women in the arts and crafts which serves the ruling classes as conspicuous consumption. Lastly, as we have seen, there is conscious creativity in the work of those involved in survival during natural disasters and in social movements.

Conscious creativity in communist societies

The first stop is what people do in revolutionary situations. The description of the activities in workers’ councils is an example. From there, maximum collective creative activity lies in the political and economic decision about the production and circulation of goods and services by a dialectical exchange between the local and regional workers councils on the one hand and the centralized socialist state on the other. This happens first locally regionally and internationally. The same process occurs when the human species sets up civilizations in outer space. In addition, there are collectivist myths and rituals for socialists which draws from the rich traditions of Neopaganism. In the process women and men re-own their alienated labor and become goddesses and gods themselves. On the individual level there are not visionary arts in the service of socialism

Conclusion: Healing the Split Between Conscious and Unconscious Collective Creative Activity

As I’ve shown in the last section, collective responses to natural disasters and the building of social movements are examples of attempts to make collective creativity conscious. In the case of social movements, through what Marx called “practical-critical activity”. In the case of workers’ councils, examples include conscious creativity in the service of building dual power proto-communist organizations.

Conscious collective creative activity under communism

Collective creativity would express itself in the design and implementation of political and economic organization and no longer be determined by aristocrats, capitalists or state bureaucrats. Secondly, whatever myths and rituals remained in society would be co-created by everyone, not by a priestly caste. Thirdly, humanity would re-own the projection of its creations as the work of gods and goddesses and simply recognize that humanity creates itself over time and across space through laboring. Lastly, while there would be arts and artists who would pursue their work on an individual basis, the arts would be freed from the service of the ruling class either as ideology or for conspicuous consumption. The arts would no longer be for elites. On a collective level, the arts would return to their magical roots, not as superstition but in the form of visions of the world being born through mask-making, drawing, sculpture, music, dancing, theater and writing for a socialist future.

How would conscious collective creativity be different in a post-class society in comparison to a pre-class society? In at least three areas – scale, technology and material wealth. Collective creativity in the socialist future would not be local or regional, but national and international. Secondly, the technology used to make goods and services as well as communication will be vastly superior to tribal societies. Products will be of higher quality and made in less time. Lastly, the amount of wealth produced would make it possible for everyone to live in great comfort. Fifty five years ago, Buckminster Fuller argued that we have the material wealth in place so that every member of the population could live a middle-class lifestyle and work about 20 hours per week. The impediments to this are not natural scarcity, but economic and political class war. The anarchist Fredy Perlman, who understood Marx very well, once said that in tribal societies people were much but had little; in class societies people had more but were less; in socialist society people will have more and be more.

• First published in https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org

The post The Collective Creativity of Workers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Collective Creativity of Workers

Bruce Lerro — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 06:03:06 +0000

Orientation

One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most powerful forms of creativity are collective, not individual. One problem is that with the evolution of society into social classes the collective creativity of workers and peasants is buried in their alienated social-historical unconscious. Making this collective creativity conscious is inseparable from making a social revolution.

I proceed first by discussing individual creativity. I begin by describing the ways in which the artist is different from other workers. Then I connect this to the values and limitations of the romanticization of art. Then I discuss what an artistic person is like. In the second part of my article I discuss the field of history. First, I talk about how all the arts were once integrated into magical activity in egalitarian hunting and gathering and horticultural societies.

There is the long shadow of alienation of collective creativity in caste and class societies. But then I show how even within capitalist societies there are instances during natural disasters, social movements and ultimately revolutionary times when workers express their collective creativity consciously in the construction of workers’ councils.

The Artist as a Visionary

The life of an artist provokes many, if not most, people. Whether dismissed as a good-for-nothing slacker, a vehicle through which the Muses may speak or just an eccentric personality, an artist in the 21st century West is not boring. One reason is that artistic activity flies in the face of that old sop, “you can’t mix business with pleasure”. In its highest moments, considered as a process (rather than a product), artistic activity approaches a synthesis of work and play as well as work and pleasure.

For most of my twenties I worked in various blue-collar jobs, unloading and loading trucks and driving a forklift in a warehouse. Wage-labor, especially the unskilled kind, is so mechanical and deadening it became associated with suffering. It was something I hated to do, a drudge to be gotten over with, a scourge to be wistfully contrasted to “the good life”. After years of this kind of work, it is difficult not to generalize from this particular job to work in general. Among workers not only is work avoided like the plague, as Marx says, but activity itself can come under suspicion. By activity I mean purposeful, non-frivolous deeds which require concentration and the exertion of will. When activity is done under alienated conditions, it is experienced as a dissipation. Rather than experiencing the outpouring of energy as producing more energy, the expenditure of energy is felt to be a loss.

One the other hand, if the hatred of work because synonymous with activity, then the good-life appears to be consuming sprees of mass media, sporting events and concerts, sensual, sexual pleasure, substance abuse and rest. In the United States, even active play like table games, video games, dancing or travel far from home competes with TV, or internet surfing. Rather than an interlude, a moment of respite and fertilization for the more gratifying work to come, leisure becomes an end-in-itself. Bourgeois utopias are written about a time when leisure will be all there is.

However, we all need a rest from rest. Justifiably, there is a sense of uneasiness when idleness is posed as a way of life, and the discomfort is not limited to puritanical preachers. Many of us can sense this House of Death, jingling with the trappings of divine honors, as Nietzsche said, when we refuse to retire from jobs, even miserable ones, because we “wouldn’t know what to do with ourselves.” I wonder how many people unconsciously kill themselves before or soon after retirement, when we start to get a full dose of “leisure for leisure’s sake”. Contrary to superficial notions of pleasure, rest can be disturbing just as activity can be alienating.

The road in between the cycle of hard, mechanical work and passive consumption lies the road of the artist. And she is not alone. Skilled workers, middle class professionals such as teachers, along with upper-middle class professionals such as doctors and architects, know better and use what is called “best practices”. For these folks share with the artist a certain joy in the activity of working. Clearly there is a joy in making objects, pictures, music, in dancing and acting for anyone who does it as leisure. But engaging these activities as a way of life creates a sensitivity that escapes others. It is not just the end result that sets the artist afire, in either joy or exasperation. It is the process of production over and over again which invites a sensitivity that we know as the creative process. If, as Nietzsche says, maternity is the love of what is growing within one, then the artist knows well the joys of expectant motherhood. Once impregnated with an idea, she gleefully muses on how it will come to be: who is the audience; what is the theme; which materials will I use; what technical obstacles will challenge me?

The careful ascertainment of how we shall do so, and the art of guiding it with consequent authority – this sense of authority is for the master builder, the treasure of treasures – renews in the modern alchemist something like the old dream of the secret of life (Creative Process, Brewster Ghiselin, p. 150).

In this self-contained magical workshop, in this valley of fertility, the artist pushes and pulls, she hems and haws, and when the oils dry, when the clay is fired, when the curtain falls a baby begins to make its way through the world.

Every artist is at heart a magician. Just as the shaman ventures into the forest or the desert on his vision-quest, so the artist heads for her secluded place of work, fitfully muttering “good riddance” to daily distractions. Alone at last, she surrounds herself with her talismans – a hat with a feather, a ring of beads. Like the Greek chorus, they whisper to her of previous glorious ventures, revelation. “Yes” they tell me, “this time you too can make magic on paper”.

Magical considerations of timing motivate the artist’s habits. Just as a magician studies the stars and arranges her correspondences, so too the artist becomes attuned to when and how she does her best work. What are the optimum conditions? What stage of the creative process is most appropriate based on her mood that day? What non-artistic activities are most likely to stimulate further creativity? The artist becomes sensitive to knowing when persistence pays off and when it doesn’t. In short, the artistic creative process is a secularization of a magical ritual:

In the minor occurrences of everyday life which passed unnoticed…the person disposed towards the creative life repeatedly finds clues, fragile portents which he seizes as the basis of some future identity at odds with the social pressures prevailing about. He lives like Schubert’s wanderer, in search of the land which speaks his language. (Dialectical Economics, L. Marcus, p. 100)

Artists can be understood as the link between the old world and the one which may be born:

How can an individual within capitalist society base his identity on a non-capitalist set of identity and world-outlook? In the study of creative personalities. (Dialectical Economics, p. 98)

Limitations of Romantic Theories of Art

The following bullets below are the beliefs and assumptions of Romantic theories of art. Let us take them one by one. The first two beliefs can be taken together. Like other animals, the human species has to adapt to its environment. Creativity is rooted in the capacity to solve problems that its environment presents. Since all human beings problem-solve, all human beings have some degree of creativity. The Romantic artist not only fails to see the creativity necessary for people to live in everyday life, he also images that the very involvement in the arts bestows upon him the mantle of creativity. By merely crossing the sacred portals of the arts each novice becomes initiated into the mysteries of creativity. It’s as if artists could never be accused of being mechanical or uncreative just because they are artists. But on the contrary, there can be instances of everyday problem solving that involve more creativity than an artistic product.

We can also combine tenets three and four. Romantic artists have a distrust of groups. Rooted in the individualist reaction to the mindless repetition of factory work of the industrial revolution, romantic artists think of groups only as a force for conformity or obedience to the authorities. The Romantic takes the alienation between the individual and society as given. He ignores the fact that extraordinary social circumstances, such as natural disasters and revolutions, can bring out the most of an individual’s creativity.

When the Romantic artist discounts planning and structure, he accepts that creativity is fundamentally unreasonable or irrational activity. On one side are the emotions, intuition and spontaneity and antithetical to that are reason, organization and constraints. It is hard to imagine how a Romantic artist who made their living from art could hold these beliefs. To sell a work to the public requires rationality, organization and deadlines. Only individuals who are supported by others or dabble in the arts as a form of therapy can imagine art as antithetical to organization, planning and setting priorities.

What is the place of shock in the arts? Surely one of the callings of the artist is to move a society beyond the comfortable, the taken-for-granted and the obvious. In the early part of the 20th century, Cubists, Dadaists and Surrealists did this as a reaction to the Renaissance and Baroque conventions. Before a society is crumbling this is a very important calling. However, once social cracks appear and spread, too much shock from the arts is counter-revolutionary. The Romantic artist imagines that shocking people might propel masses of people into social action. This may be true. But too much shock can result in anesthetizing, not moving people. Past a certain point artists should be creating constructive visions of the future not tripping over themselves about how to outrage a public already frightened by social conditions.

The values and beliefs of Romantic theories of art include:

All creativity is artistic. All other activities are less creative.
There are creative individuals and then there are the rest of us.

Maximum creativity is achieved in isolation (groups hold creativity back).

Creative activity has nothing to do with everyday life. It is an escape from that life.

Creativity and planning are mutually exclusive.

(Disciplined, intellectual and structured activity holds creativity back)

What is creative is what is shocking and incomprehensible

What is creative is what makes us feel better. Art as therapy (Feedback from an audience matters little to the creative process).

What is creative is what appears to be absolutely new.

Art expresses more creativity than craft. Art is non-utilitarian (the more people use the art, the more debased it becomes). Art is about ornaments and decorations.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. Objective judgments about what is creative are impossible. Judgment of creativity is purely subjective.

Art is secular and has little to do with sacred beliefs, mythology or rituals.

Art is all about the process and the product doesn’t matter.

Being an artist means you are eccentric, an outcast, unrealistic and a dreamer.

Art is the opposite of necessity. It is subjective and voluntary.

Art is fictional. It is an escape from reality.

Romantic artists turn art into therapy. However, while there are certainly therapeutic elements to the arts, the purpose of art is to move the public from more than it is to massage and prop up the emotional states of the artist. Romantics fancy themselves as undiscovered geniuses who are too sensitive to subject themselves to the barbaric tastes of the public. But without criticism from the world the artist loses a vital feedback loop that helps him to stay in touch with the socio-historic reality.

Is there anything that comes into the world that is absolutely new? Romantic artists imagine creativity in the Christian sense of God making the world out of nothing. In reality, the most creative work is always built upon the work of others in society, in the cross-currents between societies as well as the influence of those who have went before. There is no such thing as a genius creating something out of nothing.

Crafts are about making things for everyday use such as baskets, hats, pots, and beads. Crafts are embedded in everyday life and can be used by others in the spirit of carrying on a tradition of their kin and the ancestors. The separation of art from crafts in the modern period came about as part of the class divisions within society. Artists were hired by the Church to support its spiritual ideology and among the upper classes to immortalize themselves. During the Romantic period, artists began to rebel against these influences and began to make statements about societies that were somewhat independent of the upper classes. Unlike craft, art in this sense was more abstract, self-reflective, intended for fewer people and involved innovation as part of an ideology of change. To say that art is more creative than craft says that creativity has less to do with everyday life, large groups of people and that which has continuity across time and space. It is a hard case to make. At its worst, the Romantic artist can be accused of being elitist.

The notion that art is merely a matter of subjective taste is a relatively recent phenomenon. Western art became increasingly psychological in the 20th century and with that, the inner experience of the artist became a subject of consideration. This change in part was a reaction to the objective standards of the academic painting. Cross-cultural research on aesthetics together with evolutionary psychology has shown, however, that there is a set of objective standards that all cultures point to when making aesthetic judgments about beauty. Among them include bodies of water, places to hide, and available food.

The Romantic movement was not opposed to spirituality, but to organized religion. While many Romantics wanted to bring back myths and rituals, still for many of the Romantics spirituality was an individual experience so that art in the eyes of Romantics is separated from collective myths, rituals and religious practices. This stance ignores the fact that for most of human history, art was in the service of preparation and delivery of magical rituals and the making of costumes for acting out mythological stories.

While Romantic artists rightfully drew attention to and reflects on the creative process rather than just the product, there is a point at which process becomes everything and the product becomes incidental. Again, artists who make their living as artists must pay attention to the product and reactions of the public in order to continue to paint. It is only those who are supported by others or using art for therapeutic purposes who can afford to ignore the product.

“I will live on the fringes of society rather than compromise my art”. This image of an artist as being an outcast, an eccentric, unrealistic or a dreamer has not been typical of how artists have been seen throughout history. More times than not the artist was producing objects that supported the existing order. Many artists who lived during the Renaissance were well-off, conventional, realistic and by most standards, creative. Suffering based on feeling misunderstood is atypical in the history of art.

What does it mean to say that art is the opposite of necessity? By necessity I mean that there is some external crisis or constraint that the artist must respond to. In other words, making art is not a voluntary experience. This is offensive to the Romantic because art is imagined to be coming from within, a free choice uninhibited by external circumstances. But why can’t art begin in reaction to something that must be done for social or historical reasons? Art, like problem solving, is often most creative when forced by circumstances out of their control. Conversely, without the force of external events artist can fall asleep, falling back on the usual subject matter, materials and treatment or means of creativity. They can become obsessed by personal problems and lose their perspective.

Lastly, the belief that art is fictional is based on the assumption that reality is unchangeable, and the best you can do is escape it into an imaginary world or a future world. On the contrary, revolutionary art can change social and historical reality by being used in the service of a social movement.

The Artist’s Life as a Work of Art

Though Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller were both significant artists in the traditional sense, each understood that artistic products and artistic processes are just moments of living life. How creative is the artist beyond the activity of making art? Certainly, it is possible to be creative as an artist and uncreative in how life is lived. Both Stein and Miller understood that creativity should be extended beyond art. The artistic products and processes are like streams, which, if followed long enough, can converge into the river of how an individual lives their lives. Stein points out the shortsightedness of exclusively identifying creativity with being an artist:

They become writers. They cease to be creative men and they find that they are novelists, or critics or poets or biographers. When a man says “I am a novelist” he is simply a literary shoemaker (The Creative Process, Ghiselin, p. 162) – a very important thing – and I know because I have seen it kill so many writers – is not to make up your mind that you are any one thing…When one has discovered and evolved a new form, it is not the form, but the fact that you are the form that is important (Ghiselin, p. 167). ‘This book will make literary history’ and I told him, ‘it will make some part of literary history, perhaps, but only if you can go on making a new part every day and grow with the history you are making, until you become part of it yourself’.

Henry Miller continues the same line of argument:

I don’t consider myself a writer in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life… I become more and more indifferent to my fate as a writer and more and more certain of my destiny as a man…My life itself becomes a work of art…Now I can easily not write as write, there is no longer any therapeutic aspect to it. (Ghiselin, 178-180)

These are modern artists aware of their own psychology. However, there were artists before them like Leonardo or Goethe who clearly as artists, lived extraordinary lives and their lives were works of art.

Coming Attractions: Conscious and Unconscious Creativity in History

Up to now I have argued that a) Romantic notions of art keep the artist imprisoned in their subjective life and alienated from society and history; b) the vocation of an artist can still be understood as a link between the old world and the world being born; c) even the artist’s life at its best has its limits. An individual’s entire life can be understood as a giant canvas which may include art, but is more than art. Are there more inclusive levels in which creativity can be expressed than an individual’s life? In Part II I discuss the history of human societies as going through three phases:

The conscious creativity of people in egalitarian hunting and gathering and simple horticultural societies;
the unconscious, alienated collective creativity of caste and class societies beginning with Bronze Age states and ending with capitalist societies;
the return of conscious creativity in capitalist society which can be seen in natural disasters, social movements and revolutionary situations which are expressed in workers’ councils.

• First published in https://socialistplanningbeyondcapitalism.org

The post The Collective Creativity of Workers first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 20 Aug 2024 05:09:11 +0000

Orientation

The mismatch between the complexity of the world and the simplistic manner in which we think about it

The social, economic and political world in which we live is extremely complex, but most of the Yankee population does not have the thinking skills that can make intelligent decisions about this world and what to do about its problems. At the micro level, we find the same shortcoming in how we solve individual problems if we can tolerate learning and appreciating that thinking goes through stages of judgment. The choice of the word “how” instead of “why” in the title is intentional. I am not asking why the Yankee population thinks in simplistic ways because that involves a comparative knowledge of other cultures. I am only describing a cognitive style which contributes to Yankees being blockheads.

Introduction to stages of reflective judgment

In their book Developing Reflective Judgement Karen Kitchener and Patricia King claim that many adults clearly have trouble thinking intelligently about ill-defined problems. For many years they have been asking adolescents and adults of all ages and occupations where they stand on questions on the objectivity of news media, safety in food additives and the use of nuclear power. They are not interested in the content of what these subjects believe or how much they know. They are interested in the process of how they came to their conclusions, their method, whether conscious or unconscious. They interviewed more than 1,700 people ranging in age from 14 to 65. First the researchers provide the interviewee with statements that describe opposing viewpoints on various topics. Then the interviewer asked: “What do you think about these statements? How did you come to that view?” What they found is that people go through seven stages in their attempts to solve problems. The first three stages are non-reflective followed by a transition stage, leading to two relativistic stages followed by the highest, seventh stage of reflective judgment.

The authors define reflective judgment as a highly developed thinking skill which makes defensible judgment about ill-structured problems by the manner in which they weigh and discover evidence, uncover underlying rules, generate multiple solutions, accept probabilistic results or judge expert opinion. As it turns out, most people do not show evidence of reflective judgment until their middle or late 20s, if at all. You might glance at Table 1 which defines their seven stages of judgment. I will comment in more depth about the table later on in the article. You don’t need to completely understand the table before you continue to read.

Purposes of this article

One purpose of this article is to introduce you to Kitchener and King’s seven stages of judgment. Secondly, I want to apply them to six areas of our lives:

Religion, paranormal and scientist
Romance
History of anthropology
Problem solving
Individual development
The political spectrum

Furthermore I want to briefly compare and contrast the seven stages of judgment to my four styles of thinking model. I will attempt to synthesize Kitchener and King’s stages with what I call the spectrum of styles which includes naïve absolutist, relativist, dialectical and cynical. I will make a comparison between the two systems later in this article. For now, let’s explore the four kinds of judgment.

The Spectrum of Four Kinds of Judgment

What is the difference between someone who is skeptical and one who is cynical? A skeptical person is one who says “show me” but is open to the results, especially if the evidence is scientific. A cynical person is not only critical but is closed. No amount of evidence will convince him. What is the difference between someone who is open and someone who is gullible? A person who is open takes in some information but not everything. They draw the line at the far-fetched or outlandish claims. In other words, they are open but not so open that their brains will fall out. Gullibility means you believe anything. Let us apply these types of thinking to religious, paranormal and scientific thinking.

The Spectrum of Religion, the Paranormal and Science

Naïve absolutist

When we apply the differences between absolutist, relativist and dialectical thinking we can see that Yankee religious fundamentalism conforms to what I call the naïve absolutist thinking. Here the answer to the ontological question of what I can know is that knowledge is objective and certain. Further, knowledge is concrete and not abstract. By what process is knowledge acquired? Knowledge is passive, poured into people as a result of religious conversion. As a kid in a Catholic school religious training through the catechism was like this.

Relativist

But what about if someone believes in the paranormal – ESP or telepathy? Many Americans are very interested in psychic phenomena. Think of a 16-year-old bright thinker who wants to explore the mystery of haunted houses. For New Agers as opposed to fundamentalists, knowledge is subjective and created by them through experience, not objective based on a holy book as with the fundamentalists. Knowledge for the relativist starts with the individual and is uncertain. Unlike the fundamentalism, this New Age relativist says that the knower actively creates knowledge by processing it autonomously. Lastly, relativists understand that how they acquired knowledge needs justification, but not beyond personal experience. New Agers are critical of what I call naïve absolutists who simply obey religious authorities. For relativists Religion (for them “spirituality”) has to be personal. Relativist New Agers do not have a method for how to know things. They proceed by eclectic trial and error. From a class point of view naïve absolutists with their fundamentalism are more likely to be working class. Research shows relativists whose interest is in the paranormal are more likely to be middle or upper-middle class Yankees.

Dialectical

Now suppose someone is neither religious nor believes in the paranormal. Like the naïve absolutist, the dialectical scientist understands knowledge as objective, but not absolutely objective. For the dialectical scientist knowledge is only relatively objective because it is impacted by history, the economic system and social class of the person. Just as for the relativist, the scientist sees knowledge as an active process of experimentation, not experiential. It discovers events that are already there and discusses them with other scientists. Unlike the New Ager, his mind does not construct events. For the scientist, knowledge needs to be justified using objective standards of scientific method. Furthermore, scientific standards themselves evolve. Yankee communists or socialists think this way at their best.

Cynical

For the cynical scientist, knowledge is objective but must be worked through and evolving and subject to universal scientific laws. The cynic is less sensitive to historical changes, economic systems and social class as the dialectician in science and is less settled about probability. He is after universal causal laws if he could find them. A cynic is dismissive of both fundamentalist religion and New Age relativist and is less likely to view them as themselves products of evolution. He is less likely to see anything positive in them. A cynic can be an upper-middle class scientist or a working class person who is bitter and has given up on their lives.

So what we have is:

Religious fundamentalist; naïve absolutist
New Age paranormal; relativist
Scientist – dialectical
Scientism – cynical

Spectrum of Judging Applied to Romance

What is the difference between the following statements about romantic relationships? “I’ve found prince or princess charming.” The second person is lucky enough to have three relationships at the same time. When pressure is applied to choose one, they can’t decide. “Why do I have to decide?” they say. Let’s assume them are polyamorous. The absolutist disapproves of their lifestyle and wants them to hold out for their soulmate”. The third person says, “there are no princes or princesses. Everyone has their pros and cons. We must set up a spread sheet, list the pros and cons of each person. Assign qualitative weights to each and then choose.” The relativist sees this as too harsh and judging of other people. The absolutist thinks the dialectical way takes all the romance out of relationships. The fourth Yankee cynic says, “Everyone is damaged. There is no use in trying”. The dialectical thinker believes the cynic has given up too soon or their standards are too high. The first and the fourth way of making sense of relationships appear to be opposite. One is Pollyanna and the other is bitter. But as we shall see, they have some unsuspected commonalities.

The naïve absolutist is slavish to the ‘authorities’ in helping them find a partner, whether he trusts his parents, his priest or his therapist. The relativist is cynical about the authorities, feels they are untrustworthy and believes you just have to trust your “gut feelings”. He trusts his personal experience in romance. While the dialectical thinker is skeptical of the authorities he will listen to them about weighing the pros and cons only if they prove themselves. The dialectical judger is less trusting of his personal experience. He trusts the research done of other groups and trusts the demographics about what are the ideal match-ups. The naïve absolutist does not understand why the dialectical judger does not trust the authorities and the relativist is amazed at the lack of trust in personal experience. For the relativist, personal experience is much more valuable than demographics. A cynical scientist may be not only skeptical of personal experience, he is also skeptical of the demographics of groups. Because his standards are so high, he wants to be much more certain than what is yielded from statistics on groups. He doesn’t want to take any chances and may wind up single. A Yankee working class cynic just says “romantic relationships are too hard to bother with”.

History of Anthropology

Naïve absolutist: theories of progress

Let’s switch from the micro to the macro world. Around the time when anthropology began about 1870, the first theoreticians gathered information from missionaries and explorers and arranged their findings into stage theories – savagery, barbarism and civilization. This followed the trajectory from primitive societies, to agricultural states to industrial capitalist societies. They claimed that this arrangement constituted “progress”. That means that the later in time in history we go, the better societies get. The criteria includes political complexity, happiness, morality, science and intelligence. The theorists of progress assumed that all hunting and gathering societies were the same, the agricultural states were all the same. Their sweep was universal and insensitive to time and place differences between cultures. They asked questions which emphasized commonalties, not differences.

Relativists: all societies are equal

Around the turn of the century, the German-American anthropologist Franz Boas attacked the theory of progress as racist. Unlike the first wave of anthropologists, Boas was not an armchair anthropologist. He did field work and his conclusions were that “primitives” (who were mostly Indigenous) were by no means less intelligent, less moral, less happy or more superstitious than white Western Europeans. His students like Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead claimed that there was no basis for comparing or judging societies. All societies were equal. These anthropologists were called “cultural relativists”. They held sway in anthropology for well over 100 years to today.

Unlike the absolutist theorists of progress, relativists are very sensitive to specific times and places. They are splitters rather than lumpers. They ask questions which emphasis differences. They are hard-pressed to find commonalities across cultures and view generalization as a kind of cognitive imperialism.

In 1959 at the centennial of Darwin’s birthday a new school of anthropology emerged. People like Leslie White argued the societies can be compared and studied scientifically. White claimed that societies can be organized hierarchically based on the degree to which they harnessed energy. Others such as Elman Service and Marshall Sahlins had other materialist criteria. But it was Marvin Harris and Gerhard Lenski who claimed that while societies couldn’t be meaningfully be structured according to progress, Harris in particular noticed something else.

Dialectical: improvised evolutionists

On the one hand, dialectical judgers like Marvin Harris and Gerhard Lenski said that the reason societies changed was not due to discovering a new technology or being suddenly enlightened as theories of progress assumed. They argued that societies changed because of necessity. These necessities included as populations grew resources being depleted that produced crises. It was new technologies, along with economic and political reorganization that pulled societies out of the crisis. But the same crises grew back hundreds or thousands of years later. Unlike the cultural relativists, Harris didn’t say all societies were equal. He argued that more complex societies created greater crises, but also produced greater material wealth to solve their problems. Harris called his school of anthropology “cultural materialism”. I call these anthropologists improvised evolutionists. These theorists understand that hunter-gather societies are different from each other because their ecological settings are different. Yet they were able to say that all hunting and gathering societies face many of the same problems. Dialectical thinkers ask questions that are both differences and commonalities but also ask themselves and their colleagues Socratic questions.

Cynics

In the field of anthropology there are no scientific cynics. What we have are cultural cynics of post modernism who don’t dare ask questions about commonalities across cultures. They are not interested in science and simply studying individual societies. They think that studying other societies is just a projection of what exists in the society of origin.

See any patterns?

So, do you see a pattern between attitudes toward romance on one hand and the evolution of anthropology on the other? Do you see any commonalties between the individual who is looking for prince or princess charming and the anthropologists who organize societies in a progressive manner? Is there a commonality between the person who can’t decide among partners and the cultural relativist who thinks all social formations are equal? Does the individual who wants to organize relationships into spreadsheets have anything in common with Harris’s cultural materialism?

Problem Analysis and Problem-Solving

What are well-structured and ill-structured problems?

A well-structured problem is like solving a jigsaw puzzle or a word problem. There is one right answer, you know when you have found it and you don’t have to search for evidence because it is all given in the problem. This is how Yankee naïve absolutists think about politics: two choices, Democrat or Republican. More on this later.

With an ill-structured problem there could be many answers. You have to search for evidence outside the problem and you often don’t know if your answers are right because all answers are in varying degrees of probability. An example of an ill-structured problem is a vocational counselor helping a worker find a new occupation. The counselor can give them an assessment test which matches their interests to occupations. But a worker has to join vocational organizations which show them available jobs. The worker may do an internship as a welder, shadow working to see how they like it. However, they might not know if this is a good match for them as a field until they commit to the job and then see what happens. In critical thinking a well-defined problem is like formal logic or rationality. An ill-defined problem requires informal logic or reason. Let’s see how our four types of thinkers do with these problems.

Naïve absolutism

A Yankee naïve absolutist would expect ill-structured problems to fit into well-structured problems because he expects personal or world problems to fit into his fundamentalist type of religion or his expectation of finding a single soul-mate, prince or princess charming. For the naïve absolutist there is only one right answer.

Relativist

Our relativist would be cynical that any problems could ever be well-defined. He might say, two and two makes four but in the world of non-linear geometry this would not be the case. For the relativist there are an infinite number of answers.

Dialectical

The dialectical thinker would be able to differentiate well-structured from ill-structured problems and be able to use formal logic rationality for one and informal logic or reasoning for the other. For the dialectical thinker there are a few right answers that roughly correspond to the five or six theoretical schools of thinking in sociology or psychology. The dialectical thinker chooses the best of lot and sets out to take action. Communists and socialists at their best in groups think this way.

Cynical thinker

A cynical thinker, like the naïve absolutist, prefers the one right answer of a well- defined problem. However, unlike the absolutist the cynical scientist can suspend judgment and hold out for the best solution to the problem. A cynical thinker will know there are a few answers but will hold out for the perfect one and bypass taking action. A Yankee cynical working-class voter might give up on all politics thinking that if all the choices are Republicans or Democrats what is the point in voting. Neither party speaks to their needs.

Reflexive Judgment revisited

Have a look again at Table I. The stages of judgment are listed down the left-hand side of Table 1. The first four stages are relatively simplistic. King and Kitchener call these stages pre-reflective. Stages 5 and 6, the relativist categories are more sophisticated and the last stage is the most complex. Each of these stages is described in detail under three categories; metaphysical assumptions, epistemological assumption and the concepts of justification.

What is the relationship between the stages of reflective judgment and the four styles of thinking?

The first three stages of pre-reflective judgment correspond to the naïve absolutist form of thinking.
There is no correspondence between the fourth transition stage of judgment and the styles of thinking.
Stages 5-6, quasi-reflective can be matched up with the style of thinking I am calling relativist.
Stage 7, reflective judgment goes with dialectical thinking.
There is no stage of judgment which corresponds to the cynical style of thinking.
My styles of thinking table (see Table 2 if you dare!) adds many categories of comparison that are not in the seven stages of judgment table.

Application to Individual Development.

It is not far-fetched to group the Yankee naive absolutist judgment into childhood, relativist judgment to adolescence and dialectical open-skeptical thinking into adulthood as well as cynical thinking. However, in adulthood there can be Yankees who think in a naïve absolutist way or relativist manner. In the case of naïve absolutist, the individual would probably be very low functioning because they would be thinking too simply for the complex social world we live in. Sadly, many Yankees fall into this category politically. In their personal lives these Yankees would have difficulty sustaining mature relationships or holding jobs that require managing people. Relativists can function well as adults in friendships, romance and work but would have problems with major life decisions because of their difficulty prioritizing.

Naïve absolutists

How do the four types of thinking fare in understanding the relationship between thinking and emotions? As we might expect, naïve absolutists are both irrational and unreasonable. They let their emotions rule. They are likely to be guilty of scapegoating because they see the world in either-or terms. They are likely to be superstitious because naïve absolutists don’t understand probability. They are almost always surprised that the claims of other people about a problem may be just as valid as are their own.

Relativists

The relativists might understand cognitive psychology in that emotions are driven by thoughts but they might not be able to abstract thoughts completely from emotions because they think in a concrete operational way. They are not likely to be able to use Piaget’s formal logic. Relativists can put themselves in the place of others’ claims. However, they do this so well that they become enmeshed and get lost in the hearts of others so that they lose their claim.

Dialectical

Dialectical thinkers are reasonable. They allow their emotions a place at the table, but they don’t let them decide. They know the existence of other claims and they will compare and contrast them to each other according to a justified criterion, knowing that some claims are better than others, but no claim is perfect. They can enter the heart and mind of another, but they will not be swept away by them. Their claim may be affected by the input of another, but not likely to be completely upstaged. Communists and socialists at their very best relate to their personal life this way.

Cynical

Cynical thinkers are cut off from their emotions and will try to use rationality to muscle their way to a conclusion. They will not be moved by the emotions of others so their decision-making process is linear. Once their mind is made up, that is the end of the line. They are isolated in using the scientific method but will hold out for the perfect solution which never comes. Consequently, they are detached and disappointed. In my experience, socialists at their worst often conduct their personal lives this way.

The Linear Political Spectrum

Dictatorship and democracy

In the United States we have some very peculiar ideas about what democracy is. What is supposedly the opposite of democracy? We are told it is a dictatorship where only one-party rules. Examples of dictators are trotted out and virtually they always have something to do with socialism. But something extraordinary happens when we add one more political party! In this country now we have two parties to vote for and that is the maximum we can hope for democracy – Republicans and Democrats. But if democracy is “the rule of the people” wouldn’t more parties mean even more democracy? Some other countries see it this way and have many parties. But not here in Mordor. The rulers tell us more parties make things too complicated, unwieldy and more drawn out. We are told by Colin Woodward (American Nations) there are eleven regions of the country and only two parties speak for them. Sociologists tell us we have between six and eight social classes, but two parties is plenty to represent us. So what we have is:

One party – dictatorship
Two parties – democracy
Five parties – too complicated, unwieldy, maybe even a mobocracy

Democrats and Republican voters are naïve absolutists

So we have an “election” in three months in which we are told that democracy means we have to vote for one of two parties. Voting for a third party is called a waste of a vote but then we are told that if the Democratic candidate loses that our votes decided the election. What about not voting? According to the Democratic and Republican ruling circles not voting shows ignorance, lack of education, apathy or maybe being on drugs. What I am claiming is the insistence only voting for a Democrat or a Republican is a form of naïve absolutist thinking. For example, Democrats naively think that those of us who vote for a third party are choosing between a Democrat and a Green. The truth is that most of us who vote for a third party are really facing a choice either voting for a Green or not bothering to vote.

Cynics don’t bother to vote

Not bothering to vote is a higher form of judgment than naïve absolutism, a form of cynicism which understands both these parties represent the upper classes and have nothing to do with middle class, working class or poor people. Some of these same people understand that the lords of capital own both parties and control what they say about dualistically framed issues through think tanks and lobbyists.

Dialecticians vote for a socialist third party

Those who vote for third parties aspire to think about politics in a dialectical way. For example, most naïve absolutist Democrats are myopic. Every four years they claim that this election is the most important in history. A voter for a third party understands that building and sustaining a political party is a 15 or 20 year project. That means you build up a base of loyal voters over the long haul. We don’t expect to win an election every four years any more than a sophisticated baseball owner expects to win the World Series every year. Secondly, naïve Democrats and Republicans think that having a political party is synonymous with voting. But there are many socialist parties that never expect to be voted in. They use the opportunity to run a campaign to present a program for what they will do when capitalism collapses. The Bolsheviks were a political party that was not voted in yet they successfully seized power. So far:

Naïve absolutists – Democrats and Republicans
Cynical – not voting at all.
Dialectical – voting for a third party

Complexity of analysis

In its complexity of analysis both Democrats and Republicans present the issues as a choice between black and white solutions to black and white issues carried out by good guys or bad guys. Those who don’t bother to vote because there is no one to vote for understand that their issues like raising the minimum wage, having a health care system and educational system, that make being in debt for life are not anything either party is interested. Those who vote for a third party are even more dialectical. They see that wars, stock market instabilities, inflation, extreme weather and ecological degradation are all connected and can only be addressed in a systematic way as part of a transitional plan.

Precision and quantification

In her book Eloquence in the Electronic Age, Kathleen Jamieson pointed out that in the 19th century before the electronic age, politicians made speeches just as lawyers make cases. They defined key terms and set out to show four of five ways of making a claim. Democrats and Republicans today do not define their terms. Like naïve absolutists they think their use of the term is universal and understood by everyone. Those who do not vote are not in any position to define their terms since they are either working class or poor and no one would care about whether they strove to define terms. Those who are dialectical are devoted to defining terms because they understand the same words mean different things to different people. A cynical member of the third party might get preoccupied with the definition of a word and get carried away with the purity of having the right word. Race and gender politics within third parties have had bitter conflicts in identity politics, sad outcomes of cynical insistence on one term.

Capacity to suspend judgement

Republican Donald Trump is a great example of a naïve absolutist who will say the first thing that flies into his head rather than to appear hesitant. Can you imagine this blowhard saying something like “I need to think about it”? A dialectical thinker understands the difference between a surface “I don’t know” and a depthful “I don’t know”. The surface “I don’t know” is the result of a lack of information. A deep “I don’t know” is having evidence that is equally balanced where it is truly wise to wait and see how things play out. A dialectical thinker in a third party is not pressured to have an immediately canned reaction.

Decision-making

The Democratic and Republican parties are in no position to hold out for the perfect answer to a political problem. The truth is these parties are not deciding anything of consequence. They are thrown hither and yon by conflicts between ruling class capitalists, the deep state FBI and CIA, the neocons controlling foreign policy and the powerful Israeli lobby, AIPAC. All these political actors have overlapping but conflicting interests. The heads of parties are figureheads. Those that are relativist/ cynics might understand the complexity of issues and their interconnectedness, but because they don’t set priorities, they wind up solving a couple of problems in a watered down way and then kick the can down the road. Democrats typically do this when it is their turn to assume power.

Makes claims falsifiable

Just like the naïve absolutist, Democrats and Republican candidates make promises but they never state the conditions under which they can be proven wrong. Unlike real scientists Mordor politicians are not held to any consequences if they fail to deliver. And sadly, the public does not demand falsifiability and does not track the contradictions between what is promised and what is delivered. The same is true for naïve absolutists economic advisers, mainstream economists. These folks claim to be scientists but fail to predict either crises or prosperity. Politicians who are relativists, who may well be in Green party or some communist party, might develop a program but they don’t relate to their program in a scientific way. At their very best, third party candidates in other countries who are fortunate enough to come to some representative power would have dialectical relationship with their base. This means that if claims made by elected politicians that were not followed up on, or came to ruin, they would have to account to the people who voted for them. In the case of economics, real scientific economists, whether Marxians or Post-Keynesians, make predictions and the following year write assessments of what they got right and wrong. Jack Rasmus is one political economist who does this.

Monitoring feedback

Naïve absolutists of either party pay no attention to feedback. When the size of the homeless population grows, instead of a structural solution like expanding low-cost housing, they drive the homeless to the outskirts of the city. When bridges collapse the Republicrats do nothing. They claim they have no money. But they have money for wars that they continually lose. When the national debt grows to 35 trillion dollars, is this a sign for them there is a problem? No – the Fed just prints more money. There are signs everywhere that Mordor is collapsing and these naïve absolutists look the other way. They specialize in secondary rationalizations. The relativist politicians outside the party are open to feedback but relativists lack the skills of prioritizing, setting goals and making a feasible plan so they never take the bull by the horn. At its best, a dialectical third party meets with its members and reads scientific reports together about what has happened politically and economically on a regular basis. They reorganize accordingly and come up with a new plan.

How to Navigate Through the Spectrum of Thinking Styles

The table below tracks the engagement of the four styles of thinking across 20 categories. All these categories have been applied partially to the topics of religion, paranormal and scientific thinking; to romance; history of anthropology; problem analysis, problem-solving; individual development and life on the linear political spectrum. Moving from left to right on the table, on the extreme left are the categories that are being compared. The stages of judgment move across vertically down from the most simple (naïve absolutist) to the most complex (dialectical). In terms of complexity, the cynical thinker lies somewhere between the relativist and the dialectical thinker. Beginning with category one, the types of categories proceed from the simplest kinds of input (knowledge); analyzing sources of evidence; evaluation of answers to making decisions; taking action and monitoring the actions taken. Lastly the table can be studied in two ways. If you read this vertically you will get a “snapshot” of how each kind of thinking answers the processes of thinking questions across the 20 categories. I would start with this. When you read across you are comparing and contrasting each form of judgment to its rivals across the categories.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this article is to try to explain how the Yankee population has difficulty analyzing complex problems of our social world, politically and economically, at both domestic and at international scales. I argued that those people who feel compelled to vote for one party or another are naïve absolutists. Of those 40-45% who don’t vote many can be categorized as cynical. Those who understand a third socialist party needs to be built are thinking dialectically. In the stages of reflective judgment, naïve absolutists correspond to King and Kitchener “pre-reflective judgment”. Those who are politically open relativist are called “quasi-reflective”. Those who use stage 7 reflective judgment correspond to dialectical thinkers.

In terms of social class, surprisingly it is middle and upper-middle class Yankees, even with their higher formal education, who think like naïve absolutists when it comes to the two-party system. A higher percentage of working-class people, many whom don’t bother to vote can be characterized as cynical.

As a second purpose I attempted to show how absolutist, relativist and cynical thinking affects the Yankee population in micro-problem-solving abilities, romance and individual lifecycle development.

Table I Kitchener and King’s 7 Development of Reflective Judgment

Stage	Metaphysical assumptions	Epistemological assumptions	Concepts of justification
1 Prereflective (Naïve absolutist)	There is an objective reality which exists and the individual sees it. Reality and knowledge are identical and known absolutely through individual perception	Knowledge exists absolutely One’s own view and the authorities correspond Knowledge gained through a teacher	Beliefs simply exist and do not need to be explained Differences of opinion do not need to be explained and justification seems unnecessary
2 Pre-reflective	There is an objective reality which is knowable and known by someone	Absolute knowledge may exist but it may not be immediately available to the individual but it is available to legitimate authorities	Beliefs either existed or are based on absolute knowledge of a legitimate authority
3 Prereflective (sophisticated absolutist)	There is an objective reality, but it cannot be immediately known even to legitimate authorities	Absolute knowledge exists on some areas but not in others. Even authorities may not have certain knowledge and cannot always be depended upon. Evidence is known in a quantitative way	While waiting for absolute knowledge to become available, people can temporarily believe whatever they choose believe
4 Transitions	There is an objective reality, but it can never be known with certainty Neither authority, time or money not quantity of evidence can lead to absolute knowledge	Absolute knowledge is for practical reasons impossible to attain and always uncertain Knowledge is idiosyncratic to the individual	Beliefs are justified with idiosyncratic knowledgeable
5 Quasi-Reflective (Naïve Relativism)	Objective reality doesn’t exist and objective knowledge does not exist	Knowledge is subjective based on rules of inquiry compatible with that perspective	Beliefs are justified with appropriate decision rules according to parsimony
6 Quasi-Reflective (Sophisticated Relativism)	Some judgments about reality may be evaluated as more reasonable or based on stronger evidence	Knowledge claims can be constructed through generalized principles of inquiry by abstracting common elements across different perspectives Knower must play an active role	Since our understanding of reality subjective anyway, such justification is limited to particular time, case or issue
7 Reflective judgment (Dialectical)	There is an objective reality. Though our knowledge of reality is subject to our perceptive and interpretations, It is possible through the process of critical inquiry and evaluation	Our perceptions of objective reality can be corrected by the openness to the scrutiny and criticisms of other people	Beliefs reflect solutions that can be justified as most reasonable though they vary from domain to domain

See Table II at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Absolutist, Relativist and Cynical Thinking Styles first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Holistic vs Analytical Thinking

Bruce Lerro — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 16:06:42 +0000

Orientation

How much do left brain pathologies have to do with culture and geography?

Recently I was interviewed by Jeff J. Brown on China Rising about an article I wrote titled “The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations”. During the interview, I contrasted the differences between the functions the left and the right sides of the brain. As we went through this, Jeff commented on how the characteristics of the right side of the brain corresponded to Chinese culture and how the characteristics of the left side of the brain seemed to be an expression of European-Yankee culture. A big part of my article discussed how there is a power struggle between the left and the right sides of the brain. Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist pointed out that when the left side of the brain gets out of control, the result is the dark side of cultural institutions like the Reformation, the Enlightenment and industrial capitalism.

At the end of my interview I pointed out that McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, did not explain why the left brain running amuck was not the characteristic of Far Eastern countries like China, Japan or Korea. In other words, if when the left brain gets out of control if it was strictly a biological or psychological process, we would expect to find it happening in all cultures all over the world including South America and Africa. But we don’t. It is only Western. This new article attempts to provide a materialist explanation for these differences based on the book The Geography of Thought by Richard Nisbett for why Easterners and Westerners think differently.

Some provocative questions

Why would the ancient Chinese excel at algebra and arithmetic but not geometry (as the Greeks)? Why do modern Asians do very well at math and science but produce less in the way of revolutionary science compared to Westerners? As Nisbett says:

Chinese civilization is remarkable because Chinese civilization far outdistanced Greek civilization technologically in ink, porcelain, magnetic compass, stirrups and wheelbarrow, pound locks on canals, sternpost rudder, quantitative cartography, immunization techniques, astronomical observations of novae, seismographs and acoustics.

Why are East Asians able to see relationships between events better than the West but find it more difficult to disentangle an object from its surroundings? Why are Easterners more susceptible to the hindsight bias such as ‘they knew it all along’? Why do Western infants learn nouns at a much more rapid rate than verbs?Why do Easterners learn verbs at a more rapid rate? Why are Easterners so willing to entertain apparent contradictions? Why are Westerners more likely to apply formal logic when reasoning about everyday events?

Where are we going?

My purpose in this article is three-fold. First is to show the differences that Nisbett contrasts between holistic and analytical thinking. Secondly, I explore his materialist explanations for why these cultures think so differently. Lastly, I point out some weaknesses in Nisbett’s book.

Holistic vs Analytical Thinking in nature

Functional vs taxonomic classification

Which of these three is least like the other two? The three items are a dog, a carrot and a rabbit. If you think holistically the dog is different. If you think analytically the carrot is different. Why? Because in holistic thinking rabbits eat carrots, the dog is different. But if you think analytically the carrots are different because dogs and rabbits are animals while a carrot is a vegetable. Holistic classification is functional, based on how objects work together in everyday life. They are grouped together because of causal, temporal or spatial functional relationships. This analytical classification is called taxonomic. This means objects are classified according to type, independent of space, time or cause. It has little to do with everyday life interactions.

Form vs content

Closely connected to these classification differences is the relationship between form and content. In holistic thinking, objects (content) are never understood as separate from their atmosphere form (or setting). In analytical thinking, objects are separated from their context and treated separately. Thus, empiricism separates objects from their context and examines them in terms of what they have in common (empiricism). So too, thinking is separated from the senses and thoughts are compared to other thoughts leading to rationalism, including formal logic. Contrary to this holistic thinking treats thinking and sensing as going together. There is no formal logic I know of in Chinese thinking.

Here are a couple of examples. In a research experiment with fish in the water, the Japanese made many more references to background elements. Americans focused on the fish and ignored the environment. In the United States an instruction book on how to draw was published called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. In it there was an exercise on drawing the negative space which surrounded the figure. The idea was to let the figure emerge growing out of the negative space rather than drawing the figure directly. The whole point of the exercise was to get Western students to stop treating the background as irrelevant. Easterners, knowing this already, would have little need for this exercise.

Diffused vs focused attention; aggregates vs synthesis

Holistic thinking and analytic thinking each have their pros and cons. In holistic thinking, we have a wide, diffused lens. We see the forest but the trees are blurry. In analytical thinking we have tunnel vision. We see the detail of the trees, but miss the majesty of the forest. This attention to detail leads analytical thinkers to imagine that the whole of the forest is nothing more than an aggregate of individual trees. In holistic thinking the entire forest system is more than the sum of the trees.

Organism vs mechanism; plenum vs atoms and the void

In general, way beyond forests, holistic thinking imagines all of nature as an organism where all aspects are interdependent. In Chinese philosophy, nature consists of a plenum or Tao which is filled with interdependent substances like the five elements. Wood, fire, earth, metal and water are constantly changing into each other in different proportions. This philosophy is embodied in the writings of Lao-Tze. The philosophy of nature in the West is mechanism where all the parts are interchangeable rather than interdependent. According to Democritus and Epicurus, nature is not a plenum. it is composed of atoms and the void. These atoms are discrete objects (atomism) and these objects are composed of particles or things.

Differences in language socialization

The differences between East Asian languages and Indo-European languages are so deep that they are embedded in how each learn language. Philosophically we can say that for East Asians generally, movement is more important than stasis. In the West, on the other hand, we start with things and then as a derivative try to explain movement. Nisbett points out that East Asian languages verbs are learned at a faster rate than nouns. It the West the opposite is true, nouns are learned faster. What do the nouns and verbs say? In East Asia, verbs are denoted by relationships. In the West nouns are denoted by categories. Lastly, there are differences even in the placements of nouns and verbs in a sentence. In East Asia, verbs come at the beginning and the end of sentence, with nouns in the middle. This indicates that first there is movement which temporarily thickens into a noun which then returns into more movement. In the West it is the opposite. First nouns, then verbs (predicate) and then objects. This follows a philosophy that says in the beginning there are things (nouns), there are verbs in the middle and then nouns (objects) at the end.

Polar vs dualistic opposites

The Tao in Chinese philosophy consists of two polar opposites, yin and yang and these opposites turn into each other creating new combinations of the five elements. These opposites depend on each other and cocreate with each other. In analytical thinking opposites are understood as being mutually exclusive, zero-sum game with choices such as “either/or”, as in Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. When confronted with two apparently contradictory propositions Americans tended to polarize their beliefs. In the West there is typically a right and wrong and there will be a winner and loser. In holistic philosophy choice involves not choosing one or the other. Both are chosen in addition to other choices. Holistic philosophy strives for hostility reduction and compromise mediated by a third party.

Formal logic vs informal logic

Formal logic in the West is the study of the structure of an argument independently of its content. The basis of formal logic is to abstract qualities from context and connect these abstractions as if they had a life of their own. The syllogism:
– All women are mortal
– Sandy is a woman
– Sandy is mortal

It is correct from the point of view of formal logic. It doesn’t matter if we change Sandy’s name to Phyllis. It doesn’t even matter if we substitute immortal for mortal.

So:
– All women are immortal
– Phyllis is a woman
– Phyllis is immortal

This is still logically correct. It doesn’t matter that in real life woman are mortal. Nisbett points out that for the Chinese there is a whiteness of the house and the whiteness of the snow but not whiteness as an abstract, detachable concept that can be applied to almost anything. The Chinese were distrustful of decontextualization.

Nisbett writes that In China there were only two short-lived movements of little influence in the East that shared the spirit of logical inquiry that has always been common in the West. These are the logicians and the Mohists (Mo Tzu), both in the classical period of antiquity. Mo Tzu shared several logical concerns. They include the ideas of necessary and sufficient conditions, the principle of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle. Mo Tzu developed a rough version of cost-benefit analysis. However, there was never even among the logicians and Mohists a willingness to accept arguments that flew in the face of experience.

Holistic vs Analytical Relationships in Society

Cogs in the machine vs interdependent belonging

Earlier I said that analytical thinking treats parts in nature as particles or things. This carries over into how workers function in relationship to capitalism. Workers are treated as things, interchangeable parts. Unskilled workers are hired and fired with no sense of continuity or membership in an organization. They are cogs in a mechanistic machine. In Japan in the 1970s and early 1980s, even though it was a capitalist society, workers were still treated as interdependent parts of an organization. Every worker had a place and worker could have one job for their whole life. In speaking about the industrial revolution, Nisbitt points out:

Seeing the world of objects is linked to the industrial Revolution. Assembly line—auto part atoms were put together by workers performing a repetitive set of actions over and over again (82)… {in the} late 18^th century, especially in the United States, they began to modularize the world of manufacture and commerce. From muskets to furniture they were broken down into the most standardized parts possible and the simplest replicable actions…. Time itself became a modular entity: three minutes for bolting on the carburetor; two and a half minutes for installing spark plugs…Starting around the late 19th century retail stores became modular chains. (83)

Collectivism vs individualism

One of the major divisions within cross-cultural psychology is that between collectivism vs individualism. As you might expect, holistic thinkers are collectivist. This means that the group comes first and decisions are based on the interests of the group, which is true from the micro to the macro level. Analytical thinkers are individualists. The individual is the center of attention and the group is seen as secondary or a necessary evil. This plays out when something happens to an individual. When an individualist has an unfortunate circumstance, their tendency is to imagine the personal motives of another person involved rather than the situation another person was in. This is called an “internal locus of control”. In social psychology Collectivist holists are more likely to examine the situation first. They will underestimate the power of individuals to change things. In part this is because they have an external locus of control.

In answer to the question tell me about yourself, Japanese schoolchildren are taught how to practice self-criticism both in order to improve their relations with others and to become more skilled in solving problems. In the West individuals answer the same question by referring to their personality traits, role categories and activities statically proclaiming, “I am what I am”. The proportion of self-references was more than three times higher for American children than for Chinese children.

In-group and out-group

In our initial description of the differences between collectivism and individualism we said that for collectivists the group comes first and for individualists the single person comes first. But this is only for the in-group. It says nothing about relationships with the out-group or strangers. As it turns out in East Asia the gap between in-group and out-group (strangers) is greater than in the West. In the West the relationship between individuals and their in-group is weaker, but their relationship to the out-group (strangers) is less. Part of this no doubt is that under capitalism, being civil to strangers is necessary for the exchange of commodities. In East Asia, which has either outright socialism or moderate capitalism, they are less likely to give strangers the time of day.

Rights vs obligations

Nisbett tells a story that an Asian friend is perplexed to hear in households in Yankeedom members of a family are always thanking each other rather than simply carrying out obligations. The basis of thanking someone is that there is no necessary interconnection between people that makes help a constitutional part of society. Instead, we volunteer to do something with the option to not help. This is the essence of individualism.

Nisbett says that for Westerners, once a contract has been agreed to it is binding regardless of circumstances that might make the arrangement problematic. To the Western mind, once a bargain is struck, it shouldn’t be modified. For Easterners agreements are often regarded as tentatively agreed upon guides for the future. There is little or no conception of rights that are inherit in the individual. Furthermore, Nisbett points out:

The combative, rhetorical form is also absent from Asian law. More typically the disputants take their case to a middleman whose goal is animosity reduction. There is no attempt to derive a resolution to a legal conflict from any universal principle. The Americans were more likely to prefer adversarial adjudication with representation by lawyers. (75)

Holistic vs Analytical Relationships in the Sciences and the Arts

The Chinese used their experience to measure things. The Greeks abstracted from their experience and fixed abstract rules which were used as the basis for predicting and explaining the motion of these objects. As might be expected those who think analytically will disentangle relationships in order to extract abstract rules from them. The Greeks understood that it was necessary to categorize objects in order to be able to apply rules to them. Nisbett says that because the Chinese see relationships first their lack of interest in the categories prevented them from discovering laws that really were capable of explaining classes of events. In the case of the Greeks, most of Aristotle’s physical propositions were false, but Aristotle had testable propositions. Though the Chinese excelled in algebra and arithmetic they made little progress in geometry because proofs rely on formal logic. While the Greeks excelled in geometry and had formal proofs they never developed the concept of zero which was required both for algebra and for an Arabic style place number system.

The arts

Interestingly but not surprisingly, Chinese paintings are dominated by landscape which dwarf human figures. Studies of Western paintings show human figures as three times as large. Furthermore, the Chinese paint the horizon lines 15% higher to call attention to the depth and allows more room for the objects. Analytical tradition of the West paint the horizon lines 15% lower. This reduces the range of the scene that is visible. Nisbett says the Chinese emphasized monophonic music which reflected their concern with unity. In the analytical West, polyphonic music was present where different instruments and different voices take different parts. Please see Table I for a comparison.

Table I

How Asians and Westerners Think Differently

Holistic Thinking	Category of Comparison	Analytic Thinking
Ancient China	Region of the world	Ancient Greece
Wide Lens See forest less trees	Scope	Narrow Lens—Tunnel Vision See trees, less forest
Objects are never seen separate from their atmosphere	Form and content	Objects extracted from their environment and treated separately (Empiricism and rationalism)
Functional-associative Based on how objects working together They are grouped together because of causal, temporal or spatial functional relationships	How things are classified	Taxonomic classification Objects are classified in relationship to type, not what they do together or their connection to causal, temporal or spatial relations
Wholes are more than the sum of their parts	How wholes and parts are understood	Wholes are aggregates, no more than the sum of their parts
Plenum Tao yin-yang principle (Lao Tzu)	What is nature?	Atoms and the void Democritus, Epicurus
Interpenetrating substances Five elements Wood, fire, earth, metal, water	What is nature composed of?	Collection of discrete objects (atomism) Objects are composed of particles, “things”
Organicism	Nature philosophy	Mechanism
As organisms with interdependent parts	Application to society: How are organizations depicted?	As machines with inter-changeable parts
Polar opposites depend on each other and co-create each other “both and more”	How are opposites understood?	Dualistic opposites Mutually exclusive and have nothing to do w/each-other “Either/Or”
Other than Mo Tzu, the Chinese lacked even a principle of contradiction	How are contradictions held?	Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction
Informal logic	Form of logic	Formal logic—syllogism
Collectivism	Type of Self	Individualism
Explain things situationally Understate disposition	Attribution of causes	Overstate disposition, understate situation
External	Locus of control	Internal
More conforming to in-group More hostility to out-group (strangers)	In-group/out-group	More challenging to in-group More civil to out-group (strangers)
Learn verbs at a faster rate Verbs are about relationships Verbs come in the beginning and end of a sentence Nouns come in the middle	Linguistic socialization	Learn nouns at a faster rate Nouns are denoted by categories Nouns come at the beginning and end of a sentence Verbs are in the middle.
Experience	What is used to measure?	Fixed abstract rules are used as the basis for predicting and explaining the behavior of these objects
See relationships Their lack of interest in categories prevented them from discovering laws that really were capable of explaining classes of events	Science	Disentangle relationships and see rules The Greeks understood that it was necessary to categorize objects in order to be able to apply rules to them
Excel in algebra and arithmetic They made little progress in geometry because proofs rely on formal logic	Mathematical Application	Geometry Had formal proofs, but Greeks never developed the concept of zero which is required both for algebra and for an Arabic style place number system
Paint horizontal line of landscapes 15% higher Calls for attention to depth and allows more room for objects	The Arts Landscapes	Paint horizon lines 15% lower. Reduces the range of the scene that is visible
Human figures are smaller	Portraiture	Human faces are three times as large
Monophonic music reflected Chinese concern with unity	Type of music	Polyphonic music where different instruments and different voices take different parts

Qualifications

We must be careful not to overstate generalities. In the case of the Far East, there were some atomistic and empirical traditions such as Mo Tzu that shared many of same interests as Western philosophers. Conversely in the West, while the atomism of Democritus and Epicurus were surely important, Western philosophy has a deep anti-atomist tradition stretching from Plato to Leibniz, Shelling and Hegel.

Within the Western tradition, Nisbett points out that the Southern European countries like Spain, and Italy plus Belgium and Germany are intermediate between the East Asian counties and the countries influenced by Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture. Still more generally the European continent is more holistic and rationalist than are the empirical England or the United States. The big picture theories in politics and economics come from the continent including Marx, Weber, Durkheim and Comte. In psychology we have the big system philosophy of Freud and Piaget. It is hard to imagine behaviorism emerging in any place but the United States or England. When we turn to Western religions, we find the same split between the Anglo-American world of Protestants and the continental European tradition where Catholicism reigns.

Within Eastern traditions not all roads lead to China. While both the Chinese and Japanese stress order, it is a different kind of order. For the Chinese, order comes from the macro world of state on the one hand and the micro world of family relations on the other. This comes in the form of mother-son or father-daughter relations. For the Japanese the forces of order come from the meso-world of the peer group. The same pattern holds in school. For the Chinese, obedience to the teacher is primary, but for the Japanese control is managed by what classmates may think or say.

A huge difference between the Japanese and the Chinese is that Japan developed capitalism well over 100 years before the Chinese. But even in this case geography might have had something to do with it. Japan, like England, was an island where no large centralized system had room to develop. Even so, Japanese capitalism still retained a collective orientation. Loyalty to the corporation was much stronger among workers there than in either the United States or England. Finally, Nisbett points out that while in the macro and micro worlds the Chinese expect order, in the meso-world the Chinese have a more relaxed form of life. It is the Japanese who insist on a need for order in all parts of their lives. In that way they are similar to the Germans and Dutch.

Materialistic Explanations for East-West Differences

Geography and climate

Not just in China, but in all the great agricultural civilizations of the past there is a crucial climate, geography problem. First, there is inadequate rainfall, yet the presence of large bodies of water in the valleys. The problem for them is how to get the large bodies of water to their farms. In Greece and in Europe generally there is no such rainfall problem. European countries are surrounded by mountains leading to a change in climate as Jared Diamond pointed out in Guns, Germs and Steel.

Political consequences

China, along with Egypt, and India have ways to solve the problem of inadequate rainfall and large bodies of water by setting up irrigation systems. But China and India are very large countries and setting up local irrigation systems is too risky and they could fail too easily. Hence the development of a centralized agricultural state could solve their problems. However, the leaders of these centralized states soon recognized their position and they begin to expect more and more in return for performing this public service. The result is a centralized political system with a ruling class.

In Greece and generally in Europe there was no need for any centralized irrigation system because rainfall made it unnecessary. In addition, the high mountains between European states made any centralized political power over Europe next to impossible. The European continent has never completely fallen to an empire. Hence all political power was decentralized.

Means of subsistence

With a centralized irrigational system and rich river valleys, Chinese peasants settled down to do subsistence agriculture, including rice. The Greeks were not so fortunate. The Greek land was stony and dry which only lent itself to orchards growing olive trees. The Greeks made their living from herding, fishing and trade. They engaged in commercial agriculture producing olive oil for trade.

The subversiveness of trading

The activity of trading produces mutual effects in differentiating Greece from Chinese and other near Eastern civilizations. For one, it taught the merchants different languages and different systems of weights and measures opening them up to more trading. Second, living near the coast meant encountering many ethnic groups with different religions and politics. Third, trading also forced traders to haggle, going back and forth and arguing. This was a very powerful instrument in conducing not only economic affairs but political affairs. As is well known Greece developed an extraordinary decentralized political system in which debate and the teaching of rhetoric by the Sophists was a way of life. Farmers hired rhetoricians to help them win cases when their land was threatened to be taken over.

On the other hand, trade for China was not a necessity. They traded mostly in luxury goods. Surely traders were never given free reign by the emperor. This meant that China was a more closed civilization. Nisbett says that 95% of the Chinese population belongs to the same Han ethnic group. Nearly all of the country’s more than fifty minority ethnic groups are in the western part of the country. The Chinese were less exposed to other religions and political systems and when they were Chinese rulers saw them as inferior. Because there was no reason to learn how to haggle and be argumentative in marketing situations Chinese politics was far from the tradition of Greece debate. Chinese civilization was under a centralized political rule that was from the top down. Argumentation was disapproved of because China did not have liberal political expectations. In addition, the Chinese kin relations, like the Japanese, had built into them the expectation people should be able to save face.

Implications for contemporary science

Nisbett makes a very interesting point about contemporary differences between Chinese and European traditions in science that are connected to what has been said so far. He writes that the Chinese are very good at following up and expanding what Western science has produced but they are not as good at making breakthroughs. Why could this be? Nisbett points out that most scientists they hit their peak contributing innovative scientific explanations in their 20s. But Chinese scientists have a tradition of deferring to elders. Therefore, at Chinese conferences young scientists are expected to defer to elders, even if these elders have nothing new to say. Seniority is more important than innovation. Competitive debate with clear winners and losers is understandably seen as in bad taste. However, in the West competitive debate has been going on for well over 2000 years. In addition, in the West the elderly are not revered, and are considered over the hill. The revering of the young in the West goes perfectly well with young scientists presenting findings that might contradict those of the elderly. Please see Table II for a summary of the ecological, political and economic explanations for the differences between holistic and analytical thinking.

Table II

Materialistic Explanations for Holistic vs Analytical Thinking

China	Original Region of the world	Greece
Fertile plains, low mountains and navigable rivers	Ecology	Mountains descending towards the sea
Subsistence agriculture Rice, other grains	Means of subsistence	Herding, fishing and trade Commercial agriculture
Easy to do	Political centralization	Difficult to do
Yes. Yellow River Valley of North China where the Shang Dynasty originated (18th -11th century BC) Chou Dynasty (11th to 256 BCE)	Centralized irrigation required?	No Adequate rainfall
Bureaucratic Centralization	Political organization	Decentralized competing states Direct democracy
Not essential Trade for luxuries Competitive debate not taught Rhetoric harmonious	Place of trading	Necessity for subsistence goods Competing traders and competing cities invited skills of argument and competitive debate
95% of the Chinese population belongs to the same Han ethnic group	Cultural diversity	Living near the coast meant encountering other ethnic groups, religion and politics
Held back by respect for elders Seniority over innovation	Contemporary science	Elders “over the hill” Glorification of young Innovation over seniority
Absence of competitive debate and peer review	Place of contemporary debate in science	Competitive debate and peer review

Criticisms of The Geography of Thought

The Geography of Thought is a very interesting and provocative book. Most of what I have to say about it are qualifications rather than direct disagreements. First of all, the book seems ahistorical. It presents the origin of two cultures, China and Greece, too much as destiny. It really does not account for the fact that China has a history which surely has some innovations since ancient China. So too Greece, let alone Europe, must have developed new innovations over the last two thousand years. In addition the book does not provide any explanation for how these historical innovations could have emerged using the ecological, political and economic explanations.

According to world-systems theory capitalism emerged in the West in the 16th century. This, of course, is a direct expression of analytical thinking. However, in the last of the 19th century Japanese capitalism developed and from the beginning of the 1980s capitalism also developed in China. We need an explanation for how this invasion of holistic thinking came about. Lastly, the relationship between socialism in the 19th and 20th centuries needs to be made sense of in its relationship with holistic thinking in China. How is it similar and different from the values of ancient China?

The post Holistic vs Analytical Thinking first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Recapturing White Rhetoric for Socialist Agitating

Bruce Lerro — Mon, 22 Jul 2024 22:36:43 +0000

Orientation

Leninist and anarchist shortcomings in relation to rhetoric

A little over three years ago I wrote an article about how bad Mordor Leninists and anarchists are about knowing about, let alone using rhetorical rhetoric. The article is titled Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communication: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment

These areas of bumbling included:

Initiation engagement
Holding attention
Time and timing
Setting the right atmosphere
The use of the five canons of rhetoric
Importance of charisma
Adjusting to neutral and hostile audiences
Defining key terms
Use of Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle
Appealing to short-term self-interest in the audience
Making predictions
Having transition plans
Distinguishing competitive as opposed to cooperative argumentation

Purpose of this article

The aim of this article is six-fold:

First, to challenge the negative associations about what rhetoric is so that its techniques can freely be used by all socialists. To do this I contrast “Light” with “Dark” rhetoric across thirteen categories.
Second, to point out that light rhetoric has been undermined by the use of electronic media beginning in the second half of the 19th century. I will be referring to Kathleen Jameson’s great book Eloquence in the Electronic Age as I pointed out from a previous article.
Third, I will point out that at least since the Middle Ages the ruling circles of Europe (whether it be Church, State or capitalists) have used propaganda to influence people. This propaganda has used dark rhetoric for its purposes.
Fourth, I emphasize the value of light rhetoric further by contrasting it to propaganda.
Lastly, I show how white rhetoric can be criticized using the “ideological” school of criticism developed by Marxists like Terry Eagleton any Raymond Williams.

Defining rhetoric

Let me begin with a controversial definition of rhetoric. Rhetoric is the systematic and overt study of the process of how speakers influence public to either convince or persuade an audience on a controversial issue. This is done through the use of Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle which consists of logos (facts, reasons), ethos (credible sources) and pathos (use of emotions and imagination). Typically, it is practiced in law courts, political debates (city council meetings, unions, workers co-ops), or scientific conferences.

Conditions of rhetoric

First, the issue in contention must be controversial. If the issue is trite, there won’t be any reason for using rhetoric because the answer is more or less decided. On the other hand, if the issue is outlandish not enough of the audience will be interested in being engaged or curious enough about the outcome. Second, the issues must have an urgency. Both the speaker and the audience are interdependent and no one can walk away. Parties also must have a great deal of commonality so the issue can be resolved, even though they might not admit the commonality at first. The third condition of rhetoric is that risks are accepted. The parties in a rhetorical situation know they can be publicly proven wrong and they may have to alter their claim. The fourth characteristic of rhetoric is that the best solution we come up with is probable.Unlike in formal logic, no certainty is possible. The fifth and last condition of rhetoric is that the power bases used cannot be force, economics, politics or sexual seduction. Only competency, legitimacy or dialectic may be used.

Why is my definition of rhetoric controversial?

Where does rhetoric take place? Usually, rhetoric is dated back to classical Greek civilization. But George Kennedy has shown that cross-culturally rhetoric is much older. I know from my study of social evolution that rhetoric was practiced all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Recently some feminists have tried to argue that conversations in the interpersonal world or family life should be included. At the other extreme, thanks to mass communication, some rhetoricians have attempted to do rhetorical analysis based on radio, film and television. For purposes of this article, I am avoiding both the micro and macro attempts to apply rhetoric. The reason is because the places that I hope it is used is in public situations. These include city council meetings, union discussions or in workers co-op’s general assemblies

As we know, most of human communication is analogical, not digital and many analogical messages occur below the level of consciousness. When a person convinces or persuades someone unconsciously through body language or utterances not intended, does that count as rhetoric? My definition says it should not. Unconscious body language would fit in the field of influence. Influence is a larger category than rhetoric or persuasion. Rhetoric is a specific type of influence.

What is the range of mediums that should be permissible? I am drawing the line at oral and written. To be sure, the use of the alphabet and the printing press certainly changed oral rhetoric in certain ways, but it is with the medium of mass communication that propaganda overwhelms too many of the original features of rhetoric to be included. It is at this point in history that the field of propaganda begins to merge with or marginalize rhetoric.

Up until now in all categories I have tried to define rhetoric narrowly as opposed to broadly. But in this last case I would like to define rhetoric more broadly. In all pre-state societies (hunter-gatherers, simple complex horticulture societies and herding societies) rhetoric was used to come to decisions cooperatively.With the rise of agricultural states and social classes cooperative rhetoric was marginalized. At this stage the ruling elites made decisions that were no longer subject to communal debate. The invention of propaganda arose out of the need of the ruling classes to justify why so many people should accept being ruled by so few. But in the time of classical Greece and Rome there were still rulers who propagandized their population. However, rhetoric returned in the form of competitive debates in law courts and in democratic councils. Unfortunately, most of the history of rhetoric has only been presented in the form of competitive debates. It is mostly thanks to feminists that the ancient tradition of cooperative argumentation has returned. So I will argue that rhetoric should be used for both competitive and cooperative goals.

Light Vs Dark Rhetoric

Arousing the audience

“Step right up the Big Top, where seeing is believing. Right over here to the freak show”. This is an example of dark rhetoric in operation. These attention grabbers of dark rhetoric are in the business of creating awe, making thunderstruck or frightening the audience by horror. There is no suspense but plenty of special effects. Whatever their claim, it is hidden and the audience is manipulated to do things without the speaker’s intentions ever being consciously stated

In light rhetoric, attention is drawn in gradually through questions that are within the range of the audience’s curiosity. A light rhetorical speaker has made a study of his audience’s demographics before the speech itself. In dark rhetoric, audiences are considered as all the same – stupid. In light rhetoric audiences are drawn in and suspense is created so the audience does not quite know what the speaker will conclude. The claim is always made explicit to the audience, but the speaker will determine whether it is best to make the claim in the beginning, middle or end of the argument

Quality of reasoning

Dark rhetoricians do not think much of reason or providing evidence. They are notorious for committing reasoning fallacies such as ad hominin (attacking the person), guilt by association, confusing wholes with parts either-or thinking and many faulty appeals to emotions. In white rhetoric speakers are very aware of human fallacies all the way back to Aristotle and do their best to make their arguments be fallacy-free. However, they may still make mistakes but it is not with the intention of tricking the audience

Use of imagination vs fantasy

In light rhetoric, the imagination is used to create reasonable alternative futures that are based on science. The method can be though stories, analogies or vivid imagery. In dark rhetoric, fantasies that are impossible in real life are concocted. Their belief about their audience is that what freedom entails is making impossible things possible. It is an appeal to the unnatural.

Speaker ethos: charisma vs character

In dark rhetoric a speaker with charisma is essential. Dark rhetoric needs a charmer who has the spirit to inspire people. The speaker appeals to what I call the Darwinian unconscious. In other words, speakers who are tall, have a shape that indicates they have good genes (see Evolutionary Psychology by David Buss), facial symmetry, hair sheen, a sense of theatrics and are articulate and funny. Dark rhetoricians want the audience to be swept away. In light rhetoric, the speaker has to have character. This means the speaker has legitimate authority, has a good reputation, is trustworthy and competent. S/he has to exude good will and be articulate. Humor always helps, but the speaker wants the audience to be grounded, not swept away.

The relationship between the speaker and the message

In dark rhetoric, speakers will be engaged in character assassination. The speaker is enmeshed with the message. A good speaker will be claimed to have a good message and a bad speaker a bad message. In light rhetoric, the speaker and the message will be differentiated. It will be acknowledged that a bad speaker might have a good message and a good speaker might have a weak message.

Competition vs cooperation

In many of the textbooks on argumentation they show people in competitive debates. One book even showed arguers on the verge of a fist fights. But as I pointed about above, rhetoric can be used cooperatively among union members deciding whether or not to strike or participate in a city council meeting while attempting to persuade the city council to oppose a national war. Cooperative argumentation can also be used in a worker’s co-op on deciding what the ratio in salary should be between managers and workers.

Short-term vs long-term self-interest

Dark rhetoric practitioners use demagoguery. They appeal to the worst in people. They are not above spreading gossip, name dropping and meanness at the expense of the weak. They play to people’s pettiness, prejudices, and myopia. They appeal to people wanting to keep up with the Joneses, as well wishing to be superior to others. They appeal to the audience’s infantile wishes like losing weight while eating whatever they want. Dark rhetoric speakers appeal to the audience’s crude superstitions as well as the desire to take the path of least resistance. Their appeal is to short-term self-interest – pleasure, comfort or acquiring wealth without working for it. On the other hand, in the glow of light rhetoric, speakers appeal to depthful emotions, loving the stranger (agape). Emotional appeals include kindness, generosity, foresight, altruism, heroism and hope. They speak of what is good for humanity in the long-run even when it is less than popular.

Range of audience

Dark rhetors do not go where the audiences are either neutral or hostile because their cheap tricks will not work there. Trump would not do well against an audience who is neutral or hostile because he is not trained as a politician and knows nothing about how to move an audience who is not already a member of the club. Even as smooth a person as Obama, fully trained in rhetoric as a Harvard lawyer, would not do well against an angry working class crowd because his rhetorical tricks such as telling individual stories of Horatio Alger won’t fly. A practitioner of light rhetoric relishes dealing with a hostile audience and knows what it takes to change a hostile audience. Their success is not to move an audience from a hostile to a sympathetic audience, for that is too much to expect. However, they will modestly hope to influence a cynical audience to became skeptical. That is realistic.

How is the audience treated?

Dark rhetoricians treat their audiences as dupes. They will water down a speech to appeal to the lowest common denominator. They will flatter the audience. In light rhetoric, audiences are treated as active participants. The speaker creates a dialectic with the audience giving them some of what they want but also giving them more than they bargained for. In light rhetoric, the very way the audience responds changes the speaker and makes the speaker improvise what they had originally prepared.

Truth as a means to an end or an end in itself?

The standard of truth as an end in itself, regardless of time, place and circumstance is an overly idealist aspiration of Plato. Both Aristotle and the Sophists agreed that striving for the truth was admirable but most of the time it has to be parceled out because audiences are often not mature enough for the whole truth. For the Sophists, what matters in an argument is being effective. Winning them over to taking an action matters more than telling them the truth while getting no cooperation. For the Sophists truth was a means to an end, but most of the time the truth was also effective. Dark rhetoric is much more extreme than anything the Sophists did. Dark rhetoric does not care for the truth. They peddle lies, but the lies may work because there are some lies that people want to hear.

What is the relationship between form and content?

One of the stereotypical criticisms of rhetoric is that it is all fluff, all smoke and mirrors, all bombast. In other words, form without content. The opposite extreme of this is what Plato aspires to. If the content of a subject is true, the form is irrelevant. Light rhetoricians say form and content are dialectically related. When something is true, it should produce good form and good form is grounded in the truth. For example, evolutionary Darwinists have pointed out that what the human species finds beautiful is connected to outdoor scenes where there is water and landscapes of prospect (being able to see while not being seen). This also serves to increase the chances of survival.

What are the most important parts of a speech?

As many of you know, in classical rhetoric there are five cannons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, delivery and memory. In dark rhetoric, all that matters in moving an audience is arrangement of the parts of the argument and style which consists of eloquence, body language and voice tone. In dark rhetoric, the invention part of the argument is irrelevant. If you have style you can sell anything. In light rhetoric the invention of the argument and the arrangement of the argument is most important. As Aristotle pointed out the invention of a good argument has logos (facts, statistics, reasons) ethos (creditable sources) and pathos (emotion and imagination). Light rhetoricians do care how these reasons are arranged depending on the audience. The other parts of the canon matter, but not as much.

What is the relationship between the reasoning process and taking action or behaving?

In dark rhetoric, rhetors don’t care about changing minds (convincing audiences) because it is too difficult and unnecessary. Dark rhetoric is interested in getting people to do things (persuasion) – buy a product or vote. They don’t care if this happens consciously or unconsciously. In dark rhetoric rhetors think the audiences must be entertained to get them to do anything. In light rhetoric, the speaker is committed to engaging and changing the mind. The rhetor wants to persuade his audience but only after the mind is changed. Entertaining may be a byproduct but is not essential. In my teaching I was often complimented, not just being convincing but being entertaining. I never had this as a goal but it was gravy.

Sophists are our guide for white rhetoric, not Plato

Going back to the Greeks, Plato was mostly the enemy of rhetoric and thought for the most part the only kind of rhetoric was dark. Aristotle, as usual, occupied a middle position. On one hand he was a very serious formal logician but on the other hand he appreciated rhetoric and even categorized the most common mistakes using rhetoric. Contrary to Plato the rhetoric of the Sophists was middle tone or sometimes even white rhetoric. Plato, with his insistence on Truth regardless of time, place and circumstance gave rhetoric a bad name while throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Please see my table for a summary of light and dark rhetoric.

Table 1 Light vs Dark Rhetoric

Light Rhetoric	Category of Comparison	Dark Rhetoric
Moved gradually, with questions w/in the range of curiosity	Arousing the audience	Aweing, making people feel thunderstruck or in horror
Creative suspense, avoidance of special effects		No suspense, special effects freak shows
Always explicit	Claims	Never stated
Awareness of history of fallacies Makea mistakes but not in the service of tricking the audience	Quality of reasoning	Doesn’t provide evidence Commit fallacies of a hominin, guilt by association, confusing wholes and parts; either/or thinking; pathos fallacies
Imagination in the service of reasonable futures based on science	Use of imagination vs fantasy	Fantasies that are impossible in real life Appeals to the audiences idea of freedom as the impossible becoming possible
Character – legitimate authority, has a good reputation, trustworthy, competent and appears to have good will	Speaking ethos	Charisma Charm people by appealing to “the Darwinian unconscious”
Speaker and message are differentiated Good speakers can have weak messages Weak speakers can have truthful messages	Relationship of speaker to message	Character assassination Fuses speaker with message Good speakers have good messages; bad speakers have bad messages
Cooperation or competition Win-win is possible. We all learn together	Process of arguing	Competition Zero-sum game
Long term self-interest Appeal to depthful emotion, Altruism and humanity at its best	Range of self-interest	Demagogy Short-term self-interest Gossip, name dropping, pettiness, prejudices, keeping up with the Joneses, desire to feel superior, infantile wishes, superstitions, path of least resistance
Can move neutral or even hostile audiences	Range of audiences	Limited to a sympathetic audience
Active participants – giving audiences partly what they want but giving them more than they bargained for Audience has the power to change the speaker’s message	How audiences are treated	Dupes Stupid people
Truth is important but effectiveness may require time, space and circumstance considerations to be effective	Truth as means to an end or irrelevant	Truth is irrelevant What matters is getting audiences to act
Form and content are dialectically related When something is true, it should have good form When something has good form it must be at least partly true	What is the relationship between form and content	Form is what matters – content is not relevant
Invention, arrangement	What are the most important of the five canons of rhetoric	Style delivery, arrangement
Convincing first, then persuading to act	What is the relationship between changing the mind and action	Persuading them to behave through entertaining and amusement Convincing the mind is a waste of time
A scrupulous lawyer	Examples	An unscrupulous lawyer
A union meeting of rank-and- file workers deciding whether or not to strike		A barker at a carnival or a side show
Worker co-op meetings to decide on the ratio of salaries between workers and management		A used car dealer
		Radio, magazine, television advertisements

The Decline of Rhetoric in the Electronic Age

At the end of my article, Fame vs Celebrity: Movies, Music Sports and Politics, I discussed the impact electronic media has on the formation of celebrities as it applied to politics. It was in this age that we can see the decline of rhetoric as applied to politics.

Oration in Yankeedom before the electronic age

In politics before the electronic age, Yankee politicians boarded trains and gave speeches in the hot sun for 90 minutes to two hours. The public walked for miles to hear these speeches. These orators wrote their own speeches and went through all five of the canons of rhetoric. They defined their terms and they were loaded with evidence which they arranged carefully in an order that might be conductive to the audience. They laid out all possible positions in an argument to the audience the way a lawyer builds a case before his speech. The speaker was well-rounded and had command of the great speeches of the past, using poetry at times to make his point. His entire speech was committed to memory. These orators did not have to account to the public for problems in their personal lives. After all, this was politics. Their use of pathos was episodic and used to strike fear at times. They were well trained to create images from words. Lastly, for these politicians their party and their program came first. There was no cult of personality.

Oration in Yankeedom during the electronic age of television

For the most part, the use of electronic media, especially television, had a debilitating impact on political rhetoric. The number of outdoor speeches declined as the politician was followed by television cameras inside the studios. The public now had to make much less effort to hear a speech as they could now watch it on television. For various reasons, over the years the attention span of the public got shorter and shorter in part because there was a lot to see on television and also because the pace of life quickened. The owners of television networks were not willing to give a presidential speech 90-minutes to two hours of air time. The speeches of candidates got shorter, often less than thirty minutes. Gone were the parts of the argument such as defining key terms and presenting 3-5 views on a subject. Argument sides was flattened to two sides. Providing massive evidence to support a claim cost too much time and committing the speech to memory were no longer necessary. Their speech could be read off cue cards.

The political candidates no longer wrote their own speeches and the content of the speech changed as well. Since it was the nuclear family that gravitated towards television, the speeches themselves were more conversational and homier as the expectation that politicians had to appeal to women in a way they did not have to do in pre-electronic age politics. This is because woman had household responsibilities that would make travelling for hours to hear speeches less likely. The speakers continued to speak about their party but they allowed their personal opinion or personal stories to creep in. Gone was the poetry and the memorization of historical events.

Summing up the last two sections, we suspect that socialists are critical of rhetoric because they think all rhetoric is dark rhetoric and all political rhetoric is what was on TV. These are good reasons to be skeptical or even cynical.

Dark Rhetoric in the Service of Propaganda

Defining propaganda

Let me begin this section with a qualification. The fact that rhetoric became weaker in the electronic age does not mean it turned into dark rhetoric. What I want to ask and answer now is what is the relationship between rhetoric and propaganda? From my article Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communications: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment “Paraphrasing Jowett and O’Donnell’s book Propaganda and Persuasion, propaganda is the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, emotions and behavior cognitions. Who are they controlling? Millions of people through mass media while censoring, hiding, restricting, distorting or exaggerating the claims and evidence of their opposition. Propaganda can be white, gray, or black. Propaganda can be easily found during political election campaigns, inaugural speeches, religious recruiting, news reporting, film and, some say, sports”.

What was the relationship between rhetoric and propaganda before mass communication?

As a reminder, there was propaganda in Yankeedom all the way back to the plantation owners since all ruling classes need to justify their dominant existence some way. But before mass communication propaganda and rhetoric existed side by side. Surely the ruling classes of the 17th-19th centuries knew about rhetoric but the lack of access to mass communication made their power limited to the use of monumental architecture and warmed-over religious symbology. More importantly, it was still possible for lawyers and writers to use rhetoric not directly connected to ruling class propaganda. After the electronic age this changed.

The impact of Black Rhetoric on mass propaganda

Before beginning this section, I want to clarify the difference between White and Black propaganda. White propaganda presents facts, but it twists the interpretation of facts in its favor. White propaganda works well because it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Black Rhetoric is used when elites are in trouble. It makes up facts because its impact on the subject population is failing. Black Rhetoric of aweing and making people thunderstruck or feeling horrible, using special effects while never stating its claim works beautifully with black propaganda. Black propaganda has the same bad quality of reasoning as Black Rhetoric and is guilty of the same kind of fallacies. While the Black Rhetoric technique of creating fantasies that may be impossible in real life may not be used in black political propaganda, it could be used in entertaining black propaganda such as Walt Disney productions. Both white and black propaganda benefit from having speakers who have charisma. Black political propaganda is right at home with the Black Rhetoric technique of character assassination.

In Dark Rhetoric there are only winners and losers, determined by competition. This fits very well with the part of capitalist propaganda that promotes competition between capitalists as the only way an economy can be run. The entertainment division of propaganda such as reality television programs works very well with the worst superficial and petty side of the population and their short-term and infantile hopes. The limitations Black Rhetoric has to a sympathetic audience does not apply to propaganda because propaganda has to attempt to reach the entire population even those who are cynical because it has to control them. While advertising propaganda is used to treat people as dupes just as propagandists do, advertising that comes off the internet treats people as having specialized needs.

The impact of mass propaganda on Black Rhetoric

Mass propaganda explodes black rhetoric on the scale at which Black Rhetoric can be produced, the times it can be made available to people as well as the number of people it can reach. Black rhetoricians can hide their identity because its sources are elite institutions in which they will be well-protected. Black rhetoricians are much better able to time when their message gets out because it has mass media coordination. While Black Rhetoric is not usually linked to a mythology or ideology under the wing of propaganda it could be harnessed to make it even more powerful. Propaganda has power bases that are linked to political parties, economic systems well beyond the solitary reach of a typical black rhetorician, whether it be a side show barker or used car dealer. The control of some of information flow is less with propaganda than in Black Rhetoric because the Black Rhetoric loses the feedback from performing for a public audience. In Table 2, all the categories beginning with the place of controversy, propaganda doesn’t amplify Black Rhetoric. It just supports it.

Table 2 Light Rhetoric vs Propaganda

Light Rhetoric	Category compared	Propaganda
Interpersonal arguments (persuading your romantic partner to go to a particular movie) Public debate, public talks Face to face	Scale of appeal	Appeal to larger masses of people who are spatially dispersed
Usually not backed by power institutions Single individual	Presence of power institutions	Backed by large social institutions controlled by elites
Alternative sources available though not always presented fairly No censorship	Are alternative sources of information available	Alternative sources of information discouraged Either demonized, marginalized or censored
Usually visible – overt	Visibility of source	Usually concealed—covert
No mass media. Media is five senses or print	Place of Mass media	Use of newspapers, film radio, movies, television
Open-ended information flow	Production and distribution of information	Withheld, releasing information at predetermined time Manufacturing information, communicating information to selective audiences, distorting information
New information may contrast message with an audience’s existing body of knowledge	Relationship between existing knowledge and new information	New information is attempted to be smuggled into the audiences’ existing body of knowledge
Usually not linked to an ideology or mythology	Presence of an ideology or a mythology	Linked to a clear institutional ideology or political mythology capitalism/communism
Charisma, legitimacy, Competency, manipulation	Leading power bases	Politics, economics charisma, seduction legitimacy
Stated up front	Place of controversy	Controversy hidden
Dominated by the speaker but built in opportunity for audience to respond	Direction of information flow	Lopsided from propagandist to a passive audience Attempts to control information flow Monitors public opinion with polls, focus groups
Either friends, acquaintances some strangers	Strength of social bonds	Large, anonymous masses of strangers
Sought voluntarily	Does the audience seek to be influenced	Not sought voluntarily—maybe discovered later
Deliberate	Is the communication unintentional or intentional	Deliberate
Monologue, q and a Turn taking – dialogue	Process of communicating	One-sided Monologue, bombardment
Slower, time to think, reason, write	Speed of interaction	Fast, little time to reflect Bypasses opportunity to reason: rapid images; arresting symbols Sensory bombardment Slogans, architecture
Longer – 30-90 minutes	Length of messages	Short –30 seconds to 5 minutes
Convincing (changing minds) and persuading (actions)	Outcomes What is each trying to achieve	Persuasion, control
Ideally satisfy both speaker and audience needs	Whose needs are satisfied?	Satisfy needs of propagandist and not necessarily in the interest of the audience
Typically liberal values	Political ideological values	Conservatives, fascists Socialists

Left-wing Ideological Criticism of White Rhetoric

What is Marxian ideological criticism of rhetoric?

The field of White Rhetoric makes a separation between communication theory on one hand and politics and economics on the other. Marxians do not accept this separation. Marxian ideological criticism analyzes rhetorical communication messages for their obvious and subtle moves to control relationships in political and economic ways. It examines rhetorical situations and acts for the way in which they can be linked to material conditions of society, like technology, economics or politics. Marxian ideological criticism is bold. For some it is too bold. It claims that all other approaches: liberal, conservative or fascist can be explained by it. It claims that other schools of rhetorical approaches themselves are ideological.

White Rhetoric takes place in a hegemonic capitalist society

Liberal rhetoric operates in a system of capitalist hegemony. Hegemony is the process by which the ruling class gained the willing consent of subordinate groups without the use of force, coercion or bribery. Furthermore, once hegemony is attained it must be reproduced. It is here that White Rhetoric is either part of the problem or a small part of a socialist solution. The goal of the Marxist rhetoric critic is to identify rhetorical acts that legitimate the hegemonic views of the ruling or upper classes. Most Marxist rhetoric has focused on studying mass media – film and TV because of their mass impact on working class life. Our criticism is ideological as it evaluates rhetorical activity in order to discover how the powerful vested interests in a society benefit from policies

The class basis of White Rhetoric

Just a reminder that the purpose of this article is to capture white rhetoric for socialists. So it is the traditions of white rhetoric that I attempt to win over though it also must be criticized. Marxist Ideology criticism claims that mainstream rhetoric appeals to middle class and upper middle-class audiences and they generally exclude working class people. This is due to the liberal origins of debating in politics and law. Without necessarily hoping to white rhetoric can create false consciousness in the working class. On top of this we have to face that working class people are complicit in their own subjugation (class-in-itself).

Questions to use in the analysis of white rhetorical situations

Consider all four variables of criticism in the analysis: source-message-environment-critic
What is the historical, social, political and economic context in which the rhetorical situation or act exists?
How might the rhetorical situation or act reflect the ideology of the dominant class?
Does it articulate the ideology directly? In what ways does it legitimize support or sustain it in some way?
What evidence of the subjugation or exploitation of the working class does the rhetorical situation or act not show?
In what ways, consciously or unconsciously, does the rhetorical situation or act divide the working class in order to fragment it?
How might the rhetorical situation or act attempt to create an imaginary unity into the hegemonic ideology?
Are there any rhetorical acts which demonstrate class conflict favorable to the working class?
Where is the ideology in the criticism of the other rhetorical approaches to the text?

These questions involve a “critique” that is more than interpretation or evaluation. It is judgment relative to the liberation from the grips of false consciousness of the working class and empowerment, changes in social action and personal identity.

The shortcomings of Marxian ideological rhetorical criticism

Ideological criticism is not unique to Marxists. Ideological criticism can come from conservatives as well. The weaknesses of ideological criticism is that we assume we already know how the world really works. For example, time and again capitalists have survived economic crises that Marxists swore would be the last one. Secondly, doing ideological criticism also creates a danger of becoming paranoid and believing rhetorical forces have intended harm when many of the results of circumstances are unintentional. Third, Marxist critics have known to be reductionist, thinking that every single White Rhetoric artifact can be reduced to an ideological criticism. Fourth, the socialist commitment can lead to a lack of objectivity in evaluating White Rhetoric produced by various liberal rhetoricians. Fifth, it fails to consider the ruling classes are not always conscious, cynical manipulators. They may be themselves imprisoned by the same false consciousness. The constant image of hooded puppeteers twisting and turning the masses at will does not do justice to the subtleties of power and control. Finally, the will of the individual tends to get lost in the shuffle of economics and politics structures. The counter to the individualism in a capitalist society is not to ignore the individual but to identify their social identity not just as a product, but as a co-producer. Fortunately, the work of Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall in cultural studies has addressed some of these criticisms.

Conclusion

My article began experientially with a list of thirteen ways in which anarchists and Leninists fail to use basic rhetorical skills. In part 2 I’ve explained the left’s lack of interest in rhetoric as originating from the bad reputation the field of rhetoric has. To counter this I compared Light to Dark Rhetoric across fifteen categories and claimed that Light Rhetoric can be successfully implemented by socialists. Then I discussed the weakening of White Rhetoric which came about with the electronic age, especially television.

All rhetoric traditions black or white have not been very sensitive to the existence of propaganda and how it interacts with rhetoric. In the service of clarifying this, I differentiate the interaction between rhetoric and propaganda before and after mass communication. I show how black rhetoric techniques are amplified when they have propaganda to support it. Further, I show how propaganda can benefit from the knowledge of Black Rhetoric techniques.

I close my article by defending the use of White Rhetoric by socialists provided it can withstand Marxian ideological criticism. This includes an awareness that all rhetoric takes place in a capitalist society riddled by class struggles. Nine questions are provided for Marxians to use in criticizing White Rhetoric. I suggest the work of Terry Eagleton and Raymond Williams in carrying out Marxian rhetorical criticism and I close with six criticisms of the Marxian ideological school of rhetorical criticism.

The post Recapturing White Rhetoric for Socialist Agitating first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations

Bruce Lerro — Mon, 08 Jul 2024 01:21:28 +0000

Orientation

Power struggles between the two sides of the brain

In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions do not work in a harmonious manner all the time. There is a power struggle between them. Just as we have accepted Freud’s depiction of the psyche as composed of a struggle between the id and the superego and just as many of us have accepted that working class people are conflicted between a class-in-itself and a class-for-itself identity, so might the two sides of the brain be involved in working at cross-purposes. John Milton’s Paradise Lost seems to be a precisely profound exploration of the divided human brain.

Rise of the left side of brain in Western history

Over the course of Western history, the left side of the brain has gotten more powerful. But at least initially, as Karl Jaspers demonstrated in his book The Axial Age, the shift to the left-side of the brain has happened not just in the West, in Palestine and Greece, but also in the East in China and India. As we shall see, this power struggle is further externalized in the material world in Western history when we examine the differences between the Renaissance and the Reformation, between the Enlightenment and Romanticism and between capitalism and socialism. They will also show themselves in the commonalities between the Reformation, the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

The Ancient Worlds of the Greeks Lack of faces in Egypt and Mesopotamia

The right hemisphere is crucial in interpreting faces and evaluating facial reactions. The right hemisphere was also important for aesthetic judgments in art. In his book Faces: the Changing Look of Mankind, Milton Brener points out that there are no individual facial portraits in prehistoric art. The earliest drawings, especially in the Neolithic Age, lack of spatial orientation or a clear relationship between the parts and the whole. The faces in Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia are inexpressive gazes. Artistic subjects are mainly animals. If humans appear at all, it is only the parts of the body, the pelvis or buttocks, that are shown most frequently. Human figures are headless. When faces do appear as with aristocrats or kings, they are expressionless, and non-individualized. Lack of faces shows the lack of right brain involvement.

Right brain presence in ancient Greece

In Archaic Greece at the time of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the right brain was clearly operating in the sustained, unified theme that produced a single coherent narrative over a long stretch of time. The degree of empathy and insight into characters show the mark of the right hemisphere. A change to portraits came about in the 6th century BCE. Brener says the Greek subjects in this period are more individualized, varied, emotionally expressive and empathic. Emotions include pride, hate, bodily gesture, envy, anger, pity and love. There is yet to be a separation between the body and the mind, matter and the soul. He posits it is the right hemisphere that creates and understands expressive poetry and uses metaphors in oral discourse and in writing.

Left brain in Greece and the commercial spirit (600-400 BCE)

Prometheus is the god of technical skill where the left side shows prominence over the right. The god Prometheus is said to bring numeracy and literacy to the Greeks while inventing weights and measures.

The invention of money is an indicator of the same neuropsychological development. As Marx pointed out, historically the use of money went from a means for exchanging commodities to developing an independent existence.

In his book Money and the Early Greek Mind, Richard Seaford points out that monetary currency is the prime mover of a new, more abstract kind of philosophy. Before the development of currency (whether barter or gift) there is an emphasis on reciprocity in exchange. With currency, reciprocals relationships become static, based on equivalence with and the emphasis placed on utility and profit sustaining the community. Money is homogenous. It flattens its objects, eroding their uniqueness. Money is impersonal and weakens the need for bonds. Just as money freezes reciprocity between humans and objects, so too the mind becomes abstracted from its relationship with the body. The disembodied mind – noos – emerges, a mind separate from the body in about the 4th century. Bruno Snell discusses a fascinating history of this in his book Discovery of the Mind.

Legal constitutions, bodies of laws, formalized geography and study of maps

By the time of Socrates, the respect for the testimony of the senses had been slipping and the importance of metaphor was forgotten. For Plato, poets are to be banished from The Republic. In art again we return to the depiction of parts of the body: heads sprung without necks; arms wandered without their shoulders. The left hemisphere seems to be in control again, but then this changed back. The 4th to the 2nd century was a high point of expressiveness of portraits in painting and sculpture with the most extraordinary attention given to individual expression. The left and right together produced the development of a legal constitution and a body of laws, studies of history, formalization of geography and the study of maps.

The Romans

As for the Roman world, McGilchrist tells us most of the great legacy of Rome’s literature belongs to the first century BCE with Virgil, Horace and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. All three suggest an alliance between the right and left hemisphere. Until the end of the 3rd century, portraiture had sought to convey a lifelike individuality.

However, a fundamental change took place after the third century in the depiction of the face. Portraits of stone began to show a particularly abstract, distant gaze no longer concerned with the real world. McGilchrist points out that the features suddenly stiffen in an expressive Medusa-like mask. There is a movement away from life-like nature to an abstract type; from plastic articulation to conceptual generalization; from the corporeal to the symbolic. Natural objects lose their liveliness and idiosyncrasy. In art an abrupt marionette-like movement predominates. A mechanical order is imposed on the objects from above and pressed into horizontal lines that are symmetrical, just like soldier to his rank-and file. With Roman military and administrative success, a bureaucracy grows and the left hemisphere begins to duplicate itself without regulation in the material world. In drama McGilchrist says there also is a possible parallel to the left hemisphere being out of control with the influence of Theophrastus character types.

Middle Ages

From this point through the Middle Ages the face and body are symbolic only. Individualized portraits of the emperor disappear and they become alike in the same way as the saints are depicted. Myth and metaphor are no longer semi-transparent but opaque. At best myth and metaphor or superficial ornaments – at worst lies and superstitions.

The Renaissance

Intensity in the rise of self-consciousness and individualism

The Renaissance was the next great flowering of the right-left hemispheres at their best. In this period, human dignity lay in our unique capacity to choose our own destiny, not simply be the plaything of fate as it was with the Greeks. This resulted in the importance attributed to the recording of individual lives in the rise of biography and autobiography. There seems to be this standing back, an even more self-conscious reflection than the Greeks in the 6th century. There is also a demand for abstraction and generalization, favoring the left hemisphere in the same time period.

The plays of Shakespeare

McGilchrist says drama has come to the fore at those points in history when we have achieved necessary distance but not yet so detached that we are inappropriately objective or alienated from one another. The plays of Shakespeare constitute one of the most striking testimonies to the rise of the right hemisphere during this period. There is a complete disregard for theory and categorization which might come about with the predominance of the left hemisphere. Everywhere, Shakespeare reveled in opposites, seeing life as a mix of good and bad. He did this instead of standing outside or above his creation and telling us how to judge his character. In music, there was the amazing efflorescence of polyphony and complex harmony throughout the Renaissance.

The Reformation

Attacks on image and metaphor

The Reformation is a great example of a religious movement driven by the left side of the brain gone haywire. The Reformation is the first great expression of the search for certainty in modern times. It attacks the visual image, the vehicle par excellence of the right hemisphere. McGilchrist points out that the decapitation of statues by the Reformers took place because both lay and clergy could not handle the confrontation between the animate form with an inanimate image. They could make sense of them together if the image could be understood as a metaphor for the real object. For the Protestants, either the statue is a god or an idolatrous thing, with nothing in between. During the Reformation there was a decline in metaphoric understanding of ceremony and ritual. Instead, they understood the repetition of empty procedures. In Protestant circles, words acquired the status of things. The word freezes into a kind of idol itself. The Reformation replaces the immediate presentation of an unmediated mystical experience in the Renaissance with a representation through the Bible. The way to get the meaning across for the Protestants was to repeat words endlessly, drumming and drilling it into the mind. This is something the left hemisphere would attempt. In the Reformation the sacred space centerpiece is no longer on the image on the altar, but on the pulpit.

Mechanization of sacred space

McGilchrist points out that the Catholic Church encouraged and incorporated movement, walking and processions into its ceremonies. Not the Protestants. Koerner, in his book The Reformation of the Image draws attention to the bureaucratic categorization that springs up from the Lutheran church. People are neatly placed in symmetrical ranks on the floor of the Church which are laid out like graph paper in a typical left hemisphere materialization. The congregation is seated neatly in rows of obedient, mechanical subjects.

The Seventeenth Century

Philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin says 17th century science was a secular version of what the Protestants had done religiously. It was the reversal in Renaissance values. This can be seen in literature to philosophy in the movement:

From Pantagruel to that of Pilgrim’s Progress
From Shakespeare to Racine
From Montaigne to Descartes
From the reciprocal oral mode to fixed and unidirectional written mode
From Eliot’s unified sensibility to dissociation

Descartes and Madness

Descartes is one of the first and greatest exemplars of the left hemisphere philosophy in the 17th century. He has problems with the very idea of temporal continuity. Descartes thought that reliance on the body, the senses and the imagination would lead not only to error, but to madness. Yet as we have seen in Part I of this article, it is an excess of rationality that can lead to schizophrenia. In fact, Descartes had many of the same characteristics as schizophrenics: excessively detached, hyper-rational, an intense self-awareness, a disembodied and alienated condition. McGilchrist tells us Descartes describes looking out of his window seeing what he knows to be people passing by as seeming to him like machines. Descartes was not even sure he had a body at all. This is the rationality to which he was committed. This devitalization results in a need for certainty. The analytical geometry which he founded is a disciplined application of left-brain thinking.

The Enlightenment

Symmetry and balance

McGilchrist says the true relationship between the left and right side of the brain is that reason is the constitutive foundation of functioning and rationality plays a regulatory role. The relationship between reason and rationality is developed in some detail in Part I of my article. However, Kant reversed the relationship between reason and rationality. He imprisoned reason within the closed system of rationality, including his space, time and causality categories. Reason in the Enlightenment was static, not dynamic. Reason means holding tensions that are incompatible in a balanced symmetry meaning equal measure. Beauty in the Enlightenment is holding tensions symmetrically. Symmetry was also the ultimate guiding aesthetic principle of the Enlightenment typified in music by Hayden.

In any scientific procedure on a natural object, if the scientist leaves it unchanged s/he is admired. The butterfly is skewered and unmoving, a specimen in the collector’s cabinet. This is what McGilchrist says captures the Enlightenment’s sense of nature. The changing, evolving nature of individual things or beings had to wait until the 18th century revolution in biology. Unlike the Reformation, the Enlightenment did not attack metaphor and imagination frontally. However, they trivialized it as nothing more than a playful ornament, an extra, not something that helps us to understand reality.

The all-seeing eye

There were serious political consequences to the discovery of optics. As Foucault has pointed out, the all-powerful, all-surveying and all-capturing eye achieved its ultimate form in Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, a prison in which the authorities can see every prisoner while the authorities are invisible to the prisoners and the prisoners cannot see each other. This monstrous imaginary prison could only be hatched by the left brain. McGilchrist argues that Bentham has many of the features that would suggest a mild degree of autism and defects in right hemisphere functioning. Bentham was socially awkward, and probably never talked to a woman at all except to his cook and housemaid. He had a contempt for the British common law tradition which was much more right-brain law tradition.

The problem with sight, as Herder points out, is its tendency to meet the depth, breadth and volume of the world with the cool rebuff of a planar surface, a representation. In the romantic period, Herder and Winckelmann both praised sculpture for its depth, volume, fullness and complex curvature, transcending the rectilinear flatness of a single plane of vision which would be consistent with the left side of the brain. Wordsworth spoke of what he called the tyranny of the eye.

The uncanny

The uncanny is a psychological state which results from a loss of the distinction between the living and the purely mechanical. Koerner makes the point that iconoclasm of the Reformation granted so much uncanny powers to images that it came close to idolatry. McGilchrist criticizes the violence of the French Revolution by pointing out it was not saints made of wood images that were attacked by the revolutionaries but kings and dukes themselves that were decapitated. In the book The Female Thermometer: 18th Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny Terry Castle explores the elements of phantasmagoria, the grotesque, carnivalesque travesty, hallucination reveries, paranoia and nightmarish fantasy doubles, dancing dolls automata, waxwork figures, mirror selves and spectral emanations.

These are all related to schizophrenia as we saw in Part I. Living things are experienced as mechanisms. The living body becomes an assemblage of independently moving fragments. Interest in the uncanny resulted in the book Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Here in the person of the mad Dr. Frankenstein, the left hemisphere of Dr. Frankenstein assembles the dead body parts and breathes life into it through lightning. However, the result is not a human whole which is more than its parts, but a monster that is no more than the sum of the enlivened body parts, a monster. Remember, for the Enlightenment after all, nature is a whole equal to the sum of the parts. Later on, the Romantic William Blake contrasted the single-minded, limiting, measuring mechanical, the god of Newton, to the many-minded liberating power of the creative imagination the God of Milton.

Romanticism and the Right Side of the Brain

Depth and mystery

In the first wave of Romanticism in the early 19th century, we find a return to cultural expressions of the right brain. McGilchrist points to the work of Claude Lorain. He has been said to be the greatest landscape painter ever. His paintings have depth, both spatial and temporal, and a deep perspective with steeply angled buildings. Light and color suggest not just distance as such, but a succession, a progression of distances.

For the Romantics, half-light and transitional states have a multitude of affinities with complexity. The romantics are attracted to fog, haze, moonlights and mist. They love unfinished sketches, the half-light of dawn, music heard far off, and mountains where the top is obscured by mist. The right hemisphere is at home with blurry, fleeting, half-lite form. The romantics were convinced that one might learn more from half-light than full light. As many of you know, Hegel imaginatively said that the owl of Minerva, goddess of wisdom, only flew at dusk. For the Romantics there was a longing for the innocent unselfconscious both in a historical and personal past. It is with the right hemisphere that we recall our childhood memories. Distance in time and place expands the soul. Fusion with nature included fusion with the body. The fusion of body, soul and spirit were never more keenly aspired to than with romantic pantheism.

The Industrial Revolution: Making the World in the Likeness of the Left Brain

Who but a political economist and a class of people with the left side of the brain in overdrive could imagine that through the selfishness of individuals a harmonious social whole could result? Without care or compassion a whole is supposed to spontaneously emerge. “Liberty” for the left side of the brain is the laisse faire of Adam Smith’s version of capitalism.

The mechanization of work spaces, commodities, and workers under capitalism

In the next century, McGilchrist says the most daring assault of the left hemisphere on the world was the industrial revolution. It was creating a world in the left hemisphere’s own likeness. Whether it is the mechanics of the production of the factory, production of commodities or the production and reproduction of workers, they are broadly similar.

In the early days of the factory, skilled workers still controlled the pace of production and took breaks as they needed them. In the second half of the 19th century family capitalists joined in larger corporate entities and the organization of the factory changed. Now rectilinear grids of machines make identical surfaces and shapes. In the machine of factories, capitalists want to know three things;

how much it could do?;
how quickly can it do it?; and,
with what degree of precision?

In the case of commodities, they were mass produced cheaply for a national market. Quantity replaces quality. Gone are the handicrafts, each of which is different and bears the creativity of the artisan who made them. Workers are the makers of commodities but due to alienation from their work they no longer understand that commodities are a means to an end. Rather commodities become ends in themselves. As Marx says, things are in the saddle. People become enslaved to the things that they make.

Whether it is on the assembly line itself, the production of commodities or the life of the worker in the factory, the parts of the machine were just, equally interchangeable units of their categories. It is here that the inner structure of the human organism, the left side of the brain, externalizes and multiplies in ever increasing measure into the material world, transforming it along the way. The innate structure of the left hemisphere through capitalist technology is being incarnated in the world it has now come to dominate.

Socialism as a return of the right brain to the industrialization process

One the other hand it was through Marx and the socialist movement that the attempt was made to change these conditions. Socialists want to redesign factories so that artificial intelligence serves to relieve workers of rote movement and allow them to work less. Socialists want to produce commodities for use-value, not exchange value and restore the production of pre-capitalist production modes. They want to appreciate commodities as a means to an end, not an end in itself. But socialists seek to achieve this on a higher level. Lastly, socialists strive to overcome alienation of workers on the job and the specialization of labor where a worker does one activity over and over again. Instead, as Marx wrote, in a communist society people will fish in the morning, raise cattle in the afternoon and criticize society in the evening. The entire socialist program can be understood as a collective movement to reinstate the projects that are expressions of the right side of the brain.

Modernity From 1880 to Mid 20th Century

Time and space contraction

In Anthony Giddens’ book, Modernity and Self-Identity he described the characteristic disruption of space and time that is required by globalization as a necessary context of industrial capitalism. This means the intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness.

The features of modernity include:

mobility which insures a permanent population with no attachment to place;
a high pace of change in the physical environment; and,
the need for convenience in physical transport.

These disruptions in time undermine traditions which are either discarded, marginalized or reinvented (Eric Hobsbawm’s Invention of Tradition). Attachments to others are weakened radically.

In the 20th century the Vienna Circle of logical empiricism involved another philosophical-scientific attempt by the left brain movement in its grasping for certainty, which was even more formal, and exact than the one of Descartes. But this had psychological implications. Louis Sass calls the result hyper-consciousness where everything gets dragged into the full glare of consciousness. This is typified in Robert Musil’s novel Man Without Qualities.

On the other hand, in the United States the pragmatic movement of William James, John Dewey and Charles Sanders Pierce were right-brain attempts to make philosophy practical and down to earth. Also, the emergence of Process philosophy in the work of Whitehead and Samuel Alexander is an attempt to link a dynamic science of complexity to a dynamic philosophy.

Conclusion: What the Left Hemisphere Becoming Dominant Would Look Like:

increased specialization;
it would substitute information for knowledge;
keep refining experiments in detail;
increase in both abstraction and reification;
expansion of bureaucracy;
morality based on utility, calculation and enlightened self-interest;
paranoia;
panoptical control;
individuals as interchangeable parts of mechanical system;
altruism is seen as suspicious;
lack of common sense;
anger and aggression would be more common;
loss of insight;
pathos becomes shameful;
boredom drives towards sensationalism and novelty;
conceptual art lacks depth and distorted and bizarre perspectives;
dance is solipsistic rather than communal; and,
despoilation of the natural world.

Psychological surveys show increased unhappiness in the Anglo-American Empire. Iain McGilchrist fears we are at risk of being trapped by the I-it world. On the other hand, the factor that explains the most in happiness in humanity is the breadth and depth of our social connections. McGilchrist writes that the fallout into this left brain world is the story of Adam and Eve being turned out of Paradise. McGilchrist tells us that the quest for certainty is the greatest of all illusions. It is what the ancients meant by hubris and this is what the Western world is currently trapped in.

Left Brain-Right Brain in Human History

Left Hemisphere	Hemisphere of the Brain	Right Hemisphere
No portraits in prehistoric art including Egypt, Mesopotamia	Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece	Portraiture in 6th century Greece
Prometheus—technical skills Numeracy, literacy, weights and measures Money/Plato’s theory of forms Legal constitutions, bodies of laws; formalization of geography; study of maps	4th century Greece
With Roman military and administrative success, bureaucracy in the left hemisphere begins to freewheel	Early Roman Empire	Rome—first century BCE with Virgil, Horace and Ovid Portraiture until end of the 3rd century
Portraits of stone began to show a particularly abstract form Distant gaze of disengagement with the real world The features of the face suddenly in a Medusa-like mask	Late Roman Empire
Body and face as symbols	Middle Ages
Reformation–Quest for certainty Literal vs metaphor and ritual Destruction of images Representation Words are the new idols Pulpit replaces altar Mechanization of sacred space (rows in church)	Renaissance vs Reformation	Renaissance Perspective unites the world and the individual Love of imagery Presentation—magical and Mystical experience Efflorescence of polyphony and complex harmony Rise of biography and autobiography Shakespeare – Individuality, not types
Mechanical nature Quest for certainty Hydraulic force, mechanical pressure	17th century	Organic Nature
Descartes The body, the senses and the imagination lead not only to error, but to madness Analytical geometry Types Racine’s plays End of sensibility (Eliot)
Ideal is rational Symmetrical balance	Enlightenment/Romanticism	Claude Lorain Paintings with spatial and temporal depth Deep perspective
All seeing eye Panopticon Jeremy Bentham The Uncanny: confusing inanimate with animate		Mist, foggy, mystery Artisan handicrafts
Timeless, permanent Laissez faire Adam Smith capitalism		Time dependent
Mechanization of the factory Mass production of commodities Turning workers into interchangeable parts	Industrial Revolution	Socialism Artificial Intelligence makes work less rote, relieves workers of long hours Making commodities for use-value Overcoming the specialization of labor with well-rounded work day
Pointillism, Cubism	Late 19th Early 20th century Paintings	The movement towards aestheticism has been seen as the last flowering of Romanticism William Morris
Disharmony in music Schoenberg	Music	Harmony in music causes changes in the automatic nervous system with a slowing of the heart
Logical Positivists Vienna Circle	20th century Philosophy	Pragmatism Process philosophy
Robert Musil’s the Man without qualities	Literature

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

•• Read Part 1 here

The post The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 20 Jun 2024 15:25:23 +0000

Orientation

Left and right brain divisions and dependencies

Why is the brain so clearly and deeply divided? Why are the two cerebral hemispheres asymmetrical? Is the division of labor in the brain complete or do the sides overlap in functions? A lot of what we once thought went on in one hemisphere alone is now known to go on in both. For instance, both sides of the brain can handle words and images, both are involved in thinking and both can process language. Further, there is duplication across both spheres. While the hemispheres need to cooperate, believe it or not, Iain McGilchrist claims there is a power struggle between them, analogous to differences between Freud’s id and superego or Marx’s divided worker possessing both class-in-itself and class-for-itself identities. It is only at the level of the interpretation of specific events that competition between hemispheres occurs. The left hemisphere is ultimately dependent on the right, though it seems to have no awareness of this fact. As we will find in Part II, the brain does not merely mediate our experience of the world but shapes it as well.

Where we are going?

This article is divided into two parts. In Part I, we will contrast the differences between the left and the right side of the brain. Secondly, we will discuss how the left brain at its worst leads to schizoid or schizophrenic behavior. Lastly, in Part I we will explore the commonalities between schizophrenia and modern art, including painting, music and writing literature. Without arguing that modern art causes schizophrenia there is no question that cases of schizophrenia have multiplied during the industrialization process of the 19th and the first third of thc 20th century.

In Part II of this article, the author of the book The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist ambitiously claims that the difference between the hemispheres is not just inside the brains of individuals. They are expressed in the history of the West of the brain’s response to changes in the movements of thinking from ancient Greeks through the Middle Ages, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

Differences Between Hemispheres

Faust is seen by many as the best representative of modern self-consciousness who declared there were two souls in his breast. The right side of the brain deals with the big picture and emerges first in human development. Its attention is diffused and it searches for unique patterns in the real world. Whatever information it finds, it places it in a context. For the brain’s right side, wholes are more than the sum of their parts. Once the new information is in, its function is to stabilize the system (negative feedback). The right hemisphere watches out not only for itself but for the left side as well. It multitasks. In the brain, the right-side does parallel processing of systems at the same time. It generates alternatives to problems.

The left hemisphere is its junior partner and is more unpredictable. The left hemisphere is more specialized, focused and sees the parts very well in isolation. The left hemisphere does not seek out new information but focuses on bringing order and logic within the system. It does not seek out the new but organizes information within into types and classifies it. If the right hemisphere, processing wholistically, misses the trees for the forest, the left hemisphere is preoccupied with the trees, missing the forest. At its worst, the right side of the brain has attention deficient disorder. A corresponding downside of the left side of the brain would be obsessive compulsive disorder.

While the focus of the right hemisphere is to bring information from the real world into the system, the left hemisphere abstracts from what the right hemisphere brings in and then generalizes from it. The left hemisphere prefers to do one thing at a time, serially. It prefers linear processes with a beginning, middle and end. The right side of the brain understands that processes recur, they are cyclic, reciprocal and sometimes turn into spirals. The left side likes to break things into parts, analyzing them while the right side likes to pull processes together synthetizing them. The left side takes what the right brain pulls together and gives fixity to what was once an ambiguous process. It seizes one alternative and turns it every which way. Believe it or not, a great deal of psychological research shows that most of the normal psychological processes go on in our unconscious; namely, the automatic systems and sympathetic parts of our systems such as heart rate and blood pressure in reaction to emotions. This is part of the right side of the brain. The conscious part of our system. Where we solve problems is the domain of the left side of the brain.

The left side breaks processes into bits. The right side of the brain does not see bits, but rather networks. In the evolution of the triune brain stem, the right side of the brain is more directly connected to the limbic and mammalian system. The left side of the brain is connected to the late developing neocortex. The right brain is most interested in the dynamics of the world, where things are leading. The left side hungers to turn these events into a history, what has become of events. It follows the left brain and tries to capture the events of the world and freeze them into a static system. The right side is more at home with how things change over time. To use a metaphor the left side is like the noun side of language; the right side in interested in motion. Lastly the right side imagines that all of nature is alive and all relationships are “I-thou” to use Buber’s terminology. The left side prefers to make things out of nature, acting as in “I-it” relationships.

The left side of the brain is most at home with either/or answers, while the right side can tolerate ambiguity. The left side likes single meaning while the right side can handle meanings which only partly overlap. The left side of the brain is more likely to be dogmatic and the right side more open-minded. The left side prefers the denotation of language with precision of reference and meaning. The right side is more sensitive to the connotation, emotional side of language.

Rationality vs reason

A number of years ago two rhetoricians, Stephen Toulmin and Chaim Perelman made a very important distinction between two words we tend to use interchangeably: reason and rationality. These distinctions arose in order to address the question of the difference between formal logic and informal logic. We use our reason when we try to make probabilistic guesses about what is likely to be true when no one knows for sure (informal logic). Formal logic, what they call rationality, occurs in situations which are closed systems where one sure answer is possible. An example of a closed system problem is a word puzzle. You don’t search for information outside the problem to solve it. All the information you need is within the problem. The left side of the brain follows rules and manipulates symbols. The right side of the brain is more creative and finds new rules and new symbol systems. The right side of the brain is reasonable, the left side is rational. Rationality is about the relation of means to ends. The right side sees further into the distance by looking at ends in themselves. In terms of processing events, the right side is at its best starting things up and closing things out. The left side at its best is processing things in the middle, once they are under control. This has many other ramifications.

Reason understands the world more broadly. It appreciates poetry and metaphor. Rationality takes things literally and prosaically. Reason also has a sense of humor, including irony and sarcasm. The rationality side is dead serious, it doesn’t get jokes and as you might imagine, is socially awkward. A rational person acts something like a nerd. It focuses focus on digital communication while reason is sensitive to body language, vocal tone, gestures and postures (analogical messages). The rational brain likes the virtual world; the right side prefers the real world.

What Can Go Wrong With the Left Side of the Brain?

McGilchrist does not have much to say about what can go wrong with the right side of the brain, but he has plenty to say about what can go wrong with the left side. Remember that we said the one psychological fruit of the left-side of the brain that can be out of control is in obsessive-compulsive behavior. While repetition brings comfort, past a certain point it can result in mindless pounding or the mechanical and repetitive assembling and disassembling of machines. The left side prefers the codes for non-living things like tools or machines. On one hand it can lead to the perfecting of inventions. Yet this can lead to unrealistic perfectionism. Without the right side of the brain’s input, the left side of the brain can create non-realistic, distorted fantastic images which can result in the world being seen as uncanny as we shall see.

The left sphere has a precarious relationship with emotional life. It is capable of superficial social emotions but not good at imaging in depth the emotions of others.

The left side is good at making judgments when all the information is in but not when judgment is required in situations that are ill-defined. Because it prefers the world of the inanimate things, it often, as in the case of Descartes, treats its body as a thing among other objects. At worst it might not recognize its own body parts as in asomatognosia – a feeling that parts of a person’s body is “missing” or have disappeared from corporeal awareness.

In any dynamic system, there is positive feedback which amplifies the system to help it deal with environmental stress. On the other hand, negative feedback cools the system out to regulate the system over time. When the left side of the brain goes haywire the amplification process takes on a life of its own and shows itself in doing and undoing rituals or in pathological gambling.

The left side of the brain is individualistic and has to be coaxed into understanding other people. It takes a gods-eye-view of things, a view from nowhere so that it barely takes into account people other than its own self-interest, let alone anyone else’s. Table A at the end of Part I is a summary of the differences between the hemispheres.

Weaknesses in Left Hemisphere

To recap, in cases where the right hemisphere is damaged, we will find similar problems that we might identify in schizophrenia. These include:

Subjects don’t understand context;
Subjects don’t understand elements of discourse like subjects, predicates and objects;
Subjects have difficulty interpreting emotions;
Subjects have difficulty separating wholes (Gestalt perceptions) from parts;
There is a decrease in the functioning of the limbic systems;
There is difficulty interpreting tone;
There is difficulty with interpreting facial expressions;
There is trouble understanding underlying points of view; and,
A lack of common sense.

The Left Hemisphere Schizoid and Schizophrenia States and Behavior

The old ideas of schizophrenia include:

They are a regression from a more mature state;
The relationships between thoughts and reality or between thoughts and thoughts is irrational;
In schizophrenia there is less sense of self-awareness than there is in non-schizophrenic people; and,
That schizophrenia is a retreat to primitive emotions and infantile body states.

John Cutting in his book The Right Cerebral Hemisphere and Psychiatric Disorders has found that schizophrenia is a state in which the sufferer relies excessively on the left hemisphere. This explains the divorce from the body; detachment from human feeling; the separation of thought from action; excessive concern with clarity and fixity; and the triumph of representation over what is present. This is also the conclusion that Louis A. Sass comes to in his mammoth book Madness and Modernism.

Rather than a regression to an earlier developmental state, schizophrenia can happen to a mature adult. Secondly, schizophrenia is far from being irrational. In fact, it is hyper-rational. It is a product of the left side of the brain gone haywire! Instead of lacking in self-awareness the schizophrenic is hyper-reflective and cannot get out of their head back into the world. Rather than being lost in their emotional life, the schizophrenic is disengaged from their emotions and the emotions of others. This results in depersonalization, in which the person loses a sense of their identity in the world. They see themselves as an automaton. Schizophrenics routinely see themselves as machines, robots, computers or cameras. At the other end, they see the world in a derealized way which is when the real world loses its aliveness and becomes a thing, an object unconnected to the rest of the world.

Modernism and schizophrenia: the core phenomenology

In Paradoxes of Delusion: Wittgenstein, Schreber and the Schizophrenic Mind Louis Sass explores the idea that madness is the end point of a trajectory that consciousness follows when it separates from the body and the passions from the social and practical world and turns upon itself. Chris Frith’s identification of the core abnormality of schizophrenia is an awareness of automatic processes. There is a veering between two apparently opposite positions that are really aspects of the same positions. They are omnipotence and impotence. Either there is no self or an all-observing eye that swallows the whole world into the self.

Schizophrenia and Schizoid Disorders are Connected to Industrialization

Anthropological psychiatrists claim that schizophrenia goes all the way back to hunting and gathering societies. Yet McGilchrist points out that schizophrenia has grown with industrialization. He claims that in England it was rare if it existed at all before the 18th century. The same was true in Ireland, Yankeedom or Italy. Schizophrenia steeply increased in the first half of the 20th century. Mental health is generally better in rural populations. The risk of developing schizophrenia is doubled in urban environments. Multiple personality disorders are also modern. On the positive side people with schizoid or schizotypal traits will be attracted to and deemed suitable for employment in science, technology and administration, all of which have been influential in shaping our world during the last 100 years.

Dissociation is Connected to Both the Left Hemisphere and Schizophrenia

This includes:

Inability to tell what another is thinking;
Lack of judgment of non-verbal cues in communication;
Lack of judgement of tone, humor, irony;
Inability to detect deceit;
Attraction to the mechanical;
Treatment of other people and body parts as inanimate objects;
Obsession with detail;
Amnesia about autobiographical information;
Identity disturbances such as depersonalization;
Derealization – a lack of a sense of reality of the phenomenal world; and,
Loss of feeling of belonging to the world (feeling we are spectators rather than participants).

The Relationship Between Schizophrenia and Modern Art

Self-referentiality, depersonalization and realization and representation

McGilchrist says in both schizophrenia and in the modern artist the interpreter begins to interpret himself. Each’s focus on paranoia do not allow for accidents or unintended actions. Depersonalization and derealization in each leads to devitalization. Devitalization leads to boredom, and boredom to sensationalism. Emptiness and restlessness lead to gross stimulation. Speech becomes either gross or hyperbolic. Music appears loud and nervous .The left hemisphere with its orientation towards what is lifeless and mechanical appears desperate to shock us back to life. There is concern with materiality and simultaneous impulse in both modern art and schizophrenia. Representation is when real objects are replaced by concepts and concepts turn into things. Objects become more abstract and more thing-like. There is also a preference for inanimate things. In his book The Philosopher’s Gaze: Modernity in the Shadows of the Enlightenment, DM Levin writes that representation, rather than the presence of the real world, the left hemisphere’s role is the characteristic state of modernity.

The heart of the modern art is a dogmatic trampling of all taboos. The artist makes a fetish, a fascination with the amoral restlessness of modern urban life. Shock and novelty become defenses against the boredom and seeming inauthenticity of modern life. There is a fear that without novelty there is only banality. Objects are juxtaposed without being brought into relation. Increasingly, perspective is deliberately disrupted as with the Cubists. Modernism does not build on the past while taking it in a new direction, but it wants to sweep away the past altogether and start from scratch.

The left hemisphere prefers cylinders, cubes or spheres. McGilchrist points out that Modernist art appears to mimic the world as it would appear to someone whose right brain was inactivated. He writes:

The demonization of the body reaches its most disturbing apotheosis in the bizarrely distorted and dismembered marionettes of Hans Bellmer. Pointillism reduces Gestalt figures to a mass of discrete points. Collage represents the concept of a whole as composed of independent pieces. Futurism declares the left hemisphere’s preference for the future over the past. What the artist has written about his work is as important as the thing itself as if the artwork could not stand for itself. Similarly, some painters have made the eye more intellectual and have gone far beyond what was previously called a joy in form or color. More and more the symbolic replaces that which exists in reality. (415-416)

Modern artists

In fact, a remarkable number of the leading figures of modernism displayed schizoid or schizotypal features: These included Nietzsche, Jarry, Strindberg, Dali, Wittgenstein, Kafka, and Stravinsky. Antonin Artaud had schizophrenia. He told Anais Nin that he wanted a theatre that would be like a shock treatment to galvanize people into feeling. In modern art attention is focused on the medium, not on the world beyond that medium. The content is denied. The self-reflective statements of modern literature and criticism concentrate attention on language and either deny or minimize the world beyond language. Tristen Tzara, one of the founders of Dada, summed up modernism early when he proclaimed that art is a private affair. The artist produces it for himself and any judgment about it had become completely subjective on the part of the critic. No critic has any objective powers.

Modern music

Since the 20th century, music has aspired to and attained a high level of abstraction. As Schoenberg put it, how the music sounds is not the point. Gilchrist claims the melodic line has been largely abandoned and its harmonic structures are hard to appreciate intuitively even if they might be appreciated conceptually. Nietzsche writes that our ears have become more intellectual. The meaning in music is confusing because of the way it sounds. McGilchrist writes that the idea is to disturb the listener’s feeling of gravitational attraction by combining so many different forms of attraction that this sense of location cannot adjust fast enough. The lack of tonal centers destroys the listeners anchor point. He says we do not have sufficient short-term memory to cope with the degrees of apparent formlessness. On the other hand, harmony in music is an analogues to perspective in painting. Both harmony and perspective is right hemisphere dependent.

Coming Attractions

The differences between the left and the right side of the brain are not simply bio- psychological phenomenon taking place inside the bodies and minds of individuals, schizophrenics, or modern artists. They are also manifested physically, materially in the world through the social institutions and movements in the West from the ancient world of the Greeks and the Romans through the Middle Ages and on to Modern life, beginning in the 14th century. The Renaissance is often contrasted to the Reformation, the Enlightenment to Romantism and Capitalism to Socialism. Can the differences in these European movements be expressions of the left and right brains? Can the common social problems which arose between the Reformation, the Enlightenment and capitalism be attributed to the left brain which has gotten out of control? Through McGilchrist, I will examine this in Part II.

Table A Contrasting the Left to the Right Side of the Brain

Left Brain	Category of Comparison	Right Brain
Neocortex	Part of the brain	More connected to limbic and mammalian systems
Digital	Type of messages	Analogical Can tell about facial expressions, vocal intonations, gestures, body language
Whole is sum of the parts Whole can be controlled by the parts	Parts and wholes	Whole is more than the sum of the parts
Positive – amplify conditions to overcome stress Can become stuck in amplification Pathological gamblers	Type of feedback	Negative feedback – stabilize conditions
Atomistic	How are relationships perceived?	Organic
Linear – beginning, middle end	Direction in time	Cyclic, spirals
Surface space	Spatial orientation	Depth and distance in space
Declarative	Type of memory	Autobiographical, Episodic
Body as a thing like other things Drives are no longer integrated to the personality	Perception of body	Embodied self
Rationality – thinking within closed systems where one answer is possible Follows rules and manipulates symbols	Type of thinking	Reason—judgments of probability under conditions of uncertainty Makes new rules and invents new symbols
Focused	Attention	Diffused
Categorizes information once inside the system by order, formal logic and type	Categorization and context	Searches for pattern in the real world
Does things serially One thing at a time	Processing information	Parallel processes in the brain Does many things at once
Selects among alternatives	Generating solutions	Generates alternatives
Obsessive, compulsive	At worst	Attention deficient
Abstraction and generalization	Contest, abstraction and generalization	Contextualizes
Analysis, breaking things down into bits	Analysis – Synthesis	Synthesizes – puts things together into networks
Only conscious problem-solving	Conscious/Unconscious	Processes much information through unconscious, automatic processes
Past—what has happened	Time-orientation	Present, future – what things become
Static – turning processes into things (danger of reification)	Static/Dynamic	Fluid, dynamics – tracks things in motion
I – it relations	Individual relation to the world (Buber)	I -thou relations
Either/or binaries	Clarity vs Fuzziness	Tolerates ambiguity Both and more
Single meaning	How many meanings?	Many meanings
Dogmatic	Style of thinking	Open-Minded
Denotative	Language	Connotative – emotional
Literal, symbolic, conceptual	Interpretations of situations	Metaphorical – mythical
Prosaic	Prosaic vs Poetic	Poetic – rhetorical
Middle of process	Points of processing	Beginning and ending
No humor, dead serious	Humor	Appreciates humor, irony, sarcasm
Virtual world	Virtual world vs real world	Real world
Unwarranted optimistic view Unrealistic about its shortcomings	Judgment	Realistic Self-reflective
Saussure, Chomsky, universal grammar, brain a cognitive machine, computer responding to rules- based programs	Theories of origin of language	Lakoff, Johnson
Coherence theory	Epistemological truth	Correspondence theory with something other than itself
Cruelty does not exist in nature, only humans with their left prefrontal cortex have the capacity for deliberate malice	Cruelty and compassion	Only humans with their right prefrontal cortex are capable of compassion
Left Brain	Category of comparison	Right Brain

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post The Dark Side of Left-Brain Operations first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Dogmatic Neoliberal Democrats

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 03:43:12 +0000

Orientation

How dare you!

How can you write an article against the Democratic Party less than six months before the election? You must be a Trump supporter!
We must keep Trump out of office no matter what!
Vote Blue no matter who! (Or now, Vote Biden no matter what!)
Only a privileged person would consider voting for the Green Party!
You must be a dupe of the Russians!
If you don’t vote for the Democrats, you must be antisemitic!
This election is the most important in history!

Anyone who is critical of the Democratic party from the left will be greeted by these slogans, warnings and accusations.

What is dogmatism?

A little over a year ago I wrote an article titled The Dogmatic Personality. In it I attempted to show fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking and contrasted it to open-minded thinking. Please see the table at the end of this article. As in my previous article, I will follow Judy J. Johnson’s book What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief.

Which social class is dogmatic?

When we think of a dogmatic personality, we are likely to imagine a conservative “Archie Bunker” type, a lower middle-class or working-class man. The open-minded person seems likely to be a well-educated middle-class or upper middle-class liberal, and probably someone who votes for the Democratic Party. But times have changed. For the last 50 years, the Democratic Party has shifted from a center-left party to a right-wing Neoliberal party which has been increasingly embattled and compromised through its involvement in overseas wars, a deindustrialization process, financial debt accumulation and austerity programs for working class and poor people. I will describe in this article that, in fact, the Democratic Party has become a dogmatic, authoritarian party whose leaders and loyalist followers can easily be characterized as dogmatic in all fourteen characteristics.

What is the relationship between dogmatism and authoritarianism?

Now that you have reviewed the fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking in the table, we need to clarify what its relationship is to authoritarianism. Johnson sees authoritarianism as a subcategory of dogmatism. According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarian Specter, authoritarianism means the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual autonomy in thinking and acting. He defines authoritarianism as the co-variation of three kinds of attitudes:

Authoritarian submission to established authorities
Authoritarian aggression against anyone the authorities target
Conventionalism adhered to by society and established by the authorities

The first nine characteristics of dogmatism plus characteristic number 14 are all psychological or social psychological qualities. Authoritarianism is more sociological involving the relationship between groups (characteristics 10-13). In terms of personality, Judy Johnson says that 6 out of the 14 characteristics of dogmatism would qualify a personality as dogmatic. While it is hard to imagine an authoritarian personality with characteristics 10-13 would not have the other dogmatic qualities as well, it is not too far-fetched to imagine a dogmatic person minding their p’s and q’s when it comes to large groups.

My claim

My aim in this article is that the Democratic Party and its upper middle class loyalists have all of these dogmatic and authoritarian characteristics.

Five Cognitive Ingredients in Dogmatic Thought

The Five Characteristics of Dogmatic Cognition are:

Intolerance of ambiguity (either/or thinking) due to anxiety
Defense cognitive closure
Rigid certainty
Compartmentation (sealing off contradictory beliefs)
Lack of self-reflectiveness

Intolerance of ambiguity

The Neoliberal Democrats insist that there are only two choices: Democrats or Republicans. Any votes outside the Democratic Party are a vote for Trump. Under these conditions, the Democrats cannot imagine that people voting for a third party do so in the hopes of building a third party over time. For them a vote for a third party can only be a vote for a second party. But what about the people who don’t vote? In any given election, over the past fifty years between 40-50% of the population do not vote. For Neoliberal Democrats this is not a problem. Why? Because they treat people who don’t vote as if they are the ignorant, stupid or apathetic lower classes. What Neoliberal Democrats cannot comprehend is that the reason people do not vote is because there are no candidates that represent their interests. They think the uncommitted are weighing between them and a Green party, when what is really going on is the uncommitted weighing between voting Green and not voting at all.

Defensive cognitive closure

The Neoliberal Democratic candidates act like they are entitled to the vote of anyone on the socialist left. They don’t think they have to work to get it, or that they might be expected to answer to potential voters for their past failures. They insist they are the only game in town for “reasonable” people. Only a privileged person can afford to vote for the Green Party. In other words, racial minorities are all voting Democrat and as a white person you would be voting against them. The problem with this argument is that Trump is gaining more and more support of African American and Latino voters. Just as large numbers of working-class people left the Democratic Party decades ago, so now their much-vaulted race base is starting to break ranks.

Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions for admitting they are wrong)

As many of you know, the philosopher of science Karl Popper claimed that a good scientific theory must insist on stating the conditions under which they can be proven wrong. It is also a good rule in argumentation classes to state the conditions under which your claim could be wrong. Do the Democratic Party politicians or their loyalists do this when they solicit new voters? No, they don’t. To be fair, the entire politician system in Mordor is not set up for parties to actually account for the contradictions between their promises and what they deliver. But if you talk to an upper-middle class loyalist and ask them what are the conditions under which they would give up on their loyalty to the Democrats they look like deer caught in the headlights. Next to no one has traced the relationship between promises and deliverance. Though well-educated, they have not thought seriously about what their liberal beliefs really are and how well the party has been faithful to them. No matter what the Democrats have done or not done over the past four years, they expect you to wipe the slate clean and simply say we have to vote for them.

Cognitive compartmentalization – sealing off contradictory beliefs

My hunch is that a large number of people who consider themselves liberal today believe the following:

The state should provide for pensions, and unemployment.
There should be universal healthcare.
The minimum wage should be raised to keep up with inflation.
Women should make the same amount of wages or salary as men for the same kind of work.
Everyone should be able to go to college without being tens of thousands of dollars in depth.
Unions should be supported because they protect working class people.
Capitalist profits should be reinvested in society in the form of infrastructural building and repair and mass transportation.
Internationally the United States should not be at war and meddling in the affairs of other countries. Investment in the military has only a defensive role to play.

I could go on but you get the idea. The problem is that when the Democratic Party has gained power over the last 50 years they have not done any of these things. It takes a great deal of cognitive internal gyrations to know these things and still vote for Neoliberal Democrats.

Lack of self-reflectiveness – refusal to bend back and analyze themselves

Hillary Clinton, with all the Deep State wealth and the Neoliberal capitalists behind her, managed to lose to Donald Trump. In a political party that was sensitive and self-reflective, they would say “where did we go wrong? Why did so many people not vote? We used to depend on working class votes. How can it be that many working class people are Republicans? What is wrong with our candidates? What population demographics were weak?”. They did none of this. Instead, in true paranoic style they blamed the Russians. Since 2016, whenever the Democratic Party failed it was the Russians. This is a powerful change in party affairs. For 15 years the Democratic Party mocked and dismissed the 9/11 Truth movement for its tinfoil, paranoic conspiracy theory. For the past eight years the Democratic Party has so little understanding of its right-wing 50-year drift that its answer to all its problems are now “the Russians”.

The Four Emotional Disorders

Although Neoliberal Democrats, being upper middle class, have more control over their minds than working class dogmatists they can still reify their emotions, making them “rigid states” rather than processes that can be changed by cognitive changes in interpretations, explanations or assumptions. Neoliberal Democrats, like everyone else, has a need for social connection, but as an upper-middle person they are surrounded by most people who are not like them. Yet they must find commonality with them became they want them to join the Democratic Party. Because they are more or less oblivious of the social class distinctions, they find ways to avoid talking about them. They are most emotionally sensitive to race relations, since most African-Americans and Latinos are not upper middle class.

The four kinds of emotional issues that arise, according to Judy Johnson are:

Anxiety and fear
Lack of a sense of humor
Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
Excessive pessimism and despair

For Neoliberal Democrats the anxiety and fear they have centers around:

What will happen if a Republican, specifically Trump, wins the election?
What will the mass of Trump followers do?

Anxiety and fear

Faithfully, like clockwork, the only claim to winning voters over is fear of is what will happen if a right-winger like Trump gets in. Over the past 4 years with the Democratic Party in power, we have billions of dollars wasted in Ukraine followed by a massacre of Palestinians funded by the Democratic Party. How much worse can it be than this? The Neoliberal fears know no bounds. They never state the conditions under which they are willing to admit there really is not much difference between the two parties, let alone to say there is only one party, capitalism, with two wings.

Secondly, Neoliberal Democrats fear the great unleashing of the great unwashed Trump followers. These folks are imagined to be goosestepping Gestapos terrorizing these liberals when they decide to have an outdoor brunch. It will be too late for liberal Karens to call the police! In reality the laughable power of Trump’s followers came about over a temporary “take-over” of the White House in 2021. Did his followers block the roads, seize the radio and TV stations and begin broadcasting like what would happen in a real coup? No, they simply wandered around, perhaps breaking a few things before being taken over by the police. For Neoliberal Democrats, this is the end of civilization. As for their treacherous fascist leader, Trump, he was nowhere to be found.

Lack of a sense of humor

Having a sense of humor means you can step out of situations and see them in perspective. Humor allows for a break in being serious before returning to serious endeavors. Lack of humor (being humorless) means you are serious all the time. This comes out most clearly in the Neoliberal attempts to control people’s vocabulary so they are “politically correct”. Up to a point it is reasonable to expect people to upgrade their vocabulary to be more sensitive racial and sexist issues. But past a certain point, as communication grinds to a halt because every word is dissected, the situation becomes laughable. But for the Neoliberal Democrat, this is no laughing matter. The combination of self-righteousness mixed with completely unrealistic expectations makes it understandable why the right-wingers get fed up at best and full of hatred at worst.

Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger

At the same time, the Neoliberal Democrats are terrified of being called a racist.

After all, they work so hard to “understand” the history of racism and the conditions of Blacks and Latinos today. They feel betrayed when they themselves are called out on some racism. This is where accusations of being a “snowflake” really come from. For example, liberals are only dimly aware of their racism when it comes to Black politicians. For them, any Black man or woman who is well-educated must be liberal. Lo and behold, when presented with people like Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell or Barak Obama it comes as a great surprise they could be so right-wing. No, Obama was never FDR in waiting. He is a Harvard lawyer, trained in the Chicago School market fundamentalism and his political actions were consistently right-wing. But to this day Neoliberals refer to him as a great liberal. Their racism comes in when they do not grant the full political spectrum to any minority politician.

Excessive pessimism and despair

As I’ve pointed out in other articles, the beginning of Neoliberalism came about through the Rockefeller orchestrated Club of Rome report followed by a book called the Limits to Growth. Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission was founded around the same time. This was a clarion call to let Americans know that the days of abundance, a high standard of living, more leisure time and a better life through science was ending. Instead, we were told that people needed to tighten up their belts and do with less (Jimmy Carter). Why? Because nature was limited. Secondly, there were too many people on the earth and the population problem would soon be out of control. Thirdly, there was global warming caused, according to them, by the industrial revolution. Lastly, thanks to all our high living we have polluted the earth. This systemic attack on the values of the Enlightenment by the Rockefellers, together with their control over Think Tanks and Universities and mass media has been the methodical message of Neoliberal Democrats for 50 years. Ironically, the countries of the multi-polar world like China, Russia and Iran are carrying on the Promethean tradition of the Enlightenment with their infrastructure projects, harnessing of many forms of energy.

Five Behavioral Characteristics of Dogmatism

Dogmatism is not just what is going on cognitively and emotionally inside of people. Dogmatism is also about how people behave and act. The five behavioral characteristics of dogmatism are:

an arrogant, dismissive communication style;
preoccupation with power and status;
glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group;
dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities; and,
dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities.

An Arrogant, dismissive communication style

Because Neoliberals usually make their living from speaking and writing, like lawyers and academic professors, they are at home in stressing the importance of language. Compared to them, both Trump and his supporters are at a disadvantage. Neoliberals are at their worst when it comes to attempting to control language. Secure in their tenured college professions Neoliberal professors control their classroom by making them open forums for every possible identity politics group to have their say. At the same time they insist that other members of the class learn to use the right words while addressing an identity politics group from gender pronouns on down the line. In their drive to inclusivity, they imagine they are liberating humanity and winning new people for the Neoliberal Democrats. The problem is that the largest sector of the population is unaffected by these battles about identity politics on college campuses. Some of the most interesting hypocrisy within Neoliberal Democrats is that the arm-twisting that takes place on college campuses never reaches the upper echelons of the party. Are Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer or Joe Biden going to be corrected by Kamala Harris when they refer to a non-binary man as “he” when he prefers to be addressed as a “they”?

Preoccupation with power and status in form

Neoliberal Democrats are snobs. A very simple comparison which brings this out is the difference between how they react to Obama vs how they react to Trump. Obama above all has all the formal qualities they look for. First of all, he is Black, but not too black, not Marshawn Lynch black. He is tall, slender and graceful in mannerisms. He is articulate, seems easy-going and reasonable. He doesn’t seem to get angry and he plays basketball. He went to the right schools and did well for himself as a Harvard lawyer. As Neoliberal Democrats swoon over the lure of his appearance and his rhetorical skills the way he acted as a president – the wars started, his failure to stem the economic tide of 50 years of decline, his failure to help working class Blacks economically – go unnoticed.

On the other hand, Trump is viscerally hated. He is a loud blowhard who neither knows nor cares about political protocol or diplomacy. He is fat, with a ridiculous wig along with orange face makeup. He looks like the worst lower middle-class used car salesman you can imagine. He knows nothing of history and bullies his way through press conferences. He has a string of unsuccessful business disasters under his belt and his behavior towards women infuriates Neoliberal feminists. He prides himself in mocking the politically correct. He has the attention span of a gnat and has no coherent foreign policy. But if you ask Neoliberals about his political actions, whether domestic or international they usually don’t know. What matters is they find him disgusting on a personal and psychological basis and that is enough for them and unsuited to be the President of the United States.

The same class contempt is visited upon his followers. For Neoliberals, Trump followers are “deplorables”. They are uneducated, don’t care about facts and do not know how to reason logically. They think dualistically and more are likely to be some kind of ignorant, fundamentalist Christian. They know nothing about history, or geography and could care less. They are fat, have teeth missing and don’t dress properly. They watch too much TV and are preoccupied with the worst types of entertainment from World Wrestling to Reality Shows. This class contempt blinds Neoliberal Democrats from being sympathetic to the fact that Trumpsters are overworked and underpaid, have insecure jobs and are living from paycheck to paycheck. Secure in their own professional jobs, Neoliberals are too proud to visit the Trumpeters where they live and come electoral campaigns, deal with their own discomfort. Trump did next to nothing for working-class or lower middle-class in his four years, but he did visit them, unlike Queen Hillary or Bernie Sanders who stayed close to the college campuses.

Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group

For this category let’s turn from domestic to international affairs. For Neoliberal Democrats Russia has been their enemy even after the break-up of the Soviet Union. When you hear the name Vladimir Putin the Pavlovian response is “evil dictator”. There is normal reasoning about his political leadership with its pros and cons. Neoliberal Democrats who get on their hobby horses of “Putin”, “Putin” usually have no understanding of what Putin has meant for the recovery of Russia after being left for dead by Obamas buddies the Chicago boys in the 1990s. The same dualistic sloganeering treatment is metered out for Syria, Iran, Lebanon, North Korea and Venezuela.

In the case of the glorification of an in-group let us turn to Israel. “The only democracy in the Middle East” has just massacred over 40,000 Palestinians and yet the Democratic president supplied the Zionists with billions of dollars in weaponry. “Israel has a right to defend itself”! What are you, antisemitic?” Then there is the war in Ukraine. The Ukrainians fascists became “freedom fighters” for Neoliberals against the evil Putin. It never occurs to these Neoliberals that the money spent on arming Ukraine could have been spent on infrastructure repairs at home, building low-cost housing, supporting the growth of unions and upgrading the minimum wage. Since the working class is invisible to Neoliberal Democrats this alternative way of spending money never occurs to them.

Thanks to the work of Matt Ehret and Cynthia Chung, the British Empire has been exposed as at the root of imperialism in the Western world. The British Empire sided with the South in the American Civil War. All along the line, this Empire tried to prevent the United States from industrializing because it feared the competition. In the 20th century the British Empire was supporting the growth of fascism in Europe long before Mussolini or Hitler. After the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis, the British Empire helped arrange to have Nazi scientists and political bigwigs safely transported to the Western world where they were never prosecuted. Yet England is naively seen by Neoliberal Democrats as some kind of benign “liberal democracy” worthy of a “special relationship”.

Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities

To understand this let us look at the manner in which the Democratic Party dictated that there will be no competing candidates in the 2024 primaries. This is an attempt at totalitarian control of the party. “No” you might say, “the other candidates agreed not to run a campaign”. Was that a real democratic process? During the Moscow Purges, members of the Communist Party willingly confessed their guilt before the Central Committee and were purged. “No” say the anti-communist Democrats. There must have been some ‘sinister psychological brainwashing’ on the part of the evil Stalin”. But when it comes to the dictates from on-high, Powers that Be within the Democratic Party saying that there will be no party competition, where is the outcry from the Neoliberal Democrats? Why aren’t we permitted to imagine there must have been some sinister psychological brainwashing on the part of the Democratic Party elite to keep other candidates from running. No Neoliberal Democrat would dare point the finger at AIPAC, the most powerful Israeli Lobby in the United States. That would be antisemitic!

There is also passivity of liberal Democrats to leaving their own party and building another one. Upper middle-class Neoliberals make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. There is no reason why they couldn’t pool their money and start a new party closer to an FDR model. Sure, it would take maybe 12 years to become a force to be reckoned with. However, upper-middle class people are trained to think long-term in their work. They are well-educated and can envision a long-term trajectory, not just within Mordor, but internationally. Since liberal Democrats support capitalism, surely they are smart enough to notice that finance capital and wars are not productive for capitalism in the long-run. Why is there no movement to leave the Democrats? To do so would be disobedient to the leaders of the Democratic Party and those capitalists’ national and international interests that stand behind them.

Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities

If the Neoliberal Democratic Party lived up to its name, it would welcome competition from a third party, especially from the left. They would say “let us compete! Your program will teach us some things and the competition will be good for our ‘democracy’”. Instead, faithfully every four years it spends a great deal of money on lawsuits attempting to keep the Green Party off the ballot. It rigs the debates so the Green Party candidate cannot compete with the Republican and Democratic candidates on the stage. The Democratic Party would scream “totalitarianism” if there were only one party to vote for. Somehow the addition of one more party makes the political system go from totalitarian to democratic. But if you add a third or fourth party wouldn’t that make it more democratic? Not for Neoliberal Democrats. A third or a fourth party would make things chaotic and confuse people. Besides, authoritarian Democrats know what’s best for the people even though two thirds of the Mordor population wants more than two parties.

Conclusion

When Judy Johnson wrote her book on dogmatism it appeared that the targeted population were the lower middle-class and the working-class people. Middle-class and upper middle-class people could breathe easy since dogmatism was not really much about them. In fact, liberals like these were probably the model for fourteen characteristics of open people. My argument has shown that Neoliberal Democrats could be just as dogmatic in these fourteen characteristics. The following is a summary of how the Neoliberal Democrats and how their loyalists stack up against fourteen characteristics of dogmatism.

Intolerance of ambiguity

You cannot vote for a left-wing party. There are only two parties, you have to pick one.

Defensive cognitive closure

We are entitled to your vote regardless of past failures. Only privileged people vote for third parties.

Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions under which they are willing to admit they are wrong)

Past failures are ignored. The Party’s 50 year slide to the right is ignored. No matter how bad they are, the Republican party (Trump) is worse.

Cognitive compartmentalization

Both the DNC and their loyal followers act like social-schizophrenics. They pretend to be following tried and true liberal principles while, in fact, they fund wars all over the world, blow up pipelines, support fascist Ukraine and support right wing Jewish fundamentalism against Palestine.

Lack of self-reflectiveness: refuse to bend-back and analyze themselves

The Democratic Party blames Russia for its losses, rather than examine its internal failures. They become paranoid and see the “evil” Putin everywhere.

Anxiety and fear

The Democratic Party and their loyalists know no limits to how the horrible things can be if Trump or any Republican wins an election. Similar fear of what the Trumpster followers will do if Trump wins. Yet their ineptitude shows in the pathetic political theater of January 2021.

Lack of a sense of humor

They have a seriousness and moralistic policing of people’s vocabulary to the point of failing to recognize the humor in trying to change people’s vocabulary all at once.

Oversensitivity to unintended consequences which result in anger

They imagine that they could never behave in a racist way, not realizing that Black politicians can be extremely right wing: Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell and Barak Obama are examples. Their racism is not granting blacks the full political spectrum of commitment that they grant to whites.

Excessive pessimism and despair about the future

By buying hook, line and sinker the anti-Enlightenment Rockefeller program of austerity, global warming, overpopulation and pollution.

Arrogant, dismissive communication style to the lower classes

The war of college professors and their loyalists in the public and students who do not care about identity politics and gender pronouns. They silence students in their communication unless it conforms to their standards. They have a double standard since the heads of the Democratic Party do not have to adhere to these standards.

Preoccupation with power and status of appearance and rhetoric

Their obsession with good form and rhetoric skills in politicians like Obama. Hatred of the bad form, appearance and personality weaknesses in both Trump and his followers. They downplay the political content in their political performance.

Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group

In international affairs the out-group, the evil Russia (Putin), Iran, North Korea and Syria can never do anything good. Meanwhile in Mordor, their European vassals along with Israel carry on the great tradition of liberalism, democracy and human rights. For this in-group these Neoliberals always find extenuating circumstances for all coups, assassinations and imperialistic pillaging.

Dogmatic authoritarian submission to the authorities

This has to do with the Neoliberal Democratic, upper-middle class loyalists’ acceptance that there will be no competition in the Democratic primaries. This authoritarian move has been meekly accepted. Neither do serious New Deal liberals have the nerve to break with their own party and found a new party which is closer to an FDR model.

Dogmatic authoritarian aggression to minorities

This is found in the repression of the Green Party to block their access to getting on the ballot and for controlling the ground rules for the Green Party for getting into the debates.

Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking

Dogmatic Thinking	Open-minded Thinking
1) Intolerance of ambiguity Black and white Either/ Or Thinking	Tolerance of ambiguity Can suspend judgment
2) Defense cognitive closure (Having barbed wire around declarations)	Open, inviting a response
3) Rigid certainty Cannot state conditions of being proven wrong	Flexibility Qualifying statements Falsification—stating conditions where you could be proven wrong
4) Compartmentalization Sealing off contradictory beliefs	Dialectically using contradictions to create new knowledge
5) Lack of self-reflectiveness Refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves	Self-reflective of one’s own part in creating problems
6) Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope)	Curiosity and confidence in their ability to cope
7) lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective If humor is used, it is sarcasm to undermine the gravity of the situation	Uses humor to keep things in perspective
8) Belief associated with anger Oversensitivity to unintentional infringements	Does emotional work Gives people the benefit of the doubt
9) Excessive Pessimism	Moderate optimism, not pollyannish
10) Pre-occupation with power and status	Is aware of, but not preoccupied with, status and power
11) Glorification of in-group Vilification of out- group	Critical of in-group Welcoming of out-group
12) Authoritarian aggression towards minorities	Assertive, not aggressive Sympathetic to minorities
13) Authoritarian submission Excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities	Critical of the authorities
14) Arrogant, dismissive communication style	Open to what is strange or what appears to be a problem

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Dogmatic Neoliberal Democrats first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 23 May 2024 01:44:27 +0000

Orientation

Mythology and folklore can be used for political and religious purposes whether they be to support socialism or fascism. What was going on at the end of the 19th century politically and in the 1930s that made mythology so attractive to both German and French fascists? Why did the imagined gods of the Indo-Europeans change from how they were conceived in the 19th century? Why was their geographical location changed from India to Germany? The Indo-Europeans of 19th century were considered monotheists. But in the 20th century they became polytheists or even animists. Why was this? Why does the study of Indo-Europeans persist even after the Nazis used the search for the Indo-European for such horrible ends? What can be done to minimize the chances of the study of comparative mythology being used for political and religious purposes? Its gods are different and the places they were said to inhabit change.

I Aryanization Project of the 20th century: Order Theorists vs Barbarophiles

Order Theory

Theorists of order was built out of late 19th century scholarship. It was an attempt by the bourgeoisie to shore up their private property, the sanctity of the family and the authority of the father in the face of:

the rise of militant worker unions, social democrats, anarchists, and communists;
the economic instability of capitalism with panics and depressions;
the rise of the women’s movement;
the challenging of a deterministic view of science; and,
artistic movements which challenged representation.

It used research on Aryans to defend its existing order by promoting a pessimistic, romantic cultural appeal of the virtues of organic society. At least in their origins, Indo-Germans were seen as proud pagans. Arvidsson says Indo-Germans do not pray bending over and kneeling, but rather standing and stretching their hands toward the sky. Also, the gods were in the world, not transcendent to it. Because the gods are immanent, there is no separation between the supernatural world beyond and the natural world we know. Neither was there a distinction between appearances and reality. Appearances were not epiphenomenon or illusions. What appeared is what reality was. Aryans were imagined as passive provincial farmers rooted in the landscape and distinguished by their love or life and nature. Because there was no gap between the natural and supernational world there were no bridges (saviors) necessary to get from this world to the next.

However, order theorists are not primitivists. Their interest in the Aryans is to see them as a beacon of light arising from the darkness of tribal groups. The dark forces of nature are exiled to pre-Aryan times. The Aryans had reverence for the sun in its struggle against darkness. For all Indo-Europeans, the sun is the highest good. Myths about the victory of the sun are the founding matrix for the worldview and life of IE. Arvidsson suggests the sun was imagined by the bourgeoisie as behind the order theorists acting as a cosmic constable who could strike down the chaotic beasts of darkness.

Order theorists vs cultural evolutionists

The order theorists’ picture of the Aryans as the light at the end of a dark tunnel was challenged by cultural evolutionists who claimed that ancient peoples could not have been as high standing as order theorists claimed. Evolutionists began to describe PIE as a primitive people like any other. It dissolved the whole IE field since its classifications of primitive-civilized made linguistic categories irrelevant. In addition, race was having a declining place within evolutionary anthropology. Broadly speaking, the evolutionists supported the Enlightenment’s social unity of mankind across space and over time.

Order theorists turn right

Order theorists relied on mythology. This theory became connected to the world of Indo-Europeans through Leopold von Schroeder and Viennese mythologists. These included scholars from Nordic movements such as those of Gunther and Kummer as well as SS scholars such as Wust. Von Schroeder’s mission was to show an unbroken continuity between contemporary German culture and Germanic Indo-European cultures through studies of myths and legends. In the 1930s order theory was carried on by Rosenberg’s party college as well as partly by SS Ahnenerbe.

Barbarism theory

While order theory incorporates Neo-tradition religion for the purposes of papering over growing questions about industrialization and modernity, it still accepts modernity, even though it is critical of it. Barbarophiles, on the other hand, not only criticize modernists on the left, but traditionalists of order in conservative aristocratic circles on the right. Barbarian theory proposes the Germans must break out of the iron cage of modernity which they believe was created by the Jews. While order theorists wanted to use Aryan theory to justify why it deserves to stay in power, barbarian theorists wanted to recreate a new society.

Male fellowships and rituals

Arvidsson points out that the dissolution of traditional Western European society during the 19th century produced a need for new connections. This, combined with the growing women’s movement at the turn of the century, made joining clubs an attractive alternative. At the end of the 19th century, numerous singing, hunting and teetotalers’ societies were formed. Among the more powerful were male fellowship societies.

These male fellowships had an uncompromising hatred of materialistic and pragmatic life. They questioned bourgeois ideals and were motivated by a neo-traditionalism that was revolutionary rather than conservative. These consisted of groups of initiated youths who lived together in special buildings and initiation rituals that were synchronized with seasonal shifts during the year. Members were presented in mythical dress as vegetation demons. They emulated ancient German secret rites. However, male fellowship scholars considered ritual more important than myths in the study of a religion.

According to Otto Höfler there was once a wild army of men led by Odin, that had no women, children, or servants among them. These groups encouraged courage, camaraderie, ambition and hard discipline. By fighting side by side, these warriors grew closer to their brothers in arms than to their own families. The demonic, ecstatic, cultist and tragic were fundamental ingredients in the religion of Aryans. Barbarophile theorists tried to show how male fellowships existed in Iran and India. The struggle for and against the religion of male fellowships has made up the main theme in Indo-Iranian religious history.

Ancient Aryan religion as warlike

By the early 20th century German competition with other nation-states for colonies made aggression and imperialism a growing possibility and this is expressed in the changes attributes of Aryan gods. Whereas for order theorists, Aryans were peaceful, rooted, life-affirming farmers, for the barbarophiles Aryans were believed to be activists, struggling, warlike and familiar with sacrifice and death. The power underlying their religion was not a warm ever-present sun, rejuvenating the crops but rather the storm god Odin and the chthonic gods or goddesses Dionysius or Ruda. For barbarophiles, Aryans are not the light at the end of the tunnel of previously primal dark people. The Aryans and their gods themselves were dark and ecstatic forces.

The conviction that Aryans were warlike was hardly confined to barbarophiles scholars like Otto Höfler. The fact that a socialist (Childe), a royalist (Schmidt) and a feminist (Gimbutas) agreed to show that the latter conviction was far from limited to the moderate right-wing and that Aryans were anything but farmers.

Folk psychology and barbarophiles

During the interwar period, this theory was also reinforced by so-called folk psychology, a discipline that had been developed during the 19th century by evolutionary-influenced scholars like Adolf Bastian and Wilhelm Wundt. It had the aim of determining the differences between the psychic constitutions of different peoples and races. It was their notion that different people and different races could be proven to have different mental capabilities. Needless to say, this attracted reactionary thinkers during the interwar period while feeding colonial appetites.

Ludwig Klages claimed there first existed a natural cosmic state that can be compared to a collective dream state or Dionysian life intoxication. This paradisiacal order was shattered when the rational spirit penetrated the sphere of spiritual, illuminated life. This led Klages to a cult of an immanent ecstatic mysticism that aspired to return to the cosmic original condition. Jung was especially interested in the folk psychological differences between Jews and Germans. For him, Odin was the truest expression of German folk soul and the Nazis’ dramatic use of neo-pagan symbols was a natural and healthy answer to what was perceived as thousands of years of Semitic-Christian oppression.

Please see my table at the end of this article which compares order theorists with Barbarophile theory.

French Fascist Mythology

Action Française

The members of Action Française were either royalists or neo-royalists. They wanted to know how the king’s power could be recreated after having been weakened. During the 1930s the French Action Française strove to ally itself with Italy. Mussolini and the Pope had agreed to share ideological power (which Lincoln had related to Dumezil’s dual sovereignty as we shall see) with the aim of counterbalancing Germany’s growing influence. It was hoped that France and Italy together would protect the classical heritage from the barbarians from the North (the Germans).

Dumezil’s Indo-European three-part order

The master of many languages, Dumezil had written 50 books which Bruce Lincoln says are marked by extraordinary lucidity, ingenuity, rigor, intelligence and a respect for system and structure as he explained the complex logic encoded in mythic narratives. Dumezil has presented his work as strictly apolitical and that it powerfully influenced those of all ideological persuasions. Scholars who have endorsed Dumezil’s research include Levi-Strauss, Eliade, Sahlins, Vernant, Le Goff and Caillois.

Dumezil argues that there are three functions of the ideal social order of Indo-European demonstrated:

sovereignty and sacred – king – specialist in law;
physical force – 2 aspects of the warrior;
- noble, chivalric
- brutal
abundance, prosperity and fertility including:
- production
- agriculture
- reproduction
- herding

Dumezil felt that the Indo-Europeans were a particularly favored people in world history for they alone discovered the secret of organizing thought and society in a trifunctional structure.

Dumezil’s ideological Use of Indo-European Mythology

For 50 years George Dumezil was among the few historians of religion whose theories have found a wider audience outside the discipline and even the academy. Influence by Durkheim gave Dumezil a structural and anti-historical bent. Dumezil deemphasized the historical etymological approach. Dumezil’s structuralist method had meant that the etymological method of proof had been less important in 20th century research about Indo-Europeans. Bruce Lincoln says this allowed comparative mythology to isolate Indo-European studies as a freestanding entity.

Initially Dumezil worked with themes taken from the evolutionists, particularly Sir James Frazer and his dying god cycle. But the anthropological and folkloristic material that assumed such a prominent place in the turn of the century evolutionism largely disappeared from Indo-European religious research with Dumezil’s fame. Just as other right wing Aryanists, Dumezil wanted to separate the Indo-Europeans from any cultural evolutionary schema.

Dumezil’s right-wing connections

No Germanist was more influential on Dumezil than Höfler except the Dutch historian of religions Jan de Vries, (1890-1964). De Vries’ book carried a swastika on its cover (1934) and celebrates the race of blue-eyed blond-haired warriors. Also noteworthy is the Swedish Indo-Europeanist Stig Wikander who remained close friends and made fundamental contributions to Dumezil’s thought over a period of five decades. He was also an active street fighter of fascism on the streets of France in 1934.

Since the 1980s Dumezil has been criticized politically for:

his introduction of 3 functions within society in publications from 1938-1942 when fascism was an urgent concern for many Frenchmen;
the resemblance of this system to Mussolini’s corporate society model; and,
his involvement in circles close to Maurras’ Action Française.

It was during the 1920s and 1930s that Georges Dumezil supported Action Française and wrote for its journals. Dumezil published articles in two right-wing newspapers. He praised Mussolini’s Italy and urged France to align itself with him so that together they might check the growth of German power. Dumezil was profascist but anti-Nazi. His theory about tripartite ideology of Indo-Europeans suited the Italian and French corporative ideals in which society is divided into leaders, soldiers and producers.

In a critical article of the early 1980s Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg claimed Dumezil belonged to a group that oppose the Judeo-Christian society. His theme of the binding gods should be connected to a reactionary ideology with roots in Joseph’s Marie de Maistre who conceived of God as the one who binds individuals together into a nation. Male fellowship constituted central power that can actually function as an agenda of real order.

Dumezil supported these forces that wanted to recreate a traditional hierarchical order in Europe. His respected work in prehistoric religions is not easily separatable from his interest in right-wing European politics in the 1930s. More specifically Dumezil wanted to make fascist ideals appear natural and make the liberal and socialist ones unnatural. He was looking to confer the historical legitimacy to the Fascist dream. Bruce Lincoln writes that Dumezil was deeply anchored in the Germanophobia and French fascism. He wrote articles which supported the French fascist organization Action Française and wrote articles under a pseudonym in which he praised Mussolini. Father Schmidt, an Austrian fascist, Catholic and royalist of Action Française also supported the restoration of a medieval type of society with stable hierarchies and integrating corporations.

Scholarship in myth was largely inseparable with discussions about Aryans for most of the 19th century and continued into 1930s and 1940s. But after World War II any research about Aryans became suspect. Understandably, after the Nazi disaster and after World War II the study of Indo-Europeans did not die. It shifted its home from Germany to France. Between 1946 and 1949 classes of Dumezil were joined by Levi-Strauss and Mircea Eliade who continued to produce concrete and less political inflammatory material in mythology. However, right-wing mythology continued in Switzerland, Romania and in the United States. See my article Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age: Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell.

The Fate or Order Theorists and Barbarophiles with the Nazis

The period from 1930 to 1945 saw the second flowering of Indo-European studies. The ideology that motivated this research Arvidsson calls “barbarian ideology”. To understand this, it is important to fix in our minds how the Nazis made sense of Germany in the 1930s.

Arvidsson characterizes the Nazis as skeptical of capitalism because its individualism undermines the organic unity of a cultural group. So too, capitalism’s internationalism creates cultural mixes which the Nazis thought only lead to cultural degeneration. The Nazis thought that the best cultures do not mix racially. The basic political unit for the Nazis was neither internationalism nor localism, but the state. In terms of geographic mythology, the Nazis imagined the ancient Germans as farmers surrounded by forests. The urbanization of the modern world creates a parasitic relationship with these farmers. The city is seen as a place of rootless individuals who lack a common purpose. The city was also the seedbed for secularization, atheism and other fragmenting forces. All these forces of centrifugalizing are typified by the Jew.

For the Nazis the organic unity of the nation did not mean everyone was equal. Most, if not virtually all, individuals need strong leadership and were moved to defend their land and race. The Nazis do not defend their land defensively. Loyalty to the nation is sustained and amplified by the process of fighting, dying and winning wars.

Once the Nazis had established their power in the Third Reich, they did not want anything to do with the wild, ecstatic and barbaric myth and rituals. The male fellowship radical hatred of all materialism and all pragmatic thinking were inappropriate for a party that now aimed for cooperation with capitalists. What was needed was not Odin or Rudra storming demons, but Thor and Zeus’s police protection

The Third Reich did not have to create its fundamental myths. Rather, it was German mythology resuscitated in the 19th century that gave it form, spirit and institutions.

Roger Pearson and Neo-Nazism

Yet, since World War II some have worked to reconstitute the study of IE myth (while “Aryan” use is forbidden). The New Right carried on contemporary racist literature on Aryan tradition. For example, in the Journal of Indo-European Studies, Roger Pearson, founder of Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friendship and former director of the World Anti Communist League, was described as “one of the most persistent neo-Nazis in the world, was one of the most persistent neo-Nazi apologists in America, and one of the best connected racialists in the world”. Pearson continued his writings on the relation of race, intelligence and eugenics. One of the books announced itself as based on Hans Gunther, having been the Third Reich’s foremost theorist of racial science. Pearson also arranged for an English edition of Gunther’s work on Indo-European’s religion. In 1974, Pearson began receiving grants from the Pioneer Fund which directs its assets to the cause of eugenics and race betterment. His book is Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academia. A book which Stefan Kuhl calls the most comprehensive defense of scientific racism in the US since 1945.

Conclusion: How to Overcome the Ideological Uses of Mythology

Bruce Lincoln has proposed a method for reducing the ideological use of mythology. Since the 1980s Lincoln established himself as the US foremost scholar in the area of Indo-European religion through his books Myth, Cosmos and Society and Death; War and Sacrifice; Discourse and the Construction of Society. He was mainly inspired by Durkheim and Gramsci. Lincoln provides an ideological criticism among scholars of Indo-Europeanism. He claims that Indo -European research aims to reverse historical processes and recapture a primordial and a historic moment of unity. This, itself, is a myth and ritual based upon romantic nostalgia for paradise. Myths are authoritative narratives that can be used to construct boundaries and hierarchies. For example, he interprets Laws of Manu as attempts by priests and kings to appear to be indispensable for society. Lincoln says we need a political theory of narration that recognized the capacity of narrators to modify details of stories that pass through them by introducing changes in the classificatory order as they do so, most often in ways that reflect their subject position and advance their interests.

In order to combat this Lincoln developed a ten-step methodology for studying myth:

establish the categories at issue;
notice the relations among these categories as well as their ranking relative to one another;
notice the logic used to justify that ranking;
identify the logic used to justify the rankings;
note whether there are any changes in the ranking of categories between the beginning of the narrative and its conclusion;
if there are, identify the logic used to justify any of these shifts;
assemble a set of related materials from the same culture area – other variants of the same story, on the basis of characters, actions, and themes;
establish any differences that exist between the categories and rankings that appear in the focal text and those in other materials;
establish any connections between the categories that figure in these texts the relations of the social groups among whom the texts circulate;
try to draw reasonable inferences about the interests that are advances, defended or negotiated through each set of narration – understand which groups move up and others move down;
establish a date and authorship of all texts and the circumstances of their appearance, circulation and reception.

Right-Wing Research: Order vs Barbarism in the 20th century

Order ideologists	Category of comparison	Barbarophilism
Built from 19th century scholarship	Historical origins	20th century proto-Nazis
Bourgeois conservative Defense of modernity, order, private property, sanctity of the family and authority of the father	Place on the political spectrum	Right-wing reactionary Need to break out from the iron cage of modernity that Semites had created
Social democrats, anarchists, suffragists, communists	Who is the opposition?	Not only modernists on the left, but traditionalists in conservative aristocratic circles
Tor, Zeus, Indra Dark forces exiled to Pre-Aryan times Sun’s struggle against darkness. Gods and heroes as noble and majestic	Who are the Aryan gods?	Storm gods Odin, Dionysus, Ruda Dark and ecstatic forces existed in Aryan times
Be a cosmic constable who could strike down the chaotic beasts of darkness	What are the gods supposed to do?	Use the unconquerable chthonic power to upend the existing order
Peaceful Passive provincial—landscape, rootedness (ideology of order) IE distinguished by their love or life and nature. Closeness between man and God	What were the Aryans like	Warlike Activist – war and fire, struggle and discipline from experience, death and martyrdom Power, readiness to fight Feeling for tragedy
Confident farmer	Who is the Demographic archetype	Ecstatic youth who enters a comradeship of fate with his brothers in arms (male fellowships)
Viennese mythologists, scholars from Nordic movement (Gunther, Kummer) as well as SS scholars (Wust) Eliade, Jung	Theoretical approach to religion	Viennese ritualizes (Höfler, Weiser-Aall, Wolfram and male fellowship researchers) (Wikander)
Colleges Rosenberg’s Party College	Where was each practiced in Nazi times?	SS Ahnenerbe and independent scholars
Draw from Neo-traditional sources to shore up existing order	Purpose	Wants to recreate a new society

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 14 May 2024 17:48:26 +0000

Orientation

Purpose of this article

Almost 2 years ago I wrote an article called Aryan Right-Wing Mythology for the New Age based on the work of Robert Ellwood (The Politics of Myth). In it Ellwood showed the conservative nature of popular mythologists Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell. My purpose was to show how the naïve New Age movement took these mythologists to be liberal in spite of their conservative and even proto-fascist leanings. All three mythologists were writing from the early to the middle part of the 20th century. In this article I want to trace the history of right-wing mythology back 200 years. For this task I will be relying on two great books. One is Aryan Idols: Indo-European Mythology as Ideology and Science by Stefan Arvidsson; the other is Theorizing Myth by Bruce Lincoln.

In search for the Indo-Europeans

Why explore a lost culture with little evidence to go on? From the early 19th century to the end of World War II historians, linguists, folklorists and archeologists have tried to re-create a lost culture, a people older than the Sumerians. Those scholars who have maintained that this culture existed and have called them “Indo-Europeans;” “Proto-Indo Europeans”, “Aryans” or “Japhetites”. It was in 1813 that Thomas Young coined the term “Indo-European”.

In Part I of this article I explore those theories that searched for the Indo-Europeans by dissecting language-based on the theories of Sir William Jones and Max Muller. Both these theorists suspected that India was the home of the Indo Europeans. Further on, in the hands of the Grimm Brothers, the search for the Indo-Europeans takes a nationalist turn. Finally, neo-traditional religion supports the vitality of chthonic earth gods. Lastly, I discuss the impact of racial anthropology in which the search for Indo-Europeans is now based on the climate of the area, the skin color and brain size of people in these cultures.

Part II continues this rightward turn in Indo European studies with explicitly fascist direction. Following Arvidsson, I contrast the difference between the “order” theorists and the more “barbarophilism” as they affect the rise of Hitler. India falls out of favor as the home of the Indo-Europeans and is replaced by Germany.

But later, following Bruce Lincoln we find a French fascism smuggled into the work of the great French comparative mythologist, Georges Dumezil. I close with a brief presentation of the fascist work of Roger Pearson in his efforts to carry Indo-European studies right into second half of the 19th century. By way of conclusion, I present comparative mythologist Bruce Lincoln’s ten methodological steps to be sure that the political use of mythology does not interfere with the science of comparative mythology.

Who were the Indo-European scholars and what were their methodological problems?

Interestingly, supporters for the discovery of IE culture were a multidisciplinary lot. They consisted of historians of religions like Mircea Eliade, Jan de Vries, Jacob Grimm, Frederic Max Muller; historians such as Georges Duby and Jacques Le Goff; anthropologists such as Claude Levi Strauss and Marshall Sahlins; archeologists like Gordon Childe; sociologists like Georges Dumezil. Others included Franz Bopp, Ernest Renan and Emile Benveniste.

The problem for these scholars was that Indo-Europeans have not left behind any texts and no objects that can definably be tied to them. Given these problems, why did these scholars not give up and turn their attention to other excavations? Why did they persist under these difficult conditions? The answer Stefan Arvidsson gives is that most of these scholars did so for religious and political/ideological reasons.

I The Ideological Origins of the Search for Indo-Europeans

Anthropology typically examines the similarities and differences between cultures. Yet anthropologists are affected by the political climate of their countries. In European colonial times of the late 18th century, there was little to gain by elites for pursuing the Enlightenment dream of finding a universality of all cultures. Instead, religious and political zealots look for differences to justify the subjugation of these countries. The ancient history of the supposed Indo-Europeans became the proof that one branch of humanity was destined to exploit and rule the others. Mythology became an ideology to justify conquest. As Arvidsson pointed out, romantics like Chateaubriand, and Joseph de Maistre stressed importance of Laws of Manu found in India as a justification for a tripart conservative ideology as we will see later.

Indo-European “Aryan” studies were appropriated at an early stage by racial science. British archeologist Colin Renfrew has concluded from his own research that the research in IE is itself a modern myth. They included those who want to rekindle the old pre-Christian IE or Aryan paganism. Even as late as 1940-44 the most important dividing line among Europe’s inhabitants were between Aryans and Semites. After the fall of Germany in World War II “Aryan” was replaced by “Indo European” because post-war scholarship was dominated by Dumezil who never spoke about “Aryan religion”. Today the term is only used by Neo-Nazis.

Why was it so important for Germany to search for a culture of its origins? Unlike Britain, France or Spain there was no Germany until the end of the 18th century. The usual process of nation-building involved a reference to an ancient geographical homeland as well as an ancient religion. In this climate of imperial ambitions, Germany had neither, so it set out to discover one.

II Discovery of Sanskrit

Sir William Jones

The Romantic use of language interpreted by various peoples who spoke IE languages made them have an organic unity and had a common fate. They claimed that all people who spoke IE had also inherited a common belief system. IE scholars like Bryant and Jones attempted to find similarities in the myths and god figures and found traces of these beliefs in at least four places: Roman texts, Greek myths, Indian hymns and Norse saga literature.

Bruce Lincoln, in his great book Theorizing Myth says Sir William Jones (1746-1794), established himself as one of the world’s foremost linguists with a grasp of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Turkish along with a knowledge of Persian and Arabic. He was a scholar, poet and translator sympathetic to the most liberal causes of his day. By a series of occupational happenstances, this led him to study Sanskrit.

In 1785 he gave a lecture in which he proposed the common origin of the languages (Sanskrit) to which others would later derive and give the name “Aryan”. Jones discovered the similarities between Latin and Greek European languages and the Sanskrit and Persian languages which were termed “linguistic families”. The Bhagavad Gita was translated by Jones along with The Laws of Manu. India was assumed to be the oldest member of that group.

Jones focused on four specific domains of culture a) language and letters b) philosophy and religion c) architecture and sculpture d) science and arts. In his discussion of an evaluation basing his judgments on what he took to be levels of accomplishment, he considered India first among the nations and evaluated it most favorably. He connected the peoples of India and Iran on the basis of their linguistic, religious and artistic similarities.

Romanticism and India

Interest in Sanskrit exploded. Herder (1744-1803) was the first to spread the doctrine of Indomania in German. He thought it was one of the most important steps in the development of the human race. Raymond Schwab referred to the period around 1800 as an “Oriental Renaissance”. Schlegel’s book in 1808 made the case for India as the Aryan homeland. In the translation of the Laws of Manu, the word “Aryan” means noble. The plot thickens.

For romantics the idealization of India served both as a protest against and an escape from the contemporary world that seemed like a confident march of progress. Threatened by rationalism, mechanistic science, materialistic anthropology, anti-aristocratic politics and watered down theology Romantics made India a mystical unity that did away with interdisciplinary European conflicts. While the Enlightenment advocated a contractual right of man, German Romantics argued that human races are an organic part of the natural world with India as its model. Poets such as Shelley, Lord Byron and Schopenhauer attempted to synthesize India with European thinking.

Paris was the Mecca of Orientalism during the 1830s-1840s and it was hoped that studying Sanskrit would liberate scholars from their preoccupation with Greece and Rome. For some time, ancient India became the imagined home of Indo-Europeans. The attractive power of this world grew in 1819 through the writings of Frederic Schlegel, who attempted to build a comparative linguistics (1767-1845) along with von Humboldt and Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Like many to come, Herder believed that Asia was the original home of human unity.

The discovery of IE language transformed India, Persia and Central Asia as a kind of European Orient. Thomas Trautmann writes that Jones’ work is nothing less than a project to make the new Orientalism safe for Anglicans. Interest in India was popularized by the historian of religion, Max Muller. What we are interested in is the relationship of that discovery to political interests of colonial British rule in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

Language mediates how nature grows in culture

For Romantics, language was the most basic expression of the soul of a people and is the foundation for musical and artistic traditions as well as social laws. The study of the origin of language (philology) was the cornerstone in the 19th century of research in the search for Indo-Europeans. Language became the vehicle through which nature grows through people.

For Hamann and Herder, the ancient vernacular of languages and literature — poetry and myth – was a prime basis of national identity. Each language embodied the history of the people who spoke it. Each language had a basis in poetry and music far deeper than the degraded prose of modernity. For Herder, the formation of culture consisted of 4 parts:

A variety of climates — heat and cold have an impact on the disposition of customs and bodies. Climate first produces change at the body’s most superficial level. Over long periods of time the effects penetrate deeper to transform skeletal structure and even the shape of the skull and nose
The landscape – the features of individuals in a culture are brought into line with the features of the landscape.
Language impacts thought and social relations.Language impacts thought and social relations.
The arts through music and dance.

III Max Muller and the Birth of Comparative Religion

Comparative religion as rooted in linguistics

As a philologist, Max Muller believed that religion is tightly linked to linguistic groups. Muller thought the only scientific way of classifying religion was by language. He raised the question that if the belief in God arises naturally, why are there such different religious types? In order to explain the origins of myths he founded the discipline of comparative mythology.

Primitive religion was monotheist and rooted in sun-worship

Which natural phenomenon had been the most prominent in catalyzing the mythopoetic imagination? Was it thunder and lightning, earthquakes, volcanos or the sun and dawn? Muller suspected that primitive religion was monothetic and this divine creator had originated from humanity’s encounter with forces of nature. However, it was not the wildest and most unpredictable events but it was the ones which were the most persistent and reliable. He thought the light of the sun fit the bill. Muller hoped to find traces of the original experience of the infinite among the oldest and most primitive peoples. He believed that the origin of monotheism was India. In the hopes of finding the monotheistic roots of India, he translated the Rigveda.

Use and abuse of myth: history of myth

According to Bruce Lincoln, the word “myth” has been used in many ways depending on the historical period. Myth had been used originally in early Greek times to mean a primordial truth or a sacred story. It gradually became discredited with the rise of the Pre-Socrates and dismissed by the Romans as a “fable”. Christianity saw myth as a lie and set them in dualistic opposition to the non-mythic bible. With the rise of science myth was seen as either a sign of ignorance, the result of poetic revelry or a children’s story. Resurrected by the romantics in the 19th century, it became politicized and used to assist in the building of nation-states. In the 20th century it helped to build support for the wave of fascism in the 20th century.

Muller sees myth as degenerative

Muller was a modernist Protestant. He was not a romantic when it came to myths. He found myth irrational and immoral. Muller agreed the IE mythology was a poetic explanation of nature. But if Vedic India was equal to the West, what kept India economically and politically backward? Unlike Nietzsche and other romantics, Muller saw myth not as a foundation of all religion but as a source of religious degeneration. Like Hamann and Herder, he took poetry to be present from human origins and to reflect an innate religious awareness. Myth was a later development, a disease of language. The Jews, Muslims and Christians as staunch monotheists, were less disposed to the seductions of myth.

Muller and British colonialism

Muller hoped to influence a change in British colonial politics. He wanted to make the British colonists understand that their Indian subjects were Aryan brothers. During a long degeneration, Indian religion withered while Europeans grew and matured into monotheism. Muller hoped that the people of India would leave behind worship of idols if they received knowledge about the old Aryan Vedic religion.

IV Romantics Champion Myth and Folklore to Build Nationalism

At the end of the 18th century romanticism turned its back on the Enlightenment, especially its more deterministic tendencies. Myth was given a new lease on life. People such as Jones saw myth symbolically as veiled wisdom which simply needed to be first interpreted and then explained. Interest in the vernaculars (local language) displaced the international languages of church and court while myths and, to a lesser extent, folk songs were constitutive as an authentic primordial voice of the volk.

The use of myth at the end of the 18th century was also used by nationalists in their search for a language and set of stories on which the emergence of the nation-state could be founded. In the hands of the Brothers Grimm and others this is exactly what happened. The Grimm’s monumental research shows a Herderian interest in language and myth. They devoted themselves to the first encyclopedic compendium of German myths of 4 volumes. The Grimms argued that it was the conversion to Christianity that shattered the nexus of land-myth and folk. Myth then became entangled with attempts to contrast Aryans and Semites, as we shall see.

Grimm stirs the use of folklore to build nationalism

For the brothers Grimm, prehistory was not a period of dark barbarism but a high cultural golden age. The recovery of ancient texts during the Renaissance included Tacitus’ Germania, first published in 1457. It dealt with the German sense of honor and integrity, their physical prowess, their courage and sense of beauty. They were received with enthusiasm by the people of Northern Europe, in part because Tacitus broke the Mediterranean monopoly on antiquity by giving the Germans, Scandinavians, Dutch and Anglo Saxons their first sense of the prestige derived from a deep and noble past.

Grimm (1785 – 1863) gathered folktales from German peasants in order to recreate a strong German culture. He wanted to find rich German stories that could successfully compete with classical Judeo-Christian traditions He hoped that within the surface of folktales searchers he could find traces of a German mythopoetic prehistory. Theorists of Northern origins challenged the Bible, for orthodox religion looked to Israel as the cradle of language. Grimm’s work spread and scholars began to record tales and customs of their society. Nationalist motives were always in the search for myths whether they were folktales or rituals.

V From Modernist to Neo-Traditional Religion: Fall of Nature Mythology of Max Muller

Modernist theories of religion see the modernization process, including science, as part of the evolution of religion. The focus of religious experience is the individual. Modernist theories of religion look for a common core in all religion and its practices involve ethics and prayer. Modernists understand animism and polytheism as late degenerate forms of primitive monotheist tendency. To study non-modern cultures it focuses the language, and it studies myth. Max Muller was a modernist.

Capitalist class rejects modernist religious interpretations

Bruce Lincoln points out that when the bourgeois class at the end of the 19th century became the ruling class, it grew all the more skeptical about modernization. One of the reasons was that more radical modernists, social democrats, communists, anarchists and union members became interested in these subjects. Events that shook bourgeois idealism and liberal humanism were the real threat of socialism as seen in the Paris Commune. Between 1880-1920, the bourgeois class became a dominating class whose interest in social change decreased, and the relationship between a civilized bourgeoisie and a barbaric working-class now became more important than the relationship between the bourgeois class and a reactionary aristocracy and priesthood which the bourgeoisie had defeated. In reaction, the bourgeois became conservative, nostalgic and nationalistic. Correspondingly, the image of IE as cultural heroes changed from a modernist to a neo-traditionalist. But what does neo-traditionalist mean?

What is neo-traditional religion?

Neo-traditional ideals of religion want to recreate a vitalized traditional religion that could serve as a counterbalance to modernization (Muller). Von Schroder, a Baltic German Indologist, wants to renew folk-national, heathen rituals. Scholars like Lang, Von Schroeder, Harrison, Mauss and Eliade think that modernization has been chocked full of what is most vital in religion which was its magical, communitarian and collective rituals. What makes religion vital is what makes religion locally dispersed. Rather than ethics and prayer, what makes religion juicy is its altered states. Animism and polytheism are not only prior to monotheism, but once monotheism comes to power the part of religion that speaks to most people is chocked off. Further, evolutionary anthropologists claimed as Muller’s theories were no more than Christian crypto-apologetics. Frazer’s theories of ancient religion were an attempt to replace Muller’s philological paradigm with an evolutionist and folkloristic theory.

Jane Harrison and the chthonic roots of Olympian Greece religion

Beyond anthropology, the importance of ritual as opposed to myth was embraced by classicists like Jane Harrison (1850-1928), Francis Cornford (1874-1943) and the Cambridge ritualists. Jane Harrison argued chthonic religion had been the true religion of Greece up to the 7th century BCE. With the Olympians’ victory over the Pelasgian religion, reflection, distinction and clarity triumph over pulsing life. She held that myth arose as an attempt to explain well-entrenched and no longer understood rites.

VI Aryan Studies Turn Rightward at the End of the 19th Century

Aryan liberal romanticism, which began with Jones, had weakened substantially by 1870. Yet the search for the Aryans grew, with input from Michelet, Fichte, Lasson and Hubert on the left and Renan, Schlegel and Wagner on the right.

Right-wing transitions to Aryanism

On the right, Renan idealized the polytheism of the IE. He constructed a long-lived opposition between IE and Semitic people. He connected the Biblical Shem’s line with monotheistic intolerance, egotism, conservatism, otherworldliness, irrational rituals along with lack of feeling for art and nature. For conservatives, the Jews promoted modernism. From 1870 on IE became connected with anti-Semitism.

Schlegel questions whether the French Revolution really was, along with its cosmopolitan and humanistic optimism, about progress. Becoming a Catholic, he came to embrace a nationalistic, reactionary and pessimistic world view. In circles close to Schlegel people began for the first time to value the Middle Agesmore highly.

Wagner

Wagner greatly admired Grimm for all his work on folktales. He sought to connect the Volk through art rather than scholarship. According to Wagner, a total work of art would integrate music, poetry, dance, theatrical spectacle, the plastic arts and architecture. This integration of all the arts would undermine the shallowness of modernism, and rejuvenate an appreciation of folk, where the arts and rituals were once one.

Wagner worked on his materials over the next thirty years into the four dramas of The Ring Circle. This was intended as a ritual celebration, not a theatrical performance. He claimed that both the science and art of today are specialization of activities that were once unified. He believed this appreciation of the beauty of nature could arise only out of polytheism. That Wagner traced the origins of the German Volk to India shows that he understood them as part of the Aryan Diaspora.

The place and misplace of Nietzsche in Aryan politics

For Nietzsche, myth was a necessary foundation for all religion. In his earlier writings on myth, he took Wagner’s theories as his point of departure, especially in his book Birth of Tragedy. But in his later life Nietzsche disliked the vulgar antisemitism and German nationalism of Wagner. Nietzsche threw in the towel with Wagner after The Ring premiere at Bayreuth. Nevertheless Nietzsche’s training was in classical philology and he was well-versed with research in Indo-European linguistics and myth and undertook his own studies. He was not dependent on Wagner for this.

Nietzsche has been mistakenly categorized as antisemitic, especially in liberal and socialist circles. But as Walter Kaufman pointed out many years ago in his great biography of Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s work was taken over by his sister who had fascist connections so that his work was pulverized to make it fit with Nazi ideology.

Bruce Lincoln gives us at least four reasons why Nietzsche was not antisemitic or a proponent of fascism:

Nietzsche’s “blond beast” is not a special race but a category that encompasses multiple races, including Greeks and Japanese. However, he gave them further consideration. His detailed discussion was all devoted to the Greeks and the Germans.
Soon after Nietzsche wrote Genealogy of Morals he came upon the Laws of Manu, an ancient Indian text on the ethics, law and social structure of India. Nietzsche admired the original religion and culture in India. While all the world’s people originated in India, he thought those of the West-Egyptians and Europeans came from the higher castes and it was for them that was reserved the title “Indo-Europeans”. While Nietzsche showed racial bias it was towards Europeans and Egyptians, not Germans.
Nietzsche drew a sharp distinction between ancient and modern Germans. Ancient Germans (based on the work of Tacitus) had freedom and energy, but modern Germans did not, having become ever less Aryan and ever less barbaric. Therefore, Nietzsche saw nothing in the Germans of his time that was noteworthy.
The Nazis were antisemitic – Nietzsche was anti-Christian. His early antipathy toward the Jews and Judaism was gradually attenuated and balanced by a growing, occasionally grudging, respect. Instead he become mercilessly more critical of Christianity. Everything wrong in Judaism was amplified and exacerbated in Christianity. The criticism he had of the Jews was that they were the first weak Christians, not that they had any of the other characteristics that fascists attributed to them. His most acidic systematic criticisms, his theory of resentment was leveled at Christianity not Judaism. Christianity is treated as the extreme form of all that is sickeningly present in Judaism.

VII) Racial Anthropology

As we’ve seen, the first Indo-European studies were grounded in linguistic observations. Max Muller equated linguistic affinity with ethnic affinity as opposed to physical appearance. In retrospect, he rightfully saw language, religion and nationality as independent of blood, skull or hair color. Jones also did not think skin color was important. However, both scholars’ contention was increasingly isolated and drowned out. The issue was how to measure being Indo-European. Did one belong with those who spoke related languages and are considered to have a similar culture, or with those who looked similar?

During the 19th century racial anthropologists began to discuss IE, threatening the proprietorship of linguists. Instead of the study of religion, language and folklore to find the origins of Indo-Europeans, the new school focused on differences between people in material and physical characteristics and their geographical location. Racial anthropologists argued that people’s physical appearance could directly explain their degree of civilization. They debated which race was the original one and whether other races were the result of evolution or degeneration. They thought pure races were more fit than mixed ones. Racial anthropology became a study of signs where the internal moral and cultural states could be interpreted from external physical signs.

Climate, skin color and physique

According to Tacitus, the German climate is harsh and damper in the North and West, windier in the South and East. The cold and damp character of the Northern environment impressed itself on the bodies of those who live there. Bruce Lincoln says the whiteness of the cold must have scorched the Indo-Europeans and produced their red color. From mid-19th century, the empirical methods of racial anthropologists were improved to measurement of skin color and the size of skulls and noses. Carl Gustav Carus (1789-1869) argued that Aryans could be identified by their long skulls, blond hair and blue eyes. In his more extreme moments, Carus associated blond hair with the color of the sun and blue eyes with that of the sky, which identified Aryans as day people in contrast to the darker, lesser races.

The changing meaning of “barbarians”

Bourgeois humanists before 1870 looked down on barbarians for having had destroyed classical Rome. But as romanticism gained hold of bourgeois ideology, barbarian invasions were seen in a more positive light. As European romantics grew more cynical of the benefits of civilization and they studied the decline of other world civilizations and tumultuous migrations, the violence of the barbarians seemed to be necessary steps in a process of revitalization. Over a period of time from 1870, the barbarian origin of Europe changed from having been a source of guilt and shame to being something honorable.

The right turn against India

A racial anthropology of India begins in 1840s. It was discovered that not all Indian languages were Sanskrit. South Indians had Dravidian language roots. From this, John Stevenson developed the racial theory of Indian civilization. According to him Indian races were divided into Aryans and Dravidians. It was thought the caste society was developed as a protective mechanism against racial mixing. In other words, violence was justified as a means of maintaining racial purity. This theoretical framework served to legitimatize British colonialization. The relations of the British as a new invader into India was only the latest version of a hierarchical order that had existed thousands of years before. These vital colonizers had no use for romanticizing India.

Arthur de Gobineau and Germany as the proposed new home of Indo-Europeans

Scholars like Gobineau, Chamberlain and Paul Broca described Indo-Europeans as blond, blue-eyed and tall with straight noses, a straight profile and long narrow skulls. In their hands, Indo-Europeans were no longer a large group of different people who spoke IE languages but a delineated group of people with defined physical characteristics.

According to Gobineau, what happened in India was that white Aryans became brown and their culture and religion had degenerated into Hinduism. This racist historiography was also backed up by philological interpretations of India’s oldest source, the text the Rigveda as an interpretation of the description of the Aryan Dravidian conflict. Gobineau’s moral of history claimed that when whites racially mix their superior civilization degenerates Indo-Europeans were looking less and less like Indians and Iranians and more and more like Germans. Led by Renan, the culture that was Indo-European was no longer to be discovered in West Asia but ultimately in Germany. Wagner was friends with Gobineau and tried to make de Gobineau’s theories less pessimistic and more antisemitic. Wagner’s son-in-law was Houston Chamberlain (1855-1927) whose book in 1899 was the foundation text for the development of Nazi ideology.

Please see my table which compares the framework for the changing meaning of Indo-Europeans.

Changing Meaning of Indo-European –19th-20th Centuries

Second-Half of 19th century	Time period	Early 20th century
Rising bourgeoisie	Situation of the bourgeoisie	Declining Attempted imperialism
Liberal values and humanistic ideals of science	Political views	Neo-traditionalist ideas
No Anti-Semitic and sometimes anti-Christian but not connected to a racial ideology	Is there a racial ideology?	Yes. Connected to racial ideology John Stephenson on racial anthropology in India: Aryans vs Dravidians
Muller, Jones	Theoreticians	Renan, Stephenson (India)
They were heroic, idealistic free thinking and rational humanists who fought against despotic power and antiquated customs	The stories told of Indo-Europeans	Stories of how Indo-European colonizers in ancient times conquered dark primitive original population (Stephenson)
Civilized India, Iran	Where Indo-Europeans came from	Barbarian Germanic, Nordic
Comparative linguistics	What was used to measure differences?	Physical criteria – long, narrow skull, blond hair blue eyes Gobineau
Extraordinary language and culture	Why were Indo-Europeans successful?	(Violence) No racial mixing (Gobineau)
Fought against backward superstition	What did the Indo-Europeans do?	They were a regeneration and revitalizing growth movement
Originally monotheists Animism and polytheism is degenerate	Religious origin	Originally animists and polytheists Monotheists degenerative
Shameful for barbarians having destroyed ancient Rome	Attitude towards the barbarians	Necessary for clearing out the rot of modern life
Humble monotheists		Proud pagans who don’t bend their knees

The post Aryan Idols and the Search for Indo-Europeans first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 02:57:53 +0000

Orientation

Who are Neocons and Neoliberals today?

In the collapsing Mordor society of today we have two contending foreign policy theoretical tendencies, the Neocon realists and the Neoliberal globalists. The Neocon realists are represented by people like Robert Kagan, Victoria Nuland, Steve Bannon and other war hawks who go back to the Bush Years (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz) and back even further to Michael Ledeen, Irving Krystal and Leo Strauss. The Neocons never found a war they didn’t like. Political domination is the name of their game. While they support capitalism, trade relations are seen as subordinate to political power.

The forces of Neoliberal globalism are best represented by people like George Soros, the Rockefeller brothers and Henry Kissinger. Going further back in time, Neoliberals can be dated with the founding of the Austrian school of Von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, later on by Milton Friedman followed by Paul Volcker and the Chicago boys economists made notorious by Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. For the Neoliberals, opening up of free trade around the world is more important than defending their home state. Neoliberal globalists will go to war in reaction to free trade being threatened by a national government with protectionist policies, but they don’t go looking for war. However, Neoliberals are fine with a military capitalism that knows no boundaries, while arming the whole world whether or not its home country is at war.

The purpose of this article

There is no international policy that is not grounded in theory. In the discipline of politics, this field is called “international relations theory”. The aim of this article is to:

show why neither of these Neocon or Neoliberal theories and their policies are working and how they are complicit in Mordor’s economic and political collapse;
to show theoretically the bankruptcy of both Neoconservative and Neoliberal theories;
to probe three other theories of international relations – liberal institutional liberalism, constructivism and world systems – to see how well they can explain or predict world events;
to ask whether any of these theories could move Yankeedom away from collapsing;
to inquire whether any of these theories can help us understand the rise of the multipolar world.

My sources for this article are International Relations Theory: A Primer by Elizabeth Matthews and Rhonda Callaway; International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction by Cynthia Weber, and The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations by Brian Schmidt.

Old vs Neoconservatives

Old conservatives

The word “neo” means new. But how can we understand what a Neoconservative stands for if we don’t know how to contrast it to the kind conservative that came before? Therefore, in this section I will make that comparison. Old conservatives go all the way back to Edmund’s Burke’s criticism of the French Revolution. Other old conservatives are Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald and Michael Oakeshott. What these folks share in common is their criteria for solving social problems. This involves looking to the past, to history, to solve problems. Since they believe human beings are flawed with original sin, what has happened historically by trial-and-error that has continuity should not be tampered with. This is embodied in both law and especially custom.

Old conservatives are champions of moderation and caution and perceive change as dangerous. They prefer the familiar to the unknown; the tried, compared to that which must be experimented with. When solving problems, they stuck close to the facts and were suspicious of anything mysterious. In political policy, they preferred the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, and the messy present rather than wasting time striving for the ideal. There was a romantic side to some conservatives who preferred poetry to the prosaic or stoic.

The lower classes constituted a “mob” and old conservatives hated both democracy and liberalism. The only good culture was the upper-class culture of aristocrats. The culture of peasants was perceived as gross and backward. Still aristocrats owed their inferiors something in return for their hard work, this was called “noblesse oblige.” Old conservatives believe in order and structure. The ideal society for old conservatives is feudalism where the structure takes the form of hierarchies with the king and aristocrats in charge. Obedience of the lower classes is highly valued. Some people found themselves in the lower classes due to accident or bad luck, yet old conservatives still felt that inequality was mostly inherited and based on the talents people were born with.

When feudalism reigned in Europe, old conservatives were skeptical of capitalism because it disrupted the class and status hierarchies they were used to. They felt that Adam Smith’s doctrine of the invisible hand was barbaric, not because it appealed to selfishness in individuals, but because it based itself on selfishness as an economic principle for society as whole. Because many of the money lenders involved in trade in the Middle Ages were Jewish, conservatives did their best to exclude Jews from their social institutions.

Conservatives were dead-set against the engineering and experimenting with society through the use of reason. There was a place for reason in calculating the pros and cons of individual behavior, but not reason as it applied to nature. These conservatives were patriotic, not nationalists. Their patriotism was reactive, committing itself to defending a country against foreign aggression. It follows that they were isolationist in their foreign policy.

Neocons

The Neocons are far more militant than the old conservatives. They are nationalist and expansive, seeking national greatness. They want a strong patriarchal state with a strong military, law enforcement and prisons. They resist any matriarchal functions of the state such as pensions, welfare or childcare provisions and clearly have imperialist ambitions. Neocons come out of World War II swinging with the Cold War on their minds. They include Daniel Bell, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Nathan Glazer and Samuel Huntington. Unlike the old conservatives, Neocons embrace corporate capitalism. They started out as isolationists economically in the 50s and 60s when out of power, but then were won over to neoliberalism economics beginning with Reagan.

Whereas old conservatives rely on a messy accumulation of wisdom over the years, Neocons believe in the Great Man Theory of history à la Leo Strauss. They look to great philosophers rather than traditions coming from below to help them. Whereas old conservatives are cautious and prudent, Neocons are fundamentalists and assume they have the right answers. They interpret opposition as hostility and need boogeymen like Russia and China to be paranoid about internationally, or they see the “counterculture” as enemies domestically. They are not afraid to spend militarily and use demagoguery in their political speeches. Their speeches include dualities like “friend or foe” as exemplified by Bush’s “you are with the terrorists or with us”.

While it seems fair to say there was a streak of antisemitism in old conservatives, many Neocons are Jewish and support both Zionism abroad and Christian fundamentalism domestically. Like Neoliberals, Neoconservatives also use a kind of “social rationality” in their use of game theory to make decisions about the likelihood of military invasions (Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy by S.M. Amadae). There is nothing romantic in their examining the past nor is there anything poetic about them. They are hard-headed and prosaic. Domestically, for Neocons, social hierarchies are the result of an aristocracy of talent and these aristocrats don’t owe the lower classes anything “noblesse oblige”). Their enemies at home are upper-middle class liberals. Unlike old conservatives, Neocons don’t hate the masses. They try to manipulate them through populism against effete relativist liberals.

Who Are the Neocon Realists?

Cold war origins

Early Neocon realists just before and just after World War II were E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan. The hard-ball drive of Neoconservative realism is inseparable from the Cold War. After two world wars, their realism was an attempt to bring “realpolitiks” into international relations following the naïve illusions of institutional liberals and typified by Woodrow Wilson.

Roots in Thomas Hobbes

Neo Conservative Realism is the application of Hobbesian theory of the political actions of the domestic state into the international arena. Instead of individual monads crashing against each other in a society, we have states as mindless monads crashing against each other internationally. States are inherently hostile to each other and in international relations states act as instrumental rationalists and utility maximizers. The priority of states are security and defense. States are like Hobbes’ billiard balls obeying the same laws of geometry and physics except at a macro level. Strategically Neoconservative realists draw inspiration from Machiavelli and even further back to Thucydides.

Roots in social Darwinism

It is not far-fetched to imagine Realists as Social Darwinists in which nation-states are like individual organisms struggling to survive. Ideas matter only in so far as states weigh the cost-benefits of past, present and future political actions. The use of reason or appeals to morality are dismissed as naïve pie-in-the sky schemes. It follows that human nature is competitive, aggressive and suspicious. Power is an end in itself, not a means to something higher or better. Just as the human nature of individuals is flawed, so too the political behavior of nation-states is flawed and myopic. The interactions between states is a zero sum game with winners and losers. There is no room for unintended consequences. While Neocons might be skeptical of pooled ideas when it comes to improving society, they are not opposed to the pooling of ideas among heads of state to develop think tanks, and foundations for combatting communist ideas.

States are static zero-sum games between Atlantic states

Neoconservative Realists have no sense of there being an evolution to the history of states. In a dog-eat-dog world, states rise and fall without any sense of an accumulation of things getting better or worse. For Realism the focus is on the relationship between the great powers, north-north relations. The global south is looked upon as backward and there is no expectation of support for it. It accepts imperialism as a fact of life. There is no effort to help industrialize the global south if they are possessed as colonies.

The place of geography

There is a field of international relations which deals with geography called geopolitics whose closest affinity is with Neoconservative Realism. But whether the theories are of Ratzel’s political geography, Alfred Thayer Mahan’s Sea Power, Mackinder’s Heartland Theory and the geopolitical pivot of history, Spykman’s Rimland, Kennan’s and Kissinger’s containment theory or Brzezinski’s Grand Chessboard, all these theories are Anglo-American or German, with imperialism as their goal. The ideological nature of this field can be seen as geopolitics of Russia with Aleksandr Dugin or China are not even included in the field.

Support of economic mercantilism

While neoconservative realists certainly support capitalism against communism, they are wary of international trade growing out of the control of the state. In its pure form Neoconservative Realists are mercantilists imagining that real wealth consists of positive balance of payments. Their economic policy is more protectionist rather than free trade. When it comes to scientific disciplines, it accepts the separation between politics and economics. It imagines state-state relations are driven by politics and it treats economics in a social schizophrenic way, as a separate discipline.

The place of socialism

Neoconservative Realists consider socialism as a completely separate system and it cannot easily explain the nature of trade relations between the two. It imagines all socialism as Stalinism and it is insensitive to the differences between Trotskyists, Stalinists, anarchists and social democrats. One size fits all! It is insensitive to the macro conflicts within socialism.

Relative criticisms of Neoconservative Realists from within International Relations Theory

The first criticism is that there is a mixing of descriptive and proscriptive statements which makes scientific testability difficult. In other words, its ideology of power politics gets in the way. Secondly, because it is wedded to conservative ideology it has no theory of how social movements arise to challenge the great powers. Further, because socialism is seen as flat and lacking in innovation it could not explain the fall of the Soviet Union or the rise of China. Lastly because it pays little attention to the evolution of capitalism it failed to predict the rise of collaborative multi-lateral institutions that support capitalism such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund or the SWIFT balance of payments system.

Who Are the Neoliberal Globalists?

Origins of Neoliberal globalism

While Neoliberalism began just after War World II with the Austrian school of Von Hayek and Von Mises, it had to wait a good thirty years for New Deal liberalism to have its “golden age” between 1948 and 1970. It really came into its own after the Keynesianism economic policy ran into trouble. It also was triggered by the oil crisis in 1973, along with the new competition from Germany and Japan that had recovered from World War II. Neoliberalism has always been inseparable from:

The declining standard of living in the United States;
The arrival of credit cards to soften the blow of the decline;
The increasing power of banks and finance capital.

Theorists of Neoliberal globalism today include Francis Fukuyama in his claim to the “end of history” and the triumph of Neoliberalism all over the world when the Soviet Union collapsed. Also, Samuel Huntington in his books the Clash of Civilizations and the Soldier and the State which supported Neoliberalism.

Capitalist international institutions promote austerity for non-core countries

With the help of the World Bank and the IMF, Neoliberal neo-imperialism promoted austerity programs on the periphery of the world economy, placing those countries in an impossible debt-trap. Unlike Neoconservative realists, Neoliberal globalists emphasize the international nature of the capitalist societies and they use the state militarily to support the reign of Anglo-American foreign capital in semi-peripheral and especially peripheral countries. The globalization of communication, transport, along with immigrant and refugee movements weakens the power of the nation-state to regulate all these transnational movements.

The state is subordinate to global capitalism

For Neoconservative Realists, the state is sovereign. For neoliberal globalists, the state is simply an aggregate of private interests. Neoliberal globalists have more confidence that wars can be controlled by multilateral efforts. At the same time Neoliberal globalists have no problem with military capitalism, where the military not only supports its home nation-states but it arms the whole world. To the horror of Realists, global Neoliberals are short on patriotism and long on making profits no matter where they come from.

Growing interdependence of states

Though in actually existing nation-states have been more interdependent than Realists like to imagine, with alliances prominent during both world wars, this interdependence has grown with the founding of NATO and the division of countries into capitalist and socialist blocs after the war. While geopolitical theory is mostly Realist in outlook, the work of Kennan, Kissinger and Brzezinski showed that Neoliberal globalists were just as anti-communist and coveted their potential markets of socialist states. These states had to form blocs and could no longer afford to be isolationist.

Think tanks and game theory

More than Realists, Neoliberals put a high preference on ideas. The first think-tanks came out of the Rand Foundation and global capitalists such as the Rockefeller brothers who set up not just think-tanks but foundations and organizations such as the Council of Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission, all in the service of opposing communism. New Deal liberal gatekeepers acted as “controlled opposition” such as the Ford Foundation. The Neoliberal notions about human nature are not as bleak as Neoconservative Realists. Under certain conditions, state actors can cooperate. Game theory is a neoliberal attempt to understand the conditions that are likely to promote competition or cooperation among states.

Free trade

Unlike Neoclassical Realism, Neoliberal globalism contends that state-state engagements can result in a positive sum game. It believes in free trade and David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage. It holds out hope for peripheral countries if they play by the rules of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. If Neoconservative Realists think that power politics is what is the most important determining factor in international relations, Neoliberals imagine that the field of economics determines the basis of state action. Like Neocon Realists, Neoliberal globalists imagine that economics is a separate discipline whose laws have nothing to do with politics. This way of thinking can be seen in theories of free market fundamentalists like Milton Freidman. Naomi Klein blew the roof off of this ideology when she exposed how the Chicago Boys muscled their way into Russia, Argentina and many other countries and turned their nation-states against institutional liberal FDR policies.

Failure to explain inequalities between the West and the rest

Neoliberal globalists are not much better than Neocon Realists in explaining the difference in wealth between core, periphery and semi-periphery countries. They imagine that peripheral countries face the same conditions as core countries did when they first developed capitalism. Like Neorealists, they imagine that nation-states are still internally driven and peripheral countries are poor because either their rulers are dictatorial or the population is uneducated and holding on to superstitious beliefs.

Attitude towards socialism

Neoliberal Globalists assume that centralized state socialism has no redeeming value. It sees these countries as poor and run by dictators. However, there is some recognition that social democratic states have some value, but in practice it is in the business of undermining them while demanding that their foreign policy allow for transnational corporations to make profits in their countries and leave with no strings attached.

Relative criticisms of Neoliberal globalism from within international relations theory

Like Neoconservative Realists, Neoliberal globalists have no theory of how social movements arise to challenge the great powers. While Huntington and Fukuyama celebrate the triumph of capitalism they have no theory to explain the failure of Neoliberalism, not only in other parts of the world but in the deterioration of their own home countries between 1990 and today. Neither can it explain the return of Russian nationalism nor the productiveness of the Chinese economy despite its leading industries being Communist state controlled.

Absolute Criticism of Neoconservative Realists

Failure to face the world economy is centered in the East

The fundamental reality that Neoconservative Realists fail to face is that world economy is undergoing tectonic shift, moving from West to East. For the first time since the 16th century, the center of the world economy is settling in China, Russia and Iran. Because realist theory is relatively shallow historically, it traces the history of the world system back a couple of hundred centuries at best, when the Western world was the center of world power. The wars the Neocons want to start today are not powers of imperial expansion. Instead they are fighting to keep from losing control over its former colonies (like in Africa) who are placing their hopes with the multipolarists.

Cold War containment has backfired.

While China claims to be a communist country it has not insisted that its allies like Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia or Brazil become communist. China’s attraction for these counties is China’s willingness to harness energy, build railroads within these countries while internationally constructing their vast Belt-Road Initiative. Realists sense the United States allies are dwindling and so it increases pressure on European countries in the EU to do its imperial dirty-work.

Bye-bye mercantilism

World politics today is hardly Hobbesian nation-states clashing in a war of all against all. Today nation states have allies and blocs. In this sense. Neorealist theories are more sensitive to the relativeness of states than Realist theories are. To the extent that Realist theory is mercantilist, its capitalist economy hasn’t been protectionist for close to 100 years. When Neoliberal globalists uprooted the manufacturing industries in the mid 1970s and shipped their jobs overseas, it undermined its industrial economy from competing with other economies. These days, there are no infrastructural companies that can seriously compete with the countries in the multipolar world.

Neoconservative Realists are social schizophrenics. They concentrate on their political power overseas, but they fail to realize that the instability of their economic system both at home and abroad makes the power politics ineffective.

Failure to understand China

Neoconservative Realists know very little about what is going on in China. They fail to face that the Chinese Communist party knows how to make a profit. That 60% of its sources of profit come from state institutions. It imagines that the Chinese people, like the Russian people, are unhappy with their “authoritarian” states and are just waiting for a Western politician like Navalny to liberate them. While Neoconservative Realists mock the power of ideas in international relations, the Chinese Communist Party values the moral appeal of communism. Culturally, Neorealists imagine that the Chinese have a repressive culture that has little appreciation for the arts because of imagined repression. But the truth is the Chinese population is very interested in national and international culture. Recently Russian ballet, music, theatre and literature have sold out Chinese audiences for whom to perform.

War of all against all does not explain the multipolar world

Neoconservative theories of human nature can be compared to the dynamics of the novel Lord of the Flies. But when we look at the way the multipolar world is working, human nature is much closer to the movie Society in the Snow. This was about how rugby players on a flight to Chile survived 72 days in the Andes after their plane crashed because they cooperated. In the multi-polar world today Chinese and Russian policies of either debt reduction or even debt cancellation in Africa resemble human cooperation in practice. State-state interaction is not a zero-sum game. It is a positive sum game, at least in the multipolar world.

No sense that the world economy evolves

Neoconservative realists have no sense that states evolve, that there are a set of accumulating political, ecological and economic consequences that will affect its power politics. It treats them as accidently unexplained mishaps rather than the consequences of past myopic political actions.

Absolute Criticism of Neoliberal Globalists

Its failure to have a deep analysis of how capitalism works

One of the major problems for Neoliberal globalists is that they do not understand their own system of capitalism. They see no problem in investing in military capitalism which destroys the productive forces. They see no problem in investing in fictitious capital which produces no social wealth. Consequently, its domestic economies are falling apart because it fails to invest in industrial capital. Secondly, their economists cannot predict or explain when crises occur. Thirdly, they make no effort to understand the history of capitalism which might enable them to reform the system. These capitalists cannot think further down the line than three months. It pays little attention to the steepness in the gap between the very wealthy and the working class, except to occasionally moralize about it at conferences every six months. They make no attempt to study social movements so any rebellions against it coming from unions, nationalist groups or Occupy are treated as surprises driven by external causes.

Failure to understand that most countries are against free market capitalism

Since neoliberal globalists treat their own state as weak and something to be used by capitalists, it comes as a great shock to them when non-Western nation-states elect leaders who want to treat their economy as in need of a domestic plan. These are the conditions where Neoliberal globalists trade in their invisible hand for a visible fist. They turn to the CIA and the National Endowment of Democracy to give these elected officials their walking papers at best, or assassinations at worst, whether their state is socialistic or not. Neoliberal globalists understand that domestic populations are no longer in love with capitalism. So, like Neoconservatives, they develop economic propaganda centers through think tanks, foundations, and universities. These attempts are no longer working.

The failure of the comparative advantage ideology

Neoliberal theory of comparative advantage, which worked well as an ideology on peripheral countries in the middle to the last third of the 20th century, has worn thin. Periphery countries now see through this ideology, especially because of the presence of Russia and China to provide real alternatives. Neoliberal globalists like to present their economics as not political. However, this is easier to do domestically than it is internationally. The book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is only the tip of the iceberg in showing how neoliberals play hard ball geopolitics whenever a peripheral country informs transnational capitalists that they will have to pay taxes.

Success against social democratic regimes

For Neoliberal globalists, communist parties are the devil incarnate with whom there is no compromising. However, they have shown a willingness to deal with countries that have elected social democrats. Between 1980 and the present Neoliberal globalists have been very shrewd at isolating and weakening social democratic rulers, making them slide to the right on the political spectrum along with liberalism generally. The example of Norway, Denmark and Sweden is a case in point. These countries have slid to the right along with the overall rightward trend in the Western world and are currently supporting Mordor, sending troops against Russia in Ukraine.

With the exception of Chavez, to a lesser extent Maduro and Evo Morales, Neoliberal globalists have been able to stem the Pink Tide.

Other International Relations Theory: Liberal Institutionalism, Constructivism and World Systems Theory

Liberal institutionalism

This is an older theory of liberalism applied to international politics after World War One. It was an attempt to bring reason, universal ethics and education into international affairs. At first glance, looking at today’s world, this view seems hopelessly naïve, but with the founding of the League of Nations at the end of World War I, there was an appeal to a higher human nature. They believed that the belligerence between states was not inevitable. International anarchy could be policed by international institutions. As opposed to Realism theory, liberal institutionalism understood states as semi-independent rather than Hobbesian billiard balls crashing into each other without rhyme or reason.

Following Grotius and later Immanuel Kant, the basis for international relations was understood to be international law. These laws could bring about an orderly, just and cooperative world. Human problems were the not the result of human nature but of flawed, irrational institutions. Liberal institutionalists were very different from Neoliberals as we have seen, and they expected capitalist institutions to be governed by reasonable international politics. Despite World War I, liberal institutionalists hung on to a belief in progress. They also believed that Western nation-states still were the model for any future society.

As you might imagine, this theory would be laughed out of court by Neoconservative Realists as being utopian and out of touch. Neoliberals might agree with institutional liberals about the importance of law but this was only on paper. Neoliberal globalists do not want transnational corporations hemmed in by any state, let alone any potential world government. Neoliberals now believe in an unregulated global capitalism and any state had to dance to the tune of the international capitalist band.

As paradoxical as it might seem, it is not the current Western transnational finance capitalists who might give institutional liberalism the time of day, but the multipolar countries of China and Russia. These so-called authoritarian states have made some surprisingly liberal international statements about the nature of the future multipolar world. It is they that hold out the claim for free and equal development of all multi-polar states, whether they be in BRICS or in the Shanghai Cooperative network. Of course, whether or not they put this into practice is another matter.

Constructivism

Constructivism is a theory that first developed in the field of sociology with the work of Berger and Luckman in their book The Social Construction of Reality. It was first applied to international relations in the work of John Ruggie, Nicholas Onuf, Kratochwil and later Alexander Wendt. Constructivists reject the rational self-interest of the Realists and they claim that Realists reify international relations and state policies as things rather than processes. International relations are constructed and reconstructed based on the interaction of diplomats. They seek a more sociological conception of international relations by introducing the dialectic between structure and agency. Neoconservatives Realists behave as if there was only structure and no agency. For constructionists, material interests are not transparent and uncontested. They grow and change based on interaction with other states. For constructionists, states are not unified actors, as realists claim, but that they are impacted by political pressures.

Constructionists are rightfully skeptical of modernization theories of progress, but cautiously hold out hope for improved international relations. Constructionists are critical of Neoconservative realist theories that treat periphery countries as backward political entities that need to “catch up.” They accept Dependency Theory that Western countries are wealthy in part because the wealth of peripheral countries has been stolen. Constructionists look at peripheral countries as having corrupt rulers in need of internal political reform. The main scientific problem with constructionism as a theory is sometimes not testable.

Neoconservative Realists would dismiss constructionism as some woolly-headed academic discipline which muddles the waters, attempting to make processes out of things, and destabilizing hard facts with various interpretations. They are naïve in believing that diplomats rather than the forces of the deep state are responsible for public policy. Neoliberals might pay lip service to constructionist processes when it comes to law and politics, but they would hardly stand for constructionists mucking around with international market forces. Chances are likely they would be ignored.

Again, paradoxically it is the multipolar country of China that would be open to some of the process-orientation of the constructionists. Of course, as Marxists, China’s leaders would emphasize structure over agency, but they would agree with constructionist insistence of not reifying material interest and state policies and being open to international policies that are win-win.

World-Systems Theory

Origin and founders

World-systems theory is by far the most radical of all international relations theory, an explicitly Marxist theory based on the four-volume work by Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, whose first volume came out in 1974. Along with Paul Baron, Sameer Amin and Andre Gunder Frank, system theorists were sensitive to the imperialism of the core states. Core countries exploited the peripheral countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America and this explains why they are poor, have growing debt and don’t seem to be able to catch up. The IMF and World Bank exploit peripheral countries in the service of core countries. It is these reasons they are poor more than any internal state dynamic lack of economic willpower or superstition. Other family members of world-systems theory were Oliver Cox, George Modelski and Paul Kennedy (The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers). The roots of world-systems theory is not only in political economy, but history and sociology rather than the high politics of Neoconservative Realists.

Beyond politics and economics to political economy

Unlike either Neoconservative Realists or Neoliberal globalists world-systems theories do not accept the separation of politics (political science) from economics (neoclassical). There is only one field: political economy. This means all capitalist economics is partly political and there is no economics that is not also about power and politics. State diplomats do not make independent decisions but are mostly “talking shops of the bourgeoise” as Marx put it. Nation-states take their marching orders from transnational capitalists. The priority of states is to defend the world-capitalist ruling class.

Controversies within Marxism about actually existing socialism, imperialism and domestic class struggle

What makes world-systems theory controversial within Marxism is that world-systems theory claims that there are no real socialist states. All claimed socialist societies are really state-capitalist societies which are subject to the laws of capitalist world- economy. This directly challenges the claim made by Leninists that the former Soviet Union, China and Cuba really are socialist societies. For world systems theorists Stalinism has little to do with socialism. A second difference between world-systems theorists and Leninists is over the stages of imperialism. Lenin argued that imperialism was the last stage of capitalism, a new stage of the capitalist system. But Giovanni Arrighi, in his book The Long Twentieth Century claimed that there were four cycles of capitalism: a) merchant capital b) agricultural capitalism (slavery); c) industrial capital and d) finance capitalism, which includes imperialism. Over capitalism’s 500 year history, the Italians, the Dutch, the British and the United States each went through these four cycles. So, imperialism didn’t happen once, but four times, each time expanding wider and deeper into the capitalist world-system.

Please see my article for a more complete explanation of world systems theory: Tectonic Shifts in the World Economy: A World Systems Perspective. Lastly, Leninists insist that world-systems theory overemphasizes international dynamics between countries and understates the class struggle within nation-states.

Nation-states policy is determined by international core-peripheral relations and class struggle

For world-systems theorists, the material interests of states are determined on the one hand internationally by core-periphery relations and on the other hand domestically by class struggles. International relations are more powerful than state domestic relations. Like for Neoconservative Realists and Neoliberal globalists ideas are not very important in explaining international relations for world-systems theorists.

Human nature is fundamentally cooperative

While world-systems theorists agree with Neoliberal globalists that human nature is both cooperative and competitive, they believe that human nature is primarily cooperative. It becomes competitive due to social scarcity brought about by capitalism. Most human problems are due to flawed capitalist institutions. State-state relations are neither a zero-sum game claimed by Neoconservative Realists where one state wins and one loses. Nor are they a positive sum game where both states win as the Neoliberals claim. In world-systems theories state-state relations are negative sum gains where all states decline due to war, ecological disasters and international economic crises. Only socialist states are capable of positive sum games.

Socialism is too new to be judged a failure

All things considered, capitalism has had 300 years to develop after it overthrew the feudal system. Socialism has had about 160 years under which has never been free to develop autonomously. When we look at the state of the world today with the rise of China and the multipolar world, it is way too soon to judge the long-lastingness of socialism. On the other hand, if we look at the bleak landscape of the failure of Neoliberal capitalism over the last 30 years, it is more likely to say capitalism is the system that is on the way out.

Criticisms of World-Systems Theory

Dependency theory is weak in explaining why some peripheral states are not immiserated but relatively successful.
It is too hard on actually existing socialism and its achievements for middle-class and working-class people, especially given the backward nature of society before socialism came into being.
Given that world-systems theory is more sympathetic to the social democratic experiments in socialism, it doesn’t explain well its rightward turn in the last 40 years, especially the Scandinavian countries.
With the exception of work by Christopher Chase-Dunn, the late Terry Boswell and Charles Tilly, most world-systems theory does not make social movements within states and its global implications a very high priority, though it is better than any other theory.

How Useful is World-Systems Theory to Western Powers?

World-systems theory might be useful to the West if the West was able to elect a social democratic party which could put into practice some of its insights. But the entire Western world seems to be sinking and at best might occupy a peripheral position within a new multipolar world led by China, Russia and Iran. There is currently no place for world-systems insights to be applied in Mordor or any of its European satellites.

How Useful is World-Systems Theory to the Multipolar world?

World-systems theory would be very helpful in explaining a problem that has plagued classical Marxism. Why has socialism arisen in countries that were not industrialized? World-systems theory argues that in the history of capitalism, new leading hegemons arise from the capitalist semi-periphery. Russia, China, Iran and India all fit this bill. The multipolar world would be in complete agreement (at least China, Cuba and Venezuela) that political economy rather than politics or economics taken separately will explain international relations. The multipolar world would feel quite at home with world-systems theory claims that cooperation between states is natural and that the zero-sum games of the Neoconservative Realists are out of touch with the new world they are building. They agree with world-systems theorists that neoliberal globalist claims of a positive sum game between states are ideological window dressing to mask the exploitation by core countries of peripheral countries. Lastly, there is nothing I can see that is threatening to multi-polar socialist states to consider world-systems theories cycles of imperialism rather than a linear stage.

On the negative side, China, Cuba and Venezuela would be very upset that world-systems theory would argue they are not really socialist countries. They would claim that the standards world-systems theory holds for socialism, such as the levelling of classes, the absence of wage labor, the shortening the work week are too strident for a socialist world still surrounded by decaying and desperate capitalist states. In addition, world-systems theories would criticize socialist multipolar states for the continued existence of class struggles within socialist states, especially China. There are no unions and strikes by workers going on.

A Conclusion and Autopsy

In this conclusion, my aim is to pull together all the criticisms of both Neoconservative Realism on the one hand, and Neoliberal globalism on the other. For each one I will state relative criticisms from within International Relations Theory. That will be followed by criticism of these theories based on the current tectonic shift in the world economy from the Western world to the East.

Neoconservative Realism

Relative criticisms on International Relations Theory

The mixing of descriptive and proscriptive statements makes scientific testing difficult.
It has no theory of how social movements arise to test the great powers.
Because it sees socialism as flat Stalinism, it has no theory of why the Soviet Union fell or how China arose.
Because it pays little attention to the evolution of capitalism, it failed to predict the rise of collaborative multi-lateral institutions that support capitalism (World Bank or IMF, and the Swift method of balancing payments).

Criticisms based on the current multipolar movement from West to East

Failure to explain or predict the tectonic shifts in the world-economy from West to East.
Failure to explain or predict the loss of former colonies.
Failure to explain why the Cold War containment policy of Kennan and the influence of Mackinder has failed.
The decline of protectionism and mercantilism. Realism has been forced by market fundamentalism to give up any hope of an insular, mercantile economic policy.
Failure to explain how finance capital has undermined its claim for power over resources. These days profits are counted based on stocks and bonds, not material resources.
Failure to explain inequalities between the West and the rest.
Failure to understand the Chinese source of power. If Neoconservative Realists were right, Realist war drums against China would be based on its military threat. But China’s superiority stems from its economic superiority in producing goods and services, and building infrastructures.
Failure to understand the popularity of the Chinese and Russian leadership among their populations. The picture of these states as dark totalitarian nightmares is out of touch with how people are actually living in these countries.
The Hobbesian war of all against all, does not explain the cooperative relations between members of the multipolar world (China, Russia and Iran) and their followers in BRICS as well as in the global south.
There is no sense that states break down, built up in the context of an irreversible, accumulating process that is not static and beyond the intentions of state actors or great men.

Neoliberal Globalists

Relative criticisms of International Relations Theory

They have no theory of how social movements arise to challenge the great powers.
It has no theory to explain the failure of Neoliberal capitalist economics around the world and the deterioration of its home countries such as Europe and the U.S.
It cannot explain the return of Russian nationalism under Putin.
The world’s most productive country, China, is successful despite its claim to be a communist country and its substantial profits derived from state-run institutions.

Criticisms based on the current multipolar movement from West to East

Failure to explain or predict the tectonic shifts in the world-economy from West to East.
Failure to explain or predict the loss of former colonies.
Failure to explain why the Cold War containment policy of Kennan and the influence of Mackinder has failed.
Failure to explain inequalities between the West and the rest.
Failure to understand the popularity of the Chinese and Russian leadership among its population. The picture of these states as dark totalitarian nightmares is out of touch with how people are actually living in these countries.
Failure to understand the necessity of expanded reproduction for capitalism to continue. It invests in non-productive forces like the military and finance capital.
Failure to explain when, where and why capitalist crises occur. There is no long-term planning to stop future crisis.
Failure to understand that free-market fundamentalism has more adversaries than friends either among multi-polar rulers nor their populations and this country despite their best propaganda techniques in think tanks, foundations and universities.
Failure of the comparative advantage ideology. The Global South has had roughly three generations to see how productive it is to specialize in the production of coffee, sugar and tobacco has been. They have had enough, especially now that Russia and China have offered to cancel their debt and build their industries, rather than “brain-drain” exported to core countries.
Neoliberal globalists have been successful in stemming the Pink Tide in South America, as the tide has become white domestically and become imperialist in its support of Mordor against the multipolar world.

The post Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Jean Houston’s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 01:36:36 +0000

Orientation

How I came across Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self

In the middle of the 1980s I had decided to return to college to get a degree in counseling psychology. I was sitting in a café in the North Beach area of San Francisco waiting for my interview to get into Antioch University. It had been ten years since I had recognized that I wanted a more expansive view than what Marx and Engels had to offer. I began studying the work of Teilhard de Chardin, especially The Phenomenon of Man. From there I stumbled on Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. I also became interested in books that had a sensitivity to the visionary possibilities for the globalization of society through the work of Oliver Reiser and General Systems Theory. I wanted to expand the work on social evolution so that it had a biological dimension on the one hand, and a cosmic dimension on the other. I was jazzed by a book I was reading called Life Force: The Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self. Up until this book, I perceived western history, western psychology and western spirituality as all separate disciplines. This book integrated all three into one movement. This tells the story of the dialectic between social evolution and psychological development through the description of Life Force.

Lack of a psychological and spiritual evolution of Marx and Engels stage theory

Marxists have a stage theory of social evolution. The first stage was primitive communism. The second stage was something Marxists called “Oriental Despotism” which roughly corresponded to the ancient states of Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. They were all caste societies. From there Marx and Engels argued that the next three social formations were all class societies. Slavery corresponded to Greek and Roman civilization. The second form of class society was feudalism, which in the West lasted from the 10th to the 14th centuries. The last form of class society was capitalism, which is roughly coextensive with the modern world, beginning with the fifteenth century into its decline in the 21st century. After a successful revolution against the capitalists, Marx and Engels predicted that first socialism, then communism would replace it. There was no integration of this model with the evolution in the micro psychology in individual development. Further, since spirituality was inseparable from organized religion, Marx and Engels only saw religion as an ideology of the priests to oppress the population for their benefit and that of secular rulers.

Lack of social evolution in psychology and religion studies

Meanwhile, the field of psychology treated the evolution of society as having little or nothing to do with the problems of how people learn, how emotions get produced, the stages of cognitive development or how mental illness evolved. As for spirituality, monotheism seems to have had little to do with psychology or social evolution. They imagined that in the evolution of religion, monotheism was an advance over the polytheism of ancient times but it was not connected to the evolution of human societies.

Integration of social, psychological and spiritual evolution

The first of two people I found who actually combined social, psychological and religious evolution was Jean Houston in her book Life Force. The other was Ken Wilbur in his book Up From Eden. Jean Houston’s book will be the study in this article.

Jean Houston’s Mentor Gerald Heard

As I was reading Life Force, I noticed that she referenced a book called The Five Ages of Man by someone named Gerald Heard. His book was written in 1963. I was very eager to read the book but in the days before the internet and Amazon, the chances were slim to none I would ever find it in a used book store twenty years later. But, thanks to the wonderful resources of Moe’s Books in Berkeley, I found a copy. It was expensive ($50.00 in the early 1990s) but in retrospect, it was well worth it. So, who was this guy Heard anyway?

He has been called “an advanced scout” on the Aquarian Age frontier. He played the role of global midwife to a New Age of human potential movement long before Jung or Joseph Campbell became popular. Heard was born in London in October of 1899 to parents who were landed gentry. At the age of 17, in the midst of a crisis in faith, he turned to and embraced secular humanism. Gerald was involved in progressive education along with social and prison reform. While in Ireland, he came to know George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats. Heard also was involved with an agricultural cooperative in Ireland and he was a champion of an Irish cultural Renaissance. In 1926, he became a public speaker and made a name for himself as a science journalist for the BBC. He worked on an editorial board that included Julian and Aldous Huxley, H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. In the middle third of the 20th century, he was a well-known polymath. He influenced Huxley away from the cynicism of The Brave New World to the perennial philosophy of esoteric religion.

In the early 1930s Heard became influenced by Hindu and Buddhist thought. He transitioned from being a secular humanist to a mystic. He learned exercises for regulating his diet, attitude, inspiration and meditation. In the 1930s and early forties Heard was involved in the research committee for Society for Psychic Research. With World War II looming, he emigrated from England to the US with fellow pacifist Huxley and never returned. He had a long-cherished dream to establish a place where the study of comparative religion could be combined with research into the techniques of meditations. In Los Angeles they joined the Vedanta Society of Southern California as a place to nurture his dreams.

The 1940s were Heard’s most productive writing years where he turned to novels and science fiction. His early writing included nonfiction work such as Ascent of Humanity, 1929; The Social Substance of Religion, 1931; Source of Civilization, 1935; and Pain, Sex and Time written in 1941. His magnum opus was The Human Venture.

Like Jean Houston, in the 1960s he pioneered the study of LSD and its value while it was still legal to do so.This early hero of the Esalen founders of the Human Potential Movement died in 1971 in Santa Monica at the age of 81.

For my purposes, what is most important about Heard was his attempt to connect social, psychological and spiritual evolution. In terms of psychology and spirituality, Heard published a remarkable fictional story Dromenon (like a Labyrinth). The story is of an archeologist who encounters an ancient therapy which involves the mystical transformation of body, mind and spirit by following the pathways inscribed on the floors and walls of a medieval English cathedral.

Each of his stages was beset by a specific crisis-ordeal under which the individual was either broken down or transformed and then went on to the next stage. Heard suggested therapies of initiation for each stage along the lines of ancient mystery traditions. The psychotechnology that Heard advised as providing for the initiation of movement included LSD, electrical stimulation and walking on fire.

The Life of Jean Houston

Like Gerald Heard, Jean was an early pioneer in the Human Potential Movement along with her husband Robert Masters. She was born in 1937 in New York City and is still alive and working 87 years later. Her father was a comedy writer who also developed material for theatre, movies and television. This helped Jean to develop her theatrical approach to what she later called “sacred psychology” and group dynamics. She continued to live in NYC after her parents got divorced and she graduated from Barnard College in 1958. Jean was an interdisciplinary from way back. She received a PHD in both psychology and religion. This further supported her later work in sacred psychology. She has taught and lectured at many colleges and has made a name for herself as a social visionary. In the mid 1990s she was given the Keeper of the Lore Award for her studies in myth and culture.

Early Research on Altered States of Consciousness

In the 1950s up until the mid 1960s, psychological research on the effects of LSD was legal and she met her husband working on a government research project on the effects of LSD. This led to their book The Varieties of Psychedelic Experience in 1965. They married the same year and soon became known for their work in the Human Potential Movement. Both Masters and Houston continued their interest in altered states of consciousness without chemical inducement. Their book in 1972 called Mind Games detailed their findings of the power of guided imagery and body movement for altering states of consciousness. Together they conducted research into the interdependence of body, mind, and spirit through their Foundation for Mind Research until 1979.

Group sacred psychology

Jean had been deeply influenced by Heard’s short story Dromenon. Her rites of passages are powerful new versions of what Heard, following Cambridge anthropologist Jane Harrison, terms the Dromenon. In 1975 she formed the Dromenon Center which was named after the ancient Greek rites of growth and transformation. In Pomona New York, she began to offer workshops on this material. She used the Dromenon book and often implemented it in her seminars by inscribing it on the floor and having her participants walk its pathways. She crafted her own transformational rituals as I will illustrate later in the article. Around 1978, she decided to offer an experimental advanced Dromenon workshop in which she would rethink some of the themes of the Five Ages of Man in light of her own subsequent research and findings.

From her study of Toynbee, Sorokin and others, she attempted to discover a relationship between social evolution and individual development. Child psychologists like Stanley Hall and his student Arnold Gesell have suggested that the individual infant, child and adolescent are recapitulating in their individual growth phases of past epochs of humankind’s psychosocial evolution. Jean’s interest in anthropology brought with it an appreciation of social evolution and its integration into Western history.

The New Dromenon

Jane Harrison in Ancient Art and Ritual points out that for the ancients the enactment of the Dromenon extended the boundaries of the self so that it became part of the larger social order. From the spring of Dromenon there arose two of the main forms of Greek life and civilization:

Agon or athletic contest
The agon of the drama

At the heart of the ancient Dromenon is the principle of conflict, the conflict that comes from the anima and animus of the old self and birth of the new year and a new self. She had a yearly 10-week mystery school format of spiritual study and sacred psychology. An emphasis on myth and story began to be essential to her work since about 1980. The use of the mythic is not as implicit in Life Force as it is in her later works. Works on myth include: The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology and The Hero and the Goddess. So how does the structure of her groups work?

The structure of Jean’s groups

Her groups include between 5- 25 people. Ideally, members have sufficient life experience to appreciate the historical and psychological scope of the human drama they will be required to go through. At the initial meeting, the group assigns members to take responsibility for obtaining and preparing the setting for each Dromenon. This includes music and recorder, tape or CD players, art materials, as well as bringing food for a closing celebration for each Dromenon. The setting should be treated as sacred space with no interruptions. Before the meeting, every member of the group is to read the relevant material from the Life Force book. The group discussion of this material should in most cases be the subject of the first part of the meeting. After discussing the content members are to explore the meaning of its content in their lives. There is also discussion of the changing patterns of viewpoint that members have observed in themselves since the last meeting. They are to keep a journal for their journey.

Jean’s use of Greek mythology

In 1982, Houston began teaching a seminar based on the concept of “the ancient mystery schools” which proposed that human beings have an inherent potentiality which is far deeper and wider than their experience in everyday life. All her later work involved first tapping into that potential in her group settings and then learning how to bring it into everyday life. She used Greek mythology to instill in her students a quest which was not just for individual growth but part of the evolution of the human species.

Jean’s influences in stage theories of history

In Jean’s studio, statues of the gods of Greece and Egypt sit with the most advanced biofeedback equipment. A mummy case overlooks the conference area, while a wildly colored nine-foot carving of a Garuda bird-god of Indonesia shares quarters with a xerox machine. The historical material for stage theories for her workshops were influenced by the stages depicted in St. Augustine, Vico and Hegel. She studied historical cycles of Arnold Toynbee, Walter Schubart, Spengler, Berdyaev and Pitirim Sorokin. Cross-culturally she worked with societies that have scarcely changed form since the time of Christ as well as societies that are still medieval. Every kind of society that has ever existed can be seen today in a hybrid form. Their rituals can be drawn from and incorporated into the Dromenon work.

The Five Stages of Social Evolution

Following her mentor Gerald Heard, Houston divides western history into five stages:

Tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations
Greek civilization from 800-300 BCE
Middle Ages of feudalism (10th – 14th centuries)
Modern Europe of the capitalist/scientific revolution of the 15th to middle 20th. This includes the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution
Planetary civilization

These five stages mostly follow Marx and Engels’ writing. The problems with her model include the slurring over the differences between tribal societies and agricultural state civilizations. These civilizations developed cities and states for the first time. They created caste relations which were a radical departure from egalitarian societies that exist mostly on a tribal level. They produced enormous wealth and created the first divisions between mental and manual labor. What agricultural civilizations have in common with tribal societies is that they are both collectivists. However, in my opinion this is hardly enough to justify lumping them together.

The characterization of Greek society as individualistic, aristocratic and warrior-like is good. The otherworldly characteristic of stage three, feudal society also makes sense. Her fourth stage of capitalism and the scientific revolution as the explosion and expansion of goods, infrastructures and population increase follows the work of Toynbee, Vico, Spengler and Sorokin.

Her last stage, planetary civilization, makes sense if you can imagine it as spreading of communism around the world. The problem with Houston-Heard’s stages is that they really ignore the power of capitalism to destroy populations either through world wars, colonialism or the exploitation of labor. Neither do either Heard nor Houston take into account the emergence and spreading of socialism. The place of either capitalism or socialism is not worked into her global civilization.

Five Stages of Individual Development

Houston identifies five stages of individual development which compliment her stages of social evolution:

Infancy
Childhood
Adolescence
First maturity
Second maturity

One of the more exciting proposals Houston makes is that there is a relationship between social evolution and psychological evolution. In the cross-cultural literature on the evolution of the self, there is a movement from horizontal collectivism of tribal societies to vertical collectivism of agricultural states. Greek civilization can be characterized by first order individualism or what she calls “proto-individualism”. Houston’s 4th stage of social evolution – science – can be characterized as 2nd order individualism. If she added the cross-cultural research, the model of social evolution to individual evolution would work. But she doesn’t do this. Instead, she argues that social evolution conforms to individual development. This harkens back to the old racist anthropologists who suggested that tribal society corresponds to infancy while modern industrial capitalist societies correspond to maturity. This is exactly the kind of ordering of societies that Franz Boas rightly called racist and which justified imperialism. However, if we take out the implication of social evolution recapitulating individual development there are some interesting connections.

Five Types of Selves

The first stage of individual development is the pre-individual, co-conscious human. At this stage, egotism is repressed, sensuality is important and what goes in here is what she called “polymorphous perversity”. This stage does correspond to tribal societies since their senses are heightened because of the need to survive in a hostile environment. People are co-conscious because they do everything together.

Houston called the second stage the proto-individual heroic, self-assertive human.

These are the heroes of Greek civilization, the characters in the Iliad and especially the Odyssey. Greek aristocrats are likened to a warrior kind of self, where a code of honor is vital. Doing anything dishonorable leads to shame. Mythology is very important as Greek psychology was inseparable from mythology.

The third stage of the self is called the ascetic self-accusing man. Instead of a hero, this kind of self at its best is a mystic. The Middle Ages was dominated by the Catholic Church so the ideal self was the self-denying, otherworldly individual attempting to escape from the material world. The entire feudal society of the Middle Ages was anti-materialist and anti-secular. Because the Middle Ages was dominated by a Christianity that lost the appreciation of the gods and the psychology of mythology, the stories told were allegories, not myths. Allegories are moral tales as to how to behave.

The fourth stage of the self is called the individual humanistic, self-sufficient adventuring man who is self-confident. This corresponds with the period of the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment. There is an explosion of interest in the external world. If the Middle Age visionary cultivated subjectivity, the new self-sufficient individual became enthralled with objectivity. World trade spans the globe. Science reaches beyond the mesocosm of earth to explore the macrocosm of the stars (telescope) or the miniscule world or organism (microscope). There is a harnessing of energy – coal, steam and oil. Population grows, great wealth is produced by world trade, diseases are controlled and life is lengthened. Leonardo, Goethe and Bruno are the best examples of this type of self.

The final stage of the self is what Houston calls the post-individual, planetary ecological human. This is a stage where society becomes globalized. Books that support this kind of world are books like Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man

Peter Russell’s book The Global Brain; the books of Oliver Reiser such as the Integration of Human Knowledge and Cosmic Humanism and Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book Conscious Evolution. I found nothing in Houston’s work which describes the economic system or political system where globalization will take place.

The kind of self in the last stage is dialectical in the sense that it is a return to the co-conscious, egoless self of tribal societies but on a higher level. The post individualist self is wealthier, less afraid and operates at a grand global scale rather than in local identity. This self is well-rounded like individuals in tribal societies but also well-rounded in the power to use technology on a global scale. One model for this kind of self is Buckminster Fuller.

Crisis, Pathology, Therapy

For me the most interesting part of Jean’s evolutionary landscape is the connection she makes between the stages of the self and three processes.

The developmental crisis of each stage
The pathology which arises at each stage
The mythological therapies that resolve the crisis and the pathology

We will go through each of the developmental stages.

Pre-Individual Tribal societies: crisis, pathology and therapy

To protect themselves from natural disasters, other animals and some other kinds of societies, tribal societies, have ideology that, at least socially, things do not change. It is true that change in these societies is slower than any other social formations, which makes the break-up of tribal societies more difficult. So too, in individual development. When a child leaves home for the first time it can be traumatic. In both cases, Houston calls the crisis a “birth drama”. The pathology in social evolution is to refuse to change. This might mean living on less and less resources born out of a refusal to seek new lands, develop new technologies and politically and economically reorganize themselves. In individual development, the pathology is called “infantilism”. This means acting out, refusing to go to kindergarten or feigning sickness to maintain dependence. Houston’s proposal for a solution is “the mysteries of the earth” which remedies the trauma of birth by becoming “a one among the many”.

In this next section I will describe what the crisis and pathology look like. Space doesn’t permit me to do this with each stage but I wanted to give you a feel for what it is like.

The Dromenon for the pre-individual: The recovery of the beginning

The experiences are divided into four stages:

First stage recalls the hypnotic symbiosis and comforting securities of the early social group
2nd stage one is wrapped in the arms of another, there to undergo a terrible birth of the individual and a hero
In the 3rd stage birth is inspired to its blessed form, we relive our birth based on the work of Fredrick Leboyer. Here the atrocities of deliveries are refused
The classical mystery of the earth is reenacted

Stage one: the remembrance of the primal community

One member will sit in a circle, arms linked and facing each other. Members of the second group will sit back-to-back with members of the first group reaching behind them. The entire group is a woven network corresponding symbolically to the interwovenness on all levels of the early community.

After 10-15 minutes of entering into participation mystique and continuous chanting, the guide will tell some to continue chanting but that very shortly some members of the group will be touched on the head. Those touched represent the proto-individual who are trying to break away from the close and interwoven society. Those selected should struggle to break loose while the untouched ones should hold them back and keep them from moving out. (58)

Some members of the hero group will be celebrating their revolt on the outer perimeter and even launch an attack on the inner group trying to drag members off. Some may form into wandering bands of marauders, fighting among themselves and their attacking other bands (59)

This is the beginning of the waking and appreciation of your inner life.

Stage four: the mystery of the earth

This invocation is recorded in Aeschylus The Suppliants and is thought to have been part of the initiatory chants to one of the mysteries…move downward, move inward, return to the earth…of initiates and prepare to receive the ancient mystery of earth rebirth.

Like Persephone in the ancient Eleusinian mystery, ascend out the earth, cave, womb, tomb.

The meal that follows should be a simple, ancient rite, with fruits and cheeses and good bread and perhaps a little red wine, only a little, however. (70-72)

Proto-Individual Heroic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

The heroic aristocratic society of ancient Greeks are proud individualists, easy to anger and ready to fight. These individuals are not grounded in their individualism and behave like children of 7 or 8. Their individualism is short-sighted and gets them into trouble. Their crisis is that the drive for separation winds up in fighting, which Houston likens to a Tower of Babel. The pathology of this age is paranoia, always finding enemies even when there are none. The therapeia for this is the “mystery of water” where the egotism is tempered through communing with nature. Another therapeia is that of Odysseys “holding people under the water”

Mid-individual Ascetic societies: crisis, pathology, therapy

Ancient Greek society of the heroic aristocrats was followed by the rise of a merchant, trading society of Greece developed by a democratic polis and a more sophisticated individualism of the classical Greeks of Democritus, Plato, Aristotle and the Sophists. When the Greeks were conquered by the Romans, the Roman civilization lasted 800 years including the very sophisticated Alexandrians. When Roman civilization was conquered by the tribes of Northern and Southern Europe, ancient civilization lay in ruins. The only unification which followed throughout Europe was the Catholic Church. The Church at that time was extremely otherworldly.

The feudal societies that were built were hierarchical including a weak king, decentralized aristocrats, artisans and peasants . The only individualism really came from self-denying mystics who expressed their individuality through severe control of their bodies. Turning to individual development, this is the stage of adolescence, when the body explodes faster than the individual can keep up. Their self-mortification is a strategy for controlling the body. Aristocrats in the Middle Ages expressed bodily prowess through tournaments and gymnastics. The pathology of this stage is schizophrenia where the individual is torn between the poverty of the material world and the supposed glories of the spiritual world. The therapeia of this stage is the stories of Parsifal and the Holy Grail. Houston has her group enact “the mystery of the air” which is a correction of the drive to self-mortification.

Individual humanistic adventurous self: crisis, pathology and therapeia

The emergence of the Modern world was hammered by seven revolutionary movements: the Renaissance, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution and the emergence of socialism. This produced in the individual both a feeling of liberation from the closed world of the Middle Ages and at the same time a feeling that just as there were no longer ceilings, so there were no floors.

The development of capitalism produced both more material wealth and more alienation. There was specialization of labor and a loss of a sense of how all the world fit together. There were no longer Renaissance men. There was both an expansion of society as well as informational overload. The struggle of Faust typifies the psychology of the humanist-self-sufficient self. What is meaningful in life is chocked full of new knowledge. Faust solved this problem by putting the knowledge to work in what Marx called “developing the productive forces”. Most other individualists were not so fortunate, swinging between mania and depression. They were haunted by the myth of Midas, where everything touched turns to money.

The therapeia for this Promethean self was the mystery of fire, where the self becomes more disciplined and deeper, rather than wider. There are also exercises for integrating the higher self with using mandalas with both mechanical devices as well as artificial intelligence.

Planetary higher self-crisis, pathology and therapeia

At the time I first read Jean’s book, I thought there was no book more inspiring and hopeful about the next stage of civilization than Teilhard de Chardin’s book Phenomenon of Man. Though I am a materialist, I highly recommend this book by this Jesuit renegade, at least as a place to start. Vernadsky’s great book The Biosphere is strictly Marxist materialist, but a lot more technical. Buckminster Fuller’s Utopia or Oblivion shows us that the scarcity that exists in the world is socially produced, rather than natural. My article The Slavophile Russian Cosmists lays out how social visionary models need to include colonizing other planets. The anarchist Fredy Perlman characterized the history of social evolution in three stages.:

Tribal societies – having little and being much
Capitalist societies – having much and being little
Communist societies – having much and being much

In this individual second maturity, if Marx had his way, we would become as well-rounded as we were in tribal societies, except on a higher level—fishing in the morning, cattle rearing in the afternoon, criticizing in the evening. A major obstacle to catapulting into this planetary world is what Jean calls “involutional melancholy”. My way of interpreting this is the zero growth, people-are-pollution, Malthusian renunciation of human societies as a higher form of nature. Instead we imagine humanity as outside of nature, as a degenerate form of nature. But we must take the Promethean self, developed first with Greeks and along with the adventurous self of the modern world sore higher, not clip our wings and beg an otherworldly god for mercy. We must continue to be proud of our individualism, while recognizing the individuality of others on a global scale in a converging confluence of agape love. This is Jean’s Mystery of the Fields exercise.

Missed Opportunities

I was very surprised that Jean Houston did not attempt to integrate Heard’s five ages with the work of Jean Gebser and Ken Wilber. In the second edition of Life Force, she mentions both but she doesn’t take things any further. This is especially a shame because in the case of Gebser, his states of consciousness could have fit in beautifully with Heard’s stages. For example, Gebser’ magical state of consciousness goes with Heard’s tribal societies. Greek civilization would go with Gebser’s mythical consciousness. Gebser has an in-between 3rd stage which he called mystical, which is perfect for the Middle Ages. Gebser’s 4th stage, mental consciousness, goes with Heard’s humanistic self-sufficient self. Gebser even has a degeneration of mental consciousness which he calls rationality. In Heard’s stages this would begin with the scientific revolution. Gebser’s last stage, which he calls integrative, has a wealth of examples showing how it would go with Heard’s post-individual planetary human stage. Gebser’s stage could have been a whole other category called states of consciousness. Further, Gebser’s work is very rich and could have easily lent itself to therapeutic group exercises.

Integrating Heard’s work with Wilbur would have been a taller order. Both Heard and Gebser are really focused on Western civilization and neither has much to say about the civilizational processes of India and China. Wilbur, with his training in Buddhism, has a lot to say about these civilizations, their individuality and especially their states of consciousness. Integrating his work Up From Eden is probably too much. However, a couple of pages of footnotes suggesting the overlaps and divergencies between The Five Ages of Man and Up From Eden could have been enlightening and inspiring while provoking new research. Please see my table below for a summary.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Jean Houston’s Psycho-Historical Recovery of the Self first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 12 Mar 2024 13:04:09 +0000

Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, secular ideology that replaces religious systems. According to Kedourie, nationalism is a new doctrine of political change first argued for by Immanuel Kant and carried out by German Romantics at the beginning of the 19th century. In this early work, nationalism was the spiritual child of the Enlightenment, and by this I mean that nationalism and religion are conceived of as opposites. While religion supports hierarchy, otherworldliness, and divine control, nationalism, according to Kedourie, emphasizes more horizontal relationships, worldliness, and human self-emancipation. Where religion supports superstition, nationalism supports reason. Where religion thrives among the ignorant, nationalism supports education. For Enlightenment notions of nationalism, nationalism draws no sustenance from religion at all.

Modern theorists of nationalism such as Eric Hobsbawm and John Breuilly (1993), share much of this position. For these scholars, secular institutions and concepts such as the state or social classes occupy center stage, while ethnicity and religious tradition are accorded secondary status. For Liah Greenfeld (1992), religion served as a lubricator of English national consciousness until national consciousness replaced it.

Conor Cruise O’Brien (1999), Adrian Hastings (1997), and George Mosse (1975) have added sacred texts, prophets, and priests to the list of commonalities between nationalism and religion. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities) argues that just as sacrifice is important to religion, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is the equivalent translation for the nation. Just as religion has its rituals of religious conversion, nations have citizenship rites in which immigrants sing a national anthem rather than religious hymns. Just as members of a religious community are encouraged to love the stranger, members of a nation will never know, meet, or even hear about most of their fellow members.

Anthony Smith (1998) argues that nationalism used and secularized the myths, liturgies, and doctrines of sacred traditions and was able to command the identities of individualists not only over ethnic, regional, and class loyalties, but even over religion itself. What Smith wants to do is conceive of the nation as a sacred communion, one that focuses on the cultural resources of ethnic symbolism, memory, myth, values, and their expression in texts, artifacts, scriptures, chronicles, epics, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, and crafts. Smith’s greatest source of inspiration was George Mosse (1975), who discussed civic religion of the masses in Germany.

My article will help us understand not only which social institutions command people’s loyalty, but how they accomplished this. It is not enough for states to promise to intervene in disputes and coordinate the distribution and production of goods, although this is important. Individualists must also bond emotionally with each other through symbols, songs, initiations, and rituals in support of nationalism. In this effort, the state does not have to reinvent the wheel. There was one social institution which, prior to the emergence of absolutist states, was also trans-local and trans-regional. Interestingly, this institution also required its members to give up their kin, ethnic identity, and regional identity in order to become full members. That institution was religion.

Civic Religion In The French Revolution

During the great calling of the Estates-General in 1789, Abbé Sieyès contended that the rights of the nation had been usurped by the nobility. He wanted a “nation-state” to end the aristocratic rule of regional privileges, along with intermediate institutions and corporate bodies that came between the individual and the state. By 1793 the revolution swept away regional bodies, resulting in a centralized regime with no parallel in the history of Western Europe.

Understood from a secular view, the state was seen as a sole and absolute sovereign, directing and advancing the process of secularization by limiting ecclesiastical power. Religion was totally subordinate to the state. A new national community was to be based on reason and nature without reference to the customs of the past. It did not appeal to ethnic or linguistic commonalities, but to a centralized education. The nation was envisaged politically as calling for unity as well as liberty and equality. The idea of democracy was strong, coming from the working classes. These classes wanted to push for popular sovereignty, not national representation.

On the surface, French nationalism was secular, political, scientific, and anti-clerical. The beheading of the king during the French Revolution deprived France of its divine protector. This left an increasingly autonomous sphere for humanity to construct an earthlier protector: the nation-state. Reinforced by the horrors of religious wars, patriotism was seen as a counter to religious strife and appealed to an increasing number of people, both educated and uneducated. Patriotism was the sacred communion of the people in arms. If the nation simply replaced religion with a more enlightened view, there would be no need for religion’s rituals and techniques. But this was not what happened.

If we examine the process of how the state commands loyalty, we find the state uses many of the same devices as religion. After the revolution in France, the calendar was changed to undermine the Catholic church. The state tried to regulate and dramatize the key events in the life of individual—birth, baptism, marriage and death. French revolutionaries invented the symbols that formed the tricolor flags and invented a national anthem, La Marseillaise. The paintings of Delacroix and Vermeer supported the revolution. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen became a new belief system, a kind of national catechism. By 1791 the French constitution had become a promise of faith. The tablets of the Declaration of Rights were carried around in procession as if they were commandments. Another symbol was the patriotic altar that was erected spontaneously in many villages and communes. Civic festivities included resistance to the king in the form of the famous “Tennis Court Oath,” (Serment du Jeu de Paume) along with revolutionary theater. The revolution, through its clubs, festivals, and newspapers, was indirectly responsible for the spread of a national language. Abstract concepts such as fatherland, reason, and liberty became deified and worshipped as goddesses. All the paraphernalia of the new religion appeared: dogmas, festivals, rituals, mythology, saints, and shrines. Nationalism has become the secular religion of the modern world, where the nation is now God.

In his book, Nationalism: a Religion (1960), Carlton Hayes says that:

Nationalism, like any religion, calls into play not simply the will of the intellect, but the imagination, the emotions. The intellect constructs a speculative theology or mythology of nationalism. The imagination builds an unseen world around the eternal past and the everlasting future of one’s nationality. The emotions arouse a joy and an ecstasy in the contemplation of the national god who is all good and all protecting. (pages 143–144)

For Hayes, nationalism is large-scale tribalism. Modern national identity appears in Western Europe at a time when all intermediate bonds of society were collapsing due to the industrial revolution and religion was losing its grip on its populations. What occurs is a reorganizing of religious elements to create a social emulsifier that pulverizes what is left of intermediate organization while creating a false unity. This unity papers over the economic instabilities of capitalism as well as the class and race conflicts that it ushers in.

How Monotheism Differs From Animism and Polytheism

Anthony Smith is not simply saying that religion itself is the foundation of nationalism. He claims that the monotheism of Jews and Christians forms a bedrock for European nationalism. However, Smith does not account for why animistic and polytheistic religious traditions are not instrumental in producing nationalism. What are the sacred differences between magical traditions of tribal people and monotheists—the high magical traditions of the Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Aztecs, and Incas on one side, and Jews and Christians on the other? We need to understand these religious differences so we can make a tighter connection between monotheism and nationalism.

The five parts to a monotheistic covenant vs polytheism and animism

The following discussion draws from my book, From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, along with the work of Anthony Smith. According to Smith (2003), the foundation for the relationship between a monotheistic people and its God is a covenant. A covenant is a perceived voluntary, contractual sacred relationship between a culture and its sacred presences. This contractual relationship is one of the many differences that separates monotheism from polytheism and animism. Polytheistic and animistic cultures perceive a necessary, organic connection between themselves and the rest of the biophysical world, and this connection extends to invisible entities. The monotheistic Jews were the first people to imagine their spiritual relationships as a voluntary contract.

The first part of a covenant agreement is that God has chosen a group of people over all other groups for a particular purpose. This implies that God is a teleological architect with a plan for the world and simply needs executioners. Polytheistic and animistic people imagine their sacred presence as a plurality of powers that cooperate, compete, and negotiate a cosmic outcome having some combination of rhythm and novelty rather than a guiding plan. Like Jews and Christians, pagan people saw themselves as superior to other cultures (ethnocentrism), but this is not usually connected up to any sense of them having been elected for a particular purpose by those sacred presences.

Still another side of this contract is that people have to consent to join in the agreement. There has to be choice. This choice implies that the elected culture could get along well enough even if they refused God’s offer. For polytheistic and animistic people, spiritual presences are the life blood of their communities. There are no debates, negotiations, qualifications, or haggling with sacred presences as to whether or what kind of a relationship will exist. There relations are already and always the case.

The second part of a covenant is the announcement of a promise of prosperity and power for the chosen people as part of the bargain if they behave themselves. In polytheistic and animistic societies, the gods make no promises. Some people are born into ecological settings that are bountiful while others are born into austere conditions. Why this has happened has more to do with the success or failure of magical practices than it has to do with spiritual kindness or cruelty on the part of the gods.

The third part of a covenant is the prospect of spreading good fortune to other lands. This is part of a wider missionary ideal of bringing light to other societies so that the blind can see. It is a small and natural step to affirm that the possession of might—the second part of the covenant (economic prosperity and military power)—is evidence that one is morally right. We know that the ancient Judaists sought to convert the Edomites though conquest. On the other hand, while it is certainly true that animistic and polytheistic people fight wars over land or resources, these are not religious wars waged by proselytizers.

The fourth part of a covenant is a sacred law. This is given to people in the form of commandments about how to live, implying that the natural way people live needs improvement. In polytheistic societies, how people act was not subject to any sort of a plan for great reform on the part of the deity. In polytheistic states, the gods and goddesses engaged in the same behavior as human beings, but on a larger scale. There was no obedience expected based on a sacred text.

The fifth part of a covenant is the importance of human history. Whatever privileges the chosen people have received from God can be revoked if they fail to fulfill their part of the bargain. The arena in which “tests” take place is human history, in the chosen people’s relationship with other groups. For the animistic and polytheistic, cultural history is enmeshed with the evolutionary movement of the rocks, rivers, mountains, plants, and animals. There is no separate human history. Please see Table 1 which summarizes these differences.

Animistic and polytheism rituals vs monotheistic ceremonies

Lastly, in polytheistic societies, sacred dramas enacted in magical circles and temples were rituals. This means they were understood as not just symbolic, representational gestures of a reality that people wished to see in the future. Rather, they were dramatic actions believed to be real embodiments of that reality in the present. In the elite phase of monotheism, rituals were looked upon with suspicion because people became superstitiously attached to the ritual and thought their rituals could compel God to act. In From Earth Spirits to Sky Gods, I coined the word ceremony to describe sacred dramas that were more passive and less likely to create altered states of consciousness, intended to show deference and worship to a deity who was not subject to magical incantations. In contrast, a religious ceremony, at least among middle and upper-middle class, is more passive. The priest or pastor does most of the work while the congregation supports what the priest or pastor is doing.

Table 1 Monotheism vs Animism and Polytheism

Judeo-Christian Monotheism	Type of Sacred System	Animism, polytheism
Contract between two free parties (covenant)	Type of connection between a culture and sacred powers	Organic bond between two interdependent powers
A culture is chosen. Ethnocentrism with a spiritual justification.	Is a culture “elected?”	Ethnocentrism without any spiritual justification
Yes. Promise and deliverance of land, prosperity, and power	Is there a promise of abundance?	No. What abundance exists comes from magical rituals upon ecological settings
Missionary ideal to bring light to others (religious wars and proselytizers)	Expansion or provincial?	Fight wars and expand for land or sexual and material resources, but they do not fight over spiritual beliefs.
Obedience to a law, typically written texts, for purposes of reforming humanity	Expectations of humanity	Altered states using imagination and the senses, transmitted orally with no purpose for reforming humanity
Holy and all good —qualitatively different from humanity	Qualities of sacred beings	Gods and goddesses are the same as humanity, except on a larger scale
Human history is important as the arena in which people will be blessed or punished	Place of history	Human history is less important. More important is an extension of the ecological relationship with plants and animals
Ceremony—symbolic, representational gestures that show deference	Dramatization	Ritual—real attempts to compel the spirits

Common Elements Found In Monotheism And Nationalism

Elite monotheism vs. popular monotheism

Just as we saw in my previous article Nationalism as the Religion of Modernity that there was elite nationalism and mass nationalism, there was also an elite monotheism and popular monotheism. In the early Iron Age, (1000 BCE to 200 CE) elite monotheism was an intellectual reaction of the prophets and upper classes to what they perceived as the degenerate superstition of polytheism and animism among their fellow Jews as well as of the agricultural states of West and East Asia. These qualities included a close identification of people with animals and plants, particularly through the use of the arts—music, dance, mask making—to create altered states of consciousness using imagination, sensory saturation, and trance states.

In some cultures, this pagan magic was used by state officials, such as priests and priestesses such as the Canaanites and the Babylonians. The first monotheists were reformers and outsiders to pagan magic. In societies where monotheism acquired state power, as when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, Christianity had to appeal to the lower classes. It had to bring back some of the magical ways that it had first rejected. To overcome the huge gap between the transcendental power of a God who had no human qualities and human beings, intermediaries such as saints, the Virgin Mary, and angels were brought in. Something similar also occurred in India when the Buddhism of the merchants acquired more influence among the lower classes.

Loyalty to one God; loyalty to one nation requires pulverizing intermediaries

All sacred systems have to answer the question of whether the sacred source of all they know is singular or plural. Monotheistic religions break with the pluralistic polytheism and animism in pagan societies and assert that there is one God. It is not a matter of having a single God who subordinates other gods. This is not good enough. The very existence of other gods is intolerable. Any conflicting loyalties are viewed as pagan idolatry.

Just as monotheism insists on loyalty to one God, so nationalism insists on loyalty to one nation. Claiming national citizenship in more than one country is looked upon with suspicion. Additionally, within the nation, loyalty to the nation-state must come before other collective identities such as class, ethnic, kinship, or regional groupings. To be charged with disloyalty to the nation is a far more serious offence than disloyalty to things such as a working-class heritage, an Italian background, or having come from the East Coast. In the case of both monotheism and nationalism, intermediaries between the individual and the centralized authorities must be destroyed or marginalized.

Loyalty to strangers in the brotherhood of man; loyalty to strangers as fellow citizens

The earth-spirits, totems, and gods of polytheistic cultures are sensuous and earthy. In tribal societies, they are part of a network among kin groups in which everyone knows everyone else. The monotheistic God is, on the contrary, abstract, and the community He supervises is an expansive non-kin group of strangers. Just as monotheism insists that people give up their ties to local kin groups and their regional loyalties, so the nation-state insists that people imagine that their loyalty should be to strangers, most of whom they will never meet. The universal brotherhood of man in religion becomes the loyalty of citizens to other citizens within the state. In monotheism, the only way an individual can be free is to belong to a religion (pagans or atheists are barely tolerated). In the case of a nation-state, to be free the individual must belong to a nation. One cannot tolerate individuals with no national loyalty.

Many inventions and historical institutions facilitate one’s identifying with a nation. The invention of the printing press and the birth of reading and writing helped build relationships among strangers beyond the village. Newspapers and journals gave people a more abstract sense of national news, and they were able to receive this news on a regular basis. The invention of the railroad, electricity, and the telegraph expanded and concentrated transportation and communication.

The problem for nationalists is that all these inventions can also be used to cross borders and create competing loyalties outside the nation-state. Increasing overseas trade brought in goods from foreign lands and built invisible, unconscious relations with outside producers. In the 19th century, another connection between strangers began with the international division of labor between workers of a colonial power and workers exploited on the periphery.

Religious contract of equality before God; constitutional contract of equal citizenship

In polytheistic high magical societies, it was only the upper classes who were thought to have a religious afterlife. If a slave were to have an afterlife at all, it was to be as a servant to the elite. Monotheism democratized the afterlife, claiming that every individual, as part of God’s covenant agreement, had to be judged before God equally. So too, nationalism in the 18th century imagined national life as a social contract among free citizens, all of whom were equal in the eyes of the law and the courts of the nation. In the 19th and 20th centuries, popular nationalism included the right to vote in elections.

Monotheistic and nationalist history as mythology

According to Anthony Smith, the history that religions construct is not the same as what the professional historians aspire to do. For example, historians ask open-ended questions for which they do not have answers. They accept the unknown as part of the discipline and accept that an unknown question may never be answered. In contrast, accounts of religious history are not welcoming to open-ended questions. Rather, they ask rhetorical questions for which they have predictable answers. Those believers or non-believers who ask open-ended questions are taught that the question is a mystery that will only be revealed through some mystical experience or in the afterlife. Further insistence in asking open-ended questions is viewed as blasphemy or a sign of heresy.

So too, nationalist renditions of history most often share a mythological conception of history as well. The history books of any nation generally try to paper over actual struggle between classes, enslavement, colonization, and torture that litters its history. Members of a culture that have built nationalist histories like to present themselves as being in complete agreement about the where and when of their myths. But, in fact, myths compete with each other and are often stimulated by class differences within the nation. Smith (2003) gives the following examples:

The Celtic pagan vs. Christian antiquity in Ireland
The Gallic vs. Frankish origins and culture in France
The Anglo-Saxon vs. Norman origins of Arthurian cultures in England
The Classical Hellenic vs. Byzantine origins in Greece
The Islamic-Ottoman vs. Turkic origins in Turkey
The Davidic-Solomonic vs. Rabbinic Talmudic traditions of the Golden Age of Israel

Nationalist history is sanitized, polished, and presented as the deeds of noble heroes. This mythology is intensified by the way the founders of religion and the nation are treated. It is rare that Moses, Christ, or Mohammad, in addition to their good qualities, are treated as flesh and blood individuals with weaknesses, pettiness, and oversights. So too, in the United States, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson are treated like Moses or Christ, having charismatic powers (Zelinsky, 1998). Just as religion attacks open-ended, critical questions of heresy, so nationalists tar and feather citizens as unpatriotic when they question national stories and try to present a revisionist history.

Written records and artifacts comprise the building materials for historians. Myths are often treated as untrustworthy and are interpreted sociologically or psychologically for their “real meaning”. Historians might say that myths tend to oversimplify, exaggerate, and act as comforting devices rather than describe events that actually occurred. Collective memories are treated by historians as untrustworthy because, just as individuals have selective memory, so can whole cultures. However, for both monotheism and nationalist histories, the search for records and artifacts tends to be used to support the memories and myths that cultures already believe.

Further, what makes nationalist histories and monotheism different from the work of professional historians is the direction of history. All national histories have a cyclical shape. They begin with a golden age and are followed by a period of disaster or degradation and, after much struggle, a period of redemption. First, there is a selection of a communal age that is deemed to be heroic or creative. There is praise for famous kings, warriors, holy men, revolutionaries, or poets. Second, there is a fall from grace, whether it be a natural disaster, a fall into materialism, or external conquest. Third, there is a yearning to restore the lost communal dignity and nobility. In order to return to the golden age, they must emulate the deeds and morals of its past epoch. For Christianity, the golden age consists of the story of Adam and Eve. For the Hebrews, it is the Old Testament with Moses in the wilderness. In the United States, it is the time of pioneers, frontiersman, cowboys, and Western expansion. These are mythic archetypes that are endlessly recycled today in the names of banks, television commercials, television programs, and movies.

Contrary to both nationalism and monotheism renditions, among professional historians, whether there is a shape to human history is controversial. Some 18th and 19th century historians also saw history as having a linear time direction. The movement from beginning to end was categorized as progress. This means that things are gradually getting better for human beings as we progress through history in the areas of technology, economics, political institutions, and morals. However, after two world wars, the Great Depression, and the rise of fascism, this position has fallen into disfavor among most historians.

The Function of the golden ages

Smith identifies four functions of the golden ages. The first is to provide a sense of continuity between the present and past. Golden ages do this either through the presentation of a cyclic mythical story or through an archaeologist’s geological discovery of a long-lost vernacular language, a sacred book, or artifact. Second, the golden age grounds nationalist culture with an identity in the flux of historical change. Third, a golden age provides a community with temporal roots, a time for beginnings and endings. Lastly, golden ages give expression and sanction to a quest for authenticity. It provides models for the nation’s true identity, stripped of cultural mixing, corruption, and decline.

Creating altered states of consciousness

Everyday life is composed of small conflicts and problems that most often require neither a sense of adventure nor a great deal of social solidarity to resolve. But extraordinary life circumstances require both risk-taking and group support. Whether the sacred tradition is magical, religious, or nationalistic, it appeals to the big picture and requires the adventure and support that goes with it.

In tribal societies, rituals before war or harsh rites of passage induce altered states of consciousness, which are memorable because they require both courage and dependability. Popular monotheistic states of consciousness invite speaking in tongues, devotional emotional appeal, and the promise of being taken care of in exchange for obedience. In nationalistic settings such as recruiting offices, prospective soldiers are promised they will be taken care of by a strict military discipline while having great adventures in other parts of the world. Like monotheism, nationalism appeals to the petty side of humanity. Participants are told they are an elite group, superior to other nations. Once inside the military, boot camp becomes the arena in which individual will is broken. New recruits are taught to be dependent on authority and to not question things.

Altered states can be created by either sensory saturation or sensory deprivation. A great example of sensory saturation to create an altered state is the Catholic mass. Here we have the bombardment of vision (stained glass windows), sound (loud organ music), smell (strong incense), taste (the holy communion), and touch (gesturing with the sign of the cross). Sensory deprivation in a monotheistic setting includes fasting, prayer, or meditation. Sensory deprivation in nationalistic settings is at boot camp and on the battlefield of war itself.

Sensory saturation occurs in nationalistic settings at addresses by prominent politicians, such as the presidential state of the union addresses, in congressional meetings, at political rallies, and during primaries. Presidential debates and elections are actually throwbacks to rituals and ceremonies. Those diehards of electoral politics who attend these rituals are at least as taken away by the props as were participants in a tribal magical ceremony. In Yankeedom, the setting includes the Great Seal of the United States hanging above the event, along with the American flag, a solemn pledge of allegiance, a rendition of “God Bless America,” and a military parade.

Attachment vs. detachment to land

As Yi-Fu Tuan (1977) and others have pointed out, tribal societies’ sense of physical setting contains a psychic element, where rocks and rivers are not physical things separated from our psychological states, but rather they have a psychic field before we even interact with them. When we interact with them, they deepen our own memories, dreams, and emotional life. This sense of attachment was not attachment to a nation, but a kind of group loyalty to the ecological setting of trees, mountains, and rivers. Tuan refers to this as attachment to “places.”

With the rise of monotheism, and later commerce in city-states, physical nature as a psychic, sacred place is undermined by a geographical conception of “space” as being purely physical and secular. Correspondingly, outside of churches, much of Christianity saw natural geography either as a temptress—a lush and tropical jungle—or as a wasteland.

The relationship between monotheism and territorial attachment is conflicted. On the one hand, elite monotheists depreciate the importance of territorial attachment as an expression of pagans whom Christians feel are enslaved to the land. The prophets promote a kind of cosmopolitanism. Yet on the other hand, the more fundamentalist sects in popular monotheism insist on locating the actual birthplace of the religion and making it the scene of pilgrimages—Muslims go to Mecca, Christians to Bethlehem—or even a permanent occupation as with Zionist Jews in Palestine. In a way, on a more complex level, the rise of a nation’s sense of loyalty based on geography is a kind of return to pagan attachments to place.

Promised lands of the past: the Swiss Alps

We need to make a distinction between the promised land as an ancestral homeland (the past) and the promised land as a land of destination (the future). During the late Renaissance, the Alps were becoming a source of interest for artists like Dürer, Bruegel, and da Vinci as a vortex of the great powers of nature (Tuan, 1977). Naturalist Conrad Gessner climbed Mount Pilatus in 1555 to lay to rest stories about evil spirits in the mountains, and he raved about the clarity of mountain water. But the link between the Alps and the national identity of the Swiss was made only by 18th-century Enlighteners. They championed the primitive virtue of simple Alpine rustics. A century ago, Ernest Bovet, professor at Zurich University, wrote that Swiss independence was born in the mountains:

A mysterious force has kept us together for 600 years and has given us our democratic institutions. A good spirit watches our liberty. A spirit fills our souls, directs our actions and creates a hymn on the one ideal out of our different languages. It is the spirit that blows from the summits, the genius of the Alps and glaciers. (Tuan, 1977, page 161)

In his play William Tell, Friedrich Schiller links the origins of the Swiss confederation to the purity of the Alpine landscape.

Promised lands of the past: Anglo-Saxons

For the Anglo-Saxons who had traveled across the waters to Britain, the analogy with Israel’s election was established by the time of King Alfred and his successors before the 10th century. The parallel between the Exodus of the Israelites and the journey of the Saxons across the seas from Denmark and Germany to Britain was already present, according to Anthony Smith, in Bede’s work as long ago as 730 CE.

It was the Anglican Church that, supported by the monarchy, advanced providential interpretations of Anglo-Saxon history. England was imagined, in biblical terms, an island nation under God in the manner of ancient Israel. The Germanic invasions of Britain were understood as divine punishment. The invasions of Anglo-Saxon land were compared to the assaults of the Assyrians upon the Jews.

According to Adrian Hastings (1997), the Norman Conquest did little to diminish the sense of English nationhood, except that the French language replaces Anglo-Saxon languages among the elites for almost two hundred years. It was only towards the end of the 13th century and into the 14th century that a more aggressive and widespread English national sentiment appeared in a series of wars conducted by Edward I against Wales, Scotland, and later France. Nationalism was also fueled by the rise of English literature in the age of Chaucer and the use of English in the administration and the courts.

During the 17th century, Cromwell’s New Model Army and the English Civil War against Catholic influence deepened the connection between the English people and their feeling of being chosen. In fact, men going into battle for Cromwell’s New Model Army were inspired by hymns and songs from the Old Testament. Myths of the English Protestant election was carried over into the constitutional settlement after 1689. Hans Kohn (2005) also claims that the Puritan myth of missionary election became deeply entrenched in subsequent English nationalism. Christopher Hill (1964) points out that Milton’s writings contain frequent assertion of the English having been chosen. This is carried over into colonial attitudes of cultural superiority and paternalism overseas.

Promised lands of the future: Yankeedom and the Dutch

For the Puritan settlers in America, who fled the Restoration and experienced a perilous exodus in crossing the seas, it was easy to create in their imaginations an “American Israel,” or a “New American Jerusalem.” Though conditions were difficult at first, the scale and abundance of the continent held promise for many immigrants. American Puritans’ ideal of the “City on the Hill” was originally confined to small settlements and towns. From the early 19th century on, the promised-land concept came to include expansion across the United States. As the Western frontier expanded and indigenous populations dwindled from disease or conquest, the belief in a providential and manifest destiny was extended. This is exemplified in the epic paintings of Thomas Cole, Edwin Church, Frederic Remington, Thomas Moran and Sanford Gifford that glorify the majesty of the West. Anthony Smith (2003) points out that the relationship of sublime landscape to nationalism was not unique to the United States.

Even more than the British, the Dutch returned to the Old Testament—the idea of themselves as the chosen people and the children of Israel—to build their national and colonial identity. At first the Dutch strove for their rights to their land in their struggle with Spain. But then it was used later in the story of the Dutch Afrikaners who colonized South Africa.

The Great Trek of Dutch-speaking farmers from the British-ruled Cape Colony occurred 1834–1838. The wandering of the Boers from British oppression to freedom in a promised land was interpreted as deliverance of Israelites from Egypt. The Dutch saw themselves as a later-day version of the Puritans—the prototypical Israelites, fleeing a British pharaoh. But the Dutch were also taking the land of the Zulus. In the Battle of Blood River, the badly outnumbered Boer farmers linked ox wagons in a circle and held off an army of three thousand Zulus. A few had taken a vow that if God would deliver them from their enemies, they would honor Him on that date, and so the Battle of Blood River was celebrated annually.

The covenant and the Great Trek amplified later Boer drives for purity through separation from all other peoples:

The genealogy of Ham…legitimated the servitude of non-white heathen to the Judaeo Christian children of Shem. Just as the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua had commanded the Israelites to drive out the idolatrous peoples of Canaan… their descendants believed they were destined to take the lands of heathen natives and expel or rule over them. (Smith, Chosen Peoples, page 81)

To be “the elect” was to justify land conquest.

Using the theme of the promised land as both a past and a future for the nation is powerfully described at the hundred-year anniversary commemoration of the Afrikaner Great Trek. Daniel Malan, a chief instigator in the Dutch Reformed Church, said the following in his speech:

You stand here upon the boundary of two centuries. Behind you, rest your eyes upon the year 1838 as upon a high, outstanding mountain top, dominating everything in the blue distance. Before you, upon the yet untrodden Path of South Africa, lies the year 2038, equally far off and hazy. Behind you, lie the tracks of the Voortrekker wagons, deeply and ineradicably etched upon the wide outstretched plains, and across the grinning dragon-tooth mountain ranges of our country’s history. Over those unknown regions which stretch broadly before you there will also be treks of the Ox Wagon. They will be your Ox Wagons. You and your children will make history. (Smith, 2003)

Smith concludes, from these and many other examples, that no amount of manipulation by elites of myths and biblical texts could have mobilized and transplanted such large numbers unless these myths and texts were rooted in sacred beliefs of ethnic election. He shows that these beliefs were deeply rooted in the history of everyone in the ethnic group, not just the elite. Modern theorists of the nation separate nature from the history of cultures and separate the human psyche—emotion, memory, inspiration—from the landscape, but, according to Smith, they simply cannot explain this kind of attraction to nationalism.

From mission of the chosen people to Manifest Destiny

Earlier we said that what separates monotheism from polytheism is the expansionary, missionary zeal of monotheism. This tendency was also characteristic of many nation-building projects throughout history. Both monotheism and nationalism wish to expand. There is an exclusive commitment to either one religion or one nation; yet once that exclusive commitment is made, the religion or nation sometimes advocates for expansion around the world. Table 2 below shows a summary of the commonalities between monotheism and nationalism.

Table 2 Commonalities Between Monotheism and Nationalism: Beliefs and Dramatization

Monotheism Judeo-Christian	Category of Comparison	Nationalism (United States)
A sacred system prevalent stratified state societies with possible developing empires in which a single, abstract and transcendental deity presides over “chosen people” via a contract or covenant	Definition	A secular system which exists in capitalist societies in which a single nation claims territory regulated by a state. It is an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity, and identity
Destroys gods and goddesses, ancestors, spirits, totems, and earth spirits	Destruction of intermediaries	Destroys loyalty to kin groups, regions, religion, and social class
Singular: “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before me” (Idolatry)	Sacred Source	Singular: One nation— “Thou shalt not have other nations before me”
Covenant: contract of equality of participants before God as opposed to class or status differences in access to God.	Type of binding to source	Constitutional: contract of equality as citizens as opposed to class and status differences
Chosen people	Status in relation to other groups	Chosen people (American Exceptionalism)
Lighting up the world; opening a blind eye (missionary work)	Expansion	Manifest destiny, making the world safe for democracy, and flooding colonized countries with commodities
Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.	Importance of history	Human history is important, but it combines facts, myths and memories. Distorts and omits conflict and atrocities. Resistance to revisionist history.
Golden ages: Adam and Eve, Old Testament and wilderness	Importance of origins	Golden ages: Founding of Jamestown, taming the western wilderness with pioneers, frontiersman, and cowboys
Strangers united in the brotherhood of man	Composition of community	Strangers united as citizens of the nation.
Moses, Christ	Founders mythologized	Washington, Jefferson, Franklin
Ceremonies: going to mass, speaking in tongues, dancing in the aisles, blessing one’s self, crucifix	Ceremonies; symbolic reality; giving thanks	Presidential elections, rallies, Great Seal of the United States, military parades, pledging allegiance, flag
Sensory deprivation: prayer, fasting, meditation Sensory saturation: Catholic Mass (stain glass windows, organ music, incense, Holy communion)	Methods of altering states of consciousness	Sensory deprivation: boot camp, fighting in a war. Sensory saturation: singing the national anthem, flag waving, hot dogs, apple pie
Religious paintings: Gothic Cathedrals, Sistine Chapel (Michelangelo), The Last Supper (Da Vinci)	Paintings	Patriotic paintings: Washington Crossing the Delaware, redemptive Western landscapes (Remington, Moran)
Liturgical hymn books: “Amazing Grace,” Christmas music	Music	“The Star-Spangled Banner,” “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee,” “God Bless America,” “Battle Hymn of Republic
Catechism	Literature	Novels about the American West

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Nationalism as the Religion of the Modern West

Bruce Lerro — Wed, 21 Feb 2024 03:47:54 +0000

Orientation

The emergence of a strange, secular god

“I am the Lord Thy God, Thou Shalt not have strange gods before me” is not just a religious commandment. Every nation-state expects their citizens to give up or subordinate their regional loyalties, their class, their ethnicity and even their religion to this new god. If we could tell any culture in the world before the 18th century that we nationalists are willing to give our lives to fight strangers in a land we have never seen, they’d say we were crazy. I am a US citizen by birth, Italian by heritage, living in the state of Washington. But I am expected to feel more loyalty to someone who is English, living in North Carolina because they also live in the US. I am expected to feel more loyalty there than I would be to a fellow Italian living in Genoa.

People living in tribal societies would think we nationalists have lost our reason. It took a very heavy duty propaganda machine lasting over 300 years to make us loyal nationalists. This article and the next two explain how this process occurred.

Questions about nationalism, nations, and ethnicity

Nationalism is one of those words that people immediately think they understand, but upon further questioning we find a riot of conflicting elements. There are three other words that are commonly associated with nationalism that are used interchangeably with it: nation, state, and ethnicity. But these terms raise the following questions:

What is the relationship between nationalism and nations? Were there nations before nationalism? Did they come about at the same time or do they have separate histories? Can a nation exist without nationalism? Can nationalism exist without a nation? Ernest Gellner (Nations and Nationalism) thinks so.
What is the relationship between a state and a nation? After all, in the premodern world there were primitive states such as Egypt and Mesopotamia that were not nations. On the other hand there were nations within larger polities (like Poland) that were without national sovereignty and part of empires.
What about the relationship between a state and nationalism. Can states exist without the flag of nationalism? When were national flags introduced? Can people be nationalistic without having their own state?
What is the relationship between ethnicity and a nation? Can one be part of an ethnic group and not have a nation? Can one be a part of a nation without being in an ethnic community?
When did nations emerge? The school of primordialism argues that nations emerge early in human history and must have an ethnic core. This group of scholars are called primordialists. Modernists claim that nations come later in European history, anywhere from the 12th to the end of the 18th century,

There is rich scholarly work in this field and most agree that nations, nationalism, ethnicities, and states are not interchangeable. [1] Despite scholars’ differences around the questions above, they agree that nationalism as an ideology arose at the end of the 18th century with the French Revolution. Since our purpose is to understand nationalism, not nations or ethnicities, we are mercifully on safe ground to limit our discussion to nationalism.

Tumultuous Times

It is tempting to think that since the Western individualism that we live under today rejects loyalty to the village, kinship group, or region, individualism was against any social commitment outside of short-term contractual relations. After all, by the end of the 18th century, the world was changing rapidly. Agricultural capitalism was undermining the last vestiges of village life in feudal Europe, while the Enlightenment cosmopolitanism saw loyalty to local communities as being superstitious and backward as it hammered away at traditional religious beliefs. The Industrial Revolution was emerging in England, cutting former peasants and artisan cities from their village roots.

In 1789 France was the scene of the first modern revolution. Between 1789 and 1793 merchants, together with artisans in Paris and peasants in the countryside, had risen against the king and the aristocracy. It was the first time large masses of people had entered a stage of history. However, in these unstable times, some sort of regularized social order was necessary. What came out of the French Revolution provided for a new, non-blood community of individualists – nationalism. The “nation” stands in a tension-filled spatial crossfire between a cosmopolitan globalization of capitalism on the one hand and subnational regional or local identities of collectivism on the other. This community, or “The God of Modernity” as Josep Llobera (1994) claims, is nationalism.

Elements of Nationalism

Four sacred dimensions of national identity

In his wonderful book Chosen Peoples, Anthony D. Smith defines nationalism as an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of three characteristics: autonomy, unity and identity. Nationalism has elite and popular levels. Elite nationalism is more liberal and practiced by the upper classes. Popular nationalism is more conservative and practiced by the lower classes.

According to Smith, the four sacred foundations for all nations are a covenant community, including elective and missionary elements; a territory; a history; a destiny. A major concept of Romanticism that helped develop nationalism was the “cult of authenticity”:

At the center of the nationalist belief systems stands the cult of authenticity, and the heart of this cult is the quest for the true self. Authenticity functions as the nationalist equivalent of the idea of holiness in many religions. The distinction between the authentic and the false or inauthentic carries much of the same emotional freight as the division between the sacred and the profane. And, just as the sacred things are set apart and forbidden, so authentic nationals and national objects are separated and venerated. (Chosen Peoples, p. 38)

The fourth sacred source of nationalism – destiny – is a belief in the regenerative power of individual sacrifice to serve the future of a nation. In sum, nationalism calls people to be true to their unique national vocation, to love their homeland, to remember their ancestors and their ancestors’ glorious pasts, and to imitate the heroic dead by making sacrifices for the happy and glorious destiny of the future nation.

Core doctrine of nationalism

These four dimensions of sacred sources in turn relate to the core doctrine of the nation, which Smith describes as the following:

The world is divided into nations, each with its own character, history and destiny.
The source of all political power is the nation, and loyalty to the nation overrides all other loyalties.
To be free, every individual must belong to a nation.
Nations require maximum self-expression and autonomy.
A world of peace and justice must be founded on free nations.

Phases of Nationalism

Most scholars agree that nations are a necessary but insufficient criterion for nationalism. While most agree that nationalism did not arrive until the end of the 18th century, almost everyone agrees with the following phases of nationalism:

Elite nationalism—This first nationalism emerged with the middle classes and used language studies, art, music and literature to create a middle-class public. The dating of this phase varies depending on the European country and ranges from the early modern period to the Middle Ages.
Popular nationalism—A national community took the place of the heroes and heroines who emerged with the French Revolution. This nationalism was political and was associated with liberal and revolutionary traditions. This phase is roughly dated from 1789 to 1871.
Mass nationalism—This nationalism was fuelled by the increase in mass transportation (the railroad) and mass circulation of newspapers. It also became associated with European imperialism and argued that territory, soil, blood and race were the bases of nationalism. This last phase of nationalism was predominant from 1875 to 1914.

In the second and third phases of nationalism, rites and ceremonies are performed with an orchestrated mass choreography amidst monumental sculpture and architecture (Mosse, 1975). We will cover each of these phases in more detail as we go.

We said earlier that due to the Industrial Revolution, among other things, individualists began to sever their ties to ethnicity, region, and kinship group as capitalism undermined these identities. By what processes were these loyalties abandoned while a new loyalty emerged? The new loyalty is not based on face-to-face connections, but rather is mediated by railroads, newspapers, books. This is a community of strangers whose loyalty to the nation is not based on enduring, face-to-face engagements. As we shall see, states create nationalism by two processes: first by pulverizing the intermediate relationships between the state and the individual and second by bonding individualists to each other through loyalty to the nation forged by transforming religious techniques into secular myths and rituals.

The Primitive Accumulation of Nationalism: Evolution of States

What is nationalist accumulation?

In Karl Marx’s description of the evolution of capitalism, he describes its first phase as “the primitive accumulation of capital”. By this he means the violent process by which peasants are driven from their land, separated from their tools, cattle, horses and farm products, and then with nothing left to sell but their labor, are forced to work in the factories of capitalists. This primitive accumulation process is then glossed over by Adam Smith and other capitalist economists who create a sanitized version of capitalism’s origins which more closely resembles mythology than history.

This section shows the primitive accumulation of nationalism. We shall discuss the origins of nationalism based on wars between states, wars within states and their own populations, the manipulation of religious techniques to serve the purposes of states’ own purposes, and the propagandization of the state’s own population in order to bind and sustain popular loyalty.

European Systems of States

Before we discuss nationalism further, we need to do a bit of work in disentangling the relationship between states and nations. Since they each have separate histories before they were joined at the end of the 18th century into what Charles Tilly calls “national states”, we will start with states.

Tilly (1992) defines states simply as:

politically centralized institutions;
independent from households, kinship groups, economic associations and clubs;
functioning to steer social policy and maintain public order;
monopolizing control by means of violence; and
ruling over a designated piece of land.

Tilly notes that Europe, unlike Asia, has never been dominated by a single empire. In Europe, after the fall of the Roman Empire, the fragmented nature of Western societies allowed emerging states to develop autonomously and to compete with one another. Because no state was very powerful, these states were closer to being equal, and this equality fueled military innovation. These innovations helped build centralized powers that out-competed other kinds of states, such as city-states and empires. States were able to achieve this not only because they assembled standing armies, as opposed to using mercenaries, but because they pacified their domestic population.

While the Muslim, Byzantine, Ottoman and Mongol empires tried to incorporate Europe into their folds, nothing was successful. What arose in Europe instead were regional hierarchies based on trade and manufacturing that maintained an edge over an interstate rule’s imposition. What also arose was a system of states. This means that states regularly interact. Their anticipated interaction affects the policies of every state in a way that, in most cases, deters violence. In contrast, in Asia there was no system of states or recognition of an interstate system; kingdoms and empires simply rose and fell. The merchant class never got out from under the emperor.

Absolutist States

During the feudal Middle Ages, centralized political power was weak. Real political power was in the hands of local aristocrats and the Catholic Church. But as merchants rose in the towns to challenge aristocratic rule, they also formed alliances with kings who wanted to build up a more centralized state. Under the resulting agreements merchants funded standing armies, thus building a centralized state apparatus, in exchange for state protection of merchant long-distance trade.

Centralized State Against Localities and Intermediate Organizations

Absolutist states in Europe didn’t emerge out of nothing. According to Tilly, they emerged out of kingdoms, empires, urban federations, and city-states and had to compete with them for allegiance. In feudal times, local authorities could match or overwhelm state power. This slowly changed as the state centralized power.

In their battles against these other political forms, states learned hierarchical administration techniques from churches that had hundreds of years of experience holding together the sprawling kingdoms of Europe, beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and throughout the early, central, and high Middle Ages. In order to command obedience, the absolutist state had to break down the local self-help networks that had developed during the feudal age and among those states that became empires.

The state’s strategies and enactments included setting taxed farmers against poor peasants and artisans, forcing the sale of animals in exchange for taxes, imprisoning local leaders as hostages to ensure the community’s payment of overdue taxes, turning mercenaries returning from wars on a civilian population, and conscripting young men who had been their parents’ main hope for comfort in old age. What stood in the way of state centralization were the clergy, landlords, and urban oligarchies who allied themselves with ordinary people’s resistance to state demands.

On the positive side, Tilly reports that homicide rates in the 16th and 17th centuries were half that of the 13th century. The state’s disarmament of civilians took place in small steps, such as through the following tactics:

Seizure of weapons at the end of rebellions
Prohibition of duels
Control over the production of weapons
Introduction of licensing for private arms
Restriction of public displays of armed force
Elimination of fortress-castles

To gain revenue for wars, early states had slim pickings for squeezing tribute and rent from their populations. But as the monetary economy spread and credit became available, it became possible for the state to receive payments from flows such as exercise customs, tolls, stocks (e.g., property), and land tax.

Dividing and conquering intermediaries

Early modern popular allegiances of culture, language, faith and interests did not neatly overlap with centralized political boundaries. States played a leading role in determining who was included and who was excluded in their jurisdictions. This would force people to choose whether they wanted to live in a state where they would, for example, become a religious or cultural minority. Furthermore, the state can play its cultural, linguistic, and religious communities against one another by first supporting one and then switching to support another.

It may seem self-evident that absolutist states would try to join and expand whatever local identity a people had, such as the Basques or the Catalans in Spain. However, this was not initially the case. A local identity was interpreted as a threat just like any other non-state identity—region, ethnic group, or federation—because it competed with the state for people’s loyalty. It was only later when states were out of cash and desperate for manpower that they began trying to manipulate these outside loyalties by promising citizenship and later education in exchange for taxes and conscription.

Sociologists and social psychologists demonstrated that among a group with internal conflicts the best way to forge unity is to present them with a common group enemy. An individual’s group loyalty is solidified by discrimination against an outside group. A scapegoat is selected because it is present, visible, powerless to resist, and useful for displacing aggression.

Building a centralized nervous system: postal networks and newspapers

States reduced barriers between regions by developing roads and postal systems. In the late medieval world, the emergence of private mercantile networks enabled postal communication (Starr, 2004). In the 15th and 16th centuries, private postal networks were built. In France, the postal system was created as early as the late 1400s, and England’s came about in 1516. They expanded until they linked together much of Europe, employing 20,000 couriers. Turnpike construction upgraded routes from major centers to London. From the second half of the 18th century, the postal network offered regular service between regions as well as into London. By 1693 in the United States regular postal service-connected Philadelphia, New York and Boston, and the comprehensive postal network assured postal privacy. The network of US postal systems came to exceed that of any other country in the world and was a way to bring the Western frontier under the umbrella of the Northern industrialists in their struggle against the agricultural capitalists of the South.

Postal networks supported the creation of news networks intended for bankers, diplomats and merchants. They contained both the prices of commodities on local markets and the exchange rates of international currencies. Newspapers also helped centralize and nationalize American colonies by pointing to commonalities across regions. For example, the Stamp Act led to the first inter-colonial cooperation against the British and the first anti-British newspaper campaign.

State vs religion conflicts

In spite of what they learned from ecclesiastical hierarchies about organization, the state and the Catholic church were opposed to each other. The church was an international body that had a stake in keeping any state from competing with it for power. Before the alliance between merchants and monarchs, the Catholic church played states off of one another. One event that began to reverse this trend was the Protestant Reformation. Protestant reformers may not have been advocates for the national interests of Germany, Switzerland, Holland, or England, per se, but they were against the international aspirations of the Catholic church. Protestant leaders like Wycliffe and Hus called for the use of vernacular (local language) rather than internationalist Latin in religious settings. The Protestant religions became increasingly associated with either absolute monarchies or republics (e.g., the Dutch).

The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 helped end one hundred years of religious wars, and there was an expectation among internationalists that Catholics and Protestants would choose separate countries. According to Llobera (1994), this helped cement the legitimacy of the state. Religious dissidents caught in the wrong country—Catholics in England; Jews, Muslims or Protestants on the Iberian Peninsula; or the Huguenots in France—were seen as potential enemies of the state.

In his book Faith in Nation, Anthony Marx argues that one of the ways the state gained the upper hand over religion was to play religions off of one another within the political boundary. In order to organize support for themselves, states commanded loyalty from their subjects by scapegoating minority religious populations. Anthony Marx argues that state unity was not achieved simply and peacefully through an expanding homogenization process carried out through newspapers, railroads, or common political affinities. The actual process was a divide-and-conquer strategy that lasted for two hundred years.

Anthony Marx takes issue with the notion that a vital part of national identity is in remembering the great deeds of the nation. He says that it is more important for a subject or citizen to forget. This means developing a collective amnesia about past religious massacres and civil wars. In contrast to Enlightenment-era liberal interpretations that national loyalties should be based on citizenship and democracy, which come to replace religious superstitions, Marx says that the state is founded on religious intolerance. Strangely, citizenship and democracy have their roots in exclusion and the amplification of majority–minority conflicts.

National states

According to Tilly (1992), state activities involve a minimum of three processes:

State making—attacking and checking competitors and challengers within the territory claimed by the state
War making—attacking rivals outside the territory claimed by the state
Protection—attacking and checking rivals of the rulers’ principle allies, whether inside or outside the territory claimed by the state

According to Tilly, national states separated themselves from absolutist states creating the following additional functions upon their subject populations:

Adjudication—authoritative settlement of disputes
Distribution—intervention in the allocation of goods
Production—control of the creation and transformation of goods and services

Nationalism in the 19th Century

In the West, when we think of nationalism today, we might imagine right-wing racists and flag-waving war mongers. That is certainly a popular image that began in the last decades of the 19th century, but not before then. After all, the breakdown of intermediate organizations—regional, ethnic, and kin—was opposed by conservatives in the name of religious and aristocratic “tradition.” Hobsbawm (1983) says that what we weakened by modernization was:

the legitimacy of dynasties, which crossed states;
the divine ordination of states (kings were understood to be holding a spiritual office);
the historical right to continuity of rule without a political monitoring process (no input from the middle and lower classes); and,
religious cohesion across territories.

In the 19th century, we can identify three phases of nationalism and, interestingly, nationalism becomes more right wing only at the end of the 19th century. The three phases are:

patriotism and early nationalism (1789–1848);
liberal nationalism (1848–1871); and,
right-wing imperialistic nationalism (1871–1914).

Patriotism from 1789 to 1948

According to Viroli (2003), there was a long-standing patriotic tradition that was based on the republican forms of government that date all the way back to the Romans, the Italian city-states, and the Dutch cities founded on the presence of political institutions, especially constitutions. The English, American and French revolutions were fought over loyalty to political freedom from the church and crown. While initially championed by the upper and middle classes, patriotism then spread to the lower classes after the French Revolution and the Italian nationalist movement of Mazzini.

For patriots, unlike later right-wing nationalists, ethnicity, history, language, landscape and blood elements were irrelevant for consolidating loyalty. Loyalty to country was created through the political choice of its members. It did not draw inspiration from the past but imagined itself as a model for future societies. In the first half of the 19th century, patriotism was inseparable from the middle and working classes. Nationalism became more radicalized in the 1830s and 1840s, becoming associated with the working classes and the poor. Hobsbawm (1990) says class consciousness had a civic, national dimension.

Liberal nationalism (1848-187)

According to Hobsbawm, the number of nation-states was small in the early 19th century. Before the second half of the 19th century, there were nations without states and states without nations. Nations existed within states and across states. For example, the French saw no contradiction in electing Thomas Paine, an Englishman, to its national convention. To the extent that progressives identified with the emergence of newspapers, urbanization, and centralized transportation, nationalism went with republicanism and liberalism.

The 19th century revolutions in transport and communications typified by railways and telegraph tightened and routinized the links between central authority and its remotest outposts. Rural people were brought into the loop through gendarmes, postmen, policemen, school teachers, garrisons of soldiers and military bands. The state kept records of each of its subjects and citizens through the device of regular periodic censuses. Census did not become general until the middle of the 19th century. This included records of births, marriages, death. (Hobsbawm, 1990)

Mercantilists wanted to promote national economic development. For example, Alexander Hamilton aspired to unite the nation with the state and the economy by founding a national bank. The national bank assumed national responsibility for the debts of local states and protected national manufacturers through high tariffs. These measures were also intended to develop the seed of national awareness among citizens.

Between 1848 and 1880, in practice, there were four criteria that allowed a people to be firmly classed as a nation. It had:

sufficient size to pass the threshold in the number of people under its banner
a historic association with a current state that could claim a fairly lengthy past (for example, the existence of English, French, Russian, or Polish nations);
a long-established cultural elite, possessing a written national literary and administrative vernacular; and,
the capacity for conquest (Hobsbawm says there is nothing like an imperial power to make a population conscious of its collective existence).

As the poor and working classes increased in emerging or expanding European cities, they built a new force to be reckoned with: unions. From the point of view of the state, citizens were no longer subjects and their consent had to be negotiated.

Political membership in a nation was the emulsifier that bound the state to its citizens, with the promise of democratization in the name of the nation as a way states could acquire legitimacy in citizens’ eyes.

In the last half of 19th century, democratization, unlimited electoralization of politics was unavoidable. It was a new covenant, a civic loyalty, a civic religion that could hopefully out-compete not only traditional loyalties but newly developing class loyalties of the working class. In exchange for the vote, citizens could now be recruited for military duty. By the 1850s as socialism was joined to the union movement, the left gradually became associated with internationalism and while nationalism was taken over by the right wing. (Hobsbawm, 1989)

Right-wing, imperialistic nationalism (1872-1914)

Increasing tensions between nations, classes, religions and ethnic groups

The political unification of Germany in 1871 and its rapid industrialization changed the balance of power in relation to England, France and the United States. In the United States, there were five economic panics (1819, 1837, 1857, 1873, and 1893), which undermined the trust of capitalists in Europe. The result was a protectionist economic foreign policy in all major countries except England. National tariffs allowed for building up home industries rather than having those industries compete internationally.

At the same time that there was political concentration within states, these same states looked to expand their territories through colonization. Italy attempted to expand into Eritrean Somaliland and Ethiopia, the Russians expanded into Turkistan and the frontiers of China, and the United States annexed Hawaii and part of Samoa and forcibly acquired Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

As national states were consolidating their power, a growing number of ethnicities within these national states were fighting either for their independence or for more rights within these states. These included the Irish against the British, the Breton, Flemish, and Corsicans against the French, the Finns, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians against the Russians, the Basques and Catalans against the Spanish, the Czechs, Serbs, Slovaks, and Romanians against the Austrian-Habsburg Empire, and the Norwegians against the Swedish. As Marxists have long pointed out, there was no more effective way of diverting the class struggle between workers and capitalists than to point to other races, other religions, or other nations as the sources of their problems.

The economic instabilities at home that drove capitalists to seek new markets resulted in colonial rivalries. There was war between England and the Dutch (Boer War) between Italy and Turkey; between Russia and Japan in 1904, between China and Japan, and between the United States and Spain in 1898.

Increasing economic disruption also saw the rise of religious intolerance in France, Germany, Russia and the United States. The French state encroached on the functions and rights of the Catholic Church when no more religious instruction was allowed and the Jesuits were banned. In Germany, by the mid-1880s, the Jesuits were also banned.

The rise of unions, socialism, and the Paris Commune threatened capitalist profits from below. This led to an “open door” policy among the heads of state, who would import cheap foreign labor to undermine the increasing demands of local workers. The mass migrations between 1880 and 1914 from Eastern Europe to Western Europe threatened the livelihood of local workers and made them more susceptible to nationalism.

Lastly and paradoxically, the freeing of the slaves in the United States in 1865 led to an increase of racial ideology in the United States. There was soft coercive assimilation of “the melting pot” ideology directed at Eastern Europeans. After the Civil War, the North attempted to paper over their basic economic differences with the South by using the increased hatred of blacks by whites in the South to unite the North and the South by appealing to a white racial nation. But racism was not limited to the United States. In Europe there was a Social Darwinist interpretation of the origin of races: in England Chamberlain), France (Gobineau), and Germany (List).

Novel characteristics of right-wing nationalism

According to Hobsbawm (1990), nationalism between 1880 and 1914 differed in four major respects from the earlier patriotic criteria for nations:

There was the abandonment of the threshold principle of the 1830s. This meant that a body of people who considered themselves a nation could claim the right to self-determination, meaning they had the right to separate as a sovereign, independent state with their own territory.
Ethnicity and language became central criteria for nationalism. This was partly a reaction to increasingly massive geographical migrations of people.
There was the presence of race ideology of social Darwinism, which treated nations as organisms where only the fittest survive.
There was a sharp shift to the political right, away from republican inclusion and political principles of the Enlightenment and towards an imperial expansionist outlook.

Building nationalism is not just a political and economic process. In France, Britain, the United States and Germany, nationalist clubs sprang up along with fraternities, national holidays, the invention of flags, national anthems, and monuments (Mosse 1975). In the United States, original motivation for public schools was less for learning and more as hothouses for civic patriotic propaganda. They included flags outside of school houses along with pledges of allegiance (O’Leary, 2000).

Conclusion

While individualism rose in the West by the 12th century, the European political development — including political representation and the rise of capitalism — required another kind of community to house these individualist selves. This was a community that was not based on clans, kinship, regions, ethnicities or cities. It was based on loyalty to a state. In part because this was a new political institution, it took hundreds of years to convince its population to be loyal to it. We said that primitive accumulation of nationalism consisted of two parts: first pulverizing intermediate loyalties while building a centralized nervous system: postal networks and newspapers. However we have said nothing about the propaganda techniques used and the social-psychological techniques used to grow that loyalty. Religion and nationalism mostly seem to be opposed to each other. But in my next article I will describe how nationalist drew from the same religious techniques Christian monotheists use to win their populations over.

The post Nationalism as the Religion of the Modern West first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Out on a Limb with Dialectical Materialism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 16:00:03 +0000

Orientation

Who cares about philosophy?

When most people hear about philosophy, they think it is:

Hopelessly abstract
The opposite of concreate reality
The opposite of application
For talking heads who are otherwise inept and clumsy – the wallflowers at a party
It has no impact on daily life unless we consciously apply it
It is a philosophical study about lives of old great men, either talking heads or idle dreamers

As we proceed, I hope you will feel differently about philosophy. In my experience, philosophy is one of the most practical subjects to study there is. Why? Because the simplest practical act contains within it assumptions about the nature of reality. Furthermore, a person does not have to have a conscious interest in philosophy in order for that to be operating in their life. Either we choose our philosophy consciously, or it chooses us. If we do not choose it consciously, including the way in which we make meaning, our actions will be out of our control.

I think of philosophy as the skeleton of our thinking process, our infrastructure. If a person has worked out a rough sense of where they stand on the basic philosophical questions, then over time that stance will sink into the plumbing of how they think about any everyday problem. It will seem less and less abstract and closer to everyday life. In other words, the person will see how the choices made in everyday life relate to the abstract philosophical issues. In addition, the individual’s thinking process will be interconnected and more consistent across a wider and wider range of situations. As it stands now most people’s thinking processes are a confused hodge-podge of contradictory platitudes, unexamined assumptions which are often centered around religious belief. But you may say, how do philosophical assumptions get inside the heads of people who have no interest in it?

Every culture must have answers to the fundamental questions regarding the relationship of the group to the larger reality. Part of what makes human life tolerable is the meaning we give to these questions. Now the answers to these big questions have been answered throughout history in various ways. Further, new philosophical questions come into being at different points in history, depending on the general problems a society faces. So I don’t think that philosophical questions are eternal and unanswerable. Over time we develop answers to some questions which are good enough to generate a set of problems for scientists to solve. Cultures that do not develop science answer these questions through mythical stories. Philosophy is not invented voluntarily by smart people.Every individual living in an industrial capitalist society today has at least partly internalized the philosophical thinking and assumptions of Plato and Aristotle because both Protestant and Catholic theorists have drawn from them. Of course, it is possible to challenge their ontology and epistemology but it takes substantial effort.

My claim

My purpose in this article is to argue that dialectical materialism (which I will refer to as DM) is too narrow in the way it understands the history of philosophy. Typically, it divides the schools into idealist or materialist. Through the work of Stephen Pepper and Andrew Reck I will suggest that the history of philosophy can be better grouped into five schools. These schools will do better justice to the variety of what philosophical ontology has to offer.

Ontological Questions

Ontology deals with the fundamental nature of reality. So let’s look at what these philosophical questions are which every philosophical school must deal with:

What are we? Are we biological, social or spiritual beings?
Where do we come from? the earth or the heavens?
Where are we going? Is there an afterlife or do we die in our graves?
How is the universe organized? What proportion is designed, improvised, determined or chaotic?
What is the relationship between mind and matter? Which is primary and which is derived?
Is the universe good, evil or neither?
What is the relationship between permanence and change? Which is primary and which is secondary?
What is the relationship between determinism and free will? To what extent can our actions be controlled?
What is the nature of time? Is it coexistence with space and matter or does it emerge separately?
What is the shape of time? Is it cyclical, linear or a spiral?
What is the nature of space? Is space an empty container for matter? Is it separate from matter? Or is space a qualitative location for magical correspondences such as the zodiac of astrology?

Epistemological Questions

Epistemology answers the question of how we know things. Epistemological questions include the following:

How trustworthy or untrustworthy are our senses in how we know things? Are they direct reflections of the material world (naïve realism)?
Are the senses partly accurate and must be refined by reason?
How trustworthy or untrustworthy is reason in telling us about what is true?
How trustworthy is mathematics (rationality) in describing to us what is true?
How trustworthy are our emotions in guiding our understanding of the world?
Is there such a psychological process such as intuition and if there is how is it different from the senses, reason, rationality, and emotions?
How trustworthy is a revelation (claims to knowledge that are claimed to come from other worlds)?

Our major focus will be on the ontological schools with some reference to epistemology.

Axiology

The field has to do with the nature of values. These values include morals, ethics and beauty. I will not be addressing this topic in this article.

How Many Philosophical Schools are There?

Since I am a Marxist and I studied how Marxists made sense of philosophy, I was taught to divide all philosophical schools into either idealist or materialist. Over the years I have come to see that this grouping was too stark and narrow. Thanks to the work of Stephen Pepper in his book World Hypothesis his division made more sense to me. He divided philosophical schools into:

Organicism
Contextualism
Formism
Mechanism

I also found the work of Andrew Reck very helpful. In his book Speculative Philosophy he grouped philosophical schools into:

Idealism
Materialism
Realism
Process philosophy

Roughly speaking materialism and mechanism have considerable overlap. The same is true between process philosophy and contextualism. There is more moderate overlap between idealism and organicism but there is more difference than in our first two pair. Realism stands roughly midway between materialism and idealism in Reck’s system. Lastly, formism overlaps with realism.

In the following section I will describe the assumptions of each school. I will also compare the schools to each other. For example, I show that mechanism and organicism will have different answers when applied to how each understands the relationship between individual and society. I will also name the philosophers who go with each school. The assumptions for each school will answer most of the ontological questions at the beginning of this article.

Lastly, all philosophical tendencies don’t fit neatly into the schools listed. Schools of thinking such as rationalism, empiricism and skepticism, pragmaticism, or positivism are mixtures of two or three different schools. Rather than add these and raise further complications, for purposes of learning I wanted not to be overly simplistic (materialism vs idealism) or overly complicated. I suspect there will be some inconsistencies in parts. My intention is to give you a rough and ready map so that you can categorize individual philosophers you might be aware of into their proper categories. Once you become aware of the typical responses of some of these great thinkers you will be in a better position to make up your own mind and group the philosophers into schools rather than treat each as individuals.

Mechanical or Atomistic View

Fundamental assumptions

Entities of things exist prior to their relationships (objects are mutable and self-contained atoms).
Relations only externally or secondarily define an entity.
Differences are prior to commonalities.
Boundaries are prior to connections (freedom is the right to be separate).
Reductionism is a complex system that can be completely accounted for by analyzing their simple parts. Qualitative relations can be completely understood by quantification.
There is no design in nature, neither divine or human (all change is due to either rigid determinism or chance or both.
There is no self-reflection within entities (as opposed to an internally generated feedback system).
Change is secondary and is not constitutional or necessary. Change is an anomaly or a temporarily disturbance on a more basic state of permanence.
Linear or cyclic causality. Initial conditions determine the outcome. The past determines the future. This is as opposed to being pulled in the direction of a future goal as in divine or human teleology.
Change eventually leads to a state of equilibrium or homogeneity. This is opposed to change leading to disequilibrium, accumulation, irreversibility and crisis. From this more complex heterogeneous systems may emerge.

Two forms of Mechanism; discrete and Consolidation

In his book World Hypothesis, Stephen Pepper further divides Mechanism into two parts:

Discrete
Consolidated

Discrete mechanism is ruled by chance.

Things are real only if they have a time and place (as opposed to what is real being hidden or sometime in the future) and grounded on primary qualities such as size, shape, motion, solidity, mass (weight) and number. Secondary qualities such as color, texture, smell and sound are not counted
Most of the structured features of nature are externally related. These include space from time; every atom from every other atom; every natural law from every other natural law; primary from secondary qualities; names of things from their objects (nominalism).
Fields of location are primary
Whatever can be located is real.
Only particularities exist.
Atoms are indestructible and eternal.
Time is an infinite one-dimensional manifestation of externally related locations.

In the history of philosophy examples of discrete mechanism are Leucippus, Democritus, Epicurus and Lucretius from the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Gassendi, Galileo, Hobbes and Descartes are representatives from early modern Europe.

Consolidated mechanism is ruled by determinism

The entire world is internally determined, and machine-like. The structure of space and time is completely determined. Historical examples in the history of Western philosophy include Spinoza, Laplace, De La Mettrie, d’Holbach and Helvetius all from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries.

Each form of mechanism is called a “mechanical materialism” by Marxian dialectical materialists.

Examples of mechanism at work in understanding the relationship between society and the individual

This contrast will be between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism. Mechanical materialism is the philosophical position of capitalists.

Individuals are more than or equal to the sum of social relations.

This is in contrast to the Marxian dialectical materialism which says society is more than the sum of individuals.

Individuals or families can exist independently of society as in functional or dysfunctional families or healthy or sick individuals.

Dialectical materialists would say that whatever problems there are within the family or individuals they are ultimately grounded in larger social institutions.

Home is the haven from a heartless society.

Dialectical materialism says that, like Martha and the Vandellas, there is nowhere to run. The only haven is building a heartfelt society.

The individual’s relation to society is voluntary, accidental and contractual, as in Rousseau’s social contract theory.

For dialectical materialists, individuals’ relation to society, is constitutional, necessary and organic.

Society exists as a neutral field in which individuals compete to satisfy needs and pursue happiness.

The opposite of this for dialectical materialists is society as a womb which gives birth to individuals through cooperative relations. Competitive relations internal to society are a product of the last 400 years (Macpherson, The Theory of Possessive Individualism).

Social change only partly impacts individual change.

Dialectical materialists say that social change will dramatically change an individual like whether or not they want this.

Freedom consists of minimizing external social constraints and maximizing the pursuit of private dreams. Flying “free as a bird”.

What is the opposite of this? It is discovering freedom by acting first within social constraints and then acting on those constraints and expanding them. As Robert Frost said, freedom is moving easily within your harness.

Human beings cannot shape history since history is the result of only determinism or chance. Only extraordinary individuals can shape history.

For dialectical materialists human beings can shape history, not just extraordinary individuals. However the shaping is mostly unintended and behind our backs. It is possible to design history in the future.

Organic World View

In DM view, the organic view is connected with idealism. For us, most of the organic view of the world is the opposite of mechanism.

Fundamental assumptions of organicism

Relations within a larger whole define entities.

Objects will change as the whole changes:

Relations within a larger whole internally define what is an object.
Commonalities within a larger whole are more important than differences.
Differences have to do with differences in the entity’s functional role within the whole of which it is a part.
Connections within a whole are more important than boundaries.

All boundaries are relative and permeable.

Anti-reductionism – complex systems cannot be completely understood in terms of their parts; qualitative relations cannot be completely understood through quantification.
There is design in nature. There is a hierarchy of wholes with the supreme spirit at the top.
Entities grow in self-reflection. They develop self-regulating feedback systems.
Change of an entity is inevitable and moving towards the self-development of the whole universe
Reciprocal causality. All entities reciprocally affect each other so that what was once a cause is now an effect. It is the future telos or striving that is the final cause.
Change inevitably leads to increased differentiation or heterogeneity, increasing expansion and integration with other entities.

Organic worldviews on truth, conflict and evil

Truth lies in development.

Unlike the mechanist, truth is not to be found in local space and present time.

It is found in ever-widening connections between entities which will occur in some future time.

Appearances are secondary. What counts is an ever-unfolding unity. This unity is in the process of becoming which is deeper than appearances and is largely hidden.
The importance of stages. The present state of entities is only a moment of their true identity, which unfolds over time.
Conflict is secondary. They are understood as either inconsequential or illusions.
Evil is a product of social or psychological problems. It not ontologically real.

Examples in the history of western philosophy include Schelling, Hegel, Green, Bradley, Bosanquet and Royce.

Contextualism

Contextualism shares with mechanism a materialist outlook, but it is not the reductionist mechanical materialism. In many ways contextualism is the opposite of organicism and it has most in common with process philosophy which I will cover shortly.

Fundamental assumptions of contextualism

Entities have no essence independent of the situation or context in which they are embedded.

These contexts are not necessarily wholes or systems (in contrast to the organicist view).

The uniqueness of each context is more valuable to understand than the commonalities between situations
Anti-reductionism. Elementary analysis can be distortive of the richness of the context
There will always be elements in the universe which are recalcitrant and will resist organization and integration (unlike the organicist).
Anti-foundationalist. There is no top or bottom in the universe. The search for either an ultimate material building block (mechanism) or a supreme force at the top (organicism) is fruitless.
Change is primary and structure is secondary. However, change is not preprogramed in a particular direction as it is in organicism.
Novel events are constantly coming into being that are unpredictable relative to previous structures.
Improvisation in nature produces more complex levels but these levels are not designed.
Time is part of the creative process in nature

Time is much more than a tracker of events. Time is part of the events themselves and changes them.

Reciprocal causality. All contexts reciprocally determine others, but as material, formal or efficient causes. Unlike organicism there are no final causes.
Truth is present in every local context or situation.

This is opposed to the need to derive natural laws from sensuous events (mechanism).

Neither is truth an end point in development as in organicism.

Truth lies in its ultimate utility, as successful functioning. Truth is, as William James says, in its consequences, in what works.

Most of the contextualism school comes out of the Yankeedom pragmatists, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead and to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce.

Realism/Formism

This is the trickiest category of all the schools of philosophy. First, because it is easy to confuse with Organism or Idealism. Secondly, because there is an ontological realism which I will discuss also and an epistemological realism.

Ontological realism

There is an objective world of universals like Platonic forms, typologies, archetypes and templates which exist transcendentally to either the material world or the human mind that seeks to grasp them. Universals can be love, beauty, or truth.

This issue emerged in medieval times over the question of the relationship between the universal and particular things. There were three possible positions:

Nominalism – only particular things are real. Universals such as fathers or mothers are not as real as sensually detected objects.
Conceptualism – universals exist, but only as conceptions in the human mind.

Their being is in human mentality. In the natural world there are only individual things.

Realism – universals have existence beyond particular things or mental constructions of those things. Universals are beyond matter and human minds. They are archetypes or like Plato’s forms.

The main problem of universals is how to connect the particular to the general. Another problem is the relationship between external objects in nature and mental objects. This included the relationship between sense data, perception, representation and ideas. Another problem is the relationship between the mind and the body; that is between mental states and physiological processes.

In the history of philosophy in the ancient world, Plato and St. Augustine are good examples. In the medieval world, Duns Scotus defends realism against nominalism.

Closer to the present, Charles Sanders Peirce was a realist.

Fundamentalist formism or realism assumptions

What is the relationship between things and form? Form or types exist prior to things.
What is the relationship between commonalities and differences? Commonalities matter more.
What is the connection between change and structure? Structure matters more. Change comes out of structure. Change is a sign of imperfection?
What matters is what is eternal. Time is atemporal (unlike Organicists).
There is design in nature, but it happens once. This is unlike the Organicists for which design is an ongoing process in nature.
There are levels in reality, but the levels are there from the beginning. They don’t unfold (Organicist) or emerge (process philosophy).
Ordering of the levels: descend from the top, down.
What is the place of self-reflection? Self-reflection is there from the beginning. It is not an unfolding or an emergence.
Type of causality – final causes, due to purpose at the beginning.
What is the relationship between appearance and reality? Appearance as surfaces which create illusions (Plato). Reality is invisible, prior to and behind appearances.
How do we make sense of conflicts? Conflicts are not part of nature as they are with the Contextualists. They are to be explained away as due to ignorance or wrong information. The ultimate reality has no conflicts.
Epistemological foundations are grounded in externalities, eternal forms (Plato) or Aristotle’s unmoved mover.
What is the realist theory of truth? Truth is externally found in mathematical equations, geometry, maps, diagrams and formulas. This is opposite to the contextual theory of truth. The latter is operational and is manifested in successful functioning or in concrete consequences.

Epistemological realism

This is directed mostly at Organicists either objective idealists like Hegel or various subjective idealists like Kant or Fichte. Epistemological realism says there is an independent objective world independent from the mind that knows it. When cognition relates knowing minds to objects known or knowable, these objects will always have independence of any mind, human or divine.

Epistemological realism comes close to materialism or mechanism because it implies:

The independence of biophysical nature.
The mind does not exist as a substance but rather as a function of the physical organism.

The philosophers who were tenacious examples of epistemological realism were all in the 20^th century and included GE Moore; RB Perry, A. Lovejoy; Santayana and Strong.

Process Philosophy

Evolution

In science, the seventeenth century had been the century of physics and astronomy. In the eighteenth century thanks to Lyell, there was the discovery through geology of deep time. With the invention of the microscope, we learned about minuscule organisms. When Darwin began his studies when on the voyage of the Beagle we learned of the vast variety of organisms. But of course, Darwin went much further, first in his discovery of adaptation and sexual selection. Then in 1871 with his book The Descent of Man, the relationship between humanity and the rest of nature was posed without the need for a “Grand Creator” who divinely intervened.

Creativity in time

In the history of philosophy neither mechanical materialists, nor organicists or realists took time seriously. Along with space, it was a container for natural or social events. Marx and Engels were among the first to suggest that human history was a process of class struggle, rather that the frozen events like congresses or wars. Pragmatists in the late 19^th century like Charles Sanders Peirce and Chauncey Wright sought to think not just about quantitative change within organic nature but qualitative change that occurred in large scale relationships between matter (the inorganic), life (the organic) and the human mind. Peirce writes that evolution displays three types:

Tychism – evolution of change
Anancasm – mechanical necessity
Agapism – evolution of creative love

It was Henri Bergson who emphasized that “creative evolution” was a never ending process and that static events were temporary thick moments of an effervescence movement the flowed between matter, life and mind.

Immanent vs emergent evolution

In the philosophy of Schelling and Hegel, organicists had their answer. The lower levels of nature were immanent in the higher levels. What happened at the lower levels unfolded from higher forms. Higher forms descended into the lower and brought them up. In the 20^th century Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo in India continued this tradition.

By what if Bergson was right about creativity of time? Does that mean that instead of evolution being immanent, evolution was emergent? What if the levels of nature emerged from lower levels and there was real novelty in nature? This was the road taken by George Lewes in the mid-19^th century and followed up on by British philosopher comparative psychologist C. Lloyd Morgan and by the American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars and to a lesser extent by John Dewey. In the field of social psychology George Herbert Mead showed how society was the next emergent property beyond life and matter.

Process theology

Many see the grandest synthesis of process philosophy in the work of Alfred North Whitehead in his great book Process and Reality. Whitehead did not want to abandon process philosophy to materialists and insisted that God can be seen as a process rather than as a being. Charles Hartshorne learned from Whitehead and added some twists of his own. David Ray Griffin worked to sharpen the work of Hartshorne. Process theologists wanted to unify nature through a kind of panpsychism, without any supernaturalism.

Fundamental assumptions and endeavors of process philosophy

Despite the differences between theological and secular process philosophy we can still identify many principles that unite them:

Movement and change is the primary reality. It is ongoing independently of human intentions. Structure or form is a derivative of change and not primary as it is with the mechanists.
It strives to articulate the conditions in which change takes place.

To what extent is it the result of necessity, chance or design?

It strives to develop a typology of change distinguishing qualitative from quantitative change and distinguishing transitions from crisis.
It strives to understand the shape of change whether that change is cyclic, linear, non-linear or a spiral.

Are changes oscillations of a primary statis state? Are changes irreversible or reversible?

To what extent does change accumulate and have consequences?

Process philosophy strives to understand the relationship to time, the past, present and future.

It strives to understand the levels of change. Process philosophers involve themselves in understanding the relationship between matter, life, mind and society.
It strives to understand the value of change.

Is change inherently good, progressive and negentropic? Or is change degenerative, and entropic? Is change necessary?

With which other school of philosophy does process philosophy have most in common?

Process philosophy shares most in common with contextualism.

There are no essences independent of contexts and situations
Anti-reductionism – there are levels of complexity in nature.
There are recalcitrant elements in nature which resist organization.
Anti-foundationalism – change is infinite in space and time.

There is no bottom or top where change ceases.

Emergence of novel events are constantly happening in the universe.
Nature is self-regulating through improvisation. Nature creates and recreates herself.
Time and timing is a constitutional element in this improvisation.

What Can Dialectical Materialism Learn from Mechanism, Organicism, Formism, Contextualism and Process Philosophy?

Mechanism

In trying to integrate DM to the five schools, it’s best to start with mechanism because mechanism starts from the material world, nature. It dismisses any spiritual essences or interventions. At the same time, DM departs from mechanism because mechanism is reductionist. In contrast, DM shares with contextualists and process philosophy a sense of emergent levels in nature. Furthermore, mechanism lacks a sense of self-reflectiveness that characterizes organicism and contextualism. DM shares with mechanism the conviction that what drives natural evolution is necessity and chance. What mechanism misses is that at the level of humanity there is design in nature in that human social plans that can change nature. Lastly mechanism’s sense of matter is that it is dead and externally driven. In DM, as for La Mettrie, matter is dynamic and self-organizing.

Organicism

DM is directly opposed to organicism in its point of departure. Organicism starts with a spiritual whole whether the whole is of Schelling or Hegel. DM begins with matter in motion. It agrees with organicism that there are levels in nature, but it sees these levels as emergent processes, driven from the bottom to the top. Organicism understands levels in nature as unfolding and moving from top to bottom and back to the top. DM agrees with organicism that self-reflection and internality are an important part of nature. Yet, organicists assume self-reflection is built into the cosmos as a whole, right from the beginning. For DM self-reflection is an emergent process which occurs with the rise of social complexity. Self-reflection is not there at the beginning. DM agrees with organicism that internal relations precede things. However, internal relations only apply at certain levels of complexity. Primitive matter does not have internal relations. It is driven by external relations such as natural selection and chance variations. We agree with organicist Hegel that conflict is the mother of all change. However, Hegel’s conflict is too neat and pretty and lacks the “out of control” dimension when conflict is generated outside the system.

Formism/Realism

DM has the least in common with formism for many reasons. We don’t think much of Plato who is probably the most well-known Formist. Like organicists, Formists start with a spiritual essence (Plato’s eternal forms) but unlike organicists Formism lacks a developmental direction that organicists share with DM. Also, unlike organicists time is unimportant to Formists, while it is essential to emergent nature for DM. Formists are opposite to DM in that conflict and change are indicators that something is wrong. In DM both conflict and change are more important that stability or types. We agree with Formists that appearances should not be taken as given. For us, the senses can be deceptive and should not be taken for granted. However for Formists, appearances never tell the truth because they depart from eternal forms. For us, sometimes the senses, corrected by reason are trustworthy. We agree with Formists that structures are important, but for us structures are not transcendental, eternal forms. They are a necessary part of nature but they change, disintegrate and reform.

Contextualism

DM has a great deal in common with contextualism. We appreciate their perspective on situational change, conflicts as foundational in nature and emergence as a property of levels in nature. We applaud its insistence that appearances matter but they often understate the important of structures underneath appearances. DMs are less militant that there are no foundations in nature. Though foundations today keep changing (the nature of subatomic particles) that doesn’t mean it will always be that way. Our main problem with contextualism is that it comes out of a liberal understanding of society. The pragmatists – whether James, Dewey and to a lesser extent Peirce and Mead – see the individual as the basic unit. This applies to its theory of truth – practice and consequences. For DM truth for humans is practice, but social practice. Individual practice is not the test of truth for science. Individuals are far too untrustworthy to measure the truth of something. It is the social practice of science which is a much more reliable test.

Process philosophy

Process philosophy can be broken down into types:

The naturalistic process philosophy of Heraclitus, Lloyd Morgan and Roy Wood Sellars.
The process theology of Samuel Alexander, Teilhard de Chardin, Whitehead, Hartshorne and David Ray Griffin

DM has little in common with Chardin’s God or Whitehead’s eternal objects. We would take issue with Hartshorne or David Ray Griffin’s argument that the internality of nature goes very far back. Rather, psyche is emergent in complex human life. However, some of the concepts of Samuel Alexander can be worked into a dialectical framework. For example, Alexander’s slogan “deity is an effort not an accomplishment” is a powerful statement about what matters most is movement rather than things. Alexander’s God is the material world in its totality. This makes Alexander a pantheist god. Furthermore, Chardin’s concept of a noosphere surrounding the earth speaks to the globalization of society and a planetary communist society in the future. I still find Chardin’s description of the growth of the noosphere as breathtaking now as it was to me 50 years ago.

Process philosophy has levels in nature, usually matter, life and mind. DM claims that levels of nature are matter, life (biology) and society, not mind.

Mind is the emergent result of societies that grow to become complex. In addition, process philosophy has no primary place of conflict in its philosophy. Unlike Hegel and Marx, in which conflict is the driver of evolution, for process philosophy if conflict exists at all in nature it is not given a primary place. As Marxists evil for us has no ontological status. Rather it is a derivative of social life under class conditions. For theological process philosophy, evil has an ontological place though their evil has nothing to do with any fundamentalist devil. DM stress the importance of time, not just in philosophy, but in social life such as the preconditions for capitalism and socialism. Both dialectical materialism and process philosophy see nature as self-regularity and immanent.

What’s wrong with dialectical materialism

DM has two forms of idealism – the objective idealism of Plato, Schelling and Hegel and the subjective idealism of Kant and Fichte. However, it makes no distinction between Formists like Plato and Organicists like Hegel and Schelling. Secondly, while the distinction between mechanical materialism and dialectical materialism is good, the difference between discrete and mechanical materialism is not clear enough. Marx’s dissertation of a comparative study between Democritus and Epicurus should have been followed up on. It is my hope that Marxists open up their framework of philosophy to include six types rather than two or three.

Please see the table on our website for a summary of the six schools at the end of the article.

Six Schools of Philosophy (Pepper and Reck)

The post Out on a Limb with Dialectical Materialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Fame vs Celebrity

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:11:31 +0000

Orientation

Questions about fame and celebrity

What does it mean to be famous? Does being famous go all the way back to hunter-gatherers or does it have an origin later in history? What does it mean to be a celebrity? Is it common in all societies or do celebrities emerge at a certain point in history? What is the relationship between being famous and being a celebrity? Are these terms interchangeable or are they distinct phenomenon? What fame and celebrity have in common is that they involve relations that are not:

Everyday
Kin-based
Occupy local places

According to Leo Braudy in his great book The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History there are four parts to being famous: a) a person; b) an accomplishment; c) there is immediate publicity; and d) how posterity has held them ever since. I shall define celebrity later.

My claim in this article is that fame and celebrity, while having the common characteristics above, are fundamentally different and emerge at different points in history.

My sources

In order to make these comparisons I have relied on three books. For the history of fame, Leo Braudy’s great book, The Frenzy of Renown is about the best book I know. While there are many books on celebrity, Chris Rojek’s book Celebrity has the advantage of comparing six other theories of celebrity besides his own. Most theories of celebrity focus in on the fields of entertainment. The first focus is on movies, then secondarily on sports and music. But like it or not, politicians have become celebrities and politics is not supposed to be about entertainment. How do we understand the relationship between fame and celebrity when it’s in politics? A book that does a great job on this question does not set out to contrast fame to celebrity. Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s book Eloquence in the Electronic Age simply compares politics in 19th century Yankeedom before the rise of radio and television to politics in the 20th century. As it turns out, this historical contrast in politics corresponds to the evolution from fame to celebrity. Fame is linked with 19th century politicians while celebrity corresponds with 20th century electronic age politicians. The image that this article leads with is a sculpture of fame in mythology.

My direction in this article

In the first part of this article, I compare fame to celebrity in terms of when each starts historically; how each evaluates authority; how its status was acquired; who is the targeted audience and what media are used to bridge the relationship between these notorious individuals and their public and mass audiences. I also ask questions about what the power bases involved are; how long fame or celebrity lasts and I also ask what the notorious person gives and receives from his audience. As it turns out, unlike fame, the celebrity-mass audience relationship produces psychological pathologies on both sides. In first half of the article, I only talk about celebrity as resulting from entertainment.

In the second half of the article, I contrast the difference between fame and celebrity only in relationship to politics. We will find that famous politicians have a great deal in common with famous military men or artists. However, we discover that political celebrities are very different from celebrities in the fields of entertainment such as movies, sports and music.

What is “Primary Fame” Prior to the 18th Century?

Fame in social evolution

To be famous is to be regarded with special attention by people with whom the average person has no contact – that is, strangers. There was no fame in either hunter-gatherers or simple horticulture societies because everyone knows everyone else by direct or extended kin groups. I suspect the first forms of fame came in complex horticulture societies, in chiefdoms. It is not the chief within one’s own society people consider famous, but a chief from another society with whom a commoner has no personal relationship but the chief has a reputation of being a great fighter, arbitrator or healer. The first time an individual could be famous within a society is in an agricultural civilization with tens of thousands of people and most having no kinship relations with others. The famous person may be of high standing as a religious authority, a divine king or a military hero. In the Italian Renaissance artists and musicians were famous.

Fame is rare, connected to deeds done that are notorious

How easy is it to be famous? Being famous for most of human history was rare. There wasn’t an infinite opportunity for people to be famous. This isn’t because there was some kind of quotient. It’s just because in the caste societies of agricultural states most people lived and died in their social caste and had no ambition to be famous. As you can probably imagine, being famous has little to do with being virtuous or not. It is more a case of people taking notice. You do have to do something to be famous. That is, having achieved status is more than you can inherit by being famous such as being the son of a great military hero. For the most part, being famous is connected to notorious deeds that have been performed. These deeds can be witnessed by the same generation or they can be remembered as having a reputation and then saved for posterity.

Means of cultural transmission

How do people find out about famous people in agricultural civilizations? Because there was no printing press, people found out through theatre, mystery plays and storytelling. The population also found out through mimes and minstrels. In the case of famous people who died their fame was carried on through folk tales. After the invention of the printing press stories of famous people reached middle class readers. The scope of fame reached to the end of empires but was limited mostly to the upper classes. Merchants in agricultural civilizations were unique in learning about famous people since they regularly traded with other societies.

Power bases

The leading power base for fame is competency. Competency means a famous person can get people to follow them because of demonstrated skill. Famous people can also move people because they occupy a social office that people respect, but this legitimacy by itself cannot generate fame. The same is true for charisma and sex appeal. By themselves, neither of these can make people famous, but they help.

How long does fame last?

The answer to this depends on the methods of transmission. The reputation of a famous chiefly warrior will only last as long as the storytellers who transmit the story. In the case of agricultural states famous people’s memory can be preserved through pictures or painting, writing and monuments. Here fame can last over generations.

What do famous people and their publics give to each other?

There is great social distance between famous people and their populations. There are few personal facts about them and their private lives are sequestered from the general population. What do famous people give to their population? Usually, they will bestow political or spiritual blessings. They might claim to heal their populations but they are too distant to give people any psychological satisfaction. There is no reciprocity in their relationship with the public. For famous people, members of the population are interchangeable. They do not depend on the audience for anything. With rare exceptions prior to the 20th century, most famous people were men. Before the 20th century capitalism had not reached its consumer stage, and for this reason famous people could not be commodified and sold to the public as we shall see is true about celebrities.

What is Celebrity?

Celebrity as a form of notoriety did not occur until the end of the 19th century with the rise of mass communication. This included the first newspapers in the seventeenth century, then photography in the 19th century and finally cinema, radio and television in the 20th century. By the end of the 19th century, religious and political authorities were in decline. Military generals alone maintained their fame throughout the two world wars. New heroes and heroines came from three domains – movies, music and sports. While prior to the 20th century ascribed fame was a rarity, no celebrity inherited their status. They were discovered and gained their reputation through the work they did to achieve what they had. It was very difficult to be a celebrity, but the chances were better than it was with primary fame. This is because class mobility made it possible for middle-class and even working-class people to become a celebrity.

Theories of Celebrities

In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojek identifies seven theories of celebrity. The first is the subjectivistic theory of Max Weber. Weber claims that the basis of celebrity is that the person has charisma. Charisma is an inspiring way a person has about them, that sweeps people away and makes the audience want to be like them. Politically this would go with the “Great Men” of history theory. The second theory is that of Orrin Klapp. In his book Heroes, Villains and Fools: The Changing American Character, he argues that all social groups develop character types that function as role models for leadership. Such roles include good Joe, a villain, tough guy, snob, prude and love queen. Celebrities are personifications of these types.

The rest of the celebrity theories are all social and/or historical. In his book The Stars and The Cinema, Edgar Morin argues for the opposite of Weber’s charisma. He says that celebrity is not due primarily to the subjective power of the celebrity but is a projection of the pent-up needs of the audience. Celebrities are transformers, accumulating and enlarging the dehumanized desires of the audience. Likewise, Richard Dyer also focuses on audiences. His post-structural theories, in his books Stars and Heavenly Bodies, he claims the key to understanding celebrities is how audiences construct and consume a particular star’s persona. Discourse theory emphasizes the mass media as productive agents in governing the population and specific audiences. This functions as a kind of crowd control. The books that make this argument include Celebrities and Power and Claims to Fame written by D Marshall and J Gamson. The most one-sided sociological theory is the Frankfurt School. Like discourse theory, they argue that all organized entertainment is in the service of crowd control. Involvement of the masses with their celebrities has no redeeming value. They are all forms of false consciousness. This is argued for in Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man and Aesthetic Dimension. Lastly, there is the work of Chris Rojek who emphasizes how much the point of history matters as to when celebrities emerge. He articulates this in his book Leisure and Culture.

Celebrities have fans

Movies, radio and TV carried with them a host of mediators between celebrities and those who followed them. These mediators – the press, press agents, fan clubs – barge their way into the lives of celebrities so that those who were interested – fans – could find out all about them. Through movies, radio interviews and television appearances the notoriety of celebrities reached more social classes than primary fame. Through fads and fashions, it spread across nations and even became international. The power bases of celebrities were more narrow than primary fame. While many celebrities certainly got into the movies by skill, much of celebrity life was due to charisma and sex appeal. Economic propaganda was at work when film companies promoted their actors and actresses. At its worst, celebrities were more appearance and less skill.

Rapid rise and fall

While famous people built their reputation slowly and their fade-out might take generations, with celebrities it was the opposite. They could rise up instantaneously and fade just as quickly. A good musical example of this is doo-wop groups of the 50s. Many of these groups had one hit and then disappeared from the radio stations forever.

Fans and their celebrities

People who had fame prior to the 20th century had no fans. Fandom was the result of the work of cultural mediators who get the lowdown on celebrities. Because musicians, sports figures and especially actors and actresses partly made their living from box office turnout, they could not ignore their fans. For those fans these “intimate strangers” become increasingly important. It is not only movie magazines where celebrities “tell all”. They appear on television interviews on late night shows or, if they are on the way out, they appear on television game shows.

Celebrity fans expect much more than the crowds that followed primary famous people prior to the 20th century. Fans are psychologically involved with actors and actresses and receive the vicarious satisfaction of living through stars. They are titillated and awe-struck. Fan clubs are set up and fans expect responses to their letters, becoming upset and even violent when a star fails to respond. This can lead to the stalking of celebrities or even fans killing themselves when celebrities die. Fans collect relics and autographs and their homes become shrines to celebrities. At the same time, fans are fickle and change loyalties quite easily.

There is minor reciprocity through fan attendance at concerts, films and sporting events. Fans cheer and boo depending on how a star responds. A good example of this is when a musician plays at a concert. The fans call out for the old songs, a trip down memory lane, while the artist wants to play new work. A most extreme case is Van Morrison and his fans. Watch the first thirty seconds of this video.

This impact of the demands of fans has a great psychological impact on celebrities as they are driven from normal public life and in many cases leads to psychological disorders. Some of these disorders include paranoia and mania narcissism and what Reisman used to call “other directedness” . Celebrities become commodities, bought and sold just like other commodities. This leads to what is called achievement fatigue and achievement mirage. Rojek identifies “achievement fatigue” as when celebrities view their status as a burden and a sequence of diminishing returns. Achievement mirage is the recognition that their status is shallow and false.

Secondary Fame

It is too simplistic to polarize fame and celebrity. While it is safe to say there was once fame without celebrity, it would be naïve to argue that celebrity is the absence of fame. For example, just because the emphasis of fame is on actions and skill that doesn’t mean that celebrities whose identity is largely based on appearance, charisma and sex appeal are not also skilled. We can easily agree that Robert Duvall, Prince, and Aaron Judge all have skill. Secondly, fame is simply a mixture of fame and celebrity. Celebrities’ fame is all mixed up with their fan base, their psychological needs in a way that primary fame is not.

Table 1 is a summary of the differences between fame and celebrity.

Fame vs Celebrity

Fame	Category of Comparison	Celebrity
5,000 years ago Agricultural civilizations to the end of the 19th century	Time period	End of 19th century to present
High Religious (Catholics, Protestants) and political authority (Kings) Military heroes, artists	Evaluation of authority	Low Decline of religious and political authorities Heroes and heroines in movies, music and sports
Ascribed or achieved Achieved – Renaissance artists in open competition	How their status was achieved	Achieved (being discovered)
Rare	How easy to accomplish?	Very difficult but more frequent (class mobility opens up some possibilities)
Public strangers (crowds)	Targeted audience	Mass strangers (fans)
Literature, theatre Monuments Oral – storytelling, mimes, minstrels. Folk tales, mystery plays	Mediums of transmission	Mass communication Newspapers, photography, cinema, radio, television
Beyond locales, to regions spread to empires through reputation	Scope – how far it expands	Beyond locales to regions nations and in some cases international
Legitimacy, charisma, competency	Power bases	Charisma, Sexual power Competency
Survives over generations	How long does it last?	Ephemeral Instant recognition
Reputation, skills Actions (military, artists) Inheritance (kings, aristocrats)	What are its characteristics?	How a person appears physically, skills and actions in some cases
Most distant	Degree of exposure	Less distance because of fan magazines, television appearances
Blessings, healings Awe	What the audience receives	Vicarious satisfaction of living life through stars Titillation, awe
No reciprocity (does not need audience)	Nature of person of Notoriety and audience	Minor reciprocitythrough fan attendance at concerts, films, sporting events—cheering, booing (needs audience)
Little impact Character	Star pathologies	Significant impact – lack of privacy, psychological disorders Narcissism mania, schizophrenia, paranoia
None Not attached	Audience pathologies	Fan pathologies: Stalking Killing themselves when celebrities die
Larger than life Not commodities	How are notorious people held?	Larger than life Celebrities become commodities
		Relics of the dead – Signed autographs Homes are shrines
Long term loyalty	Loyalty	Fickle – rarely exclusive or lifelong Fads, fashions Simmel—fashion makes people radioactive
Men – with rare exceptions	Gender representation	Men and women (technological amplification makes it easier for women)

Fame vs Celebrity in the History of Politics

The impact of the electronic age on politics

Up until now we have limited our discussion of celebrity to movies, and to a lesser extent music and sports. What about politics? In her wonderful book Eloquence in an Electric Age: The Politics of Political Speechmaking, Kathleen Hall Jamieson contrasts politicians and the public before the end of the 19th century to politics in the 20th century. For us, contrasting politics before and during the electronic age overlaps exactly with the time period we are contrasting fame and celebrity. In other words, we can use her work to understand the evolution of fame to celebrity to politics. As we shall see, politicians before the electronic age were famous, whereas after the electronic age they were celebrities.

Means of communication, accessibility private life and the length of speeches

The setting for political fame was communicating directly in public or through newspapers. At the end of the 19th century, first indirectly through the movies and then later through radio first and then television, politicians more and more became celebrities. Before the end of the 19th century the private life of politicians was protected. However, especially after television, the private life of politicians became public. A political public speaker (like Webster, Sumner or Clay) was an orator who could go on speaking for hours to audiences who were interested in politics and came from miles around and stood in agricultural fields. The contents of what the speaker had to say was usually fiery, full of imagery of swords and conquest. But especially after World War II, when politicians now had to compete with movie stars, sports figures and musicians, audiences with shorter attention spans expected politicians to speak briefly, be more entertaining and willing to take the needs of the audience into account.

Politicians as preachers of news vs politicians as reactors to news

Before the electronic age, famous politicians expected people to remember their words. But by the mid-20th century, what mattered more was not only how the politician came across on TV, but what was presented on TV in news (the Vietnam war). Whereas famous politicians were ahead of their audiences because they could simply report on what was going on politically while their audience had no way of knowing about that. But once television began reporting the political news, there was a period where the celebrity politicians had to answer questions about the news that the audience had already seen on television. This contributed to the growing skepticism and disrespect for celebrity politicians.

On the hot seat: celebrity presidents and instantaneous communication

Famous politicians used to only have to deal with a local audience. If a famous politician made a mistake at a local stump stop only the locals would have noticed it. It might be written up in the newspaper but the visual impact on the audience is blunted. Celebrity politicians are dealing with thousands of people all over the country whom the politicians cannot see. But for a celebrity president to make a mistake is a huge deal and thousands of people watching have all seen the same thing at the same time in their own private living rooms.

From rhetoric and newspapers to broadcast media

Famous politicians had to deal with critics who would challenge their oratory style. Their speeches were printed in newspapers. Celebrity politicians were not expected to be skilled in rhetoric because their speaking time was much shorter, at most it was 30 minutes. Newspapers no longer printed the speeches of politicians because people either listened on the radio, saw the speech on television or didn’t bother to watch or listen at all. Because the pace of life had quickened audiences had neither the time nor the interest to read these speeches. Furthermore, advertisers who controlled newspapers would never tolerate that much space taken up with a political speech. Broadcast media of radio and television displaced newspapers.

From argumentation with many sides to playing tag with two sides

Orators of the 19th century spent a fair amount of time defining their terms to the public and then laying out all the alternative prospects just as a lawyer or a rhetorician lays out their case. They presented all the available evidence. In addition, fame politicians used words to create imagines in their audiences. Celebrity presidents didn’t bother with definitions as audiences were not expected to hold definitions in their heads. Perhaps for fear of losing people, celebrity politicians flattened out the alternatives of the debate to two sides. Furthermore, celebrity presidents act like they are playing tag. They hit and they run. Those with the fastest quip win. Whereas public speaking requires a certain degree of an ability to think on the spot and field spontaneous questions from a relatively informed audience, celebrity “town hall” meetings are choreographed with the questions from the audience preselected as are the audiences themselves. Celebrity politicians don’t use words to help the audience create images. They use images from television to begin with and their words followed the images (captions).

From speechwriting to teleprompters

Famous politicians in the 19th century wrote their own speeches. This means they had to distinguish the logos of a speech from the ethos and the pathos and they had to be sensitive to timing – kairos. Celebrity politicians do not have to know anything about rhetoric as they don’t write their own speeches. The speeches are given to them. Because their speeches are televised they don’t have to be ready for audiences’ immediate reactions whether they are verbal or non-verbal. For celebrity politicians, they simply speak their lines. No thinking by them has gone into crafting their speech. In some cases their responses are guided through a teleprompter.

From respect to disrespect of the past

Famous politicians of the 19th century were expected to remember not only their previous arguments, but the political literature of the past. Also quoting poetry demonstrated that a politician was well-rounded. While their public audiences might not be able to quote literature from the past themselves, they respected politicians who could. By the mid 20th century, the audience respect for the past dwindled and they are more likely to be bored by a politician referring to their past arguments or political literature of the past. They might easily say “who cares”?

From hellraiser to moderate

Famous politicians of the 19th century were expected to be powerful, but predictable. There was nothing wrong with riling their audiences up. Famous politicians emphasized the points of disagreement with other politicians and they ignored the points of agreement. Famous politicians expect people to think and vote accordingly.

In reaction to the terror of instantaneous communication and in order to compensate for possible mistakes, celebrity politicians attempt to make up for losing points by seeming to be a “regular guy”. By mid-20th century, psychology has had an impact on the public and politicians begin to use personal examples to become “intimate strangers” to their audiences. Celebrity politicians are expected to be more folksy and inflaming the audience might seem demagoguery at best, or pathological at worst. Please remember that celebrity politicians in the 50s were anti-communists and they were expected to be moderates, not extremists like the communists or the fascists. Celebrity politicians want to appear not too extreme. They want to emphasize the unity of the nation so that the audience will identify with them. Celebrities want to cross a line to gain emotional rapport. They are not far from a hope for mass collective therapy. Engagements were choreographed to resemble conversations more than speeches.

How the electronic age helped women politicians

Public speaking without loudspeakers, let alone radio and television mediations, was a man’s game, because men’s voices usually carried further than women’s. Even if a woman was a good speaker her power would be muffled if not everyone could hear her or her voice was straining. Radio and television definitely assisted female politicians in being taken more seriously. Furthermore, 19th century politicians in Yankeedom was a men’s club. Their wives and children were nowhere to be found. But for celebrity politicians their wives and children were never far out of view. In the 19th century it was possible for single male politicians to be elected. By the middle of the 20th century it became next to impossible to run if you were not married. This is as true for men as it was for women.

From party to personality

What is the relationship between the political candidate and his party? In the 19th century, the party had predictable stances that didn’t change much over decades. The personality of the candidate running was not essential to his winning or losing. However, beginning with the introduction of television, this began to change (certainly in the case of J.F. Kennedy). By the middle of the 1980s political candidates were treated as commodities and party politics began to lose its identity. All you have to do is trace the trajectory of the Democratic Party from the time of JFK to today to understand how the party of FDR has morphed into a neoliberal right-wing party. The personalities of the politician mattered far more than their parties. This can be seen in Part IV of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of the Self.

Two Forms of Notoriety in Politics: Fame vs Celebrity

19th Century	Category of Comparison	20th Century
Public communication	Setting	Mass communication Movies, radio, Television Private living rooms
Private lives protected	Politicians Private/ public lives	Private lives known
Public interested Would walk for miles to spend two hours standing in a field listening to a speech about national affairs	How involved is the audience?	Audiences restless Short attention span
Orator	Type of engagement	Speaker
Fire and sword Conquest	Type of speech	Intimate discloser based on conciliation
Lincoln Webster, Sumner, Clay	Examples of politicians	John F Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton
90 minutes to two hours	Length of speech	Shorter, less than 30 minutes
Newspapers reprinted text	How do newspapers treat speeches?	Advertising takes over newspapers – can’t waste advertising space on politics
	Steps in Argumentation
Spent time defining their terms	Defining terms	Don’t bother – Don’t have time
Explored the range of available evidence Routinely laid out the range of policy alternative for examination – like rhetoricians or lawyers building a case	How expansive is the argument?	No scrutinization of alternatives in depth Argue by hitting and running
Four or five sides	How many sides of an argument?	Flattened to two sides
Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric In decline Interest in mass persuasion
Tested the ability to recall previous arguments and the literature of the past	Importance of Memory	Americans can’t refer to previous literature Little in contemporary education cultivates memory
Newspapers Marconi – wireless telegraph	Mass media	Broadcast media of radio and tv increased information – displacing the newspaper
Yes – speaking and thinking go together	Does the speaker write the speech?	No – speechwriters Speaking and thinking separated
Heard only by those in the local field Newspapers printed the speech for people in far regions to hear Delayed	Scope of speech	Instantaneous Heard in 90% of homes in US and in 27 other countries all at the same time.
Preacher of news	Do politicians control the news?	Reactor to news
Words	What moves audiences	Images on television are much more powerful than words
Politics No place for personal	Impersonal, personal	Personalized self-disclosure and autobiographical
Powerful, but not predictable—fear and potential destruction	Use of pathos	To inflame the audience was a sign of demagoguery
Areas of disagreement stressed Agreement ignored	Passion or moderation	Emphasize reconciliation Burke – identification
Painted pictures with images and words	Relation between words and images	Images presented first Words worked as caption pictures
Lack of voice projection limited women’s political speaking	Gender dynamics	Technology of radio and TV amplification opens speech up to women
Lone speaker Family absent	Is the family included	Wives, children, pets are close by
Stable party platform comes 1st Personality secondary	Party vs personality	Unstable party platform Personality as a commodity is primary

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Fame vs Celebrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Fame vs Celebrity

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 19 Jan 2024 16:11:31 +0000

Orientation

Questions about fame and celebrity

Everyday
Kin-based
Occupy local places

My claim in this article is that fame and celebrity, while having the common characteristics above, are fundamentally different and emerge at different points in history.

My sources

My direction in this article

What is “Primary Fame” Prior to the 18th Century?

Fame in social evolution

Fame is rare, connected to deeds done that are notorious

Means of cultural transmission

Power bases

How long does fame last?

What do famous people and their publics give to each other?

What is Celebrity?

Theories of Celebrities

Celebrities have fans

Rapid rise and fall

Fans and their celebrities

Secondary Fame

Table 1 is a summary of the differences between fame and celebrity.

Fame vs Celebrity

Fame	Category of Comparison	Celebrity
5,000 years ago Agricultural civilizations to the end of the 19th century	Time period	End of 19th century to present
High Religious (Catholics, Protestants) and political authority (Kings) Military heroes, artists	Evaluation of authority	Low Decline of religious and political authorities Heroes and heroines in movies, music and sports
Ascribed or achieved Achieved – Renaissance artists in open competition	How their status was achieved	Achieved (being discovered)
Rare	How easy to accomplish?	Very difficult but more frequent (class mobility opens up some possibilities)
Public strangers (crowds)	Targeted audience	Mass strangers (fans)
Literature, theatre Monuments Oral – storytelling, mimes, minstrels. Folk tales, mystery plays	Mediums of transmission	Mass communication Newspapers, photography, cinema, radio, television
Beyond locales, to regions spread to empires through reputation	Scope – how far it expands	Beyond locales to regions nations and in some cases international
Legitimacy, charisma, competency	Power bases	Charisma, Sexual power Competency
Survives over generations	How long does it last?	Ephemeral Instant recognition
Reputation, skills Actions (military, artists) Inheritance (kings, aristocrats)	What are its characteristics?	How a person appears physically, skills and actions in some cases
Most distant	Degree of exposure	Less distance because of fan magazines, television appearances
Blessings, healings Awe	What the audience receives	Vicarious satisfaction of living life through stars Titillation, awe
No reciprocity (does not need audience)	Nature of person of Notoriety and audience	Minor reciprocitythrough fan attendance at concerts, films, sporting events—cheering, booing (needs audience)
Little impact Character	Star pathologies	Significant impact – lack of privacy, psychological disorders Narcissism mania, schizophrenia, paranoia
None Not attached	Audience pathologies	Fan pathologies: Stalking Killing themselves when celebrities die
Larger than life Not commodities	How are notorious people held?	Larger than life Celebrities become commodities
		Relics of the dead – Signed autographs Homes are shrines
Long term loyalty	Loyalty	Fickle – rarely exclusive or lifelong Fads, fashions Simmel—fashion makes people radioactive
Men – with rare exceptions	Gender representation	Men and women (technological amplification makes it easier for women)

Fame vs Celebrity in the History of Politics

The impact of the electronic age on politics

Means of communication, accessibility private life and the length of speeches

Politicians as preachers of news vs politicians as reactors to news

On the hot seat: celebrity presidents and instantaneous communication

From rhetoric and newspapers to broadcast media

From argumentation with many sides to playing tag with two sides

From speechwriting to teleprompters

From respect to disrespect of the past

From hellraiser to moderate

How the electronic age helped women politicians

From party to personality

Two Forms of Notoriety in Politics: Fame vs Celebrity

19th Century	Category of Comparison	20th Century
Public communication	Setting	Mass communication Movies, radio, Television Private living rooms
Private lives protected	Politicians Private/ public lives	Private lives known
Public interested Would walk for miles to spend two hours standing in a field listening to a speech about national affairs	How involved is the audience?	Audiences restless Short attention span
Orator	Type of engagement	Speaker
Fire and sword Conquest	Type of speech	Intimate discloser based on conciliation
Lincoln Webster, Sumner, Clay	Examples of politicians	John F Kennedy, Nixon, Clinton
90 minutes to two hours	Length of speech	Shorter, less than 30 minutes
Newspapers reprinted text	How do newspapers treat speeches?	Advertising takes over newspapers – can’t waste advertising space on politics
	Steps in Argumentation
Spent time defining their terms	Defining terms	Don’t bother – Don’t have time
Explored the range of available evidence Routinely laid out the range of policy alternative for examination – like rhetoricians or lawyers building a case	How expansive is the argument?	No scrutinization of alternatives in depth Argue by hitting and running
Four or five sides	How many sides of an argument?	Flattened to two sides
Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric and poetry	Study of rhetoric In decline Interest in mass persuasion
Tested the ability to recall previous arguments and the literature of the past	Importance of Memory	Americans can’t refer to previous literature Little in contemporary education cultivates memory
Newspapers Marconi – wireless telegraph	Mass media	Broadcast media of radio and tv increased information – displacing the newspaper
Yes – speaking and thinking go together	Does the speaker write the speech?	No – speechwriters Speaking and thinking separated
Heard only by those in the local field Newspapers printed the speech for people in far regions to hear Delayed	Scope of speech	Instantaneous Heard in 90% of homes in US and in 27 other countries all at the same time.
Preacher of news	Do politicians control the news?	Reactor to news
Words	What moves audiences	Images on television are much more powerful than words
Politics No place for personal	Impersonal, personal	Personalized self-disclosure and autobiographical
Powerful, but not predictable—fear and potential destruction	Use of pathos	To inflame the audience was a sign of demagoguery
Areas of disagreement stressed Agreement ignored	Passion or moderation	Emphasize reconciliation Burke – identification
Painted pictures with images and words	Relation between words and images	Images presented first Words worked as caption pictures
Lack of voice projection limited women’s political speaking	Gender dynamics	Technology of radio and TV amplification opens speech up to women
Lone speaker Family absent	Is the family included	Wives, children, pets are close by
Stable party platform comes 1st Personality secondary	Party vs personality	Unstable party platform Personality as a commodity is primary

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Fame vs Celebrity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part II

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 11:22:45 +0000

Summary of Part I

In Part I of my article, I described how initially the field of social psychology had deep roots in the socio-cultural traditions of Wundt, Royce, Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead. But by the beginning of World War I a shift towards individualism can be seen in the work first of the behaviorist Watson, and most powerfully in the work of Floyd Allport, Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists. When it came to understanding group life these social atomists only tolerated three kinds of groups:

Fleeting face-to-face groups (interactional groups)
Groups that were in laboratory situations (interactional groups)
Derived groups which were mass aggregates based on polling

Missing were reference groups. To keep all of this straight, please see the table below. In Part II of my article, I present the reference group theory’s criticisms of two more sociological social psychologists – the dialogical psychology of Ivana Markova and the social construction theory of Kenneth Gergen.

Types of Social Groups

Category of Comparison	Interpersonal Groups	Derived Social groups	Intrinsic Groups
Social structure	Small face-to-face Aggregates	Large mass aggregates Publics	Small face-to face organic groups Reference groups
Who is it directed to?	In everyday life to particular individuals	A pollster No contact with others in the poll	Roles enacted independently of particular personalities
Examples	Sexual advances, some acts of aggression or circumventing another person who is blocking a doorway	Men, women, blacks, senior citizens, deaf, unemployed, homeless (mass aggregates)	Married persons, occupational work groups A local Baptist Church, a Hells Angels club
Provision of resources	No practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity	At its best, state provides practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity	No practical resources for the formation and maintenance of identity
Duration of group	No institutional structure Created and dissolved in the social situation	Categories of groups remain members are born and die	Maintain institutional structure as members come and go
Ontogenetic development	Does not track purpose and development over time One cannot make a lasting developmental projects with fleeting social interactions with strangers	Does not track purpose and development over time One cannot make a lasting developmental project out of being unemployed or retired or some other demographic membership	Can create a purpose and direction in life through Rites of passage, of status elevation or reversal Routes are available for management of reputation and self-worth
Degree of depth in social identity	Superficial: Flirting Gaining temporary attention	Oppression in these groups can keep a developmental identity from getting off the ground or it could be a stimulus to improve standing in terms of race or gender.	More threats to social identity: An academic who publishes a disastrous book; a warrior who runs away; a mother who beats her children
Definition	Populations whose members merely share a common property Experimental settings	Populations whose members merely share a common property Public opinion polls	Members are bound by local subcultures who have a history together of necessary, ongoing and deepening interactions
	Fleeting Encounters in everyday life No commitment	Longstanding engagements with commitments, agreements and conventions

War Research in World War II and Migration of European Social Psychologists

Just as in World War I, World War II catalyzed applied social psychology. They studied attitudes, troop morale and adjustments to combat conditions. Kurt Lewin developed a program to persuade housewives to change their food habits to promote the sale of U.S. savings bonds. Social psychologists were also involved in the study of psychological warfare. Bruno Bettelheim studied the effect of concentration camps on prisoners of war and The Tavistock Institute in England studied the dynamics of small groups.

Thanks to the barbarity of Hitler, there was a migration of academic refugees from Western Europe including Kohler, Lazerfeld, Lewin, Asch and Leon Festinger. France and Germany lost many psychologists to the war. The result is that after the war Yankee social psychology became the center around which social psychological research was funded for decades. There was considerable funding in Yankeedom for research in small group dynamics by the Office of Naval Research. The behavior of Europeans during World War II became the focus of Hannah Arendt’s study on Eichmann on the trial in Jerusalem. In the 1950s, Asch probed the question of why people conformed. In the 1960s Stanley Milgram set up experiments as to the conditions under which people obey.

Solomon Asch and Reference Groups

The most articulate theoretical descriptions of social dimensions of cognition were offered by Solomon Asch in his text Social Psychology. According to John Greenwood, Asch understood attitudes as being constitutionally social. They arise from mutual dependence on reference groups. For example, the racial antagonism of southerners towards Blacks is not just directed at blacks. These attitudes also function as a cementing tie to their families, neighborhoods, race, jobs, their religion and political party loyalties. For Asch there is no such thing as attitudes taken separately. Asch denies that attitudes can be equated with what people have in common as Allport claimed.

In the original Asch experiment, conformity of individuals was not in response to interpersonal pressure from strangers nor were the individuals randomly selected. The extent to which people conform is connected to whether or not they know each other and have a history together. Interestingly, for members of individualist cultures, the difference between strangers and organic groups is not as great as between collectivists in-group and out-group. This results in different cross-cultural outcomes to conformity. The Japanese are more likely to conform if they are in the presence of other Japanese than Americans will in the presence of other Americans. However, the Japanese will be less conforming than Americans in the presence of strangers.

Cold War Impact on Social Psychology

According to Valsiner, the social sciences in Yankeedom throughout the 21st century have been inseparably connected with war preparation, the waging of war as well as trying to overcome the experience of war. After World War II, the US captured control over social science institutions by its power to give grants and publishing rights. This was inseparable from the crusade against communism.

Social psychology in this century has never been free of the distorting effects of wars, both hot and cold. On the whole, Greenwood writes:

the approach was ahistorical, acultural and decontextualized. (211) Socially engaged attitudes were held to represent the psychology of psychopathology of other-directed people or “groupthink“ or nesting grounds for prejudice. (217)

In terms of research, the emphasis was on studying very small chunks of social life that could be quantitatively measured. In addition, research continued to imagine itself to be atheoretical as in the social learning theory of Bandura. In the study of a group’s conformity and/or a group’s susceptibility to persuasion, aggregates were used rather than reference groups. For example:

Lewin inspired his colleagues and students to artfully reproduce theoretical variables abstracted from the dynamics of real-life social processes in artfully managed and controlled experiments. The members of his groups were strangers.(205)

In the 60s

“Bystander effect”, discovered by Latané and Darley, of strangers’ response to cries of help were interpersonal, not social. Neither the victims or the helpers were presumed to be members of distinctive social groups. The explanations offered were diffused responsibility and failure to represent the situation as an emergency. (210)

In terms of the population chosen, there was an increasing use of college students – aggregates – as opposed to ongoing reference groups.

Lastly, social psychology from the 50s forward has continued to be driven by individualism. When individualism becomes an ideology raised against collectivism as the counter-ideology, it becomes a form of political propaganda which distorts the development of social psychology. Students such as Aronson and Zimbardo continued the individualist tradition. Even in Europe, Tajfel’s theory of social identity has its roots in Festinger’s theory of social comparison. Tajfel’s theory is an individualization of the social. It proposed a cognitive theory of prejudice as opposed to Sherif’s field studies based on reference groups.

Reference groups in the 60s

Social representation works of the 60’s and 70’s were Secord, Backman and Slavitt’s book, Understanding Social Life as well as the work of Ralph Turner. Newcome and Turner’s Social Psychology: the Study of Human Interaction was a continuation of groups as reference groups. Michael Billig’s rhetorical approach to groups has done much to restore the cultural and temporal dimensions of social phenomenon. Moscovici chose Durkheim as an appropriate ancestor for his theory of representations and would be classified as sociological.

Revolt Against Individualism

Dialogical Psychology

Mead’s contention for the social nature of the mind returned in the 1970s along with the influence of European social psychology with its emphasis and the language, interpersonal dialogue and internalization of group process. Concepts such as intersubjectivity, interactional synchrony and empathy replaced Allport’s individuals who had hard boundaries around them. Dialogical theorists insisted that we have to start with the interpersonal relationships or the dyad in order to come to understand the mind of the individual. In her book Paradigms, Thought and Language Ivana Markova argues that most of Western psychology is riddled with dualisms that are the product of Descartes. These include mind-body; mind-emotions; thought-behavior; self and other and rationalism-empiricism. In order to break away from these dualisms, we must renounce Descartes and embrace Hegel.

Hegel was the first thinker to break with the dualism theory of minds and bodies of the Cartesian paradigm. For Markova, the mutual relationship between consciousness and its world evolves from abstract to concrete, from less discriminating to more discriminating structures. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind is the story of a social psychology of the cognizing mind’s development. They are arguments about the social rather than the individualistic nature of the mind and about the social nature of the acquisition of knowledge. Hegel wants to demonstrate the fundamental misconceptions of the traditional epistemology as well as its contradictory nature.

Markova takes Hegel’s five stages in the development of consciousness in the Phenomenology of Mind:

sense data
perception
understanding
self-consciousness
reason – recognition

and creates a loose connection between these stages and the development of awareness in ontogenetic development. Secondly, in her book Human Awareness, she thickens Mead’s understanding of the development of the self by adding the emotional development of empathy. She uses the work of Selman to develop a five-phase theory of perspective taken from birth to the teenage years. She fleshes out the dialectic between Mead’s I-Me dialogues by providing specific strategies that the I and the Me use.

Criticisms of Dialogical Psychology

There is the lack of connection between dialogical self-research and mainstream psychology. In part this is because the notion of dialogue has been largely neglected in psychology and other social sciences. Another disadvantage of the theory is that it lacks a research procedure that is sufficiently common to allow for the exchange of research data among investigators. Although different research tools have been developed by dialogical psychologists, none of them are used by a majority of researchers in the field. This creates stumbling blocks for comparing research data. In addition, other researchers find the scientific work done thus far too heavily weighted on language and verbal exchange. While the theory explicitly acknowledges the importance of pre-linguistic gestures and other non-linguistic forms of dialogue, the actual research is typically taking place on the verbal level. Some researchers would like to see more emphasis on the bodily aspects of dialogue.

Social constructionists challenged Yankee individualism of Allport

In the last two decades of the 20th century in psychology, controversies in social psychology have arisen between left wing “social constructionists” and most traditional social psychologists whom social constructionists have labeled “empiricists”. These mainstream social psychologists use interpersonal or derived groups. Kenneth Gergen challenged social psychology in at least five areas:

Empiricist social psychology lacks a sense of historicity.

Social psychology subjects such as socialization, the self, and persuasion techniques are presented in a universal manner as if these processes have not changed over the course of history. Gergen begins by suggesting that the major topics social psychology studies either change over the course of history or perish for lack of interest. So, for example, let’s take Goffman’s topic of behavior in public. Historically people behave differently in public depending on how the streets are constructed (if there are streets!); what transportation is available and whether the social class composition is rigid or fluid. Social realists or social reference group theory agrees with this.

Empiricists picture the social-individual relationship in a mechanical way.

Social existence is understood as a secondary, instrumental interaction, or social life is seen as a simple aggregate of individual wills. These social atomists reduce the group to a fleeting, ephemeral aggregate which evaporates when individuals decide to dissolve their social contract. Gergen suggests that the relationship between the social and individual is co-creative and already always the case. Social reference groups theory agrees with socially constructionists on this.

Empiricists ignore the political power dynamics that go on between stratified groups—class, race and gender—in everyday life.

For example, in social psychology textbooks, inter-group relationships are treated at the end of the textbook. This implies that there are no race or class relationships in the topics of the earlier chapters such as socialization, emotions or the construction of the self.

Empiricists treat language in a descriptive way and fail to consider the manipulative nature of language.

Allport and other individualist social psychologists treat language as a simple exchange of information between equals. This ignores that people coerce, use force and mass persuasion techniques to get their way. Besides description, there are other functions of language or micro-manipulation techniques (Cialdini, Influence) that Austin points out such as commands, questions, promises, requests and expressives that go unaddressed by empiricists.

Empiricists fail to consider that social life cannot be captured in laboratories.

Lab experiments are contrived and don’t test complex social processes. According to social constructionists, social psychology does not lend itself to experimentation because of the difficulty in reproducing the meaning of everyday situations in social psychology experiments. Because social studies are more of an in-vivo construction, it cannot be objectively recorded. In order to capture it in a lab the process is slowed down and simplified. When people know they are in a contrived situation, they do not react the same way they might in a natural setting. Yet if you try to do experiments in natural settings, it is more difficult to control for all the variables which might affect the outcome.

Social Reference Criticisms of Social Constructivism

According to Greenwood, up to a point social constructionism is a justifiable reaction to the individualism and social reductionism of Allport. However:

Social constructionists overstate the subjective agency of individuals and understate the importance of group loyalties that constrain individuals — family, religion, occupational roles and club memberships.

Greenwood criticizes social constructionists such as Graumann, Danziger and Farr because they lose the concreteness of group loyalties of reference groups by dissolving social life into language and cognition. As we saw earlier, social life is much more specific and tangible than the ethereal linguistic of social relations generally presented by social-constructionists.

Social constructionists overemphasize the importance of language

What is the relationship between language, society and the individual? Because language is a necessary condition for sociality in humans, social constructionists jump to the conclusion that it is language that creates social structures. Normally we think of our language as a description of the world and a map for getting around in it. Social constructionists understand language exchange not as a collaborative effort to understand the world but an artifact through which we decide what counts as an object. An extreme version of constructionism argues that language is not about the world but a living record of the power struggles between derived social groups—class, race and gender struggles. Social identity is inseparable from the social processes of language to negotiate and manipulate, using rhetoric or propaganda. For Gergen, social dimensions of phenomena such as political stratification and economic exchange are not intrinsic properties and real in themselves independent of language, but functions of our linguistic or cognitive constructs of them.

Social Constructionists fail to understand the power of intrinsic groups to stabilize social identity

For social constructionists social identities are constructed out of socially negotiated forms of discourse. There is nothing more to identity than social discourse. They deny the intrinsically social nature of identity or that social emotions form out of loyalty to socially intrinsic groups. As most feminists recognize, changes in vocabulary, by itself, will not ensure the creation of alternative occupations, membership in clubs or higher status positions in religious groups. Greenwood points out that the Hungarian language is entirely non-sexist. One can only refer to a third party by their non-gender. Despite this, Hungary is not known for having a large number of women in the paid work-force. The social identity of a scientist doesn’t come into being and pass away depending on how people talk to him and how he talks to them in the course of a single day. The social identity of a scientist involves actions such as publication in internationally refereed journals, by peer replication of significant results and the attainment of prestigious positions.

Social constructionists fail to understand the power of intrinsic groups (reference group) to understand the social nature of emotions

Constructionists say theoretical discourse “about” emotions does not describe independent psychological states but is rather employed to serve social performing functions such as warning, excusing or endorsing. For example, claiming to be depressed is employed to excuse one’s behavior or elicit sympathy rather than to describe one’s psychological state. Talk about mental talk is largely performative. Language does not map an independent reality. Social constructions argue that emotions come from the labeling process involved in language use.

Social constructionists assume nothing more than that reified social labels exist which are socially constructed. This ignores the fact that emotions are socially constituted for purposes connected to the conventions of long-standing social groups. For example, for a man to be able to admit they are hurt or sad rather than angry in an Anger Management class may be transformative for the man as an individual in opening up a greater range of emotions. The same is true of women who can learn to say they are angry instead of being “upset”. However, both men and women have to face their reference groups who may not like men who express hurt or humiliation or women who express anger. Those reference group loyalties and expectations are not going to dissolve just because these individual men and women have gone to therapy.

The social constitution of emotions from reference groups

Beneath the froth: unconscious grounding of socially constituted emotions

The socially constituted nature of emotions does not include all emotions. Emotions such as physiological pain or sensations like itching or hunger are not discussed. The non-social emotions are also excluded like rage or fear that we share with non-social, non-linguistic animals.

Socially constituted emotions are grounded by three deeper levels. First, different cultures take pride in different things such as home-building, virginity, academic achievements or birds they have bred. Second are the social conventions and agreements about how to behave in these settings. What is expected and how to play one’s role in a reference group within a culture. Thirdly, within this reference group we are motivated to be included, hold prestige, be honored and respected, have a good reputation, achieve power or have responsibilities. These commitments have been identified in all ages and cultures. On the other hand, we would prefer not to be excluded, degraded, nor appear offensive to others. To summarize, social emotions are grounded in what an entire culture finds a worthy activity; the commitments in our reference group shares within the culture and the social motivations that follow from them. None of this necessarily involves social labeling of emotions that social constructions make so much of.

Long standing human emotions like shame, remorse, pride, envy, jealously, anger, guilt and disappointment are socially constituted. Shame does not occur in us spontaneously and independently of imagined evaluation by our reference groups. Shame has to be taught. Parents would wait a lifetime for purely spontaneous expressions of shame in their children. We have to learn to represent and come to treat certain classes of actions or failure to act as degrading and humiliating and reflecting negatively on our identity. Initially epileptic seizures are reacted to by the epileptic with distress and fear. Only later is the epileptic taught to label their arousal as shame, pride or disappointment.

The depth of our social identities – what events trigger in us such as pride, shame or indifference – are connected to the presence of our loyalties to constituted groups and the social virtues we aspire to within them. Cheating on an exam will inspire more disgust in a teacher than would theft upset a cashier at a market. Failure to support a comrade in the military means more to a soldier than to a lawyer who fails to support another lawyer. Such characteristically human emotions and motives do not simply occur in atomistic isolation.

Social constructivists enmesh the relationship between individualism and empirical research methods

Social constructionists dismiss all experimental methods as inherently individualist. Constructionists and phenomenologists argue that the experimental approach is narrowly restricted because cognitive structures used to develop the research design are already products of society and a specific historical trajectory—individualistic.

For example:

Samuelson explains why social psychologists settled on experimental method because of pressure to publish or perish which encouraged swift, piecemeal unread and unreadable publications loaded on method but with little meaning. (227) Actual social groups were gradually replaced by hypothetical groups that had a purely statistical reality. (224)

Greenwood is skeptical that by itself, commitment to more sophisticated statistical techniques was responsible for the abandonment of a more sociological social psychology. The reason was because its neglect is at least as old as the interwar years. It is true that the development of American social psychology was affected by grant funding agencies such as Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford, Sage and the Office of Naval Research. The Ford and Sage foundations were unlikely to fund research that would undermine psychological foundations of autonomy and political liberal individualism. It is also true that social psychologists were steered by these agencies in a direction of small groups rather than large groups and their power dynamics. However, Greenwood says, these factors seem insufficient to explain the specific neglect of the reference group. Social and political factors may explain why American social psychology focused on certain topics at the expense of others (why aggression became a topic) but not at the neglect of the social dimensions of the topics studied. (Why some classes, religions, region of the United States are more aggressive than others).

As Greenwood argues:

the problem was not that experimental method precluded studying the social dimensions of human psychology, but because of the impoverished conception of social groups that came to inform experimental programs of American social psychology. (160)

All experiments of science are not, in their nature, individualist. As mentioned earlier, the experimental methods of social psychologists such as Sherif, Asch and Milgram all captured some very deep truths about our sociality using experimental methods that were far from contrived. Asch traced social group orientation to the role they played by reference groups. Secondly, it is important to understand why there aren’t more studies using reference groups as a base for experiments, not dispensing with experiments, per se.

Greenwood insists that the possibility of experimental social psychology should be directed at the exploration of socially engaged psychological states based on reference groups. It is legitimate and achievable. Individuals do not have to be reduced to individual psychological states in order to be analyzed using research methods. One of the virtues of experimental role-playing is its potential ability to reproduce the social demands of everyday life rather than the peculiar demands of ambiguous laboratory experiments employing deception. The social dimensions of human psychology could be studied experimentally as long as the subjects in experimental groups were pre-selected members of reference social groups.

Social constructionists have misunderstood the place of pragmatism in American social psychology

The original pragmatists Peirce, James, Dewey and Mead were all pro-science and used the experimental method. With the possible exception of William James, all would have criticized Allport and the empiricists as being individualistic (Mead, Dewey) and nominalist (Peirce). Yet none of them would have criticized the very idea of conducting experiments. In social psychology both Sherif and William Thomas were committed pragmatists and Sherif’s work on inter-group relationship was experimental.

When social constructivists and phenomenologists claim the mantle of pragmaticism as their own, they are taking into the bargain a more idealist version of pragmaticism of Richard Rorty.

Social Constructionists overly politicize the field of social psychology in order to understand the predominance of individualist social psychology

Lastly, there is no necessary relationship between the socio-political orientation of the scientists and whether or not they are for or against the experimental method. For example, Sherif and Asch were both socialists yet both were committed to the scientific method. The idea of linking science to capitalism and proposing that only liberals portray science in a favorable light as a problem is a product of the New Left in the 60s, the Frankfurt School and the legacy of Western Marxism which had severed its hopes for a place of science in its vision of the future.

Overview of the History of Yankee Social Psychology

Starting with continental Europe in the middle of the 19th century, social psychology was concerned with how society was imported into the mind of the individual to create an internalized social life. These were the concerns of Adam Smith and David Hume. In Germany Herder (with language) and Herbert (with Folk psychology) continued the emphasis in cross-cultural comparisons of social life. Espinas and Darwin drew references between humans and other animals. Darwin compared the gestures and emotional life of humans and chimps. Espinas compared the social life of humans to the social life of insects. What is provocative is that for the first 60 years of psychology (1850-1900) social psychology was comparative psychology (with other animals), cultural and dominated by Europe. There was no individualism in social psychology nor was it prevalent in the United States.

A transition figure beginning in the 1880s was Wilhelm Wundt who wanted to study the psychology of individuals in laboratories while at the same time developing his own version of cross-cultural psychology. Individualism came out in its brashest form in the social Darwinism of Spencer in England and Sumner in the United States. The avalanche towards individualist social psychology began the pragmatist work of William James and erupted into full scale ideologies in the form of Watson’s behaviorism. Two different forms of individualist psychology began to develop on separate sides of the Atlantic just before the outbreak of war:

Behaviorism in the US (perspective of the observer)
Gestalt perception theory in Germany (perspective of the actor)

Both forms of psychology agreed that the starting point of social psychology ought to be within the individual. The differences were that behaviorism examined conduct and gestalt probed human perception. Between the wars Floyd Alport’s behaviorism insisted that there was nothing in social life that could not be explained by individual psychology. This included public opinion and rumors.

It is tempting to imagine that this individualist version of social psychology went unopposed in this time period, but that is not the case. Alongside the behaviorism and social atomism of Floyd Allport and the individualist symbolic interaction of Blumer, there was a tendency toward a continuation of a sociological social psychology which inherited and developed the ideas of Adam Smith and David Hume. The work of Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead kept the sociological social psychology alive in the United States. At the same time, in Russia the work of Vygotsky built upon and expanded the work of Mead. Vygotsky and his comrades Luria and Leontiev developed the first explicitly socialist psychology which included a continuation of comparative psychology, added a historical dimension to social psychology, explained the social origin of higher mental functions and developed a cooperative theory of learning (through the zone of proximal development).

During the 1920s and 1930s individualist social psychology continued in the field of mass behavior in the form of Walter Lippman’s pessimistic book, Public Opinion. Sociological social psychology responded with Reich’s Mass Psychology of Fascism, and Bettelheim’s writings on the psychology of concentration camp victims. Undeterred by the horrors of war in Europe, behaviorist social psychology continued blithely along churning out public opinion polls, including attitudes about everything but power politics and political economy.

During World War II many European social psychologists fled Europe and contributed some of the best research on group dynamics. This included Asch’s experiment on conformity, and Sherif’s experiments on inter-group conflict. This was followed in the 60s by Moscovici’s study on the power of minorities to influence majorities and Milgram’s great experiment on obedience.

By the 1960s radical behaviorism went into decline. Goffman’s work on stigma, life in mental institutions, focused groups and behavior in public added a Durkheimian slant to a wide variety of social life. Up until the 1960s the field of crowd psychology was dominated by the legacy of the right wing ideas of Le Bon and called by later theorists “mass hysteria theory”. New crowd theorists developed two more moderate competing theories – “emergent norm theory” and “structural functionalist theory”. By the early 1970s more radical left-wing theories of crowds developed largely from the experience of crowds during the social movement of the 60s. My discussion of crowd psychology can be found in my article Crowds, Masses and Movements: Right-Wing and Left-Wing Macro Social Psychology.

In the 80s and 90s behaviorist individualist empiricism was attacked in its description of how people were socialized by two new forms. One that emerged out of Europe was the dialogical self of Hermans and Markova. The second one from the US is in Kenneth Gergen’s social constructionism. Meanwhile in the late 1990s John Greenwood sought to revive the reference group theory of Asch and Sherif. From this position he criticized both dialogical psychology and social constructionism. Lastly, individualist social psychology has become more cognitive rather than behavioral. The work of Festinger on cognitive dissonance theory was carried on by Aronson and Zimbardo.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part II first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part I

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 21 Dec 2023 03:05:20 +0000

Orientation

Developing a Marxist social psychology is a very important aspect of explaining what is going on within the individual in relation to society as well as what is going on in small group interactions between themselves. What we find when we examine social psychology in Yankeedom is what you might suspect, and that is social contract theory. Here the individual is understood prior to and the center of attention. The group is secondary and derivative and attached to the individual as something voluntary and accidental. This is opposed to a Marxian understanding of society as necessary, involuntary and causal. My two articles follow the work of John Greenwood and other social reference theorists and their attempt to expose the individualist nature of Yankee social psychology. While social reference theory is not Marxist it is deeply social in the way that is similar to the work of George Herbert Mead and well worth studying.

This article emerged from my lecture notes for a course I taught in social psychology. I felt that students needed to know the history of the field and since there were no books that covered the full two hundred years, I thought I’d write my own. For the early history I used Gustav Jahoda’s book A History of Social Psychology. For the early social psychologists I referenced Jaan Valsiner and Rene Van der Veer’s work The Social Mind. For the rise of individualism in social psychology, I used Robert Farr’s The Roots of Modern Social Psychology. The social reference orientation of John D. Greenwood is the heart of both Part I and Part II. His books are The Disappearance of the Social In American Social Psychology and Realism, Identity and Emotion. I’ve relied on two wonderful books by Ivana Markova to represent the dialogical self in Part II. They are Paradigms Thought and Language and Human Awareness.

My article is divided into two parts. In part I describe how the early social psychologists were very social in their study of the social-individual relationship. People like Wundt, Royce, James, Baldwin, Cooley, Thomas and Mead, as different as they were, all agreed that the individual was constitutionally social. Then beginning with behaviorists, Floyd Allport, Herbert Blumer and symbolic interactionists and the rise of experimental groups, social-individual dynamic was recalibrated in individualist ways. In part II I describe the return of the social to-social psychology with the work of the theory of reference groups. At the hands of John Greenwood, using experimental groups composed of strangers is criticized as a way of understanding social groups. At the same time Greenwood’s reference group orientation criticizes two left wing social psychology theories, the dialogical psychology of Ivana Markova and social constructionism of Kenneth J. Gergen.

Sociogenetic thought in the United States: late 19th to early 20th century

What is the folk psychology of Wilhelm Wundt?

German psychology was the opposite of British empiricism, atomism that later characterized individualist social psychology in Yankeedom. Instead, for reducing the individual to the lowest elements – pain-pleasure, associations – the Germans started from the complex and refused to reduce it to the simple.

How much can you tell about the psychology of the individual by the things they make – pictures, writing, books read as well as the material they leave behind? We might say quite a bit. But what about the psychology of what a culture leaves behind in the way of tools, language, art, mythology? Are these the products of a collective mind? Why should this collective mind not have the same reality as the individual one? Folk psychologists thought it should. Volker psychology was devoted to the study of the mental products of social communities. These principles were first articulated by Herder and Vico and then carried on by Lazarus in 1851 and then by Wilhelm Wundt.

Wundt wanted to study the developmental history of the collective human soul in the mental products it left behind. To do this he studied tribal and ancient societies from around the world. Wundt filled ten volumes of folk psychology between 1900 – 1920. He thought the comparative-historical methods of folk psychology are at least as objective and scientific as the methods of experimental psychology. Why is this? Introspection was rejected because it will not tell us about the historical dimension of the individual which folk psychology addresses. Furthermore, introspection captures fleeting assessments which do not even cover the ontogenesis of the individual, let alone the historical dimension.

Yankee pragmaticism

Valsiner tells us that major social changes were afoot at the end of the 19th century, including:

Industrialization – Late 19th and early 20th century social science was obsessed with the problem of alienation. It’s unifying theme was the destructive result of industrialization which was eliminating the traditional small town and destroying the community based on personal ties.
Increase in urbanization (NYC grew twelve-fold during the 1890s).
Increases in immigrant populations.
Efforts toward racial and moral purification.
Evangelicalism, including campaigns for social hygiene against venereal diseases.
Progressive political era filled with “muckraking” which lasted until 1916.

Out of this malestream of changes it became difficult to contemplate the search for truth as independent of human wants and needs. To the extent that the American people could tolerate philosophy at all, this philosophy would need to be down-to-earth and practical, based on what could people do. The truth of philosophy should be measured against its consequences.

The authentic test for truth is if it works in action. This need was a match made in heaven for philosophers like John Dewey and William James. James characterized the universe as like a joint stock company and our action in the market is a real factor in the course of events. As we shall see shortly, the advent of pragmatism led to the diminishing of an emphasis on dialectical synthesis that Royce and Baldwin had been developing out of the Hegelian tradition.

In spite of the climate of social Darwinism in the 2nd half of the 19th century, social theorist Trotter’s Instincts of the Herd in Peace and in War, Graham Wallas in The Great Society, Our Social Heritage and in both Hobhouse’s Mind in Evolution and Development and Purpose maintained that evolved human intelligence enables humans to surmount the limitations of their biological heritage. What united these first great micro-social psychologists was the search to understand by what process social life was internalized by individuals.

Josiah Royce and James Mark Baldwin

For philosopher Josiah Royce the internalization of society into subjective life allows the person to construct subjectivity (what the individual wants) in terms of a contrast with his dialectical opposite (what he thinks others expect of him). The development of the self takes place through constructive imitation that builds ever more complex oppositions on the basis of new social experiences. Internalization is the process by which social experiences become functional in the self-system.

For James Mark Baldwin, a person’s actual self makes constant effort set against the constant resistance in the actual world. Complex imitation involves increasing experimentation with different aspects of a situation and going beyond it. Play, art and fiction are examples where the situation is used as a scaffold to make new things.

Baldwin argued there are three stages of child social perception:

Projective – is conscious of others but not herself—people are objects.
Subjective – also conscious of himself – people are special objects, active but arbitrary.
Ejective – conscious of others as similar to herself, they are social fellows.

Baldwin was very ambitious and also attempted to harness individual development to social evolution. He suggested that whole societies could be at a certain stage of cognitive development. The stages were:

Prelogical (diffused) – primitive societies
Logical (differentiated, hierarchical) integration – differentiation oppositions
Hyper-logical – dialectical synthesis – affective generalization – modern societies

Baldwin ran into trouble with cultural relativists because this characterization of people in primitive societies made them less developed mentally. However, he laid the foundation for the study of child development undertaken later by Piaget and Vygotsky.

Cooley and Thomas

Cooley was a master of what has been called “sympathetic introspection”. He provided narrative accounts of “stories” individuals told themselves as they were participating in their social worlds. Cooley was the first to distinguish “primary” face-to-face” groups such as play groups of children from families and neighborhoods and socialization forces which the individual identifies as “we”. A person puts himself into intimate contact with various sorts of persons and allows them to be aware in himself of a life similar to their own. Larger, anonymous groups to which there is little affinity might be called a “they” or an “it” group.

These socialization groups help to build what Cooley called a “looking glass self” which he divided into three parts:

How we imagine we appear to other people
How we imagine they are reacting to us
The accompanying emotional reaction – pride or dismay

While Cooley and Baldwin distinguished primary from secondary groups in general, they failed to give explicit categorization to other social groups such as aggregates, reference groups or collectivities.

Lastly, sociologist William Thomas pointed out that objective social truths do not guarantee in the slightest that people will follow them. He famously said if human beings define situations as real, they are real in their consequences regardless of whether they are objectively true or not. A good example of this is racism. If physical anthropologists could control our vocabulary, they would abolish the word “race”. Why? Because scientifically it has no meaning. Because of the intense mating between races over the last thousands of years – much of it forced – whatever significant genetic differences between races which might have existed no longer exist. Yet this does not stop people from deciding not to marry someone because they want to maintain their “racial purity”. As long as people believe in this and act accordingly, the more racism becomes a social fact, regardless of whether or not there is a genetic basis for it.

George Herbert Mead

Darwinian beginnings

Though Mead was a social psychologist, he started with Darwin. He was a comparative psychologist in his whole approach to social psychology. This approach can be seen in his reference to the behavior of snakes, insects, birds, cats, dogs, horses, cows and the higher primates. Mead asked how is it that an immaterial mind can arise from a material world? Furthermore, by what process can immaterial thoughts result in material actions? Mead saw Darwin’s theory of evolution as a new beginning, an alternative to both mechanistic explanations of the physical sciences and the teleological explanations of idealists and spiritualists.

Mead drew from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals as well as on Wundt’s work to develop importance of gestures in socialization. In the winter semester of 1888-1889 Mead enrolled in Wundt’s classes in Leipzig, Germany. Later, in his own work, Mead showed gestures were systems of social relationships, not isolated expressions. He was very interested in the relationship between the hand and the development of the central nervous system.

Social origin of mind

Mead was critical of Wundt for presupposing mind in his physiological psychology. Mind, the basis of Wundt’s experimental science can only be the mind of an individual. Mead thought the mind was social in its origins. Mead shows how mind emerges naturally from the conversation of gestures that occurs at the lowest level in the evolutionary scale. When a person speaks, she speaks to herself as well as to others. Mead agrees that it is possible to have society without minds, for example, in insect social organization, but not mind without a society.

Furthermore, Mead showed how the self does not evolve out of itself in isolation but is a product of social interaction. This actual social interaction is then internalized into the form of roles. While studying at Harvard Mead was more influenced by Royce than William James. Cooley introduced Mead to the writings of Adam Smith, (Theory of Moral Sentiments) who is the source of Mead’s idea about assuming the role of the other. According to Smith in everyday market transitions buyers and sellers assume each other’s roles by imaging what they might say. In assuming the role of the other with regard to ourselves, we become an object to ourselves. Our awareness of others is a necessary prerequisite to our awareness of self (Markova, Human Awareness). Mead showed how an actress, in the course of interacting, might incorporate the perspective of the other in her own perspective and become an object to herself, become self-conscious rather than merely conscious.

Mead was trying to create a theory of meaning which is midway between introspectionists on the one hand and behaviorists on the other. Meaning should be more action-oriented than the introspectionists’ views of Wundt, but more mentalistic than the behaviorists. He drew from Wilhelm Dilthey in arguing that meaning is not derived from the individual but within existing systems of relationships.

Types of play, generalized other, biographical selves and I-me dialogues.

Environments can change in uncontrollable ways such as an earthquake, but the organism involves itself in a social process that follows such sudden changes and reconstructs new adaptive environments. It is in this process that social institutions emerge. Other selves stand upon different bases from that of physical objects. Physical objects are merely objects of perception, while the other selves are perceiving subjects as well as perceived objects. Mead agreed with Cooley about the importance of play groups. In fact, it was in play groups that children were first socialized through both let’s pretend play and what Mead called the game. Both these forms of play taught children to develop role-making (pretend play) and role-taking (designed play). The socialization of the individual included cultivating an objective self – what Mead called “the generalized other” – and a subjective self – which he called the biographical self.

These two identities became internalized by the middle of childhood through dialogue with each other. Most situations require the individual to balance out the needs of the subjective side: “what do I want in the situation” and from the objective side “what do others expect of me”. Mead labeled the side that weighs what others expect him to do, the “me” side and the part that defends their immediate self-interest is the “I” part. The internal conversation Mead called “I-me” dialogues.

Beyond Descartes Dualism

Markova points out that the histories of Western philosophy are often accounts of the epistemological conflict between rationalism and empiricism and we are asked to choose between them. Such histories obscure the fact that these rival philosophies are both mutually exclusive opposites within a larger system of Descartes. Thanks to Descartes we have the following dualisms:

Cartesian dualisms

Mind	Category of comparison	Body
Knower	Epistemology	Known
Isolated individual	Inner-outer world	Outer world
Self	Social relationships	Others
Rationalism	Epistemological system	Empiricism
Cognitivism	Theories of social psychology	Behaviorism
Chomsky	Study of language theorists	Watson, Skinner
Syntactic Structure	Books about language	Verbal Behavior

As a philosopher, Mead sought to overcome Cartesian dualism in all its forms.

The real incompatibility is not between rationalism and empiricism, but between the paradigms of Descartes and Hegel. Mead, Wundt and Vygotsky were part of a tradition that goes back to Herder, Humboldt and Hegel. For them humanity was constitutionally social with social life being responsible for creating language, the mind and the self. In referring to the history of modern psychology, Markova says that between 1912 and 1920 psychology books were written as if behaviorism had laid to rest the ghost of Descartes with behaviorism’s own anti-cognitive stance. But psychologists did nothing of the kind. For Watson, how the mind interacts with the body is to be found now in the larynx rather than in the pineal gland of Descartes. But this was not a full-blown revolution. Behaviorism just switched from the rationalist, mind side of Descartes to the empiricist action side of dualities. They really just switched to the opposite pole within the same tradition. When psychology became a “science of behavior” it did not progress beyond Cartesian dualism.

Language

The same is true for language. The social nature of language is undermined whether one accepts the rationalism of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structure or the empiricism of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. What both have in common is a physiological search for the mind. The psycholinguistic traditions in the study of language and thought derive from Descartes rather than from Hegel. Speech for Mead is social not physiological. Mead suggests the origin of mind is not in the brain but is in language. It is the person’s inner speech that creates the autonomy of the self. This is in contrast to Watson who treats thinking as sub-vocal speech. It’s potentially detectable as minute innervations in the larynx.

Mead is rightly grouped with pragmatists such as James, Dewey and Peirce but there are important differences between them. Peirce and Mead are more social in their theory of truth. As Lewis and Smith point out in American Sociology and Pragmatism:

The lines of influence run from Peirce; Royce to Mead. Epistemological, Dewey and James were nominalists; Pierce and Mead were realists. The social psychology of Mead is closer to the pragmatics of Peirce than it is to either the pragmatism of James or the instrumentalism of Dewey. Mead socialized Dewey’s philosophy in his book Philosophy of the act. (66-68)

Please see my article Collectivist, individualist and Communist Selves Part I for more detail about this section and Mead.

Invasion of individualist social psychology

Wundt’s Folk Psychology is rejected in the US

Between 1865 and 1914 something like 10,000 Americans studied in Germany. However, the rise of pragmatism in philosophy and behaviorism in psychology both emphasized the individual and laboratory experiments to the neglect of a comparative historical and cross-cultural psychology. With behaviorism, the model for studying human behavior was natural science, not social science. The split between the two approaches was amplified by World War I where the United States and Germany fought on different sides. Wundt’s increasingly vociferous support for German nationalism cut him off from his many former students in the US. After World WWI, the central relevance of Germany as the source of knowledge was in steep decline.

As we saw earlier Wundt had his hands in both experimental psychology and folk psychology. But his students in the US, along with the historians of psychology, ignored Wundt’s Folk Psychology. According to Lewis and Smith, most of Wundt’s American students almost completely ignored folk psychology which were grounded in alien philosophical tradition of Leibniz and Kant, not Locke, Hume, Mill or Berkeley. It is not widely known that Wundt also wrote ten volumes of Volk psychology between 1900 and 1920. The fact that historians of psychology have overlooked the folk psychology of Wundt even though he developed it earlier than his experimental work is a good example of American psychology’s efforts to deny its humanistic, historical roots in favor of the ideals of the physical sciences (45)

The reduction of Wundt to a laboratory psychologist was deepened by a student of Wundt, Titchener. Titchener gave an empirical , associationist twist to Wundt’s philosophy of mind.

Wundt’s Legacy

Both social constructionists (more on them later) and social atomists (Allport and other behaviorists) want to claim Wundt as their own. But contrary to the experimentalists’ claims, Wundt did not come to folk psychology in his old age (implying that only an enfeebled old man could be interested in such things). His interest in folk psychology existed throughout his life. Even schools of later periods (cognitive psychology in the 1950s) and cross-cultural psychology in the 1990s distanced themselves from Wundt’s folk psychology.

On the other hand, social constructionists claim Wundt as their own because it seemed that by advocating for a folk psychology he was renouncing the experimental work he did in the lab. In fact, Wundt was interested in both all throughout his life. Wundt did not suggest that the folk community had a life of its own, a super-mental mind independent of the mental life of individuals. According to Greenwood, Wundt insisted that higher cognitive processes were grounded in neurophysiologic systems of individuals.

Behaviorism denies consciousness as a field of social study

Watson attacked the imprecision in the calibration of the introspectionist research instrument. Watson wanted to rid psychology of consciousness, self and mind. Instead, he wanted to focus on what could be measured precisely. Since at the time measuring behavior made more sense than tracking individuals’ self-reports. His manifesto was comparable to other social purification efforts that were occurring at the time in the United States. Watson’s call for a revolution in psychology was supported by Dewey and James.

The advancement of the behaviorist tradition in America led to the narrowing of the discipline of psychology in the following ways:

The issue of the social nature of the mind disappeared from the discourse of American psychologists. Most of the sociogenetic thinking became “exiled” into other areas of social sciences.
The study of the higher mental functions was ignored.
The cross-cultural differences in psychological states were neglected.
The impact of history on psychological processes was ignored.
The Darwinian side of psychology was neglected by behaviorists.

Yet behaviorism widened psychology in other ways. For example, the study of the behavior of animal species compared to the functions of human behavior was scandalous to humanists and religious evangelicals but it had the blessing of the pragmatists. The combination of pragmatism and behaviorism constituted an ideological take-over of American psychology.

Mead’s legacy is misunderstood: Herbert Blumer and the symbolic interactionists

As famous and respected as he is now, Mead had little influence over the historical development of social psychology because he was a Hegelian and social psychology developed within a Cartesian paradigm. Also, Mead followed Peirce instead of the more individualist James and Dewey as did his fellow sociologists at Chicago.

Mead did not win many followers for himself because at a time when social psychologists were demanding more precision Mead referred to society in at least three different ways:

as represented social groups
as people as co-present in social interaction
as society as a whole

When Mead died in 1931 his course on social psychology was taken over by Herbert Blumer and the course changed substantially. The problem today is that many social psychologists present Mead’s work as more or less synonymous with the work of Herbert Blumer. But as we shall see, Blumer, like Thomas and Cooley, was a psychic interactionist with their roots firmly planted in the social contract theory of Rousseau. Blumer was able to see how Mead’s social psychology opposed Watsonian behaviorism, but he failed to appreciate the radical differences between the psychical interactionism of Thomas and Cooley as opposed to the social realism of Mead. He proposed a psychological social psychology which views interpretive interaction as the source of social organization.

Let’s review these differences in detail. According to Greenwood, Blumer moved increasingly away from the organicist, Darwinian model of Mead in favor of a more phenomenological orientation. Reference to interaction between organic and psychical phenomenon have virtually disappeared in Blumer’s work.

One place this can be seen is when we consider the difference between Mead’s “attitude” and Blumer’s “role”. For Mead, an attitude partly refers to a physiological base. Blumer’s role is completely social and has no physiological foundation and is more dramatological as in Goffman.

Thirdly, Blumer’s depiction of the social order was local, situational and voluntaristic. For Blumer, the active part of society appears to be no more than what is negotiated in every situation. For Blumer, a larger social order exists but only as a parameter for voluntaristic action or a power to be avoided. While there is no better “process sociologist” than Mead, he did recognize there is a relatively permanent social order which exists independently of local situations. Just like Peirce’s general laws of nature and the objective existence of the scientific community, so society is a whole that, while not independent of all individuals, is more than each taken separately.

Fourth, for Blumer, whether the social order is engaged at the micro or the macro level, social life is external to the individual. For Mead, society at all levels is already always inside of people and it is not anything that could be negotiated. Fifth, for Mead the self consists of a never-ending dialectic between the self as a subject (biographical self) and the self as an object (how I imagine others see me). According to Greenwood, there is no place in Blumer’s theory for Mead’s generalized other or collective conscience. There exist only so many individual consciences co-adapting to each other from autonomous positions. There are only flesh and blood individuals who must calculate one’s actions but not an internalized socialization. It seems that for Blumer all of social life is negotiated by the individual.

Sixth, for Mead, meaning is grounded in significant symbols for society. They are universal and objective. They have an existence which is independent of whether this or that individual negotiates what they mean or how they are interpreted. Symbols are antecedent to their use. They exist before people are born, will be there when the person dies. Meaning is based on performance which results from long-standing gestures. These meanings can be unconscious and sometimes physiological. Human beings act towards things on the basis of meanings that things have for them. But for Mead, Peirce, Durkheim and all realists, there is no such thing as meaning for me as there is for Blumer and the symbolic interactionists who followed him. There is only meaning for us.

Blumer undermined Mead’s social theory of meaning by making meanings dependent upon subjective imagination (Cooley) rather than on the objective, communal character of significant symbols. This meant that the meaning of symbols emerged through the gestures and interpretations of individuals as they interact. Meaning is based not on gestures or performance but through the interpretation of words. Because meanings are negotiated with others there is no room for an unconscious processing of symbols. Everything takes place at a conscious level.

Blumer’s emphasis on interpretation makes it difficult for making social psychology to be a science because:

For Stryker, interpretations are an extremely undesirable terminus for the explanation of human behavior. They are undesirable because there are no laws of interpretation. Without laws we can never say the interpretation was a necessary or sufficient condition for the appearance of act b. (178)

On the whole, Mead was more expansive than Blumer. His claimed that human beings were a product of two larger forces, evolutionary Darwinism on one hand and the macro-structure of society on the other. While Mead did not discuss larger social institutions very much he still understood them to be present inside individuals. Blumer was more of a micro psychological social psychologist and far more interested in how people make sense of things when they meet face to face. Blumer treated Darwinian and macro-sociological forces as unimportant. Please see my table at the end of this article for a summary.

Floyd Allport’s individualist social psychology

Decline of Darwinism

Continuing Watson’s separation of human beings from Darwin, Allport’s textbook Social Psychology ignored its comparative psychological framework on the social life of insects including wasps, bees, ants and termites. Instead:

The laboratory replaced the field as the preferred location of observing the behavior of animals.
The number of different species being studied was dramatically reduced to rats and pigeons.

Unlike Allport, social scientists at Chicago University were very much concerned with studying the metropolis. They produced urban studies on crime, juvenile delinquency and mental illness. They studied anomie and egoism in the strictly Durkheimian sense. Yet, though Durkheim’s understanding of society was the opposite of Allport’s behaviorism, what they had in common was a rejection of Darwin.

Social Atomism

Floyd Allport was an unrelenting critic of any social psychological attempt to attribute any agency to social processes beyond the individual. Allport’s methodological individualism made him hypersensitive to personifications, objectifications or reifications of society. He attacked any kind of social group as if it were a group mind of crowd psychologists.

What was social was an abstract concept of what people had in common. This is a Humean description of empirical invariance. This ignores that:

People can have common beliefs with others that do not originate in interpersonal relations. For example, they could be rooting for a professional sports team.
There are some interpersonal acts that are not common such as acts of rape or aggression.
People’s common beliefs can have a developmental history rooted in reference groups like region of the country, occupation or religion.

Allport’s commitment to behaviorism limited him to an empiricist conception of science. His behaviorist perspective played a significant role in his rejection of theories of the social reference groups states because they were often in the physical absence of actual members. His behaviorism precluded treating representative products rather than social stimuli.

Allport perceived any understanding of social life that claims existence beyond the psychology of individuals as a threat to his cherished ideals of moral individualism and to his ideals of personal autonomy and responsibility. According to Greenwood, behind this was Allport’s Kantian theory of morality. Morality is unconditionally autonomous and personal. One ought to do one’s duty for its own sake independently of whether any others are represented as having done their duty in similar circumstances.

Allport equated sociality with uniformity (conformity) and uniformity with involuntary behavior. This means that social behavior cannot be diverse or voluntary. Allport was insensitive to the fact people can conform to something voluntarily and sometime people prefer to do social activities over individual activities and that individual activities can be unpleasant but necessary. A simplified picture of Allport’s thinking about the individual and the social looks something like this:

Individual	Social
Voluntary	Involuntary
Freedom	Uniformity, conforming
Enjoyable	Necessary evil
Moral individual: autonomy	Collectivist loyalty to fascism or communism
Methodological individualism	Personification, objectification, reification
Social is what is abstract and common

Allport had his most powerful influence on social psychology between the wars.

Allport mistakenly identifies with Mead

Even though Mead was critical of Watsonian behaviorism, Allport treats Mead as a fellow behaviorist and fails to understand how profoundly Mead differed from Watson. While Mead was interested in society as a whole and the self, including the mind, Watson was interested in the relationship between a small stimulus and a micro-behavior. He was not interested in the mind or in social relationships.

Individualist Rejection of Reference Groups

Embracing the social as public, facilitation experimental groups

While American social psychologists were individualists, they accepted certain kinds of social groups like interpersonal groups. These occur when strangers interacted in face-to-face encounters in everyday life or when strangers interacted in scientific experiments. The second group is derived social groups – when individuals answered polling questions which were based on their membership as races, genders or ages.

For these social atomists, any description of social forces larger than these interactions was dismissed. For social atomists lurking beyond these atomistic relations were the dark social forces of crowds, movements and what seemed to them human irrationality. To a point this is understandable, given fascism and perceived authoritarian communism which were present in the 1930s. Yet most social psychologists, including Park, accepted uncritically some of the worst, least scientific claims of the crowd psychologists and imagined them as the only way crowds, masses and movements could be understood. See my article on macro social psychology.

Derived social groups as mass aggregates

In reaction to crowd theory, American social psychologists sought to avoid the irrational and antidemocratic tendencies they perceived in crowds by developing Tarde’s distinction between physically proximate crowds and dispersed crowds or publics. American social psychologists maintained that so long as aggregations of individuals are physically dispersed, then they exist as masses. That way the irrationalist influences of physically proximate crowds could be resisted. Allport thought that publics were less of a threat to rationality than crowds. After all, according to Allport, moderate public opinion is what guides politicians. Mass aggregates are groups that are known to each other not through face-to-face encounters, but through statistical gatherings and publishing through polls or individual interviews.

For these reasons, American social psychologists restricted experimental social psychology to publics. Social attitudes were restricted to surveys of dispersed masses of individuals. After all, according to Allport, public opinion is merely the collection of individual opinions. It has no existence except in individual minds. In the field of persuasion studies, Paul Lazarsfeld emigrated from Vienna where he helped to establish The Bureau of Applied Social Research. He became a dominate influence in the methodology of social research.

Many more radical theorists stressed that our sense of identity comes from our social location such as gender, race, age, social class – that is derived aggregate groups. However, many measures of social psychologists of identity are free of structured invitations to list and rank self-categorizations. But this is only a partial identity. Whether I am happy or embarrassed to be an Italian-American hardly helps to direct my social identity that I do not make any long-standing commitment to. For example, there is far more loyalty to my Elks club or to a local gang.

Interpersonal groups as facilitation groups and aggregates in scientific experiments

Allport was also involved in experimental facilitation groups. Facilitation studies are made when people are placed in groups with some task to be performed by themselves. The experiments consist of whether and how the variation of size and atmosphere will affect how well the task will be performed. When mass studies of attitudes such as competition and aggression were undertaken, the results were grouped on the common properties of groups such as all males within the state of Oklahoma between the ages of 21 and 25.

Interpersonal groups are not limited to experimental facilitation groups. The interpersonal groups are interactions between particular individuals in face-to-face encounters within everyday life. For example, a women resisting sexual advances is not in any particular role. She has to deal with the physical characteristics of this particular man. She cannot give a stereotypic response. If a person is blocking a door-way an individual has to adapt and change courses. Since blocking doorways is not part of a socially scripted situation the individual must make adjustments, not in any particular role to role, but as individual to individual. Social atomists think that being social begins with a face-to-face encounter. A social identity is built up from a series of fleeting, and changing social encounters. Anglo-American theorists of social cognition such as Fisk and Taylor think social cognition grows out of interpersonal situations rather than being there at the beginning. Greenwood concludes:

Anglo-American “social” psychology has never really been a social psychology. Unlike European studies of social representation (Farr and Moscovici) where attention is focused on the social dimension of cognition, Anglo-American studies of social cognition like Fiske and Taylor, focus on other persons in situations. There is no consideration of the possibility that cognition itself has social dimensions (95)

A rejection of intrinsic groups (reference groups) as subjects for experiment

The problem with the way American social psychologists have understood groups is that they ignore using an individual’s membership in intrinsic groups in their experiments. They ignore that:

Individuals have an ongoing social relationship with groups whom they get to know.
These groups provide support for individual development in the form of rituals.
They constrain the individual with norms and expectations.
They invite the individual to take a role.
Intrinsic groups themselves have a history.
A person is becoming social all the way from birth and once that infrastructure is in place they continue to be social even when they are alone.

Over time an individual develops loyalties to family of origin, religious communities or neighborhood associations and work groups. They also join clubs and over time roles are played with others interdependently through mutual role enactment. In socially intrinsic groups individuals make a commitment to abide by certain standards and agreement which both constrain the individuals while allowing for a new kind of individual development. In intrinsic social groups, society is outside and inside the individual. All human cognition is social cognition because being social is a condition for being human.

Greenwood argues that being married is not only socially significant but also enables a person to fix and develop their identity by reference to the predictable hopes and structure the institution of marriage provides. With marriage comes a predictable set of expectations about what constitutes a good reputation, along with dignity, honor and respect. All emotions which follow are inseparable from:

their social identity as a member of a reference group;
their social motivational virtues.

Every intrinsic groups provides this, not just marriages.

On the downside, most threats to identity will be connected to reference groups and their social expectations. Greenwood gives the example of a writer who publishes a disastrous book, a warrior who runs away from a battle or a mother who is caught beating her children. The problem is that with rare exceptions, American social psychologists do not conduct experiments with people with their membership of intrinsic groups (reference groups) as the focus of attention.

Mead vs Symbolic Interactionism

Mead	Category of Comparison	Blumer
Important Organicism interaction between organic and physical	Place of Darwinian evolutionary theory	Not important Phenomenological No references to biological evolution
Attitude Has a physiological referent	Social identity	Role Dramaturgical meaning
Thick Permanent social order which exists independently of local situations	How thin or thick is the social order?	Thin Temporary social order negotiated in each situation
Outside and inside The part that is inside of people and cannot be instrumentally manipulated	Is the social order inside or outside the individual	Outside Social organization sets conditions for individual action Social structure merely a tool to be used or an obstacle to be avoided
Active dialectic Self is a subject and self is an object. Me, generalized other, collective conscience	How is the self conceived?	Self as a subject but not self as an object—no “me” or generalized other or collective conscience Social negotiations are only with flesh and blood individuals, no internalization
Organic interdependency	How to understand the relationship between society and the individual	Social contract of voluntarily participating individuals
Realism (Charles Sanders Peirce)	Epistemology	Nominalism (William James)
Social theory of meaning Depends on objective communal character of significant symbols	What does meaning depend on?	Depends on the subjective imagination
Universal and objective Meaning for us	Meaning of symbols	Individual and subjective Meaning for me
Antecedent to their use	Timing of meaning	Emerges with the interaction between people as they deal with local situations.
Unconscious and physiological	Is meaning conscious or unconscious	Conscious
Gestures, performance	What is meaning based on?	After the gesture through individual interpretation of words
Sociological	Field of social psychology	Psychological

The post Yankee Micro Social Psychology Part I first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Crowds, Masses and Movements

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 09 Dec 2023 02:13:06 +0000

Orientation

Why study crowds, masses and movements?

It is tempting to imagine that as socialists we must know a great deal about crowds, masses, and in medieval thought individual meant inseparable, that is indivisible. People were defined as individuals by reference to the groups of which they were members. Group membership defined their very identity as individual units. Farr treats individualism as a product of the Renaissance and Reformation, stressing the emerging traditions of religious, political and economic liberalism. However, unlike Farr, Ivana Markova argues that it was monasticism and chivalry that contributed most towards strengthening the development of individualism in feudal society. Nikolai Berdyaev has pointed out that the individualism of the Renaissance and Humanism brought man to the limit of his ability to withstand the uncertainty and loneliness into which the Renaissance and Humanism threw him.

With the rise of capitalism, the concept of the individual came to be divorced from its original intrinsic connection with the social community. This tendency can be seen in the work of Hobbes, Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill. In psychology, individualism became connected to the Associationist theory of John Locke and the hedonistic psychology and utilitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill. Individuals came to be treated in isolation and abstraction. Individualism in its most extreme form is present in social Darwinism in the 1870s in the work of Herbert Spencer who was much more influential in the US than he was in Britain. This individualism continued with pragmatism in the late 19th and 20th centuries and with behaviorism beginning just before World War I.

The majority of the main issues to which psychology is addressing itself has been concern with the isolated individual rather than the individual as a member of a particular social group. With the aggregate of strangers thrown together in lab experiments this became the setting in which social psychologists explored what social life was supposed to be about. What is missing is the social psychology of real groups that an individual was part of, including occupational groups, church groups or extended families. These are called “reference” groups.

Reference groups

So far, the social-individual dialectic has been understood as a group mind (crowd psychology) or a social contract (individualism). The third way to put a frame around the social-individual polarity is to think of society not as a group mind but as a reference group. According to JD Greenwood (What Ever Happened to the Social in Social Psychology) the term “reference group” was introduced by Hymen and then developed in 1951 by Newcombe. An individual’s reference groups were ongoing groups with whom the individual has a commitment and history with and whose norms they are loyal to. They had shared norms and differentiated roles and they met in the same time and place. Social psychologists who represent this school included William McDougall, Omar Sheriff, William Thomas and Solomon Asch. These theorists claim that understanding social life should begin with reference groups with whom the individual has a foundation, not strangers with whom one has no commitment or history.

Reference groups are contrasted to aggregates of strangers who are thrown together for an experiment. Aggregates are statistical groups. Reference group theory also argued against conceiving of the social life as a mystical social mind hovering above individuals. The early psychologist William McDougall embraced this socially embodied individuality of the communitarians. He thought that the social groups were the source of individuality. McDougall rejected both the social mind theories of group super-individuality and also opposed social aggregate theory. This intrinsic form of group identity was followed by Baldwin, Cooley, Mead and Goffman.

For crowd or social mind theorists individuals think, feel and act differently in the physical presence of other individuals than they do in physical isolation from other individuals. For collective mind theorists like Le Bon, the mechanism of influence is grounded in hypnosis, imitation and contagion. For reference group theorists, social psychological-states are distinct from individual psychological states but not separate from them. Social life in any concrete case is the mind of an individual in a social group. Historically, in the philosophy reference group, the tradition of the individual as being socially embedded is in the philosophy of Vico and in the idealist philosophy of Hegel, Green and Royce.

Why was reference group theory lost in the shuffle?

Greenwood asks why the original form of the social in American psychology was abandoned. He gives two reasons:

It became associated with crowd theories about the emergent properties of supra-individual group minds. This was against the beliefs of those committed to empiricism, experimentalism and individualist social psychology.
It challenged principles of autonomy and rationality – the moral and political individualism most common in American psychology.

Demonization of Collective Life

Interestingly, around the same time individualism was understood in its most extreme form, any kind of group life or collective behavior was treated as if:

it was completely separate from the individual; and,
it contained all the negative tendencies such as irresponsibility, irrationality, violence and pleasure-seeking animality.

There was the tendency of some American social psychologists to follow Le Bon and Tarde in equating social behavior with the irrational and emotional behavior of crowds. Le Bon and Tarde completely overlooked and suppressed the altruistic picture of the behavior of collectivities perpetuated by crowd theorists.

Between the first and second World War the empiricist behaviorism of Floyd Allport argued there is nothing in the social world that is not first in the minds and actions of individuals. Allport maintained that social phenomena can be explained only in terms of psychological phenomena of individuals (opposite of Durkheim). Other behaviorists besides Allport denied that when people come together to create a social world, whatever the result, it is no more than the sum of individual wills. Crowds do not have a nervous system or an introspective faculty.

The following table is a summary which contrasts the three ways social psychologists have contrasted the nature of the relationship between the individual and society.

Three Ways to Understand the Relationship Between Society and Individual

Category of comparison	Aggregates (Yankeedom)	Reference groups (Yankeedom)	Social mind (Europe—France, Germany, Italy)
Definition	Populations of individuals that merely have some property in common and do not represent themselves as a social group	Members are bound by a history of interaction. Shared forms of cognition, emotion and behavior. They represent themselves as a social group	Society as a whole is like a social mindwhich is more than the sum of individuals
Examples of types of groups	Demographics of class, race, age groups, gender	Class, race, age groups, gender	Strangers in crowds
	Strangers in labs
Time, place displacement	Dispersed in space—masses Or face to face as strangers	Same time and place or over time Organic groups	Same place and same time Crowds
Range of social cognition	Public opinion or opinion in focus groups	Tradition and group beliefs spread historically	Hypnosis, group contagion
What is social learning?	Interpersonal learning in face-to-face Experimental situations	Intrinsic learning by passing on traditions	Imitation Regression
Historical origins	Social contract theory of Hobbes, Locke, Hume	Goes back to Herder, Goethe, Hegel	Late 19th and Early 20th century crowd psychologists
Theorists	Allport Behaviorism Lazarsfeld -mass communication, Gallup polls	McDougall, Cooley, William Thomas Mead, Sheriff, Asch	Le Bon, Levi-Bruhl, Tarde, Wallis, Wundt, Durkheim
Research methods	Experimental groups Statistical surveys	Experimental Local groups—Families, religious or occupational groups Professional organizations Experiments in social psychology may require special adaptation of experimental method	Eye witness accounts
Typical questions	How do different social classes feel about the importance of leisure time?	How are Catholic, working class families different from Methodists and Baptists families?	How do crowds behave in revolutionary situations?

Right-Wing Crowd Psychology: Crowds as Super-Minds

How to understand crowds

Philosophers of conventional sociology at the end of the 19th century thought that crowds were not a separate or new phenomenon. Rather they were seen as fleeting gatherings outside of social institutions which resulted in temporary chaos between social classes. Émile Durkheim and Marx emphasized reason or class interest to explain why people gathered in crowds to begin with. Liberal politics saw the masses as an epiphenomenon which would pass away as education, technology and a more just distribution of wealth would even things out. Crowds were still equated with the general population and not considered “mobs”. Liberals saw gatherings as no more than a collection of individuals.

Whether conservative or liberal, mainstream philosophers of sociology were social Darwinists whose ideas of a liberal society were of individuals who took care of themselves. “Crowd” psychologists claimed Darwinian evolution showed that progress was a slow process and any sudden changes based on strikes or armed conflict was a throwback to pre-modern times. Crowds were like Herbert Spencer’s undifferentiated matter. Crowd psychologists perceived crowds in a much more sinister light.

Crowd psychologists were united in rejecting sociological theories such like Durkheim and Marx because they felt they left out the emotions and unconscious motivation of people. If you could not depend on what people intended, then was what is really driving them below the level of consciousness? Crowd psychology was interested in the behavior of crowds, the behavior of leaders and the relationships between them. Crowds were here to stay and the sooner we understand them the better. For crowd psychologists individuals were both more than and less than the sum of their parts. Until the 1960s social psychologists accepted right-wing crowd theory even though it was not based on any research. (Social Psychology, Delamater, Myers, Collett; David Miller Introduction to Collective Behavior and Collective Action). Please see my article for more detail about crowd psychologists. Ruling Class Fears of the Day of Reckoning: Historical Causes for the Biases Against Crowds

Left-Wing Crowd Theory: Crowds as reference groups

Up until the 1960s social psychologists continued to examine crowds in an unfavorable light following the thinking of Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. To the extent they tolerated collectivities at all they followed research on mass public opinion. But in the early 1960’s Carl Couch began to have his students study the work of George Rudé on the French Revolution which showed crowds in a more favorable light. Crowds were workers, not criminals, and the behavior of workers was somewhere in between derelict and heroic.

From collective behavior to collective action

In 1968 Clark McPhail began to take his students into situations where crowds had assembled and got them to engage in participatory research. Later, in 1997 he took a team of over sixty trained observers to a very large “Stand in the Gap” rally of the Promise Keepers on the National Mall in Washington DC. They used paper, pen, film and videotape to record people’s activities at political as well as sports and religious events. This was something that early crowd theorists never had done. The results challenged all seven of the myths I described in my previous article. The myths are:

Irrationality
Emotionality
Suggestibility – mindless behavior
Destructiveness
Spontaneity
Anonymity
Unanimity of purpose

McPhail tried to indicate this difference by distancing himself from the word “crowds”, calling collectivities “gatherings.”

McPhail classifies gathering according to their behavioral composition. The most inclusive category is that of prosaic gatherers, where behavior is simple – shoppers at malls, people waiting in lines for rides, at amusements parks, gatherings at store openings and spectators at fires and arrests. Less common are demonstration gathering – political demonstrations, sports rallies and worship services… Even less common …are state ceremonial gatherings such as inaugurations, royal weddings and state funerals. (Intro to Collective Behavior, 43)

Meanwhile theorists who studied social movements pointed out that up until now all theories of collectivities saw crowds either acting as solitary individuals or reacting to circumstances outside themselves. For scholars such as Charles Tilley, William Gamson, McAdam and Lipsky, people who considered themselves part of social movements, come into a crowd with a plan. Any major demonstration against a war requires months of planning on the part of the organizers. Secondly, being in a crowd and acting in a crowd is not an end in itself, but a means to gather more people to swell the movement long after the particular crowd disperses. Because of this, movement scholars began to change the name of their study from “collective behavior’ (which is more passive) to “collective action”.

Within the field of social movements there were two tendencies. “Political process” theory is interested in how people come to frame their discontent into ideas. What is it in the nature of some negative events which makes people put up with them, and what is it about negative events that make them seem abusive? In other words, what events will make people more likely to throw down the gauntlet?

“Resource mobilization theory” tries to answer the question of how movements succeed through networks of movement organizations. What kind of material resources are necessary and sufficient in order to succeed?

Right-Wing vs Left-wing Theories of Crowds

Spontaneous vs planning

There are roughly six theories on crowd psychology – two conservative, two liberal and two radical. However, for our purposes we will contrast them between conservative and radical theories. Collective behavior theories are conservative because they focus on a crowd’s reaction to events – which are often spontaneous. Collective action theories emphasize what crowds do to initiate activity and these activities often involve planning.

The difference between crowds and everyday life

A second major difference between the theories is that conservative collective behavior theories think there are some major qualitative differences between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. They imagine that crowds bring out a degenerative side of people. They would look approvingly at William Golding’s book Lord of the Fliesand and say that is what happens in crowds. Collective action theorists think that there is no qualitative difference between how people act in crowds and how they are in everyday life. Whatever there is that is sinister in human behavior it is just as likely to happen in everyday life.

How unified are crowds?

Conservative theories of crowd behavior imagine that the individuality of people melts down in crowds and the crowd is easily unified because people are easily emotionally involved. This is because crowds exert a hypnotic effect which then spreads like contagion. Theories of collective action argue that the individuality that people have when they enter a crowd stays with them during the events that happen in crowds. People disagree about actions to be taken and crowds can remain divided. It takes real work and skill for leaders of collective action to unify a crowd.

Masses vs movements

Theories of collective behavior are most at home studying masses. Masses are people who are not necessarily located in the same space, but which are happening at the same time. Examples are fads, rumors, urban legends, fashions, crazes and mass hysteria. The most famous case of mass hysteria was Orson Wells’ radio broadcast of Martians having landed.

Mass behavior doesn’t bring out the best in people. People are shown to be petty, superficial, acquisitive and easily aroused. However, collective action theorists tend to study crowds in more serious circumstances as part of movements. Movements are actions that might take place in present time and space but also at different times and different places. Movements can be cross-cultural and historical. Protests, strikes, work-stoppages and boycotts are inclusive of crowds and yet go beyond them.

Sports crowds, natural disasters and riots

Both collective behavior theorists and collective action theorists study sports crowds, natural disasters and riots but come to very different conclusions about them. Collective behavior theorists might focus on hooligans in sporting events and violence both between fans as well as collective frustration resulting from the outcome of a game. When it comes to natural disasters, conservative collective behaviorists will focus on the looting of stores and sexual violence as well as stealing between the victims of disasters. As for riots, conservatives will usually focus on damage to property, the chaos of revolutionary situations and the lack of order. This way of thinking about things is perpetrated by mass-hysteria theory which is based on class fear of the lower classes rather than objective research that has been done.

Collective action theories shine a more favorable light on sporting crowds, natural disasters and riots and they have the research that backs it up. Collective action theorists will marvel at the amount of spontaneous order that occurs in baseball games when tens of thousands of people take the train to a game, watch and enjoy the game peacefully and take the train home without any police intervention needed.

As for natural disasters, research clearly shows that natural disasters tend to bring out the altruistic, pro-social side of people, far more often than they bring out the selfish side. Lastly, collective action contains two pieces of research that must be deeply disturbing to conservative crowd theorists. The first is that the most common instigator of violence in riots are the police. More times than not the presence of police with the threat of coercion and use of force amplifies a tense situation rather than cools it out. The second piece of research shows that riots get results. Though people are endlessly told to vote or to write to your member of Congress, it is after riots that the authorities somehow find the time and money to right wrongs. The Watts riots of 1967 is an example.

Who is drawn to crowds?

Collective behavior theorists with their negative view of crowds naturally think that only unsavory troublemakers are drawn to them. They believe these people are emotionally unstable or even criminals. No self-respecting member of the middle or upper-middle class would tolerate being in a crowd for long. Theorists of collective action point out that there is no particular type of group or individual that is drawn to a crowd. It is true that middle and upper-middle class people would more easily separate from crowds by driving a car. Cars and money can bypass traveling on buses and trains. However, the difference is much less extreme than collective behavior theorists make it seem to be. When it comes to natural disasters while poorer people are likely to be trapped in poorly built homes or buildings, upper middle-class people have also been the victims of floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes and earthquakes.

Collectivities and human nature

Conservative collective behavior theorists imagine that crowds bring out only the worst in people, a selfish, desperate and violent side. Collective action theorists say that crowds tend to bring out more extremes of behavior both for better and for worse. Groups and individuals bring out what is most moderate in people. In crowd situations people can be more extreme: selfish and violent on one hand or more altruistic and heroic on the other.

Who determines norms?

Contrary to conservative collective behavior theorists who might say all norms vanish as a person goes from a group to a crowd, moderate, liberal theories of crowds such as emergent norm theories argue that group norms emerge spontaneously as the situation dictates. Collective action theorists argue that in the case of social movements, the leaders initiate norms which are created and imposed by crowd monitors from within the protest movement itself. There may be an expectation from within the movement not to break bank windows or throw rocks. In fact, people who do these things may be labeled FBI agents.

Are members of crowds rootless or do they already have communities?

Collective behavior theorists imagine that the only people who join crowds are rootless individuals drawn to a crowd because they lack community. On the contrary, collective action theories say most people come to crowds with friends, families and sometimes with neighbors. People are not desperately seeking a community. They already have one but just want to expand those communities.

How much monitoring of crowd behavior goes on?

Liberal crowd theorist Herbert Blumer argued that crowds do not monitor their behavior. His circular reaction theory claimed that emotions feed on each other rather and get stuck in an amplifying groove, creating a snowballing effect. Social interaction theorist Clark McPhail points out from his research that crowds do monitor and interpret what is happening, talk to each other about what is going on and change the direction or movement of the crowd as they go.

Are crowds rational?

“No!” say the collective behavior theorists. The size of crowds, their anonymity and lack of continuity makes a crowd act more irrationally because of the noise and emotional euphoria. Collective action theories disagree. Crowds are just as capable of groups and individuals of behaving rationally. Perhaps the best example of this is how orderly and graceful people are at the 5 PM rush hour as they navigate walking towards train stations on foot, weaving in and around others, barely touching them. Another example is how most of the time people assemble and leave going to concerts in an orderly fashion without police presence. Disorderly crowd behavior is the exception to the rule. Newspapers with their slogan “if it bleeds it leads” only point out extremes of crowd behavior. Who ever heard of a news headline, “42,000 People at Yankee Stadium Arrive Home From the Train Station With no Incidence of Violence”?

Crowds as super-minds vs crowds as reference groups

Let us return to the three ways the relationship between society and individual can be understood. The perspective of crowds as collective behavior corresponds to crowds as having a super-mind. This is because crowds are understood as deeply irrational, with emotions easily aroused and easily spread (contagion). Crowds consist of suspicious strangers who easily melt down through hypnosis, imitation and regression.

Crowds as collective action corresponds to crowds as reference groups. Why? Because people in crowds consist of reference occupational groups, religious groups and neighbors from the same region. These folks carry the same values into crowds they had in reference groups. Thus, they bring with them their shared history and values which is not so easily thrown off kilter when they celebrate as part of a crowd in a victory in a sports game or while attending a music concert. They’re sharing norms and differentiated roles which come to the fore in emergency situations such as natural disasters.

Theoretical perspectives

The most conservative collective behavior theories are mass hysteria theories which were supported by Orrin Klapp. Mass hysteria theories also harken back to the right-wing crowd theorists such as Taine, Sighele and Le Bon. More moderate theories are that of Gabriel Tarde, Herbert Blumer and David Park. Liberal theories include Smelser’s value-added theory and Turner and Killian emergent norm theory. Clark McPhail really blew the roof off of conservative and moderate crowd theory with his social interactionist defense of crowds as purposive, focused, creative and for the most part non-violent. Radical crowd theories include the resource mobilization theory of JD McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald. Political process theory of McAdam, Gamson and Lipsky both have their focus on social movements.

How good is the research?

All crowd research is not just about the present. Georg Rule opened the door with archival research on the French revolutionary crowds. Charles Tilly did the same thing for the 500 years of European revolutions. Gamson did some ingenious work on social protests about what works and what doesn’t work. There have also been participant observations of religious cults (John Lofland), UFO cults and the current Tea Party movement.

Unfortunately, theories of collective behavior do not have comparable research methods. They mostly rely on conservative ruling class fears of crowds which shows up in newspaper anecdotes, reports by the authorities such as police reports and eyewitness accounts which are notoriously unreliable. Please see the table below for more vivid comparisons of the two theories.

Conclusion

I began this article by posing the question of how to think of the relationship between individual and society. One is in the image of society as a kind of group mind superimposed over society. The second way is to think of society as an aggregate which is no more than the sum of its parts. The most grounded approach is to understand society as reference groups. In the second part of my article, I do a comparison between crowd theories based on crowds as a super-mind (collective behavior theories) compared to crowds as reference groups (collective action) theories. Crowds as gatherings are like reference groups applied to macro-social psychology.

Two Perspectives on Crowd Theory

Collective Behavior	Category of Comparison	Collective Action
What collectivities do in reaction to events (spontaneous)	Mode of Conduct	What collectivities do when they plan events
Qualitative differences Collectivities behave in unusual ways	What is the difference between collective behavior and behavior in everyday life?	There is no qualitative difference Crowds act normally most of the time
Crowds are easily unified because people are aroused and these emotions spread like contagion	How unified are crowds?	They are pluralistic, not unified People disagree and it takes work to unify them
Rumor, Urban legends Fads, fashions, crazes Mass hysteria—radio UFO landings (War of Worlds) Diseases	Examples: Masses	Collective action does not usually study mass behavior More interested in crowds and social movement
Sports’ crowds, UFO reports Natural disasters—floods, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, riots Social movements, political or spiritual	Examples: Crowds and movements	Sports crowds, UFO reports Natural disasters Protests Riots Strikes Work stoppages Boycotts Social movements—political or spiritual
Crowds draw trouble-makers or people who are emotionally unstable or criminals	Who is drawn to crowds?	There is no type of social group or individual that is drawn to crowds compared to groups
Crowds bring out the worst characteristics in people, characteristics that would not show up in the same individuals or groups Selfish, desperate violence side	What is the relationship between collectivities and human nature?	Crowds bring out the best and worst in people Groups bring out what is moderate in people Selfish, violent, selfless and heroic
Norms are created spontaneously as the situation unfolds (Emergent norm theory)	What determines norms?	Norms can be created before events occur
Strangers, people who are rootless and have no communities	Composition of collectivities	Families, friends, neighbors
Blumer’s circular reaction Emotions build in a snowballing effect	How much monitoring of behavior goes on?	Crowds monitor and interpret what is happening and can change direction
Size, anonymity and lack of continuity in time makes crowds act more irrationally	The place of rationality	Crowds are as rational as other social formations.
Mass hysteria theory (Le Bon Tarde, Blumer, Park, Klapp) Value Added theory (Smelser) Emergent norm (Turner, and Killian)	Theories	Social interactionist (McPhail) Resource Mobilization theory (McCarthy and Zald) Political process theory (McAdam, Gamson Lipsky)
Anecdotes (Mackay) Reports by authorities. Newspapers, eye witnesses	Research	Archival (Rude – French Revolution) Gamson – (social protest) Tilly (revolutions
		Participant observation— Religious Cults –Moonies (Lofland) UFO Cults Tea Party Film, video, records (McPhail)

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Crowds, Masses and Movements first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Collectivist, Individualist and Communist Selves Part II

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:31:17 +0000

Summary of Part I

In Part I of my article, we began by distinguishing the social self from two forms of identity that are often confused with it: temperament and personality. The focus of part one is to show how very social (or even socialist) was the work of social psychologist George Herbert Mead. We discussed in detail the thirteen building blocks necessary for creating the social self. This self must construct both an objective and subjective identity. From here even by the age of eight the child must learn to navigate routine, mild-problematic and crisis situations. They do that by learning how to role-take and role-make. Furthermore,learning to play in improvised and designed ways are rehearsals for role-making and role-taking. Lastly, all selves must always face a tension between weighing individual and social self-interest in making decisions. Creating internal I-Me dialogues is the manner in which these selves decide what their course of action should be.

However, we must include a larger, cross-cultural and historical perspective. Mead was writing about a social self as it existed in a capitalist society during his time. In Part II we explore what kind of self an individual has in a collectivist society. An even bigger challenge is that both capitalist and individualist selves emerge in relatively stable conditions. What happens to the self in unstable times when social movements are afoot? As we shall see, the requirements of building a self in the heat of social movements are also necessary conditions for developing a world-historical, communist self of the future.

Collectivist or Individualist Selves

Horizontal and vertical collectivists: vertical individualists

Just as different social formations have very different technologies, economies, political and sacred systems, these different kinds of societies also have very different concepts of the self. We shall see that broadly speaking, individuals in egalitarian hunter-gather and horticultural societies had “horizontal collectivist selves” while people in Bronze Age agricultural states had “vertical collectivist selves”. (Rank societies such as simple chiefdoms are a transition between the two). It is only in the late Iron Age (600 BCE) that we see the first signs of a “vertical individualist self”.

With the rise of capitalism in Europe roughly 500 years ago, the vertical individualist self takes on a life of its own. Calling selves “horizontal” refers to the communal anti-hierarchical nature of the way the self interacts with others. Calling the self “vertical” refers to the stratified way in which a self relates to other selves. While a collectivist can be either horizontal or vertical, an individualist can only be vertical. There has never been a self that is a horizontal individualist. Please see my article Three Strikes You’re Out for Western Psychotherapy: The Dark History and its Shortcomings With Collectivists for more details about the differences between collectivists and individualists.

The division of social selves into individualists and collectivists has a long history in the West and has recently been researched by a number of psychologists (Triandis (1995, Segall, Dasen, Berry and Poortinga, 1990, Smith and Bond-Harris, 1994). While individualism and collectivism exist to some degree in all societies, for purposes of our work we are interested in how this difference is connected to the building blocks of the self together with the forces of socialization. We are also interested in how these cross-cultural psychological studies apply to the concept of the self developed by Mead.

Defining collectivist and individualist selves

What exactly do we mean by “collectivism” and “individualism?” We will begin with how each identity orients itself in relation to society and nature. Individualism is a set of beliefs and practices which assumes that: a) the individual is separate from kin-groups and the biophysical environment and identifies more easily with strangers; b) the inner world is more a source of identity than objective actions; and c) the individual is more important than the group. Collectivism is a set of beliefs or practices which assume the reverse: a) the individual is interdependent with kin groups and nature; b) the outer world of objective actions matters more than does inner experience; and c) the kin group is more important than individual.

The technological, political and economic structure of society creates forces for socializing the individual to work and reproduce in these societies. These forces of socialization will teach individuals the building blocks of the self in either a collectivist or individualist way that will create and sustain the dominant social relations.

Forces of Socialization Under Collectivism and Individualism

Collectivists are conservative. The forces of socialization, the extended family, the clan or the neighbors are more or less giving the same congruent message. “Things have always been this way. Do what you are told and make your ancestors proud”.

In an industrial capitalist society, it is likely that the messages of family and mass media will conflict; the messages of friends may conform to neither while the state and the churches could be at odds based on the separation of church and state. Identity crisis questions like “who am I?” and “what is my place in society” are unique to societies that promote individualism. All individuals in all societies do not ask this question because it would not even be raised unless a variety of answers were possible. For a variety of answers to be possible there would need to be in place socialization forces that give different answers to these questions

In industrial capitalist societies there is a vast division of labor. In part this means there will be a variety of possibilities of what the individual imagines they can be. Further, even if all of the socializing forces are individualist, they are competing over the individualist’s choices of identity – soldier, rock musician or family person – they still may be causing confusion because they are all suggesting that any one of these identities is possible. As Berger (1967) points out, it is because a person sees a conflicting number of choices that they come to see: a) relativity of all social institution; b) the individual is prior to the group; and c) the constraints on an individual are not as great as the possibilities.

Collectivists and the thirteen building blocks

The first four of Mead’s building blocks are more or less the same for all societies. However, developing a conscience is somewhat different. If we look at Freud’s system, because collectivists have stronger group ties, the conscience of collectivists will be weighted more on the side of the superego. Egoic, and id structures would be more repressed than in industrial capitalist societies. As we shall see shortly, collectivists will be better at learning routine situations, be more at home with role taking, prefer designed play and be more at home with the Me side of the I-me dialogue. What is a significant difference between collectivist and individualist that I will comment on here is learning to think abstractly. For Mead the importance of thinking abstractly has to do with the power that comes from being able to think about the past and the future. Both individualists and collectivists can do this.

However, the uniqueness of a merchant society in Greece taught the middle and upper middle classes in the West to use what Piaget called early formal operational thinking. This can be seen in the work of Plato, Aristotle, Democritus and others. Later, thanks to the revolution in scientific methodology in the 17th century, scientists, merchants and other professionals learned to think in a formal operational manner. Collectivists were content with what Piaget called concrete operational or even a sophisticated form of pre-operational thinking. See the work of CR Hallpike, Foundations of Primitive Thought.

Collectivists and the objective and subjective selves

Collectivists will be especially socialized to cultivate an objective self over a subjective self. Collectivists are concerned with what is expected in their extended families, clans or village neighbors. If they live in agricultural civilizations, they will be preoccupied with what the castes above them will expect. Collectivists will not support interest in their unique biography or their personal aspirations. Such preoccupations are considered selfish and inconsequential.

Collectivists in routine, mild-problematic and crisis situations

As most of us know, the individualist self in industrial capitalist society is expected to manage mild-problematic and crisis situations as a way of life. But historically in collectivist societies the pace of life is slower and the amount of change a collective self is expected to deal with is small. Collectivists do not like change and want to keep things as much the same as they’ve perceived they have always been. Collectivist selves are usually not prepared to deal with mild-problematic or crisis situations.

Collectivists in role-taking and role-making

Anyone in a routine situation will get used to the position of role-taking. In other words, the role is already intact, has existed for years and the individual simply steps into it. Role-making is what people are forced to do when they face a mild-problematic or crisis situation. They have to make up a role on the spot to stabilize the mild-problematic or crisis situation. Collectivists have less experience with this.

Collectivist identification of status groups

At least in agricultural civilizations, there are class and even caste relations. It is very important for collectivists to know what is expected of them and what to expect from others. People often live and die in the same status group. Staying within your caste has high moral value. You can’t afford to make mistakes. Among individualist selves in industrial capitalist societies, especially in Yankeedom, people imagine they can shift social classes. They do not pay as much attention to what is expected of them in a status group. In fact, in Yankeedom, upward mobility is a virtue and imagining you can mix the values of different social classes is thought of as normal or even virtuous.

How collectivists play: designed and improvised play

As Mead points out, how humans play is not some frivolous cultural pastime. It is dead serious. First you learn “let’s pretend” games and then you graduate to what Mead calls “the game”. As I’ve said before, designed play is practice for learning routine situations. Improvised play comes in handy as rehearsals for mild-problematic and crisis situations. For collectivists, let’s pretend games will not be taken as seriously as organized games because organized games are preparation for role taking in routine situations. Let’s pretend games will seem less important because the number of times collectivists are in non-routine situations which might require improvisation is infrequent.

Collectivists in I-Me dialogues

As might be expected by now, the internal battle of weighing individual against social self-interest is lopsided on the side of social self-interest. Collectivists will constantly be asking themselves what others expect of me in situation after situation. Individual self-interest, or what Mead calls the “I part” is weakly developed because the group is more important than the individual. For individualist selves, the internal battle is more robust because it is expected that individuals are entitled to sometimes put their self-interest before the group.

Towards a Communist Self

The Self and Social Movements

When we discussed the individual self in social evolution we talked about the individual essentially reacting to changes in social structures by developing collectivist or individualist selves and all that follows from it.But this presents social change as essentially involuntary. However, groups of people occasionally do try to collectively change social evolution in a particular direction. The seeds of collective action, specifically socialist are rooted in many of the skills the self is expected to build when participating in a social movement.

Social institutions produce both order and conflict and this tension is expressed in the types of skills people are socialized to learn as selves. As we saw earlier in Part I, when children are socialized to play games they are taught to follow rules and roles and to exercise their creativity within social constraints. These skills translate into non-play circumstances in everyday life. Learning how to master routine situations means sizing up a circumstance, identifying its spatial and temporal setting and the power bases and norms for conforming or obeying. At the same time these individuals have to be able to negotiate mild problematic and crisis situations which happen frequently in social movements. They must be capable of re-organizing spatial and temporal settings and restructuring power bases.

My point is that the skills required to participate in social movements are rooted in the skills learned in play and non-play circumstances in everyday life. Without this understanding the study of social movements, how people come to be involved and how they sustain their involvement, will be mystified. We will have social movements without concrete individuals.

The self in social movements as rooted in world history

The self in social movements would gradually learn to see themselves as world-historical individuals acting within a larger system that is composed of multiple societies and cultures. What exactly does this mean? Earlier we said that part of developing a generalized other was to learn to understand that the world is bigger than the individual in time – beyond their individual biography – and in space – beyond their domestic household. To become a world-historical individual means to push these boundaries beyond where most people normally go. Individuals would develop world-historical selves if they came to comprehend the fact that their own identity and cognition is as rooted in civilizational and global institutions and the arena of action occurs on the stage of world historical evolution. The internet and the electronic revolution is intensifying both human problems and human capacity to solve them because of the global scale in which they occur. It involves knowledge about the roles and occupations that are historically specific to the 21st century. It involves a sense that in world history and long-term social change some roles and occupations emerge and others wither away.

A world-historical self understands that its location in the core, periphery or semi-periphery of the global capitalist world-system both constrains and invites ways of living that may not be possible in other parts of the system. A world-historical individual does not privatize their individual biography as their own and dissociate him or herself from world history. Rather the biographical self, ones’ goals and plans and actions are part of world history in-the-making. Using the comparative world-systems perspective, a world-historical individual would comprehend contemporary social movements both in space – around the world – and in time – in the historical evolution of the world-system in which they are a part.

Ways in Which the Communist Self is Different From the Collectivist Self

It is not far-fetched to imagine that the communist self would be a lot like the collectivist self because both prioritize the group over individuals. There are some superficial similarities between the horizontal selves of hunter-gatherers and what would be the horizontal selves in communist society. However, the vertical collectivist selves of the great agricultural civilizations were caste or class stratified. This meant that the relationship between the vertical collectivist peasants and the upper classes would be deferential and obedient. This would not be the case with the communist self.

Furthermore, despite what might seem as diametrically opposed interests between communists and capitalists, communists also came out of the Enlightenment. This means that communists are for creating abundance based on a championing of science against religion and creating a high standard of living for everyone through technological innovation. These are not projects the vertical collectivists share. Finally, communists value change over stability. We see change taking the shape of a dialectical spiral. Vertical collectivists understand change has been happening in cycles with the past being more valued than the future. There are more differences, but I think you get my point.

Where Might a Communist Self Arise and Over How Long a Time Period?

It is perfectly reasonable to expect that my picture of a communist self would be grounded in particular nation-states within a particular window of history. It would make sense to name places like China, Cuba or Venezuela as the most likely places where a communist self would begin to take hold. However, I am not knowledgeable enough of those countries to make intelligent speculation about what a communist self, using the work of George Herbert Mead, would look like. Unfortunately, the country I know best, Yankeedom, is one of the last places we can imagine a socialist country flourishing, at least in this century. Nevertheless, I will try making some reasonable guesses of what a communist self might look in Yankeedom in 100 years, or three generations.

Communist Self: Agents of Socialization

As a reminder, the forces of socialization include the family, religion, sports, the state (nationalism), education, peer group, mass media and the internet. As far as the family goes, they would be under much less pressure because under communism day-care centers would help to raise children and parents would come to understand that day-care workers know more than parents about how to raise children because they deal with many kinds of children. The same is true in the field of education. Children would be taught using Vygotsky’s method of cooperative learning. In school the subjects in school would resume teaching the arts, music and philosophy. A liberal arts education would be valued because it produces the most well-rounded citizens.

In a communist society, religious fundamentalism would wither because the desperation, self-deprecation and longing for an afterlife would no longer be in evidence. Yet the number of atheists would continue to grow because the scientific world view would have more prevalence. However, people’s ideas of the spirit-world would be more earthly and less transcendental because life on earth will come closer to heaven. I further predict the continued rise and flourishing of Neopaganism, especially among women since people’s appreciation of the natural and cosmic order will be heightened. Professional sports will still be of interest mostly among men for Darwinian reasons. There would not be a hysterical mania coming from people who are desperate for a large scale community because they have no local community. Nationalism will go the way of religious fundamentalism. The blind loyalty of nationalism will be replaced by a patriotism that will defend its land but will not be imperialist as so many western countries are today.

Peer groups will be grounded in local community groups and teenagers and in vocational training groups working with adults rather than separated from adult life as they are now. Mass media will still be a draw, but the violence, sex and horror will be integrated with the story line rather a non-stop bombardment. I have not studied the internet enough to say anything about trends that might support a communist self.

Communist Self: Thirteen Building Blocks

Having a conscience would not involve appeals to abstract morality or religious duty. The conscience would be a secular appeal to tap into for how to best apply oneself to the world-historical situation of one’s country. Knowledge of status entitlements would be based on achieved skills rather than fossilized entitlements based on social class. In reasoning powers, communist individuals would achieve a new level of abstraction beyond Piaget’s formal operation, called dialectical operations (Riegel and Basseches). As for the I-Me dialogues members of a communist society would develop a new voice, a “we dialogue” (see below).

Communist Objective and Subjective Selves

Mead made much of developing an objective self, what he called a generalized other. However, his generalized other was insensitive to the constraints of what social class, race and gender loyalties might have in limiting the range of their identity. Secondly, his generalized other lacked a historical identity. Under a communist society, for the first time, Mead’s generalized other might become real since class, race and gender identities would be far less in operation. As for the subjective self, it would become less private, as the individual biographies would have a life-mission which would be identified by psychologists and vocational counselors as being far more powerful. Unlike bourgeois psychologists, now communist psychologists would link world-historical identity to life-mission.

Communist Navigating Routine, Mild Problematic and Crisis Situations

The communist self would certainly be more capable than the collectivist self in dealing with mild-problematic and crisis situations than the collectivist self. However, crisis situations would be far less of an issue because society would be less riddled by class, race and gender conflicts. In addition, routine situations would be malleable and less subject to reification and alienation because communist selves have confidence that they can change situations as necessary.

Communist Role-taking and Role-making

It follows that in communist societies role-making would be far less of an ordeal than for collectivist selves because in communist societies people are relatively free to shape roles as necessary. At the same time, role-taking would not be a mindless duty since it is most often treated among collectivist selves. This is because the communist self is part of the process of taking roles in the first place. On the other hand, role-taking would be met with joy rather than with animosity and resentment as they often are among individualists in capitalist society. For communist selves, playing a role is not a mask, as a necessary evil that represses the “real self” as in the humanist psychology of capitalist society. It is a role that is gladly taken on because it could be taken on and challenged when necessary.

Communist Identification of Status Groups

As mentioned earlier, in a society with minimum class differentiation, knowing the status of others would be based on status-achievement (mostly from work skills) rather than ascribed status. The communist self would be more sensitive to what the individual has to offer or based on a reputation rather than any kind of deference.

Communist Improvised and Designed Play

Typically among individualists in capitalist society, improvised play is supported at an early age more so that among collectivists. However, by adulthood, at least in working class households, pretend play is discouraged or thought to be frivolous or unimportant. In Yankeedom, this can be seen throughout grammar school, high school and college. Art and music classes, the place where improvised play is part of the creative process, is cut. Capitalists ask us, “ what does this have to do with your work, once out of school?”. Something similar happens with designed play.

Games are fine through childhood and even adolescence (Dungeons and Dragons) are supported. But by adulthood, in capitalist society, participatory designed play in minimum. The best they have to offer is the spectacle of designed play in professional sports, where spectators live in a vicarious world where they can criticize the players in how they play their roles. For the communist self, both improvised and designed play are both integrated into the work life of individuals.

Communist I-Me Dialogues

In Mead’s I-Me dialogues, the Me is the internalized expectations of what significant others want from us. Mead says that with maturity the internalized me stretches beyond significant others to communities. From the view of the communist self this generalized other, lacks body, depth and breadth of participating in a communist society. At its best, communist self would replace the I-Me dialogue “I-We” dialogue in which the building of communist society is both the product and co-producer of the world historical individual.

Conclusion

In Part I of my article, I introduced the work of process social psychologist George Herbert Mead. I introduced the importance of learning the difference between how to take and make roles in order to deal with three kinds of situations, routine, mild-problematic and crisis. In order to learn these skills the child must practice, using pretend play and organized games. But before this, over the course of the first eight years of life the child must cultivate an objective and a subjective self. It is imperative that the child make the objective and subjective selves create an internal dialogue (I vs Me) in order to navigate the unending tension between individual and social self-interest. Behind all situations, roles, play, internal dialogues are the cultivation of thirteen building blocks.

Mead’s construction of the self was set in the industrial capitalist society of the early 20th century. Since then, cross-cultural psychologist have discovered that roughly 70-80 percent of the world are collectivist. No one to my knowledge has applied Mead’s work to the collectivist self. In part II I attempt to do this. Lastly, over the past hundred years Russia, China, Cuba and Venezuela, among other countries, have developed communist selves. After I distinguish the difference between collectivist and communist selves I again apply Mead’s work to the emergence of a communist self. I am aware of no other books or articles that have attempted to do this, so I have attempted my own synthesis.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Collectivist, Individualist and Communist Selves Part II

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 03:31:17 +0000

Summary of Part I

Collectivist or Individualist Selves

Horizontal and vertical collectivists: vertical individualists

Defining collectivist and individualist selves

Forces of Socialization Under Collectivism and Individualism

Collectivists and the thirteen building blocks

Collectivists and the objective and subjective selves

Collectivists in routine, mild-problematic and crisis situations

Collectivists in role-taking and role-making

Collectivist identification of status groups

How collectivists play: designed and improvised play

Collectivists in I-Me dialogues

Towards a Communist Self

The Self and Social Movements

The self in social movements as rooted in world history

Ways in Which the Communist Self is Different From the Collectivist Self

Where Might a Communist Self Arise and Over How Long a Time Period?

Communist Self: Agents of Socialization

Communist Self: Thirteen Building Blocks

Communist Objective and Subjective Selves

Communist Navigating Routine, Mild Problematic and Crisis Situations

Communist Role-taking and Role-making

Communist Identification of Status Groups

Communist Improvised and Designed Play

Communist I-Me Dialogues

Conclusion

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Science of Superstition Part II

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:35:39 +0000

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this 2-part article, I began by listing the typical superstitious behavior college students engage in before taking a test. I identified the conditions of superstition, what superstition is and then added the range of its scope. My piece is about socially shared and personal superstitions rather than about paranormal or spiritual beliefs. From there I probed the demography of superstition including occupations, social class and gender. Next, I talked about the importance of Pavlov’s theory of associations as well of Skinner’s consequential reinforcement in the acquiring of superstitions. I analyzed the attachment to places and objects and the theory of contagion that underlines both. Lastly, I explained the evolutionary psychological reasons why creationism has more appeal for people than Darwinian natural section. As I mentioned in Part I this article is based on 2 books, The Science of Superstition by Bruce M. Hood and Believing in Magic by Stewart Vyse.

Growing Up Superstitious

Wishing and reality

Until Piaget’s concrete operational stage children are unclear what is the relationship between their mind and reality. Young children are not sure about the relationship between mental thoughts and actions. They think that wishing can cause things to actually happen. For example, Hood reports on children making wishes with birthday cakes with candles or when English schoolchildren bring in mascots to examinations to set up at the front of their desks. It is only after the age of seven that mind and reality are mostly differentiated.

How do children understand solid and liquid objects

Hood points out that by their first birthday very young children have solid objects pretty much figured out, but they are still not sure about non-solid objects like liquid, sand and jello. They know that solid objects cannot float in thin air and they stare in amazement if shown a conjurer’s illusion to create this effect. Only after some years at school can children start to understand that while some things are improbable, they are not necessarily impossible. Skepticism is not learned until Piaget’s formal operations stage of thinking which begins, if it begins at all, in high school.

Child development beyond Piaget

Here are some of the original findings from Piaget about early childhood.

Out of sight out of existence: if babies cannot see an object, they think it no longer exists.
They do not understand objects as separate from themselves.
The baby believes that its own act of searching will magically recreate the object.
Young children behave as if their minds and action can control the world.
Children before the age of seven imagine that the name of the object is directly connected to the object
They do not understand that dreams originate inside of them as opposed to coming from the external world.
The inanimate world is alive. Piaget called this animism, meaning attributing a soul (anima) to an entity.
Children are also more prone to anthropomorphism: they think about nonhuman things as if they were human. This applies to pets and dolls.
Teleological thinking means thinking in terms of function – what something has been designed for. Hood gives the example that for teenagers there are many ways to travel down a hillside like walking, skipping, running, rollerblading skateboarding and sledding. But no teenager would make the mistake of saying the hill exists because of any of these different activities.

Hood points out that magic trick experiments have revolutionized the way we interrogate babies about what they know. In other words, magicians trained in perceptual illusions will show the baby these magic tricks. The psychologists will judge their perceptual stage of development by whether or not children are surprised by magical tricks. According to these new techniques, some of Piaget’s research has become dated. Hood says that there are rules for objective knowledge that must be built on from birth.

Objects do not go in and out of existence like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland.
Other solid objects cannot move through them.
Objects are bounded so that they do not break up and then come back together again.
Objects move on continuous paths so they cannot teleport from one part of the room to another without being seen as crossing in between.
Objects generally only move when something else makes them move by force of collision.

Otherwise, the objects are living things.

Ontological fusion

Babies must first decide if something is an object, a living thing or a living thing that possesses a mind. When you play the game of twenty questions the first question starts with “is it an animal, mineral or vegetable?”. This narrows the focus. Children generate naïve theories that explain the physical world, the living world and eventually the psychological world of other people. This is tricky because sometimes objects do not fall straight down; sometimes living things do not move; and sometimes moving things are not alive (toys powered by batteries). Slinkies are another example of a toy that seems to come to life. Children might think that a burning chair feels pain or that a bicycle aches after being kicked. Children may believe they can affect reality by thinking. This is the basis of psychokinesis.

In part, this ontological fusion of the physical and biological worlds exists in order to explain the causes of events. Ontological fusion occurs if a child thinks a toy (physical property) can come alive at night (biological property) and has intentions (psychological property). All these would represent a violation of the natural order.

This is understandable since the causes and mechanisms they are trying to reason about are invisible. This invisibility is a foundation stone for superstitious thinking.

Transition objects as examples of animism and anthropomorphism

Hood informs us that one half to three quarters of all children form an emotional bond to a specific soft toy or blanket during their second year of life. They need them for reassurance when they are frightened or lonely. These objects enable the infant to make the transitions from sleeping with their mother to sleeping alone. Interestingly, transitional objects are more common in Western cultures but rare in Japan where the children sleep with their mothers well into late childhood.

What is Essentialism?

What is essentialism and what is its opposite? According to Susan Gelman, in her book The Essential Child, essential entities are discovered while non-essential entities are invented. Essential categories are intrinsic. Non-essential entities are a product of external forces. A sign of something considered to be essential is that it appears to be unalterable, whereas something non-essential can easily be changed. Whatever is considered as essential, it remains stable across transformation. The non-essential changes across transformations. What is essential usually occurs below the surface while what is non-essential occurs on the surface of things. The traits of the essential are mutually exclusive while the non-essential have traits which are overlapping. Essential characteristics have sharp boundaries, while non-essential phenomenon have boundaries which bleed into each other. A concrete example of this is the relationship between nature and nurture. It used to be thought that nature was unchanging essential whereas nurture was non-essential and changeable. In philosophy Plato thought that otherworldly, eternal forms were essences while the changing natural and social worlds were inessential appearances.

In perfume, essences are the concentrated reduced quantity of a fragrant substance after all the impurities have been removed. Special things are considered unique by virtue of something deep and irreplaceable. Apple seeds grown in flowerpots become apple trees. It appears there is something inside that cannot be changed. The idea that you can absorb someone’s essence is a recurrent theme in the explanations of cannibalism. Youth, energy, beauty, temperament, strength and even sexual preferences are essential qualities that we attribute to others. However, the more essential a quality is deemed to be, the greater the potential for contamination. The superstitious belief is that we can absorb the good essences of others. If the victim was young the muscular parts were given to the village boys to eat so they could absorb his power and valor.

In the philosophy of vitalism, vitalism is a life force, something that is in living animals but not in dead ones. Vitalists claim that life does not obey the known laws of physics and chemistry. When you kill a large animal close up, you can experience a sense that something leaves the body. The concept of enduring life energy is not entirely wrong. The living body does generate energy in that it converts energy from one source to another. That’s what a metabolism is. Psychological essentialism is one of the main foundations of the universal supernatural belief that there is something more to reality. Both good and evil are perceived to be tangible essences that can be transmitted through items of clothing and contaminates them for better or for worse.

Children’s essentialism

Children assume the living world is permeated by invisible life forces and patterns that define which of the three ontological categories they belong. They assume there are essences that define what a living thing is. Children’s intuitive biology sows the seeds of its supernaturalism. It is not until age six or seven that children begin to understand what it is to be alive.

Adult essentialism

For many adults, essential, vital and connected properties operate in the world that go beyond what is scientifically proven. Hood gives us an example of kidney donation, in which the person felt they shared a link with someone because part of her was inside them. Around one in three transplant patients believe they inherit the psychological properties of the donor. The supernatural belief is that the psychological aspects of an individual are stored in organ tissue and can be transferred to the host recipient. Hood points out that:

While biological contamination through viruses and microbial infections is a real mode of transference between individuals, we also believe that other non-physical properties such as vitality, morality and even identity can similarly be transferred as if they were physical entities (194). Personal possessions, items of clothing and former dwellings of significant others will take on something of the previous owner. (195) …psychological contamination emerges naturally out of psychological essentialism (247).

The Social Mind

Long before the individual mind becomes reflective of their own psychology, the individual must first realize that others have minds which give meaning and have intentions as well. Our social nature depends on our ability to be mind-readers. Most of our thoughts are about other people. In becoming sociable mind-readers, children start to think about how minds are separate from bodies. This kind of thinking prepares the ground for some very strong supernatural belief about the body, mind and soul. Whether we are reflecting on our own mind or inferring what’s going on in the mind of others, we are treating minds as separate from bodies. Remember that we can see how our bodies change and age when we look in the mirror. But we cannot step outside our minds and see how they age in a mirror. How can a physical thing like the brain create the mental world we inhabit? Furthermore, we have no natural explanation of how something that has no physical dimensions (the mind) can produce changes in the physical world through our thoughts and actions. If minds are not hinged to the physical brain then mind is not subject to the same destiny as our physical bodies.

Social origins of ghosts

In adulthood we need to figure out our friends from our foes. We increasingly learn the subtleties of social interaction. We readily remember every occurrence when we sensed this discomfort that proved justified, but we conveniently forget every time when we were wrong (confirmation bias) and read too much into the situation. This is amplified by our increasing global social connectedness to others and our attention to their eyes. The emotional arousal we experience when we are being stared at simply reinforces the sense that we can detect another’s gaze even when we can’t see them.

Hood asks us if you haven’t you ever felt the pang of guilt when you have done something wrong and wondered whether someone saw you doing it? Sometimes the thought of someone watching us from beyond the grave is enough to make us behave ourselves. In fact, the psychologist Jesse Bering thinks that belief in ghosts and spirits may have evolved as a mechanism designed to make us behave ourselves when we think we are being watched.

From Being Stared at to Paranoia

Thinking that others are watching you and talking about you is a classic symptom of paranoia. Not surprisingly, supernatural beliefs are a major feature of psychotic disorders of mania and schizophrenia. We can all sense patterns, but psychotic patients are more prone to do so all the time. Superstitious thinking becomes pathological when episodes of paranoia start to dominate and control the individual’s life. They may even attribute such thoughts as coming from some outside source. That is why schizophrenics often think their thoughts are being transmitted or invaded by outside signals. Everything is given significance. Every single thing means something. They vehemently deny Freud’s quip that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. They believe there is a hidden connection to everything that happens. They see themselves as extended beyond their bodies and connected to an invisible oneness of the universe.

Is Superstition Abnormal?

Hood approaches the relationship between abnormality and superstition questions in two ways:

We will try to define abnormal behavior and measure examples of superstitious behavior against our definition.
We will identify known mental disorders that have features resembling superstitious behavior or paranormal beliefs and see what, if any, relationship they have to common superstitions.

David Rosenhan and Martin Seligman have proposed a family approach to abnormal behavior. They have named several properties of abnormality. A person’s behavior might not have all seven elements, but if several are present with sufficient severity then the label of abnormal can be applied with some confidence. The elements include:

experience of suffering;
maladaptiveness to work, romance and friends;
Irrationality and incomprehensibility;
unpredictability, loss of control;
statistical infrequency;
observer discomfort; and
violation of moral or ethical standards.

Let us apply the seven criteria to superstitious behavior.

Based on Rosenhan and Seligman’s criteria, most superstitions are not abnormal.

In most cases, superstitions do not produce suffering. In fact, some cases they produce some psychological benefit. Most superstitions are not maladaptive. An athlete using a lucky charm is not likely to affect his play or his life. Most popular superstitions are socially shared and personal superstitions are benign. They are maladaptive when it wastes time that could have been spent studying or resting. But these are minor issues.

The irrationality of most superstitious behavior is mild compared to the schizophrenic thought disorders. Superstitious behavior is not unpredictable. In fact, superstitious behavior is designed to have more control. Are friends or strangers uncomfortable in the presence of superstitious behavior? Not likely. If anything, a friend’s lucky charm is a source of amusement and teasing. Finally, in most cases, superstitious behavior does not violate moral or idea standards. Some religions hold that superstitious behavior is a form of paganism and an affront to God. But this is not a popular attitude. The violation of ideal standards is also pretty rare. Superstitions rarely interfere with the normal standards of behavior. They maintain love relationships, jobs, families, and as a group they are no more aggressive, depressed or shy than the general public. We do not seek psychological services for the treatment of belief in astrology. Nevertheless, the converse is not true. Some serious mental disorders do include forms of superstition. Let us look at Rosenhan’s and Seligman’s criteria and the results.

Is Abnormal Behavior Superstitious?

Neurotics

Stuart Vyse points out that neurotics have emotionally distressing symptoms and unwelcome psychological states but their behavior is still within the boundaries of social systems. In addition, there are many anxious and fearful people who think superstitions are silly.

Obsessive–compulsive disorder

Remember in Part I when we discussed the difference between a routine and a mindless ritual? The disorder with features most akin to normal superstitions is obsessive, compulsive behavior (OCD). The primary features are obsessions with unwanted, often disturbing, thoughts and impulses that occur repeatedly and are difficult to control. Compulsions are behavioral responses. Mistakes in the superstitious ritual must be repeated again from the beginning. Obsessive-compulsive disorders resemble common superstitions, especially superstitions involving bad luck, avoiding black cats in your path and stepping on cracks on pavement. But is superstition causing obsessive compulsive behavior. The answer is no. The superstitions are there as an attempt to control the obsessions and compulsions. If cognitive therapists like Albert Ellis insisted on making fun of or talking the patient out of the superstitions, that would not make the obsessions and compulsions to go away.

Schizophrenia

Psychosis is characterized by profound disturbances in thought and emotion. People suffer from hallucinations and delusions of grandeur. The schizophrenic imagines their thoughts being controlled by outside forces or that someone is out to get them (delusions of persecution). While superstition is a factor in predicting schizophrenia, superstitions do not cause schizophrenia. They are a product of schizophrenia which is primarily a bio-chemical problem.

On the whole, superstitions are not signs of abnormality. It is more a question of how many superstitions people have rather than whether they have them at all. While some extreme disorders like schizophrenia clearly involve superstitions, many disorders do not. Cognitive psychology points out eight typical thinking errors that can make people unnecessarily miserable but none of these qualify as superstitions.

Dopamine: the brain’s supernatural signaler?

Hood suggests that there may well be a chemical foundation for superstition:

If there is a smoking gun for the biological basis of the superstition it seems to be firmly held by the hand of dopamine. Apophenia represents abnormally excessive activity of the dopamine system that leads individuals to detect more coincidence in the world and can see patterns that the rest of us miss. (238)

If Superstition is not Abnormal, is it Irrational?

According to Hood, beliefs are rational if they draw conclusions which are valid (following formal logic) and sound ( following the rules of informal logic) from the evidence available. But often the true nature of events in many cases is hidden, meaning ones’ beliefs can be based on the best of what is known yet could be false. However, in the case of superstitious thinking or behavior it is based on beliefs which are inconsistent with the available scientific facts.

If a young man bought the lottery ticket purely out of a belief that it directly affected the lottery results, we must label his action irrational. When superstitions interfere with the more reasoned responses to a situation, we must put them in the irrational category. But if it indirectly produces a positive emotional effect that leads to a temporary good mood, a secondary gain can be in the form of entertainment (temporary distraction), it is rational. The ticket was purchased based not on a belief in superstition. The rationality of the superstition rests on the expected utilities of other benefits provided it be inexpensive. When might superstition be rational?

great uncertainty;
stakes are high;
time is short;
the superstition is inexpensive;
scientific research is inconclusive; and
we have exhausted problem analysis and decision-making possibilities.

When superstition is irrational:

there is little uncertainty;
the stakes are low;
there is plenty of time before the event occurs;
the superstition is expensive (calls to psychic advisers);
scientific research is ignored; and
problem solving analysis and rational decision-making is ignored or done badly.

Conclusion to Whether Superstition is Abnormal and Irrational

Superstition is not an abnormal behavior.
Under some circumstances superstition is rational and under others irrational.

The Two Parts of the Brain

Characteristics of the ancestral brain

At the end of my article The Haphazard Conflicted Brain I developed a table which contrasted the ancient brain to the deliberate system of the brain. I used the table to explain why the brain is erratic and why it is impossible to use the deliberative side of the brain all the time. This same table helps us to understand why superstition is part of the ancestral brain. Superstition can be contained but not eliminated. The ancestral part of the brain works fast, automatically and unconsciously. It uses heuristic shortcuts and its knowledge is implicit. It ontologically fuses physical, living and psychological phenomena which has a lot to do with superstitious ideas.

The ancient brain is teleological, anthropomorphic

This ancient brain does not understand how Darwinian natural selection can be creative of new processes because human beings don’t live long enough to actually witness this slow, creative change. Instead, the ancestral brain imagines creative change teleologically as caused by God, just as human design is responsible for carrying out human plans.

This same ancestral brain animates the non-living because in our early history we had no scientific knowledge about the origin of life. The ancestral brain anthropomorphizes inanimate nature and life from a survival point of view. Sadly, human beings are more dangerous to each other than any life form. In an ambiguous and dangerous situation it is safer to imagine that what is rustling in the woods might be a human being rather than the wind. To image that sound might be the wind and be wrong might get you killed. On the other hand, if you guess wrong and it is not a human being there is little cost (it’s only the wind).

Ancestral mind is essentialist

The ancestorial mind is essentialist. It believes beings have an unchanging inner core that makes things what they are. Interactions with other forces, be they rocks, trees, plants, animals, or humans can contaminate essences often times for the worse. This is also an important part of superstition. However, there is hope that we might absorb the good essences of others. The opposite of essences is contextualism, the degree to which animals, plants and humans are products of physical, biological and sociological contexts. Again, a knowledge of human and animal life that is based on Darwinian adaptation to environments is far too late in human history to be part of the ancestral brain.

Ancestral brain accepts René Descartes’ mind-body dualism

Lastly, the epistemological roots of the ancestral brain and superstition is Descartes’ dualistic separation of the mind from the body. This is because experientially our thinking processes seem not to be rooted in anything physical. Most people today still think the mind is independent of the body. Again, this is because the discovery of the brain as the seat of mentality was too late in evolutionary history to be incorporated into the ancestral brain. The heart of superstition is the fact that the deeper causes of events are invisible to us. Without understanding how these invisible processes work, we project beings who are responsible – ghosts, spirits, lucky charms or gods.

The deliberate brain is for the most part the product of science. It works slowly, consciously, methodically and intentionally with explicit knowledge according to a plan. It does not fuse ontological categories, keeping the physical, biological and psychological separate from contamination. It understands chance and coincidence and does not overly interpret events as patterns and meaning when there aren’t any. Epistemologically, most scientists do not accept Descartes’ mind-body dualism. They are either physicalists, claiming the mind is either identical to the body or that the mind is an emergent property of the body.

Here is a summary:

Two Parts of the Brain

Ancient brain:

Intuitive
Natural
Automatic
Heuristic
Implicit
Sensori-motor, preoperational
Ontological fusion
Teleological
Anthropomorphic
Psychological contamination
Essentialism
Effortlessness
Covert
Fast
Prone to superstition
Mind-body dualism
Most of human history up until the 17th century

Deliberative mind

Conceptual—logical
Rational
Intentional
Planned out
Explicit
Concrete or formal operational
Ontological distinction
Non-teleological: necessary and probability
Sees nature as it is
Biological contamination
Contexualism
Effortful
Overt
Slow
Marginal superstition
Physicalism or mind as an emergent property of matter
Blossoms in the 17th century with the scientific revolution

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Science of Superstition

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 28 Sep 2023 22:49:45 +0000

Orientation

Examples of Superstitious Behavior

Stuart Vyse is a psychologist and the author of one of the books I’ll be referencing called Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition. In that book he used his students as guinea pigs for his research on superstition. Before taking one of his exams Vyse found the following superstitions for good outcomes among his student. These included if they:

Used a lucky pen, piece of jewelry or clothing – 62%
Wore sloppy clothes – 28%
Dressed up – 33%
Touched a lucky object – 36%
Sat in a particular seat – 54%
Listened to special music or particular song – 38%
Eaten a particular food – 26%
Avoided particular person, place and action – 23%
Performed a lucky action or sequence of actions – 31%
Wore a particular kind of perfume – 13%

Given that Stuart teaches courses on statistics, these students need all the help they can muster!

The scope of superstition

Gustav Jahoda proposed four categories of superstition that provide a valuable framework in our search to understand superstition:.

as part of a cosmology or coherent world-view such as the magic of tribal societies;
as experiences with the paranormal such as ESP, communicating with the dead, ghosts and haunted houses;
as socially shared superstitions such as black cats that can bring bad luck. Not walking under a ladder or not doing anything significant on Friday the 13^th and;
as personal superstitions that include lucky shirts, hats, and numbers.

We will be mostly concerned with the third and fourth categories in this article.

What is superstition?

Superstitious behavior and thoughts are most likely to emerges under three conditions:

when there is significant uncertainty which promotes fear;
the reward in very important; and
the cost of the superstition is minimal.

Yet not all superstition is based on fear. For example, gambling, driving fast, skydiving and taking drugs are all instances in which people choose uncertainty for the high that is brought.

Science divides the natural world into three dimensions: the physical world of material objects, the biological world of life and the psychological world of human intentions. These are all distinct from each other. What religion, the paranormal and the superstitious all have in common is the fusion of inanimate, animate and psychological. What this means is the belief that rocks can come alive or that caterpillars can have intentions. In addition, minds can communicate with minds, unmediated by brains and bodies. Superstitions are beliefs and behaviors which defy natural law (fusing ontological categories) while making a supposed invisible connection between natural events. Its purpose is to:

either quell uncertainty;
bring good luck; and
create a temporary high (sensation-seeking).

Sir James Frazer’s principle of superstition as it relates to magic is more precise in what this hidden order is like. Frazer described two important principles of sympathetic magic:

Homeopathy magic is based on the law of similarity, that like produces like. In voodoo, a burning an effigy will weaken the person burned in effigy.
Law of contagion – where there is a lasting connection between things that were once in contact.

Superstitious judgmental biases

Control, or the illusion of it, is very important in superstition. For example, gambling participants think they have a better chance of winning if they roll the dice and if they choose the number. In superstitious thinking illusionary correlations play an important role in the maintenance of many superstitions. For example, too much attention is paid to times when:

the superstition was tried and the outcome worked or;
when the superstition was not tried and the outcome failed.

It is ignored in times when:

the superstition was not tried and the outcome succeeded; or
when the superstition was tried but the outcome failed.

Further, the number one reason people given to believe in the superstition is from personal experience. But these same people do not understand the inherent weaknesses in how people interpret events. For example, scientific research shows we underestimate the likelihood of how often weird stuff happens. They are more common than we think. The second bias is to overestimate the likelihood of events that are rare, like being killed in a plane crash. If you go to a different party each week with at least 23 people each, on average two people will have the same birthday half the time. We are not equipped to think about likelihood very accurately because the science of probability is only about 300 years old. It’s too recent to be part of our evolutionary heritage. Instead, we interpret these coincidences as if something supernatural were involved.

Questions about the relationship between religion, superstition, the paranormal and psychopathology

Is it possible to be religious and not superstitious? Is it possible to be an atheist and still be superstitious? Can you believe in paranormal (ESP, telepathy) and not be superstitious? Can you be superstitious and not believe in the paranormal? Are all irrationalities superstitious? The answer is no. Some irrationalities are not always superstitious, such as murder or schizophrenia. Further, some superstitions, given the level of intensity, the dangers involved and the unpredictability of the outcome might make superstitions a rational strategy! Is there any relationship between the kind of work you do and superstition? How much of superstition is governed by age? Are there certain ages in children when they are more superstitious than others? Is there a superstitious personality? Are superstitions people abnormal? Are superstitions indicative of a psychological disorder? Should we be concerned about our mental health if we are superstitious?

Where we are headed

This article is divided into two parts. In Part I, I start with a socio-culture of superstition. I identify the social demographics of groups most likely to be superstitious, including their occupations. Further, I identify how superstitious behaviors are learned, focusing on associative (Pavlov) and operant conditioning (Skinner). We discuss attachment to places and to objects and the reasons for these attachments. I close part I by showing why it is easier for people to believe in creationism rather than evolution.

After summarizing part one of this article, the heart of Part II is to discuss how the mind develops in children. We examine children’s superstitious thinking in the light of recent criticisms of Piaget. We talk about how some of Piaget’s findings have been replaced by psychological essentialism. Next, I show how our social theory of mind invites superstitious thinking. Our ability to form social relationships leads to speculation about meanings and intentions which leads to superstitious mind-reading. Towards the end of Part II of this 2-piece article, it may seem like a no-brainer to announce that superstitious behavior is irrational. However, there are some extreme conditions in which thinking superstitiously is rational. Further, I ask whether superstitious thinking is pathological. Whether superstitious thinking is irrational or pathological, I’d like to know if it is dangerous. As I pointed out in an earlier article, superstition is the product of an ancient mind. Experiencing the world in a non-superstitious way is a product of the reflective mind and only gathers force in the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

My claim

My claim in this article is that superstitious thinking and behaving is built into the mind by our biological inheritance and we cannot get rid of it completely. While more modern societies can minimize its impact through science and its institutions, there are limits in how far it can go. For this article I will be referring to two books. The first in Believing in Magic by Stuart Vyse and the second is by Bruce Hood, The Science of Superstition.

Qualifications

This article is about the origins of supernatural beliefs, why they are so common and why they are be so hard to get rid of. This piece is not about ghosts and ghouls or anything paranormal. Rather it is about the supernatural thinking and behavior in everyday activity. Lastly, this article is about the science behind our superstitions not whether these beliefs and behaviors are or are not true.

The Sociology of Superstition

Culture is a necessary but not sufficient condition for superstition

Superstition depends partly on the proportion of social life that is secular and how much is sacred. Of course, in tribal societies where there is little secular culture developed, parents will pass on cultural superstitious traditions. However, in his book The Science of Superstition Bruce Hood points out that children, even when raised in a strong secular culture such as Russia (when it was the Soviet Union) or the Scandinavian countries, children are still superstitious. Even atheists are still vulnerable to good luck charms, knocking on wood and crossing fingers no matter how much of a rationalist they may be.

How are work and leisure related to superstition?

Which social groups are superstitious considering demographics of occupation, gender, age, and education? Traditionally superstitious occupational groups include sports figures, gamblers, sailors, soldiers, miners, financial investors and college students.

Professional athletes and actors are the most famous superstitious people and there is more to superstition in team sports than individual sports like track. In baseball, the most capricious parts of the game are batting and pitching and are the most suspectable to superstition. Female athletes think that dressing well is especially important to success.

Some gamblers certainly have rules like these: the number of rolls is connected with the velocity of the throw; a soft touch brings low numbers and; a hard throw brings a high one. If you want to talk to the dice, slow the pace down. Some superstitions are aimed at maintenance of successful hot streak; other superstitions are designed to break a batting slump with a hit.

Demographics

Gender studies show that women are more superstitious and have a greater belief in the paranormal than do men. I think this has to do with women having less control over their lives and needing some method of making their world seem more predictable. Vyse tells us that in childhood and early adolescence boys and girls do not differ in their locus of control. In college however, women begin to show a greater external locus of control then men. People in the soft sciences are more likely to be superstitious than people in the hard sciences. The later probably use the scientific method as part of their work more frequently.

People with an external locus of control are more superstitious. If a person feels their life is unpredictable, they are going to be drawn to superstitious techniques for making them more predictable. This means working class people are more likely to be susceptible than upper middle-class people. Hypnotic suggestibility studies found that those who were higher in suggestibility were more likely to have psychic experience, such as seeing angels or extraterrestrials. In terms of the big five of personality theory, superstitious behavior is connected to higher levels of neuroticism, depression, anxiety, low self-esteem and low ego strength. They have difficulty responding constructively to stressful or challenging events. People with low ambiguity tolerance and living in high stress area are especially superstitious.

How is Superstition Acquired?

Association and conditioning

As Ford says, we are not born knocking on wood. Superstition is acquired. We become followers of astrology. How it is acquired depends on events coming together in time, place and with people, something psychologists call “contiguity”. Pavlov developed seven laws of association. Associations are events that happen right before the stimulus and the behavior and are for the most part unconscious. The first law of association is temporal continuity of association. In a weak association more time will pass between the association and the stimulus. A stronger linkage between association and stimulus occurs if association happens right before the behavior. The second law is the intensity of the association. A weak association goes with drab colors, monotone sounds or neutral smells. Strong intensity is associated more with vivid sights, sounds and smells. The third law is the frequency of the association. The more frequent and consistent the association the more likely the behavior will be repeated. The more infrequent or erratic the association the less chance the behavior will have of continuing. This is one reason why therapists like to insist that their meetings be on the same day of the week, hopefully at the same time and in the same place.

The fourth law of association is the resemblance between the association and the behavior. The closer the resemblance association is the greater the chance the association will be linked to the stimulus. So if you are trying to build a habit of going running it’s not a good idea to play Brahma Lullaby right before getting out of bed to run. Speedy music is best for speedy activities. The fifth law of association is the sequencing between association and stimulus. It is always best to create an association right before the behavior, not right after it. The sixth association has to do with duration. Associations which last a long time right before the behavior will create a deeper impression than if the duration is too fast. Lastly, we have the quality of the association itself. If the association is very enjoyable that will make it more likely to be repeated. If it is enjoyable in itself, it is more likely to make the connection with the behavior intrinsic.

What is the connection between these laws and superstition? After all, Pavlov was a scientist. The most significant thing is that these associations are made unconsciously by people who haven’t a clue about Pavlov’s laws. That means the associations are operating behind the person’s back. The success between the association and behavior is interpreted superstitiously, as some kind of occult connection when there is really a scientific explanation.

Consequential conditioning

The same process of unconscious assimilation happens right after the behavior with the consequences. BF Skinner argued that a consequence that follows the behavior can either strengthen the behavior or weaken it. A consequence that increases the behavior is a reinforcement. The consequence that weakens the behavior is called a punishment. Skinner further divided reinforcers into positive and negative. Conversely, he divided punishment into positive and negative. Again, people’s behavior is not consciously connected to consequences so successes and failures seem to happen in a haphazard way. The successes and failures seem to come out of nowhere and so there is a search for some hidden set of rules that explains them. Hence, we have superstitious beliefs and behaviors. The development of pathological obsessions, compulsions and phobias can all be explained by both associational and consequential conditions. Magical and religious rituals can be similarly explained.

When Does a Routine Become a Superstition?

People like to have routines to ground their lives in things they can control. So, if every morning I turn on the lights, start my computer, wash up, put my clothes on, go into the kitchen and start to have breakfast there is comfort in knowing I do everything in the same order. Then I might read my email, have breakfast and go for my walk. So practically, if I went for my walk before I looked at my email and then had my breakfast and then checked my email it really is not that important. This routine would become superstitious when the order became compulsive. I might feel that the rest of my day would be ruined if I did things out of order. I might feel instead of the routine being mindful, it became mindless, like muttering hymns in church as a little kid with no understanding of what the words meant. However, I did it because God would punish me if I didn’t.

Attachment to Places

In his book The Science of Superstition, Bruce Hood points out that houses associated with notorious murders are difficult to resell. Could you buy or even rent a house where a murder was once committed? Are you a person who would cross the street to avoid standing on the same spot where the evil took place? Why would mature adults will pay good money for personal items that once belonged to famous people? Why do fans go crazy when they get to physically touch their sports heroes or rock stars?

There are principles of superstition that underlie these reservations. We intuitively feel that the integrity of something good can be more easily spoiled by contact with something bad rather than the reverse. Why do we treat evil as contagious more so than good? Why do we refuse to touch evil items? Bruce Hood quotes Rozin saying that adults endorse each of these reasons to varying degrees because:

we do not want to be seen undertaking an action that the majority of people would avoid;
an item associated with a killer is negative and wearing it produces associations with the act of killing;
it is imagined there is a physical contamination of the clothing; and
we believe there is a spiritual contamination of the clothing.

Attachment to Objects

In an old store author Bruce Hood visited, the objects were so evocative that if he closed his eyes he could smell decades pass him by. The shop had a wonderful aroma of the past, laced with tobacco. Objects are a tangible, physical link with the past that can instantly transport us back to earlier days. Objects define who we think we are. We treat objects as an extension of ourselves. We think some invisible property in them makes them what they are. Old chairs seem to know something about the past. How far can this be carried? When will it turn into a superstition?

What is a fetish? A fetish is a belief that an object has supernatural powers. They are attributing to physical objects invisible properties. Certainly, furniture has a history in its faded fabric and scratched legs. They remind us of events or people, but many people go further. They claim that the objects are haunted by dead relatives.

Evolutionary Mind Structure

What humans do most naturally and spontaneously at the most basic level is to look for patterns. We imagine hidden faces and causes as part of watching for patterns. Further we see things in wholes, not parts. Gestalt psychologists have shown that the mind fills in the missing edges of shapes that in real life are only partly formed. The completed shapes do not really exist. Our brains have created something out of nothing because the completed shapes are generalizations about shapes that help us to survive. In part we see faces in the clouds or on Mars because we are not used to working with coincidence and the possibility that things happen randomly and by chance. If you are like most people, if Vyse asked you to generate a random series of numbers, you might happily announce you could do it. In coin flips, you are much more likely to alternate fourteen flips with either heads or tails. But chance is just as likely to generate streaksof heads or streaks of tales. Because our minds are designed to see the world as organized we often detect pattern that are not really present. Because what causes events in the world is something we cannot witness since they happen in scales of time and space that are too large for us, our minds have evolved to infer the existence cause of things we can’t see. This is because any cause, even sinister ones, is better than being ruled by chance.

Humans’ Lack of Imagination About Slow Creativity

Darwin’s theory of natural selection is hard to understand because it operates at time scales well beyond the lifetime of an individual. This makes it difficult for people to accept. When we see the diversity of life forms in our day it is hard to believe that such complexity could arrive spontaneously with no designer over long periods of time. As individuals with relatively short life-spans, we don’t have the experience of immense passages of time and so we cannot observe evolution at work. Furthermore, we are not naturally inclined to imagine a theory that is non-purposive and non -directive. This is because so many of our actions are driven by plans and purposes. We can’t imagine nature without it.

Why is it so hard for people to become scientific in their thinking? Science is full of ideas that seem bizarre simply because:

a) we are not used to them and
b) they are hard to wrap our heads around and require specialized knowledge like a class in scientific methodology and statistics. It is easier to imagine ghosts than a light wave made of up photons

On the other hand, monotheistic intuitions for creationism include:

the world is governed by non-random events or patterns in the world;
events are caused by intention;
complexity cannot happen spontaneously but must be a product of someone’s plan to design things for a purpose; and
All living things are fundamentally different because of some invisible property inside them (essences)

No wonder monotheistic religion continues to be adhered to in spite of Darwinian evolution!

The Roots of Mind-Body Dualism

Epistemologically, the mind seems to have no real direct connection in the physical world. That is why some consider mind-body dualism irrefutable evidence for why there must be supernatural powers operating in the world. Hood cautions us that once we commit to the independent existence of mind and body, there is no limit to what the mind can do. If the mind is separate from the body it is not constrained by the same laws that govern the physical world.

Coming Attractions of Part II

As a result of his research among children and adolescents, Piaget developed a cogent and elaborate system for understanding child development. He certainly explained superstition well. But recently many of his findings have to be adjusted as a result of collaborations between psychologists and stage magicians. Current research in child development tells us that much of superstition results from the fusion of the physical, biological and psychological worlds. Piaget would haves certainly agreed with this, using his own terminology. However, thanks to the work of Susan Gelman, we learn that children are psychological essentialists. In part II we will find out what that means, not only for children but also for adults.

The human mind is lost in the world of other people long before the mind becomes self-reflective. A child learns very soon that other human beings have minds which have intentions and give meaning which is different from the child. The mind of the adult has intentions which are hidden from them. But in order to become mind-readers, children must face up to the fact that minds appear to be separate from bodies. How might this be related to the emergence of superstition? Ghosts are often associated with the superstitions but what evolutionary adaptative function might ghosts serve?

Which psychopathology is most consistently connected with superstition: paranoia, neurosis or schizophrenia? Is superstitious thinking and behavior the cause or the consequence of psychopathology?

What are the conditions under which superstitious thoughts or behavior are rational? What does how much uncertainty there is in a situation and what are the stakes have to do with rationality? How much does the amount of time and the cost in time and energy play a factor? How does knowledge of science, problem-solving skills and decision-making capacities connect to being rational yet still being superstitious?

It is a common stereotype to say that tribal people are more superstitious than people who live in industrial capitalist or socialist societies. Putting aside the imperialistic and monotheistic use these claims can be put to, this claim is true for bioevolutionary reasons. Comparing the ancestral mind to the deliberative mind pulls together most, if not all the facets of superstitious thinking and behavior in this article.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Greater of Two Evils

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 03:46:54 +0000

I’m reposting this article about the Democratic Party five years after it was published because after re-reading it, I wouldn’t change a thing. In addition, the Democratic Party has become even more right-wing since it gained power in 2020. At the end of the article I will name the many ways it has gotten still worse.

How to Conceive of the Two-party System

Lesser of two evils

Among liberals and all the different types of socialists, when the subject of the Democratic Party comes up, there are at least two variations. One is the familiar liberal argument that the Democratic Party is the “lesser of two evils”. For them, the Republican Party is the source of most, if not all, problems while the Democratic Party is presented as shortsighted, weak and/or incompetent bumblers. Among some of the more compromising members of the Green Party, the lesser of two evils manifests itself when it implores its voters to “vote in safe states”

There are a number of reasons why I will claim that the Democratic Party is not the lesser of two evils. But for now, I want to point out that the lesser of two evils has at its foundation a political spectrum which is organized linearly with conservatives and fascists on the right. Along the left there are liberals, followed by social democrats, state socialists, and anarchists on the extreme left. All the forces moving from liberals leftward are broadly categorized as “progressive.” What this implies is that there are only quantitative differences between being a liberal and being any kind of socialist. In this scenario, being a liberal is somehow closer to being a socialist than being a liberal is to a being a conservative. However, there is an elephant in the room, and the elephant is capitalism.

What unites all socialists – social democrats, Maoists, Trotskyists, council communists and anarchists – is opposition to capitalism? What divides us from liberals, whether they are inside or outside the Democratic Party, is that liberals are for capitalism. In relation to the economic system, liberals are closer to conservatives than they are to socialists of any kind. So, the “lesser of two evils “argument is based on the expectation that socialists will ignore the capitalist economic system and make believe that capitalism is somehow progressive. It might have been possible to argue this case 60 years ago, but today capitalism makes its profits on war, slave prison labor and fictitious capital. Characterizing this as “progress” is ludicrous.

The parties are interchangeable

Most anarchists and various varieties of Leninists claim there is no difference between the parties. They say that capitalists control both parties and it is fruitless to make any distinctions. I agree they are both capitalist parties, but what most socialists fail to do is point out that, in addition to protecting the interests of capitalists as Republicans do, the Democratic Party: a) presents itself as representing the middle and lower classes; and (b) stands in the way of the formation of a real opposition to the elites.

The second reason I disagree with the idea that the two parties are simply interchangeable is that it fails to make a distinction between the interests of the ruling and upper classes (Republicans) on the one hand, and the upper middle class (mostly Democrats) on the other. There are real class differences between elites that should not be dissolved.

The Democrats are the greater of two evils

The argument I will make in this article is that the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party for about 85% of the population. I make this argument as a Council Communist, and my argument in no way implies voting for Republicans, Greens or even voting at all. Before giving you my reasons for why the Democratic Party is worse for most people I want to give you a sense of how I came up with the figure of 85% .

Old money vs new money and the class composition in the United States

Sociologists have some disagreements over how many classes there are in the United States and what occupations cover what social classes. While some might have a bone to pick about my percentages, I am confident that I am at least in the ballpark. The ruling class constitutes the 1% (or less) of the population and the upper class another 5%. What these classes have in common is that they all live off finance capital and do not have to work. This is what has been called “old money”. This old money had its investments in extractive industries like oil, mining and the war industry. This is the stronghold of the Republican Party.

The upper middle classes consist of doctors, lawyers, architects, and senior managers who make a lot of money, but have to work long hours. It also includes scientists, engineers as well as media professionals such as news commentators, magazine and newspaper editors, college administrators and religious authorities Yet there are tensions between the elites and the upper middle class. The upper middle class represents “new money” and makes their profits from scientific innovation, the electronics industry, including computers and the Internet, among other avenues. This class constitutes roughly 10% of the population. The upper middle class is the stronghold of the Democratic Party.

A number of economists from Thomas Piketty to Richard Wolff have argued that for these social classes there has been an “economic recovery” since the crash of 2008. For all other classes there has been decline. The role of the Democratic Party is

To represent the actual interests of the upper middle class
To make believe it is a spokesperson for the other 85%

Far be it for me to say that the Republicans and Democrats represent the same thing. There is real class struggle between the interests of the ruling class and the upper class on the one hand and the upper middle class on the other. My point is that for 85% of the population these differences between elites are irrelevant. What the top three classes have in common is a life and death commitment to capitalism – and this commitment is vastly more important than where the sources of their profits come from.

Who are these remaining 85%? Poor people, whether they are employed or not, constitute about 20% of the population. When they are working this includes unskilled work which simply means no previous training is required. Working class people – blue and white collar – represent about 40% of the population. This includes carpenters, welders, electricians, technical workers, secretaries, computer programmers, and X-ray technicians. Middle class people – high school, grammar school teachers, registered nurses, librarians, corporate middle management, and small mom-and-pop storeowners – are about 25% of the population. Most poor people don’t vote and in a way, they are smart because they understand that the Democratic Party can do nothing for them. While many working-class people don’t vote, highly skilled working class people do vote, and many will vote Democrat. Middle classes are also more likely to vote Democrat with the exception of small business owners. In fact, research by labor theorist Kim Moody into the voting patterns of the last election showed that a high percentage of this petty bourgeois voted for Trump.

The Democratic Party has nothing to offer the middle class

When I was growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s, my father worked as a free-lance commercial artist about 40 hours per week. My mother stayed home and raised my sister and I. One income could cover all of us. My parents sent me to Catholic grammar schools and high schools, which were not very expensive, but they had to save their money to do it. They helped pay for part of my college education after I dropped out and then came back. They helped my partner and I with a down payment on a house in Oakland, CA. Today both parents in a middle-class family need to work and the work-week for middle class workers is at least 10 hours longer. As for savings, if a middle-class family buys a home, it is much more difficult to save for their children’s education.

In 1970 I was living in Denver, Colorado and had my own studio apartment for $70/month. I worked 20 hours a week at the library as a page and could afford to go to community college part-time. Twenty years later I tried to communicate this to my stepdaughter who was 20 years old and then compared it to her experience. She was working full-time as a waitress, had to live with two other people and could only afford to take a couple of classes without going into debt. Reluctantly and seemingly defeated she had to return home to live if she were to ever graduate from a community college. The Democrats did nothing to stem the tide of the decline of the middle class. Working class and middle class people may continue to vote for Democrats, but that doesn’t mean Democrats are delivering the goods. It just means these classes don’t want to face that:

a) They have no representation;
b) There is no alternative party and they do not live in a democracy.

Now on to why I believe the Democratic Party is worse that the Republican party for this 85% of the population.

The Democratic Party has nothing to do with being liberal

Most people who support the Democratic Party don’t really consider the party as it actually is, but how they imagine it should be according either to political science classes they’ve picked up in high school or college or from what they have picked up unconsciously through conversations. They have also gotten this from Democratic Party members themselves who talk about liberal values while in practice acting like conservatives. These voters think the Democratic Party is liberal. What do I mean by liberal? The term liberal has a long political history which I have traced elsewhere (Counterpunch, Left Liberals Have No Party) but let’s limit the term to what I call “New Deal Liberals”.

These New Deal liberals think that the state should provide essential services like pensions, food stamps, natural disaster relief as well as road and bridge construction. They also think the state should intervene to minimize some of the worst aspects of capitalism such as child wage work or sex slavery. These liberals think that Democrats should support the development of unions to protect the working class. This class deserves an adequate wage and decent working conditions. They also think – as it is in the American dream – that in order to justify their existence, capitalists should make profit from the production of real goods and services. These liberals think that the Democratic Party should support the development of science and research to create an easier life so that the standard of living for the American population should go up from generation to generation. These are the values of New Deal liberals. If the Democratic Party acted as if it supported these things, I could understand why liberals would say voting for the Democratic Party is the lesser of two evils. The problem is that these New Deal liberals are trapped in a 50-year time warp when the last real liberal Democratic president was Lyndon Johnson. The Democratic Party hasn’t been liberal in 50 years. This is one reason why the program of New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders had been so popular.

It does not take a Marxist to argue that the United States has been in economic decline since the mid 1970’s. It won’t do to blame the Republicans alone for this 50-year degeneration. The Democratic Party has had presidents between 1976 and 1980, in addition to eight years of Clinton, as well as eight years of Obama. They have had twenty years’ worth of chances to put into practice liberal values and they have failed miserably. Under the Democratic Party:

The standard of living is considerably below the standard of living 50 years ago.
The minimum wage bought more in 1967 than it does today.
The standard of living for all racial minorities has declined since the 1970’s.
Unions, which protected the working class, have dwindled to barely 10%.
With the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich, no Democrat is prepared to commit to building infrastructure as a foundation for a modern civilization.
The proportion of wealth claimed by finance capital has dwarfed investment in industrial capital compared to fifty years ago.
The Democrats have signed off on all imperialist wars for the last 50 years.
Science has lost respectably in the United States as it fights a battle against fundamentalism. Do Democrats come out unapologetically for science and challenge the fundamentalists and the New Agers? There are more people in the US who believe in astrology than they did in the Middle Ages. Does the Democratic Party, in the name of its claimed roots in the Enlightenment, rescue the public from these follies? Hardly.

Please tell me in what sense is this party liberal?

The Democratic Party is not an oppositional party: the Republicans play hardball; the Democrats play badminton

It is right about this time that a liberal defending the Democratic Party would chime in and say something about the Supreme Court. The line is “If we don’t get so and so elected, then the evil right-wing judge will get appointed and Roe vs Wade will be threatened.” This line has been trotted out for the last 45 years. What it conveniently ignores is that the Democratic Party has been in power for at least 40% of the time, whether in the executive or any other branch. It has had forty years to load the Supreme Court with rabid liberals so as to bury the right-to-lifers when they had the chance. An oppositional party would have done this. The Democratic Party has not.

Trump has been on a tear destroying what was left of US international diplomatic relations put into place by Kissinger and Brzezinski. His “policies” are consistently right wing “interventions”, whether they succeed or not. At the same time, domestically Trump has been consistently right wing on every issue from public schools, to immigrants to social programs. What he has done has destabilized international and domestic relations. Conservatives have been doing this kind of thing for 50 years, but with more diplomacy. If the Democratic Party were really an oppositional party, I would expect to find liberal interventions that are roughly the reverse of what Trump and the conservatives have done. There have been no such interventions.

Examples of what an oppositional party would look like

Under an oppositional Democratic regime we would have found a normalization of trade relations with Cuba. There would be scientists and engineers sent to Haiti to build and repair roads and bridges destroyed by natural disasters. There would be normalization of relations with Venezuela and bonds built with the social democratic parties of the Latin American left. Domestically the minimum wage would be restored to at least the standard of 50 years ago. After all, statistics show “productivity” has gone up in the late 50 years. Why wouldn’t the standard of living improve? Social Security and pensions would be regularly upgraded to keep up with the cost of inflation. Bridge and road repair would have been undertaken and low-cost housing would be built. A real liberal president might be so bold as to deploy US soldiers to build them since most of them would no longer be employed overseas. They might also have put forward bills implementing a mass transit system, one that is as good as those of Europe or Japan. Has the Democratic Party done any of these things?

This is “opposition”?

Internationally the Democratic Party’s policies have been indistinguishable from the Republicans. Obama did try to normalize relations with Cuba but that was in the service of the potential for foreign investment, not out of any respect for the social project of building the socialism Cuba was engaged in. The US Democratic regimes have done nothing for Haiti. Its attitude towards the Latin American “pink tide” has been hostile while supporting neoliberal restoration whenever and wherever possible.

Domestic Democratic regimes have done nothing to stem the tide of longer work hours and marginalization of workers as well as the temporary and part-time nature of work. Social Security and pensions have not kept up with the cost of inflation. The Democratic Party has had 20 years to repair the bridges, the roads and the sewer systems and what has it done? The Democrats had 20 years to build low-cost housing and get most, if not all, the homeless off the streets. What have Democrats done? Like the Republicans, the Democrats have professed to have no money for infrastructure, low cost housing or improving mass transit. Like the Republicans they have gone along in blocking Universal Health Care that virtually every other industrialized country possesses. But just like the Republicans they suddenly have plenty of money when it comes to funding seven wars and building the prison industrial complex. Time and again Democratic politicians have ratified increasing the military budget despite the fact that it has no state enemies like the Soviet Union.

In 2008 capitalism had another one of its crisis moments. Marxists and non-Marxist economists agree that the banks were the problem. The Democrats, with that classy “first African American president” did not implement a single Keynesian intervention to reign in the banks. No banker has even gone to jail. What a real Democratic opposition would have done is to tell the banks something like, “look, the public has bailed you out this time, but in return for this collective generosity, we require that you make your profits from undertaking all the infrastructural work that needs to be done, like building a 21st century mass transit system and investing some of your profits in low cost housing.” This is what an oppositional party would do. Notice none of this has anything to do with socialism. It’s straight New Deal liberalism.

In sum, the last 45 years have you ever seen a consistent left liberal intervention by Democrats that would be the equivalent of what Trump is doing now or any conservative regime has done in the last 50 years in any of these areas? Has Carter, Clinton I or Obama done anything equivalent in their 20 years of formal power that Republicans have done in their 30 years? No, because if they ever dreamed of doing such a thing the Republicans would have them driven from office as communists. When was the last time a Democratic candidate drove a Republican from office by calling them a fascist? The truth of the matter is that the Republicans play hardball while the Democrats play badminton.

The second reason the Democratic Party is not an oppositional party is because “opposition” is a relative term. The lesser of two evils scenario works with the assumption that parties are partisan: all Republicans vote in block and all Democrats vote in block. This, however, is more the exception than the rule. Most times some Republicans support Democratic policies and most times some Democrats support Republican measures. Many Republican policies would not have been passed had the Democrats really been an oppositional party. In 2004, when Ralph Nader ran for president, he was raked over the coals for “spoiling” the elections. Yet as later research proves, more people who were registered Democrat voted for Republicans than the total number of people who voted for the Green Party.

The Democratic Party is a party of the elites

Those politicians and media critics who inhabit the nether worlds between left liberal and social democracy such as Robert Reich, Bernie Sanders, Cornell West are tenacious in their search for the “soul” of the Democratic Party. They insist on dividing Democrats into conservative and liberals. The latest version is to call right-wing Democrats “corporate” Democrats as compared to some other kind of Democrat labelled “progressive”. The implication is that it is possible not to be bought hook line and sinker by corporations if you are in the Democratic Party. I am skeptical that any person can run as a Democrat candidate win an election and not make some compromises with corporations even at a local level, I am cynical this can be done at a state or national level. Corporations are ruling class organizations and they own both parties. There is a reason why Martin Luther King, Malcolm X never joined the Democratic Party.

If the last Democratic primaries in which Clinton II was handed the nomination over Bernie Sanders was not enough to make you leave the party, the World Socialist Website published two major articles on how the CIA is running its own candidates as Democrats this year. When a world terrorist organization runs candidates under a liberal banner, isn’t that enough to convince you that the Democratic Party is a party of the elites?

Earlier I stated that the upper middle class represents the Democratic Party and the upper class and the ruling class represent the Republican Party. While each may have interclass differences it is essential for all three social classes that their struggle be seen by the 85% as something this 85% has a stake in. It is important for the ruling class and the upper class that there is a party that appears to represent the unwashed masses (the Democrats). The ruling class and the upper class need the Democratic Party even if they have differences with the upper middle class, whom the Democrats represent. They need the Democratic Party to help create the illusion that voting is an expression of democracy. But the Democratic Party has as much to do with democracy as the Republican Party has to do with republicanism.

The Democratic Party’s presence is an obstacle to building a real opposition to elites

By far the greatest reason the Democratic Party is worse than the Republican Party is the way in which the presence of the Democratic Party drains energy from developing a real opposition to the elites and the upper middle class.

The Democratic Party attacks the Green Party far more than it attacks Republicans

While the Democratic Party plays badminton with Republicans, it plays hardball with third parties, specifically the Green Party. It does everything it can to keep the Greens off the stage during the debates and makes things difficult when the Greens try to get on the ballot. After the last election, Jill Stein was accused of conspiring with the Russians to undermine the Democrats.

If the Democratic Party was a real liberal party, if it was a real opposition party, if it was a party of the “working people” rather than the elites, it would welcome the Green Party into the debates. With magnanimously liberal self-confidence it would say “the more the merrier. May all parties of the left debate.” It would welcome the Greens or any other left party to register in all 50 states and simply prove its program superior.

The wasted time, energy and loss of collective creativity of non-elites

About 10% of the 40% of working class people are in unions. Think of how much in the way of union dues, energy and time was lost over the last 50 years trying to elect Democratic candidates who did little or nothing for those same unions. All that money, energy and time could have been spent in either deepening the militancy of existing unions or organizing the other 30% of workers into unions.

Think of all untapped creative political activity of working class people who are not in unions that was wasted in being enthusiastic and fanatical about sports teams because they see no hope or interest in being part of a political community. Instead of being on talk show discussion groups on Monday morning talking about what the Broncos should have done or could have done on Sunday, think of the power they could have if instead they spent their time strategizing about how to coordinate their strike efforts.

Think of all the immigrants and refugees in this country working at skilled and semi-skilled jobs that have wasted what little time they had standing in line trying to get Democratic Party politicians elected. That time could have been spent on more “May Days Without An Immigrant” as happened thirteen years ago

Think of all the middle class African Americans whose standards of living has declined over the last 45 years who wasted their vote on Democrats and put their faith in the Black Caucus. Think of the wasted time, effort and energy of all middle class people who often actively campaign and contribute money to the Democratic Party that could have been spent on either building a real liberal party or better yet, a mass socialist party.

For many years, the false promise that the Democratic Party just might be a party of the working people has stood in the way of the largest socialist organization in the United States from building a mass working class party. Social Democrats in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who should have known better continue to blur the line between a real socialist like Eugene Debs and left liberals like Bernie Sanders. With 33,000 members there are still factions of DSA that will not break with the Democrats.

Are there real differences between the neoliberal Democrats and the neoconservative Republicans? Are there differences between Soros and the Koch brothers? Yes, but these differences are not, as Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Claire have said, “a dimes worth of difference”, especially compared to what the presence of the Democratic party has done for 50 years to 85% of the population. Their fake opposition has stood in the way of building a mass left political party.

The Democratic Party is a parasite on social movements

Can you remember a time when the Democratic Party had an innovative program of their own that was clearly separate from the Republicans yet distinct from any left wing social movements?

I can’t. What I have seen is a Democratic party that does nothing but sniff out the flesh and blood of social movements and vampirize them. I have no use for identity politics, but I can remember a time when the Democratic Party wanted nothing to do with it. Now it runs candidates based on identity politics. Black Lives Matter is now part of the Ford Foundation, a Democratic Party think tank. The Occupy Movement term “occupy” was taken as a name for a Facebook page sympathetic to the Democrats, Occupy Democrats, as if the Democratic Party could be occupied. The Democratic Party, which did nothing for feminism while it was attacked and marginalized by the right wing since the 1980’s, has suddenly “discovered” feminism in the Pink Pussy cats. This is an upper middle class party that sings “We Shall Overcome” fifty years too late.

What should be done?

Rather than focusing on the evil Republican Party, which makes the Democrats seem merely wishy- washy or inept, the policies of the Democratic Party should be attacked relentlessly while paying little attention to Republicans. In the election years, the Green Party should abandon its strategy of soliciting votes in “safe states”. Instead, the Greens should challenge those who claim to be “left-wing” Democrats to get out of the party as a condition for being voted for. In my opinion, there needs to be an all-out war on the Democratic Party as a necessary step to building a mass party. The goal of such a party should not be to win elections, but to use public opportunities as a platform for deepening, spreading and coordinating the commonalities of the interests of the poor, working class and middle class people.

How the Democratic Party Has Gotten Worse in the Last Five Years

It has surrendered its foreign policy maneuvers to neocons Victoria Nuland and Robert Kagan.
It has aided, trained and supplied military supplies of fascist forces in Ukraine
It has blown billions of dollars on the war in Ukraine (I thought the Republicans were the “War party”).
It cannot compete with China or Russia in building infrastructure, providing raw material and goods so its solution is to make war on them.
It failed to replace a head of state who is incompetent, incoherent and is incapable of any rhetorical debate while lacking in any power and backbone.
Its profits are made on either destroying the productive forces (wars) or the creation of fictitious capital.
It has exerted no control over the financial, insurance or real-estate sector while the manufacturing sector of the economy declines (this is Build Back Better?).
The Fed solution to debt is to print more money not backed by gold.
The Democrats have done nothing to stabilize the manic-depressive stock market.
It has failed miserably to reform its domestic terrorist organizations, euphemistically referred to as “police departments”, where killing civilians has become normalized.
It has failed miserably to attack the NRA and intervene effectively in regular mass shootings all over the country.
It has done nothing to raise the minimum wage. People can work-full time and be homeless because their rent is higher than their income.
It is does nothing to end the slave labor in prisons or reduce the numbers of people in prison.
It has done nothing about the housing crisis where the number of vacant houses in this country are five times that of the homeless population.
High school and grammar school education is in shambles. Yankee students cannot compete internationally.
Primary and secondary educators are leaving the field. The Yankee state is hiring teachers at that level with no teaching experience or formal training.
After all its promises it has failed to do anything to relieve student debt.
It has failed to protect the Roe vs Wade decision making abortions legal.
The party has a paranoid, conspiratorial explanations for its failures, beginning with the loss of Clinton to Trump in 2016. It used to be the Democratic Party made fun of conspiratorial people like Alex Jones. Today its conspiracies are its stock and trade explanation for its failure.

On the other hand the Democratic Party has embraced New Deal liberalism in the following ways….ummm…it’s okay, I’ll wait.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Heroic Skeptical Odysseys Into Parapsychology Part II

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 09 Sep 2023 03:53:41 +0000

(Image is of young skeptics in action)

Summary of Part I

The purpose of this two-part article is to present an eight-step method that a self-organized community of scientific skeptics developed specifically to investigate the claims of the existence of paranormal phenomenon. I began Part I with a survey of what the Yankee population believes about the paranormal, including psychic healing, ESP, the existence of ghosts and extraterrestrials’ visitations to earth. Using the work of Jonathan Smith I categorized eight types of paranormal experience on a spectrum, based on how modest or extraordinary their claims are. The bulk of the article was to name the first three of the eight steps skeptics use in evaluating paranormal claims. This include the quality of sources, how sound the logic is as well as the quality of observation.

In part two of my article, I complete the rest of the eight steps. These include quantitative reasoning (assessing probability); perceptual trickery; memory errors; the placebo effect and the possibility of hallucinations that can lead to false conclusions about the paranormal. Furthermore, I identify four reasons why believing in the paranormal is not harmless, either at an individual or societal level. I close my article with the optimal conditions for a good scientific process of investigation as well as how best to evaluate the most superior among competing theories. The image in the front of this article are young skeptics in action.

Estimating Probability and Gauging of Chance

Are you more likely to die on a motorcycle or on a bicycle? Are you more likely to die on a bus or a train? Which is more likely, drowning in a swimming pool or in a bathtub? A psychic will claim it is big news that among 75 people in a room, she predicted there are two people there who have the same birthday. Did you know that the chances of this happening are 99%?

People around the world are very bad at gauging chance occurrences. This is because quantitative rationality only goes back to the 17^th century. Learning this skill takes special training in at least two courses: research methods and statistics. We also misjudge probabilities because of a lack of experience with the unusual which only becomes possible through familiarity working with large numbers.

Heuristic mistakes

People are also terrible at estimating probabilities because we are prejudiced for numbers which stand out and are easy to recall. This is called the availability bias. Conversely, people underestimate the probability of rare negative events such as the likelihood they will get injured in a car accident. Furthermore, we have slight biases towards optimism rather than seeing things as they really are. This is why smokers think they are less likely to die of cancer than other smokers. A knowledgeable but unscrupulous psychic or astrologer who knows these human tendencies can comfortably predict that you will have good fortune to persuade you that astrology works.

Coincidences

Coincidences are events that unexpectantly occur together in a meaningful way without any apparent causal link. Therefore, they could be interpreted as a prophesy or an omen. The average person is very bad at generating random numbers. This is because random numbers are just as likely to appear in clumps or streaks as well as simple alternations. Alternations like HTHTHT to the end of a page are too regular to be random. They need to include streaks like HHHHH or TTTTT. People underestimate the frequency of the size and the frequency of the clumps. Winning at gambling 3 times in a row is just as usual at alternating between winning and losing. For our purposes it is important to know that Blackmore and Troscianko have found that people who believe in the paranormal ability are especially prone to make mistakes in probability judgments. This is called psychic bias.

Perceptual Trickery

Barnum Effect

Perception (how our senses are organized) is selective and distorted. We select (mostly unconsciously) what serves our interest and needs. Our perception is something like a spotlight that targets and intensifies some stimuli and ignores others. Our emotions and motivations guide this spotlight. Tricksters can, and do, take advantage of this. The Barnum effect is displayed in the following experiment by Bertram Forer’s personality tests. He gave participants generic descriptions based on their horoscopes and found that subjects who were more likely to believe the results were true if: a) the subject thinks it only applies to them; b) the subject has confidence in the authority; and c) the horoscope reveals mainly positive traits.

Cold Readings

Stage magic is an old practice in which skilled sleight-of-hand is involved in deceiving an audience into making errors in perception. The range goes from simple card tricks to escaping locked jails to the feats of Houdini. Stage magicians are so good they have convinced PhD physicists under laboratory conditions that paranormal effects are real. For instance, that they can bend spoons and read pictures sealed in envelopes. Cold readings are a judgment about a stranger based on a combination of reading body language, knowledge of rhetorical techniques, behind the scenes investigation into a person combined with knowledge of how to create atmospheric effects.

Jonathan Smith names five techniques in cold reading.

Maximize the Barnum effect and confirmation bias

You pursue elaborations of a prediction that seem to evoke a positive response in the audience. For example, “you have more creative talent than you give yourself credit for” or “your friends respect and love you more than you might expect”. After that, engage in “shot gunning” – you ask your subject so many questions and claims that some are bound to be right. Participants are more likely to seize on what fits and ignore that what doesn’t fit (confirmation bias).

Develop sneaky strategies for tricking the subjects into telling you things about themselves when they are not focused

One method can be informally chatting with the audience before a performance is about to begin. These can easily be worked into part of the reading. Another is to encourage cooperation. Insist that doing a reading is a collaborative venture. This is a way to narrow down the scope of what the stage magician is after. For example, games such as Twenty Questions where the question asked is “is it an animal, vegetable or mineral?” allows the narrowing of the focus through the process of elimination.

Ways of drawing inferences from information other than what the subject tells you

For example, reading subtle cues and body language, noting the clothes, demeanor, posture and gestures of the subject. Also, what really captures attention is basing predictions on a probable but unexpected statistic. For example, people don’t realize that in most homes they would likely find old, unsorted photographs; some toy or book that dates from childhood; some jewelry from a deceased relative; a deck of cards with one or more cards missing and an instruction book on a hobby one no longer pursues. When the psychic mentions one of these the naïve target begins to wonder whether there really is something to parapsychology.

Ways of making less than perfect readings seem accurate

An easy way to turn a miss into a hit is to say your claim refers to something that will happen in the future. Another technique is to blame the subject for being too skeptical. “You are thinking so much it is blocking the energy” or “there is too much negative energy in the room”.

Creating atmospheric effects

The hypnotist, Mesmer, was very good at creating atmosphere such as candlelight, incense, eerie or dreamy music and photos of mystics and strange animals, especially cats.

Memory Errors

This is especially relevant when it comes to paranormal tales of reincarnation and alien abductions. Many people believe that everything we experience is recorded in memory, like a personal security system camera that is always with us. In fact, our memory capacity is limited and new memories can replace corrupt old ones. Memory is reconstructed more as historical fiction or docudrama. Also, memories such as alien abductions could hardly be repressed as advocates suggest. Traumatic experiences are much more likely to be remembered.

A false memory is an inaccurate recollection based on selective forgetting – the mixing of memories or memory fragments, along with the mushing together of dreams and fantasies. In addition, we don’t have mechanisms which can isolate our real past from information gotten from TV and movies. Neither can these memories be isolated from the influence of authority figures like therapists who are committed to theories of repressed memories.

Placebo Effect: When Wishing Makes it So

What it is and when it works

What is a placebo? A placebo is when a pharmacologically or physiologically inactive substance can have therapeutic, physiological or psychological effect if it is administered to a patient who has the expectation that it is effective. The placebo is stronger for problems with a strong psychological component, such as pain or depression with up to 60% efficiency. As you might expect, placebos have less effect on problems that are mostly physical, such as cancer. The following are some tips for how accentuate the placebo.

How to pump up your placebo

Motivate your subject to want to get better. Give then exciting testimonials of others.
Find a nurse to administer the treatment.
Give a complicated explanation that sounds plausible and uses scientific sounding terms.
Introduce a complicated and sophisticated procedure. Put water in a chemistry flask surrounded by tubes that run through an electronic device with lots of knobs, dials and lights.
Belief that colored pills work better than white pills; large rather than small pills; capsules are better than pills. They work better when they are administered frequently rather than infrequently and when they are expensive rather than cheaper.
Alter the placebo so that it has a slight negative side effect. Spike the water so that it stings. Or give it a slight unpleasant medical odor. The sting will be interpreted as a sign it is working.

Hallucinations

What they are and how sleep effects them

Hallucinations are generally defined as false involuntary perceptions that occur while awake when a sensory experience occurs in the absence of corresponding external stimulation. Before falling asleep some people experience hypnogogic hallucinations which are typically static images. On the other hand, hypnopompic hallucinations can emerge in the twilight state of sleep but before waking. Experiences of ghosts, alien abductions and angels reported throughout history and around the world are examples of what can happen when hypnopompic or hypnogogic hallucinations or sleep paralysis in physiology is in operation.

Hallucinogenic proneness

Smith cautions us that while some people are more likely to experience hallucinations than others, it is a mistake to think of some sort of hallucination trait, once manifest, can affect someone for the rest of their lives. Instead, Aleman and Larøiprefer use the term “hallucination proneness” which may be expressed in childhood is controllable and emerges only when triggered.

Five types of hallucination;

Deprivation which can include food and fasting; oxygen deprivation (too much or too little carbon dioxide); sleep deprivation and fatigue
Reduced sensory input

Sensory loss (blindness or loss of hearing) or social isolation

Sensory overload

This includes increased external stimulation such as a gambling casino, an amusement park or walking in Manhattan’s Times Square.

Sensory orchestration – to create a depthful meaning. A sacred example of this is in magical rituals with singing and dancing. A Catholic religious ritual which combines stained glass windows (sight); organ music (sound); incense (smell) oak pews (touch) and holy communion (taste). A secular version of this would be creating a patriotic spirit with songs, pledging of allegiance, taste (apple pie) and flags.
Stressful and strenuous situations

Such as trauma and bereavement.

Consumption of chemical substances

These include LSD, cannabis, mescaline, PCP, amphetamines and cocaine.

Please see the table at the end of this article for a summary of the typical mistakes parapsychologists make in each of the eight steps of critical thinking.

The Bottom Line About Parapsychology

Why the public likes parapsychologists

In spite of all these criticisms, why does the public continue to believe in the paranormal? Some of this has to do with the way scientists are perceived. The public’s picture of a scientist is they are overly serious and somewhat angry that people remain interested in parapsychology. They seem narrow and rigid, as Smith says, “sexless geeks wearing white lab coats, isolated from the real world in windowless laboratories”. Scientists speak in a specialized language of mathematics which takes time to learn. On the contrary, books about parapsychology are filled with mystery and can be understood by an educated layperson.

When it comes to physical health, most medical doctors are locked into managed care hospitals with little time for their patients. But if the public wishes to see a homeopath, they will be attended to by a professional who is not beaten down by seeing patient after patient. Homeopaths are more emotionally available and will see the patient for a full hour. Attention, as we know, is very important to people. Parapsychologists seem to be more open and flexible, although as we shall see they are actually less open.

Parapsychologists as researchers

Jonathan Smith concludes that Psi researchers are frustratingly persistent in ignoring and discounting reasonable requests to fix problems. Replications have been inconsistent and are generally cancelled out by other studies that find no effect. Psychologist James Alcock says that parapsychologists have never been able to produce a successful experiment that neutral scientists with appropriate skill, knowledge and equipment have that can replicate the original experience.

Meanwhile, parapsychologists complain that mainstream science is inflexible, prejudiced and unconsciously afraid. They imagine that scientists are not open to the mysterious. But this is not true. Smith points out that in the case of dark energy it was once rejected and it took five years of astronomical observations to change their minds. But they did change. Science is open to new findings if it plays by the rules of scientific method, as we shall see. In fact, some of the findings of science such as Einstein’s relativity theory, black holes and dark matter are far weirder and more exotic than anything parapsychologists have come up with.

Who is more rigid in changing their minds, believers or skeptics?

Psychics often claim that skeptics are rigid in their thinking and not open to new possibilities. But research by Susan Blackmore has not born this out. She says research shows that when believers are compared to skeptics in terms of changing their minds, skeptics are more likely to change. Believers are rigid and fail to reconcile the negative evidence.

Paranoia among parapsychologists

The distance between parapsychologists and mainstream science can be seen when parapsychologists often argue that some individual, agency or force is actively suppressing evidence. For example, the state doesn’t want you to know all the proven powers of the human brain because such knowledge could lead to challenging the state. Therefore, people believe in ESP. Another example is about flying saucers. Information that flying saucers have visited earth would cause mass panic and social chaos. Therefore, the information is being suppressed. The movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an example. Others will say there are some everyday herbs that can cure many illnesses and eliminate the need for physicians and specialist treatments. The medical profession hides information that could threaten the livelihood of doctors.

It is frequently noted that one of the strongest findings in scientific research on the paranormal is a negative correlation between study quality and obtained support for the paranormal. In parapsychology poorly designed and inexpensive studies are more likely to yield positive results. Good studies are much more likely to yield negative results. This is the opposite of what is found in all other areas of research. There, the better the studies the more likely we are to find a positive result.

Dangers of Believing in Parapsychology

Cults

Some may say to scientists “what is the harm of believing in ESP or telepathy? It isn’t harming anyone?”. Well, the answer is it can be quite harmful. For one thing the flying saucer cultists of Marshall Applewhite paid with their lives by collectively committing suicide. Nine hundred followers of Jim Jones lost their lives when they followed his instructions to kill themselves. Followers of fundamentalist David Koresh died in a shoot-out in Waco, Texas

Religion and politics

Those Catholics and Protestants who believed in the realities of witches in the Middle Ages murdered at least 100,000 witches. In the case of faith healing, people throw crutches away and the pain returns after the adrenaline rush subsides. Seriously ill patients have died after paying for healing instead of medicine. Parents have lost children they have deprived of life-saving medicine by those who followed Christian Science claiming all disease is in the mind. During the Nazi murders of Jews in the 1930s, the Nazi top advisers consulted astrology.

Costs of alternative medicine

Smith points out that up to 75% of the population believes alternative medicine is as effective as mainstream medicine. The risks involve the cost of ineffective intervention. In the case of acupuncture research has shown that its successes mostly have to do with the placebo effect. If acupuncture is used alongside of Western medicine its limits are difficult to expose. But if a person uses acupuncture instead of western medicine the costs are very high since most health insurance doesn’t cover it and the results are questionable.

Costs of subjective relativism: believing every individual creates their own reality

Subjective relativism is the claim that each of us creates our own reality. Reality depends on what you believe. For upper middle class people who become interested in the paranormal, specifically channeling, the cost of imagining you create your own reality is not high. Since upper middle class people have a high degree of control over their lives it is not so far-fetched to believe this. But suppose the person is from the working class background and cannot find work because of the economy. They would be completely justified in getting depressed because they are unsuccessful in creating their own reality. It would lead to political passivity and hopelessness because for the working class, socio-economic reality is much harder to change.

Problems with subjective relativism are as follows:

If an individual can will something to be true, someone else can will it to be false.
There is a logical contradiction: if in the real world there are no absolutes; if subjective relativism is part of the real world then it is also not absolutely true.
They attribute to themselves god-like powers – individuals make anything exist by thinking or wishing it. For most people in the world this may seem grandiose, to say the least.
They are eclectic – they don’t take a stand on the validity of conflicting claims. This leaves the contradictions to lay in suspended animation.
They appeal to ignorance. They say just because it can’t be measured by science doesn’t mean it’s not true. They do not provide any way other than science that can be tested beyond personal experience.

What is a Good Theory?

Public, replicable, reliable and valid

All observation involves collecting data in a way that is both public and replicable.

Typically parapsychologists have great difficulty producing these conditions because they were not public. Secondly, they were not replicable because there was no way the researcher could do the same thing in their head. In addition the measures should be both reliable and valid. Reliability means consistency of results over time. That means yielding the same result again and again. Validity measures what it claims to measure and not something else.

Free of fraud, error, deception and sloppiness

The optimal research situation needs to have an expert, independent and impartial supervision and replication to eliminate fraud, detect error, deception and sloppiness.

Fraud means the investigator changes data, reports only positive results, fails to report compromising design features, or claims to have done something they haven’t done.

Error is when the investigator misuses experimental tools, methods or statistics unintentionally. Deception is where research participants, assistants or colleagues trick the investigator. Lastly, there is sloppiness. This is where the investigator does not account for stimulus leakage, untrained or careless assistance or failing to account for eight steps in critical thinking that skeptics use. After publication, the mechanisms of science are unsuited for identifying potential sources of sloppiness, error and fraud. For example, laboratories may have closed making direct inspection impossible. Out of the thousands of experiments done on paranormal claims few provide enough evidence to check for sloppiness, error and fraud.

Control groups, double-blind procedures and stimulus leakage

The best way to rule out alternative explanations is to establish a control group, have in place double blind procedures and controls for stimulus linkage. What do all these mean? Control groups answer the question – compared to what? A good way to rule out random fluctuations as an explanation is to include a control group. Perhaps students generally pass their first driving test after hot herbal tea for a week. The claim might be that the herbal tea has calming ingredients. We need a control group of students who take their first driving test without drinking herbal tea and seeing the difference.

Stimulus leakage can come about when the enthusiasm and beliefs of an experimenter rubs off on participants. Perhaps they have unconsciously picked up on this excitement and become more motivated. In addition, a psychic might detect the facial expressions of their students. This is hard to test and may require a magician or any expert trained in deception, distraction and subliminal control. To protect against this leakage double-blind control might be introduced where neither the experimenter nor the participants know which treatment anyone has received.

Criteria for an Adequate Theory

In their book How to Think About Weird Things, the authors identify five criteria for an optimally adequate theory.

Falsifiability

This means a theory is formulated in a way that it states the conditions under which it can be proven wrong. In the field of the paranormal Jungians are often guilty of failing the falsifiability test. Their theory of the existence of the collective unconscious is not stated in such a way that you could find out if it were real one way or another. When alternative medicine people discuss “energy blockages” they don’t present their claims so that the existence of this energy can be measured and challenged. Quantum theory of ESP cannot be tested. How can we test the existence of connections between thoughts connected to a subatomic level? If everyone is connected shouldn’t everyone have access to everyone’s thoughts all the time? Or is the connection between thoughts random, like the flickering of electrons? In the case of astrology, predictions can be falsified but the problem is that the astrologers simply don’t take nature’s “no” for an answer. The complexity of the system allows for a slew of never-ending secondary rationalizations.

Fruitfulness

Suppose two theories are testable. How do you decide which theory is better? Fruitfulness not only explains existing phenomenon but it explains phenomenon in another field. A very good example of this is Darwin’s theory of biological evolution. Not only has Darwinian theory explained the life of animals on earth but it also explains certain aspects of social evolution as well. Specifically, the sexual behavior of men and women in mating strategies.

Comprehensiveness (scope)

How much of the world within a discipline does the theory explain? Good theories have wide scope. Einstein’s theory of gravity is more productive than Newton’s. It predicted the unexpected. It includes more than what Newton provided without violating Newton’s theory which was still true on a smaller scale. In addition, another question to ask is if it has evolved over time. Parapsychology is very weak in this area. After a century of research, it is still asking the same questions. There is no development of deeper questions after the basic questions have been settled.

Simplicity (Occam’s razor)

The best explanations are ones the require the fewest assumptions. A weak theory implies additional untested questions that must be answered. Also, the link between the parts of the theory are not explained simply. Assume no more than is required to explain the theory. The simpler the better and the easiest to test. If possible, it is better not to use a blow furnace to light a cigarette!

Conservativism (preservation and respect for the past)

Some parapsychologists announce that their findings will revolutionize the sciences, mostly physics and psychology. They talk about this as if it were a good thing. The fact that all the hard work of centuries that have been built up would be overturned is a signal that the parapsychologists’ theory is not likely to be true. Because parapsychologists often see themselves as outsiders undermines their sense that they are part of a community. So do they celebrate some kind of victory? Sometimes parapsychologists are not very well informed about the disciplines of physics or psychology and don’t realize what has already been achieved as well as what has proven wrong. A theory is better if it does not create more problems than it resolves.

On the whole, maximum adequacy explains a wide ranging set of phenomenon in depth within a discipline (scope) and across disciplines (fruitfulness) which doesn’t conflict with what we already know (conservativism). It does so with the simplest explanation that can be tested to yield results beyond a reasonable doubt.

The Challenge of Pandora’s Box

One problem that scientists face is how to deal with the relationships between the spectrum of the paranormal I have laid out. In many of my critical thinking classes over the years I asked students to fill out a paranormal profile. What I found is that some of them believed in ghosts, but they thought that extra-terrestrial abduction was too far-fetched. Others felt the opposite. Some believed that ESP was reasonable but poltergeists weren’t. What they didn’t realize is that their ontology and epistemology were inconsistent. If we return to the levels of nature we discussed at the beginning of this article we found:

In science there are three levels in nature:

the world of physics material objects that have volume, occupy space and can transmit physical energy;
the world of biology in which living creatures require food, reproduce, transmit disease, get sick and die; and
the world of psychology in which living beings have choice, make decisions and have a conscious mind.

What parapsychologists do is cross these boundaries like:

mixing physics and psychology, claiming that rocks can have thoughts and that thoughts can move rocks;
mixing physics with biology, claiming you might get sick by standing next to a broken rock; and,
mixing biology with psychology. This claims you can make someone sick by thinking about them.

Since we didn’t discuss alternative energy treatments or supernatural religion we have six areas on the paranormal spectrum. They all cross ontological boundaries. What Jonathan Smith says is that if we open the paranormal box just enough to let one out we must accept the right of others to come out. If you critique one thoroughly it must apply to others and all the rest. If you believe in ghosts you must believe in astrology and reincarnation. This puts the paranormal proponent in a bind. If they accept all the paranormal beliefs they will be caught in contradictions which my students would have to face, especially the contradictions between parapsychology and supernatural religion. If they accept opening Pandora’s box they must live with beliefs that might not make intuitive sense. If you accept weak support in bad sources, bad logic and sloppy scientific observation – and you wish to be intellectually honest you must accept other claims based on equivalent support. Accepting a claim that would have catastrophic implications for physics such implications should not prevent you from accepting other equally catastrophic claims.

Summary of Paranormal Common Mistakes

Paranormal Common Mistakes	Example
Ontological Fusion Mixing physics and psychology	Claiming that rocks can have thoughts and that thoughts can move rocks
Mixing physics with biology	Claiming you might get sick by standing next to a broken rock
Mixing biology with psychology	Claiming you can make someone sick by thinking about them
Questionable sources	Claiming “ancient wisdom”
	Relying on testimonials, anecdotal evidence
	Fallacy of popular wisdom
	Low standards of mass media and internet
How sound is the logic?
Confusing necessary with sufficient conditions	If the stars and the planets are aligned properly you will recover from your cold quickly You recovered from your cold quickly therefore the stars have been aligned properly
Fallacies in chain arguments	All atoms possess some gravity Our brains are made of atoms Thoughts are generated in the brain Thoughts travel by means of gravity (not true) Thoughts that travel to other dimensions return to our dimension instantaneously (not true)
Use of weasel words	Fusing psychological healing with physical healing
Equivocation	Fusing faith in religion with confidence in scientific laws in science
Appeals to ignorance	No one has disproved UFO sightings; therefore they must have happened. This ignores naturalistic explanations.
Confusing correlation with cause	Growth of interest in the paranormal in large cities and a rise in the number of cults Believing the paranormal causes cults to rise instead of understanding that growth of cities produce both the paranormal and cults.
How trustworthy are the senses?	Channelers in a darkened room UFOs in a quiet sky Haunted house investigators sitting in a basement at night Ignoring the autokinetic effect Ignoring the effect of pupil dilation
Innumeracy in gauging chance Inability to generate random numbers	Overestimation of positive possibilities
	Underestimating negative rare events
Perceptual Trickery
Barnum effect	Vague statement where the individual thinks the prediction is just for them If they think the person is an authority If it is stated positively
Susceptibility to cold reading techniques	About ESP, clairvoyance or astrology
Memory errors	Relating to memory as if it were a tape recorder and not a reconstructive combination of stories, movies, dreams
False memory syndrome	Applies to alien abductions and reincarnation claims
Underestimating the placebo effect When wishing makes it so	Homeopathy Talking to the dead Near death experience
Hallucinations
Hypnogogic –before falling asleep	Ghosts, alien abductions, angels
Hypnopompic —before waking	Ghosts, alien abductions, angels
Sleep paralysis	Ghosts, alien abductions, angels

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Heroic Skeptical Odysseys Into Parapsychology

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 31 Aug 2023 04:28:59 +0000

Orientation

Beliefs about the paranormal in Yankeedom

Believers in the paranormal, according to Theodore Schick and Lewis Vaughn in their book How to Think About Weird Things include the following statistics in a Gallup poll:

55% believe in psychic healing

41% believe in ESP

32% believe that ghosts can come back to certain places and situations

31% believe in telepathy (mind-to-mind communication)

26% believe in clairvoyance (knowing the future)

24% believe that extraterrestrial beings have visited earth at some time in the past

21% believe they can communicate with someone who died

If discovered to be correct, what parapsychology might result in

If these claims are true The Parapsychological Association has listed a number of possibilities:

The current scientific view of the universe, space, time and energy in information may be revolutionized.
Show that human capacities for perception and memory have been underestimated.
Beliefs about the mind being dependent on the brain would be wrong.
Fundamentalist monotheistic religions would have to make room for human powers it had previously dismissed as demonic.
There may be a greater, nonmaterialist spiritual world.
There may exist a nonmaterial human soul that survives death.
Paranormal historians and forecasters may obtain information by directly travelling to or viewing the past and future.
Paranormal archeologists could locate hidden treasures.

On the more practical level parapsychology:

May enhance human decision-making
May assist in locating missing persons
May assist in psychotherapy and counseling
Paranormal market investors could help people make stock choices

Are these numbers and prospects signs that a New Age is upon us? Are the implications of how the world could be different realistic or pollyannish? For some, the amount of interest in the paranormal is troubling.

Rise of the skeptical movement

When Marxists first heard of parapsychology, they paid no attention to it. It was almost always dismissed as more capitalist distraction from political organizing. They believed that ESP, telepathy and UFO’s don’t exist and the whole subject is for kooks. But a number of scientists were not so cynical and although they were skeptical, they wanted to understand why parapsychology is unscientific.

Throughout the 1960s in Yankeedom, there had been a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream science, as it was perceived either as part of the capitalist system of part of a deep state apparatus to control people. Interest in the mysterious and exotic was attractive to middle class and upper middle class people who were apathetic or cynical about international and domestic politics or the “materialism” of life in Yankeedom. In the mid-1970s, interest in the paranormal phenomenon blossomed along with a larger New Age movement which promised to bring back the mysterious and the exotic without traditional religion.

At first scientists were surprised at how many highly educated people would choose the paranormal over mainstream science and its methods. A growing group of scientists and philosophers decided to fight back. Led by Paul Kurtz, a collection of skeptics began to join together to form their own organization called The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). Kurtz began a publishing house, Prometheus books, to house skeptical writers. A monthly magazine and conferences followed. Some outstanding contributors over the years included psychologists, physicists and stage magicians. James Randi, Susan Blackmore (in the cover image of this article) James Alcock, Martin Gardner, Joe Nicoll and Ray Hyman are just some of the people who developed a scientific methodology specifically for the study of the paranormal. Their story is told in the wonderful book Skeptical Odysseys edited by Paul Kurtz. This article describes their method.

In part I of this article I distinguish the difference between the paranormal and the superstitious. I then follow the lead of Jonathan C. Smith in his book Pseudoscience and the Extraordinary Claims of the Paranormal and group the paranormal phenomenon into a spectrum of eight categories from the least to the most expansive claims. I then identify two types of questions skeptics ask about parapsychology. One is why believe something and the second is are there scientific explanations? Under the category of why believe something, part one reviews three topics:

Are the sources credible?
Is the logic sound?
Are the claims based on good observation?

In part II of this article, I answer the last five critical thinking questions which have to do with what alternative explanations are offered. After offering a summary table of all weaknesses in parapsychological research I identify some of the qualities of what a good scientific theory entails. I close with the reasons why believing in the paranormal can be dangerous to the individual and to society.

Difference Between Paranormal, Supernatural and Superstition

The tamest paranormal belief need not be superstitious or even supernatural provided it accepts natural laws and simply claims parapsychology is just an extension of these laws that haven’t been discovered yet. Other more ambiguous parapsychologists might believe that parapsychology violates natural laws of matter and energy but they may not be superstitious. Furthermore, superstitious people may be uninterested in either the paranormal or supernatural. They may be atheists. Superstitions are beliefs and actions rooted in an imaginative, invisible connection between objects, places and people. These can bring about positive or negative results and introduce predictability into unpredictable situations.

The Spectrum of the Paranormal

At the beginning of his wonderful book Jonathan Smith identifies eight types of paranormal claims. These are laid out on a horizontal spectrum moving from the least to the most challenging to science. They are:

Borderline, gratuitous paranormal claims which may or may not violate the laws of physics

These included Big Foot, the Loch Ness monster, flying saucers

Simple superstitions based on coincidence, folklore and similarities.

Examples include magic charms, rabbit’s foots and, stepping on cracks. People do not find careers on the study of these things.

Paranormal patterns including secret messages and special information

Examples are palm reading, tarot cards, some astrology, numerology and the I Ching

Some people can develop a career by doing this.

Paranormal powers which clearly violate the laws of physics

ESP, psychokinesis, astral projection, out-of-body experience and dowsing

Simple energies which do not direct, guide or show purpose. They lack psychological characteristics.

Examples are Chi, magnetic field therapy, homeopathy, traditional acupuncture and faith healing, karma, fate, dark energy, quantum physics.

Clearly people make a living doing this,

Intelligent forces/entities. These do direct and guide people and may have psychological characteristics and consciousness

Here we find spirits, werewolves, witches, demons.

Afterlife entities including ghosts and reincarnation

Lastly, we find the spectrum of the paranormal that claims the most extensive power. It goes beyond the paranormal and beyond challenging natural laws.

Included are organized religions which consist of hierarchies of gods, afterlife places like heaven and hell.

It includes the miraculous such as virgin birth and resurrections.

The Problem of Ontological Fusion in Parapsychology

In science there are three levels in nature.

The world of physics, material objects that have volume, occupy space and can transmit physical energy.
The world of biology in which living creatures, who require food, reproduce, transmit diseases, get sick and die.
The world of psychology where living beings have choice, make decisions and have a conscious mind.

What parapsychologists do is cross these boundaries in:

Mixing physics and psychology, claiming that rocks can have thoughts and that thoughts can move rocks.
Mixing physics with biology, claiming you might get sick by standing next to a broken rock.
Mixing biology with psychology by claiming you can make someone sick by thinking about them.

Eight Steps in Critical Thinking to Access Paranormal Claims

There are two types of questions to ask:

Why believe something?
Are there other scientific explanations?

In “why believe something” there are three kinds of support of the paranormal claim:

Are the sources credible – not hearsay, tabloid newspapers or misuse of sources?
Is the logic sound? What is true or false? What is possible or impossible?
Are claims based on observation?

Are there other scientific explanations?

Are we misinterpreting oddities of nature and the world of numbers?
Most people don’t understand statistics and as a result we have mistaken ideas about what is probable and what is unlikely.
Is there potential error or trickery?
The night is a little cloudy and the city lights a bit distracting.
Is there potential for memory error?
Might the placebo effect be at work (sugar pill)? It can effect genuine psychological and physiological changes through nothing more than suggestion. Was it just the vibrations? Perhaps it was the music that made you happy.
Are we misinterpreting sensory anomalies or hallucinations?
The human brain and nervous system is quite capable of conjuring up false percepts that appear convincingly real.

Psychology of Anomalous Experience

This is a field of psychology which focuses on extraordinary events and provides us with psychological, as opposed to parapsychological explanations. Smith gives us the following examples. Instead of haunted houses we have the normal settling of older buildings or changes in our air pressure and temperature that can cause doors to slam and walls to creak. Instead of ghosts, it actually is reflected light from passing cars or aircraft that can appear as “ghostly faces”. Random patterns, especially in low-light conditions, can be construed into medium patterns through something called “pareidolia”. Pareidolia involves projecting recognizable forms in an ambiguous object. Sound frequencies lower than 20 Hz are inaudible but may cause a person to sense a nonspecific presence and create anxiety, for example, seeing a ghost. Cameras used to detect ghosts are notorious for producing various strange optical distortion effects. Apophenia is a term from the field of anomalous psychology where we see connections and find meaning in unrelated things.

Anyone who is serious about parapsychology must have a full command of this field and exhaust all the possibilities for anomalous experience before claiming something is paranormal. While it is reasonable to imagine that some professional parapsychologists are knowledgeable about the field of anomalous psychology, it is highly unlikely that the public who supports parapsychology knows anything about the field of anomalous psychology.

The remainder of this article addresses how well parapsychology does with the first three steps.

Questionable Sources

Ancient wisdom—The field of parapsychology often has a romantic theory of history

For example, claiming astrology is true because it is 4,000 years old. Astrology has changed over the centuries, but astrologers behave as if since it is old it must be true.

It does not mean that the early priesthoods got it right the first time. We should ask – do the claims about the stars make sense in the light of our current knowledge about the stars? This is the fallacy known as appeal to tradition.

Testimonials and anecdotal evidence

One case does not prove something is true. Carroll has offered a succinct evaluation of anecdotal and testimonial evidence. Stories are prone to contamination by beliefs, later experience, feedback, and selective attention to details. Stories get distorted in the telling and retelling. Events get exaggerated and time sequence get confused. Details get muddled. Memories are imperfect and selective as we shall see in part II. They are also filled in after the fact. Some stories are delusional and there is always the possibilities of deception.

Popularity and common use

Amazon lists twice as many books for astrology as for the Ten Commandments. A Google search reveals 30 million hits for astrology. They can’t all be wrong – right? In critical thinking, this is the fallacy of appeal to the people. Many interpretations can be part of a popular fad and be completely wrong.

Mass media and the internet

Standards for getting information in the mass media are lower than for professional publications. Programs about the paranormal are notorious for editing out disconfirming evidence. Paranormal topics are a thriving business. Mass media has a stake in keeping its businesses alive. They would lose money if they revealed the truth of scientific research. In drug studies, research supported by pharmaceutical companies reports more positive results than research supported by public funds. Once a study is submitted for publication, a journal has an incentive to publish positive results. There is a publication bias for positivity. Neither they nor the public are interested in failures. Journals do the same thing. This is one reason why scientific findings of negative research don’t get much air time.

The Question of Individual Authorities

Things to consider in evaluating an individual expert include do have they the education and training from a relevant and up-to-date program? Are they experienced and have accomplishments in their area of claimed expertise? It is common in paranormal research that a licensed person in one field (like Deepak Chopra) will claim to be an authority in a field in which he is not trained, like physics. Is the authority up with current research? Are they respected by peers, other experts in the area? Another common problem is that they are not respected by other authorities in the same field. Because much parapsychology often appeals to the public, the public does not know what other experts think if these expects do not have a public reputation. Is there a conflict of interest in what parapsychologists have to say? In other words, are they making money from pushing false memories – as in claims of alien abductions or claims about past lives?

Further Grounds for Scientific Suspicions

The mainstream scientific community is suspicious of its claimed experts when parapsychologists:

Make exaggerated and unqualified claims full of superlatives like “breakthrough”, “revolutionary” or “pioneering”.
They have a record of gullibility in regard to paranormal that has been clearly shown to be fraudulent in the past.
Fail to distinguish a well-designed study from a badly designed one where there is possibility of fraud
Have a record of failing to report breaches in good design, whether their own or others. This can include an entire project that might have been conducted by relatively novice assistants.
Resort to ad hominen arguments – accusing scientists of being mean-spirited, narrow-minded and dogmatic.

How Sound is the Logic?

Confusing a necessary with a sufficient condition

As many of you know who have taken critical thinking classes, there are both formal and informal fallacies. A typical formal fallacy that parapsychologists often commit is confusing a necessary and sufficient condition. In a statement that is not fallacious such as:

If the color of ice cream is white,

It is vanilla flavor, then b is true.

The color of ice cream is white, it is therefore vanilla

A fallacy of confusing a necessary and sufficient condition (affirming the consequent) in parapsychology goes like this:

If the stars and the planet are aligned properly you will recover from your cold quickly.

You recovered quickly from your cold.

Therefore the stars and planets have been aligned properly.

This ignores the fact that (you could have taken cold medication).

Here is another one:

If a psychic can read your thoughts, he can tell if you are skeptical.

The psychic you are visiting correctly observed that you are skeptical.

Therefore, the psychic can read your thoughts.

The problem here is they could simply be reading your body language.

Fallacies in chain arguments

The typical form of chain arguments go like this:

All A is B.
All B is C.
Therefore all A is C.

In paranormal arguments one of the links in the chain doesn’t follow the others. Here is an example from the relationship between subatomic particles and consciousness:

Subatomic interactions may appear at a distance far away (true).

The human brain is made of atoms (true).

The human thought generated from the brain follows the rules of quantum physics (true).

Therefore human thoughts follow the same quantum rules as subatomic particles in the brain (not true).

Here is another one:

All atoms possess some gravity (true).

Our brains are made of atoms (true).

Thoughts are generated in the brain (true).

Thoughts travel by means of gravity (not true).

Thoughts that travel to other dimensions return to our dimension instantaneously (questionable).

This results in telepathic communication (questionable).

Last one:

A mysterious dark energy forces some galaxies apart (true).

They travel at a speed faster than light (true).

When human thoughts come into contact with dark energy they can travel at a speed faster than the speed of light (questionable).

Therefore, this proves telepathy exists (not true).

Weasel words

Weasel words are very common in parapsychology. These words can make passionate claims, but in looking at their track record, there is a loophole which gives parapsychologists an out in case their claim is challenged. For example, the use of the word “some” can mean the same as “most” on the one hand and as little as one exception on the other. More specifically you might say “some” scientists believe UFOs have landed on earth, when the reality might be only 1%.

Paranormal psychologists use the word “healing” in tricky ways. Smith points out that healing generally means returning to physical health. But alternative medicine practitioners smuggle the world of psychology into what healing means. Then alternative medicine can claim to heal people when research shows only that it was because of the placebo effect (people wanted it to work). In the case of faith healers, they can wriggle out of promises. Your spirit has been healed if your body hasn’t. How can you measure what a healing spirit looks like?

The words controversial and debatable are popular weasel words in paranormal literature. Usually, controversial means there is good evidence on both sides. However, parapsychologists can use controversy to bring in claims that might not have good evidence but they stir argument. Velikovsky and his followers did this in the field of astronomy. For skeptics, having sound evidence is a precondition or necessary condition for having a controversy. No claim is accepted as a candidate for a controversy if their evidence is not sound.

Equivocation

Parapsychologists use the word faith in equivocal ways. For example, the formal definition of faith is contrasted to logical truth or material evidence. It’s fair to say that parapsychologists might have faith they will eventually produce evidence that is public and can be replicated. But parapsychologists claim that science is also based on faith. However, it is unfair to call scientific hope faith. What scientists have is confidence in the values of the expansion of the natural laws that have already been discovered.

Appeal to ignorance

This is an especially important one for students of the paranormal. Lack of evidence against something does not make it reasonable for something that is paranormal to be true. Absence of normal explanation does not require an extraordinary explanation. There can be many normal explanations. For example, every careful scientific exploration of dark shapes in abandoned houses has found an alternative to the ghost explanation. They can be found in shadows of objects like drapes, reflections of moving lights or the activity of rodents.

If there is no evidence that a claim is false it can mean that the claim is unfalsifiable or that currently mundane explanations don’t exist yet. It could be that mundane explanations do exist, but paranormal researchers haven’t heard of them. For example UFO sightings can be explained naturally as:

Reflections of the moon
Ball lightening
Aircraft
Missile launchings
Satellite
Balloons
Searchlights
Test clouds
Flares
Elmo’s Fire
Optical camera distortions
Fraud

Confusing Correlation with Cause

Just because an event came right before another event does not mean it was caused by that event. The causes of events could have occurred deep in the past and the most recent events could be surface rippling which have nothing to do with what really happened. Furthermore, if events A and B occurred at the same time, we don’t know if A may have caused B or B caused A. It could also be possible that both A and B were due to chance. An example of A and B being caused by a third variable is the following. If we notice that in a city there is growth in the number of churches and the number of brothels. We could imagine that the growth of brothels caused more churches to be built. Or the growth of sex-negative Churches produced more prostitution as a reaction from desperate priests. But both the rise of prostitutes and churches could have been caused by a growth in population of a new city which causes both more houses of prostitution and more churches to be built.

The Tricks and Tribulations of Observations: How Trustworthy are the Senses?

Let us take three paranormal circumstances and see whether what is attributed to psychic phenomenon might be something else.

Channelers sit silently in a darkened room waiting for communication with the dead.
UFO watchers sit in a quiet field at night silently awaiting the arrival of spacecraft.
Haunted house investigators sit in the basement at night with the hall lights turned off.

Autokinetic effect

Ordinary neurophysiological states can evoke experiences easily misidentified as paranormal. Jonathan Smith encourages us to go outside and look at a darkness area of the sky with only one or two stars. Gaze for 5 minutes at the stars. In time, you will see it move. It isn’t a flying saucer or a waking dream.

Autokinetic effect is a small point of light in a dark and featureless background. It appears to move because of minor, involuntary eye movements, eye fatigue or simple suggestion. (204)

Yet a friend may claim they can move small distant objects by simply looking at them.

Pupil dilation

Another physiological reaction of the eyes is pupil response. In darkness the pupils dilate to let in light and bright colors while they constrict to keep lights out. This protects the retina from overexposure. It may seem as if the lights were being turned down or shades drawn. Shaded areas may suddenly emerge while dark areas grow darker and seem as if they are moving. So the next time you are in haunted house and someone surprises you by whispering “look, a ghost”, you may well see a shadowy form emerge and move, but it’s all because of a pupil response.

Coming Attractions

If you flip a coin and it comes up heads three times in a row, on the next flip is tails more likely to come up? Understanding how to reason quantitatively (gauging probability) is foundational for science. Yet psychics, like most everyone else, interpret patterns of connection which aren’t there and we underestimate the probability of rare negative events. This compromises parapsychology investigation.

Your horoscope predicts that you are conflicted about your work, feeling that some of your skills aren’t being utilized. In your relationship you are happy but feel that parts of you are not understood by your partner. Emotionally you are cautiously optimistic but sometimes you have fits of demoralization. Why do so many people feel like the astrologer is very good and understands them?

Memories are like tape recorders that record everything. If a person has a traumatic experience those memories are buried as psychological protection. True or False? Both these statements are the foundation for claims of alien abduction and reincarnation. We discuss this in part II.

In the mind-body relation, how much does the body control the mind and how much does the mind control the body? Can the mind act independently of the brain? Under what conditions can we say wishing something to be true can make it so?

How might we test whether claims of ghosts, extraterrestrials and angels are real or whether they are hallucinations? Hallucinations are the result of sensory deprivation, sensory orchestration or drugs such as LSD. Which form of hallucination might go with ghosts, extraterrestrials or angels?

In spite of all the skeptical criticism of parapsychology, the sad truth is that these results do not put a dent in the public’s interest in parapsychology. Why might this be? Does research uphold the parapsychologists’ claim that they are more open than mainstream scientists when their claims are challenged? What is the harm of believing in the paranormal? Why not just let people believe what they want to believe? Skeptics seem so uptight and crabby. Why don’t they just loosen up?

Finally after reviewing the eight steps of critical thinking tests, what are the characteristics of a good scientific theory? What are the conditions of a good experimental design? When the results come in, what are the five characteristics of an adequate theory? Do all five characteristics have to be met? Are some more important than others? All this is covered in part II.

First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Why Neopagan Marxists are Not Pantheists or Animists

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 08 Aug 2023 01:13:35 +0000

Orientation

In human life it is clear that we are external nature – we have an affinity with other life forms like primates as real, objective beings. However, we also have an internal nature – a psychology – of mental states, goals, imagination and sexual urges that is internal to us. We know from cosmologists that the natural world goes all the way back to subatomic particles. But how far back does internal nature go?

Nine Ways of Understanding the Body-Mind Problem

Descartes’ mind-body dualism

In the history of philosophy, David Skrbina tells us there are usually six possible modes of interaction between bodies and minds. For purposes of this article, I’ve added three more. Perhaps the most famous is Descartes’ answer depicted as mind-body dualism. Here the mind and the body (or nature) are thought of as two different substances (thought and extension) that interact through the pineal gland. Each substance is subject to its own laws.

Epiphenomenalism and eliminative materialism

Epiphenomenalists such as Santayana or the behaviorists are primarily focused on body or nature. Bodies affect mind, but minds do not affect bodies. Mind is the result of the interaction between the brain and the body. By not being a physical entity the mind has no causal power. It is like a shadow on a wall. Eliminative materialism (or mechanical materialism) takes the body-nature emphasis to an extreme. People like Patricia and Paul Churchland, along with Willard Van Orman Quine, argue that there are only bodies. Mind is an illusion. This philosophy is also called physicalism.

Idealism and neutral monism

Idealists like Plato say that the world is primarily spiritual and matter is a derivative and less real. Spiritual, eternal forms are the archetypes of the world while matter is understood as an inferior copy. The idealist theory of mind holds that mind is really a soul that is distinct from the body and has nothing to do with the brain. The next theory of the mind-body problem is neutral monism. The two extremes of eliminative materialism and idealism are challenged by a third contender. In the hands of first, Spinoza and then Ernest Mach, nature (or the body) and mind are two sides of the same coin. They are the creatures of a third substance which is beyond nature and mind which Spinoza called substance,

Hylozoic monism and pre-established harmony

While physicalists claim that everything is made of matter, hypozoic monists claim that all of what exists is life. They might strive to discover the properties of life that may be found in parts of the world that are considered inanimate. Ernest Haeckel, Fredrick Paulsen and David Bohm were all representatives. But to say all nature is life that does not mean that all of life has mind or psyche. Many forms of life exist without nervous systems that are self-maintaining and self-creative without having any psyche at all. Neither are any of these forms conscious. Much of the natural order is self-regulating without any conscious regulation. Even with human beings, much of our thinking is unconscious and part of the ancestorial brain with no reflection at all.

Leibniz had what was to me the strangest system of mind-body interaction which he called preestablished harmony. The universe consisted of an infinite number of monads (the lowest unit of possible organization). A monad is windowless and is like a living atom. All monads are active and conscious, but they vary in clarity and distinctiveness. Each monad had a final cause or purpose. Leibniz believed that monads do not influence each other. There is a correspondence between each monad’s perceptual state and the conditions of the external world (nature or the body). However, those perceptions can only mirror external events. Neither can cause the other.

Pantheism and emergent evolution

As opposed to materialism, idealism or neutral monism in its starting points all agree that the psyche or the mind is a late development in evolution. Even idealists will say that the soul is given to humanity by God late in His creation. Pantheism opposes all this and states that the mind, soul or spirit goes all the way back in nature – including molecules and subatomic particles. Animists seem to be a kind of pluralist pantheist. They have a more specific claim about the internal structure of matter. Animists claim that not only that every piece of matter has a soul or psyche but that these souls have intentions including rocks, rivers and wind. Animists and pantheists claim that the mind is embedded in nature, right from the beginning.

In emergent evolution, nature undergoes a series of quantitative and qualitative changes. As a result of qualitative change, new levels emerge and mind is added at a certain level of complexity. In emergent evolution the effects of something can be more than the cause as genuine novelty appears. Past a level of complexity, the shear creativity of matter produces new things. While initially the body in the form of the brain impacts the mind, the mind can reciprocally react back on nature or the body. Higher stages, while more complex than lower levels, are still dependent on it.

Neopagan Marxism

Marxian materialists believe the world is composed primarily of matter and that mind is a late development in evolution. The materialist theory of mind has at least two basic assumptions:

The mind is limited to humans and perhaps higher animals.
The mind is somehow dependent on the physical substrate of the human brain.

Materialists usually draw the line where mind emerges with the arrival of a central nervous system. As dialectical materialists we understand the mind as an emergent property of matter. As with emergent evolutionists there can be more in the effect than there is in the cause. However, emergent evolutionists say that cosmic evolution can be divided into matter, life and mind. For us the levels are matter, life and society. Societies are what provide for the material conditions (along with the brain) for mind to emerge. For us the brain and the mind are distinct. You need a brain to have a mind but mind is a product of a new layer of nature, society. Without societies there are no minds.

What is My Claim?

We agree with pantheists and animists that nature has an internality far back in cosmic evolution. However, my claim is that pantheists’ claim about internality being composed of minds, spirits and consciousness is coming at internality at too high a level of complexity. Internality is present in more primitive forms such as experience, memory, irritability, circular feedback, metabolism, attraction-aversion and tension between community and individual and in holons. These existed long before consciousness, mental life or psyches emerged in evolution.

Why should you care? As materialists we are in no great rush to tack on consciousness, mentality and psyche into nature to make it respectable. Matter already has a respectability in the form of self-creation and self-maintenance long before mind consciousness or psyche existed. We sympathize with pantheist views because they see nature as self-regulating and in no need of any extra-cosmic buttinskies. However, we reject their claim that mind goes all the way back or down to subatomic particles. As for animism, Marxist Neopagans feel sympathy that the animists claim every object has soul and intention, because it makes nature creative with purpose rather than being the passive creatures of an all-powerful God. However, we question the existence of souls or that rocks and rivers have intentions.

What is Pantheism?

What is the difference between saying “God is in everything” and “everything is God?” Since most every Christians will imagine God as bodiless, unworldly and spiritual, to say “God is in everything” seems to mean that even disguising body products such as phlegm or feces is somehow spiritual. But if you say everything is God, you are starting with nature as it is immediately, without any prettying up, including phlegm, feces, and decay just as they are materially and elevating it to the spiritual. This kind of God is simply the king of matter and not very noble at all. In pantheism God is identical with all that exists and no more.

So pantheism is simply an ontological claim about the relationship between nature and God. Now there are two ways of dividing the pantheistic universe. One is to say pantheism is swallowed as a single whole, a kind of king of matter. The other is a kind of riot of pluralistic panpsychism where there are infinite individual centers of psyche-matter. This seems indistinguishable from animism. As David Skrbina writes in his book Panpsychism in the West all things, however defined, possess some mind-like, noetic quality. It says nothing specific about what the nature of what mind is. Neither does it insist on the specific proportionate relationship between matter and mind. It rejects drawing the line where mind begins. It argues for a theory of continuity non-emergence. There can be nothing in the effect that is not in the cause. This makes it both the opposite of both emergence and physicalism.

To many scientists of the early 20^th century, panpsychism was uncomfortably close to the recently discredited theory of vitalism. Virtually all contemporary naturalistic theories of mind are forms of emergentism. They argue that mind is a rare and unique phenomenon that arises under only highly specialized circumstances.

David Skrbina argues there are at least four reasons for studying the relevance of Panpsychism today:

It offers resolutions to the mind-body problem that dualism and physicalism find intractable.
It has important ethical consequences, specifically a compassion for nature that comes with ecological values.
It brings into sharp relief both Descartes mind-body dualism and the physicalism of Hobbes.
Panpsychism is the most under-analyzed philosophical position in Western philosophy. The last systematic study was performed hundred years ago.

Do We Need to Say Internal Life is Mind, Mentality, Spirituality and Conscious?

When we speak as pantheists what is inside of matter is claimed to be

Mind
Mental
Spiritual
Conscious
Soul-like

As I stated in my claim, I think this is coming at internality at too high a level of complexity. This is called the pathetic fallacy. When hard scientists argued that all biological or social phenomenon were “nothing but” chemical or physical processes they were called reductionists. Conversely, when philosophers or sociologists claim that physical phenomenon are really about consciousness or mental phenomenon they commit the pathetic fallacy.

As dialectical materialists we say mind is a property of matter at a very high level of evolution. In fact, the mind is the property of the brain after the brain has been humanized. To claim that all of matter has mind ignores a long history of matter without mind. The same thing is true for consciousness. The word consciousness comes from the Greeks meaning “together knowledge”. Consciousness, at least self-reflective consciousness, is the product of human societies. Other animals may be aware, but since they don’t pool their knowledge, they are not self-conscious. Other animals have mental life where thoughts, feelings and intentions, much of mental life, is not conscious. Lastly, to say that matter is spiritual implies taking an otherworldly dimension into the bargain and one with laws that usually go beyond nature. If it didn’t, we would have no need to call anything spiritual.

Why Does Inanimate Nature Seem to Lack Internality

Skrbina says there are at least four reasons why inanimate objects appear devoid of mind: a) inactivity and inertness; b) lack of freedom and initiative; c) no clear distinction between parts and wholes; and d) lack of purpose. Process philosopher Hartshorne says mechanism and materialism assume that inanimate matter is; a) dead; b) blind; c) uncreative; and d) insentient.

Forms of Internality Without Mind, Consciousness, Mental Life or Soul

Panexperientialism

What is experience? As a result of the impact of external nature we are changed so that some adjustment has been made internally. This does not require consciousness, mental life or the existence of souls or spirits. For example, when I go out running in the morning the result is that physiologically I feel more lively and relaxed. It requires no consciousness or mental life to have that experience. Panexperientialism means all matter experiences. This term was coined by David Ray Griffin, deriving from Whitehead and Hartshorne.

Memory

Humans record experiences through morphological changes in the brain.

Ancient documents such as fossils, rocks and even planetary fragments can be dated with reasonable precision because of the permanent, cumulative record of all things acquired. William James says the whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened to them. Bergson elaborated the philosophy of memory as the decisive factor in a graded transition from matter to mind. Bergson wrote in his first book, Matter and Memory in 1896, of a continuum from matter to life. As Skrbina points out, duration implies time, and in the realm of life this implies memory. Memory grows with the complexity of the organism. Humans have the most memory and memory dwindles as nature becomes more primitive. The most primitive matter has perception without memory. There are both novelty and stability in all aspects of nature. Stability is an aspect of memory.

Irritability

Even in the most primitive forms matter does not passively react in a completely predictable and mechanical way. They become irritable, twisting and turning in unpredictable ways to get away from the initial irritant. This needn’t involve any consciousness, mental life or purpose.

Circular feedback (Bateson)

Gregory Bateson was very aware of the importance of concepts of energy, feedback and information anticipating later development in chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics. Quoting Skrbina, Bateson was adamant that it was the circular feedback system itself that was important as an elementary cybernetic system and its messages. Cybernetic feedback systems pervade nature at all levels of organization from molecular to galactic, anywhere that parts intersect and persist. The exception for him are the fundamental atomic particles because they are without parts and lack the dynamic feedback interrelationships. More complicated systems are more worthy of being called mental systems. Interacting with parts is only a necessary condition of mind, not a sufficient condition. Chalmers agrees with Bateson and concludes that it is reasonable to assign experience an even consciousness to a simple feedback system like a thermostat.

Metabolism

Another characteristic of internal life without bringing up souls, minds or consciousness into the picture is the self-motion of organisms in their ability to learn; their ability to maintain themselves by feedback; repair themselves; elimination of waste; and self-replenishment through the search for resources.

Attraction-aversion (love and strife)

As far back as Empedocles there was a tension between attraction and aversion, or more poetically between love and strife. Hartshorne assessed that pure sympathy would destroy individuality by merging all into one. On the other hand, pure antipathy would not allow for any structure or knowledge at all. All of nature is driven by attraction and aversion. Chardin writes that the universe is driven by forces moving away from the center to the periphery (centrifugal forces stretching out) and centripetal forces moving from the periphery to the center.

Individual vs community

Beginning at the more complex end of mammalian levels of evolution, there is tension between individuals and communities as laid out in primate social life between individual and group selection. Of course, this carries through the entirety of social evolution.

Holons

As Koestler points out in his books The Ghost in the Machine and Janus, virtually every part of nature is both self-assertive in expressing relative autonomy and at the same time must participate in a larger system in which it is a part. Koestler claims this tension goes all the way back in nature. He calls this whole/parts holons.

The Place of Process Philosophers in Panpsychism

For one thing, process philosophy understands time as an ontological category. It understands space, not as a container of matter but in a dialectical relationship with time on one hand, and matter on the other. As many of you know, the new physics has challenged mechanical descriptions of physical reality when we reach the subatomic level. Because human consciousness is involved in determining whether subatomic matter is a wave or a participle, this new physics created some fissures for process philosophy and panpsychism to nestle into them. The standard view of process philosophy after Whitehead is that atoms, molecules and cells are included among the sentient.

Leibniz, along with Whitehead, Hartshorne and Griffin deny consciousness to inanimate material objects but grant it cells and molecules. Hartshorne openly advocated for panpsychism and was the first western philosopher to extensively employ the term panpsychism. Hartshorne made some interesting distinctions between matter as an aggregate and matter as individuals.

Matter as Individuals vs Matter as an Aggregate

Contrary to popular understanding of animism, in process philosophy tables, rocks and houses do not have consciousness. This is because they are mechanical, predictable and display no unified action. They do not have experience and they have no minds. They are a collection of inorganic objects. On the contrary, from single-celled organisms up to humanity, they have a consciousness because they are individuals with an organic unity, even the atoms from quantum theory. Individuals have spontaneity and are unpredictable. They display unified action or purpose. Individuals have experience. They are like Koestler’s holons. They are a both a part of a larger system and a whole to a smaller system. All aggregates, even though composed of sentient atoms, molecules and cells are not in themselves sentient.

Hartshorne criticizes science for treating objects in nature only as aggregates, not as individuals. The problem that Hartshorne had to explain was why such things as rocks and tables, though composed individual monads, lost their individuality and became aggregates. Skrbina points out that Whitehead names four types of aggregates:

non-living which is dominated by the average
vegetable grade – coordinated individuality and the average
animal grade aggregates which contain both individual organisms and aggregates such as herds
human grade aggregates such as crowds of individuals

A living aggregate is clearly different from a non-living aggregate but there is no explanation as to how they are different. Skrbina claims that moving into the 21^st century there are five varieties of panpsychism:

quantum mechanics – imitated by Haldane in the 1930s and elaborated by Bohm
information theory, Bateson and Chalmers
process philosophy – Whitehead, Hartshorne, Griffin
part-whole hierarchy – Cardano, Koestler, Wilber
nonlinear dynamics – Peirce and Skrbina

The Greeks Had the Right Idea: There is no Independent Psyche in Ancient Greece

In his book True to the Earth, Kadmus writes that in archaic Greece the psyche was not the ultimate organizing principle of the body. The psyche and the body are engaged in a complex partnership rather than a division between chaotic matter on the one hand (the body) and order on the other (psyche). To separate the psyche from the body is to treat the body as an object, which the psyche puts in motion. Kadmus writes that psyche should best be understood as a body within a body. He says what is really going on in nature is the transformation of bodies, rather than the transmigration of souls. This is the transformation from one process to another, whether it be into grains of wheat or waves on the sea.

All bodies live but saying they live does not mean all bodies and minds are self-reflexive consciousness unless we are talking about the most complex forms of evolution on this planet. To focus on the mind and self-consciousness as the foundation of life or natural existence is to engage in a specific kind of anthropomorphic projection backward in time when neither mind nor self-consciousness existed. Most living bodies do not have a psyche.

A focusing psyche in the body does not necessarily mean being conscious

Being aware is something we and our bodies act and do, rather than something that we have or are. The process of paying attention only gets turned into an abstract entity or a property with the development of writing which pushes us to turn verbs and action words into timeless nouns. After all, we act, speak and think only in moments of breakdown. Then we reflect in such a way as to become conscious of these things when there is a problem. To capture the high pagan view of the cosmos, we must resist the urge to turn the action of focusing on something into having awareness. Any time contemporary animism or panpsychism tries to bring in consciousness as the governing force of nature we have fallen into Anthropomorphism and commit the pathetic fallacy.

Conclusion

The article begins by describing nine ways of understanding the body-mind problem including philosophical dualism; epiphenomenalism; physicalism (eliminative materialism); idealism; the preestablished harmony; neutral monism; hylozoic monism; pantheism of Whitehead, Hartshorne and Griffin; and the emergent evolution. Lastly, I briefly include the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels because this is the philosophy of Neopagan Marxism. After brief descriptions of each I spend more time discussing pantheism, since this is a common philosophy of Neopagans.

The purpose of this article is to say that as Neopagan Marxists with an orientation towards process philosophy, we don’t need to attribute mind, consciousness, souls, or mental life into the cosmos from the beginning in order to make an immanent nature self-maintaining and self-creative. We say that internality in nature is present all the way back in nature in pan experience: in memory; irritability; circular feedback; metabolism; attraction-aversion; tension between community and individual; and in holons. Minds, souls and spirits, whether pagans believe in them or not, are emergent properties of human beings at a very high level of evolutionary complexity.

• First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Cycles and Spirals of Capitalism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 18 Jul 2023 21:15:29 +0000

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic, spiral-like or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century. Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

raw materials (land)
means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
commodities (finished products and services)
money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

a tendency towards a concentration of capital
a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories. Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone. I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^thcentury the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core. In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States. By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
Dutch war-making was superior
the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^thcentury the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
the chance to colonize space
an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^thcentury among workers and peasants
the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Haphazard, Conflicted Brain

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 30 Jun 2023 16:09:08 +0000

Orientation

Why is eyewitness testimony been proven so fallible in courts? How do we account for emotional outbursts which, at their worst, cost us relationships?

Why are we so inept at gauging probabilities? Why do we have to be taught methods for developing an unbiased sample in research projects? Supposedly, in the scientifically evolved West, many people in Mordor can still believe in ghosts and millions sincerely believe that they’ve been abducted by space aliens. If we know that superstitions are silly why do modern architects systematically avoid calling the 13th floor the 13th floor?

Haphazard nature of human body construction

I think it is safe to say we have very mixed feelings about our asses, vaginas and penises. The bio evolutionary reasons for this are that the pleasure centers and elimination centers are inseparable to the naked eye. If you believe in a Creator who designed the universe, wouldn’t it have made sense to have our pleasure centers in a separate part of the body rather than in our elimination centers? If God really was a good engineer, this is what he would have done.

Gary Marcus, in his book Kluge, informs us that the human spine is a mediocre solution to the problem of supporting the load for an upright, two-legged creature. Marcus says it would have made a lot more sense to distribute the weight across four equal cross-braced columns. Instead, all our weight is born by a single column. The cost for many people is agonizing backpain. Why is this? The spine’s structure evolved from that of four-legged creatures. But standing up in a rickety way for creatures like us is better than not standing up at all right? The human spine arose, not because it was the best possible solution imaginable, but because it was built on top of the quadruped spine, that already existed. Some of us who are knowledgeable about evolutionary biology may grant this haphazard arrangement when it comes to the body, but somehow when it comes to the mind, people feel more resistant. Sure, my spine may be built haphazardly, but my mind?

Haphazard nature of the human mind

Marcus proposes to us that if humans were the product of some intelligent, compassionate designer, our thoughts would be rational and our logic air-tight, like Spock. But why do we plan things and then abandon them before they are even tested? Why do we spend so many hours watching television when it does our genes so little good? Why do working class people blow a good portion of their paychecks at gambling casinos where their chances of winning are so small? Why do attractive people get better breaks in job interviews, promotions and admission interviews even though we know that there is no correlation between physical appearance and skills in doing a job? When we believe something is true, why do we need special training in critical thinking skills to search for evidence that would falsify what we believe? Why does individual racism continue long after it has been scientifically disproven that there is a connection between race and intelligence?

Where we are going

In this article, I will begin with an overview of the difference between the ancestral and the deliberative brain. Then I spend most of the article outlining how their conflicts are played out in memory, language, beliefs, mental disorders, pleasure and even attempts by market fundamentalists to imagine capitalism as a rational system.

Towards the end of this article, I try to see how the haphazard brain might be connected to Aristotle’s fallacies, Francis Bacon’s four idols and Petty’s and Wegener’s central and peripheral brain routes. At the end of this piece, I ask how the haphazard nature of the brain might be connected to people’s susceptibility to propaganda.

Ancestral vs Deliberative Parts of the Brain

Human beings have two sides of the brain, what Marcus calls the ancestral system and the deliberative system. The ancestral system is what we’ve had throughout our primate evolution. It roughly corresponds to the limbic and mammalian parts of the brain. The human genome is 98.5% identified with the chimpanzee. The vast majority of our genetic material evolved within the context of primates who didn’t have verbal language, culture or deliberative thinking. The ancestral brain works quickly, automatically and operates at an unconscious level.

The deliberative system is a recently developed system that began with the neocortex and then thickened, especially with the rise of science and the scientific method 300-400 years ago. The deliberative brain works slowly, operates through calculation and is conscious. It is tempting to think that the ancestral part of the brain is irrational and emotional. But this is not necessarily the case. The deliberative brain certainly is more rational (the home of the formal logic of Aristotle) but the deliberative system produces irrational systems such as capitalism, obesity, drug addiction and world wars as we shall see.

What is Kluge?

A Kluge is the result of the haphazard way the two parts of the brain are organized.

Marcus says Kluge is clumsy or inelegant, yet an effective solution to a problem. It arises out of a combination of desperation and resourcefulness. Biology builds on what came before, a system set up haphazardly. It is a product of conflicting adaptative strategies rather than being engineered:

If power plant engineers could afford the luxury of taking the whole system offline, they would no doubt prefer to start over. But the continuous need for power precluded such an ambitious redesign. Evolution can no more take its products offline than human engineers could. So we are stuck piling new systems on top of old ones (13).

In other words, evolution cannot start over and integrate what has gone before. The deliberative part of the brain cannot weed out, streamline and eventually make the ancestral brain disappear into a single deliberative system as the founders of the Enlightenment had hoped. Instead, it must have been built on the genetic bedrock originally adapted for very different purposes.

The deliberative part of the brain invites a local possibility of optimalization and this optimalization is possible, but neither necessary nor sufficient. Brain evolution can make lemonade (deliberative system) out of lemons (ancestral system) but it cannot erase the bitter taste of the lemon. Those who are naïve optimists about the human brain act as if lemons could be sweet. Moreover, it is one thing for a deliberative system to be out of sync with the ancestral system but another for the two to flip-flop arbitrarily in their bid for control. This makes matters worse.

Haphazard Nature of Memory

Our first stop in the function of the brain is memory, which is contextual. I am more likely to remember which spices go with which recipe when I am in the kitchen than when I am in a book store. I am more likely to remember the differences in the painting style of Renoir and Monet when in an art museum rather than a museum of natural history. This contextual memory is more primed for speed rather than reliability. It involves situations which include grouped commonalities, recency and frequency. We are good at remembering the gist of happenings but not their detail.

Another common problem is that our memories are not signed, sealed and delivered. As time passes it becomes harder to keep particular memories straight. This is true not just because personal memories are blurred together over time. It is also because they get mixed up with movies we’ve seen and articles we’ve read that might resemble our experience of past events.

Yet in spite of this, remembering detail is precisely what the courts demand of eye witness testimony. They require a precision that was not necessary or adaptative for our ancestors. Thank goodness for DNA evidence that has overturned many court decisions based on eye witness testimony. Expecting human memory to have the accuracy of a video camera is evolutionally insensitive.

What is the opposite of this? Since the 17th century our deliberative brain went into high gear learning statistical reasoning, scientific methodology and critical thinking which forced us out a little bit away from the habits of our ancestral brain. In addition, through mathematics and scientific method we have built technologies which express the deliberative brain in material objects and systems. For example, computer memory is based on a postal code memory that treats all memories equally, regardless of time, place or circumstance. The contextual ancestral brain treats memory in terms of time, place, circumstance, frequency, recency or commonalities of situations. Marcus writes:

Computer memory works well because programmers organize information into what amounts to a giant map – postal code memory. (20) Search engines start with an underlying substrate of postal code memory and build contextual memory on top. The postal code foundation guarantees reliability (36).

The Haphazard Nature of Belief

We do not understand the origin of our beliefs. In other words, I cannot name the exact dates and the people who were instrumental in developing my interests in critical thinking and socialism. Furthermore, I cannot do a spring cleaning in my mind to clear our old ways of thinking that no longer serve me but are still clunking around, fouling things up. Whether I like it or not, these leaves become mulch for the next seasons’ planting of beliefs.

The Barnum effect works very well because its generalities are vague and because they are positive. Because we are hard-wired to see patterns, the Barnum effect floats some clouded generalities and we rush to fill in the pattern even if there isn’t one. This is how horoscopes, palm reading, communicating with the dead and other systems of divination work.

We also have a tendency to believe that what is familiar is good, even in the face of what is good is turning south. Further, the confirmation bias is a common cognitive error. Once we make a claim we seek evidence that supports it. Other times we don’t even bother to look for confirming evidence. We just make up reasons for supporting what we believe (rationalizing). Our perceptions are not accurate reflections of our senses but they are selective based on past experiences, needs, anxieties and hopes about the future. This is all part of the ancestral system.

As I said, our deliberative system requires a systematic education to challenge our beliefs. It requires courses in scientific methods and critical thinking to have a fighting chance. But even with this, as Carl Sagan said, deliberative scientific reasoning is a candle in a demon-haunted world. The demons of the ancestral brain are never far away

Ambiguities of Language

All language is filled with ambiguities, imperfections and idiosyncrasies. Let’s take the phase “I love you”. Think of all the misunderstandings, hurt feelings, bitterness, ruminations and irrational actions that have taken place between people because they meant different things by this phase. What about the term “support”. Do lovers mean the same things when they say to each other “I support” you? Probably not. Similar confusions may exist between parents and children, employers and workers and teachers and students. Often, we don’t say what we mean or mean what we say.

But what if each sentence was as clean as a mathematical formula? Language would be completely analytic and show at a glance its logical structure. Instead of changing over time, language would remain exactly the same. Ideally, we would say what we mean and mean what we say. As Marcus says, if language were designed by an intelligent engineer, interpreters would be out of a job.

Attempts by philosophers like Gottfried Leibniz at devising a universal language or Bertrand Russell’s attempt to mathematize philosophy have not worked out. This is because language has to be loose and flexible for dealing with a variety of situations while still maintaining communication between people across situations.

Pleasure

If pleasure is supposed to guide us to meet the needs of our genes, why do we humans fritter away so much of our time in activities that don’t advance those needs? Marcus points out that most things that give us pleasure don’t actually do much for our genes. No other species spends as much time playing and a large part of human activity does something that risks reproductive fitness.

In an ideal world, Marcus informs us, the parts of our brain that decide which activities would be pleasurable would be extremely fussy, responding only to things that are truly good for us and our genes. As it is, our pleasure center consists not of some set of mechanisms perfectly tuned to promote the survival of the species, but of a collection of crude mechanisms that are easily tricked. Pleasure is only loosely correlated with reproductive fitness.

The desire for happiness goes with the complexity of our deliberative system and is not necessarily connected to sex. Research shows having children doesn’t make us as happy as not having children does, despite its adaptive advantage. While it is true that people above the poverty line are happier than people who aren’t, if we move from middle class to upper middle-class there is no increase in rates of happiness. In spite of this, way more people continue to kill themselves striving to be richer in despite the fact it doesn’t make us happier. Pointing to studies in Japan Marcus says:

The average family income in Japan increased by a factor of five from 1958-87 but self-reports on happiness did not change at all. What seems to matter is not absolute wealth but relative wealth. (138)

While we say we want to maximize our long-term happiness, we are not good at anticipating what will make us happy. This is a sign of the haphazard brain at work.

Mental Disorders

When mentally or emotionally strained we become more prone to stereotyping, more egocentric and more paranoid. Procrastination is a sign of our Kluge with regard to decision-making. Evolution has made us rational enough to set long-term goals but not so rational to predictably follow through on them.

Evolutionary psychiatry deals with mental disorders by attempting to explain particular disorders in terms of hidden benefits. But as Marcus claims, some disorders may appear not as direct adaptations, but simply from inadequate design. They may result from little more than genetic noise, random mutations that convey no advantage at all. Could it be that the reason some aspects of mental illness persist not because there is of any specific advantage, but simply because evolution couldn’t readily build us any other way? If we humans were built from the ground up, anxiety, procrastination, paranoia and prejudice wouldn’t exist. Our mental instability gives us even more reason to doubt that we were not are the product of chance, adaptation and sexual selection rather than deliberate design.

Why Capitalist Rationality Doesn’t Work

For most of human history Karl Polanyi tells is that our economy was inseparable from social structure, politics and culture. Economic exchanges were organized in a substantive way. This means the economy was conceived of simply as provisioning and circulating goods at a societal, macro level. This was true not only in tribal societies but in the redistribution systems of the ancient empires. However, as part of the capitalist revolution, the economy began to be understood by intellectuals as a separate domain from the rest of society and economists began to imagine the economy was subject to autonomous laws. In addition, the economy was understood not as a provisioning society as a whole. Rather the real economy was imagined to be the exchange between isolated self-interested individuals. Society as a whole was the result of a blind interaction of supply and demand of markets for these individuals. This resulted in the invisible hand guiding capitalist relations.

For market fundamentalist theory the individual is a hyper-rationalist who:

Desires wealth (as opposed to community)
Avoids unnecessary labor (as opposed to enjoying work)
Can clearly see the choices available (as opposed to being motivated by lust or emotion)
Can make decisions on those choices with a clear understanding of costs and benefits (as opposed to costs and benefits being unclear and not quantifiable)
Are driven by conscious forces (rather than unconscious forces)
Are rational creatures tracking how we spend our money, how we allocate their time and how we plan for our retirement (as opposed to not closely tracking our expenses, being unskilled in managing our time, and most people’s inability to be able to plan their retirement). Marcus points out that nearly two thirds of all Americans save too little for retirement.
“Calculate your expected utility or expected gain” and then averaging the amount you would gain across all possible outcomes”

This is so unlike what people actually do. Working class people virtually never do this and most the upper middle class don’t do this but hire financial planners to do this for them.

The truth is human beings didn’t evolve to think quantitatively about numbers or money. As Marcus points out our brains did not evolve to cope with money but to cope with food.

Instead, the deliberative brain is collectively recruited by capitalists to do ideological duty in order to justify a right-wing libertarian economic policies. It fails miserably since:

Most people hate their economics courses and avoid them like the plague.
Most people to not track economic reports in the news.
Most people cannot explain the capitalist system even though their lives depend on it.

Connecting the Haphazard Brain to Aristotle’s Fallacies, Bacon’s Idols and Heuristic biases

Now that we have contrasted the bio evolutionary conflicts between the ancestral and deliberative brain, it is fair to ask what this has to do with other ways of explaining contradictions within the mind. Are Aristotle’s fallacies simply an expression of sloppy thinking on the part of individuals? Is it due to a bad educational system which does not teach critical thinking before college? Is it the result of mass and electronic media which shortens the attention span? Or is it all these things along with some bioevolutionary conflicts that underlie these other explanations?

Aristotle’s Fallacies, Bacon’s idols, Heuristic Biases

I have taught critical thinking classes in colleges for over 20 years. In virtually every textbook there are what is called “thinking fallacies”. Aristotle grouped fallacies into major categories and most of them are still operating over 2500 years later. Aristotle also claimed that a complete and balanced argument contains three parts which he called the rhetorical triangle:

A Logos component – how tight is the claim relative to the evidence, usually facts or reports.
An ethos part which is the quality of the source.
A pathos aspect which appeals to emotions and imagination.

Some rhetoricians have grouped fallacies according to violations of the three parts of the rhetorical triangle. Here is a sampling:

Logos fallacies – false dilemma; genetic fallacy (if you know the origin, you know current conditions); over-generalization; arguing from ignorance; confusing correlation with cause; two wrongs make a right; slippery slope; straw man and statistical fallacies
Ethos fallacies – appeal to false authority; abusive ad hominen and guilt by association
Pathos fallacies – faulty analogy; bandwagon; appeal to tradition; appeal to pity; appeal to flattering

It seems to me that Aristotle’s logos fallacies would go with the deliberative brain. Fallacies in formal logic would also go here. Fallacies linked to Ethos and Pathos are much older and are more closely linked with the authority of witch doctors, priests and priestesses. Pathos fallacies have their roots in the emotion required for magical rituals along with the use of imagination and saturation of the senses.

Later on Francis Bacon, trying to stay away from both blind empiricism and arid rationalism identified four sources of error scientists can commit. These include idols of the cave, idols of the tribe, idols of the marketplace and idols of theater. Of these the first three are old and would seem to go with the ancestral brain. The idols of the marketplace have more to do with the dogma that comes out of philosophy such as empiricism and rationalism and are more appropriate for scientists working with the deliberative brain.

Finally, psychologists today have identified the following cognitive biases

Exaggerating the improbable and minimizing the probable
Avoiding loss
Fairness bias
Hindsight bias
Confirmation bias
Need for cognitive consistency

I am not going to try to categorize these according to the ancestral or deliberative brain. Why not try your hand at this.

Use of the Central vs the Peripheral Brain Route

There are two methods for deciding how to interpret incoming data. One is the long route (the central route). The other is taking short-cuts (the peripheral route).

We use the central brain route:

When the message involves a high personal stake
When the person has previous experience with the topic
When the message is complicated but comprehensible with an underlying structure and direction
There is no time pressure
There is a perceived abundance of resources
There is sensory moderation
Attention is focused
There is emotional depth being demanded
The person is physically rested

We use the peripheral brain route when:

We have little personal stake in a topic
We have no prior experience with the information
The topic is convoluted with little apparent structure or direction
There is time pressure
There is scarcity of resources
There is distraction so attention is diffused
The appeal is to superficial emotions: gossip, insecurity and superstition
The person is fatigued

There is nothing wrong or unreasonable in using the peripheral brain route. Under the eight conditions above, the central brain route would be too slow and cumbersome.

The problem arises when the propagandist tries to get the targeted audience to use the peripheral brain route when a person should be using the central brain route. For example, in the case of buying a house the person has a personal stake, should take their time and should be well rested before making a decision on something as important as buying a house. A real estate agent might consciously or unconsciously influence the person to use the peripheral brain route.

Petty and Wegener (1999) identity the central brain route as attending to content issues (the why and what of a message). The peripheral brain route deals with form or context of message, the who, how, where and when of a message. As you might imagine, the central brain route deals with the logos part of Aristotle’s triangle. The peripheral part is focused in the ethos and pathos part of a message. When dealing with the grounds for a claim, the central brain route addresses the evidence, the soundness and verifiability of the evidence. The peripheral brain route focuses on the quality of the source, its credibility, likeability (in the case of a person) and the articulateness of the message.

The central part of brain is engaged with the reasoning process in the mind. The peripheral part of the brain is subject to the sensual atmosphere such as colors, sound, touch, taste and smell. When we proceed to making judgments, what do we find? Using the central brain route, we try to make judgments before we check with our peers. When we use the peripheral brain route because we might be less experienced in the situation so we use peers to help us decide what to do.

At the end of this article is a summary of the haphazard nature of brain, the rhetorical triangle, Bacon’s idols, and the two brain routes. Analyze the table by first looking in the center for the categories of comparison. Then move to the left to the ancestral brain which is old, then the deliberative system which is new. I would read this horizontally rather than vertically for the highest contrast.

Is There a Bio Evolutionary Foundation for Propaganda?

Thirteen commandments of propaganda

How might the conflict between the evolutionary brain be applied to people’s susceptibility to propaganda? In my article Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behaviors while censoring, hiding, restricting, distorting or exaggerating the claims of the opposition. The ultimate purpose of virtually all propaganda is to persuade the lower classes that the upper classes deserve to rule. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks. The commandments are the following:

Control the information flow by becoming a source or distributor of information
Use black and white absolutes
Craft the message so it resonates with what is already in people’s heads in terms of their values and beliefs
Address psychological, spiritual and social needs of the population
Censor stories or contrary information
Use group pressure to horizontally shape beliefs and behaviors
Cognitively penetrate and stick
Personalize events with anecdotes and case studies
Bureaucratize events
Demonstrate good ethics
Dispense selective interpretation of facts
Distance the propaganda from its source by using front groups such as foundations, think-tanks and research patronage
Accommodate informational needs and habits of professionals in the media

Why the haphazard mind is a necessary but not sufficient condition for propaganda

There is no question that if the deliberative mind could ideally be re-engineered, the mind would not be suspectable to modern propaganda. However, as our brains are currently configured, it makes sense that propaganda exploits the conflicts between the ancestral and deliberative parts of the brain. A good example of this is the attempt by advertisers, specifically car salesmen, to get the consumer to use the ancestral brain rather than the deliberative brain when purchasing a car. However, because the definition of propaganda is so calculated and conscious, all propaganda is the use of the deliberative system of ruling class to create a system where the population accepts its subordinate role. Because modern propaganda is so recent (500 years old), it is too new to have a bio evolutionary basis.

Let us look at some of these commandments. In our first commandment, propaganda controlling the information flow is mostly a product of mass media and state propaganda which did not exist in tribal societies where the ancestral mind was forming. The same is true with censoring information. Censorship is far more severe in industrialized societies and broad than it was in tribal or ancient societies.

The creation of black and white thinking goes with false dilemma fallacy in critical thinking. This is rooted in the ancestral brain in the fight or flight syndrome. However, until the rise of class societies and the monotheistic religion, black and white thinking was not widespread. In the last 500 years black and white thinking has become widespread with the use of mass media especially during wars between nation-states and in demonizing whole countries even when not at war. An example is the Yankee demonization of Russia, China and Iran.

Also the spread of propaganda horizontally to the group is very old and supports the ancestral evolutionary need to depend on the group. However, propagandistic advertising has created group conformity not just on a local level, but on a mass level. “Keeping up with the Jones” would be foreign to times where the ancestral brain was predominant.

Our susceptibility to storytelling also goes back very far. Today in news propaganda for war we are always treated to the personal story of a poor Iraq woman in full make-up running with her dead pet towards the camera. Remember the scene in the “Wag the Dog” movie? Here storytelling is the name of the game to propagandize war on a mass scale. Unless we are dealing with bureaucratic propaganda, propagandists stick with stories and stay away from statistics.

The ability to first diffuse attention and then focus (the commandment of cognitively penetrating and sticking) it on a mass scale has to do with technological innovations of propaganda far from the ancestral brain. As we saw on the section of this article on capitalist rationality, here is a propagandist technique used by free market economists using economic propaganda to convince the general population that an irrational system such as capitalism is actually rational.

The existence of bureaucratic propaganda is also a product of the modern age. Bureaucratic statistics as a way to snow people into thinking whatever is happening politically is beyond their control is no older than 300 years. It is another re-creation by the deliberative system that has no direct evolutionary connection. Lastly, organizations like front groups, foundations and think tanks are all products of the deliberative mind propaganda techniques that are also a product of the modern age. They have little to do with conflicts between the ancestral and deliberative minds.

What is important here is that the existence of propaganda is the product of a collective deliberative brain of the ruling class to create a rational system for justifying irrational creations which go against the evolutionary self-interest of individuals and our species as a whole. Large scale wars, capitalism, the pharmaceutical industry and the food industry which produces diabetes are just the tip of the iceberg.

In conclusion, it is safe to say that the haphazard conflicted nature of the brain is a necessary but not sufficient condition for propaganda. Without the ancestral-deliberative conflict there would be no susceptibility to propaganda. However, the haphazard brain is not a sufficient condition for propaganda. If we understand propaganda as a tool of the ruling classes to control their populations, the recent use of modern propaganda meant that even if we go back to the class societies of Egypt and Mesopotamia these societies were not old enough and the conflict between the ancestral and deliberative brain was too new to be an influence.

Table A Contradictions Within the Haphazard Brain

Ancestral system	Category of Comparison	Deliberate system
Fast	Speed	Slow
Automatic	Visibility	Calculated
Largely unconscious	Awareness	Conscious
Limbic and mammalian system?	Triune categorization of the brain	Neocortex
Pre-rational (not irrational)	Type of rationality	Rational or irrational
Contextual	Memory	Computer memory Postal code memory
Ambiguous to deal with a variety of situations Often doesn’t mean what they say or say what they mean	Language	Clear. To deal with special situations Say what you mean, mean what you say Universal language (Leibniz) Russell (mathematize logic)
We don’t know the origin of our beliefs Barnum effect Horoscope, divination systems	Beliefs	Knowing the origin of every belief Special training in scientific methods and critical thinking
Stereotyping, more egocentric, paranoia	Mental disorders	Procrastination and anxiety, paranoia would have no place
Maximization our genes Sex	Pleasure	Happiness, playing, success, well regarded by peers
Neurotransmitters Dopamine and serotonin	Chemistry	Irrational: Chemical substances like alcohol, nicotine and drugs like cocaine and heroin
Substantive economy	Type of economy	Irrational formal economy Formal rationality of neo-classical economics
Ethos, pathos	Part of Aristotle Rhetorical Triangle	Logos
Peripheral	Brain Routes	Central
Cave, tribe, marketplace	Bacon’s Idols	Idols of the theatre

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Promethean City Builders vs Finance Capital Malthusians

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 16 Jun 2023 02:03:19 +0000

Orientation

Summary of Part I

In Part I of this article, I contrasted the differences between rising Multipolarism with a declining Anglo-American empire. Taking the side of the multipolarists of the East, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone who bridged the gap between East and West.

His concept of “The American system” defends the Enlightenment as the movement to look to if the west is going to join the multipolar world. I also presented Matthew Ehret’s book The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I The Unfinished Sympathy as a concrete example of the battle between the British System and American system in the 18th and 19thcenturies. At the end of Part I, I raise questions as to where to place these advocates of the American system on the political spectrum and ask who its enemies are.

Are there times when centrism is unrealistic, ungrounded, and against common sense?

Unlike the left-wing and right-wing of the political spectrum, centrism is presented as a golden mean against the extremes. It embodied common sense, as opposed to fanaticism, pragmatism in contrast, unrealistic idealism and non-violence against violence. Yet there are times when centrism doesn’t work; occasions when centrism is not common sense, circumstances when centrism is not pragmatic, when compromise between extremes comes up empty. Not only is centrism unrealistic but the entire linear political spectrum founded at the end of the 18th century is bankrupt.

Strange bedfellows? Finance capitalists and the New Left

By the end of World War II, the financial capitalists had two enemies – the liberalism of FDR and the world communist movement. Most of us know the historical differences between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Left represented the world communist movement as well as the forces of the Enlightenment. Is it possible that the emergence of the New Left with very different values driven by Romanticism was shaped by the anti-communist finance capitalists?

My claims in Part II

1)The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalists empire is centrism and it must be opposed.

2) The forces of Promethean City builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.

3) For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left, to oppose the development of a communist movement.

The first image at the top of this article includes arch anti-communists Arthur Koestler and Sidney Hook. The second image is the founder of Democratic Socialist of America, Michael Harrington, also an anti-communist.

Poverty of Centrism

As I wrote in my article: Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description.

Today the fact that liberal and conservative parties are the same is far more significant than their differences. They have at least agreed on:

Support of finance and military capitalism as an economic system domestically
Never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way Marxists would
Suppressing third-party access into political debates.
Supporting imperialism around the world
Supporting the instillation of right-wing dictators
Supporting Israel elites despite 75 years of Zionist fundamentalism and their oppression of Palestinians
Opposition to state-centered socialism around the world

What this means is that:

There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism

The linear political spectrum is too simple for today’s complex politics

Examples include:

China forming alliances with non-socialist countries like Russia and Saudi Arabia
Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists (Germany, Norway, Sweden). This goes way back to Social Democrats voting for war in 1914
Right-wing governments like Modi’s of India supporting a socialist country (China)
The Recent elections in France in which Le Pen (supposed fascist) has social programs to the left of Macron (a neoliberal)
A neoliberal Democratic Party supporting fascist Ukrainian forces

Centrism is bankrupt in extreme capitalist crises

The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is compromising, pragmatic, down-to-earth and can never be unrealistic. Supposedly, centrists are moderate and not hysterical like the fascists or communists. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions the center doesn’t hold. It caves in. In certain periods of history being moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is so overpowering that it would overwhelm its centrist structures. Under the conditions of our time extremes are the only answer because of capitalism’s failure to address its contradictions. It has brought us to the point where neither liberal nor conservative solutions can nor will work. A new model of the political spectrum must be:

More inclusive of many more political ideologies
Economic as well as political
Able to account for qualitative leaps such as revolutions
Able to decenter the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable
Make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum, not just among those next to each other

How the left and some conservatives might work together is because both are industrializers whose goal is to expand the productive forces. They may fight about how the wealth gets distributed but they agree that real wealth should be produced. By contrast, neo-liberals, fascists, Greens, Social Democrats, and anarchists are de-industrializers who abhor the introduction of new wealth-creation, especially nuclear technologies and city building. They are Malthusians.

We are now at the point where I can reintroduce the distinctions between the Enlightenment and Romanticism from Part I. I want to show how the Anglo-American empire, finance capitalists and the CIA shaped the New Left into embracing Romanticism.

Below is a table I developed from my book Forging Promethean Psychology which compares what the Enlightenment stands for as opposed to Romanticism.

Table A Enlightenment vs Romanticism Compared

Enlightenment (1715-1815)	Category of Comparison	Romanticism (1750 – 1850)
Political – rights of man	Primary Identity	Cultural artistic identity
Against monarchist, aristocratic and religious authorities. Respectful of scientific authority	Attitude Towards Authority	Critical of all authorities
Civilization brings out the best in humanity	Relationship Between Civilization and Nature	Rebellion against civilization Wants to “get back to nature”
Value what is modern and adult	Origins and development of culture and individuals	Value what is primitive in cultures; the innocence of childhood
Primitive superstitious stories before humans had science Myths were also seen as lies told by priests	What is Myth?	Mythic stories hold the key to what is most important to being human Grimm’s fairy tales
Trade was an improvement compared to control of land by kings, aristocrats and the Church	Attitudes Towards Capitalism	Against crass utilitarian commercialism of capitalism
Its predictability and lending itself to measurement	What is Valuable in Nature?	The wild, exotic and untamable
Deist – God is an engineer or watchmaker	Characteristics of Spiritual Presences	Pantheist – god is everywhere in nature. Birth of Neopaganism
Beauty – in symmetry with proportion No unusual or accidental elements in art	Art Appreciation	Sublime – value what is unique, striking, or new; the unusual or accidental features in art.
In the eye of the spectator	What is the Arena for Judging Art?	In the creative process of the artist
Progress Quantitative gradual change	How does Change Occur?	Revolutions Qualitative change through crisis
Deliberation	Planning vs Spontaneity	Spontaneity
Reason should guide emotions	Place of Emotion and Reason	Emotions are valuable in and of themselves and should guide reason
Happiness, serenity, contentment	Types of Emotional States	Storm and stress Mania and depression as signs of real living Altered states, revelry
Confessing inner depths is bad taste	Self-revelations	Confessing inner depths is a virtue Sincerity
Republican reformist	Politics	Revolutionary, apolitical Conservative
Cosmopolitan Exotic people became a laboratory for expanding theory of universal humanity	Cross-cultural Expansion	Parochial Exaggeration of the differences between cultures
Holbach, La Mettrie Diderot, Voltaire	Typical Theorists	Rousseau. Vico, Herder, Burke

The Politics of the Anglo-American Empire, The British System, Romanticism and the New left

The Old Left

As many of you know, soon after World War II capitalists in Mordor set out to destroy the Socialist and Communist parties. But the CIA also wanted to create a relatively harmless alternative to Communism by recruiting leftists who were critical of the Communist Party but did it in the name of socialist democracy. As many of you know, this began with the Congress of Cultural Freedom. Along the way, it helped to craft an ideology of the New Left that would render it harmless against capitalism while at the same time keep the Communist movement from growing back.

The heart of the Old Left was the defense of countries that were at least part way towards socialism – Russia, China and Cuba. Its economic focus was on the inherent contradictions of capitalism whether it be the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, underconsumption or the profit squeeze. Very importantly, communists were committed to the belief that Communism had to be based on abundance, which meant “developing the productive forces”. If a communist society’s economy stagnated that would introduce the temptation to steal. By producing more than enough stealing would not be an issue. As different as anarchists are from Marxists, even anarchists before the 1960s understood that abundance was the foundation for socialism.

The major social category for political organization was socio-economic class. It was only the working class that had the power to overthrow capitalism. Also, the only real democracy was economic democracy in which workers control what is produced, how much is produced and how it is distributed through centralized planning and workers’ control. In terms of political parties the Old Left advocated a Leninist vanguard party of dedicated revolutionaries.

While claiming that the workers were internationalists, in practice the Old Left political organization operated at the nation-state level. Whatever tiny ecology or changes in the climate movement existed it was not on the radar of communists. For communists’ growth of the human population was taken as given since by the second half of the 19th century and into the 1950s it seemed human productivity could easily accommodate a rising population.

When it came to the arts and psychology, the Old Left was fairly conservative. In the arts, socialist realist mural painting was predominant. In painting and music, the focus on working class life was its subject matter. In personal life, Communists usually did not drink and their appearance emulated working class clothes. Their personal life was relatively unimportant and their marriages were traditional. They were generally hostile to psychology, saw it as a bourgeois distraction from their main purpose was to work for the revolution. While most Communists were atheists, they understand that most workers were not, and they had to make relative peace with this “superstition” in order to organize workers. The CIA, and the Rockefellers set out to destroy the values of the Old left and replace with a very different orientation to the world. Table B displays the values of the New Left, and what is equally important, how these values support and are beneficial to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers, and the CIA.

Table B How the Values of the New Left Benefit the Anglo-American

Empire, Finance Capital the Rockefellers and the CIA

New Left (beginning in Early 1950s)	Category of Comparison	Benefit to Anglo-American Empire, Finance capital and the Rockefellers
Social Democrats, Anarchists Complaints against excessive State control Lack of worker participation	Point on Political Spectrum	All anti-communism for different reasons Against all communist countries, planned economy
Rejection of Soviet Union, China, Cuba In favor of Sweden, Norway, Denmark	Socialist Countries to Emulate	Loss of international identity with large socialist countries Even socialist countries need capitalism
No – capitalism can go on forever	Does Capitalism have Inherent Limits?	Throws push of politics onto voluntarism Demoralizing people by imagining capitalism is much more flexible than it is and capitalists are more competent than they are
No – we already have too much Socialism is based on morals or sustainability: Malthusianism	Does Socialism have to be Based on Abundance?	Teaching socialists to learn to do with less Socialism based on “degrowth”
Race and sexuality: identity politics Workers have proven to be too interested in material things to be revolutionary	Social Category for Socialist organizing	Race and sexuality don’t have the work location to organize Diffusion of focus
Small is beautiful Anarchist decentralization or planetary society Rejection of nation-state	Political Scale	Rejection of the nation states which is the only political unit that can resist global capitalism
Makes an issue of lack of political party choices under socialism Minimizes democratic gains under socialism in literacy, education and job security and health care	Place of Political Democracy	Diverts focus of socialists into focus on tiny political parties that are never strong enough to take power
Pay attention to Mother Earth Go back to nature	Attitude to Ecology	The issue distracts from socialist organizing to overthrow capitalism Imagining ecological problems might be solved under capitalism
Earth has limited carrying capacity Earth is overpopulated	Growth in Population	Rockefeller-inspired Club of Rome report Blaming the global south for having too many children
Anti-science	Attitude Towards Science	Anti-science dampens down the possibility that alternative energy sources to oil will be found
Solar and wind power Against nuclear power	Natural Resources	Big oil (also little oil) does not have to compete with nuclear power
Reject working class culture for Beat poets, happenings, youth culture (white left)	The Arts	Modern art is anti-working class Drives the working-class away from art museums for inspiration
Personal is political (radical feminism)	Relationship Between the Political and the Personal	Activists become bogged down in attempting to change romance, open marriages and can focus less on political activity
Pot, LSD, peyote	Alcohol – Drugs	CIA flooded communities with LSD for distraction
Expressive hippie clothing (white left)	Clothing	At the beginning this created divisions between middle class and working class: organizational turn-off
Sympathetic to Freudian left – Fromm, Horney, Reich (White left)	Attitude Towards Psychology	Potential socialist organizers become psychotherapists
Alienated from traditional Christianity Interest in Eastern mysticism, native religion	Spirituality	Threatens working class with religions they don’t understand – might consider it Satanic
Romanticism	Intellectual Movements	Championing primitive and childlike to keep people hostile to science and technology
Idealism Cultural, psychological: Frankfurt School Linguistic: postmodernism	Epistemology	Red herring – draws people away from economics and building a socialist party
Global warming	Climate	Supports de-indoctrination
New Left (began in the Early 50’s)	Category of Comparison	Benefit to Anglo-American empire, finance capital, Rockefellers and CIA

Techniques Used by the Powers that be to Undermine Communism

If you examine all twenty categories, the purpose of the CIA and the Rockefellers was to divide and conquer:
Existing state socialism from the New Left
Class on the one hand, race and gender on the other
Personal life and political life
Clothing, physical appearance middle class hippies and the working class
Non-Christian religions and Christianity
Ecology movement and the working class

Distracting people:

With sex and drugs and nihilistic or hedonistic rock music
With psychological preoccupations as at Esalen (The Human Potential Movement, social psychology of groups and therapy) rather than economics
With cultural or linguistic issues (Frankfurt School, postmodernism)
With romantic exoticism, primitivism, individualism

Fragmentation by:

Decentralizing politics from the nation-state to local configurations
Championing infinite diversity to weaken commonality and unity of organization
Treating ecology as separate from a Socialist program
Making art psychological instead socially inspiring

Demoralization

That capitalism had no inherent limits
Undermine belief in progress and that people should expect an abundant life
Pessimistic anti-science
There is no alternative to the Democratic Party

Demonization:

Of nuclear energy
Of all state socialist societies
Any international leader who wants to set their own economic foreign policy

Qualifications

I am not suggesting that the New Left was simply a creature of the CIA and the Rockefellers. The New Left was a movement that came out of the middle class which was anti-war, anti-racist, mostly anti-capitalist and a rebellion against a conservative culture. Surely the “powers that be” did not encourage this. What I am saying is that the CIA and the Rockefellers either intervened directly as in the existence of COINTELPRO or threw money at New Left projects that suited their needs.

Conclusion

In Part II I argued that the political philosophy of the Anglo-American empire is centrism. I argued that political centrists are losing elections all over the world because centrism cannot speak to the extreme crisis that finance capital has created. Also, the linear political spectrum that houses centrism no longer works in depicting political change. I identify five characteristics a new political spectrum would need in order to be workable.

Then I contrasted the multipolar values in the East and the Enlightenment in the West to the Romantic values in depth. The reason for this comparison that Romanticism is the foundation of the Anglo-American empire’s attempt to control the potential forces of Communism in the West by shaping a New Left.

I close my article with a contrast between the Old and the New left. The Old Left of the Communist Party was a great threat to the Anglo-American empire, finance capital, the Rockefellers and the CIA. All these powers attempted to support the shaping of an anti-communist New Left. I begin with the values of the Old left. Then I identified 20 characteristics of the New Left and how each served directly or indirectly to support the powers that be against the rise of Communism. All twenty characteristics used a combination of five techniques: divide-and-conquer; distraction, fragmentation, demoralization and demonization.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Promethean City Builders vs Finance Capital Malthusians: Multipolarists vs the Anglo-American Empire

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 10 Jun 2023 01:28:08 +0000

Part I Who are Some Western Supporters of Multipolarists?

Orientation

Most of us realize there is a major tectonic shift in the world economy from West to East. The multipolar nations are basing their economies on investing in developing the productive forces of science and technology and to better human life. The Belt and Road Initiative is a good example. The West, on the other hand, has made its profits on finance capital and military capitalism. The US defense industry arms the whole world. This economy is in steep decline.

In addition, politically in Mordor (The United States), there is no New Deal liberal party, let alone any significant socialist party. The political ideology of the Anglo-American Empire is centrism. If the forces of The Enlightenment are the West – New Deal liberals and socialists – and wanted to join the movement towards a multipolar world what would its guiding principles look like? Where on the political spectrum would it locate itself?

Since Lyndon LaRouche is someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for multipolarists Russia and India, he might have something to teach the West. To become Western multipolarists, to become Promethean city builders, we must recognize that finance and military capitalists are our enemy. At the same time, we must realize that finance capitalists of the Anglo-American Empire combined with the CIA have shaped a fake opposition to itself in the New Left. Among other things, this article will expose the ways the New Left has served finance capital and the Rockefellers.

My claims for this two-part article are that:

In order to join with Multipolarists of the East, forces to the left of the Democratic Party must reorganize their worldview along the lines of The Enlightenment and become city-builders.
Lyndon LaRouche and some of the sympathetic organizations such as Rising Tide Foundation are good representations of what a multipolar policy world would look like in the West
The political philosophy of the Anglo-American Empire and finance capitalism is centrism and it must be opposed.
The forces of Promethean City Builders must dispense with the linear political spectrum and create a new political spectrum which expresses its hopes.
For the past 70 years, the anti-communist forces of the Anglo-American empire have shaped a fake opposition, the romantic New Left to oppose the continuation and development of the Enlightenment, the American system and a communist movement.

Part I of this article deals with the first two claims and Part II addresses the last three.

The Western World is Cracking Up

Internationally

If your analytical vision penetrates beyond the surface – the sanctions, the build-up of military bases and the vast financial profits made – the Anglo-American empire is fracturing. Its finance capitalists have nothing to offer the world that can compete with China’s Belt and Road Initiative. It promises the world nothing but weapons to fight wars. As China’s diplomats mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia, Mordor’splans for dividing West Asia are fracturing. As more and more countries line up to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa’s the alternative to the IMF), and the World Bank, Mordor’s allies dwindle. Meanwhile its European “coalition of the willing”, vassals for 80 years, are starting to stir. While some rulers quietly accept the leadership of Mordor, other countries, formerly the heart of the almost defunct European Union, are poking their heads above ground – as in France’s Macron statement in Beijing – and making noises about European autonomy. However, these rulers are also being pushed by the anti-war and anti-NATO elements on both left and right to stop wasting their resources on Ukraine.

Domestically

As Yankeedom engages in several wars at once internationally, domestically it is falling apart. The federal state stands helpless as regions of the country face ecological disasters and extreme cold, heat and tornadoes. Its trains cannot stay on the tracks and its roads and bridges rot from neglect. In a recent survey released by the US army, recruiters say most eligible young men and women cannot pass the physical because they are either overweight or have drug problems. The public education system is so beleaguered that a high school degree is no longer required to teach high school. Rather than invest in the physical or human infrastructures, finance capitalists cannibalize those infrastructures while they make profits on derivatives and stock options which produce no real social goods. As many of you know, there is none better than political economist Michael Hudson at pointing this out. A recent survey indicated that half the American population thinks there will be a civil war and/or secession in two years.

Tectonic Plates Shift Eastward

Like tectonic shifts, the real-world economy is shifting eastward towards China, Russia, Iran and to a lesser extent, India. South American counties are lining up to join the multipolar world, including Argentina and Brazil. In Africa, leaders are trading with the Chinese who are building railroads. Recently Russia has forgiven billions of dollars in debt. Even Mexico, along with 30 other countries, right under the nose of Mordor has applied to BRICS. What are the differences between the Anglo -American empire and the multipolar world of the East? See my table below:

Table A The international World Divide

Anglo-American Empire	Category of Comparison	Multipolar World: China, Russia, Iran
Regional: European Union, NAFTA or Global	Political Loyalties	National: The Nation-State
Dollarization of the Whole world	Currencies	De-dollarization Multiple currencies
Finance capital, military capital	Form of Wealth	Industrial capital, technology
Free trade	International Economic Policies	Protectionism
Neocolonialism	Relation to the Global South	Anti-imperialism
Win-Lose Zero sum game	Economic Results of Trade	Win-win New wealth created
Oil, solar, wind	Sources of Energy	Nuclear power
Malthusian population decline	Population Policy	Growth in population

The Place of Lyndon LaRouche in the Multipolar World

Tribute to LaRouche by Russian economist Sergei Glazyev

In a recent article, the major Russian economist Sergei Glazyev sent a message of appreciation to the Schiller Institute on what would have been the 100th birthday of Lyndon LaRouche. LaRouche anticipated a disastrous end if finance capital policies continued. Further, he helped Russia to turn around after it was decimated by the neoliberal policies of Boris Yeltsin. I am emphasizing in the quotes below what I think is most important about Glazyev’s tribute:

Already 30 years ago, and perhaps even earlier, Lyndon LaRouche drew attention to the fact that the inflation of financial bubbles, including derivatives bubbles, and the creation of financial pyramid schemes would inevitably bring about the collapse of the world financial system. And he proposed to adopt timely measures to avert that collapse.

Back then he proposed that, instead of pumping up financial bubbles, the world reserve currency emitter-countries, together with their partners and other countries, should invest in building global infrastructure, which would reduce the cost of trade, increase the efficiency of international economic ties, and, overall, contribute to raising connectivity worldwide. [This is precisely China’s and Russia’s policy.] So, he viewed the process of globalization as a process of expanding cooperation among countries, rather than attempts by some countries to exploit others.

As for the liberal globalization that today is leading to the collapse of the world financial system, LaRouche criticized it. He proposed a different model of globalization, based on the principles of physical economy in The Truth of Man and Nature. In particular, the famous project, which he and his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, put forward for international discussion – the so-called Eurasian Land Bridge. This is a splendid and interesting project, which now, after many years, has begun to be implemented through the Chinese Belt and Road initiative, which we support through linking it with the Eurasian Economic Union.

LaRouche’s voice was heard very well. We remember him. In practically all the major countries in the world today that are developing successfully – above all India and China – there are partisans of LaRouche. They have used his thoughts and ideas for creating economic miracles. It is the principles of Physical Economy championed by LaRouche that today underlie the Chinese economic miracles and are there in the foundations of India’s economic development policy. The supporters of LaRouche in those countries exist in a fruitful, very positive and constructive influence on economic policy-shaping in these leading nations of the new world economic paradigm.

LaRouche is hard to pigeonhole politically (stopped 6-7-23)

I have been around leftist movements for over 50 years. During that time, I have watched the socialist left call LaRouche a paranoid fascist and his organization a cult. It has never been easy to think or speak about him in a dialectical manner not only because the anticommunist left demonizes him, but because his followers are often uncritical of him, at least in public. Trying to find a biography of him that is objective is about as easy as looking for an objective biography of the occultist, Gurdjieff. The choices seem to be either as a cynic or true believer. Yet today some of those who have been influenced by LaRouche such as Rising Tide Foundation, have some valuable things to say. As I mentioned, LaRouche’s ideas connect nicely with the new international political configuration that is happening of creating a multipolar world. Lastly, his influence is felt in the left-right strategic alliances that are occurring in Germany and just beginning in the United States. (In the Antiwar rally 2/19/23 and in friendly debates among LaRoucheans, communists and right libertarians.)

Shifts, turns and reversals

Some of you know that LaRouche started out as a Marxist. Under the pen name of Lyn Marcus, he wrote an extraordinary book called Dialectical Economics, which I read twice and on which I took extensive notes. Since I was never an insider of the LaRouche movement, I am unable to track the changes in his political direction in depth in the early 1980s. I know he abandoned Marxism and developed what seemed to me an idealist theory of history, championing Plato. In the 1980s and 1990s he sometimes aligned himself with right-wing movements although it is difficult to see how his own economic system was, as is claimed by leftists, to be fascist.

Defender of western civilization and the Enlightenment

Why do the anarchists and social democrats hate LaRouche? First because he was an unapologetic defender of Western civilization while much of the left became skeptical of these values. Secondly, LaRouche believed that the pattern of social evolution can be claimed to have been progress at a time when the anarchists were championing hunter and gathering societies. Thirdly, the LaRouche movement stood for The Enlightenment against the Romanticism of the New left. He was opposed to most everything the New Left stood for – identity politics, experimental sex, rock music, zero growth and Malthusian population control. With some qualifications, I agree with his criticisms.

Developing the productive forces and moving from necessity to freedom

What LaRouche and his followers are for in at least one aspect is Marxism. They want to develop the productive forces. They strive for a life which shrinks the relationship between freedom and necessity. This means less necessary work and more time for creative thinking and implementation on the productive technologies, including nuclear power. For them, in Marxist terms, the productive forces are industrial capital. The enemy of industrial capitalism is finance capital or slave capitalism which is based on the premise of people learning to do with less (austerity).

Defending the nation-state

Today Laroucheans align themselves the forces of the nation-state building against the forces of globalization, which is supranationalism on the one hand and subnational regionalism on the other. Liberal globalism subordinates nation-states to the free trade dogma of the Anglo-American empire. Any nation-state that elects a leader who wants to develop an autonomous national economic policy will automatically be labelled a tyrannical strong man, and “abuser of human rights”, the new hobby-horse defamatory claim.

Criticisms of LaRouche from a Marxist perspective

Historical struggle is presented as a dualistic process

When LaRouche talks about history, he refers to two forces, the British system and the American system. It seems that the British empire is painted as negative all the way down the line, including assassinations and horrible international machinations to control the world. It would be more dialectical if there were some productive activities the British did to show complexity. That doesn’t mean the British Empire is not guilty of atrocities. It’s also a matter of knowledge that all ruling classes are guilty of this, not just the British. On the other hand, those who support the American system are presented as having no faults. This kind of extreme dualism is one of the reasons I lost interest in LaRouche over the years.

There doesn’t seem to be room for unintended consequences in history

History is presented as if there are no untended consequences. I have not found instances where the clashes between of industrial and finance capital ever produces any historical results which were not planned. History seems to be the result of the victory of either of these two forces. There is nothing left over or in between. There are no messes. I do not find any instances in which the clash of these two forces resulted in circumstances that were not planned by either. I don’t think either of the protagonists are so powerful that either’s victor simply imposed their will on history. Marx said humans make history but not as they pleased.

Where is the working class?

LaRouche is very good at locating the class struggles within the ruling classes in both Britain and the United States. However, there have been well over two hundred years of working class struggles in the US between workers and capitalists in cities and farmers and bankers in rural areas. As a Marxist I believe the working class produces most of the wealth of society. Not mentioning the working class leaves out the overwhelming majority of the population. LaRouche’s analysis would be much richer if the horizontal struggle between the major political actors at the top (American system and British system) were joined by a vertical depiction of the relationship between these elites and the working classes of each country.

How does the existence of almost 200 years of the socialist movement fit into the evolution of the American system?

By roughly the 1870s, socialism and its leaders were serious competitors against both the English supporters of the South and the industrial capitalists of the North. This movement involved thousands of people, yet there is no mention of them. There is no stance taken for or against Marx or Engels or any of their American followers. This is a glaring historical omission.

Is there a capitalist system?

It is very clear that LaRouche advocated for industrial capitalism which means the real economy over finance capitalism. But this contrast is not rooted in the history of capitalism. Marx described how capitalism evolved from barter to the first money forms to the famous emergence money being invested in commodities in order to make more money. LaRouche seems to be arguing for a reversal of the historical movement of capitalism from industrial to financial and then back to industrial. But how would that process be rooted in the already existing history of capitalism in social evolution? A renaissance in the flowering of the real economy seems to be the result of volunteerism on the part of LaRouche and his followers. It is not grounded in the history of capitalism.

Is there a crisis in capitalism?

Furthermore, there doesn’t seem to be any theory of a capitalist crisis. On page 15 of Michael Roberts’ book The Long Depression, he identifies both Marxist and non-Marxist theories of crisis. On the Marxist side, there is everything from the tendency of the rate of profit to fall to Rosa Luxemburg’s and David Harvey’s theory of underconsumption. When LaRouche wrote his book Dialectical Economics in the late 1970s he had a theory of capitalist crisis somewhat like Rosa Luxemburg’s theory. But my understanding is that when LaRouche left Marxism, he left his theory buried in that book.

Defense of Platonism and Christianity

According to George Johnson in Architects of Fear from Wikipedia:

According to George Johnson, LaRouche saw history as a battle between Platonists, who believe in absolute truth, and Aristotelians, who rely on empirical data. Johnson characterizes LaRouche’s views as follows: the Platonists include figures such as Beethoven, Mozart, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, and Leibniz. LaRouche believed that many of the world’s ills result from the dominance of Aristotelianism as embraced by the empirical philosophers such as Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, leading to a culture that favors the empirical over the metaphysical, embraces moral relativism, and seeks to keep the general population uninformed, LaRouche argued, whereas the Aristotelians use psychotherapy, drugs, rock music, jazz, environmentalism, and quantum theory to bring about a new Dark Age in which the world will be ruled by oligarchs. what matters is the Platonic versus Aristotelian outlook.

Lastly, LaRouche unapologetically accepts Platonic Christianity as an evolutionary advance from the polytheism and animism of pre-Christian times. He ignores the entire history of the misery Protestant and Catholic rulers have visited on their own populations with original sin, hatred of the body and fear of hell for starters. Neither does it seem to matter to LaRouche that both Protestants and Catholics persecuted thousands of pagans throughout history.

From LaRouche to the Rising Tide Foundation and the American System

Thanks to the Greanville Post I learned of the work of Matthew Ehret and Cynthia Chung and their Rising Tide Foundation. Influenced by LaRouche, they have excellent lectures, not only on geopolitics but also the arts and the history of science. Matthew Ehret has written a four-volume history of the United States and Cynthia Chung has written a great book called The Empire On Which the Black Sun Never Set. I’d like to share with you some highlights from Volume I of his book.

Clash of the two America’s – the Unfinished Symphony

History of industrial capitalism vs slave and finance capital in the United States

In Volume I of the Unfinished Symphony, Matthew Ehret divides the ruling factions in the United States into two groups: those who supported the British Empire and those who sided with the American system. Contrary to what most of us think, the British Empire was never really kicked out of the United States after the Revolutionary War. The US South continued to be involved with the British slave trade and many resisted fighting in the Revolutionary War.

The British Empire was dead-set against the United States becoming an industrial competitor to Great Britain. They wanted to maintain the US as a dependent country producing commercial agriculture (mostly cotton) for their textile mills. In their efforts to keep the United States under their thumb, the British were against the US establishing tariffs and protecting their industry to build canals and railroads. The British supported “free trade” and opposed Hamilton’s call for a national bank which invested in infrastructure projects. The British also supported the decentralization of banks. Doing the bidding of the British (whether consciously or not) Andrew Jackson cut out infrastructural projects and supported the spread of multiple species of currency which undermined longstanding economic projects.

The leading Americans who stood up for industrialization were Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton and in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln. The forces of slave capital and finance capital supported the development of Wall Street, the City of London and later, the Bank of Manhattan. The British supported the South’s plea for states’ rights since that weakened the federal governments’ quest to centralize power which was necessary to build a strong nation-state.

As might be expected, the major theoretician of the British system of laissez-faire (let the markets rule) capitalism was Adam Smith. The economists of the American system were Franz List and Harry C. Carey. Believe it or not, there were some Americans who did not look East to Europe for a political vision. Rather, they looked to Russia and China as civilizations worth emulating. They included Charles Sumner, William Seward, William Gilpin and Asa Whitney. They toyed with building a trans-Siberian railroad. Seward purchased Alaska in the hopes of linking it to Russia via a railroad while William Gilpin wanted to build a world land bridge uniting the whole world. He was influenced by the great Alexander von Humboldt. The British deep state forces were embedded in the US Canadian United Empire Loyalists; Eastern establishment families and in Virginian slave-owning aristocrats, including Albert Pike who later was involved with the Ku Klux Klan.

In the case of Russia, the friendly outreach of Gilpin was rewarded. Most people do not know that during the Civil War, Czarist Russia came to the aid of forces of the Union when the British attempted to invade during the Civil War. The Russian Navy blocked the British land invasion on both the East and the West coasts of the United States.

Table B summarizes the relation of the American system against the British empire.

Table B American System vs the British Empire

The American system	Category of Comparison	British Empire
Franklin, Hamilton, Thomas Paine, John Jay	Major Political Figures	Aaron Burr, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson
National Bank	Type of Banks	No – decentralized banks
Invest in infrastructure	What to do with profits?	Hording in banks
Protective tariffs	International Trade	Free trade
Franz List Harry C. Carey	Economists	Adam Smith
Expand into China Charles Sumner and William Seward, William Gilpin and Asa Whitney	Relations with China	Exploit China British opium wars
Russian Navy intervenes in Civil War on side of North	Relations with Russia	Sets up Canada to block Americans joining with Russia
Centralized state	Political Scale	States’ rights

Why are we discussing Rising Tide Foundation? Because it provides a necessary correction to the leftist trashing of all the Founding Fathers and shows there was a very progressive side to some of them. It also describes an American system which is consistent with the multipolar vision of China, Russia and the countries with BRICS.

Conclusion

I began this article using a contrast between the declining Anglo-American empire of the West and the rising Multipolar world of the East. Secondly, I identified Lyndon LaRouche as someone instrumental in developing an economic policy for Russia and India. Yet LaRouche also championed Western values of the Enlightenment, the importance of developing the productive forces of society and defending the nation-state against globalization. LaRouche argued that his ideas about developing the productive forces in Russia and India were also alive and kicking in the United States in what he called “the American system”. I then offered six reservations to his orientation from a Marxist perspective.

Finally, I brought in the work of the Rising Tide foundation and of Matthew Ehret in a book called The Clash of the Two Americas: Volume I: The Unfinished Sympathy. I presented how Matthew’s work demonstrated that there was a progressive tendency among the Founding Fathers and how the American system in the United States is connected to a multipolar world in the East.

But where do LaRouche and Rising Tide stand on the linear political spectrum? Leftists have called LaRouche a fascist. I commented briefly that this was a ridiculous characterization. Yet who are the allies of the so-called American system, and where are they on the political spectrum? Finally, what is the relationship between LaRouche and the New Left on the political spectrum? We will learn their values are diametrically opposed because the New Left itself was shaped by the arch enemies of LaRouche and Rising Tide – finance capitalists, the Rockefellers and the CIA. We will see in Part II that the linear political spectrum itself is the problem.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Edgar Morin and the Magical Origins of Stardom

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 18 May 2023 22:59:42 +0000

No one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist…Whenever there is a white screen in a black room a new religion has been established…We enter into the darkness of an artificial grotto. A luminous dust is projected and dances on a screen. We cross time and space, until some solemn music dissolves the shadows on the screen that has once again become white.

— Edgar Morin, The Stars

Why Cartesians are not Allowed at the Movies

Epistemologically, one of the major characteristics of the western world, at least as far back as the 16th century, is Descartes’ separation between the subject and the object. The objective world is thought to be outside of psychology and is the world of nature and society. To be objective was to be detached and good science means you never let your imagination, emotions or revelries get in the way of your reports. Conversely, the subjective world is what is private, personal and idiosyncratic. This is the world of poets, artists and psychologists. Most everyone in the western world today accepts (if unconsciously) this subject-object separation in everyday life. They would also unconsciously drag it into the movies. But when we go to the movies the subject-object separation becomes blurred. If the outer world was only bio-physical and social – out there – and the inner world was your private life – in here, this epistemology would not explain:

How fans get could get caught up in a story that it can become like a flashbulb memory. Remember the Marlon Brando scene in the car with his brother during On the Waterfront?
How fans idolize the stars, begging for autographs, copying their clothing and hairdos, subscribing to movie magazines, and showing up at press conferences.
How stars get so lost in their roles that they have difficulty being convincing in new roles.
How stars over-identify with their roles and blur the boundaries between their work as a star and their private life.

The claim of this article is that neither fans nor actors nor actresses act like Cartesians dualists when they participate in a movie production. Rather they enter a world which is pre-subjective and pre-objective.They enter temporarily into a world Lévy–Bruhl called participation mystique.

Lévy–Bruhl and Participation Mystique

Lucien Lévy–Bruhl was a philosophical anthropologist who pointed out that primitives do not see the objective world the way westerners do. He proposed that in their rituals, primitive societies become the animals they are about to hunt or the corn they are attempting to grow. They merge with the objective world. This is what is called “participation”. Experiencing the world temporarily as being one with animals or plants in a magical ritual, included no separation between themselves and their shadows, the living and the dead, self and others. He demonstrated this in three books. I have read: Notebooks on Primitive Mentality, Soul of the Primitive and How Natives Think. In these books Lévy–Bruhl discussed the coexistence of the practical mind and the magical mind, though he emphasized the later.

Magical and Practical Realms in Tribal Societies

For archaic peoples, subjective phenomena are alienated into the objects they are crafting and these become carriers of soul. Archaic hunters practice shooting with extreme precision, but they also cast the image of an animal in preparation for a magical spell. They practice mimetic propitiatory rites to the animal. There is a combination of practical (practice shooting) and the imaginary (casting a spell). The presence of archaic language, conduct, masks and ornaments show us that humans, while knowing themselves to be human, still feel caught in the grips of, or even possessed by altered states. This happens in their union with animal, plant, ancestors or by cosmic forces. Participation has always been able to give life and soul to statuettes, marionettes and puppets so why not the movies?

Edgar Morin and Participation Mystique

Here is what Morin thinks is going on in the movies with the fans. The participant movie goer grows to feel himself embedded in a world that Morin calls “cosmomorphism”. He is embedded in the story and the roles of the stars.

At the other extreme the material world becomes more psychological and animated by passions, desires and human feelings. So participation means the human mind gets lost in the world, losing his subjective boundaries. In the movies it means acquiring the characteristics of the characters as well as to the story of the movie. It becomes the story of the movie-goer’s life. This animation of objects takes us back to the universe of archaic vision. Going to the movies is a modern recreation of participation mystique for actors, actresses and fans as well as for the producers, directors, lighting technicians and all other mediators.

The Magical Basis of Film

Our attachment to movie stars is lot more than simply a vestige of childish or even adolescent preoccupation from which adults are spared. What Edgar Morin means by the initial quote in this article is not that there is a secret theology of monotheism embedded in the imagination of atheists which comes out when watching a movie. It is not monotheistic faith or prayer that is invoked. It is the immediate magic of rites and spells. Magical participation corresponds not only to the pre-objective vision of the world, but also to a pre-subjective stage of humanity. Like Lévy–Bruhl, Morin says subjectivity and objectivity are like twin sisters before becoming dualistic opposites. It is on the tension of their opposition and their continuity – their dialectic – that we must follow them in the cinema.

When people enter the theatre even atheists develop magical participatory states of consciousness as we get lost in the story. Through an act of mimicry, we identify with the various roles of the actors and actresses. Just as in a tribal magical state of consciousness, a good ritual leaves the participants agitated, inspired or drained. Whatever their state of consciousness they were in then, it will not be the same as when they went in. The association between film and archaic magical state of consciousness is no poetic metaphor. Morin points out for educational purposes that people in tribal societies respond much better to film because it has the motion of a ritual rather the static quality of a photograph or written page. Morin has long been preoccupied by the mythology and magic that lives both underground and next to the reason of everyday life and the rationality of the sciences.

Participation Mystique Identifies Emotions with Weather Conditions

Morin says that the camera is at once a microscope and a magic mirror. The face has become a landscape: it expresses storms at sea, the earth, the town and the factory, revolution, war. Landscapes are states of soul and states of soul landscapes. Often the weather, the ambience and the scenery are in the image of the feelings that animate the characters. We see alternately, then shots of nature and shots of humans, as if an affective symbiosis necessarily connects humanity to prehuman nature. Filmmakers entrust to landscapes the task of expressing states of the soul: rain evokes melancholy; storm evokes torment.

Against Marxist Reductionism

Unlike what Morin might called Marxist reductionism, myth and the imaginary are not just illusionary superstructures, vapors having no real substance and which mystify humanity. Human reality is itself partly imaginary. Morin knew that considering cinema as a mass medium and a sociological phenomenon was necessary, but how to do this without throwing the baby out with the bathwater? He predicted that sociologists would be oblivious to the real aesthetic situation of the experienced participation of the star and the film spectator. Morin claimed that both film critic and spectator live in the cinema and in a state of double consciousness, participating and skeptical. Morin was devoted to analyzing the relationship between stars and movie participants without disenchanting either.

Modern World Disenchants by Splitting the Subjective and the Objective

It is we moderns who split the worlds of the practical and magical worlds. Historical evolution has worked to disassociate the two orders, to circumscribe the dream and the hallucination as nothing more than subjective illusions to be cleaned up by practical perception. But our whole practical world is surrounded with rites and superstition. The cinema affects a kind of resurrection of the archaic. However, the very strong analogies between the cinema and the archaic vision of the world cannot be pursued to the point of identification. Film perception occurs within a consciousness that knows the image is not practical life.

Aesthetics are the Halfway House Between Participation Mystique and Material Reality

The aesthetic vision of the art critic is that of divided consciousness after the split between the objective and subjective worlds has taken place historically. The art critic participates in watching films at a distance, as a skeptic. The aesthetic vision dereifies the magic of the cinema and at the same time differentiates the cinema from archaic vision. But this magic is only in a nascent state and often only in a state of decline. For it is enveloped, broken up and stopped short in its place by a focused consciousness of the critic. It is internalized as sentiment. Ancient magic is ceaselessly reduced to sentiment of the aesthetic.

A Healthy Moviegoer Tames Participation Mystique

Applied to the movies, when movie fans are living a full life, they go to the movies get lost in the plot line and characters but resume their lives afterword. They enjoy the plot line and characters but the plot line and characters do not have them. They are not possessed. Like shaman, stars have charisma. They sooth our body and soul as they move us to soar beyond everyday life and its structures, at least for a couple of hours. Those of us in the audience mentally integrate ourselves with the characters and the plot, suspending judgment and getting lost in another world but coming out the other side.

Neurosis and Projective Identification

When fans are living lives that are not satisfying, they lose themselves long-term in the movies – the storyline and the characters. They are possessed by their own emotional reaction to both the characters and the story. Projective identification is a psychological term for a process whereby:

A person, say Anthony, disowns feelings he does not want to experience, say jealousy, and projects them outwards.
It lands in the psychology of the other person, let us say Sandy. Sandy can either reject or accept those disowned feelings.
If Sandy accepts the feelings, she begins acting like Anthony feels (jealous).
Anthony is now in a position to accuse Sandy of the jealousy he feels.

In terms of projective identification, the fan throws out their own creativity, charisma and skills and attaches them to the movie character. Since the characters cannot give them direct feedback, all the fans have to go on is the heroism and bravery the character demonstrates in the movie. The fan treats the star as possessing the strength and good qualities that the fan has alienated himself from. Projective identification can bring about identification even with those held in lowly regard, ignored, despised or hated in everyday life. Here the fan throws out their stubbornness, crabbiness and hatred of life on to one of the characters (probably a villain). The character acts in a way that resembles the vices of the fan. The fan then imagines that the villain who oppresses them is making him feel bad.

Projective Identification on the Industry of the Star

In falling in love with a movie star, we project ourselves onto the person and we identify them with ourselves. The corporeal and yet elusive specters on the screen. These shadow personalities the film presents seem to the fan more real more human, more intensely themselves than stars of flesh and blood behind the footlights. Here lies the danger of reification where the star and plot take on a life of its own, where the audience gets lost in the movies and never really comes back to reality. However, we identify not just the psychological side of the personality of the star, but projective identification is built out and dramatized by music, lighting effects, movements and positions of the camera. The stars also have their objective extensions of themselves: photos, trinkets, handkerchiefs, and their houses. Thus projective identification spreads from beings to things. This can lead to fetishization and even cults.

Marxian Projective Identification

Applying projective identification to Marxism is tricky. For Marxists, projective identification does not start with people’s individual or social psychology. It begins with the economic working conditions of workers on the job. Using Bertell Ollman’s definition of alienation, workers are alienated from: a) the products of labor; b) the process of labor; c) other people on the job; d) the power setting in which decisions about work are made; e) alienation from the natural world; and e) alienation from self.

These are the conditions under which workers enter the theatre (and middle class to a lesser extent). The worker enters the theatre with the intension of minimizing the conditions of alienation.

Workers need a sense of hope that conditions can be better.
Other people are not such as source of stress for them.
They may achieve a degree of personal peace.

Now the members of the audience may both project their alienated feelings of fear and hopelessness onto the villains of the movie. The audience member will also project his feeling of hope and lovability onto the stars in the movie. This star-actor then gives the audience back some of what they projected which keeps fans coming back.

The Genesis and Metamorphosis of the Stars

According to Morin, the star concept was born around 1910 out of the fierce competition between the first film companies in the US. The star developed simultaneously with the concentration of capital at the heart of the film industry. The star, like all capitalist commodities, has a price and this price regularly follows the fluctuations of supply by box office appeal and monitored by the fan mail. The 20^th century made the stars into royalty. In direct proportion to their denial of the traditional actor, the movies have created the star. Stars are born when the actor imposes their personality on the script and these heroes in turn impose their personality on the actor. From this composite a star is born. This star actor then gives the audience back some of what they projected. This is what keep fans coming back.

History of Stars Repeats the History of the Gods

Morin claims that the history of the stars repeats in its own proportions the history of the gods. Before the gods (before the stars) the mythical universe (the screen) was peopled with specters or phantoms endowed with the glamour and magic of the double (animism). Several of these presences have progressively assumed body, substance, have taken form, amplified and flowered into gods and goddesses. Morin says the two major types of gods many be distinguished:

father gods who are so remote and grandiose that they are projections of human terrors and ambitions. They are too scary for fans to identify themselves with
son-gods (heroes, or demigods) who are closer to the earth and not so unlike the fan that they can’t be identified with. These are the stars.

At the extreme level of the divine star, involvement is not implying mimetics, either because the star keeps herself at an unvarying distance or the believer feels too humble to reach up. Morin suggests that the actress Mary Pickford was like this kind of goddess. Closer to the earth, the stars become hero-gods. Finally, the star goddesses touch the ground and humanize themselves. The kings were the first to situate themselves on the level with the gods. Then gradually more classes got included and before you knew it everyone was entitled to an afterlife just as everyone was entitled to identify with stars. Stars are mediators between gods and humans, between divine and mortal. They aspire to the conditions of gods and goddesses and attempt to deliver mortals from their infinite misery. The hero is a human being in the process of becoming divine.

Flying too Close to the Ground

The humanizing tendency sometimes reduces the star to the human scale by brushing too closely to everyday life. For example, stars fly too close to the ground when they perform cheap tricks for commercials and/or play in television game shows like Hollywood Squares. An internal mechanism must reestablish distance if they are not to lose their star status. A new movie might exalt the star and she recovers altitude. Yet every excess in this direction provokes a recall to realism. As Morin quips, the star system hedgehops between the divide, the heroic and humanity rather than soaring smoothly above our daily life of humans.

Stars are in Danger of Reifying Themselves

Like gods who have gone wrong, stars can also turn into idols in which their identity is frozen in a particular character they play that they do so well they cannot get other parts because the director or producer will not believe them in their new character. Furthermore, the star system extends beyond the screen and the awards. It invades the everyday life of the stars. Hundreds and now perhaps thousands of correspondents are assigned to Hollywood to feed the world news and gossip about the stars and their personal lives. Stars never have a real personal life. They are always on. It’s no accident that Marlon Brando wound up living on his own island.

The Place of the Double

Among primitive humanity, the first self-consciousness is exterior to the self. It is only later that self-consciousness is internalized. The “I” at first is a double revealed and localized in shadows, in reflections, in mirrors and in dreams when the body sleeps. It becomes a spirit when the body dies. Today Morin insists it exists for both the stars, the fans and for everyone else in the roles we play. The star watches this double attach and detach itself from her. She must keep abreast of her double (the star and their personal life), for this is their livelihood.

The image possesses a magic quality of the double, but it is interiorized, nascent and subjectivized. The double possesses the psychological, affective quality of the image, but is alienated and magical. Between these two poles lies a syncretistic, fluid zone that we call the domain of sentiment, of the soul or the heart.

Stars Have Their Own Rites

Stars are not just a mediation between as between a shaman and their participants. Morin says stars also take part in their own rites, such as the Cannes Festival and the Academy Awards when they leave the screen and show themselves publicly. These festivals and awards are a magical site of identification of the magical and the real. They show tangible proof of their incarnation through autographs. These festivals are imagined to be a life of play, a carnival life – disguised, licentious, lavishing photographs, gossip and rumors attaining its fullness and mythic peak at the festivals. Morin says the star system has devoured the international film contests and turned them into international star contests.

For example, the first question put to anyone returning from the Cannes Festivals is not “did you see the directors or producers”, but “which stars did you see?”. “Is she as pretty in real life as she is on the screen?”. The real problem is the confrontation of myth and reality, appearance and essence. Cannes is the mystic site of this identification between the imaginary and the real. Photographers crowd around the square, each carrying on their shoulder the eyes of millions of voyeurs. Morin waxes poetically that the ceremony is an equivalent of the Roman triumph and ascension of the virgin.

Fanatics’ Reification of Stars

At worst, fans have allowed the stars to guide their manners, gestures, poses, attitudes, ecstasies and sighs. A star is capable of undermining existing fads and creating new ones without even trying. The imaginary identification with stars can become so satisfying that real life itself is held in contempt. For example, Morin quotes the regret of a female fan: “Tony, my poor boyfriend, had patiently waited until my aberration to be over”. Star worshippers constitute the idolatry mass of the fans.

Fans Sustain the Star Industry

The star system maintains itself through specialized publications we all know: movie magazines and the stars’ mail. Morin tells us that in the 1940s letters addressed to Hollywood stars was estimated to be several million a year. Morin says that in 1939 one major studio received between fifteen thousand to forty five thousand letters or cards a month. Magazines, photographs, correspondence, clubs, pilgrimages, ceremonies, festivals maintain the cult of stars. Photographs and autographs are the two key fetishes to which are added collections of clippings. According to Morin photographs are the universal presence-fetishes of the first half of the 20^th century. It is clubs, magazines, correspondence and presents that are processes of divination in action beneath these secular forms. They have replaced the temple, the bible, litanies and offerings.

Psychology of Fandom

According to Morin, love for the stars is a love without jealousy and without envy. The star and the king are flesh-and-blood creatures infected by their roles. We admire them without envying them; we are not jealous of kings or stars. The fans accept themselves, says Morin, purely and simply as earthworms.

This is not so with stars closer to the ground. Fans are no longer interested in dating their own kind. “I did my hair as much like hers as I could. I wondered what the star would do in any aggregating situation that I was in. When a star died it seemed that a vital part of my imagination died too and my world of dreams was bare. I plan films for him and think up ideas for his radio show. I plan my days as much as possible not to interfere with my listening”. Offerings to the stars include flowers, trinkets, lucky pieces, statuettes, sweaters, animals and dolls. Presents are destined for the star’s body, such as sweaters. Fetishistic presents (petals, dolls) suggest the bits of natural substances and symbolic offerings that are mingled at the foot of the altars, while the incense of praise smokes on high. One can even discern vestiges of human sacrifice as in the case of a 16-year-old girl who offered Norma Shearer pieces of skin clipped from her own body. Stars become analogous to the tutelary saints or to the guardian angels. “Joan Crawford is my lucky star, I feel she is near me, like a goddess”.

At worst, the fan always desires to consume their god, as in supposed cannibal pasts in which the ancestor was eaten and the totemic feasts in which the sacred animal was devoured. The faithful want to know everything, possess, manipulate and mentally digest the total image of their idol through gossip, rumors, indiscretions and rejections. The journalists of the cinema get caught up in the fanfare or become more interested in the stars than in the films. Beauty secrets, cosmetics, dietary or aesthetic preferences, travels, expenses, furniture, pets – all are intimate details that become material for the columns. A fan follows the star’s dietary and bodily practice and adopts her makeup, and imitates her clothes. One gal confesses to “curling my boyfriend’s hair in my fingers or stroking his face exactly as I’ve seen my screen favorites do”.

At the same time, just as primitive man confronted with a spirit who has not answered his pleas, fans overwhelm the stars with reproaches when they fail in their duties to respond, advise and console. Lastly the cult of the stars reveals its profoundest meaning at certain moments of collective hysteria such as those provoked by the death of Valentino or James Dean. The star system is fragile and subject to disintegration. There comes a moment when the star grows old and dies or a moment when the fan grows old.

Conclusion

I began the article by suggesting that both movie stars and fans must break with a Cartesian dualistic concept of the objective world on the one hand and the subjective world on the other in order to pull off a successful film. I argued that something like Lévy–Bruhl’s participation mystique must be operating in order for fans and stars to get lost in the movie, do their jobs come away inspired. Healthy fans and actors are able to get lost in the movies, but still emerge from it and go about their lives. More alienated fans and stars are subject to what Morin describes as projective identification. As a Marxist Morin knew that projective identification by itself was too psychological, so I’ve added a sociological dimension to projective identification.

Morin argues that the history of stars repeats the history of the gods and goddesses in mythology in which stars are like heroes mediating between the divine and the human. I discuss two pathologies that stars may experience. When:

They fly too close to the ground that they cheapen themselves.
They become drunk with their star identity and consequently have no personal life.

I also discuss fan pathology in which they reify the stars and attribute to them their own alienated creativity, skills, charisma and intelligence. This results in living a vicarious life.

What interested Morin was the contradiction between the modernity of the 20^th century and the archaism of our minds. Attending the cinema was the site where this contradiction played out. He sensed a profound link between the world of cinema and the participation mystique in magical tribal societies. For him, as for many others, the cinema resuscitated the archaic universe of doubles. The cinema is the greatest apostle of animism. From inanimate objects of the specters flickering, now you have a soul in the fluid universe of the cinema.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 25 Apr 2023 19:00:40 +0000

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people…”

“Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower.” — Karl Marx

Cynical Attacks by Marxists About Neopaganism

“Neopagan Marxists? What are you talking about? We Marxists are atheist materialists. We don’t believe in any gods. Do you remember what Marx said about religion? It is the opium of the people. Why are you bringing superstition back in? Neopaganism is just more decadent 1970s hippie romanticism calling for the return to a preindustrial age. All this Goddess crap is just the lunatic fringe of the women’s movement trying to bring religion back in. Real socialist feminists are atheists. If anything, Christianity was a moral advance over the barbaric paganism of the Bronze and Iron Ages.” Serious charges indeed to be answered throughout this article.

Demanding Workers be Atheists Alienates Marxists from their Base

One of many problems for Marxists in the West is that most people in the working class believe in God, whether they are Protestants, Catholics, Jews or Muslims. Furthermore, whether Marxists like it or not, most people around the world find religious rituals enjoyable, comforting and meaningful. If people treat rituals in a mindless, reified way, that does not mean rituals can be dismissed. In addition, rituals have power not just in religion, but in nationalism and sports which have drawn from religion. Typically, Marxists dismiss religion, nationalism and sports as deriving from false consciousness, simplistic reasoning of the workers or evil machinations of priests or rulers. But this has not stopped working-class people from continuing to be faithful to their religion, country and sports teams. Do you Marxists really want to continue to throw stones at the buildings of churches, stadiums or the bronze cast statues of famous nationalistic generals?

The Structure and Superstructure of Societies

Using a Marxist delineation of social structures, both capitalist and socialist societies have an infrastructure and superstructure. The infrastructure includes the economy technology, methods of harnessing energy and work patterns. The superstructure of society includes the knowledge systems including politics, law, philosophy, art, religion and recreational patterns. Broadly speaking, superstructural institutions supportthe existing order for better or worse. More specifically, under capitalism these include religious monotheism, nationalism and professional sports.

The Superstructural Mainstream Institutions of Religion, Nationalism and Sports and their Commonalities

Religious monotheism, with all its material configurations (churches, altars, pews) is comprised of social-psychological techniques (sin, confession, guilt) and paraphernalia (rosary beads, crosses on necks) was also used by nationalists to get people to bind themselves to the state politically. Sports helped to organize people’s loyalty in their leisure time to a sports team. Religion, nationalism and sports all have many commonalties:

A mythology of origins and destiny
A founder
A set of rites the community engages in
Special holy days and holidays throughout the year
A place to go for pilgrimages
A set of buildings – temple, stadium to enact these rituals
A set of holy objects
A cultivated songbook of inspiring music
Very specific set of rules to follow
A holy book
A definite attitude to other groups
Emotional expectations
Heretics
Scapegoats
Specialized language
Sacred arts
Methods of altering states of consciousness
Attitudes towards the senses
Collective memories – what you remember; what you forget

Monotheism, nationalism and sports are mainstream superstructural institutions of capitalism that are directed mostly atthe working-class. These institutions both alienate them from their social needs while providing them with inspiration, comfort, solace and hope. At the same time, there are superstructural capitalist movements which offer hope not only to working class people but to middle class and upper middle class people.

The Social and Psychological Aims of Capitalism vs the Hopes and Desires of the People

In order to derive maximal profit, the capitalist structure must pulverize social life so that every social and psychological need and desire is for sale. It must also create a consumer individuality so that the person is preoccupied with building and sustaining their individuality through consuming capitalist products. Naturally enough, many people who live in a capitalist society want to get away from this. Some of them flee into the capitalist superstructural institutions such as monotheism, nationalism or sports as a way to:

Creating an ideal community
Experience altered state of consciousness
Develop an individuality that is larger, wider and deeper than what consumer individuality has to offer

Superstructural Movements: Human Potential, New Age and Neopaganism

But the working class is not the only class which seeks another way of life from what capitalism has to offer. The Human Potential movement in the 1970s was an attempt by mostly middle-class people to create alternative communities, to experience altered states of consciousness and cultivate a new individualist identity. So too, in the late 1970s the New Age movement wished to the same thing for the upper middle classes. These included spiritual, political and psychological cults, the paranormal movement (interest in ESP, telepathy, extraterrestrial civilizations) and Eastern mysticism (mediation, yoga) Lastly, also in the late 1970s Neopaganism exploded in both the United States and England.

Unlike monotheism, nationalism, sports and interest in cults, the New Age and Neopaganism are attempts to break awayfrom what seems to be to be the collapse of western religious institutions. What these movements promise the individual is to be swept away from everyday life to an alternative community, radically altered states and an individuality which is not submissive to a god, state or sports team but something higher, deeper and richer. To summarize, there are two components in the capitalist superstructure:

Mainstream institutions: religion, nationalism and sports – which support capitalism
Movements: the Human Potential Movement, the New Age movement and Neopaganism which seek to break away from capitalism or at least its corporate version

What both superstructural institutions and movements all seek to create is:

An ideal community
Experiencing altered state of consciousness
Developing an individuality that is larger, far more so than what consumer individuality has to offer

Socialist Infrastructure and Socialist Superstructure

At its best, the socialist infrastructure has an economy that is communist, with workers’ councils deciding what and how much to produce at the local level, federated at the regional level and centralized at the state level. There is advanced technology. The socialist superstructure consists of a materialist philosophy, is pro-science and pro-technology and practices political direct democracy. There is also socialist art and there is atheism.

Socialist Rejection of Capitalist Superstructure

Good reasons for rejection

There are the atheists, socialists, communists and anarchists who think that religion, nationalism and sports are intentional distractions concocted by the ruling class to keep the working class from collectively changing life on earth. Further, the search for paranormal or mystical experience will be understood by Marxists as an attempted withdrawal from capitalist institutions in a fruitless search of meaningful experience. Socialists argue that paranormal experience has never been proven by scientists to be repeatable experimentally, while mystical experience is private escape and rarely produces revolutionaries. “Who needs spiritual a superstructure?” Marxists may say. “We see what happens when superstructural institutions are introduced into the capitalist superstructure by way of monotheism, nationalism, sports. People reify their gods, national heroes and sports figures. They engage them superstitiously and religious participants, citizens or sports fans behave submissively or mindlessly and use these institutions as escapes.

Furthermore, the impact of superstructural movements can also be engaged superstitiously and its leaders reified. The eruption of cults, psychic research and meditation centers produces its share of gurus, groupies and escapism. “Who needs that?” say the Marxists. The problem is that these capitalist superstructural institutions and movements contain 80% of the population (40% working class, 30% middle class and 10% upper middle class).

Bad reasons for rejecting

However, atheistic socialists and communists do not understand that what people who engage in institutions, movements and personal quests also want is not just about what they believe, but what they experience in a ritual-altered state. Arguing with people that science shows the earth is actually a lot older than the bible says is not going to change any fundamentalist’s minds and the evangelical atheists are foolish to try. Attempting to convince nationalists that their country’s crimes are greater than their heroic deeds is like spitting in the wind. Making an effort to convince sports fans that they shouldn’t root for their home team because neither the players nor the owners are loyal to their city will never work. The great weakness of all atheist socialists is that what people believe and the vehicles they use to support their beliefs can’t be argued with because these things all give comfort, hope and community. Communists throw rocks at the churches and stadiums but they are really afraid to go in. What socialists need to do is:

Understand what people believe and how the rituals work that supports beliefs
Recreate our own version of the 19 elements I earlier named that religion, nationalism and sports all share

Marxists do not have to Reinvent the Wheel:

The Neopagan Movement can Provide Marxists with a Missing Sacred Superstructure

Enter Neopaganism. At its very best, Neopaganism provides a far more convincing story about the cosmic evolution. It also offers a way to live in a world of conflict without losing heart or enthusiasm. Neopaganism also uses some of the same methodologies as monotheism, nationalism and sports to create altered states of consciousness. It does so relatively successfully and it does not require dogma to do it.

The Neopagan movement can bring life of the sacred into the socialist superstructure in ways that, at their best, are not superstitious, not reified, anti-hierarchical and not escapist. Joining with Neopagans will enable socialist to recruit the population currently embedded in the capitalist superstructure and lure them into a neopagan superstructure that will be in the service of socialism in our fight against capitalism.

Marx’s Criticism of Religion was too Sweeping

Marx rightfully criticized the Catholic and Protestant monotheism as it was practiced by the ruling classes of Europe, but his criticism of monotheism does not cover the polytheism or animism of pagans. In the case of the animism of hunter-gatherers who occupied most of human history, there are a lot of problems with characterizing animism the way Marxism criticized religion in my opening quote. The first animists were politically egalitarian, economically practiced what anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called “generalized reciprocity” and they had no private property. There were no gods and goddesses, just earth spirits, totems and sometimes ancestor spirits. There were no spiritual hierarchies. These earth spirits were treated as humanity’s brothers and sisters. There was no adoration, worship, begging and pleading or faith necessary. The sacred life of hunter-gatherers was no vale of tears, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless word. The type of magick they practiced was hardly the opium of the people. I am not suggesting socialists return to hunting and gathering times and practice animism. However, the animistic beliefs and practices can be used as a sacred model on which to build a communist future.

Neopagans are Hardly Washed-up Left-over Hippies

According to Margot Alder, in her book Drawing Down the Moon, Neopagans as a group are intelligent, interested in science, creative, imaginative and growing in both the United States and England. They have made inroads into mainstream religious conferences and they have yearly conferences of their own as well as regional celebrations throughout the United States. In fact, in the United States, Neopaganism is the fastest growing “religion”. We Marxists would be very lucky to have them join our ranks.

There is no Contradiction Between Dialectical Materialism and Most Neopagans

Ontologically, I identify as a Neopagan, but this in no way requires me to challenge a materialistic framework. Though some pagans are god and goddess theists, there is a vital community of Atheopagans who are materialists and believe in no gods. While I have a couple of disagreements with Mark Green (author of Atheopaganism: an Earth-honoring path rooted in science), we have enough in common to say that Atheopaganism will answer in a scientific way most, if not all the reservations of Marxists. There are other Neopagans whose goddesses and gods are admitted as psychologicalprojections and have no real independence. This is no threat to dialectical materialism. My criticism of Marxism is an immanentcriticism. It’s that materialism needs to incorporate collective and individual imagination without becoming a vitalist or a pantheist.

Characteristics of Neopaganism

There are at least fourteen characteristics of Neopaganism which have literary roots going back to mid 19^thcentury Europe. These characteristics would work very well with Marxism.

Perception of divinity as immanent (as opposed to transcendent)
A multiplicity of deities (polytheism) while for a few there is one deity, a single goddess (this is opposed to patriarchal monotheism)
The deities are female as well as male
A commitment to ecological responsibility as the most practical way to engage nature
Appreciation of science, science fiction and technology (as opposed to superstition and luddism
Creative approach to ritual with singing, dancing, music, drawing, and mask-making
Emphasis on imagination in guided visualization as essential in creating altered states of consciousness
Orientated to the tides of nature and circle of the seasons and the four directions
Devotion to hedonism or the sanctification of pleasure
A focus on the local places (as opposed to large spaces or beyond space)
No concept of sin or salvation
No need of proselytizing
Sacralization of psychology through Jungian psychology or the sacred psychology of Jean Houston
Living in the here and now, not seeking escape in heaven or nirvana

The Neopagan movement in Yankeedom largely came out of the feminist sacred movement, which was also political. Some Neopagans are liberal, but many are radicals. Generally, thanks to Starhawk and Z Budapest, many witches integrate their magickal rituals with political activity. As for Marxism, there might be a smattering of Marxists who were pagans. But for the most part, they were isolated and didn’t constitute any identifiable subgroup within Neopaganism. Then, at the turn of the century, feminist Silvia Federici wrote Caliban and the Witch that brought a feminist understanding to the witch hunts. More recently, about seven years ago, a practicing Marxist Neopagan named Rhyd Wildermuth began a small publishing house called Gods and Radicals. One of his books was All That is Sacred is Profane: A Pagan Guide to Marxism. In this work, Wildermuth tried to make a Marxian understanding of capitalism understandable to pagans. However, he did not try to make Neopaganism attractive to Marxists. That’s what my book is about – From Earthspirits to Sky Gods the primitive magic-mythology in tribal societies will be very different from the secondary magic of agricultural states. The difference between the high magic of Renaissance Italy is very different from the low magic of witchcraft, as you will see in Chapter 21 of my book.

Neopagan Marxists work with other pagans’ gods and goddesses psychologically and sociologically, even though for us, these gods and goddesses are not ontologically real. Ghosts, ancestor spirits, and earth spirits can be claimed by Atheopagans and Jungians to be psychological projections. For us they are also sociological and historical projections of human social life and the differences between classes. The characteristics of gods and goddesses – that they all have strengths and weaknesses – are projections that are worth working with but with the understanding that there is a danger of reification. Humanity can have gods, but the gods cannot have us. The characteristics of the gods and goddesses, their identification as departments of life, should be worked in as part of our socialist plans. For example, rituals to the god Hermes could accompany socialist transportation meeting plans. Rituals to Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, accompany the meetings of socialist farmers.

We agree with hardline Marxists that consciousness cannot be reduced to the brain, but we disagree with some other pagans that consciousness is rooted in nature or in a spiritual world. After the existence of the brain and a central nervous system, consciousness arises (as in bonobos and chimps) as the result of toolmaking, social life, and culture that is the inheritance of social animals. However, self-reflective consciousness is the result of the development of a sociohistorical envelope wrapped around the Earth over the biosphere, which Vernadsky and Chardin called the noosphere. Self-reflective consciousness is rooted in sociohistorical activity in creating and sustaining the noosphere.

Lastly, historical sacred oppression is very important to us. Like Neopagan feminist witches, we don’t forget nor forgive what Christianity did during the witch hunts. Neither do we forget nor forgive what the Christians did to the Alexandrian library and how the Church terrorized the likes of Bruno, Galileo and Spinoza. We reject any reconciliation with Protestants, Catholics, Jews and the whole patriarchal 5000-year albatross. Neither are we seduced by Eastern mysticism, whether it be Hindu or Buddhist, cousins of the Western patriarchal family. As a feminist titled one of her plays many years ago, Your 5000 Years Are Up. As sociohistorical Neopagans, we neither forgive nor forget. We will treat the rulers of patriarchy with the same sacred hatred that we treat the capitalists in the secular world. Far from being an advance in sacred life, as many traditional Marxists think, Christianity is a slave religion, a degeneration of a once vital pagan love of life.

What is Magick and What’s With the “k”?

The word “magic” means many things to many people. The technical breakdown of the word is to shape or make vigorous. In this book magic is not a) a secular art of creating perceptual illusions as in stage magic. Neither is it a literal individual and group technique that can directly impact physical reality. What I am calling magickal is a socio-psychological technique for altering individual and group consciousness through ritual by saturating the senses through the arts of singing, dancing, and the use of guided visualization. At its best there is nothing superstitious, reified or escapist in this. As I describe in my book, The Magickal Enchantment of Materialism it can be a guide towards group and individual evolution.

Genesis of this Book

This book really snuck up on me. Over the last five years I have been writing articles for our website, Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism. In some of these articles I pointed out how religion, nationalism and sports were very big for working class people, but that Marxists had failed miserably to understand what the appeal was, let alone what socialists could do about it. In later articles, I identified rituals, the non-superstitious use of symbols and making of talismans as tools for creating, socialist altered states of consciousness. It wasn’t until the past 15 months that I realized I had written enough articles that I could turn them into a book. Furthermore, I realized that I could add four chapters about magick from my previous books. One chapter is on the place and misplace of goddesses in the Stone and Metal ages. Another chapter is on the differences between primitive magic, secondary magic and religion that was also part of my book Power in Eden. Finally, I included a discussion of high magic in early modern Europe. One chapter was on Renaissance magick as seen through the eyes of Jungian James Hillman. The other chapter was how the Protestant religion, mechanistic science and commercial capitalism teamed up against the high magick of Paracelsus, Bruno, John Dee and the low magick of witchcraft. Both these chapters came out of my book Forging Promethean Psychology.

My Literary Sources

In this section I only want to draw from the books that have most influenced my thinking about this subject. The first is Starhawk’s book The Spiral Dance which I read in the early 1980s. Next was Margot Adler’s great book Drawing Down the Moon which gave me a historical window into the enchanting world of Neopaganism. Throughout the 1980s I read books by Israel Regardie which were excellent in combining magickal work on the Tree of Life with psychology. He saw magick as applied psychology with nothing supernatural about it. Around 1990 I met Madonna Sophia Compton and read her book Archetypes on the Tree of Life. She taught me how to apply the Tree of Life to actual daily practice to the work on psychological problems. I had my own solitary practice for some time. Since the middle of the 1990s, until about two years ago I turned to other projects. But in 2020, my partner Barbara and I joined the Seattle Atheist Church. One of the board members really wanted to get more ritual into our group. We wound collaborating on a Fall ritual by changing the liturgy and making it more magickal. For me this meant introducing Neopaganism into the Church. This led me to start an Atheopagan book club in which we read Atheopaganism by Mark Green; Godless Paganism, edited by John Halstead and Wakeful World by Emma Restall Orr.

Why I Wrote this Book

The purpose of this book is not to convince Neopagans that Marxism is a worthy enterprise. Neither is it to convince Marxists to become Neopagans and leave Marxism behind. Rather it is to convince Marxists that Neopagan practice might breathe charm, heart, play and inspiration into the political practice of Marxism, by bringing in ritual and the arts.

Usually, Marxists naively lump animism and polytheism with Marx’s criticism of religion. The purpose of this book has been to show why this is a mistake. In my three chapters on socialism and my chapter on The Power of Magic I show how Neopagan rituals can be worked into a Marxist political practice. These changes in ritual are far more likely to bring back working-class people to socialism who have stayed away up until now because Marxism in the United States has no heart or soul.

So long as Marxists dismiss religion, nationalism and sports as merely false consciousness, simplistic reasoning or blind superstition we are left out in the cold. Dismissal has not worked before and it will not work now or in the future. Marxists will continue to be alienated from working class people who are religious and at least somewhat patriotic and enthusiastic about professional sports. Neither will the middle and upper middle class explorers of cults, parapsychology or New Age mysticism be drawn to Marxism.

Red Emma was Right: If I can’t Dance, I don’t Want to be Part of Your Revolution

Marxists need to sing, spiral-dance and celebrate socialism on a weekly, monthly, seasonal and yearly basis. On a regular, weekly basis we could have a “socialist mass” that must answer the same big questions religion asks and answers:

What are we?
Where have we been?
Where are we going?

During these large-scale and small-scale events, we must play and sing to socialist songs from around the world, not just IWW songs. Just as religion has its patron saints, nationalism has its revolutionary heroes and sports has its Hall of Fame. So socialists could regularly commemorate the lives of great socialist leaders, great socialist strikes and revolutionary takeovers of states. Just as religion has its temples, sports has its stadiums and nationalism has its presidential memorials, so Marxists need their own buildings to commemorate, mourn and celebrate the past and anticipate future days of triumph.

The socialist movement is not a night in which all cows are black. Socialism consists of individuals of different classes who have unique lives. Some are red diaper babies and some are new to the movement. In true socialist form, we celebrate the commonalities that all socialists go through from birthdays, coming of age ceremonies to marriages and funerals. During a portion of most socialist rituals, we should acknowledge rites of passage and support people in the milestones of their lives.

To those Marxists who remain cynical I want to remind them that the labor organization of the Knights of Labor in the 19^th century had many rituals celebrating the events of the individual life cycle. My article The Mythology, Ritual and Art of Romantic Socialism discusses all this. The image at the heading of this article comes from the social graphic artist Walter Crane who did much work for the Knights of Labor. In addition, the Communist Party in the United States had many cultural institutions such as book clubs, dances and plays that speak to the ritual-like needs of human beings. We have a great deal we could learn from them.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Why Marxists Need Darwin

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 15 Apr 2023 18:17:14 +0000

Orientation

Most people who call themselves Marxists will tip their hat to Darwin and then move on. They laude his theory of natural selection for why species go extinct. They will support his gradualist theory that change is slow in the biological world. Of course, they will celebrate how humans evolved from the ape line rather than descended from the heavens. But once this is acknowledged and socio-cultural evolution for humans begins, Darwin seems not to be needed. In present time, Marxists are fine when they hear Darwinian explanations for other species (Stephen Jay Gould). But when it comes to applying Darwin to the human species in the present, Marxists become suspicious. Why? Because they say we are now socio-historical creatures. The argument in this article is that Darwinism, in the form of evolutionary psychology, explains a great deal about human conflict as it exists today as well as in the future.

The Social and Psychological Impact of Darwin Over the last 100 years

As many of you know, the period between 1880 to the end of World War II was a rough time for Darwinism. Social Darwinism began in the 1870s, then was joined by the eugenics movement at the turn of the century. The rise of fascism in the 20th century had a biological basis for its ideology. Then two world wars in which fascism played a major part, not just in Germany but also in Italy, Japan and Spain. By the end of World War II, and for the next thirty years you couldn’t make a biological argument for any social problems without being called racist or sexist. Even in the fields of personality, biological arguments were isolated into one school of personality (Hans Eysenck).

In 1975, E.O. Wilson threw down the gauntlet. Wilson’s specialty was the study of animal societies and he tried to explain how much of human behavior was not very different from the behavior of other animals in their own societies. Wilson emphasized genes as the major causal variable while limiting human culture to a secondary factor. He founded a new field called sociobiology. The attacks on Wilson came fast and furious and Marxists were right in the thick of things, calling Wilson a reductionist. Others implied there were racist, sexist, and class implications for what Wilson was saying. Wilson held on and over the years adapted and qualified his views, giving culture a more prominent role.

In the middle of the 1980s a new field developed called evolutionary psychology.

Among other things, evolutionary psychology was more sensitive than sociobiology to social evolution, explaining that there were different types of society. Different social formations interact with natural selection in different ways depending on whether the societies were hunter-gathering, horticulturalists, agricultural states, herding societies or industrial capitalist societies. In addition, evolutionary psychology was about how psychological conflict arises when biological evolution and social evolution clash. About one third of my article is about these conflicts which are called by evolutionary psychologists “evolutionary mismatches”.

Common Misunderstandings of Evolutionary Psychology

Human behavior is genetically determined

Genes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for determining human behavior. Biology and social life together interact all the way back in the mammalian kingdom. Together they concreate strategies of adaption. Genes are far from being the sole determinate of what people do.

If it is evolutionary, we can’t change it

Evolutionary adaptations set the framework for what can or can’t happen. But within that framework there is lots of room for bio-social creativity. However, the adaptations we developed as hunter-gatherers are at least 90% of our history. What we have learned over these 100,000 years won’t be easy to change.

Evolutionary theories require improbable mathematical computational abilities to weigh the pros and cons of different adaptation choices

Most of the decisions evolutionary organisms make in adaptation occurs through unconscious processes. Being conscious of how they work is not necessary. In fact, in some cases this knowledge would get in the way. Evolutionary processes only become conscious when there is a problem at the lower level.

Current mechanisms of adaptation are optimally designed

This is a common misunderstanding of religious creationists who imagine Darwinists have to explain how every adaptation is a perfect solution. Darwinians, however, recognize that adaptations are often imperfect compromises which are only satisfactory or just good enough. An example is the skin coloring of mammalian males. On one hand, males’ coloring must blend enough into the environment to act as camouflage so as to not be eaten by other animals. Yet they cannot be so blended that they are not sexually attractive to females. One the other hand males aspiring to look like peacocks to attract females cannot be so brilliant that they turn into dead meat.

Evolutionary theory implies a motivation to maximize gene reproduction

As we know, males and females do not look at each other consciously with the intention of maximizing their genes. Males and females do this without knowing anything about Darwin, adaptation or sexual selection. Males and females have different mating strategies and these strategies play out unconsciously. For example, men will be attracted to women with a bust-waist-hip ration of 3-2-3 of 4-6-4 because these ratios are a good bet that women will be fertile. This preference is hard-wired into men whether or not they consciously want to have children. On the other hand, women will be drawn to men with wide-shoulders and narrow hips because that appears as a way for men to offer women protection and strength against threat. Men go to the gym to strive for this, whether or not they want to have children. Good genes for men and woman translate as “beautiful” or “handsome”. Bad genetic bets translate as “ugly”.

What is Human Nature?

As soon as Marxists hear the word “human nature” being thrown around they think the explanation will be both a) biological, and b) static and impossible to change. Often, they will counter this by saying human nature is social rather than biological, dynamic rather than static. The problem with Marxist explanations are that human nature is bio-social not just social. Also, when Marx says human nature is the ensemble of social relations, he ignores the fact that in some societies biology has more influence on others, as we will see.

Human societies are said to be between 100,000 – 150,000 years old. 90-95% of that time has been spent as hunter-gatherers. Hunter-gathering societies have been the cauldron in which human nature was formed. Whatever adaptation skills or sexual selection strategies were learned during this time, they have gone deep into our plumbing and aren’t about to change quickly or easily.

The following have been our biological social predispositions for most of 100,000 years:

Preference for groups of 50-150 in number
Ethnocentrism (belief in the superiority of one’s group)
A division of labor between men and women (men big-game hunting, woman gathering)
The propensity to cooperate and share within the group
Egalitarian political relations with no institutional leadership
No political hierarchies or social classes
Economics based on generalized reciprocity
Presence of social property, not private property
A tension between polygamy and monogamy
Men marrying younger women
Life expectancy of between ages 28-35
Apprenticeship-type education
Belief in earth spirits, ancestor spirits and totems rather than gods or goddesses
Loyalty to local groups (no nationalism)

It is only due to the propaganda of state civilizations and capitalist societies that so much of our biological social predispositions has been reversed.

The Darwinian Unconscious

Western Marxists bet on the wrong horse and nominate Freud

When “western Marxists” became enthralled with the Frankfurt School, they were all aflutter with psychology. But instead of maintaining a materialist framework and looking into Vygotsky and sociohistorical psychology in the Soviet Union, they went elsewhere. Even within western bourgeois psychological schools of psychology they could have explored behaviorism or the cognitive schools which had a good reputation for doing good scientific follow-up. Did they try to integrate them with Marxism? No. Instead they selected the most unscientific school of all: Freudian. A few books came out attempting to synthesize Marx and Freud. One problem was that Freudians (and all of western societies) had a liberal social contract epistemology that is fundamentally opposed to a Marxian social materialist framework.

Additionally, the content of the Freudian unconscious is filled with far-fetched sexual motivations about babies wanting to murder their parents. Try explaining the workings of the Freudian unconscious to the working class. They would dismiss Marxists even more than they do now. Does this mean Marxists should abandon explaining unconscious motivation completely because Freud engaged in such far-fetched fantasies about it? No. We think instead that a Darwinian theory of the unconscious has a lot more to offer, as I will explain.

History of human societies: from bio-social beings to socio-historical biological beings

As we said, in the history of human societies we humans spent at least 100,000 years as hunter-gatherers. About 8,000 BCE we began to live in simple and complex horticultural villages. Complex horticultural societies (chiefdoms) had the first hierarchies. Around three thousand BCE, the first agricultural states emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt. About 1000 years later, the same archaic state system irrupted in China and India. Alongside these planting societies there emerged herding societies using camels, sheep and goats. Beginning with the Phoenicians and Greeks in the ancient world and the Carthaginians, maritime states dotted the some of the global sea coasts. Then in the 14th century, the first of four forms of capitalism emerged. The first was in mercantile capitalism of Venice and Genoa; then with the seafaring Dutch in the 17thcentury; then agricultural slave capitalism in the United States and Britain; and finally the industrial and finance capital of the British and the United States in the 18th to 20th centuries. Why am I telling you this? Because the later in time we go, the more people become social-historical beings and the less we are determined by biology.

Driving Darwin into our social unconscious

Furthermore, as different as these societies were from each other, there is a general trend that reversed most of our biological social predispositions in which we formed our human nature. Our novel socio-historical institutions included:

Societies that grew from 150 people to thousands and eventually millions of people
The state emerged from camps and villages
Hierarchical political class relations grew out of egalitarian relations
Capitalism arose – a movement away from economic generalized reciprocity to surplus appropriation and exploitation
The existence of private property out of social property
Harnessing of animate and inanimate sources of energy as opposed to human energy
Life expectancy rose from 40 to 72 by the last third of the 20th century
Polytheism and monotheism replaced animism
Nationalism became the basis of politics and overrode identification with the local

In hunting and gathering societies, we were primarily bio-social beings and consciously followed biological adaptations. At the other extreme, in industrial capitalist societies, we are primarily socio-historical beingsand we consciously follow new needs and desires that grew out of social institutions that were formed away from the conditions of our human nature. These include the nine bullet points above. Our biological adaptations are no longer consciously pursued and are now in our social Darwinian unconscious which is ready to spring up. Please see the table below for a summary.

Evolutionary Mismatches and the Darwinian Unconscious

Hunter-gatherers	Type of Society	Industrial Capitalist Societies
Bio-social	Type of Being	Primarily sociohistorical, biological
Consciously pursued Formation of human nature	Biological Adaptations	Live on as a Darwinian unconscious
Conflicts over survival between humanity and biophysical nature	Realm in which Conflicts Take Place	Evolutionary mismatches between our Darwinian unconscious and the new needs and desires created by industrial capitalist societies

Defining evolutionary mismatches

Evolutionary psychologists claim that there is a fundamental contradiction between how we lived our lives as hunter-gatherers and how we have lived today in industrial capitalist societies. Our hard wiring as hunter-gatherers is like our Darwinian unconscious. What we consciously pursue today are the needs and desires that emerge as a result of the emergence of the state, capitalism, nationalism, industrialization, social classes and private property.

Examples of Evolutionary Mismatches

Attraction to fat and sugar

Countless dieticians and health educators tell us fat and sugar are bad for us – yet we keep eating them. Why is this? Why hasn’t natural selection eliminated the attraction after over 100,000 years? What does fat and sugar give us? Quick energy. In the era of hunter-gatherers fat and sugar was scarce and finding some might come in handy against large animals during a hunt. Besides that, fat and sugar could not accumulate on bodies that walked and ran numerous miles in a single day. But between 8,000 and 2,000 BCE, life became more sedentary for the middle and upper classes in state civilizations as these classes grew heavier. Peasants working on a farm certainly maintained a rich physical life but they often lacked protein (which was monopolized by the upper classes) and loaded up on carbohydrates, gaining weight. Then the slave trade began in Europe. While sugar was once a delicacy of the upper classes, in the 20th century sugar in large quantities has been made available to the working class and even poor people. The result is an epidemic of diabetes.

Here is a case where are Darwinian unconscious is still firing — craving fat and sugar. However current social conditions are far from the conditions in which we formed our human nature and are operating to undermine our health. At the same time, capitalists have also organized the production globally so that of a great deal of healthy food can be had from all over the world in far greater variety than in hunting and gathering days.

Sedentary work requires a need for exercise

Today middle and upper-middle class citizens in Mordor struggle mightily to stay physically fit because of being locked into desk work. Gyms spring up along with personal trainers to keep people physically healthy. Doctors ask us how much exercise during the day we get. During the hunting and gathering period, there was no such thing as exercise. Both women and men were constantly moving. Neither did they have low back pain from too much sitting. Sitting in chairs was not something people did. They squatted, stood up or lay down. Leg weights, arm weights and all that gyms have to offer was unnecessary during our hunting-gathering period.

Loneliness: living among millions of strangers

The psychological experience of loneliness is for the most part unique to the last century or so. Hunter-gathers of up to 150 people were grouped to families where everyone mostly knew everyone else. In horticulture societies, kin groups and clans locked people into social networks. In agricultural states people lived in intergenerational families where elders passed on ways of life. It wasn’t until the breakup of communities at the end of the 19th century and rise of mass society — movies, mass transit and radios that people began to be feel cut off. So today we hire professionals comfort us in our loneliness: professional therapists for our minds and cuddlers to give us body contact.

On the positive side, the presence of large groups of strangers frees us from what could be the stifling conformity that life in smaller group can perpetuate. We can try new things — new forms of music, art or invention — that we might hesitate to try among tribes’ clan members or nosey extended family members.

Explosion of occupational opportunities

During the hunting and gathering period and, in fact up until about 1500 CE, no relative or neighbor ever asked children what they wanted to be when they grew up. It was understood that whatever work your parents did was the work you did. But with the rise of the modern state, bureaucratic positions opened up for middle class people as translators, scribes and civil servants. The industrial revolution opened up a variety of jobs for the working class, middle class and upper middle class, including those of doctors, lawyers, architects. This was an advance for humanity as people could pursue talents and skills that would lay dormant in a hunting and gathering society.

Advanced technology dissolves dependence on human muscle power

During the hunting and gathering times, it was necessary for men to do the big-game hunting and women to the gathering because of what big-game hunting requires.

Running, tumbling, sphere-throwing and wrestling with dead carcasses requires upper body strength that women didn’t have. This division stayed in place when the plow was invented during the agricultural era because pulling a plow and working with large draft animals also required upper body muscles. But along with the industrial revolution came tractors. This was a boon for women, because women could more actively participate in farming activities since the tractor made upper body strength irrelevant. Here is an evolutionary mismatch that contributed (unconsciously) to feminism.

The intensification of ethnocentrism

As I mentioned earlier, ethnocentrism goes all the way back to hunter-gatherers. However, the only time hunter-gatherers mixed outside their group were in exceptional circumstances such as war. Those agricultural states that developed empires brought in subjugated populations with whom the natives had to mix. On the whole, cultures did pretty well with each other. The evolutionary mismatch came about with the slave trade which created much harder boundaries between groups, especially between whites and the subjugated slaves. So, in one sense ethnocentrism was made worse within modern people by turning ethnocentrism into racism.

On the other hand, race relations in the United States were improved through the interaction of Blacks and whites in the music of blues, country music and jazz. Furthermore, thanks to the emergence of socialism in integrated unions like the IWW negative race relations were challenged. However, the modern ideology of racism has tenaciously hung on, as any look at structural racism in Yankeedom today in the area of wages, housing, or education can attest to.

From voluptuous to skinny women

As stated earlier, men are naturally attracted to women with large breasts, narrow waists and large hips because these are signs that a woman is fertile and healthy. But if that is the case then why do we see so many magazines with 12-year-old girls with makeup dressed up to look about 17 and held up as icons of femineity and attraction? Why would women be interested in becoming skinny if it goes against evolutionary psychology? Why wouldn’t sexual selection filter this aspiration out? The answer is that in the 20th century advertisers have created cultural institutions that override sexual selection preferences, at least for some classes and races of women.

If advertisers for diet programs simply appealed to women’s existing bodies there is a limit in how much money they could make. This is because women’s bodies are naturally voluptuous, especially after they have children. This means that diet programs might be limited to losing fat around the belly. But if you advertise that the ideal woman has small breasts and narrow hips in addition to a slim waste, you might be able to sell three times the products. Few women over 20 can compete with a 17-year-old in terms of the skinny woman ideal, and this is exactly what advertisers want.

If you can convince women they need to be skinny, they will buy your products for very long time. There is no anorexia or bulimia in hunting and gathering societies. This is the result of insecure teenage girls who get sucked into this trend. Thankfully most working-class women have not caught the “thin is in” contagion. Neither have black or Hispanic women. Essentially it is white upper middle-class women who have become successful targets. Many have actually successfully become slim because they are more likely to have time to go to a gym and cook or pay for healthy meals which are the result of slow cooking.

Expectations of better looks

Speaking of appearances, in hunting-gathering societies there were slim pickings when it came to finding a partner. In societies of 50-150 people, marriage partners were found either within their societies or as a result of sacred ceremonies or trading opportunities with other societies. That meant that for most men and women their partners had average looks and that was good enough. However, in the 20th century with the rise of advertising, movie stars and fashion magazines, the men and women who bought them began to compare local prospects to movie stars, musicians and models they found in mass media. Of course, this did not mean their chances of finding some “hunks” were any better. What it did was destabilize the psychology of males and females by raising their expectations while never really fulfilling them.

Timing and age range of marriages

During the hunting-gathering period men and women bonded when young. Unconsciously, people were following the sexual selection probability that 15-year-old boys and girls are less likely to have contracted any diseases, so their children would be likely to be fit. While girls would choose boys that were a little older, there was little to gain in holding out for an older guy because hunter-gatherers had no private property and did not accumulate wealth. As chiefdoms developed rank societies, chiefs could marry more than one woman. To be a chief’s wife was a step up for women because of chief’s accumulated wealth. In agricultural civilizations, the same pattern expanded. Women who were captured as slaves could actually improve their situation by being chosen as a member of the harem.

At the end of the 19th century, the life expectancy began to climb. In marriage dynamics the gap in age between men and woman began to grow. Working class women strove to marry outside their social class and held out for older men because chances of these men accumulating more wealth was greater. With the rise of the sexual revolution in the late 1960s, the tendency for men to marry younger women was challenged. Having lived through that age, I can say that my life choices were counter to Darwinian sexual selection dictates. My current partner is six years older than I and I had no desire to have children. These choices were much easier to make because the counter-culture was like a womb which made it safe to buck the evolutionary trends without feeling like an outcast.

Increase in the rate of divorce

The extent to which women are willing to consider divorce has a great deal to do with whether the work they do could support an independent life. In hunting and gathering societies men and women practiced serial monogamy and gender relations were relatively equal. In horticultural societies women were in charge of gardening and worked in public. When horticultural societies switched to agriculture, the men took over the cultivation of fields. Women lost control over working in public and began canning and weaving indoors. There was constant pressure on women to have more children, especially boys, to assist their fathers in the fields. There was also a rise in domestic violence because women were isolated from other women and could not rely on them for protection (as they could in foraging and horticulture societies). Peasant women (90% of the population of agricultural civilizations) put up with abusive marriages because they couldn’t afford to leave. This was the beginning of patriarchy. This martial abuse continued in industrial capitalist societies for the working class and to a lesser extent middle class women.

However, in the early 1970s things began to change for the better for women. Yankee capitalists decided the way to combat competition from Japan and Germany was to relocate factories overseas where land and labor were cheaper. The union jobs in US manufacturing dried up for men. Working class women began to go from working part-time to full time. Meanwhile middle-class jobs were created in corporations which middle class women flocked to. A natural expression for the women’s movement was for women to work full time professionally as middle or senior managers, lawyers, or college teachers. All this work paid enough money that if a woman wanted to leave a bad marriage she could. The divorce rate rose in the 1970s because middle class and upper-middle class women could afford to leave bad marriages or they could insist that men go to therapy with them.

Conclusion

This article began by stating that Marxists are generally aware of the value of Darwin when it came to the origin of species as well as how other species operate today. But Marxists are usually less aware of how much Darwin’s ideas are relevant today as they apply to the human species. The reason for this lack of awareness is because right-wing conservatives have used Darwin’s ideas over the last 100 years from Social Darwinism to eugenics to fascist ideology. By the time sociobiology emerged in the 1970s, Marxists remained skeptical of any Darwinian application to the human species today. It was only Stephen Jay Gould and a few others who bridged the gap between Darwin and Marx.

The bulk of this article is about what happened to Darwinism after sociobiology. A new field of Darwinism, evolutionary psychology, emerged in the middle of the 1980s. After explaining the differences between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, I take the reader through five of the most common misunderstandings of Darwinism. I point out that evolutionary psychologists claim that there is such a thing as human nature and it was formed over a 100,000-year period with human as hunter-gatherers. I identify fourteen social predispositions that were rooted in this 100,000-year period.

Evolutionary psychology does not advocate that biology is destiny. I describe how, as human beings moved away from our hunting and gathering origins where we formed our human nature, a tension was created. This tension was between what we learned as hunter-gatherers and what was expected by social institutions of later societies, especially industrial capitalist societies. This tension resulted in evolutionary mismatches.I illustrated these tensions in ten areas: attraction to fat and sugar; the need for exercise; loneliness; explosion of occupational opportunities; advanced technology; ethnic relations; body shape preferences; expectations of better looks; the timing of and age range of marriages; and the increase in divorce rates.

These evolutionary psychological mismatches explain many conflicts that people living in industrial capitalist societies must grapple with. These do not compete or replace Marxian explanations for conflict within the individual. Conflicts due to capitalist crisis, to the alienation of labor, class humiliation, exploitation of labor, overwork and other Marxian explanations are still in place. Evolutionary psychology is meant to fill in the crevices where Marxism is incomplete or left unexplored. Darwin and Marx should be understood as complementing each other in how we understand the alienated individual of industrial capitalist societies as well as the tools in creating the foundation for a realistic socialist human nature in the future.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Four Types of Play of Roger Caillois

Bruce Lerro — Wed, 29 Mar 2023 22:22:11 +0000

Orientation

What is play? What are its types and its psychological impacts?

In what way is play different from other human activities? In what ways is play different across the life cycle, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood? Do people ever stop playing? How many kinds of play are there? What is the difference in the psychological states between playing in a baseball game, playing with crossword puzzles, entering the lottery, watching a puppet show, or rolling down a hill? A child riding on a carousel in not in the same state as one who is in a state of suspenseful anticipation after betting, then watching the roulette wheel. We will find out what these differences are.

What is the relationship between society and play?

Authors such as Johan Huizinga go so far as to say that all social organization – from economics to politics to law and technology – are derived from play. Others say that the forms of play are driven by changes in human societies. For example, games of chance are primary in hunting and gathering societies because the hunt itself is a very unpredictable activity. As the food supply becomes more stable, games where the outcome is more controlled will grow greater as humans feel more stable in their economic life. So the question is – what is primary and what is secondary? The basic themes of sociology of play are that social institutions such as economics, politics and family institutions as derivable from play, just as play can be explained by economics, politics and family structures. Evolutionary biologists don’t buy the value of play. They claim that play is a useless activity in terms of Darwinian natural selection.

Why write about a book that is 90 years old?

Over 20 years ago, I became interested in environmental psychology and discovered there was a whole field in sociology called “leisure studies”. One of the main topics covered was theories of play. Besides the famous book by Johan Huizinga, I came across the work of Roger Caillois and his extremely original theory of play. I was riveted! I found his book Man, Play and Games and devoured it in about a week. However, I had no immediate use for the book either in books I was writing or classes I was teaching. I wrote a five-page summary of the book and left it at that. But I never forgot the book. I remembered it for its interdisciplinary intellectual orientation and its range in writing about every type of play. Caillois’ book was written over 90 years ago, so you are not going to find anything here about the positive and negative impact of Dungeons and Dragons on people’s psychology. Neither will you find the impact of video games on people’s level of happiness. However, despite its age, I believe it still has an enormous amount to teach us. In fact, I’ve come to feel that Roger Caillois’ book is broader and deeper than Huizinga’s famous book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-element in Culture.

Roger Caillois was an interdisciplinary French sociologist whose range of interests besides play include sacred studies(Man and the Sacred), cults, literature, mythology, poetry, and psychoanalysis. He hovered on the edge of the surrealist movement according to the book The Edge of Surrealism, edited by Claudine Frank, and he corresponded with Andre Breton, considered by some as the father of surrealism.

Theories of Play: Huizinga vs Caillois

Roger Caillois begins his insightful and imaginative book Man, Play and Games by challenging John Huizinga’s theory of play. Huizinga’s theory of play contains six components. Play is:

Free – that is not serious
It is absorbing
It is non-material—that is not for profit
It is separated from everyday life (done in its own place and time)
According to fixed rules and an orderly procedure
Done in secret

Caillois takes exception to some of these points. For example, he pointed out that some games are part of everyday life and are not done in secret as in sports or games of chance. Huizinga is not sensitive to the wide range in the spectrum of play. George Herbert Mead makes a distinction between structured forms of play, which he calls “the game”, and what Mead calls “pretend play”. Huizinga’s claim that play occurs according to fixed rules ignores pretend play which is far more imaginative. If rules exist in pretend play they are made up along the way as in “Calvinball” from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Lastly, modern games are played for profit as in sports stadiums and gambling houses. In short, Caillois claims Huizinga ignores or minimized the diverse form of play. Caillois’ book sets out to correct this.

Why do People Play?

Caillois claims that play has a natural propensity for good or evil. In both cases the same qualities can be identified:

The need to prove one’s superiority
The desire to challenge, make a record or merely overcome an obstacle
The hope and the pursuit of finding out one’s destiny
The pleasure in secrecy, make-believe or disguise
Creating fear or inspiring fear
The search for repetition and symmetry
The joy of improvising, inventing or infinitely varying solutions
Solving a mystery or riddle
The satisfaction deriving from the arts involving contrivance
The desire to test one’s strength, skill speed, endurance, equilibrium or ingenuity
The temptation to circumvent rules, laws or conventions
Intoxication, longing for ecstasy and a desire for voluptuous panic

Examples of How Play Evolved in History

Here are some examples of what play evolved from:

The cup-and-ball and top were once magical devices
Roundelays and counting-out rhymes were once ancient incantations
Stagecraft, liturgy, military tactics and debate also became rules of play
The greasy pole is related to the myths of heavenly conquest
Football emerged from to the conflict over the solar globe of two opposing phratries
String games had once been used to inaugurate the changing seasons
The kite, before becoming a toy toward the end of the 18th century, in the Far East symbolized the soul of its owner
In Korea, the kite served as a scapegoat to liberate a sinful community from evil
Hopscotch once symbolized labyrinth through which the magical initiate must first wander
The game of tag was once recognized as a terrifying choice of a propitiatory victim
Games of chance were once associated with divination
Villages, parishes and cities once had gigantic tops that special confraternities caused to spin during certain festivals
Slingshots and peashooters have survived as toys where they were once the more lethal weapons

Naming the Four Types of Play and Their Two Fundamental Structures

Caillois divides play into four categories:

Agon, which involves competition
Alea which involve games of chance
Mimicry which involves simulation
Ilinx which involves the experience of vertigo

These four kinds of play can be grouped into two categories:

Paidia play is active, tumultuous, exuberant and spontaneous. This corresponds to mimicry and Ilinx and goes with Mead’s pretend play.
Ludus play is more restrained. It involves calculating, contrivances and requires patience and subordination to rules. Ludus play is translatable to Mead’s category of “games” and includes agon and alea.

Caillois’ hypothesis is that the basic themes of society should be traceable from the proportionate use of these four types of play. Read Table A with the four types of play together with Caillois’ and Mead’s structures of play.

Table A

Types of play

Agon

Competition

Alea

Chance

Mimicry

Stimulation

Ilinx

Vertigo

Caillois’ structures of play

Ludus

Paidia

Mead’s

Structure of play

Game

Pretend play

Details of the Four Kinds of Play

Let us look in more detail into examples of each of the types of play along with the psychological states induced. Agon amusement involves competition. Agon play involves skills such as speed, endurance, physical strength, ingenuity and improvisation. The paidia example of play under agon would be wrestling or racing. This kind of play is unique to humans. The more organized type of agon, ludus play at the individual level would be doing cross-word puzzles, playing solitaire or flying a kite. Social expressions of more organized play would include sports such as boxing, football, chess, billiards, duels and tournaments. Competition involves skill. In chance games skills are minimized. In sports competition is based primarily on skill, if the outcome of a game was determined by chance, spectators would complain that the victor’s success was cheap.

The alea kind of play is the opposite of agon. It abolishes natural or acquired differences between people and leaves as much as possible to chance. Paidia forms of chance are counting out rhymes or playing heads or tails. Ludus types of chance games include playing the lottery or gambling at casinos. These activities are uniquely human and not found in the rest of the animal kingdom.

The third type of play, mimicry, involves simulation. In this a person forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds their personality into order to play a role. At the paidia level of mimicry we have masks, costumes, impersonation and games of illusion taking place. The ludus type of mimicry includes puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals and movies. Masks spill over into non-playful situations as in the use of uniforms and in ceremonial etiquette or sympathetic magic. This type of play is also uniquely human.

The fourth type of play is called Ilinx. This type of play is primarily physiological. It destroys the stability of perception and imposes a kind of playful panic on the person. At the paidia level of Ilinx is where we find children whirling, swinging on monkey bars, sleigh riding and later on, horseback riding. These states often create a feeling of ecstasy. In the more ilinx forms of play are skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking and going on the rides at amusement parks or fair grounds. Mammals will also engage in experiencing vertigo, as anyone who has watched monkeys swing on ropes at the zoo can attest. Table B at the end of this article summarizes the manifestation of play and their psychological effects.

However, are people constrained to keep these four types of play separate? Perhaps you might feel it is too simplistic to group the types of play into four separate categories. Maybe you think of play as involving more than one category. If so, which ones might work together and which combinations don’t work? We shall see.

Fundamental Types of Relationships Between Types of Play

Agon and ilinx

While a baseball game involves competition, the exuberance over a great catch to end a game or a homerun to win the game involves vertigo or Ilinx on the part of both players and fans. In fact, Caillois argues that certain forms of play constitute fundamental relationships with similar underlying principles. For example, games of chance and games of competition both presuppose absolute equality from the start. The pleasure derived from these games comes from one having done as well as possible in a situation not of their creation. There is satisfaction in overcoming voluntarily accepted obstacles. In this case, it is quite easy to see that playing this game prepares a person for real life.

Mimicry and ilinx

Another kind of fundamental relationship is between mimicry and vertigo or ilinx. Here there is equality but with less roles. There is constant improvisation and trusting in a guiding fantasy. A conjunction of a mask or an illusion is that perception is distorted and leading into a trance. The magic in tribal societies results from a combination of mimicry and ilinx to real social life.

Contingent Relationships Between Types of Play

Alea and vertigo

The second set of relationships as called contingent. Games producing vertigo and chance are contingent as games of chance have a special kind of vertigo which seizes both the lucky and unlikely. However, this does not allow the suspension of the rules of the game.

Mimicry and agon

Mimicry and agon are also contingent in that every competition also involves playing a role, not only among the players but also by the audience. An audience in a competition act must make believe they are no longer in real life. They are in a theater suspending the rules of everyday life in order to enjoy the competition. Their make-believe is also an act of mimicry.

Forbidden Relationships Between Types of Play

Ilinx and agon

The last set of relationships are forbidden. I think Caillois overstates what this relationship means when it is called “forbidden”. All this means is that the types of play work at cross-purposes and undermine each other. I would say they “clash”. The first set is between ilinx and agon. The regulated rivalry of competition would be undermined if players abandoned themselves to vertigo in the middle of the competition. It would negate the controlled effort and undermine skill, power, calculation and respect for rules. So too, the thrill of vertigo would be ruined if the revelers were expected to come back from their revelry and focus on playing a specific role with specific rules of a game.

Mimicry and alea

The second set of forbidden relationships is between mimicry and chance. In order for a game of chance to maintain its coherence, there must be no ruses. To engage in this is to cease to be playing and to be engaging in sympathetic magic, the object of which is to compel the future. On the other hand, magic would be undermined by admitting that the results of mimicry were subject to chance. Magic is based on the notion that if you do the ritual right, nature will be compelled to respond to the ritual.

To summarize:

Fundamental relationships:

Mimicry and ilinx
Alea and agon

Contingent relationships:

Ilinx and alea
Mimicry and agon

Forbidden relationships:

Ilinx and agon
Mimicry and alea

Play and the Sacred

According to Caillois, many games have their roots in sacred traditions. For example,

masks were once sacred objects that were used in initiation ceremonies. Later they became accessories to ceremonies – as in dance and theater. Now they are playthings at parties for children and erotic balls for adults. With Christianity the design became elongated and simplified reproducing the layout of a basilica. In sacred situations, ilinx type of play is induced by fasting, vision quests, hypnosis, and monotonous or strident music. Games of chance were once associated with divination, as in the case of tarot cards.

In tribal societies, ilinx and mimicry were primary in both games and in sacred traditions inducing magical states of consciousness. With the rise of state civilizations, ilinx and mimicry become forbidden for the lower classes to practice. To the extent it was still used, it was the domain of the priestesses and priests. It was in forms of play that ilinx and mimicry continued for the lower classes.

Corruptions of Play

There is a distortion of play which Caillois calls corruption. All play is based upon the ability of the participants to separate play from reality and be clear where one ends and the other begins. Where play is corrupted, it blurs the relationship between play and reality. This is the realm where the habits of play become obsessions and compulsions. Each of the four types of play has its own form of corruption.

Corruption of agon and alea

Distortions of agon (competition) are wars and unbridled economic competition which becomes lethal or detrimental to most members of society. A corruption of the game of chance is the stock market, where life savings can be wiped out instantaneously with no one able to predict anything. In the spiritual dimension, card playing games of chance can be twisted into actually foretelling the future with the use of tarot cards.

Corruption of mimicry and ilinx

A distortion of mimicry and simulation are through psychological disorders such as multiple personality disorder. In multiple personality disorder, the roles of a game are not dissolved at the end of the game, but become permanent without a central personality to reign them in. In the case of schizophrenia, the masks of people are believed to be real and not temporary. Lastly, the corruptions of Ilinx are alcoholism and drug abuse such as speed which substitutes chemical power for physical effects as a way of life rather than a temporary state.

Reification

I’ve added a category that I think fits but is not part of Caillois book. Play gets out of control not only through the corruption of fusing play with reality but when play becomes reified and takes on a life if its own. From an evolutionary point of view the purpose of play is to test the waters of a new situation under safe circumstances. Play is subordinated to reality. Reification occurs when the process of testing becomes a thing which takes on a life of its own. An example of the reification of agon is when fans get so caught up in rooting for the home team that they get into fights with opposing fans or when they lose sleep or become depressed over a team’s losses. The reification of alea is when games of chance cause the working class to lose most of their paychecks at the lottery. The reification of mimicry or simulation is the extent to which an actor or an actress becomes so caught up in the role that the role becomes their entire identity and they can’t function outside the role. Lastly, the reification of ilinx is when a person repeatedly puts themselves in dangerous situations through seeking sensations like race-car driving, skydiving or mountain climbing. You might review Table B again for an overview with examples from the entire article.

Table B

Play Classifications, Their Psychological Affects

Corruption, Reification

Types of Play	Agon Competition Hinges on skill—speed endurance, strength, memory, ingenuity	Alea Chance Abolishes natural or acquired differences	Mimicry/ Simulation Forgets, disguises or temporarily sheds personality in order to trick another	Ilinx Vertigo, thrills Destroys the stability of perception and inflicts a kind of playful panic
Range of species application	Uniquely human	Uniquely human	Uniquely human	Human and animal
Examples of Play	Wrestling/racing (not regulated)	Counting out rhymes; heads or tails	Masks, costumes, impersonation, games of illusion	Children whirling, horseback riding, swinging, racing downhill, sleigh riding ecstasy
Examples of Play- individual	Crossword puzzles, solitaire, kite flying
Examples of play- social	Sports Boxing, football chess, billiards, duels tournaments	Lotteries, casinos	Puppet shows, theatre, religious rituals, circuses, carnivals, movies	Skiing, mountain climbing, tightrope walking, amusement rides, amusement parks fairgrounds
Structures of play	Ludus Mead’s game	Ludus Mead’s game	Paidia Mead’s pretend play	Paidia Mead’s pretend play
Corruption (Clash) Blurring the boundaries between play and reality Habits become obsessions or compulsions Applies the rules of play to real life	Wars, unbridled economic competition	Playing the stock market Cardplaying turned into Tarot	Multiple personality disorder Schizophrenia: believes the mask is real	Alcoholism, drug abuse (speed) Substituting chemical power for physical effects as a way of life
Reification	Sports fans who get carried away with team losses by fighting or depression	Losing a great deal of money at the lottery being obsessed with “lucky” numbers	An actor or actress whose roles seems more real than their identity in everyday life	Putting oneself in needless danger with constant race-car driving, skydiving, mountain climbing

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Causes of Dogmatism

Bruce Lerro — Sat, 18 Mar 2023 15:19:26 +0000

Orientation

In part I of this series, following the work of Judy J. Johnson in What’s so Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief, we identified dogmatism — not as the content of a particular ideology but as a process of thinking, emoting and acting. We distinguished dogmatism from fanaticism and clarified the differences between dogmatism and open-minded thinking. I spent most the article defining 14 characteristics of dogmatism. Five are cognitive, four are emotional and five are behavioral.

In this article, Part II, we examine the many causes of dogmatism — moving from sociological, to social psychological, to psychological to bioevolutionary and physiological. I will include my own research in sociology and cognitive psychology to support Judy’s book. The image above illustrates that despite the dogmatists’ aggression and scapegoating of groups lower them themselves in the hierarchy, they are slavishly obedient to those above them.

Socio-economic Causes: Contracting Economy, Class and Race Dynamics

Sociologists have found that race relations get better or worse depending on whether the capitalist economy is contracting or expanding. In an economy where jobs are relatively plentiful there are less incidents of racial violence. But when the economy is contracting race relations get worse. Why is this?

Whether or not capitalists intend to, they benefit from racism between workers on their job site. Capitalists have always paid white workers more money and given them privileges relative to Blacks. What is the likely fallout? There will be racial animosity. Black workers will be angry that white workers are being paid more money to do the same work. White workers will look for and find ideologies like racism and fascism to help justify these inequalities. Both white and Black workers face the same problem. They work very hard under difficult circumstances and are not paid very much. They have two choices. The first is either they see their problem as part of a questionable capitalist system or not. If they see that it is, they will unite on the basis of occupying the same class. The other choice is for white workers to think they have more in common with white employers on the basis of race and ignore their class commonalties with Black workers. If they do that, they are likely to be susceptible to many of the fourteen characteristics of dogmatism.

Small business owners are also caught in a bind. In a contracting economy, compared to corporate capitalists, the small business owner is likely to go under. They are also faced with two ways to make sense of things. One is to choose a structural response which is to demand that the state give them more protection so that they are not gobbled up by corporate capitalists. But the other is to blame their workers for wanting more money. In order to make up some of their losses they pays workers less than corporate capitalists pay. In order to keep workers from unionizing they will pay white workers more than Blacks and attack Black workers for being too greedy. After all, they rationalize, the Blacks should be grateful the owner has even hired them. If the small business owners make the second choice, they too are likely to have many of the fourteen characteristics of dogmatism. In fact, in the last two “elections” in Mordor, labor historian Kim Moody has shown that small business owners have the highest percentage of voting for fascists.

This economic, class and race analysis will help explain three of the behavioral characteristics named in Part I. This includes preoccupation with power and status; glorification of in-group and vilification of out-group; and dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities.

Psychology of Dogmatism in Early Childhood Development

Johnson points out that when parents are uninformed, indifferent or malevolent and fail to satisfy their baby’s emotional and social needs it is hard for the child to develop a sense of resilience.

Prolonged separation from the primary caregiver causes emotional, cognitive and social disorganization. When repeated attempts fail to make a connection to the caregiver, they may react with clinginess or aggressive confrontation. These children learn to mistrust themselves and others because they cannot get past the burdensome thoughts and anxiety that erode their self-confidence. (369)

One mother might assume that more often than not, her baby’s crying is manipulative or attention-seeking. Still others respond with alternating periods of tender loving care, normal distancing, smothering enmeshment, negligence and even abuse. Adopting beliefs and holding them with adamant certainly will compensate for childhood insecurities Insecure attachment and the ensuring anxiety may also be converted to dogmatic authoritarian aggression. (370-371)

Young children with a history of neglect or abuse experience chronic hyperarousal that elevates their hormone level and causes chaotic biochemical alternations… This aggregate of misfortune also impairs the development of empathy. (363)

Johnson points out that in Erikson’s eight psychosocial stages of development, these types of problems would correspond to Erikson’s first stage of trust vs mistrust. But I see connections between dogmatism and Erikson’s second and third stages as well. Erikson’s second stage is autonomy vs shame and doubt. Autonomy means the child is practicing saying “no” (also known as the terrible twos). The third stage is initiative vs guilt. Initiative means saying “yes” to activities the child chooses. I see no reason why the budding young dogmatist would also be carrying both shame and doubt along with guilt as developmental baggage. This is because the authoritarian parents would not easily tolerate a child who defies them (saying no) or chooses activities that are not on the parents’ menu (initiative).

Dogmatism and Personality

Trait theory

According to trait theory one of the five major traits of a healthy personality is openness to experience. This consists of one’s desire to seek and appreciate new experiences for their own sake. Openness also reflects tolerance for and exploration of the unfamiliar. Openness means a person is curious, imaginative, insightful and has wide interests, vivid fantasies and unconventional attitudes. Low scores in openness, indicate closemindedness including an unadventurous, unanalytical mind and narrowness of interest. This person is drawn to the familiar, practical and concrete. There is a lack of interest in experience for its own sake. The open and closed personalities of trait theory closely resemble the dogmatic vs open personalities we discussed in Part I of this article. The second global trait is neuroticism. This includes emotional instability and anxiety. It means constant worry with inadequate coping mechanisms. Among the 14 traits of dogmatism this corresponds to characteristic six.

Adler

According to Johnson, within the first two years of life, infants experience inexorable feelings of inferiority due to physical smallness, intellectual immaturity, poor eyesight or hearing and health problems. Adler says that to compensate for the inevitable inadequacies, they began striving for superiority which Freudians might call a reaction formation. Children raised in harsh, punitive or negligent environments create fictions that steer them away from social interest and towards mistaken lifestyles. The three mistaken lifestyles for Adler are:

The ruling type who seeks to dominate others
The getting type (goal is passive dependence)
The avoiding type who sidesteps issues

From an Adlerian perspective, dogmatic characteristics of authoritarian aggression and arrogant, dismissive communication are tendencies that evolved from the early childhood goals of the ruling type.

If the insecure child cannot gain his caretaker’s love, safety and respect, the Divine Father would surely deliver the goods. These individuals do not go to church to maximize their social interest, but rather to both maximize their psychological survival and to minimize their self-doubt. Blind obedience to an authoritarian God is a tradeoff for a secure attachment that was not experienced as a child.

Karen Horney

According to Judy Johnson, feminist psychologist Karen Horney believed that basic anxiety that is prolonged beyond the normal range of anxiety has its origins in faulty parenting which includes parents who are dominating, intimidating, irritable, over-exacting and hypercritical. The second cause of anxiety is the unhealthy hyper-competitiveness of capitalist society.

For Horney, basic anxiety would be overcome by moving with people within a more cooperative society. If a person cannot live under those conditions there are three neurotic orientations: moving towards people, moving against people and moving away from people. Johnson writes that Horney’s moving against is the most relevant to dogmatism. The neurotic becomes driven by a search for glory at the expense of a scapegoated group. The need to proselytize or dominate conversations are typical of moving against strategies.

But I see that Horney’s neurotic trend of moving towards people can apply to the dogmatist’s in-group and their authority figures. They move with obsequious conformity and obedience. They seek out authorities who seem superior and therefore capable of taking care of them

Cognitive psychology: layers of cognition

In this section I will be bringing in three layers of cognitive identity – cognitive distorted interpretations, pessimistic explanatory styles and irrational assumptions. While Judy Johnson does not use these layers in her search for the dogmatic personality, some of these characteristics can easily be connected.

Cognitive distortions

According to Aaron Beck the eight cognitive distortions are:

Black and white thinking, which is also connected to catastrophizing. This was among the 14 dogmatic characteristics.
Overgeneralization can easily be seen at work in relation to scapegoated groups.
Over-personalization is at work when we talk about sensitivity to perceived insults.
Magnification is operating in relation to perceived insults while minimalizing would be at play in evaluating the achievements of minorities.
Distorted evidence – believing things without looking for good evidence is very common among dogmatists.
Selective choice of evidence is occurring when dogmatists stereotype groups without looking for exceptions to the rules.
Mind reading – misreading body cues, not asking people what they think because dogmatists lack interpersonal skill in conversations.
Feelings of confusion with behavior trapped in feelings and not being able to recognize that actions are different from feelings.

Pessimistic explanatory styles

According to Martin Seligman, whenever a new dramatic situation appears there are three questions that go through people’s minds:

How long will this last?
How will this affect the rest of my life?
Who is responsible?

Let’s say there is an economic crisis of some kind. The most pessimistic answers to these questions are that it will last forever, the rest of my life will be swept into the undertow, and I am responsible for the problem. The optimistic response to an economic crisis is it will be short-term (it will give me a chance to go to school or catch up in other areas of my life), it will not affect the rest of my life (I have solid support from my partner and family of origin) and I am not responsible (capitalism is in crisis all over the Western world). The dogmatist will have a pessimistic explanatory style. This matches one of the dogmatic characteristics, “excessive pessimism”.

Irrational assumptions

Albert Ellis came up with these many years ago. Most of them can be seen in dogmatists:

It is a dire necessity for me to be loved or approved of by everyone for everything.
Some people are evil and they know the things they do are wrong, but they do them anyway.
It is terrible, horrible and catastrophic when things don’t go my way.
Much human unhappiness is externally caused and is forced on one by outside people and events.
If something is dangerous or fearsome, worrying about it helps the situation.
It is easier to avoid than to face life’s difficulties and self-responsibilities because it takes less energy.
I need to depend on someone or something greater than myself on whom I can rely.
I should be thoroughly competent, adequate, intelligent and successful always.
Because something once strongly affected my life, it should affect it indefinitely.
What other people do is vitally important to my existence and I should make great efforts to change them in the direction I wish.
Human happiness can be achieved by waiting for the right person or situation to come along.
I have virtually no control over my emotions and I can’t help feeling certain things.

Clearly for the dogmatist, their early childhood background of neglect, inconsistency, and violence makes them desperate for approval, regardless of what they say. The second irrational assumption about people being evil fits easily with the dogmatist’s perception of those they are scapegoating. The lack of tolerance of ambiguity makes all disappointments catastrophic and earth-shaking for the dogmatist. Because the dogmatist lacks the ability to self-reflect, they cannot see their own part in creating a negative situation. Everything is mechanically and externally driven.

Thinking that I need to depend on someone greater than myself fits right in with an authoritarian, fundamentalist religion or an authoritarian political (especially fascist) leader. Lastly, thinking I have no control over my emotions and I can’t help feeling this way. Dogmatists have no idea of how cognitive interpretations, explanatory styles and assumptions have anything to do with their emotions. Emotions appear to be uncaused eruptions over which the person has no control.

Darwinian Evolutionary Biology

Judy Johnson names the following seven traits that have enabled primates to adapt and procreate during Paleolithic evolution and beyond:

Activity – total energy output that is expressed in vigorous, energized behavior
Fearfulness, cowering escape and wariness which activate physiological arousal of the autonomic nervous system
Impulsivity – acting on the spur of the moment without pause, planning or reflection
Sociability – preferring to be with others rather than live a solitary existence
Nurturance – helping others, which includes altruism
Aggressiveness – verbally and physically threatening or attacking others
Dominance – seeking and maintaining superior status over others

Dominance

The pushiness of dogmatism and the insistence on aggressive conversion has its roots in dominance-seeking or aggressive tendencies that are part of the package of our evolutionary inheritance. I am not suggesting that dominance and aggressiveness are the only or leading characteristic of human beings. As you can see from the list, there are also traits for sociability and nurturance which counter dominance and aggressiveness. These primitive, old-brain adaptations are still present in our modern institutions which are the products for dominance, aggressiveness, sociability and nurturance. To include evolutionary Darwinian biology as part of a theory of dogmatism, we must address the survival value of rigidly clinging to beliefs and defending them with arrogant certainty. One answer to this is evolutionary. since the rate at which nature and society change is slow from the period of 100,000 years to 10,000 years (9/10 of our existence), it would pay not to change our beliefs too quickly.

Anxiety

A biological predisposition for anxiety is part of shaping dogmatism. While a sudden intense anxiety that might be adaptive thousands of years ago, today it may be a maladaptive tagalong that continues to fire. Although the characteristics of dogmatism are not just biologically based, higher than average levels of anxiety do have a biological basis. Physiologically, Johnson says that excessive anxiety is linked to defects in the GABA system (gamma-aminobutyric acid). Research reveals strong evidence for the genetic heritability of anxiety. Genes initially create an emotional predisposition for anxiety that structurally facilitates a dogmatic style in emotions.

Biological Physiology
Amygdala and extreme stress

The symptoms of PTSD occur in response to events outside the realm of normal human suffering such as natural disasters, combat fatigue and terrorist attacks or torture. While many of us have suffered from serious accident or illness, job loss or death of a loved one, most of us are resilient enough to return to our former selves of personality function. Dogmatists are less likely to do this.

An excitable amygdala is implicated in persistent anxiety and social inhibition. Johnson shows that:

Because molecular structures consolidate early childhood thoughts and emotions in circuits of long-term memory, these circuits continue to influence ongoing experience. In particular, prolonged distress or trauma,seriously impacts neural circuity. (292)

Researchers have found that when the amygdala, a midbrain structure, detects anything that signals danger, it activates an electrochemical fear response. Low-road reactions are instant, reflexive and protective. (296)

Rather than patiently waiting to understand the full context in order to determine how to react, our amygdala signals danger and we reflexively pull back. When at school or playing, if children are repeatedly teased or ridiculed, the felt anxiety may resurface in neutral or friendly social settings, which create overreactions in their interpersonal perceptions and interpretations. These children may become angry and defensive in response to open-ended, harmless questions.

An emotionally activated amygdala releases cortisol, a powerful hormone, the net effect of which is to disrupt hippocampal activity, weakening the ability of the temporal lobe memorial system to form explicit memories. Under prolonged stress cortisol representations of oneself, others and the surrounding world may become distorted. These proteins grow new synaptic connections that further alter brain circulates some of which become static, closed and invested in defensive structures to guard against anticipated assaults.(298)

Anger

There is a physiological price to be paid for prolonged anger. Johnson says:

Self-righteous anger is always twinned with physiological arousal of the sympathetic nervous system. Research on physiological reactions of aggression, especially prolonged hostility, release the chronically elevated stress hormones that not only strain the coronary and gastrointestinal systems, they also impair immunological functioning (218)

Lack of oxytocin

Children who are repeatedly denied cuddling, attention, playfulness and kindness have serious hormonal consequences:

Abusive or negligent parents limited the child’s ability to regulate the length, intensity or frequency of distressing emotions like anger, terror or shame. This emotional dysregulation is further exacerbated if in infancy, a baby does not experience pleasurable releases of oxytocin and other brain chemical that are secreted during positions of social connection. Known as the hormone of love, oxytocin evokes an inner sense of emotional calm and balance (292)

Without loving, nurturing parents who activate the chemical that helps produce children’s positive self-image, they are less resilient to stress and lose confidence in their ability to control their emotions. Consequently, they may become clingy and dependent. Without such skills, these children are more likely to conform to group values and succumb to peer pressure even when it goes against their self-interest or morals. They have no awareness that this desperate conformity has anything to do with early emotional deprivation from caregivers.

Lack of dopamine

From research in trait theory, there is a biological basis of the “Openness to Experience” trait. Being open to new ideas and experiences is influenced by individual differences in the dopaminergic system. Since the polar opposite of openness is closedness, the closed-minded manner in which dogmatic people process information may be due in part to some failed mechanism in the transmission of dopamine.

Conclusion

Here is summary of all the factors that produce dogmatic cognition, emotion and behavior.

Socio-economic

Some of these are from Judy Johnson, while others are my own.

PTSD (wars, rape, physical abuse, torture)
Economically contracted society
Economic competition between racially mixed working class
Economic competition between small business owners and corporate capitalists
Political groups with the financial means to ideologically seduce and indoctrinate the disenfranchised and psychologically vulnerable
Membership in narrow or closed-minded groups that offer a) the promise of social acceptances; b) individual recognition; c) honor and dignity
Joining a group on the basis of their rigid, authoritarian goals
Political and economic marginalization of youth
Inadequate state funding for educational infrastructure and support programs for cognitive impoverishment during childhood and adolescence

Social-cultural

Parents who themselves have the characteristics of dogmatism
Parental styles of parenting which are anxious-ambivalent as opposed to secure
Parental inability to facilitate emotional regulation during infancy and childhood
Prolonged exposure to role models who seek revenge for past injustices
Early indoctrination of religious beliefs that discourage natural curiosity and open-minded questioning and reasoning throughout childhood and adolescence (like religious fundamentalism)
Institutional punishment (at school) for independent thought in childhood and adolescence

Psychological

Closed personality, neuroticism (Big five)
Superiority complex, ruling type (Adler)
Moving towards, moving against (Horney)
Cognitive interpretation distortions, pessimistic explanatory styles, irrational assumptions

Bio-evolutionary

Innate evolutionary adaptations for dominance and aggressiveness that linger in modern brains

Physiological

Biological predisposition for anxiety
Overly active amygdala
Lack of oxytocin
Lack of dopamine

The post The Causes of Dogmatism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Dogmatic Personality

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 10 Mar 2023 01:26:05 +0000

Orientation

Dogmatisms as a process not content

What does it mean to think dogmatically about something? On the surface, dogmatism seems associated with religious beliefs. While most world religions can be dogmatic, this implies there is no dogmatism outside of religion. We know that is not true. Many people accuse socialists of being dogmatic. In fact, socialists accuse each other of the same thing. Instead of looking at dogmatism as connected to content, to a particular set of beliefs, suppose we treat dogmatism as a process that can be applied to any set of beliefs? It is tempting to think that dogmatism would be more likely to be on the right-wing side of the political spectrum but moderates or leftist can be just as dogmatic. Here In Mordor, the neoliberal Democratic Party’s commitment to free market fundamentalism is a great example center-right dogmatist.

Interpersonal experience of talking to a dogmatists

When we think of arguing with a dogmatic person what is the experience like for us? For one thing, the person we’re talking with is overly certain that they are right. Going back and forth with them is not perceived as a dialectical process whereby new knowledge is created. Rather, it is like a king of the hill battle with each trying to take down the other. Closely related to this overconfidence in argument is a dualistic way of posing the problems. You are either right or wrong. There is nothing in between. There is no middle ground, no messiness. Dogmatic thinkers are rigid in their structures.

This article will follow Judy J. Johnson’s book What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right: The Dangerous Nature of Dogmatic Belief. Judy Johnson identifies fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking. Five include mental predispositions, four have to do with emotional disorders and the rest having to do with behavior. In Part II of this article, we will identify the causes of dogmatism, covering the fields of sociology, psychology, bio-evolutionary Darwinism and physiology.

Dogmatism and a Family of Resemblances

Working towards a brief definition, dogmatism is a characteristic that combines cognitive, emotional and behavioral characteristics that result in prejudicial closed-minded belief systems that are pronounced with rigid certainty. It is driven by a) emotional anxiety, b) cognitive narrowness, and c) energized behavior. However, It is true that in stressful situations most of us will have some of these features but not as a way of life. In the average person fatigue, boredom, depression and illness might also produce dogmatism, but only temporarily. A dogmatist will claim to know things with certainty without evidence. A radical skeptic says we can know nothing unless it is certain. Neither dogmatists nor skeptics conduct open-minded inquiry. An open-minded person will say that while nothing is certain, some facts are closer to certainty than others.

Dogmatists are not the same as fanatics

According to Bob Altemeyer in his book Authoritarian Specter, dogmatists, fanatics and zealots are soulmates with some distinctions. He says that fanatics and zealots show excessive frenzied enthusiasm for beliefs that have an absurd or bizarre quality. While some dogmatists are likely to share some of these beliefs, most do not have the emotional extreme dimension of a fanatic or zealot. In general, fanatics occupy what has been called the lunatic fringe, while dogmatists appears relatively more moderate in their beliefs and they imply less dramatic action. Political or religious zealous dogmatists can move society in extraordinary directions. People championing religious beliefs had the highest zealot and highest DOG scores in Altemeyer’s research.

Critical thinking is not the opposite of dogmatic thinking

Johnson points out that although much has been written about how to promote critical thinking skills like inductive and deductive reasoning, abstract analysis, synthesis and evaluation of data, less attention has been given to the deeper psychological conditions that seriously impair one’s ability to think critically at all. Johnson point out that dogmatists can take a class in critical thinking, but if unmet sociological, psychological and biological needs are pushing them in dogmatic directions, their minds will not be sufficiently open to turn theory into practice beyond the class.

Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking

Fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking

Intolerance of ambiguity: black and white, either/or thinking
Defense cognitive closure (having barbed wire around declarations)
Rigid certainty (cannot state the conditions for being proven wrong)
Compartmentalization: sealing off contradictory beliefs
Lack of self-reflectiveness: refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves
Belief associated with anxiety or fear (they underestimate their ability to cope)
Lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective
If humor is used, it is sarcasm at own or others’ expense
Belief associated with anger: oversensitivity to unintentional infringements
Excessive pessimism
Preoccupation with power and status
Glorification of in-group vilification of out-group
Authoritarian submission: excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities
Authoritarian aggression towards minorities
Arrogant, dismissive communication style

Openminded thinking

People who are open-mindedness have little need to change the beliefs and values of people who think differently, unless opposing beliefs directly threaten their own or others’ freedom. They confront the issue, not the person, rarely infer motives for an opponent’s stated beliefs or jump to conclusions when someone changes the topic. Johnson notes that dogmatism should not be confused with open-minded, passionate social activism which creates popular movements. Open-minded people speak out, they do not lash out.

They are willing to suspend judgment and admit they do not know. They explore multiple points of view and are less preoccupied with social conventions. Open-minded people are not easily manipulated by propaganda. They are less vulnerable to external reinforcements like flattery or bribery. Because they are self-reflective they can recognize when their personal needs shape, control, or distort information. When a truth seems to be discovered, their approach is conditional, probable, not absolute, and final. Cognitively flexible adults are more likely to have been raised by parents who enabled them to feel securely attached. Table A at the end of the article compares the fourteen characteristics of dogmatic thinking with my interpretation based on Judy Johnson’s description of what open-mindedness would look like.

Historical Background of Dogmatism Research

Little was written about dogmatism as a distinct personality disposition until the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany when Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich sought to understand why Germans were drawn to Hitler. In reaction to fascism in the 1930s, Adorno wrote The Authoritarian Personality in 1950. He was criticized because his scale only measured the authoritarian right-wingers.

Milton Rokeach is credited with the first attempt to correct the problems inherent in the F scale in his book The Open and Closed Mind (1960). His questionnaire was assumed to accurately measure dogmatism independently of ideological places on the political or religious spectrum. Rokeach is acknowledged to have made the first attempt to piece together the complex psychology of dogmatism, but his approach was limited to descriptions and measurement. He did not elaborate on the causal influences. Johnson notes Rokeach had nothing on physiological predispositions, or evolutionary predispositions. Neither did he account for early childhood development, parenting styles, social learning and how cultural institutions influence open vs closed thinking. His main contribution was that dogmatism is not merely a cognitive deficiency. How good is Rokeach’s research? It is not a valid, internally consistent measure of dogmatism. Why not? It lacks validity and reliability.

Altemeyer did extensive research into right wing authoritarianism in Enemies of Freedom: Understanding Right-Wing Authoritarianism (1988) and in the Authoritarian Spector (1996). His research methods are very rigorous.

His definition calls dogmatism unjustified certainty, not as an unchangeable mind (Rokeach). His other questionnaires that are pertinent to dogmatisms include:

The Right wing authoritarian scale
Left wing authoritarian scale
The religious fundamentalism scale
Attitude towards homosexuality scale
Posse against radicals
Zealot scale

The most important criticism of Altemeyer’s work is that his scale does not tap the emotional and behavioral characteristics of dogmatism. It is limited to a measure of cognitive style.

We will now begin our review of the 14 characteristics of a dogmatic personality.

Five Cognitive Ingredients in Dogmatic Thought

The Five Characteristics of Dogmatic Cognition are:

Intolerance of ambiguity (either/or thinking) due to anxiety
Defense cognitive closure
Rigid certainty – composure
Compartmentation (sealing off contradictory beliefs)
Lack of self-reflectiveness

Johnson claims the tendency to simplify thought is the granddaddy of dogmatism and that accompanies all five cognitive characteristics. Each of the five characteristics fail to thoroughly acknowledge and investigate complicated issues. Conceptual complexity is the degree to which we can consider several dimensions of a problem or argument at once. This is called differentiation. The second element of cognitive complexity is recognizing commonalities among the components within those dimensions. This is called integration.

Intolerance of Ambiguity: Black and White Thinking

Central beliefs begin in childhood as bipolar generalizations about the external world, other people and oneself. Central beliefs also reflect worldviews that are initially derived from parents and expanded or modified by teachers, religious leaders, peer groups, cultural and political institutions, social myths and cultural rituals. But some adults (dogmatists) remain at the level of bipolar generalizations. For example, the borderline personality exhibits cognitive splitting in which the person splits abstract concepts into dichotomous polarized compartments. This is similar to the trait compartmentalization of dogmatism

The absent of a spectrum between dogmatic acceptance and cynicism

Our belief and disbelief systems consist of a spectrum stretching from deep commitment to moderate commitment to skepticism and ultimately to cynicism. Dogmatic people have greater gaps between their belief and disbelief in the middle of the spectrum. In the case of religion, Johnston says extreme dogmatist even reject related religious beliefs. She reports that when fundamentalists are away from home, they are not likely to attend services in the only Christian church available if the Church is a different denomination.Should questions arise about an entirely different religion, dogmatic believers would prefer to consult their own parishioners rather than read and discuss dissimilar tenants with authoritative sources for that religion.

Sudden vs gradual changes in belief

Old beliefs are replaced suddenly (not gradually) with an unquestioning embrace of new ones presented by dazzling, prestigious authority figures. Religious dogmatists avoid analyzing and synthesizing old beliefs and new beliefs. When faced with doubt, they seek religious revivalists’ movements that offer a chance for a fresh beginning wherein the contradictions between the old and new beliefs are left to fester while being papered over by the new ideology.

Need for Certainty

While the human desire for clarity, predictability and safety during times of change and stress is normal, dogmatists transform these natural desires into dire necessities.

Dogmatic systems claims to absolute certainty are generally not evidence-based claims. For example, Karl Popper, one of the 20^th century’s most influential philosophers of science, writes that there are three criteria for scientific evidence:

It must be able to generate predictions
It must be capable of being tested and falsified
It must survive attempts at refutation

Dogmatic certainty does not feel compelled to make predictions, make claims falsifiable or respond to the refutation points of an adversary by modifying their original claim.

In their need for certainty, dogmatists have learned to suppress their anxious feelings behind rigid proclamations of absolute truth. For the dogmatist, not knowing is an embarrassment that must be concealed. As an antidote to fear, ignorance and powerlessness, dogmatism calms the mind.

Defensive Cognitive Closure

Defensive cognitive closure is like having barbed wire around a declaration and daring their adversity to climb over it. The use of “only” is a likely indicator. In science, when scientists say some social or psychological phenomenon is nothing but chemistry or physics, they are laying down the gauntlet. Humble admissions of hesitation or qualification or suspending judgments are seen as signs of stupidity. Sadly, this can apply to Marxists who refuse to stay current in anthropology and trot out the old anthropology of Marx and Engels that is 150 years old while refusing to incorporate new findings. They present the same stage theory of history over and over again. Failing to acknowledge how far they have fallen behind, they mask ignorance with cynicism about new theories or research findings.

Compartmentalization

Compartmentalization occurs when a person seals off beliefs that contradict the main networks of belief and keeps them from interacting with those main sets of beliefs. An easy example of this is a football fan who is loyal to his team no matter what because the team plays in the fan’s locality. Someone reminds him that the players on his football team and the owners are not from the same location as the fan. The fan acknowledges this, but never allows these facts to enter into the part of his mind that is loyal to his team. Evidence of non-local residence on the part of the players and the owners is isolated and quarantined. Johnson gives another example. Christians support war and the extralegal use of torture while refusing to acknowledge that these practices contradict their supposed support for universal rights.

Lack of Self-reflectiveness

Dogmatists are anti-psychologists. They are not curious about what might be going on in the minds of others and they are uninterested in their own internal life, whether it be thoughts, emotions, goals, drives and any contradictions that might exist between them. When they make a mistake and if they admit they were in the wrong, they do not think about their history of making mistakes and what they could do to correct them. They might say something like “what’s the point of mulling over regrets. What’s done is done”.

This same lack of insight applies to their perception of the minds of others.

Dogmatists will not understand why some people do not like them or try to avoid them. Chances are they will externalize the problem and blame their friend rather than look at the problem dialectically, as the result of both the other person and themselves. Dogmatists have poor listening and conversation skills yet demand attention. Johnson claims that lack of personal insight is a dogmatist’s greatest wound.

Four Emotional Characteristics of Dogmatic Thought

We now turn to the emotional dimensions of dogmatism. Unlike feelings, which are transient, emotions are more enduring. In part because dogmatic people are uninterested in their own minds they have little sense the power of their mind (whether interpretations, explanations of assumptions) has in controlling their emotions. Dogmatic people do not have emotions that come and go. Emotions are perceived as an alien force over which they have no control. For dogmatic people emotions have them. They say things like “once I get wound up in a heated discussion, I just can’t stop”.

Johnson claims that there are four emotional needs that dogmatists are trying to satisfy. The first is the need to know that things connected to perceived survival are relatively stable. Exploring subjects that are not immediately connected to that are perceived as a threat. Therefore, curiosity is looked down on or punished. The second need is to defend against anxiety. Johnson says domineering parents who impose arbitrary rules, who criticize, ridicule, threaten and inflict ruthless discipline and physical abuse leave the child feeling shameful and unwanted. A reaction formation emerges as a shield for anxiety. A wall of contrived certainty barricades the anxiety within.

The third need is for a stable social connection. Chronic doubts about status within groups interferes with the ability to engage in complex cognitive processing. Socially anxious people have difficulty starting and sustaining a quality discussion with others because they are preoccupied with how the other person is evaluating them. Lastly the dogmatist, like everyone, needs to feel a common dignity. However, instead of dignity coming from self-perception, dignity is sought after in groups. Because their status in groups is unstable, they are less likely to find dignity within them, except if it is a special kind of group, as we will see.

According to Johnson, the four emotional ingredients of dogmatism are:

Anxiety and fear
Lack of a sense of humor
Oversensitivity to unintended infringements which result in anger
Excessive pessimism and despair

Anxiety and Fear

Johnson argues that dogmatists are driven emotionally by fear and anxiety. Their dogmatism is designed to protect them against these emotions. They lack confidence that on their own they can cope with events that come their way. Because they cannot tolerate ambiguity, they catastrophize events that are mildly unpleasant as dangerous and worth armoring themselves against while arming themselves against others. Anxious people seem unable to clearly process events. Politically they are very susceptible to political authorities who pander to their fear. Instead of politicians being models of grounded optimism and calmness, we have fear-mongering melodramas. Leaders like Trump can potentially turn dogmatists into fascists.

Lack of a Sense of Humor

Having a sense of humor means you can step out of situations and see them in perspective. Humor allows for a break in being serious before returning to serious endeavors. Lack of humor (being humorless) means you are serious all the time. Being dead serious can wear a person out. As we will see in the section on dogmatic behavior, dogmatic people have status anxiety, so that humor at another person or at a group’s expense will be seized on. When they laugh at all, the dogmatist laughs at people, not with people.

Oversensitivity to Unintended Infringements Which Result in Anger

In part, because the dogmatist has status anxiety he is constantly unsure of how others are perceiving him. This is why he responds well to military life since there a person knows their rank and what is expected of them. But in civilian life relations between people are vague and the dogmatic person wants social relations to be crystal clear. Because they lack a sense of play and humor, they cannot imagine that vague behavior done to them was unintentional. Dogmatic people are likely to have bad cases of road rage. When someone cuts them off, they immediately take it personally. “They did that deliberately”. They do not easily think situationally. The person might be late for work, not paying attention for their exit, or having to rush to the hospital. For them, everything is personal and interpersonal. Dogmatists with guns are more likely to be trigger happy. “Nobody fucks with me”. They can’t give people the benefit of the doubt. To do so is the same as to showing weakness. Johnson says,

Those who are low self-monitors (self-reflectors) are often unaware of gestures and facial expressions that transition their words but may provide additional unintended meanings. Innocuous questions become red alerts to their adrenal glands. Simple inquiries are twisted into accusations. (227)

Excessive Pessimism and Despair

Lastly, dogmatists have a pessimistic view of human nature which includes themselves as well. Whenever the dogmatists examine things, their refrain is mostly, ”it has always been this way”. Dogmatists do not like change, and their hope is to make the present the past as soon as possible. There the present can be fit into the rigid categories the dogmatist has built for them.

Summing up, on an emotional level, the functions of dogmatic belief systems are the reduction of fear and anxiety, building up pride, status and smugness in groups, and protection against feeling joy or hope. If dogmatists feel these emotions, they fall further down when things don’t work out. The dogmatist would rather experience a steady, low-grade pessimism than roll with the ups and downs of life as an open-minded person might.

Five Behavioral Characteristics of Dogmatism

Dogmatism is not just what is going cognitively and emotionally. Dogmatism is also about how people behave and act. The five behavioral characteristics of dogmatism are:

An arrogant, dismissive communication style
Preoccupation with power and status
Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group
Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities
Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities

An arrogant, dismissive communication style

Although a dogmatist may not be very good at it, they will attempt to use pretentious, pompous language to impress or intimidate someone in discussions with others. Johnson says dogmatists have a hard time following and incorporating aspects of a discussion as they go. A spontaneous back-and-forth flow of conversation might mean the dogmatist’s failure to keep up without woodenly and awkwardly superimposing their beliefs into the conversation. Johnson says dogmatists have a short temper and machine-gun style of communication. They talk at others, not with them. They don’t listen carefully because they are getting ready to make their next point. She says disagreements elicit sighs, frowns and rolling eyes, a rigid body posture and a strident voice. This dismissive communication manner papers over individual and group fears of being exposed as inadequate, insignificant, wrong, ignorant or stupid. Built into dogmatism is a false pride that functions as a defense against being found out.

Preoccupation with power and status

Uncertainty in one’s place in the class, race or gender hierarchy leads to attempts to either stabilize one’s place, or move up in the hierarchy. Forms of behavior include emulation, keeping up with the Joneses, name-dropping or reifying official titles. Johnson reports that on being introduced to someone the dogmatist immediately wants to know the kind of work the person does, where they live, and what their race, ethnicity is. They are drawn to professions that reward them with visible displays of status, believing that uniforms and badges grant instant authority and respect. Up to a point this makes evolutionary sense as natural selection rewarded social learners who observed and copied the most successful individuals. However, since good people can have low status and bad people can have high status, getting answers to the dogmatists’ questions does not guarantee a predictable response. But for the dogmatist bent on labels, this can lead to prejudicial thoughts and/or discriminatory actions.

Johnson points out that dogmatists have a desperate need to achieve identity, the respect of others, the presence of self-esteem and dignity. A group that not only welcomes but panders to those whose self is inconsistent or fragmented with privileged status and instant dignity becomes powerfully appealing to brittle identities.

Glorification of the in-group and vilification of the out-group

Johnson writes that the size of the group membership alone sometimes gives the group legitimacy in the minds of anxious people. When a social system disintegrates to the extent that people lose their group identity and shared values, they become anxious and vulnerable to joining clearly structures groups that are hierarchically ordered. This seems to be the case if they suspect that by joining the group, they will abdicate personal responsibility for assessing the logic of group objectives. These are the circumstances in which the most despicable deeds occur. Authoritarian in-groups also involve being nationalist or even fascist.

Just as there is one and only one dogma and the rest are either false or evil, so too the group that shares the same dogma (the in-group) is good and any group outside of it is demonic. Everything is us vs them, never an expanding, evolving we.Those who are dogmatic cannot distinguish between the social authority and the qualities of the individual person. Either they think the information is true because they respect the authority or the information is false because they distrust the authority. They cannot seem to tolerate instances where an author they respect is wrong or lying or an authority they normally distrust could be telling the truth.

According to Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarian Specter, authoritarianism means the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual autonomy in thinking and acting. He defines authoritarianism as the co-variation of three kinds of attitudes:

Authoritarian submission to established authorities
Authoritarian aggression against anyone the authorities target
Conventionalism adhered to by society and established by authorities

Dogmatic authoritarian submission to authorities

Albert Bandura spent the better part of his career in social psychology trying to understand the relationship between violence on television and its transition to real life. Bandura’s major concepts of observation and modelling lay emphasis on the influential power of role models who have three characteristics: they are attractive, appear to be an expert and they have power (perhaps political). But dogmatists are attracted to characters who do things that most people would consider immoral and they are not punished. This can apply to parents, peers, authority figures or prestigious people.

Self-efficacy is the individual’s belief that he or she can generate and coordinate the necessary thoughts, emotions, social skills and behaviors required to achieve their goals. Dogmatic authoritarian submission appeals to people who feel the lack self-efficacy. Hence, they are attracted to authorities who are successful at getting away with things that do not require the efficacy that dogmatists themselves lack.

Authoritarian submitters represent extremes of ingratiating loyalty. This can be seen in German soldiers following orders to kill six million Jews. “I was only following orders” they say. It can be seen in results like the Milgram experiment when many more people “went all the way” in shocking the participants than any psychologist had predicted. We find it in the behavior of all the followers of the cults of the 1970s to 1990s from the Peoples Temple to scientology to the Democratic Workers’ Party. Lastly, we can see it in the US soldiers’ treatment of the prisoners at Guantanamo.

Dogmatic authoritarian aggression towards minorities

Altemeyer found that high scorers view the world as a dangerous, fearful place. They felt threatened that racial diversity programs at work or in education might destabilize their identity. The typical things authoritarians will say is “some kids just need a good whuppin” or “Increased crime and drug use is caused by parents and educators who are too soft on discipline”. They might say, that immigrants are taking our jobs. Since dogmatists typically do not care or follow science or the scientific method, they might not be aware that race theory has been shown to be false. They might say these terrorists need to be taught a lesson, not understanding that most people in the world today think the United States is a terrorist state.

If you haven’t already done so, please see how the fourteen dogmatic characteristics of personality compare to a personality that is open-minded in Table A at the end of this article.

Coming Attractions

In part two, we will examine the causes that make the dogmatic personality the way they are. Economies can be expanding and prosperous or they can be contracting with tight labor markets. Which might produce a higher percentage of dogmatic people and why? Do dogmatic people cut across all social classes or are they more likely to be found in some classes more than others? How much might parenting styles impact the likelihood that people will become dogmatic? What about PTSD experiences such as witnessing death in wars, torture and rape? Is there any relationship between PTSD and dogmatism? What might that relationship be? The overwhelming number of people are religious, yet openminded people will not relate to their religion in a dogmatic way. What kind of religion will dogmatists be drawn to?

What can personality theory tell us about dogmatism? What might the theories of Alfred Adler, Karen Horney and Erik Erikson tell us about the dogmatic personality? Cognitive psychologists have identified four levels of cognition: negative automatic thoughts, distorted cognitive interpretations, pessimistic explanatory styles and irrational assumptions. There is a definite relationship between these cognitive liabilities and dogmatism.

Lastly, is there anything biological involved in dogmatism? Is there a gene for dogmatism? In evolutionary theory human beings strive for both dominance and cooperation as well as for aggressiveness and sociality. How might dogmatism fit into this? Physiologically some people are predisposed to anxiety and others have an overly active amygdala. What might this have to do with dogmatism? As it turns out, lack of oxytocin and dopamine are connected to dogmatism, but how? Discover answers to all these questions in Part II.

Table A Dogmatic vs Openminded Thinking

Dogmatic Thinking

Examples of Dogmatism

Open-minded Thinking

1) Intolerance of ambiguity

Black and white

Either/Or

“I’m sticking to my guns”

“Once I make up my mind…”

“You’re either with the terrorists or you’re with us”

Tolerance of ambiguity

Can suspend judgment

2) Defense cognitive closure

(Having barbed wire around declarations)

“Only an ignoramus or someone stupid would think otherwise”

Open, inviting a response

3) Rigid certainty

Cannot state conditions of being proved wrong.

“There is no doubt in my mind”

Flexibility

Qualifying statements

Falsification – stating conditions where you could be proven wrong

4) Compartmentalization

Sealing off contradictory beliefs

“My country right or wrong”

Suppressing the atrocities over history

American dream today

Dialectically using contradictions to create new knowledge

5) Lack of self-

reflectiveness

Refusal to bend-back and analyze themselves

“The reason I got fired was that my boss was out to get me.”

Self-reflective of one’s own part in creating problems

6) Belief associated with anxiety or fear

(they underestimate their ability to cope)

“If they leave me I will never recover”

Curiosity and confidence in their ability to cope

7) Lack of a sense of humor to keep perspective

If humor is used, it is sarcasm to undermine the gravity of the situation

Making jokes about getting fired

Uses humor to keep things in perspective

8) Belief associated with anger.

Oversensitivity to unintentional infringements

Road rage

“They cut me off intentionally”

Does emotional work

Gives people the benefit of the doubt

9) Excessive Pessimism

“Things have always been this way“

“There is nothing I can do”

“People are selfish”

Moderate optimism, not pollyannish

10) Pre-occupation with power and status

Emulation – keeping up appearances

Name-dropping

Fetishizing official titles

Is aware of, but not preoccupied with status and power

11) Glorification of in-group

Vilification of out- group

Nationalism

Racism – immigrants are taking our jobs

Critical of in-group

Welcoming of out-group

12) Authoritarian aggression

Towards minorities

“Spare the rod and spoil the child”

“These terrorists need to be taught a lesson”

Assertive, not aggressive

Sympathetic to minorities

13) Authoritarian submission

Excessive obedience and blind trust of authorities

German soldiers following orders

Cult participants following leaders

Critical of the authorities

14) Arrogant dismissive communication style

“You’re in no position to talk”

Open to what is strange or appears to be a problem

The post The Dogmatic Personality first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 15:30:40 +0000

Orientation

Definition of propaganda and the purpose of this article

Are the chances better that you’d read this article if I called it The Ten Commandments of Propaganda? The author of the book The Ten Commandments of Propaganda thinks so because you have deep collective associations with the Ten Commandments because of the centuries of propaganda by the Catholic and Protestant Churches. Because this article is rhetoric and not propaganda, I will take my chances, identifying thirteen commandments of propaganda.

In my last article, Speaking with Forked Tongues, I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control perceptions, cognitions, emotions and behavior while censoring, hiding, restricting distorting and exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economics textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies, sports and even educational textbooks.

A little less than two years ago I wrote an article called Jacques Ellul: Controversies in Propaganda. The purpose of this article is to explicate the theory of propaganda of Brian Anse Patrick in The Ten Commandments of Propaganda. Secondly and briefly, it will be to compare his theory to that of Ellul.

Most Provocative Points of Ellul’s Propaganda Theory

Unlike other theorists, Ellul argued that propaganda served boththe upper classes and the lower classes for different reasons.
Unlike other theorists, he understood propaganda as inevitable in modern societies. There is no getting around this.
Unlike most other theorists, he saw masses of people as complicit in their own subordination. He saw them neither as victims of circumstance nor as heroic masses.
He distinguished between hard and fast political propagandaand soft and slow sociological He called political propaganda “agitation”. Education is not outside propaganda. It is part of sociological propaganda.
He identified two techniques of propagandizing the masses. The first kind is mithridatizationwhich acts like a sedative and sensibilization which is about riling people up.
Unlike most other theorists of propaganda, Ellul followed Joseph Goebbels and said that the best propaganda is based on facts.It becomes propaganda with the interpretation of facts. Propaganda based on lies is a sign of weakness.
Most propaganda theorists thought the working class was most impacted by propaganda. Ellul argued that it is the upper-middle classes that create the propaganda and are most likely to believe it.
Ellul distinguished horizontal propaganda,which was made inside the group, from vertical propaganda, which uses centralized power. An example of horizontal propaganda was the re-educational groups of Yankee soldiers organized by the Chinese communists during Yankee imprisonment.
For Ellul, propaganda does not come from the ruling class, but from the upper-middle class.
Industrialist capitalist “democracies” need propagandabecause they depend on public opinion, which is disorganized. It requires propaganda to compete with socialist societies.
Unlike other theorists, Ellul makes a distinction between ideology and myth and argues that myth is more powerful.
His concept of crystallization claims that the individual has latent drives and stereotypes which are vague (based on the work of Karen Horney), and they then become the foundation of propaganda.
Unlike other schools of propaganda, Ellul argues that quantitative study of propaganda isn’t effective. One cannot tell how many people are reached and how effective white vs black propaganda is. At what point do you say it failed? At what point does the payoff justify the cost?
According to Ellul, psychological propaganda in foreign countries does not work. Propagandists are too ignorant of the attitudes, centers of interest, presuppositions and suspicions of the foreign population.

Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda

Control the information flow by becoming a source or distributor of information

This includes creating news events, press releases, town hall meetings, scientific reports, op-ed pieces, direct mail appeals, talk show appearances, books, think tanks and commissions. It means creating novelties and hiring screen writers for movies. Many ideas are testing out the public by creating focus groups to see how people respond. This was shown in Parts I and II of Adam Curtis documentary The Century of the Self. Another technique was in the creating of Gallup polls which surveyed the opinions of Mordor’s citizens about sociological and political hot topics to see what floats and what doesn’t.

Use black and white absolutes

This was included in my previous article Speaking in Tongues in that it used loaded language, specifically virtue and vice words. Propaganda does not seem to work well when there seem to exist only many shades of gray. It is successful when it paints in broad, bold brushstrokes complicated social reality into a melodramatic, dichotomous struggle between good guys and bad guys. Nazi’s terms such as Jewish “bacillus” (parasites) to define the Jews helped the extermination process. Once the Jews were officially defined as the “parasitic nation of Judea” it became easier to do horrible things to them. The same is true with what was done to Saddam Hussein and Gaddafi. Conspiracy theories are perfect frameworks for black and white thinking.

Expect that as Mordor revs up its propaganda machine against China, Chinese images will appear, just like the image at the beginning of this article. Here the Chinese are wallowing in opium dens making them seem like a decadent culture. What is absent from the propaganda poster is the story of how the British brought opium to China to begin with.

Crafting the message so it resonates with what is already in people’s heads in terms of their values and beliefs

One of the two most common misunderstandings about propaganda is that propagandists want to introduce something new. Propagandists cannot afford to risk time, effort and resources on messages that might not fly. They need to work with the beliefs and commitments that people already have and just interpret the meaning differently. All a propagandist has to do to create negative propaganda is use propaganda which violates these values in order to drum up hostility among the natives against their supposed enemy. In psychological warfare, predictably, the CIA trots out its tired old list of atrocity stories of the enemy – eating babies, various betrayals to family and any of the violations of evolutionary psychology to work people up into supporting the latest war.

Neither is it true that propaganda is filled with lies. It is true that black propaganda does this, but the use of black propaganda is a sign that propaganda’s messages come out of weakness rather than strength. Following Goebbels, Patrick says propaganda must be factual. It in the interpretation of the facts that propaganda makes its move. In addition to facts, there must be something inexorable about the interpretation as if it could not be any other way. It also must seem necessary, as if any other interpretation would lead to a disaster. Finally, the message must seem to have legitimacy, with the weight of the authorities and the ages behind it.

Address psychological, spiritual and social needs of the population

Over two thousand years ago Patrick points out, Aristotle identified what made people happy. He included security, the independent enjoyment of goods, health, wealth, friendship, good children, good birth and pleasant old age. Patrick says these are the same values American politicians draw from. The differences between people in different cultures is the order of these values, not the values themselves. In addition, what is important to people will draw their attention. Lastly, the biological need for food, sex and economic survival is sure to draw people out.

Today Patrick says modern mass society the media person is a strange hybrid of neurotic insecurity and solipsistic egomania. A mass individual is socialized to think himself unique and inviolable in his opinion and in his voting. Propaganda must appeal to this.

Propaganda must appeal to the individual’s identity, his ego, his power and his efficacy. The person must feel like he belongs somewhere, that he is wanted and useful. Lastly, propaganda must give the individual a sense of understanding the world, where it is going along with addressing the political anxiety that develops because of an absence of reassurance about direction. It also helps for the propaganda to have the appearance of hidden underground knowledge that is revealed only to superior beings.

Censoring stories or contrary information

Even if you control the content and sources of information, even if you hammer your message into dualistic opposites and even if you appeal to the beliefs and values of the audience, the message of propaganda will be weakened if the beliefs, values, movements, parties and programs of its opposition are allowed to be aired publicly. Propaganda must actively suppress its opposition. Patrick’s most blatant example of this is Britain’s cutting the transatlantic cable from Germany during the World War I. A weaker version of this is to make sure that stories that run against propaganda never get to the public through the press. For over two decades an organization called Project Censored comes out with a book which, among other things, contains 25 of the top censored stories every year. In the 2022 edition, here are some of the stories:

Prescription Drug Costs Set to Become a Leading Cause of Death for Elderly Americans
Journalists investigating the Financial Crimes Threatened by Elites
Historic Wave of Wildcat Strikes for Worker Rights
Google’s Union-Busting Methods Revealed
Police Use of Dogs as Instruments of Violence Targets People of Color
Corporate Media Sideline Health Experts during Pandemic
US Factory Farming a Breeding Ground for Next Pandemic
New Wave of Independent News Sources Demonized by Google-Owned You Tube
Conservative Christian Groups Spend Globally to Promote Anti-LGBTQ Campaigns

Use of group pressure to horizontally shape beliefs and behaviors

Many, many people imagine propaganda works like the spokes of a wheel. In the center is the propagandist sending out information to separate the spokes. The relationship between the spokes has nothing to do with propaganda. But Patrick rightly claims horizontal propaganda (relationships between groups) is perhaps the most effective way yet of sustaining a propaganda message. It extends, supplements and complements centralized, authoritative bureaucratic propaganda. In the case of the Milgram experiment, the “teachers” obeyed the authorities not just because the authorities seemed legitimate, but because other members of the group were also shocking people. Maoist Chinese communists relied on hammering their propaganda in a centralized way. But they also wisely held writing contests for groups in which the winner of the essay would be the one that most successfully denounced US imperialism. These essays were then discussed in a groupsetting where the content of the essays reinforced the propaganda of the communists. In a text I used to use in teaching my Brainwashing, Propaganda and Rhetoric class, the author pointed out that when Yankee soldiers were asked why they stuck out horrendous situations, it wasn’t because of obedience to their officers and the propaganda of patriotism. It was because they didn’t want to let their comrades down.

In cults, the central propaganda comes from the cult leader. But the cult leader by themselves is not strong enough to break the bond between the recruit and their family and friends. However, the propaganda is sustained by fellow cult members, especially when they are living together. The pressure of horizontal propaganda has often been strong enough to break the loyalty of the recruit to their own family. This is why families hire cult counselors to intervene to get their children out of the cult.

A less heavy-headed approach can be seen in AA groups. The centralized propaganda of Alcoholics Anonymous are the twelve steps. But when a person declares that they are ready to graduate from AA, even the best sponsor will not be as successful in pressuring the person leaving to stay as much as having to face the group at one of their meetings. Similar processes are in place in the horizontal sustaining of propaganda in DARE and in Amway groups.

When propagandists bombard a mass population, they never know how it will be perceived. There will always be people who are apathetic, recalcitrant or openly rebellious and are invisible to the vertical propagandists. However, once propaganda becomes horizontalized, groups have a far better record of winning the recruit to their side and for marginalizing or driving out deviants.

Propagandists also have ways of controlling groups by spouting an ideology that seems to be the opposite of the propagandists’ attempts at control. Some of these include “Team” management; “Democratization” of the workplace; “quality” circles; “shared” governance. Once groups have begun implementing the ideology, it only becomes stronger and more difficult for people to recognize that team management hides the old authority; that democracy in the workplace is still controlled by managers; quality circles rarely result in higher pay for workers and shared governance still has the same bosses at the top. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Cognitively penetrate and stick

How does the propagandist get attention in an age of attention deficit? How do they sustain the attention once it has been noticed? Two means of being noticed are novelty and humor. In the case of humor, from what I am told, there are an extraordinary number commercials during the Superbowl which are dominated by humor. A person is more likely to remember a brand when a commercial made them laugh.

In order to sustain a person’s attention, the propagandist has to compete with many other propagandists from the fields of advertising, politics, economics and sports. An essential strategy is to burrow a hole into the consciousness by repeatingthe message. In addition, these messages must be simple and easy to understand, filled with slogans and with accompanying images. Popular music is a great example. I still remember the lyrics of rock and roll songs from 50 years ago because the verses were repeated, the music was simple (think of Motown) and there were the accompanying images of the musicians. For two thousand years the discipline of rhetoric has studied the ways in which people can have their minds and actions changed. Rhetorical devices – metaphors, acronyms, alliteration, and rhyme – make language memorable, dramatic and visual.

Personalize events

Many years ago, I worked as a counselor for an organization called Men Overcoming Violence. It was a 40-week program for men who were violent with their partners. Our job was to teach them better communication skills. Periodically we would hire outside speakers to give talks for the public that was related to our work. One time we had two presenters, each taking the opposite stance about the extent that violence was inevitable in men. The first presenter approached the problem statistically. He presented research from Darwinian evolutionary psychology. He also presented cross-cultural research claiming that men were nine times more likely to be violent than women. The second presenter took the case study approach. They brought up a man who had successfully graduated from our program. He told the audience the story of how he was once violent with his wife, but thanks to our program he had changed. Then he called on the man’s wife who testified about how much he had changed. There was not a dry eye in the house. After the two talks we asked the audience via secret ballot whether they thought men could ever be no more violent than woman. Guess who won? The personal story won out over the statistics.

When we hear of mass shootings in the news are we presented with statistics on how many the police have killed in the course of the year? No. We are presented with the personal stories of either the victim or the slayer. Patrick points out that when a lawyer defends a multiple slayer to the jury, he is likely to lead with “my client made a mistake”. Everyone makes mistakes, right? It could have been you. Switching to cinema, whatever the movie you’re watching, you can be sure part of the trailer line will be “one man’s quest…to overcome adversity”. Heroes and villains – not sociology – dominate the popular imagination. What propagandists fear most is masses of people responding against the propagandists in a collective manner. In making the problem personal and psychological, collective responses are less likely.

Bureaucratize events

The flip side of personalizing events is to bureaucratize them, that is to convey the message that there is nothing that can be done to combat the propaganda. It removes the question of responsibility. To speak in a bureaucratic passive voice depersonalizes decisions which are ugly, stupid and arbitrary. Political scientist Edelman says the main function of modern mass political language is to sharpen the pointless to show some interest and blunt the too sharply pointed.

In their book Bureaucratic Propaganda, David Altheide and John Johnson say that bureaucratic propaganda is used in how newsrooms use records; how tv ratings are constructed and interpreted and how religious movements count souls. Bureaucratic propaganda also includes keeping a transmission of records about what an organization does, how the police magnify or minimize its reports and how the military counts its casualties. Patrick points out:

Military censors or media relations personnel avoid news images that show the caskets for the people on their side of the conflict, especially in quantity. In the first World War, despite nearly a million United Kingdom military dead, no British newspaper reputedly even showed a photography of a dead British soldier. Seeing actual bodies shocks and reduces morale. (148)

In the political context, with competition for scarce funds, prestige and continued political support make records creation a self-serving activity. The capitalist state fudges rate of unemployment, the gross national product, the rate of inflation and the number of Covid cases to reassure the public that it has everything under control.

With bureaucratic propaganda the public gets what Goffman called the “front” part of the organization and never the back side. Unlike traditional propaganda, bureaucratic propaganda does not try to reinforce deeply held beliefs, but instead the legitimacy of an existing organization through painting a contrived, managed and decontextualized picture. The appeal of bureaucratic propaganda is not to economic, political or advertising forces, but to the scientific validity, rationality and objectivity of an organization which will hopefully not be investigated. Officials are encouraged along with their subordinates to use two or more sets of records. One for the inspection of other officials and organizations and one for the privacy of insiders only.

At the same time, bureaucratic propaganda can be used for political purposes while hiding under the cloak of dispensing information.

In its nearly half century of official existence, the US Information Agency employed several thousand persons, mainly for “informing people” in foreign countries (especially the Soviet bloc) via news, education and entertainment broadcasts. (175)

Op-ed pieces are another way of introducing scientific sub-propaganda to an unaware public. Gallup polls supposedly do a “need assessment” for social services or political programs and lo and behind, the bureaucratic organization is found to support public needs. On the other hand, if a research proposal contradicts the purpose of the bureaucratic organization it is not favorably reviewed or funded.

Why people accept bureaucratic propaganda is partly because of the reasons Weber gave in his description of a bureaucracy. There are rational rules which govern an office (not capacious); people compete for their roles (vs nepotism) and are trained in the roles they play. They receive a regular salary and work is supervised. There are records kept of their work.

Demonstrate good ethics

Patrick points out that in Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle, ethos was the most important element in persuasion. Though propaganda is different than rhetoric in many ways, including that it is impersonal, mass produced and standardized, it is still worth keeping in mind. One of the myths of propaganda is that it does not try to be moral. On the contrary, there is a need for conspicuous displays of ethics and morals in propaganda. One instance of political propaganda is Kipling’s justification for British colonialism as “The White Man’s Burden”.

Patrick points out that a triumph of British and American propaganda during the 20^th century was the successful attachment during both World Wars to the label of propaganda solely to Germans. For many, propaganda is associated forever with Joseph Goebbels. When one says propaganda people quickly think of jackboots and swastikas, but these are a direct result of Anglo-American propaganda. Later on, the same thing was done to the Soviet Union and Japan.

The truth was that it was British and Americans who were best at propaganda. It was Bernays who first called propaganda by its real name. He then wisely switched it to “public relations” when he realized propaganda had some nasty political implications which would expose what he was actually doing. Americans disguised their propaganda efforts under euphemistic organizations such as the Committee of Public Information in World War I. In World War II there was TheOffice of Wartime Information.

Good ethics in propaganda means keeping control at all times and showing poise in difficult circumstances. Losing control in public with displays of anger show there might be conflicts between elites or a lack of confidence in propaganda. Secondly, propagandists want to appear as moderates, not as “extremists”. Third, propagandists must be dressed in a respectable manner, be in good shape physically and attractive. Further, other signs of good ethics is that people are open and capable of handling disagreement. Being closed and defensive draws suspicion. Lastly, propagandists should have ethical codes of conduct, mission and vision statements which elevate propagandistic activities to the level of the broader social services.

Dispense selective interpretation of facts

As much as possible propagandists start with facts. What they do then is interpret the facts in a particular way. What the propagandist doesn’t tell you is that there may be four or five other ways of interpreting the facts and connecting the dots that are suppressed. For example, a Freudian propagandist may tell an audience at a psychoanalytic conference that depression is repressed anger. A graduate student may be very impressed. But what the Freudian propagandist will not discuss is that there are cognitive, behavioral, physiological theories of depression as well, and some of the better follow-up results than Freudians.

Distance the propaganda from its source by using front groups like foundations, think tanks, and research patronage

Propagandists rarely go to the public directly. They mediate their message through intermediate organizations such as universities, foundations, think tanks, policydiscussion group, and other organizations I’ll discuss shortly. This gives the propagandist credibility – or the benefit of the doubt that goes with organizations that appear to be just disinterested third parties.

Political sociologist G. William Domhoff in his great book The Powers That Be, lays out a political funnel through which propaganda is disseminated. He starts out by saying the three most powerful economic organizations in Mordor are the Council of Foreign Relations, the National Association of Manufacturers and the Business Round Table. It is through these three organizations that all conservative and liberal propaganda is spun. The first level of dissemination is through the board of trustees of universities and through grants that come from foundations. These organizations then set up think tanks. Centrist think tanks are the Center for American Progress and the Brookings Institute. There are lots of right-wing think tanks including the American Enterprise Institute; the Heritage Foundation; the Cato Institute; The Center for Strategic and International Studies; the Hoover Institute and the Manhattan Project.

The only liberal Think Tank is the Ford Foundation. Johnny-come-lately social democratic think tanks are the Economic Policy Institute and the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

The third level down are policy discussion groups from which testimonies, reports, books and editorials flow. The fourth level is the result of these policy discussion groups that go through mass media newscasts along with the Chambers of Commerce.

All these filters peddle the same conservative-liberal propagandistic line. Willingness to toe the line determines which political candidates are chosen from either party.

The Republicans and Democrats reproduce the same frameworks that were built at the university and foundation level. It doesn’t matter whether these candidates understand upper levels or not. In fact, it is more convincing if they don’t understand what they are doing because it appears that they are making up their own minds in what they say.

Accommodate informational needs and habits of professionals

Aiming propaganda at a mass audience is often wastefully ineffective. It is a shotgun approach because the cynical Patrick says the masses are more likely to be apathetic and inattentive to anything other than sex and food. As Jacques Ellul has revealed, it is not the ruling class that creates propaganda. It is the upper-middle classes that are the explainers of capitalism to the rest of the population. That means that propagandists have to create, package and distributute propaganda in ways that suit the informational requirements and professional routines of journalists, editors, script writers, interest groups, voluntary associations, churches, trade associations, blogs, and news media.

For the past 100 years since the development of modern mass media, propagandists have provided pre-written news articles for use of journalists known as “press releases which benefit media organizations because fewer journalists are needed to process stories. (123)

Most quotes from officials found in press releases are simply made up by the propagandists who write the releases. (124)

What Would Jacques Ellul Say?

Personalizing events

One of the things that would have surprised Ellul is the power that personalization has in moving people. France is less individualistic than Mordor’s ideology and people living in Mordor have become more individualistic in the past sixty years since Ellul wrote his book.

Propaganda in black and white

Ellul was more interested in the subtleties of propaganda. While he did make a distinction between propaganda designed to rile people up (which he called sensibilization) and to cool people out (which he called mithridatization), he was more interested in propaganda that pacified people.

Horizontal propaganda

Ellul did have room for horizontal propaganda in his system but he might have been surprised by the extent it has been developed in adding members of cults and AAA to the mix.

The post Thirteen Commandments of Propaganda first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Speaking with Forked Tongues

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 01:37:22 +0000

Orientation

Can language limit thought?

If a dogmatic belief system can narrow the kind of vocabulary used, can language itself limit the kind of thinking that is going on? How free are people to think their own thoughts independently of language? My answer in this article is that language can trap thought. In his book The New Doublespeak, William Lutz points out that instead of being an instrument for expressing thought, language became a means for concealing or even preventing thought. We will examine how language doublespeak applies through propaganda in the fields of economy, politics and advertising.

What is propaganda?

In my article of almost two years ago “Socialist Rhetorical and Dialectical Communication: Overcoming Brainwashing, Propaganda and Entertainment,”

I defined propaganda as the deliberate, systematic and often covert attempt by institutional elites to control: a) perceptions; b) cognitions; c) emotions; and d) behavior while: a) censoring; b) hiding; c) restricting; d) distorting; or e) exaggerating the claims of their opposition. Propaganda can be found in economic textbooks, political campaigns, religious recruiting, news reporting, advertising campaigns, movies and sports.

In this article we will be discussing how propaganda is used in print through verbal language. Propaganda is also used in other mediums like television, the internet and film. Furthermore, it is also used in how space is organized, in architecture, monuments and even street names. Propaganda through print is not nearly as dramatic or powerful as some of the other mediums and because of this it is more easily overlooked that are part of the motive for this article.

The six functions of language

At its most naïve and superficial, the purpose of language is to communicate information in everyday life. For example, it could be going to the grocery store and declaring to the cashier “it is pouring out there”. These are statements that to which the answers can be true or false. But this declarative statement is only one of many types.

For example, there are interrogative questions such as “did you do the reading?”. In this case there may be some power going on depending if the question is coming from a teacher or another student. Another function of language is performative, that is when you promise or commit to doing something. If I say “I promise never to leave the front door unlocked again,” the response is not true or false or the answer to a question. It is performative – or what is called a commissive.

The function of language can also be expressive such as criticism, praise, condolences or matters of taste. In power positions, we can tell someone what to do. “Either punch that time-card now or leave the building”. Lastly, as will be the topic of this article, language can be used to persuade. If during a debate on abortion, you define abortion in a loaded way as murder you will be persuading the audience to be on your side before the argumentations even begin.

Manipulation through Mixing the Functions of Language

Why bother naming the six functions of language? What does this have to do with powerplays and possibly propaganda? With the exception of a military order, most bosses or parents would prefer to get their employers or children to do something without giving them an order. Why? Because it is easier to control people by making it appear that there are no powerplays going on. In most communications, power struggles are muffled by mixing some functions with other functions. What is happening in these situations is inseparable from: a) the roles being played; b) the time; c) place; and d) circumstance.

For example, when a teacher asks a student “did you do the reading,” they are not just asking a question. They are also implying a threat – what will happen if you don’t do the reading. The same process is at work when a parent asks a child if they have completed a chore. How about this: two brothers are going out to lunch. One said, “shit, I don’t have any cash and I don’t have any credit cards on me”. This is an expressive. Instead of just being explicit and saying “can you pay for me”? This brother said nothing intentionally, hoping his brother would offer to pay without having to ask. Lastly, a mother says to her son, “you have a lot of video games in your room. How do you find the time to play them?” This is an interrogative question. She wanted her son to have fewer games so he would spend more time on homework. She was leading up to giving him an order to play fewer video games. But she turned it into a question to manipulate him into buying fewer games by making it seem as if the son came to this of his own accord.

The Power of Labels as Tools for Clarification

Suppose I am feeling under the weather. My nose is running, I have a cough, I have a head-ache and have low energy. I am bothered by this because I don’t know what the trouble is. I make an appointment with my doctor and tell her my symptoms. She says to me that I have a “cold”. I am immediately relieved. Why is this? It’s because having a label for something means a) that other people have had it or it wouldn’t have a name; b) there is probably a diagnosis for it, and she will tell me why I have it and what are the developmental symptoms; and c) there is probably a prognosis as to what to do about it. Labels for physical problems don’t come out of thin air. First, there are a fragmented set of symptoms which are unconnected with many people having these symptoms. After the symptoms are studied, relationships between the symptoms are formed. If enough people have the same symptoms, a label is used to categorize the phenomenon as a whole.

Labels are vitally important for identifying the basic features of something, where it came from and how it might progress. The same value comes about when it comes to mental illness. Suppose I find myself nervous when it is time to go to a birthday party. I have sweaty palms, dry mouth and my heart is racing. Then I notice similar symptoms before I go to work. I am nervous about being around the other workers. Then I notice the same symptoms when I am with my children. I go to a physician and she refers me to a psychiatrist. I tell the psychiatrist what my symptoms are she says I have general anxiety. Now I feel relieved for the same reasons I did when I was diagnosed with a cold. However, I am also uncomfortable because with the label comes somewhat of a stigma. But “anxiety” helps me to feel I do not have some rare problem I may die from and there is something I can do about it.

The Power of Language as a Weapon: Reification

On one hand, labels simplify processes and help us to live. Without labels we couldn’t get much done because we would be buried in events. Labels are short-cuts, generalizations which help us to rise above everyday life and predict what people are like and what people will do. However, real life is always more than any combination of labels. As individuals we are always more complicated than any group of labels. A problem with too closely identifying with a label is that you start acting like the label and lose track of the fact that you are more complex than the label. For example, a person diagnosed with anxiety might then explain all the behavior they don’t like as due to anxiety. They stop using skills to solve problems by simply falling back to the label – “I’m an anxious person”.

When people use a tool of labeling against themselves they may reify the label. Reifying the label means you take a process and turn it into a thing which then oppresses you. The term “anxiety” becomes a prison from which there appears to be no escape. Here is an extreme case of this. Years ago, I worked as a relief counselor in a half-way house. When I first came on my shift after being away for a couple of months, the new patients would introduce themselves, not by their first name but by their diagnosis. I also remember how bitterly some of them fought when the house psychiatrist gave them a different diagnostic label. They were so attached to the label that the label meant more to them than getting a better diagnosis, with better treatment plans and better medications.

Loading and Boiling the Language

Virtue words

When the Republicans and Democrats run for state offices, they hire consultants who suggest the language they use describe both their candidates as well as their opponents. Both of them are encouraged to use the following words: common sense courage; crusade dream; duty; family values; freedom; democracy; hard work; liberty, morality; pioneer, pride; prosperity; independency; patriotic; free enterprise and ambitious.

What do these words have in common? These are called “virtue” words. Virtue words are one-sidedly good words in which there are no conditions under which they can be opposed. For example, it is not possible to only be moderately for democracy. Neither could you be against freedom. How could anyone be against “free enterprise”? Surely everyone wants to be enterprising. How can you not be ambitious. Only slackers wouldn’t want to move up in the class hierarchy.

Vice words

The same advertising firms had some suggestions for choice words that Republicans should call Democrats. They include communist, socialist, terrorists, anti-flag, corruption, traitors, treasonous, welfare; liberal, radical, taxes; bureaucratic and red tape. These are words the advertising agencies have identified that will trigger the citizens of Mordor to look unfavorably at those politicians.

The larger picture: teaching people to think in mutually exclusive dualities

What both Republicans and Democrats have in common is a hope that the population does not think critically. Among other things, thinking critically means that no person or institution can be seen as all good or all bad. All people and their institutions have their pro and cons. In addition, seemingly opposites actually have much in common. Therefore, the Republicans and Democrats have more in common than they have differences. They are both for capitalism, demonize Russia and China, are against communism and socialism and ignore class stratification in their own society. It is in the interests of both parties to portray their candidates as goodie-goodies and the opposition in bad-guy hats which infantilizes their populations.

Slanting

Very often slanting is held to be a bias against objectivity in the news. As an example, Fox news is presented as biased while CNN is looked at as more objective. But slanting is much deeper than giving a one-sided view. Two-sided views can be biased. Slanting is when the process of objectivity is limited to two views, as in virtue and vice words. Or when it is limited to the positions of conservatives and liberals. What slanting ignores is what the two sides have in common and what points of view are objective but censored by both sides. For example, most citizens of Mordor agree that the minimum wage is too low. But this issue is never a regular part of any major news station in an ongoing group discussion. At the same time, close to 70% of Mordor’s citizens say that third parties should be allowed in the debates. Though many feel this way, you will never see ongoing coverage of this. Lastly, over half the people between 25-34 in Mordor are sympathetic to a socialist system. Are real socialists (not Bernie Sanders) given any air time to present a transition program of how a socialist would address current social problem? There are many people who are respectable professionals who think that the events in Mordor on September 11^th were an inside job. Yet for over 20 years these folks have been denounced as conspiracy nuts.

Euphemisms Freezing the Language

The opposite of loading the language is freezing the language. If loading the language is getting people riled up with inflammatory words, using euphemisms is masking the emotional nature of some institution or practice by stripping it of all emotions, meaning and sanitizing it. For example, instead of calling enemy troops prisoners of war they are called “detainees”. Death of civilians during war is sanitized and called “collateral damage”. It’s hard to get worked up about that. Instead of rousing and beating the homeless off the streets “police officers” conduct “street sweeps”. Sweeps implies cleaning up, implying no broken bones or crushed arteries. Sweeping also implies the homeless are dirt.

How are workers likely to feel if they received a letter telling them there will be a mass firing of 2,000 of them? They might just get angry and want to do something collectively. They are much less likely to be angry if they received individual letters telling them they were “downsized”. What the hell does that mean? Workers don’t know but it buys capitalists time while they try to figure it out.

If Democrats want to raise taxes, do they call it that? Chances are not likely given how the Mordor public feels about taxes. Better to call it “revenue enhancements”. Instead of calling Democratic deficits due to support of a fascist Ukraine war, the deficits we have, lo and behold, are “shortfalls of revenue”. An insurance broker wants you to buy insurance. As you know, when you are being sold “life’ insurance, you are really betting against your own longevity. Why doesn’t the insurance agent call you up and say “Yo, wanna buy some death insurance”? Not very appealing, is it?

The capitalist system is full of euphemisms to explain why a horrible system is really perfectly normal. In fact, Michael Hudson wrote an entire book exposing capitalist euphemisms in J is For Junk Economics. The following are a couple of examples. “Business cycles” is the term capitalist use to avoid coming to terms with crisis in the system that is irreversible and the downward spiraling – and “recoveries” never return to the level they once were. In the 19th century, economic crisis were called “panics”. That was a little too scary for capitalists, so in the 20th century economic crises were called ‘depressions”. Not so bad – right? Wrong! “Depressions” became too scary after the ten-year depression of the 1930s. Now any economic crisis no matter how bad will be called a “recession”.

Do capitalists take responsibility for extreme weather and ecological pollution? Not on your life! For capitalists, the biophysical world crises are called “externalities”. Translation? “This has nothing to do with us”. Lastly, capitalists never want to call their system “capitalist”. Why? Because calling capitalism a system means it has laws, a history and origin in time and a termination point, as so all systems. Instead, capitalists call their system “the market”. This sounds tame enough. It sounds nebulous. It makes it sound as if it has always existed and that there isn’t anything else. Capitalists also call their system “business” another meek term which hides processes like class struggle, exploitation or imperialism.

Reification

We met with this term earlier when we discussed the out-of-control use of labels. But reification is more than about labels. Reification is the transformation of processes into things. What we call entities are only processes that are temporarily frozen. We reify processes when we turn entities into things. Another part of reification is when we treat these things as if they have a life independent of processes and a life of their own. The third characteristic of reification is that these things oppress us. We pay homage to them as if they created us rather than that we created them.

Good examples of reification are gods. We create gods to give our life meaning and purpose and yet we wind up being enslaved to our own creations. We do the same thing with capitalism. Marx talked about the reification of commodities in the first volume of Capital. People make commodities on the assembly line and their purpose is to use them. But under capitalism, commodities acquire a life of their own and people become enslaved to their own creations. When we say the economy is “growing” that is a reification. The economy is not a separate thing from people working. The people working is the real thing, the economy is not independent of that. If enough people went out on strike, there would be no economy. Neither is there such a thing as “smart money”. There are only individual people making smart or dumb choices about investing money. Money doesn’t do anything by itself. A vital part of all propaganda is the turning of people into things, processes into things, and abstractions into concrete entities.

Jargon

All professions have a specialized language which are shortcuts to describe processes that would otherwise take too long to describe if they were used in every-day terminology. There is nothing wrong with this and it’s inevitable. It occurs in mathematics and in the hard sciences. Specialized language turns into jargon when professionals use technical terms outside their profession to confuse or intimidate the public. For example, someone who is a lawyer may use technical terms to keep a neighbor from suing him for damage to his property. Another use of jargon is the fine print at the end of a document used on a kind of property class. The reader must hire a lawyer to translate what the document means. Lastly, free market fundamentalists use mathematics in their beginning economic textbooks in order to hide their questionable assumptions and their lack of scientific rigor predicting the direction of the economy.

Muddying the Language

Loading the language, reifying the language and using jargon are all dramatic or overly dramatic uses of language. Muddying the language makes words intentionally imprecise in order to get away with manipulating without being found out.

Weasel words

These words are most consistently used in advertising. They combine a lot of razzle-dazzle virtue words with key non-committal words that avoid taking a clear stand. For example, mouthwash that claims to “fight” bad breath but makes no attempt to cure it. Another ad claims to “control” dandruff but does not promise to eliminate it. A car dealer claims that “no one sells for less” makes it seem as if the car is selling for the lowest prices. Sounds pretty good, right? But it could very well be that the competition is selling for the same price. It is not such a good bargain after all! Why do weasel words exist? Advertisers are legally bound. If they promise a product would cure bad breath or eliminate dandruff and it doesn’t, the advertisers can be sued. If someone finds an ad in the paper promising the lowest prices in town and another car dealer undersells the first car dealer who put in the original ad, they also may run into legal problems.

The political system in Mordor is so rotten that politicians can say anything they want and they cannot be sued by citizens for breaking their promises. This is one of many reasons why the political system in Mordor is held in such contempt by most citizens of its citizens.

Ambiguity and Vagueness

Words can be ambiguous when a word has a number of meanings and there isn’t enough context to allow you to figure out which of the meanings are appropriate.

For example, the word bank can mean an institution for investing money or someone of something you can bank on. Bank can also mean a part of a river. Lastly, bank can mean the utilization of a strategy for making a pool shot (eight-ball banked and into the side pocket). There is usually no linguistic manipulation here, just a matter of confusion.

Ambiguous words are many, but all the word definitions are clear. With words that are vague, the meaning of the word itself is foggy and this fogginess can be used for manipulative purposes whether political, economic or personal. I don’t know of a phase that has been used more manipulatively in Mordor than the words “I love you”. Especially in romantic encounters it can send one swooning or tightening up their defense mechanisms. Erich Fromm famously defined many kinds of love – parental love, sibling love, friendship love in addition to romantic love and they all mean different things. A famous use of love in a manipulative way by parents towards their children is to say “I am doing this because I love you” just before punishing them. Whether the punishment is just or unjust, the parent is attempting to escape the wrath of his child by trotting this out. When a female hears her date say “I love you,” she would be right to say, “What do you mean”? Is this a ploy to get her into bed? As the Shirelles sang, “Will you still love me tomorrow?” Or is it something that is said after sex by way of reassurance. The word love is thrown out for various types of manipulation far more than it is simply an expression of affection. We are told that radio stations love their listeners and football teams love their fans.

Another emotional word that people can be taken to the cleaners about is the term “support”. Many years ago, when I was teaching night school, I watched the sad devolution of many of my female students’ romantic relationships. By the time they were in the last quarter or two, their relationships were on the rocks or in trouble. Because the classes I was teaching were about adult psychological development, they spoke of their relationships in writing and in discussion. A common theme was their partner’s manipulative use of the term “support”. They said to their partner “I support you” going to school. But in retrospect my students said they should have responded with “What do you mean by support? Does support mean you will do the laundry on the weekends so I can do reading? Are you willing to make dinners on the weekend so I can write papers? Does support mean you can accept not going out on day trips on the weekend because I will be in class? That is what I mean by support”. Support is a practical down-to-earth series of active commitments a person does. It isn’t just an emotional word meaning you are sympathetic about my going to school.

Equivocation

The last of our muddy words is equivocation. This means changing the meaning of the same word as we proceed from the beginning or end of a written piece or a lecture. A very simple and funny one is when I tell my students that when Marx and Engels defined the class structure as between capitalists and workers, he forgot to talk about the class struggle between students and teachers. In a serious vein, the word “class” in an institutional setting means a setting in which college courses take place. I was making a joke by suggesting that the battles between teachers and students over doing the reading, turning in papers and turning off their cell phones resembles a class struggle between workers and capitalists.

How about this statement from the body of an international economic organization: “The developed countries have it all over the undeveloped countries. It’s just a matter of developmental maturation”. In the first place, the word “development” comes from either biology or psychology. In these fields the word development points to a predictable sequence from neonate, to adolescence, to adulthood, meaning maturity. Can nation-states be categorized as children, adolescents or mature adults? If they are, whose interest do they serve?

Anthropologists claim that it is the essence of European racism to categorize political/economic nation-states as immature and mature. Given that the mature, developed countries are in the West and the immature countries are in the capitalist periphery we have the following:

Western Core – like adults – US, Western Europe – capitalist

Semi periphery – adolescence – China, India, Latin America – capitalist, socialist

Southern periphery – children – Africa – socialist

This political use of the term development helps justify the dispensing or refusing of loans from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to peripheral countries. If the World Bank wants to support “mature” development they will give peripherical countries money to develop a tourist industry. But if a country in the periphery asks for a loan to develop science and technology, which might compete with the oil industry present in a mature country, that loan will be refused and the name of the country will be classified as immature.

Conclusion

This article began with raising the question of the relationship between language and thought. If your vocabulary is intentionally shrunken, distorted or exaggerated how free are you to think your own thoughts? I am most interested in showing why you are not free when it comes to a propaganda setting. After defining what propaganda is, I described the six functions of language and how they can be manipulated. Then I described the use and misuse of labels as tools on the one hand and weapons on the other. With that as a foundation I described three ways language can be manipulated, by boiling the language, freezing the language and muddying the language. Boiling the language includes the use of virtue and vice words. Freezing the language is what happens when euphemisms are used. Lastly there are four kinds of ways language can be muddied. The first two are using language ambiguously or vaguely. Other sneaky ways to use language are by using weasel words or equivocation. Jargon and reification are two other forms of manipulation that are important that we covered but don’t fit into loading, freezing muddying language.

The post Speaking with Forked Tongues first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

The Slavophile Russian Cosmists

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 20 Jan 2023 16:04:25 +0000

This beautiful Earth is no more than a brief resting place between the sea of salt where we were born and the sea of stars which we must now. venture forth

— Arthur C. Clarke Profiles of the Future

Orientation

In cross-cultural psychology, the major world divisions are between the West and the East. But what about Russia? Is it closer culturally to Europe or to China and India? As you will find out in this article, the answer is neither.

Absence of a bourgeois spirit, specialization, rationalism or empiricism in Russia

For political and economic reasons, I disagree with Nicholas Berdyaev’s characterization of the Russian “soul” as conflicted spiritually between Dionysian paganism and ascetism or politically between anarchism and despotism. However what Berdyaev is right about is that Russians are not bourgeois. For Russian thinkers, individual freedom often seems more like willful license than genuine freedom. In addition, there are two other Western tendencies which have never taken hold in Russia. One is a disembodied transcendental spirituality. Those “cosmists” (to be defined shortly) like Nikolai Fedorov insisted his spirituality include a technological dimension such as the colonization of the planets. At the same time, epistemologically neither philosophical schools such as dry-as-dust rationalism nor bean-counting empiricism ever seriously took hold in Russian philosophy as they did in the West.

Culturally there was the battle between the Slavophiles who emphasized what Russia could teach the West about say, the communal life of peasants. Then there were the Enlighted liberals like Belinsky and Herzen-who tried to show what Russia could learn from the West. The Slavophiles essentially won. This can be seen in the minority status of liberalism throughout Russia’s 19th century, the early 20th century, throughout the Soviet period and even after.

For example Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov (1912-1992) argued that Russia’s future as an international power lay not in emulating the Western European and Atlantic powers, but in gathering and uniting the “passionarity” of the steppe peoples in the East.

Young in his book The Russian Cosmists tells us Gumilyov’s views have been a major influence on the neo-Eurasian cultural and political movement prominent since the breakdown of the Soviet Union. He is a source for Russian neo-nationalist thought. Capitalism never got a foothold in Russia except when Russia was invaded by Mordor’s free market fundamentalists after the breakup of the Soviet Union.

What is Russian cosmism?

According to Berdyaev, Russians are preoccupied with eschatology – the kingdom at the end of history. Cosmists were not convinced that we were fixed in present evolutionary time. We can slide backwards in evolution at the change of the moon or setting of the sun. According to Young, tales of vampires and werewolves have haunted Slavic lands at least since the time of Herodotus.

According to George M. Young, Russian cosmism is a blend of political activist speculation, futuristic religious science and utopian outer space colonization. It includes the following assumptions and motives:

Active evolution: the present humanity is not the end point;
The exploration of the cosmos;
A belief in the existence of astral forces;
Inclusion of premodern bodies of knowledge like astrology, alchemy and the kabbalah as valuable sources of knowledge;
A belief that leading scientists should be involved in the human future
Belief in unlimited extension of human physical longevity;
Humanity bears the responsibility for our future development on this planet;
The existence of a planetary envelope, the noosphere on top of Vernadsky’s biosphere and lithosphere.

Let’s take the example of Aleksandr Sukhovo-Kobylin (1817-1903) who developed his own version of spiritual Darwinism. He argued there were three stages in the development of humanity:

Telluric earthbound man who is confined to this planet. He is a captive of gravity and the senses. Sukhovo-Ko claims the practice of “unkinship” is the present state of the world. As fallen humanity we are now natures slaves.
Our common task is to become nature’s master. When we do, we become Solar man, inhabiting or solar system.
Sidereal man – inhabiting all worlds in the universe.

He thought that the further we evolve, the smaller our bodies should become.

Individual commonalities among the cosmists

The cosmists were interdisciplinary, self-educated and they spoke many languages. They were optimistic when compared to the gloom-and-doom that has enveloped the West throughout the 20th century. They included mystic Nikolai Fedorov, who had explored the territory between science and magic; the mystical poet Vladimir Solovyov; rocket scientist pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and geochemist VD Vernadsky. One man, Florensky, was called the Russian Leonardo. He was a groundbreaking mathematician, inventor, aestheticist, an electric engineer and social worker. He wrote a visionary book called The Pillar and the Ground of Truth.

Cosmists’ stormy Relationship with the Soviet Union

Cosmists were very aware of the Russianness of their ideas and activities. They sensed that their best work would not and could not have been done elsewhere. During the Soviet period the religious cosmists worked in exile like Berdyaev and Bulgakov. Others sharing unorthodox political and economic views were restricted, suppressed and eventually liquidated including Florensky, Bogdanov, Gorky, Setnitsky and Muravyov. The scientific cosmists like Tsiolkovsky, Vernadsky Chizhevsky and Kuprevich were honored in their fields, provided their work did not contradict dialectical materialism. It wasn’t until the 1980s that hidden works from previous periods came out.

A Sampling of Science Fiction Writers, Mystics and Philosophers

Name

Accomplishments

Karazin (1773-1842)

The first to call for the human management of nature, including the use of balloons explosive projectiles and maximum control over all meteorologic phenomena

Lomonosov

Made accurate, original scientific observations about the northern lights and firestorms and the sun

Odoevsky (1803-1869)

Wrote a futuristic fantasy The Year 4338

Vladimir Solovyov 1853- 1900

Political thinker, mystic, poet, literary critic

He was immersed in Qabalah and the Divine Sophia

He thought the transformation of sexual love onto a higher plane would require the transformation of the entire external environment (in other words, eroticization of matter)

Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903)

Fedorov wanted to regulating nature and resurrect dead ancestors. He complained that all the time that now goes into attracting a mate and bringing life into the world could be used to restoring life to those who gave it to us.

He wanted to erect great cones on the earth’s surface so that people might be able to control the earth’s electromagnetic field in such a way as to turn the whole planet into a spaceship under human control. We would no longer slavishly have to orbit our sun but could freely steer our planet.

Russian artists who worked on Fedorovian and cosmic themes included the artist Kandinsky, the composer, Scriabin and the poet, Andrei Bely.

Scientific immortalism

The search for technological, physical, material solutions to the problem of death. Everything in their view, even thoughts of love, memories of childhood, can ultimately be understood as matter and energy, chemical and electronic impulses and exchanges. Mind is nothing but operations of the brain. Some immortalists are in the business of freezing brains and even entire heads of people who wish to become immortal when adequate technology becomes available.

Sergei Bulgakov (1871- 1944)

He believed the entire world-historical process proceeds from the contradictions between mechanism or thingness (based on necessity), and from nature to the principle of cosmic freedom (the world soul)

The cosmos as it exists is not yet an organism, but human labor can, but not necessarily will, make it so. Through labor humanity introduces a new cosmogonic world creating force equivalent to natural force.

Bulgakov’s man is not a creator, but recreator. This is akin to Spinoza’s “Natura Naturans”. He used images of Sophia as the world soul.

The Place of Theosophy and mediumship

Young tells us that even the early Soviet prominent officials, self-proclaimed atheists and materialists showed great interest in studies associated with the occult. For example, Gorky was interested in thought transference and the film-maker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) was a Rosicrucian initiate. For Scriabin and Kandinsky, occult philosophy was a lifetime pursuit that impinged on all aspects of their personal, spiritual and creative lives.

Many of you who have heard of Theosophy may dismiss it as the wild ravings of Madam Blavatsky about cycles of previous races and lost civilizations. In the Anglo-American world of transcendental spiritualism, Theosophy might seem to be the opposite of radical political activity. But in the Russian Silver Age, Mary Carlson says most educated readers had some acquaintance with spiritualism and Theosophy. Theosophy also claimed that present humanity is not the most advanced in history and vanished races of humanity, Atlantean and Lemurian were physically, mentally and spiritually superior to us.

Theosophists were not insensitive to human suffering. Theosophists were active in mending the clothing of soldiers during World War I and Annie Besant was a socialist. Some of the principles of theosophy could be interpreted socialistically. Here are four of its characteristics:

Spirituality could be divided into exoteric and esoteric. Exoteric religion is religions for the masses based on superstition and controlled by religious elites. Esoteric religion is the core teaching of all the world religions which are only known to a few wise people who have no control over the masses.
It is universal brotherhood without distinction of race, creed, sex, caster or color.
It is the comparative study of religion, philosophy and science.
To investigate the unexplained laws of nature along with the power latent in humanity to tap into the paranormal.

When Marx talked about religion as the opiate of the people, it is directly connected to exoteric religion. Esoteric spirituality’s criticism of priests would have warmed Marx’s heart. The second principle of universal brotherhood was a challenge to racial, religious and sexual hierarchies. Marxists would support that. Thirdly, the fact that the comparative study of religion and philosophy included science would have made room for skepticism about religion that Marxists would favor.

Russian Scientists

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935)

Young called Tsiolkovsky an unpretentious self-made genius. According to Young, he arrived in Moscow from a provincial village in 1873 with no money or friends, minimum education and was nearly deaf from childhood after a bout of scarlet fever. He visited the library where Fedorov worked every day and joined a group of followers. Fedorov was his ideal teacher spending hours with him discussing his own studies. Fedorov directed his studies towards math, physics and chemistry. Tsiolkovsky was very interested in space travel after studying Jules Verne. He dreamed of an eternal striving outward of humanity to the sun which would allow humanity to be released from the chains of gravity. He began to make rocket boats, rocket wagons and rocket powered spaceships. He wrote narratives about traveling beyond earth by rocket ship and developed mathematical formulas that would make some of his fantasies possible.

Tsiolkovsky wrote papers that would eventually lay the foundation for the 1957 launching of Sputnik. We are informed by Young that his work contained the embryo of nearly all the scientific-technological attainments of the Soviet Union in the exploration of space. He was able to determine most of the things necessary to make, launch and sustain life inside rockets as we now know them. He also calculated the amount of fuel needed to overcome the earths gravitational pull. Finally, he popularized space exploration with a number of long and short science fiction articles that drew Russian scientists into the field of colonizing the cosmos. Today The Tsiolkovsky State Museum of the History of Cosmonautics sponsors conferences containing 12 sections with people from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas attending.

Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945)

Vernadsky was well-read in the literature of the world’s religions and in Eastern and Western philosophy. He felt closest to the ancient Greek hylozoic pantheism which finds life in all matter. He read Darwin in English when he was seventeen and mastered fifteen languages. He also read widely in history and world literature.

His main breakthrough was to demonstrate the role of living matter – humans, animals and plants – in the transfer of solar energy into mineral matter. He claimed that life not only evolves from hard mineral matter but in the process of disintegrating over eons contributes to the creation of new matter. With the emergence of the noosphere in human societies in the 19th and 20th centuries, mankind becomes a geological force. It was as part of the noosphere that would guide humanity in a gradual but inevitable evolution. He says that two billion years ago plants containing calcium emerged from the world of minerals. Five hundred thousand years ago, animals with calcium skeletons began to emerge. This development of calcium within living matter was one of the major stages in the geological history of the biosphere. Young says that though Vernadsky is relatively unknown around the world today, in time he will be considered the equal of Newton, Darwin and Einstein.

Pavel Florensky (1882-1937): the Russian Leonardo

Florensky was called the Russian Leonardo and made major contributions to mathematics, physics, electrodynamics, folklore, philology, marine botany, art history and theory, earth science, and philosophy. He was also a master theorist of avantgarde art contributing to the mathematical, philosophical and theological revolution that was taking place in all the arts from realist to symbolist literature.

In Pillar and the Ground of Truth Florensky explores concepts and images of Sophia the way we experience her as a hint of the heavenly city to be built – the world soul come to earth. He proved to be of major assistance to Lenin in his efforts to electrify Russia. He wrote to Vernadsky in 1929 concerning the biosphere becoming a noosphere or planet of thought. He suggests that interpenetrating the biosphere is what he would all the “pneumatosphere” a sphere of spirit and culture intimately related to, affecting and being affected by the rest of the biosphere. The nephew of Solovyov once remarked that Florensky looks as if he had already lived a thousand years.

Alexander Chizhevsky (1897- 1964)

Like most cosmists he was interdisciplinary, acquiring great skill in music, poetry and painting. He produced hundreds of accomplished impressionist oil paintings, and water colors. Later with friends he went on archeological expeditions in Greece and Egypt.

He had increased humanities’ ability to anticipate changes in the weather. While Tsiolkovsky wanted to know how we can affect the cosmos, Chizhevsky wanted to know how the cosmos affects us and how we are subjected to the laws of nature. His life work would be the study of solar and cosmic influences on human behavior. He was called) Leonardo of the 20^thcentury with discoveries in aeroionization – air purifiers; heliobiology – the effects of solar pulsation on human life and hemodynamics which sheds new light in the circulating of blood through living bodies.

He writes as an uncompromising determinist. Everything of culture and the psyche consists of physiochemical and neurological interactions. Our blood flows with the veins of the cosmos and our heart beats with the pulse of the cosmos. Tsiolkovsky became his mentor and supporter of his publications.

The power of electricity in history

Chizhevsky argued that it is the principle of electricity that affects both culture and history. The power of electrons is to combine, attract and find larger units of matter and energy. Gravity magnetism, spacetime and matter-energy are all electronic. For Chizhevsky, the sun’s influence on the biosphere, including human behavior, is a matter of the transfer of electrons. The discovery that patterns of solar activity – sun storms, and sun stops – coincide with patterns of mass human behavior such as wars, revolutions and epidemics. He calls this new science historiometry.

Reds on Earth: From the Biosphere to the Noosphere

Animal species activity

Like all other animals, we humans have to earn a living in the environment in order to meet our needs. Each species has a specific activity, a “species activity” unique to itself by which adaptation is accomplished (for example, building dams is the species activity of beavers). All animals work – i.e., they expend energy in a focused way over time in order to survive and reproduce. But the overwhelming majority of animals do not deliberately cooperate with other members of their own species, except in the case of mammals in caring for their young. They complete all processes of work essentially alone. The simple biological strategy of most other animals is to graze, forage, or chase down prey in solitude. Humans, considered in isolation, without society or culture, and relying only on physical prowess, are mediocre competitors to other large-bodied mammals. Other animals can run faster, jump higher, and have greater sensory acuity.

Human species activity is cooperative

It is our social strategies that have made us the dominant large-bodied species on this planet, and these social strategies entail cooperation. It is our ability to cooperate with other human beings that gives us the edge over the rest of the animal kingdom. We cooperate by (a) pooling our resources, (b) creating a division of labor, and (c) working to a common end. Cooperation creates a social whole which is more than the sum of any individual. Human societies emerged as an adaptive strategy of homo sapiens to compensate for our physiological mediocrity. But society does far more than help us to survive and reproduce. Society is responsible for completing our humanization and expanding it over the course of history.

Cooperation changes human species-activity from work to labor. In laboring, we accept roles in a division of labor. Members of a hunting band agree beforehand that some will join together to frighten the game, while others will wait in ambush. Later, if they have been successful, they will share the kill with other members of the band who have stayed behind at the campsite. After all is done and they have finished consuming the edible parts of their prey, those members who did not participate in the hunt are expected to engage in other roles, such as sewing the carcass and tanning the leather of the animal.

The planetary noosphere is historical

For most of human history there was no noosphere. But in the last two centuries, our species has built a network of social institutions that reflect on each other (what Chardin called centrapedalization) around the Earth that changes, and is changed by, our biophysical environment. Society becomes akin to what Teilhard de Chardin termed a “noosphere”—a “super-organic” planetary feedback system, a “socio-sphere” nested within the biosphere. A look from outer space would show the noosphere concentrated in cities. Chardin poetically compared the system of cities of communication with electric power links and tied the circulation and electric power lines with the circulation of the nervous system.

It is within this socio-sphere (noosphere) that history takes shape. The dynamics taking place among other animals within the biosphere over time could be called “evolution.” “History” is a unique kind of irreversible and accumulating evolutionary activity that goes with the building of the noosphere. Without a noosphere there would be no history. With the few exceptions of those other animals that have some socio-culture, the human species is the only species on earth that produces history. History consists of socio-cultural systems changing over time.

Summing up:

Non-human animals Human beings

work labor

little or no cooperation cooperation: social roles

biological evolution socio-cultural evolution

evolution without history evolution with history

Human practice is the accumulating irreversible, recurring and conflicted process by which collective humanity intervenes in the biosphere, noosphere and history for the purposes of satisfying needs and wants. It is conflicted because it is both intentional and unintentional and because there are class struggles over the form and content of the intervention.

Mystics and mechanical materialists

There are at least three ways of understanding the relationship between the biosphere, the mind, the noosphere and the spiritual world. Mystics say that biosphere, mind and noosphere are all creatures of a spiritual world. The epistemological framework for mystics is with the relationship between a spiritual world and an individual. At the other extreme for mechanical materialists, the relationship is between the biosphere and the biological individual. They ignore the mind and the noosphere. Where mystics and mechanical materialists differ is in the ultimate nature of objective reality. For mystics the ultimate reality is the spiritual world. For mechanical materialists it is biophysical nature. But they agree that subjectivity begins with the individual.

The place and misplace of mind in socio-historical psychology

For Vygotsky and the sociohistorical school, in between the biophysical world and the individual mind is a sociohistorical noosphere layer of reality. It is sociohistorical objectivity of human practice which engages in an expanding feedback loop with the biosphere. Individual subjectivity emerges from and interacts with the historical-social layer of reality. The individual mind does not engage the biosphere directly, only indirectly. The individual mind does not even become a human mind until it is socialized and historicized. For dialectical materialists like Vygotsky, the human mind is created out of a socio-historical network of institutions from birth to death. Vygotsky, Leontiev and Luria claimed that psychological skills first originate through structural, meaningful, cooperative, and recurring forms of labor.

The main function of the mind is externally, not internally, driven. Primarily, the human mind is concerned with the collective engagement of transforming external objects through the laboring process in order to satisfy basic needs. Introspection or self-reflection is the second stage of this process, but it is not the main focus as it is with idealist mysticism. For dialectical materialists the human mind is a function, not a substance (as it is for mystics) of highly organized material bodies – human beings. To say that the human mind is inseparable from society and history is not to say that other animals do not have minds. What it does mean is that without intense social life and verbal language, animal minds are mostly imprisoned in the present. It is the socialization and historization of Homo sapiens that is responsible for making the mind a human mind.

From brains to minds

Before the emergence of the human mind, internality had an origin in matter, specifically the brain. The brain is an adaptive responsive to a rapidly changing biosphere where instinct was a less and less reliable resource. There are non-social creatures without brains that have no mind. With the emergence of a central nervous systems, animals developed brains. But is only when animals have a social life and brains, that pre-human minds appear. To be sure, nature was physical, chemical and biological before the brain or the mind appeared. So, the mind is first a product of material nature (the brain) and later through the social and historical practice of human beings, the mind emerges. Then the mind becomes a coproducer through society and history with nature. For materialists, there is no mind beyond nature, society or history. A dialectical materialist, unlike a mechanical materialist does not reduce the mind to the brain. While the brain is a necessary condition for the mind, once the mind emerges through its building of a socio-historic layer of nature, mind becomes more than the brain. With this foundation in place let us return to the cosmists.

God builders and biocosmists

Marxist intellectuals and future Soviet officials including Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky wanted to redirect the religious character and spiritual energy to the Russian revolution. Gorky says that mysticism and science are not incompatible. They wanted to create a new Adam for a new Eden. In Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, the character Bazarov contended that nature was not a temple but a laboratory. These “God Builders” wanted to combine non-Euclidean math, subatomic particles and depth psychology. In the arts they wanted to follow Wagner to unite all the arts into a single great pageant. Alexander Bogdanov was a physician, an experimental scientist and a science fiction writer who wrote Red Star which was published in 1908. His major philosophical work was Tektology— which he called the science of organization. It anticipated the work in Western Europe on general systems theory and cybernetics.

Valerian Muraviev (1885-1932) was as much an alchemist as a Marxist. He hoped for a total alchemical transformation of the individual and the cosmos. He wrote a book called Control Over Time to parallel the discoveries of Einstein. Muraviev wanted to investigate time, not in a lab but in history and society based on the Russian experience of the revolution and the total reorganization of society. He said it is the collective, not the isolated individual that is the shaper and director of humanity.

Valerian said there are two kinds of time:

Inner time – the realm of freedom—under the control of the individual
External time – the realm of necessity

The goal of the collective is to expand their control over the whole universe along with death. Soviet scientists and scholars are to be the guiding force for the common task in science. Valerian said we must create a population of supermen who overcome time. By contrast, bourgeois society focuses on individual creativity which is the representative of a world-view of commercial interests. This creative industry presently creates objects, not for overcoming time but for passing time.

For the biocosmists the time had come to inhabit outer space and to bring life to all the inhabitants. They viewed the struggle against death as a logical continuation of the revolution’s struggle against bourgeois culture. They agreed with Fedorov that death was not inevitable.

How Reds Would Explore the Cosmos: The Cosmic Extension of the Noosphere

Beyond technological determinism and humanism

The noosphere could become not merely the realm of interaction between society and the biosphere but rather the interaction between all cosmic civilizations and the rest of the universe. In their book The Universe and Civilization, Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko lay out what a communist practice would be like in space exploration. When it comes to the exploration of outer space there is a Flatland duality to overcome between the technicist conception which regards the astronautical as a panacea for all the difficulties and hardships of social development. The opposite is romantic humanist whose supporters reject the needs for the development of an astronautic society and insist the focus to be only with man’s earthly problems.

For communists the exploration of outer space is not a stage in the natural evolution of living matter on earth. Rather It is a new stage in social history. The space age is an explosion-like extension into infinity of man’s sphere of practical-critical activity on earth. To one degree or another, the cosmos has influenced and continues to influence the development of mankind and the outer terrestrial environment. But now that applied astronautics has emerged, society is beginning to affect the nature of the cosmos.

Realms of space exploration

The authors say space exploration is now going on in the following fields:

Immediate vicinity of near space – the higher layers of the earth’s atmosphere, the ionosphere, the radiation belts and of outer space. This is accomplished though the help of astronomic instruments placed above the atmosphere (extra-atmospheric astronomy).
Processes are being studied that are artificially created in outer space by the human species. These include technological devices in flight like growing crystals in weightlessness. Others include medical and biological research done directly in flight or on objects placed in spacecraft.
Explorations of Earth from outer space such as meteorological observations and the study of natural resources and aquatic regions.

Should we try to faithfully reproduce terrestrial conditions in space? “No!” say Sevastaynov, Ursul and Shkolenko. The essence of creative humanity consists precisely of the ability of humans to change both of our external and internal nature in any direction we choose. They say:

the construction of cities, excavation of natural deposits, and utilization of underground space for communication may well be characterized as redistribution of the planets’ mass transfer of matter into surrounding space, creation of a porous planet. (97)

This tendency is what Buckminster Fuller called euhemerization – doing more with less.

Cosmicization of human practical critical activity

As human practice extends beyond the terrestrial realm there are new processes to consider. Now the conditions and objects of activity may be both terrestrial and cosmic. The range begins at one extreme with terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions. At the other are extreme cosmic objects under cosmic conditions. Here are the steps in between.

Earth	Moving to Outer Space
Terrestrial subjects (human culture)	Cosmic culture
Terrestrial objects (prehuman, extra human nature)	Cosmic objects
Terrestrial conditions	Cosmic conditions
Terrestrial instruments tools	Cosmic instruments

Here are the full fifteen steps:

The terrestrial subject studies terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions using terrestrial instruments
Terrestrial subject studies the effect of cosmic conditions on terrestrial objects with the aid of terrestrial instruments. How solar processes affect physical, chemical and biological objects on the Earth (the sun, conscious utilization of cosmic conditions in terrestrial production)
Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth in a natural way (meteorites and cosmic radiations)
Terrestrial subjects studying terrestrial objects under terrestrial conditions with the help of space instruments (rocket technology and automatic stations for exploring the earth)
Terrestrial subject studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions using terrestrial technical instruments of cognition (astronomy)
Although the core of practice is humanity’s affect on objects of cognition and results in changes in these objects, nothing of the kind takes place in the case of astronomic observation. The object of cognition astronomy here affects the subject.
Terrestrial subject uses terrestrial instruments of cognition for studying cosmic objects reaching the earth with the aid of spacecraft
The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments for observing terrestrial objects and conditions (permanent orbital stations)
Unmanned recent devices transport cosmic and raw materials and instruments of labor to earth
Automatic cosmic implements are used to process cosmic objects under cosmic conditions for production on celestial bodies and in satellites orbiting earth
The subject undergoing cosmicization uses space instruments of cognition for observing terrestrial objects and conditions
The subject undergoing cosmicization studies the behavior of terrestrial objects under space conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments
The space environment and the conditions of space flight have specific features – weightlessness, vacuum, radiation. There is a need to study living beings under these conditions.
13) The subject undergoing cosmicization uses cosmic instrument on cosmic objects in his study of the possibility of creating terrestrial conditions (conditions similar to terrestrial ones are created for astronaut on spaceships) This task also arises in the construction of inhabit bases on the Moon and the planets
The highest achievement in science is that the subject who undergoes cosmicization studies cosmic objects under cosmic conditions with the aid of cosmic instruments.

Conclusion

This article begins by arguing Russia is different from the West philosophically in its rejection of both empiricism and rationalism. In addition, economically it has consistently rejected capitalism even when not in its Soviet phase. Politically it has said no to liberalism, and lastly Russians have turned their backs on Western transcendental religions. Next, I have defined Russian cosmism as having eight characteristics. I close the last part of the first section by naming the personal traits these cosmologists have in common, including their multilingual, self-educated, interdisciplinary and optimistic approach. They included mystics, poets, rocket scientists, geochemists, mathematicians, inventors and engineers.

In the second half of the article, I gave a sample of specific cosmists who were science fiction writers, mystics and philosophers including the interest of some in Theosophy.

Next I turned to the cosmitism of four scientists: Tsiolkovsky; Vernadsky; Florensky, Chizhevsky and their various fields of study.

In the last third of the article, I turned to a communist theory of how the earth is becoming a new layer of evolution called the “noosphere”. I closed the article with a visionary description of how communist theory of the noosphere on earth can be extended into the spreading of noospheres to other planets.

The post The Slavophile Russian Cosmists first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

High Pagan Radicalism

Bruce Lerro — Thu, 29 Dec 2022 04:05:59 +0000

Orientation

Foundational polarities between paganism and monotheism

What is the difference between a universe and a cosmos? Is the world eternal where something cannot come out of nothing or does the world have a beginning? What is primary, stasis or change? What might the difference between verbs and nouns have to do high paganism and monotheism? How might the difference between a proverb, a riddle and a paradox be connected to high paganism and monotheism. Is conflict a constitutional part of the world or is it a sign of deficiency? Does the complexity of life on earth require a hierarchy? How might the presence or absence of writing determine whether a culture is animist, polytheist or monotheist? Monotheism and materialism are usually presented as opposites. Yet they have more in common with each other than they do with high paganism.

Paganism is often connected to pantheism. Yet the author who I will be citing, Kadmus, contends that there are significant differences between the two. Contrary to pantheists, high pagan culture does not suggest that everything has spirit or mind. It is possible for an entity to be aware without being conscious. Bodies precede minds but minds help to focus bodies. Minds do not have a disembodied existence. How important is obedience and faith to a sacred experience of pagans? Is there a place for rebellion in sacred experience?

Variety of paganisms

What does it mean to be pagan? Paganism means different things in cultures, depending on the level of social complexity. In his book True to the Earth, Kadmus divides paganism into three periods:

High paganism
Late paganism
Monotheism

High paganism was the time of oral tribal societies, including Norse and Celtic cultures, along with the Archaic Iron Age Greece and the Mycenean and Minoan civilizations. It also include pre-colonized native and African cultures. These societies were either animist or polytheist.

In Greece, late paganism corresponds to the period of Plato, Aristotle and Plotinus after writing was introduced. During this period tribal societies were forcibly changed by foreign invasions. Furthermore, late paganism was more intellectual (due to writing) and less oriented to the body and the senses. Within late paganism there are two types: hard polytheists and soft polytheists:

Those who believe in the literal reality and independent existence of gods (hard polytheists).
Those who claim the gods are archetypes of the collective unconscious (soft polytheists).

With the rise of monotheism, paganism led a marginal existence, being carried on underground and displayed through the arts. There are many examples of how Christianity built itself up from doing violence to pagan cultures or recuperating pagan texts. points to one example of scribes who added Christianity to Beowulf.

But the fact that all pagan cultures originate in oral cultures allows us to hypothesize that orality provides a foundation for key conceptual distinction between pagans and monotheists.

All oral cultures are either animist or polytheist pagans.
All writing cultures can be either late pagan or monotheistic.
Monotheist cultures have never existed without writing.

Kadmus describes most of his book as focusing upon what we know of the high-pagan culture or oral Archaic Greece and the transitions that occurred during the late pagan, classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods. Though Kadmus identifies much more with pagan Celt culture, Greece has the most extensive and detailed record, not only of the transition from oral to literate tradition, but also of the movement from high paganism to late paganism. High paganism of tribal societies is the most radically pagan because the difference between oral and literate societies is the key to understanding how different high paganism was from monotheism. I first described these differences between high and late paganism in my book From Earthspirits to Skygods.

Pagan vs Monotheist Metaphysics

We normally think of metaphysics as having been consciously worked out by philosophers such as Spinoza, Kant or Hegel. But metaphysics exists whether there are philosophers to craft it or not. Kadmus gives the analogy with the lens of an eyeglass. If you wear the glasses all your life you become insensitive to the difference between what you see with the lens as opposed to what you see without them. He says our current metaphysics is a monotheist One, and it doesn’t matter whether we are agnostic or even atheists. In fact, one of his most interesting points is that science and atheism in their current formulation derive from a monotheist foundation.

Cosmos vs universe

The differences between high paganism and monotheism are far deeper than whether you believe in one god or many gods. They go all the way back to what we call the material world. Pagans call the material world a “cosmos”, and cosmos means parts without wholes. This implies that from the very beginning the material world is multiple. There is no totalizing hierarchy or unity. For pagans, parts without wholes grow without ever repeating themselves. As Heraclitus says, you can never step in the same river twice. The complexification adds to itself without ever reducing phenomenon to simplicity. For monotheists, however, the material world is a universe, meaning order. There is unification into a One and everything else is reduced into a hierarchy.

Is conflict primary or is it a derivative?

For high paganism, conflicts among the parts are fundamental and they never cease. On page 30 Kadmas points out that in order for Zeus to overthrow his father Kronos, he had to make allies among the Titans who were willing to provide him with a powerful lightning bolt. Olympians divide the world into thirds: Zeus in the sky, Poseidon in the seas and Hades in the underworld. The Olympian regime is a compromise and one which is always in danger of breaking out into new conflict. Olympus may have a king, but his throne rests on a multitude of complex and changeable political maneuvers. There is no divine right of kings in pagan cosmology.

A similar point can be made concerning Odin. His rule involves deals he has struck between two different families of the gods, Vanir and Aesir. Zeus and Odin are both frequently protecting and enforcing promises and oaths in their roles, because it is upon this foundation of tentative agreement and alliance that their own power rests. Power in pagan cosmology is collective and not based on a One or Ultimate.

For monotheists, conflicts are seen as indicators that something is wrong, whether it is the work of the devil, due to human short-sightedness or evil. Most of the great Western philosophers from Plato to Hegel imagined conflict as something to be gotten rid of.

Are there dualities or polarities?

Those cultures most influenced by writing are more likely to understand opposites as dualisms such as nature vs the supernatural; worldly vs unworldly; living vs non-living. This is also shown in the beliefs of other gods. We are accustomed to members of one religion assuming almost by default that all other religions are wrong or that pagan gods don’t exist. This is foreign to pagan culture generally. High paganism is characterized by religious curiosity and even hunger for new practices, new gods, new rituals and new wisdom. A collector’s spirit exudes paganism more than anything else and this is passed down from one generation to the next.

Monotheistic substance ontology

Kadmus tells us that monotheistic metaphysics was first clearly developed and articulated in the West by Plato and Aristotle. The invention of substance ontology is one of the most basic breaks with pagan metaphysics. The simple idea of substance is that for change to occur there must be something that stays the same throughout the changes and owes its existence to it. Change is derived from the unchanging.

Aristotle’s idea of God is the unmoved mover. God creates the universe and provides the energy. Being that then leads to all the further changes. The Unmoved Mover provides the goal to perfection to all things. The meaning of perfection is singular.

Stasis vs change

In Plato and Aristotle’s thinking, whether we start from the ground up or the top down, change always depends on the One. There is no true multiplicity, only the illusion of multiplicity. For monotheistic metaphysics sameness and unity are foundation and primary; differences are derivative and ultimately bad. Plato argues that any change that occurs moves towards perfection of the One. The One is not changed or improved with contact from below. In Genesis it is stated that in the beginning is the One and the void. For monotheists, the world has a beginning and something can come out of nothing. What is orderly is still. Change, as far back as Plato’s time, is derivative, inferior and sometimes an illusion. In the politics of purity, the emphasis is on reduction, totalizing and oneness. It focuses on perfection, purity and the one narrow path, a general ethics which consistent demand is to be integrated, unified and ruled by the One. The monotheistic universe is like a noun. Pagan cosmos is like a verb. More of this below.

One vs many definitions

Both Socrates and Aristotle want to reduce definition to a single one. For example, Socrates seeks a general abstract definition. Aristotle wants to reduce things to their essential nature. But the problem is there are multiple definitions, some of which overlap with others. Others conflict with each other while others are incommensurable. After all, there are etymological definitions, operative definitions ostensive definitions and dictionary definitions, all of which are useful or not depending on the situation. For high paganism, wisdom is the ability to appreciate and see as many of these truths as possible without allowing any of them to dominate. The gods have many names but not one true name. The same can be true of people. It is very common in most pagan cultures for people to take on and leave behind names as they pass through important developmental events.

Against the gods: the One in Plato and Socrates

Written cultures can afford to ascend from the particular to the general because writing frees language from the burden of remembering and all the theatricality that must accompany it. These cultures can afford to hypothesize that the nature of things is one ultimate and general reductive meaning, For example, in writing we have paradoxes and riddles which become clear later. Kadmus says Socrates insists that if we are going to arrive at a unified understanding of the good, we are going to have to reject the multiplicity of the gods. Plato is also agitating in his dialogues for a rejection of the gods of archaic poetry and myth in favor of the eternal, the perfect and the transhuman.

The importance of vision in monotheistic thought

Rationality derived from writing and reading relies on a cognitive and epistemological distance and based on visual models of knowledge. Visual metaphors for truth prioritize singularity. Visual unity rests entirely on spatiality. We must have a certain ideal distance from things to see them. This is the basis of objectivity. Kadmus describes writing as creating an unavoidable distance between the reader, the writer, thinker and the object. Not surprisingly, in oral cultures hearing is more important than seeing. The work of Eric Havelock covers the immediacy of the senses in oral cultures in his wonderful Preface to Plato.

Materialism is closer to spiritual monotheism than to paganism

Typically when we think of monotheism we think of a belief in a single god. What is implied in this is that monotheism has something to do with spirituality. But a deeper understanding of monotheism can include secular traditions such as atheism or Marxism. Dialectical materialism is, after all, a holistic monist philosophy. Kadmus points out there are two very common modes of thought applied to bodies in monotheistic metaphysics, neither of which captures the high pagan view of bodies:

Reductive materialism of Anaximenes Empedocles or Democritus with their search for the basic element, whether it be water or air or atoms; and
An abstract and often spiritual non-material organizing principle that makes a body a body, such as Plato and Aristotle, a form.

In each there is an abstract principle of order and organization. For Plato and the Neoplatonists this principle is non-material and transcendental and plays a totalizing and reductive role. On the other hand, thinking in terms of base elements is the earliest form of materialism. Writing allowed for the conception of an abstract materialism as well as spiritualism. Monotheistic thinking would either totalize things from above (abstract spiritual monotheism) or reduce things to their basic constituents (reductive materialism).

Pagan Process Ontology

In the beginning was the verb

Kadmus tells us that in all language there is historical tendency for centrally important nouns to derive first from active verbs that predate abstract nouns. The most important words in any language are originally words for actions. A good image for pagan processes is a horse moving with a flowing mane, forever in motion.

Growth comes before there is something. There is “doing” before we can speak of “doers”. There are actions before we can talk of actors or the objects of actions. Eros is the unending drive of time and change which rests at the base of the cosmos.

Pagan animism argues that If all things are living, and death is only a relative term involving change in a type of life, singularity and individuality are all relative terms, only temporary and relative. “I am” statements are replaced with claims to having been or become. For example, “I have been in many shapes before I assumed constant forms”. 115 pagan cultures are always in the middle of the story still being developed and unstoppable and unpredictable. The entire subject-object mode of thought is a product of monotheism and derived from a more basic element, which between actor and acted upon are separated.

The absence of the inanimate in paganism

Kadmus says the ancient Greek concept of nature derives from the process of growing. In Homer, there is no noun for nature but in English it would be naturing. The Romans also had a process orientation, where nature is born and bears future generations. Anything like a non-living nature would be literally unthinkable. In Hesiod, the various aspects of the world around us are each understood as the living children of previous gods. This includes what we frequently call inanimate, from streams and mountains to oceans and the misty vapors of the skies. The paradox is how do we understand death in a cosmos where everything is understood as living?

In interpreting Heraclitus, what is death for one thing, for example earth, is life for another, in this case fire. Fire therefore lives in the death of the earth. The same spectrum is captured in the movement from one element to another. For example, the movement from a living body to a corpse consists of a loss of element of fire and air in the earthly and watery body. Originally, the term psyche was derived from terms of “breath”. The air, as psyche escapes when the fire of the warmth of the body, dies and turns into the cold water of a decaying corpse.

Multiplicity is primacy

For a pagan metaphysics, change and multiplicity are primary. Eros or desire in Hesiod represents the force of change itself, as one of the first things to exist. This is a multiplicity without an existing hierarchy midst of diversity, and an associative, relational logic. An event ontology is pluralistic cosmos of relationally understood active bodies with agency (but not necessarily consciousness. See below). What we take into ourselves becomes part of us. This is knowledge of union, not necessarily consciousness. This is participatory knowledge. Pagan process ontology rejects the fundamental nature and even the existence of substance, whether that substance, is understood to be matter (or energy) or spirit (mind, consciousness).

The Permeability Between Divinity and Humanity

The permeability between divinity and humanity is crucial in high paganism. Heroes may be made into gods. Kadmus gives us the example of the immortal sea nymph Calypso who offers Odysseus ambrosia (the food of the gods) which would make him immortal if he ate it. What we are really dealing with is a spectrum – plants, animals, humans, part divine. Heroes, monsters, nymphs and gods all display as a spectrum in terms of what life and death means to them. Another example is Euripides in the Bacchae in which Dionysus comes as a foreigner to Thebes and inspires the women to run off to the mountains to practice his sacred rites. There the women cross over the line between genders and between human and animal.

One of the main characteristics of many, but not all, divine bodies is their ability to change from one form to another in almost every imaginable variation; the earth on which we walk that gives birth to plants around us is the fertile body of Gaia according to Hesiod. Her children are among the divinities like Kronos and Rhea) and include mountains, hills and rivers. In the case of Zeus, he doesn’t simply become animals of various sorts, but he even becomes a lightning bolt or a golden rain. the spectrum-like orientation of nature became one of the main aspects of high paganism that Plato dedicated himself to attacking. In pagan cultures when a person embodies particularly striking characteristics that falls within the domain a given god, they were frequently understood to have become that god. We are inter-bodied and flow in and out of each other.

Importance of the Ancestors

This theme of the well-being of the dead depending on the attentions and actions of the living is particularly important when we consider the practices of ancestor veneration cross culturally. These practices prove durable throughout millennia of monotheistic dominance, even when the dependence of the dead upon the living disappears. After all, the dead remember what it is to have been human and they more than the divinities are able to be understood by us and more fully and successfully communicated with.

The Tension Between Earth, Sky and Sea Gods

It would be naïve to think that all was well within the spectrum of paganism before the rise of monotheism, for there was tension. The roots of this tension was between the celestial and chthonic forces between the sky (Olympus), the earth the sea and the underworld. In early generations of the gods of the Greeks, including Gaia and her children, the Titans were associated with the Earth and the underworld. As I said earlier the rule of Odin and his fellow gods was largely predicated on the outcome of an early war between two different families of gods: Aesir and Vanir. Yet the ability of the gods to work magic, compose poetry, partake in prophecy and experience power all derive from the relatively peaceful intermixing of the Norse gods with giants and elves. Odin himself is the child of a giant. Contrary to those who associate Viking gods with white supremacy, Kadmus tells us we would be hard-pressed to find a less racially and culturally pure community than that of the Norse gods.

Monstrous Sacred Presences

Paganism has not dealt just with anthropomorphic gods. There are monstrous gods, and gods that embody characteristics of animals. There is monstrous Typhon, the last child of Gaia, whose head was said to be a hundred snakes. There was the Babylonian Tiamat, a monstrous goddess, who was both the fertile source of all life and terrifying serpent or dragon. It would be a very serious mistake to assume the huge spectrum of divine and semi-divine within the pagan cosmos are primarily human at all.

The Primacy of Bodies in Pagan Metaphysics

To speak of the body is not to speak of matter, but of ongoing patterns of change

When bodies are understood as patterns of activities, patterns within larger patterns. They are the penetrated and penetrating. Kadmus writes on page 70 the psyche is an aerial body, the part of the body that looks out for the rest, the breath of life within our body. Death at any given stage of this process is a change within bodies as transformations of one type of body into another. Calling something “dead” is premature. Many of the cells of bodies still live as it decomposes. The body becomes in some way even more alive with various types of life than it was before it died. Nobody is ever dead. The same will be true for the difference between mortal and immortal bodies. Without a body, it is unclear to an oral pagan culture what it would mean for something to exist.

For the ancient Greeks, there are gods of the river and there are gods that are rivers. There are both gods of the sea such as Poseidon and the god that is an ocean. There are goddesses of the earth, Demeter, and also the goddess earth, Gaia. There is the god of the sky Zeus and the god that is heaven Ouranos. The bodies of these gods are the world, and put together they are the cosmos. Pagan animism understands everything that exists in terms of living bodies (not consciousness.) The more common distinction between the living and dead are actually distinctions between types of bodies. Nothing is ever dead in an absolute sense but only dead to certain type of life.

Bodies are Wholes, not Parts

A body is not an arrangement constituted out of parts, but rather a whole that alone constitutes the parts of which it is made. A hand cannot be a hand without a body. It is not possible to put together a collection of pre-existing body parts to create a total body. One can’t have a river without the land through which it passes or a tree without the earth it grips and the sky it upholds. These relations, however, are not constituent parts but rather larger patterns and webs. Bodies are aways interpenetrating and interpenetrated. Bodies are incompatible with the reductionist approaches of the monotheists.

Bodies are matrices of relational actions. Kadmus writes:

One specific example of a body of a goddess makes this clear. Consider Gaia. She is the Earth. She is not the avatar of the earth, not the archetype of the spirit or intelligence of the Earth, but the Earth itself. She is (to quote Hesiod) the broad-bosomed earth. The pushing of pressure and flow of volcanic forces; the seep of water, the holding of roots, the cracking of rocks by ice, the weight of the ice caps bearing down; the weak and strong forces of the atomic level; at the largest level the centrifugal force lies with gravity and the movement of the seas. Gaia is one of the broadest of the gods and of the most concretely bodied. (98)

Our concept of private property under capitalism makes no sense in the scale of nature (no society). When I grow a tree it is as much the case that my body becomes part of the tree, part of its process of self-expression. The tree “owns” me just as much as I own it. The tree is also in partnership with things other than me, belying any claim to an exclusive relationship with it. The right to relationships replaces rights to property. It can’t be said that I own my own body. I am my body. It is not property.

The gods are late arrivals

As can be seen in Hesiod in his poem Works and Days, in the beginning there are natural processes, while the gods are late arrivals. As Kadmus points out, in Hesiod’s Theogony, in the beginning is chaos and the abyss, then Gaia and the earth come into being. Earth’s first child Ouranos is starry heaven, haunted by the nymphs who live in the deep mountain depths. Ouranos bore the Ocean with its deep currents. Kronos is the youngest of the Titans, the children of Gaia. The gods are late comers. For example, Kronos or Zeus are not first born and a ruling order. The same is true in Norse mythology – Odin is late developing.

Lying and conniving are foundational among pagan gods and goddesses

Unlike the unmoving truth of the monotheists in pagan mythology the gods lie, steal and deceive. This behavior often enough drove early monotheistic thinkers away from their pagan roots. But don’t these gods speak the truth of our experience in the world now? The Gorgons were known as the Furies, or Erinyes, and their job was to torment those who kill their own blood relatives. The furies are of the same generation as the children of Gaia, who was the first goddess to possess Delphi. Flattering these sacred presences requires rhetoric or the magic of knowing which gods require which types of flattery (magick) when the flattery should be used.

Kadmus tells us that it is through theft and lies that Hermes will work his way into becoming accepted to Olympus. But the conflict cannot be a direct clash of powers, for such a confrontation would threaten to stability of the Olympus itself. Instead, it will be a competition of wits and deception. The newly born Hermes leaves the place of his birth and immediately invents the musical instrument, the lyre. We can see in these examples how deception persuasion, or flattery is a strategy to negotiate power.

Pagan myths throughout the world often reveal divine power to be as much about successful deception and transformation as it is about raw might.

Please see table A for a summary of this article so far.

High Paganism	Category of Comparison	Monotheism
Cosmos. Parts without wholes	What do we call the material world	Universe. Wholes before parts Order
Verbs	Important part of speech	Nouns
Concrete particulars		General names
The flowing manes of horses	Images	Plotinus’ One
Accumulating Growth	Direction of movement	Unification and reduction
Complexification, additive “and also”	Complexity vs simplicity	Simplicity
Hesiod—Theogony Natural processes come first Gods come later Heraclitus Fragments	Foundation text	Genesis—in the beginning is the One. One and the void. Plato’s Timaeus
Cosmos is eternal Something cannot come from nothing	Eternal vs origin in time	Universe has a beginning Creates everything out of nothing
Conflict is basic in play or war	Place of conflict	A sign that something is wrong
Expanding horizontalism	Place or misplace of hierarchy	Hierarchy is important Timaeus
Bodies are wholes Wholes within wholes	What are bodies?	Constituent parts Organized by spirit, mind or consciousness
Lying and conniving are foundational for gods and goddesses	Lying and truth	God would never lie Lying is always a vice whether it be the devil or humanity

Language as remembrance in oral culture

When we think of language, its most obvious use seems to be primarily personal communication between individuals. But oral and written culture face different problems. For oral cultures, the main problem is how to keep from forgetting. For them an additional function of language is to remember and preserve without the prospect of writing anything down. As Eric Havelock has pointed out in his many books, oral transmission must include much more than stories. They trot out all the arts to keep them memorable including rhythm, meter, rhyme and changes in pitch. Abstract concepts are too thin and dry to be remembered. Concrete particulars are much easier to remember.

Importance of Parataxis and Proverbs in Oral Culture

Kadmus describes the most basic nature of oral thought and language as parataxis. This is additive and follows the associative logic, “and also”. In parataxis there are no structures of subordination. Oral concepts are based on irreducible complexity which echoes and resonates related to each other without any point in the web being able to be absolutely prioritized. It is the logic of pluralism rather than monism or holism which wants to gathers processes to a point and freezes processes into things.

As we saw before. a central aspect of meaning in oral societies is its irreducibility to one meaning, and we see this web of echoing resonances clearest in the attitudes of most oral societies to proverbs and forms of divination like Tarot and oracles. Proverbs have multiple meanings, not always consistent with each other. They are an ever-growing web of contradictory messages. Heraclitus is a thinker who made the art of multiple meanings his expertise. Proverbs are not principles because principles have one reductive meaning that can be applied consistently to different cases.

High Paganism is not Panpsychicism

There is no independent psyche

Kadmus writes that in archaic Greece the psyche was not the ultimate organizing principle of the body. The psyche and the body are engaged in a complex partnership rather than a division between chaotic matter on the one hand and order on the other. The psyche should best be understood as a body within a body. This does not mean:

we can weigh the soul to show there has been a substantial material soul that leaves the body at death; and
evidence of the presence of a body does not mean it is tied to a specific type of material energy.

Hylozoism vs Panpsychism

One of the most common arguments found in contemporary animism is the urge to understand what it means to say all things that are living have minds or spirit. But for high paganism there is no distinction between minds, spirts and bodies. All bodies live but saying they live does not mean all bodies and minds are spirits, unless we are talking about the very specific types of body combinations such as our own. To focus on the mind and the soul as the foundation of life or human existence is to engage in a specific kind of anthropomorphic projection. This is like treating the body as just a specific suit of clothes, a prison or an abstract object that the soul puts into motion. Panpsychism means that everything has psyche. This is a mistake since the breath part of life is rather unique to only certain types of life. Some living bodies do not have a psyche. However, Aristotle will attempt to break down different parts, aspects or types of soul that capture these differences. Yet Kadmus says his thinking in terms of reductive soul and soul types is not a true pagan view.

Focusing psyche does not mean being conscious

Oral societies don’t think of consciousness the way we do. Being aware is something we and our bodies do something that we have or are. The action of paying attention only gets turned into an abstract entity or a property with the development of writing which pushes us to turn to turn verbs and action words into timeless nouns. To say that something is alive can mean that everything has agency, but not necessarily that everything has consciousness. Having agency does mean that everything is capable of response or of some form of communication but being conscious of the process t’aint necessarily so. We act, speak and think only in moments of breakdown. Then we reflect in such a way to become conscious of these things when there is a problem. To capture the high pagan view of the cosmos, we must resist the urge to turn the action of focusing on something into having awareness. Anytime contemporary animism or panpsychism tries to bring in consciousness we have fallen into anthropomorphism.

Consciousness as a product of writing and a visual model

Kadmus claims that consciousness is the lynchpin of a view of human nature which isolates us from the world in which we exist. It is founded on a visual model and artifacts of writing. We think of consciousness as a reflection that separates the thing looked at and the thing looking. The modern idea of consciousness is distributed among all things, rather than among interconnected events. But we don’t need to appeal to the collective mind or spirit to understand the basis of this claim. None of these living events need to have awareness in the same form that we do. The “something is like” is often over-interpreted in terms of atomistic mind, consciousness or soul.

What is really going on in nature the transformation of bodies, rather than the transmigration of souls. The transformation from one thing to another, including into grains of wheat or waves on the sea, is taken by pagan cultures as real bodily potentiality. It undermines any idea of essence or purity. Pagan poetry is not symbolic, but rather aims as concrete literal descriptions

To summarize:

There is no independent psyche. Psyches are focusing points of bodies.
High pagan animism does not mean all pieces of matter have minds or psyche.
Most of high pagan animism does not have consciousness.

Pantheism is a product of late paganism when as a result of writing psyches, minds, spirits and consciousness have already been separated from the hylozoic high paganism. I think it is an attempt to reinvigorate late paganism after monotheism has destroyed high paganism.

Monotheistic vs High Pagan Politics

Monotheistic dictates: obedience and faith

Some pagans argue that paganism should not be political. Others say this is not possible. But understanding the earth as a living goddess has immediate implications for how we view laws concerning capitalism and ownership. Some Neopagans such as Mark Green (of Atheopaganism) are liberals who say that pagans should get behind the Democratic Party. Radical women like Starhawk and Z Budapest say there is a natural relationship between paganism and socialism.

However, what is not accounted for in any of this, is that there already is a theological politics in both monotheism and high paganism. The monotheistic God is a god of order. In Catholicism the angels and saints line up in a hierarchy to do what they are told. The stories of the Bible are based on the importance of the human population being obedient and what happens to you when you are not obedient. If the world doesn’t make sense, we are told to have faith. I am the “Lord Thy God thou shalt not have strange gods before me” is one of the clearest, anti-pagan statements ever made. Faith is about something other than belief. It is about obedience.

Polytheistic dictates: plot, scheme and rebel

On the contrary, high paganism does not involve the dutiful following of orders. As we saw earlier the gods plot, scheme and fight with each other, as well as with humanity. Kadmus writes that rebellion against the gods, playing one god off against another, leveling threats against deities and taking stands in godly conflicts are well-attested to in pagan magical practices. Rebellion against the gods was common. No pagan god ever told the human population to have faith. The concept of a test of faith is exceptionally foreign to the pagan mindset.

For example, Kadmus says in the Eleusinian mysteries the power of rebellion against the Olympian order is prominent. Following the disruption of her plan to provide mortals with immortality, the rageful Demeter demands a temple be built for her at Eleusis in repayment for the way in which she had been doubted by Demophon’s mother. Against that division of power put in place by Zeus, Hades and Poseidon, Demeter stands alone. Demeter’s rebellion results in the Eleusinian Mysteries with its benefits for humanity. It is the central insight of paganism that this fracture, this inevitable contradictions in the pluralistic nature of the reality can be implemented for the benefit of empowerment of humanity among the powers of the cosmos. We also see rebellion in the case of Heracles, who frequently works against the will of Zeus. We see rebellion in the Titan Prometheus, who rebelled against Zeus in ways that resulted in humanity’s benefit.

Further, the Roman poet Lucan describes a witch launching into dramatic threats against the underworld gods unless they send her the specific spirit she desires to speak to: “Upon you, Hades, worst of the world’s rulers, shall send Titan the sun bursting your caverns open, and you will be blasted by the instantaneous light of day”. Siding with any gods will ultimately consist of rebelling against others. If a god refused to show its existence and power, refused to contribute to human life, refused to grant its insight to its worshipers, refused to have any intimate relationship with its people, then this god is hardly worth bothering with.

See Table B for a summary of this last section.

Oral Cultures High paganism	Oral or Written Culture	Literal Cultures Late Paganism, Monotheism
Memorability	What is most important in language?	Clarity
Concrete particulars	Particular vs general	Concepts in general One ultimate and reductive meaning
Many definitions	Definitions	Socrates seeks a general, abstract definition Aristotle wants to reduce things to their essential nature
Present between performer and participants	Relationship between speaker and participants	Writing creates an unavoidable distance between the reader, the writer, the thinker and the object
Intersubjective Immediate mixing of all the senses		Objectivity We must have a certain ideal distance from things to see them
Auditory unity depends on time	Type of sensual unity	Visual unity rests entirely on space
Auditory plurality		Visual metaphors prioritize singularity Visual model of unity, space and distance
The most basic nature of oral thought and language is parataxis, proverbs	Structure of sayings	Riddles and paradoxes whose meaning becomes clear later
Interdependent echoes	Relationships in nature	Things
Hylozoic life everywhere Beings are in a spectrum and change form Permeability of boundaries	Levels in nature	Inanimate, animate Levels have strict boundaries
Hylozoic pluralism Bodies precede psyche, spirits, consciousness		Panpsychism (late pagan) Psyche independent of bodies Spirits independent of bodies Minds independent of bodies Consciousness independent of bodies
Rebellion Demeter vs Zeus Hercules vs Zeus Prometheus vs Zeus	Place or misplace of authority	Obedience, faith

The post High Pagan Radicalism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Multiple Economic Fractures in Mordor

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 11 Dec 2022 04:20:24 +0000

Orientation

The golden age of left-wing economists

In part because the 1960s was still a period of capitalist abundance, there were few socialists in Yankeedom who pointed to the economic contradictions of capitalism as a motivator for the coming revolution. “Western Marxists” ignored the economy, imagining capitalism could go on forever. As first anarcho-communist and then as Situationists, the group I was in never talked about any economic laws that would drive the economy into a crisis. But a couple of my comrades, one from France, had been closely studying a book by Lyn Marcus (later his public name became Lyndon LaRouche) called Dialectical Economics. Here was a wake-up call for all of us to get back to economics, especially since by the late 1970s the days of economic abundance were over.

Throughout the next thirty years, good economic Marxists like Richard Wolff, David Harvey, Robert Brenner and John Bellamy Foster have carried the torch for political economy. However, it was not until The Great Recession of 2008 and the Occupy movement in 2011-2012 really brought economic crisis into the foreground of life in Mordor. Since then, more Marxist economists have emerged such as Michael Perelman, Michael Roberts, and Anwar Shaikh. They have all added depth and scope. Non-Marxist economics such as Michael Hudson, Steve Keen and Jack Rasmus have made acidic analyses of finance capital. The great value in all these economists is that they speak in natural language, not mathematical language. This makes it easier for the Yankee population to understand them.

Varieties of capitalist crises theory and their rivals

In his book The Long Depression Michael Roberts asks four key questions from which he derives eight possible answers about the nature of economic turmoil or even whether there is a crisis at all.

Is capitalism subject to economic crisis?

Within the camp which says no, a second question is answered.

1b) Do periodic fluctuations need fixing?

If the answer is “yes” you are a Keynesian like Paul Krugman. If the answer is “no” you are a libertarian like Milton Friedman. For the libertarians capitalism only goes through “business cycles”.

Within the camp that says “yes”, that capitalism is subject to crisis, a second question is asked:

Is the kernel of the crisis found in production?

If the answer is “no” you are an underconsumptionist like Marxists David Harvey or Rosa Luxemburg.

If the answer is “yes” about the kernel of the crisis found in production, there is another question:

2b) Are crises more than struggle over wages and profit shares?

If no, you are a profit-squeeze supporter. Economics associated with this are Baron and Sweezy and Richard Wolff.

If the answer to the kernel of the crisis is found in production is “yes”, a further question should be:

3a) Are crises integral to the accumulation crisis?

If the answer is “yes” you follow Marx’s argument about the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. This is advocated by Michael Roberts, Anwar Shaikh and Robert Brenner.

If the answer to the question is crisis integral to the accumulation process is “no” then a further question is asked.

4a) Does extra-consumption come from outside the system?

If the answer is “yes” you are a follower of Rosa Luxemburg or David Harvey and claim that capitalism has limited resources and needs imperialism to survive.

If the answer is “no” to the question then there is second question.

4b) Does extra consumption come from state intervention?

If the answer is “yes” you are a post Keynesian such as Steve Keen.

If the answer is “no” you are a Malthusian.

In this article I will be drawing from David Harvey’s book The Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. I picked this book, not because I agree with Harvey’s theory of crisis, but because he lays out the contradictions so exhaustively. I am not a political economist by training but I have studied hard to understand him. What is most important for my readers to understand is that there are a great number of reasons that capitalism is in very, very, very serious trouble.

What is a contradiction?

Harvey says a contradiction is when two seemingly opposing forces are simultaneously present within a particular situation, an entity, a process or an event. A contradiction can be produced either by innovations, disasters or slow decline.

Contradiction 1 Exchange-value is More Important than Use Value Though Use-Value Matters More in Real Life

The use value of a house is contained in the cost of its production. This includes all the materials that went into building the house as well as the cost of labor to complete the house. The use value of the house is its protection from bad weather conditions, prowlers, a place of comfort, privacy and social reproduction, including sex and taking care of children. The use value of a commodity is relatively stable.

But the exchange value of housing is not fixed. It is interdependent on surrounding houses. Property values can go down on my house if my neighbors’ houses are not kept up, even if my house has been kept up. On the other hand, a house that is not kept up can sell for a high price if it is located in a gentrifying neighborhood. Harvey points out that there have been property market crashes in 1928, 1973, 1987 and 2008. The contradiction is that use-values are captive to exchange values and this constantly destabilizes the economy. Harvey says exchange value is always in the driver’s seat.

Contradiction 2 Money is Valued Above the Social Value of Labor

Harvey identifies four constructive functions that money provides:

It is the means or medium of circulation. Before money, with barter exchange was dependent on both parties having goods the other wanted. Money overcomes the incongruity in immediacy of goods and services that limits direct barter.
It provides a single measuring rod for economic values of all commodities.
It provides a way to store value.
It delays the need to buy a commodity immediately.

But there is a gap between money and the labor that ultimately produces it. Money hides the social labor that went into its material form. The problem is that money, which is supposed to be used to measure value, itself become a kind of commodity— that is money capital. Its use value is that it can be used to produce more value profit or surplus value. Its exchange value is, for example, an interest payment.

Commodity money such as gold and silver are rooted in tangible commodities with definite physical qualities like:

It is relatively scarce.
The supply is relatively inelastic so they maintain their relative value against all other commodities over time.
These metals do not oxidant and deteriorate.
The physical properties are known and their qualities can be assayed accurately so their measure can easily be figured out.

The problem is these commodity moneys are awkward to use on a daily basis of coin tokens. Bits of paper and then electronic moneys became much more practical in the exchange of goods. They are good at storing value but not so good in circulating commodities.

The problem is also the desire for finance capital as a means of social power becomes an end in itself. This distorts the concrete relation of the money that would be required simply to facilitate exchange. It also throws a monkey wrench into the supposed rationality of capitalist markets. Harvey writes that one of the most dangerous contradictions of capital is that of compounding growth so that with the abandonment of the metallic base, money could be printed infinitely by whoever was authorized to do so. This is exactly what is happening now with the Fed freely printing money without any foundation in gold or any real social wealth. Money out-of-control from material products is what leads to financial depression.

Contradiction 3 Private Property and the State Often have Conflicting Interests

Keeping refugees and immigrants out vs the need for cheap labor

The kind of rationality the state typically imposes is illustrated by its urban and regional planning practices.The job of the nation-state is to protect their borders from unwanted refugees or immigrants. On the other hand, capitalists need migrants to work under-the-table for dirt cheap wages. Capitalists indirectly fight with the state over the status of migrant workers.

Capitalists vs the matriarchal state

Secondly, the state can be divided into its matriarchal and patriarchal functions. Matriarchal functions include unemployment insurance, pensions, welfare, road construction and repair. The patriarchal state functions include the military, the police and prisons. Capitalists are against the matriarchal functions of the state because they cut into profits. However, capitalists are more than willing to invest in the police to protect them, prisons to house the unemployed or the military to take the natural resources of other countries.

Patriotism vs global trade

Even within the patriarchal state there are contradictions. On one hand the military is very patriotic and expect that people will buy Yankee cars. Harvey says the state is interested in the accumulation of wealth and power on a territorial basis. On the other hand, capitalists will seek to make a profit anywhere in the world and will import foreign cars and many other goods. As many of you know, capitalist oil businesses were making profits from Germany during the Nazi era and the Yankee state had to force them to leave.

Neocon war of all against all vs liberal laissez-faire trade policies

Lastly, the patriarchal state often opposes capitalists in its international ambitions. For example, neocon foreign policy war mongers like Victoria Nuland wants war with Russia and China. Liberal capitalists on the other hand, want to trade with China. Capital is not the only agent involved in the pursuit of technological advantages in civil society. The state apparatus looks for superior weaponry, surveillance and other methods for policing the population.

Contradiction 4 Capitalists Acting in Their Own Short-term Self-interest Undermine the Conditions of Their Own Reproduction

If the use value of a product and the price of the commodity were the same, there would be no room for capitalist profit. One the one hand, the common wealth created by social labor comes in a great variety of use values from the most basic knives and forks, to the food we eat, to the cars we drive. to the houses we live in and the clothes we wear. The capitalist private appropriation of common wealth along with the expropriation of social labor is legally sanction under normal conditions of trade. But there is a dark unseen and illegal side of the market which Harvey includes such as robbery, thievery, swindling, corruption, usury, predation, violence which goes unaccounted for. In addition, there is market cornering, price fixing and Ponzi schemes. All these activities weaken the socio-production process. Harvey writes:

It is stupid to seek to understand the world of capital without engaging with the drug cartels, traffickers in arms and the various mafias and other criminal forms of organization that play such a significant role in world trade. (53)

All this swindling and double-dealing is labor expended in counter-production which weakens the amount of energy left for production. This production includes the amount of wages paid and products consumed by workers to get to the next day.

Contradiction 5 The Class Struggle Over the Proportion of Wages given to Workers as Part of the Working Day

Harvey states that one of the most outstanding aspects of the capitalist system is that it does not appear to rely on cheating. For Marxists, labor has two aspects. On one hand, labor as human species is activity which distinguishes us from the rest of the animals and produces all real social wealth. One the other hand, there is labor power which is a commodity the capitalist rents for roughly half the working day. This “fairness” of the wage rests on the assumption that laborers have an individualized private property right over the labor they are capable of furnishing. But in reality, workers have a social property right over their labor because the cooperative social labor of all the workers in factories and offices produces all the wealth.

The commodification of labor power is the only way to solve a seemingly intractable contradiction within the circulation of capital. This contradiction is that in a fully functioning capitalist system, where coercion, cheating and robbery are supposedly ruled out, the exchanges should be based on the principle of equality – we exchange use values of products with each other and the value of those use values should be roughly the same. For all capitalists to realize a positive profit requires the existence of more value at the end of the day than there was at the beginning means an expansion of total output of social labor. Without that expansion there can be no capital. Zero growth defines a condition of crisis for capital. Here there is no room for profit. So where does the profit come from? As Harvey says, there must exist a commodity that has the capacity to create more value than it has itself. That commodity is labor power. And this is what capital relies upon for its own reproduction. It’s the exploitation of the extra five or six hours of the workers’ pay that is pocketed by capitalists. In reaction to workers joining in unions for higher wages and better working conditions capitalists will:

lock workers out or close the businesses completely:
refuse to invest or reinvest in workers or infrastructure;
deliberately create unemployment and create an industrial reserve army; and
move jobs to peripheral world countries for their cheap land or labor.

So there is a long-term, relentless struggle between capitalists and labor over the proportion of wages given to workers on a given day.

Capitalist contradictions about education

Another part of this conflict is over education. On one hand, capitalists want to keep workers as uneducated as possible so that they find out as little of the workings of capitalism as possible. But on the other hand, capitalists must make workers more creative in order to fix problems on the job. The problem for capitalists is they can’t control how the workers may use their creativity on the job to undermine capitalism one way or another.

Contradiction 6 The Contradiction Between Fixed and Circulating Capital

Capital investment takes three forms: as an investment in fixed capital – machinery, plants, land and investment and an investment in variable capital which is labor power. Labor power is remunerated afterproduction has occurred, whereas the means of production are usually paid for prior to production (fixed capital). But capital also invents the circulation of commodities. When the commodity is sold, then capital becomes liquid again. In the circulation of commodities, the speed of its circulation is also important. If one capitalist can circulate their commodities faster than another they have a certain competitive advantage. So they attempt to accelerate the turnover time of capital.

Limitations of making a profit on fixed capital

However, there are limits to the speed of circulation. To paraphrase Harvey, if I want to make steel, the iron ore and coal are still buried in the ground and it takes a lot of time to dig them out. There are not enough workers close by who are willing to sell their labor power. I need to build a blast furnace and that takes time. There are physical barriers to reducing this turn-around time to zero. Workers, furthermore, are not automatons. They may lay down their tools or slow down their labor process. (73-74)

Once the steel is finished it has to be sold. The commodity can sit on the market for some time before the buyer shows up. The capitalist has a vested interest in securing and accelerating the turnover time of consumption. One of the ways is to produce steel that rusts so fast it needs rapid replacement: planned obsolescence (73-74)

These problems center on the category of long-term investments in fixed capital.

In order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space – anchored on the land in the form of roads, railways, communication towers and fiber-optics plants, airports and harbors, factory buildings offices, houses, schools, hospitals. More mobile forms of fixed capital are ships, trucks, planes and railway engines. (75)

Capital in danger of social sclerosis

The part which is moveable capital cannot be replaced during the item’s lifetime without loss of value. As time goes by the sheer mass of this long-lived and often physically immobile capital for both production and consumption increaserelative to capital that is continuously flowing. Whole sites are abandoned and wasted as in the rust belts of Mordor. On one hand, in order for capital to circulate freely in space and time, physical infrastructures and built environments must be created that are fixed in space. Yet capital has to periodically break out of the constraints imposed by the world it has constructed. As Harvey says, it is always in mortal danger of becoming sclerotic. Why?

Capital is forever in danger of becoming more sclerotic over time because of the increasing amount of fixed capital required. Fixed and circulating capital are in contradiction with each other but neither can exist without the other. The flow of that part of capital that facilitates circulation has to be slowed down. But the value of immobile fixed capital (like the container port terminal) can be realized only through its use. It is generally much slower.

From physical goods to spectacles

One solution for capitalists is to sell events rather than physical commodities. Harvey says there is a huge difference between, for example, the live transmission of a World Cup football match and lugging around bottled water, steel girders, furniture or perishable items like soft fruit, hot pork pies, milk and bread. Commodities are variably mobile depending upon their qualities and transportability. Production, with some exceptions, like transportation itself is the least mobile form of capital. It is usually locked down in place for a time. In shipbuilding it is considerable.

Contradiction 7 The Contradictory Nature of Low Wages vs Capitalist Realization

The goal of capitalism is to sell as many products as it can at the cheapest possible price. But in the process of making a profit the capitalist must:

exploit labor power (surplus value) so it can raise the price of a commodity;
realize the sale of the product in the market – which is far from easy

The problem for capitalists is that if wages are kept low the aggregate demand of laborers won’t be enough to buy the products off the shelf. So if the cost of social reproducing of the laborers is being forced back into the household, then those laborers will be less likely to buy goods and services off the market. Lack of aggregate effective demand creates a serious barrier to the continuity of capital accumulation. Working class consumer power is a significant component of that effective demand. Yet if the capitalist insists on paying minimum wage how can the workers buy the products?

Between 1945 and the mid-1970s, the problem for capitalist was in the production of enough surplus valuebecause of unions were strong and wages high. When unions became weaker, wages dropped beginning in the 1970s. Then the problem for capitalists was was not in the achievement of extracting surplus value but in cultivating conditions for its realization since workers had less money to buy commodities. This is why in the early 1970s capitalists began issuing credit cards to workers in order for capitalist profits to be realized.

Contradiction 8 Contradiction and Alienation of Labor

Harvey says there is an important distinction between the technical and social division of labor. By technical he means a separate task within a complex series of operations, that anyone can do. By social he means the specialized task that only a person with adequate training or social standing can do, like a doctor, or an architect. In the technological division labor, the unity of mental and manual aspects of laboring was broken.

The meaning of the term “alienation” has psychological and sociological components. As a passive psychological term, it means to become isolated from connection to others whether at work or in leisure. As an active psychological state, it means being angry and hostile or feeling oppressed, deprived or disposed of. The person acts out that anger, lashing out without any clear definition. Teenage rebellion movies of years ago, The Wild One or Rebel Without a Cause, are examples.

As beautifully laid out by Bertell Ollman, sociologically alienation means the worker is estranged from his or her product of labor as well as the process of work. He/she is also alienated from other workers, from nature and from their own creativity. As Marx said it is only outside of work that the worker has the possibility to achieve any personal fulfillment. Uneven geographical development in the divisions of labor and the parallel increase in social inequality in life choices, are exacerbating that sense of alienation. This creates a danger for capitalists in the form of labor unions, strikes, labor parties and agitation for socialism. On one hand, the accumulation of capital requires squeezing the life out of the worker. On the other hand, this repression creates militancy on the part of workers.

Contradiction 9 Automation Might Shrink the Ratio of Necessity and Freedom vs Automation as the Driver od Unemployment

One of the mythological stories told by capitalists is that technological innovation would lead to more leisure time for workers. Well, since about 1970 in Yankeedom, we have seen an increase in the amount of full-time work from 40 hours to at least 50 hours per week. This is because capitalist motivation is not to create more leisure for workers, but to replace workers, especially militant workers, with machines.

On the other hand, automation and artificial intelligence now provide us with abundant means to achieve the Marxian dream of freedom beyond the realm of necessity. In other words, the population could have more leisure time to use their creativity for new inventions, new arts and new sciences. Full advantage could be taken of automation and artificial intelligence. But for the capitalists the more time that has been released from production, the more imperative it has become (for the capitalist) for the workers to absorb their leisure time in consumption. It has no room for authentically free time which neither produces nor consumes commercial wealth.

Contradiction 10 Technological Innovation vs Monopoly Capitalism

From competition to monopoly

According to Harvey, the development of technology first became a focus for capitalists in the second half of the 19^thcentury with the rise of the machine tool industry. Harnessing energy like the steam engine was applied to multiple industries. The classic Marxist argument is that through capitalist competition, the productive forces (technology) increase and outdistance the capitalist capacity to use this productive power. This overabundance of products creates the conditions for socialism. But what Marx didn’t anticipate is that capital demonstrates a trend towards monopoly rather than competition. This is a less favorable environment for innovation.

Wealth of Nations is the founding myth of liberal economic theory. Capital is imagined as constructed by a plethora of molecular and competitive collisions of individual capitalists moving freely and searching for profitable opportunities within a chaotic sea of economic activity. But in fact by the end of the 19^th century, corporations has overwhelmed Adam Smith’s competitive invisible hand. All this is news to market fundamentalist economists. Right-wing market libertarians present monopolies as an exception to the rule, rather than the predominant way of life under capitalism. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Walmart and Apple are all examples of oligarchies tending towards monopolies. The tendencies in many sectors of the economy – pharmaceuticals, oil, airlines, agribusiness, banking software, media and social media – suggest strong tendencies towards oligopoly, if not monopoly. In fact, says Harvey, most capitalists, if given the choice prefer to be monopolists rather than competitors

Lenin saw capital moving into a new phase of monopoly power associated with imperialism at the turn of the 20^th century when the big industrial cartels combined with finance capital to dominate the leading national economies. This view re-emerged in the 1960’s with Paul Baran and Paul Sweezy’s book Monopoly Capitalism. The crisis of the 1970s – stagflation and inflation – was widely interpreted by Marxists as a typical crisis of monopoly capital.

Why monopolies put the brakes on innovation

Capitalism today limits the rate of technological innovation because:

The organization of cooperation and divisions of labor must be made in ways to maximize efficiency, profitability and accumulation. This means that innovations that will not be very profitable, such as long-lasting technologies, will be repressed.
The capitalist needs to facilitate the acceleration of capital circulation in all its phases, along with the need to annihilate space through time. What I mean is increasing speed of transport and communication reduces the friction and barrier of geographical distance. This requires minimizing capitalist occupation of space.
Capitalist must shorten the turnover time by shortening the lifetime of consumer products (planned obsolesce).
Capitalist can shorten the lifetime of products’ shift from the production of things that last to the production of spectacles which are ephemeral and contain faster turn-around time.
Capitalists technologies of knowledge are used to identify consumer preferences.
The speeding up and turnover time by the use of the technologies of finance. Beginning with invention checks and credit cards, the goal is faster turn-around time. The rise of cyber moneys, like bitcoin, is just the beginning of an inexorable descent of the monetary system into chaos.
Capitalists must not only speed up the realization and consumption process, but they must develop technologies that speed up the workers. This includes time motion studies, the Hawthorn experiments, and surveillance. This attempted control encompasses not only physical efficiency but also the rise of robotization. As Harvey writes, robots do not complain, answer back, sue, get sick, go slow, lose concentration, go on strike, demand more wages, want tea breaks or refuse to show up.

All this means is that that the because the capitalist must speed up the production and consumption process, it is far from the ideal conditions of innovation. Scientific innovators are in no hurry and want their products to last. The contradiction is that capitalists want scientific innovation to create ever new processes and products. Yet in their efforts to shorten the turnover time of products, they undermine the innovative processes themselves. They will not be able to innovate at the pace that would develop the productive forces and would stagnate and shrink the rate of profit.

Contradiction 11 Globalization of Capital: Promises and Perils

The division of labor within capitalism is now taking place at a world-wide scale. Harvey writes that what is now in place is radically different from anything that existed prior to 1850.

There are three sectional classifications of the division of labor between:

primary – agriculture, forestry, fishing and mining;
secondary – industry and manufacturing; and
tertiary – services, finance, insurance and real estate sectors.

On one hand a world market in grains can forestall a local crop failure. At its best all capitalist countries have the technology to support each other during famines, extreme weather, floods, earthquakes and droughts. The fact that capitalist countries limit these interventions to countries that are their allies does not limit their potential to serve the whole world.

One the other hand, as Harvey points out today the clothing factories in Bangladesh, the electronics factories of southern China, the maquiladora factories strung along the Mexican border or the chemical complexes in Indonesia are all interdependent. Small disruptions in a supply chain can have very large consequences. A strike in a key car parts factory in one region of the world can bring the whole production system to a halt everywhere. Supply chain blockages thanks to Covid result in delays in both the process of production and the delays on the product.

Contradiction 12 Uneven Geographical Developments: Super-Concentrations of Production and Wastelands

The capitalist division of labor has reached a world scale and this results in uneven pockets of production with high concentration of work in some areas and wastelands in other areas. Time is money for capitalism. Traversing space takes both time and money. As much as possible the near elimination of transport costs and times is a factor in location decision making. This permits capitalists to explore different profit opportunities in widely disparate places.

Harvey writes that what arises is “agglomeration” economies where many different capitals cluster together. For example, car parts and tire industries locate close to car plants. Different firms and industries can share facilities and access labor skills, information and infrastructures. However other regions may become wastelands increasingly bereft of activities. They get caught in a downward spiral of depression and decay. The result is uneven regional concentrations of wealth, power and influence. Affections and loyalties to particular places and cultural forms are destroyed and treated as anachronisms. Large blotches of the world become wastelands where nothing is grown and people can no longer live.

Capital never has to address its systemic failings because it moves them around geographically. Since myopic capitalists treat these wastelands as “externalities” the problem grows worse. The heads of nation-states are enslaved to capitalists and are in no position to address the geographical mess capitalists have created. There are, however, limits to continuous centralization through agglomeration. It results in overcrowding and rising pollution. In addition, labor may become better organized in its struggles against exploitation because of its regional concentration.

Contradiction 13 Finance Capital vs the Physical Economy

There are two ways in which capitalist crises might be produced:

1) chronic inequalities produce imbalances between production and realization; and

2) financialization of profit means capitalists will not invest in their own infrastructure.

In the case of financialization, what makes the current phase special is the phenomenal acceleration in the speed of circulation of finance capital and the reduction in financial transaction costs. If all capitalists seek to live off finance, insurance and real estate interests and are just speculating in asset value or living off capital gains the gap between finance capital and the real physical economy grows.

The problem of compound interest

Harvey points out that – Michael Hudson in the Bubble and Beyond is one of the only political economists who takes the issue of compound growth seriously. He says that most people do not understand very well the mathematics of compound interest.

Nor do they understand the phenomenon of compounding growth and the potential dangers it can pose. Harvey writes that compound interest curve rises very slowly for quite a while and then starts to accelerate and by the end the curve becomes a singularity as it sails off into infinity. Harvey goes into much more detail on pages 223-228 of his book.

There is one form that capital takes which permits accumulation without limit and that is the financial form. Today finance capital is now unchained from any physical limitations. In Mordor today the Fed issues fiat moneys that can be created without limit. Adding a few zeros to the quantity of money in the circulation is no problem for them. The danger is that the result will be a crisis of inflation. The contradiction is in disparities between accumulation process that is necessarily exponential and the conditions that might limit the capacity of exponential growth. These conditions are the requirements to invest in the physical aspects of the economy such as buildings, harnessing of energy and infrastructure.

Fictious capital instruments

Besides the printing of fiat money another financial instrument in the purchase of assets includes debt claims. Harvey writes an asset is simply a capitalized property title. This was paralleled by the creation of wholly new assets markets within the financial system itself such as currency futures, credit default swaps, and CDOs.

This was fictitious capital feeding off and generating even more fictitious capital.

Harvey writes there is a labyrinth of countervailing claims that were almost impossible to value except by way of some mix of future expectation, beliefs and outright crazy short-term betting in unregulated markets with no prospect of any long-term payoff.

Contradiction 14 Capital’s Relation to Nature

Liberal environmental politics has preferred to ignore entirely the fact that it is capitalism that produced the current ecological crisis. Harvey writes that they nibble away at issues on the periphery of the capitalist system while they never reach the core of the system that is producing the problem. “Deep ecologists” wrongly call Marxism “Promethean” which has a disregard for nature and claims that only human history matters. But John Bellamy Foster has dedicated the better part of his life arguing for the belief that Marx was ecologically sensitive and had a concept of capitalism as creating a “metabolic” rift with nature.

In addition, by training David Harvey is a geographer and has written books on a Marxist criticism of what capitalism has done to the natural world. The change in climate and the frequency of severe weather events is increasing. Catastrophic local events can be readily accommodated by capital since a predatory disaster capitalism is ready to go. But pollution problems do not get solved, only moved around in uneven benefits and losses. The capitalist system is not prepared for the slow, cancerous degradations. Harvey says that whereas the problems of in past were typically localized, they have now become more regionalized such as acid deposition, low level of ozone concentration, stratospheric ozone holes, habitat destruction, species extinction and loss of biodiversity.

Conclusion

Harvey points out that this one-at-a-time presentation of capitalist contradictions does not address that all these contradictions are feeding into each other forming an organic whole. Do capitalists understand these contradictions? For the most part, no. Most are enthralled with market fundamentalist theories. A minority have read Marx. But even so, their short-term material interests as capitalists blocks them from understanding the full ramifications of their system. So capitalists as a class do not understand their system. They blithely roll along accumulating finance capital and pay no attention to the fourteen fractures I’ve identified. What problems occur are dismissed as “business cycles”. As the fractures deepen we can count on capitalists to ramp up their ideology and distract us with more extreme forms entertainment, including football games, escapist movies and increasing violence in movies coupled with special effects.

The post Multiple Economic Fractures in Mordor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

From Pagan Animism to Alienation

Bruce Lerro — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 23:55:26 +0000

Orientation: the politics of the sacred

The word “pagan” is one of those words that has been worked over by monotheists and secular rulers so that it has many meanings, mostly negative. This has been the case except for the past fifty years when Neopaganism has made a comeback, thanks mostly to the women’s movement. In his book Being Pagan, Rhyd Wildermuth writes that:

Being pagan means being of the land, rural villager, rustic. In modern terms, being a peasant or being a country bumpkin as opposed to the city (39) …

Rhyd tells us that Frankish or German people were called “heathens” by missionaries, meaning “dweller of the hearth”. Heathen lands were the most uncultivated places not suited for large-scale farming such as moors, scrubland and sparse forests. This land is better for small grazing animals like sheep and goats or for hunting small game. Because of the lack of large scale land productivity, politically it tended to remain independent of urban control far longer than other agricultural people who became dependent on cities.Heathens also more easily resisted Christianization and were made fun of by Christian and urban people because of this resistance.

In addition, my own stereotypical picture of pagans is that we are:

Materialistic
Overly sensual
Have sacred presences that are carnal and undignified
Violent
Racist (heathens or Nazi’s)
Uncivilized

Rhyd writes that when people ask him what being Pagan means he points to the flooding, the droughts, the melting icecaps, the extinctions and the plagues in the world today. He writes that in pagan animist societies people took care of the land because being an animist means everything is alive and nothing is inanimate. If we lived as animists, terrible ecological circumstances would never have been possible.

When the Christians strove to take over Celtic lands, they created stories by which old pagan presences were conquered, driven out or demonized by magical or miraculous means. The stories of Graoully, Coulobre and La Tarasque are examples and these stories were widespread in France, Spain and Germany.

Scope of this article

Rhyd Wildermuth in his book Being Pagan outlines a high contrast between our alienated existence in monotheist, industrial capitalist society while taking us back in time to when we are not alienated, in pagan animistic societies. He does not specify what kind of societies these are. My best guess is he was mostly talking about hunter-gatherers, various kinds of horticulturalists and simple, small-scale farming societies. He contrasts differences in how time and place was conceived. He shows us how the treatment of the land, including fruits, vegetable, trees, plants and animals was radically different in animistic societies

One of his most interesting contrasts was how the body and mind were thought to be related. He points out that in industrial capitalist societies the mind drives the body. In animistic societies bodies drove minds. More on this later. In current times, those who are monotheists believe they have a soul that transcends death. What did pagans prior to monotheism think about this? For them, connection to the ancestors was part of the same ecological networks that connects us to rocks, rivers, plants and animals. Today, at least in Yankeedom, ancestors don’t matter. What happened and why did it happen?

Rhyd says that pagans do not believe in the supernatural. But if pagans populate the sacred worlds with gods, goddesses, earth spirits and ghosts how can they not be supernatural?

Years ago Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that language is an organ of perception. If animists think that everything is alive, how does this translate into language? We will see how it affects the proportion of nouns and verbs used, along with the proportion of tenses to indicate the past, present and future.

Because we live in a global age, all sacred traditions have to face the problem of mixing. Monotheism has been impacted by globalization, but Christian monotheism in Europe has a clear developmental trajectory: Catholicism and Protestantism. For pagans the problem is deeper because Neopaganism has had about 150 years of eclecticism. Its history has been broken up, gone underground and resumed. Should Neopagans mix with native traditions in the United States or in African societies? Should Neopagans incorporate Shintoism? Some say this is “cultural appropriation” while others say mixing traditions has always been part of polytheism.

For most of this article I will be analyzing the book Being Pagan. However, I will also be adding my own material to fill out his argument, and hopefully make it better.

Process “becoming” philosophy vs being “static” philosophy

When verbs become nouns

Rhyd points out that every known language has two primary kinds of words: nouns and verbs. They also have two secondary categories, modifiers, which are adjectives and adverbs.

A noun is the name of something specific
Verbs describe actions
Adjectives describe a noun
Adverbs describe an action

He points out that languages spoken by indigenous peoples and by ancient cultures use more verbs than nouns – especially animist cultures. Modern languages like English and French, both products of monotheism, employ more nouns than verbs. In addition, every language has a certain proportion of words devoted to describing tenses: the past, present and future.

For industrial capitalist societies, once the present is over it becomes past, and pasts are connected to things like documents, statues, relics. For animist cultures, everything is alive and moving. The present tense is part of a never-ending act of becoming. For Western monotheists today, there are people who personally are lost in the past or the future. The inability to concentrate on the present is so bad that people take meditation classes to force them to live in the present. Animist cultures have no problem living in the present.

Furthermore, it is no accident that industrial capitalist societies are more “thing”-oriented because they have writing. Writing freezes thoughts into words and words become objects. In oral animistic cultures what people say is more in the service of social-psychological interaction. On the other hand, thoughts have a short shelf life when the conversation is over. With the introduction of writing, language becomes more static and words become things frozen on a page.

Time of the moon

We are all familiar with the calendar and tracking our time in relation to days of the week? But how far back does this go? For most of the history of social evolution it was the light of the moon and its rhythm of the new moon, half-moon and full moon which set the course, the patterns and meaning of everyday life. For pagans, the moon isn’t only visible at night, but with careful training we can see it is also visible during the day. Activities were tracked according to changes on and during moons cycles over the course of a month. Rhyd points out that the origin of the word month comes from the moon. In terms of tracking human time, at the beginning there was the month, long before there were days of the week.

There is nothing spiritual or supernatural about the moon. The tides come and go twice a day, pulled by the gravity of the moon. The tides sweep in and out daily n rhythmic patterns, twice out twice in, pulled by the moon’s gravity. The moon has different phases. During the full moon or the new moon the tide sweeps further inland and returns further from the shore than at other times. Knowing the phases of the moon is a very practical affair. It tells us when we are more likely to find fish that might be scattered on the shore. All an animist would have to do is look at the moon’s face to know when food might be more plentiful and what the conditions were best for a boat entering the ocean.

Research shows that many animals are more active during the night of the full moon. People sleep later during the full moon and longer during the new moon. Before the invention of electric lighting which enabled humanity to have the night permanently lit, people who hunted did so by using the light of the moon. Early pagans knew which phase the moon was in and they acted accordingly.

Rhyd describes how this impacts him personally:

I always feel my absolute lowest when the new moon is new and just before it is new… Noting how certain things are easiest to complete as the moon wanes, because I know that I am often more tired and feel less intuitive during new moon, I try to avoid scheduling too much for that time and instead try to rest. I find my life much more grounded and anxiety is rarely something that can overwhelm me. (22-23)

Knowledge of the moon only appears as superstitious to people living in industrial capitalist countries because they are those who are blinded by city lights, and the lack of need to hunt and fish for food. They have stopped paying attention to the moon. Until the mechanistic phase of clocks, we scheduled activities looking at the moon as well as the time we go to sleep. We city Neopagans are encouraged to look at the moon, find out where it is and what phase it is in, as well as where it has arisen and where it has set. Like anything else, it takes practice for our eyes to become sensitized to the moon and its movements. In modern city-life these sensitivities are deadened. For us, each night seems like the next and we go to sleep at the same time regardless of the moon or whether it is wintertime or summertime. We have lost our rhythm.

Cyclic time to clock and linear time

It is not just the moon that waxes and wanes. The yearly seasons change throughout the years depending on the zones around the earth. Plants and animals follow the seasons, going through developmental cycles of growth and death. Different animist cultures follow suit, dividing their cycle of the year according to the temperate or polar regions. Those who have four seasons in temperate zones divide their years into four quarters. The “time of land” tells us when berries or tomatoes are ripest. On the other hand, upper-middle class people living in industrial capitalist societies, especially Yankeedom, have come to expect the same fruits and vegetables to be available all year, regardless of the season.

Rhyd says the land has character just like human temperaments do. She is gruff, grizzled, hearty, stoic, or lush. The combination of minerals are different in some places than they are elsewhere. She is shaped by the rocks, the wind, the cold, heat and the humidity. Rhyd points out local lands themselves have a unique taste. Whether wild or domesticated, those same plants and animals taste differently depending on the quality of land they are grown and live in. By saying pagans are of the land it just means understanding basic ecological dynamics: how it works on humanity and how humanity works on it.

This natural time was the enemy of Protestants anxious to abolish the seasonal holidays, and capitalists who wanted to discipline workers to punch a time clock and work long hours regardless of the seasons or the phases of the moon. They wanted disciplined workers to accept clock time. In animist time, when people worked, they also slept during the day. Even as late as in early modern Europe, when artisans were given an order by merchants, they took breaks when they wanted to. They controlled the pace of their work. In the early Industrial Age capitalists were insensitive to workers being sick or tired. If they didn’t continue working they would be replaced.

Keeping time has a long history deep into ancient civilizations. They used the sun dials, water clocks and hour-glasses. But these were not precise and they were not used by artisans or peasants. Clocks were used by the upper classes as a luxury item. They were used by alchemists in cooking the elements or by astrologers for casting the horoscope of great political figures. Bell towers were used to remind people to pray or to announce foreign invasions or fires.

In addition, as cities rose and farming declined the drive to see time cyclically waned. Cyclic time was replaced by linear time. Capitalists hate the past because the past is a reminder that their system is historical. Linear time is laid out like a straight line moving from past to present to future. Once the past is over, unlike cyclic time, it never returns. But capitalists need to display the future as always open, and where anything can happen. This feeds into the ideology that any person can become a capitalist if they have the right psychological state.

Becoming Body

One of the most interesting arguments in this book is the relationship between the body and the mind. Rhyd says we do not have bodies, we are becoming bodies. This means that:

There is no getting out of being a body
We are becoming bodies. This connects to the difference between process and static philosophy that we touched on earlier.

For example, Rhyd points out that hunger and thirst were not something you were or had, but something you did. Being thirsty is passive state, a condition that needs to be resolved. It is something that has happened to you. On the other hand, thirsting for water is an active state. It is not happening to you. It is something you try to do something about. But then you expend energy at work and you become thirsty again. The body is constantly reproducing itself with needs, satisfaction and new needs.

How we came to have bodies

Just as we have externalized and reified our language, we have externalized our bodies and separated them from ourselves, making them something we have rather than something we are. This negative attitude about the body is not unique to Western monotheism. In the East we hear we are “trapped in the body” or we are “a prison of flesh” that needs to be escaped from. Occultists claim we “are inhabiting different bodies”. Teenage girls “hate their bodies”. To say we have a body implies that there can be a state without one. What’s left? Minds without bodies, a product of patriarchal sacred traditions, not paganism.

According to Wildermuth, the reasons for this anti-body orientation include the development of Christianity with the separation of the soul from the body. Secondly, Descartes added to this by claiming the mind can be separated from the body. Lastly, capitalism insisted on the discipline of the body during capitalist production to conform to the pump and lever in Early Modern Europe. Later, human bodies are disciplined again as a reflection of the complex machines and the steam engine in the second half of the 19th century. In the early 20th century the bodies of workers were subjected to the time and motion studies of Taylorism.

Ecological networks are bodies

In pagan understanding, everything that exists is in terms of living bodies. Ecological settings are bodies too. Having a body is like seeing a body mechanically, seeing a body as a collection of separate things. Imagining having bodies has negative ecological consequences. Seeing the forest as a collection of separate beings rather than a body leads to:

Killing off of species of insects
Hunting too many of the birds and animals
Felling too many trees
Damming a river or taking too many fish from a lake which can turn the entire system into something unlivable for everything there

Doing this to our ecology is like removing an organ from a human body and expecting it to work right. It is only possible for us to do such destructive things to the natural world because we do not see it as body, but rather separate things unrelated to each other. Rhyd tells us that:

Over the last 100 years alone, 543 species of terrestrial vertebrates (reptiles, birds and mammals) have gone extinct worldwide, a rate of disappearance that would have historically occurred over 10,000 years. That is, the rate of extinction is occurring 1,000 times faster for such beings now. (91-92)

Alienation from trees

Rhyd points out that oaks are special trees for pagan people. Oaks are more likely than shorter species of trees to be hit by lightning and are more likely to survive a lightning strike. It is no accident that oaks were associated with the gods of thunder. Oaks also protected other trees from storms and high winds. Many oaks grow very old, outlasting the rise and fall of civilizations. When oaks die they are put to sacred use as shrines or temples by Celtic and Germanic peoples An oak struck by lightning became a political ritual site, often becoming a place for major decisions. The importance of oaks to pagans was not lost on monotheists who ordered the cutting down of oaks dedicated to Thor to make the conversion of pagan peoples to Christianity easier. The Christians then built Cathedrals from the oaks.

Alienation from other animals

In my diet, much of my protein comes from eating chicken and fish. I know two women vegans who insisted I watch documentaries of what goes on in slaughter houses and chicken factories. I watched part of one and then turned it off. I didn’t want to know my eating habits were linked to so much suffering, but I continue to buy chicken at the supermarket. I’m confident I am not alone. We buy meat in packages at the supermarket but we rarely know anything about the process by which these dead animals arrived there. Rhyd points out that the flesh of these beings:

is processed by machines into forms that would be unrecognizable to people even a hundred years ago. Cows, pigs, chickens live in settings that look much more like factories than the pastoral landscapes. (93)

Contrary to all this, animist views see all living forms to include not just plants and animals, but rocks and rivers are also connected to the ancestors. Animists are engaged in reciprocal exchange of gratitude. When humans killed an animal, they apologized to the animal and made sure that future hunts were conducted in ways that did not thin out the species they hunted. This contrasts to monotheists who tell humanity we have “domain over nature. It is there for us to do what we want”. It is easy to see how this domain would directly link up to the scientific exploration of the 17th and 18th centuries and capitalist exploitation of land through colonialism in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The importance of ancestry for pagans

Today, especially in the United States, ancestry is not anything that is taken seriously. For the most part, people can’t trace their genealogy beyond their grandparents. Sure, there is new interest in tracing genealogical trees but in my opinion this is a fad. Whatever value and meaning this has, it is certainly not pursued with the same level of building a serious sacred connection. Most Yankees do not hope to have their ancestors come to them in their dreams, in their homes or giving them direction. Our relationship with ancestors is thin. In part, this is because we didn’t live near them because capitalist enclosures drive communities apart. This has been widened even further in the 20th century by capitalists. Geographical industrial specialization drives people to work in different parts of the country. In addition, the rate of change in industrial capitalist societies is so fast that the wisdom of the ancestors dries up quickly because the world has changed so much between generations. As gaps between generations grow, political differences emerge as to how to handle the change. Ancestry is marginalized as race and class identities replace them.

Pagans on the other hand, because they were not displaced, lived in the same location for many generations and they could trace their ancestors well beyond their grandparents. Secondly, because the rate of change was slow, the knowledge of the ancestors was respected knowledge that did not change much between generations. This means their politics are similar. Lastly, since tribal societies did not have classes and groups, ethnic composition was similar. There was no class or race identity to compete with ancestry. In many cultures a common truth is that the dead speak to us in our sleep.

Scale of pagan presences

According to Rhyd Wildermuth, in most pagan societies there are four levels of scale.

At the bottom and the smallest level there are shrines to the home. On a larger scale there are rituals to the ancestors. On the third level there are community festivals which include arts and crafts. Lastly, there are offerings to a god a few times a year. It’s important to understand that these scales are not hierarchically organized. In other words, the gods do not control the community rituals, ancestors or shrine presences. What is true is that they are organized in terms of the frequency with which they are enacted, beginning with the shrines in the home. In animistic societies when something is strange or has gone wrong, the spirits are not seen as evil but in the wrong place. The job of the shaman is to understand the problem and resolve it.

What happens when monotheism arises? Shrines are marginalized and in the case of Catholicism, replaced by pictures of saints in the house. Ancestors lose their connection to the rocks, rivers, plants and animals along with their wisdom. Community rituals and outdoor places are replaced with patron saints. The pagan gods, whether dragons or giants, are demonized and replaced by a single monotheistic deity.

Are spirits, ancestors and gods internal to us or external?

The key to understanding the difference between animalism and monotheism centers on where the sacred source originates. For animistic people, consciousness is diffused so that spirits, ancestors and even gods are inside our psyche and project outward. This is based on the unconscious intelligence of the body. Under monotheism, our alienation from the body is an important obstacle to our understanding of magic. As a result, for monotheists both spirits and God are external, objective and have little to do with our psychology

Magic is the unconscious intelligence of the body

Rhyd has a very interesting although strange definition of magick. He argues that magick is the unconscious perceptual wisdom of the body that is constantly reacting to the real world, which we have forgotten to notice in our modern world. Our bodies are constantly steering us in everyday life. When we speak of the unconscious, partly what we really mean is everything that our body knows and senses.

A very simple example is body memory. It is a process by which you find your way through a dark room that you know very well. Another example is being able to drive down a familiar road where your motor skills take you home while you are zoning out on music. Another example is if you are playing the outfield and you know how far back to go for a fly ball just by hearing the sound of the bat. In the case of baseball, that body knowledge has never been consciously processed. We know things we don’t realize we know. A pagan definition of magick is aligning consciousness to the body in order to enact change. Consciousness is the servant of the body. It is the directed focus of the body. Magick means giving attention to what the body is telling us and acting consciously in accordance with it. Our conscious attention, including our minds or our egos, is not the true seat of knowledge.

Meditation is not magick. Rhyd says:

In most forms of meditation a person stills their thoughts in order to have better control over consciousnessand the ways in which it was directed. (158)

Magick is not about quieting our thoughts in a disembodied way. It is about listening to how those thoughts are related to the sensations of our body.

Eudaemons and genii’s vs the eternal soul and permanent genius

In animistic societies people recognized that benevolent protective presences entered into the person at birth and left the body at death. Even as late as the time of the Greeks such presences were called eudaemons. The Romans called them genii’s and made shrines for them. This was too much commotion for monotheists, and St. Augustine replaced these fluid presences with a noun like eternal soul. Long after monotheism, in 20th century intelligence testing, we have the same noun – like genius – which is permanently attached to the eternal soul. For pagans, people were not geniuses themselves but had a particularly helpful genii to whom they listened.

Left and Right Sacred

In the early days of animism, from hunter-gatherers 100,000 years ago up to the Bronze Age civilization of 5,000 years ago, animists kept to their local identity and did not try to mix cultures. The great civilizations of the ancient world certainly traded enough so that pagan people became aware of other pagan people. Did they keep separate or did they mix? Their answer was always to mix and to synthesize. With the rise of globalization, the knowledge across cultures became even more intense. However, in the last 50 years, Neopaganism arose as part of the women’s movement. Because Neopaganism has a broken and suppressed history rather than a single stream leading all the way back as monotheists do, it has to determine what it will mix and match with. A new problem emerged for Neopaganism as the New Age emerged in England and the United States. A significant number of New Age organizations were small capitalists who have overridden Neopagan resistance to commercialization. New Age organizers have offered people courses that have drawn from native cultures (from the United States and Africa) and have turned a nice profit. Some native cultures have fought back against this. So pagan mixing cross-culturally has become politicized because of the ravenous nature of capitalists for profits.

There are two tendencies within paganism. Right-wing pagans think that the sacred should be orderly, that there should be separation between the sacred and the secular and the sacred traditions should be kept pure, based on exclusion and supposed genetic ancestry. These are represented by far-right groups who are nationalist, some neo-Nazis. They say white people should only involve themselves with European gods.

The left-wing pagans care less about order and are more interested in continuing the historical paganistic mixing. The socialist wing is very aware of the exploitation of cultural appropriation but they don’t want to throw the baby out with the bath water. They want to trust spontaneously mixing, multiplying and adding. They do not want to keep the sacred and secular separate, but are committed to expanding the sacred into the secular. We do this, not because we want an animistic theocracy, but because sacred pagan life will challenge the capitalistic control over secular life.

What is ironic is the so-called social justice movements that demand that cultures don’t mix because they think mixing is inherently exploitative. Yet they wind up on the same side as the right-wing sacred pagans. They also want to keep things pure but for different reasons than right-wing pagans.

Criticisms

I do not disagree with anything that was said in Being Pagan. However, the contrast between rural tribal paganism and monotheism and capitalism is too severe and some transitions need to be at least suggested. For example, there is nothing said about the city paganism of the Greeks and Romans, the Alexandrians of North Africa or the city magick of Renaissance Italy. At least a few pages of some of the differences between city and rural paganism would have been very helpful along with some references. This is especially important since today the overwhelming number of Neopagans live in cities.

As I said earlier, the kind of animism described is overwhelmingly tribal. But in between tribal societies and industrial societies are agricultural states where the goddesses and gods predominate. Had this been included, there would be an evolutionary sense of movement from animism to industrial capitalism. As it stands now, Rhyd’s description of alienation would have come about gradually. Without that alienation seems to come out of nowhere. A few pages about the polytheism of agricultural states would have thickened history and minimized abrupt changes.

Third, it was disappointing to me to have the word “god” introduced along with land spirits and ancestors and used interchangeably. Typically, the word “god” is used to indicate a degree of power that is more powerful than ancestors or land spirits or nature nymphs, yet this distinction is left out. A good example is the Greek and Roman gods and goddesses who were superior to humanity in scope and scale. Why introduce the word god at all unless it was used to refer to something different than other sacred presences?

Fourth, In his book All That is Sacred is Profaned, Rhyd claims to be a Marxist. His purpose is to introduce Marxism to Pagans. But in Being Pagan there is no mention of Marxism. Given that Marxism denies the ontological existence of a spiritual world, it would have been helpful to explain somewhere, either in the preface or an epilogue, how he squares a Marxist denial of the sacred world with the paganism he espouses in Being Pagan, especially in his chapter “The Fire of Meaning”.

Fifth, the definition of magick is limited to tapping into the unconscious wisdom of the body. This is an important addition to pagan practice. But why call it magick? Why not call it “body” knowledge? Furthermore, magick is often defined as changing consciousness through the use of imagination along with saturating the senses though the use of theatre and the art as in “Tree of Life” magick. There is no mention of any of this.

Lastly, ritual descriptions are disappointingly skimpy and it makes it seem as if all pagan rituals are private. This ignores the fact that most pagans practice magick in groups. There should be at least some description of group rituals to see how his animism would be practiced.• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

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This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism?

Bruce Lerro — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 01:17:19 +0000

Orientation

The linear political spectrum is bankrupt! How does it explain why socialist China is making alliances with capitalist Russia and even with fundamentalist Saudi Arabia? Why is it that so-called socialist Social Democrats support imperialist United States rather than socialist China? Why is it that right-wing fundamentalist states like India and Brazil are supporting Russia and socialist China instead of being rabid anti-communists? The linear political spectrum is not just simplistic. It serves the interests of neoliberals and New Deal liberals as we shall see.

All over the world, centrist parties are losing elections. People are either not voting at all or they are voting for fascists. In some countries, people are voting for Social Democrats. The traditional choices between liberals and conservatives do not speak to world problems today. Additionally, just as centrist parties are collapsing (as depicted in the image above) so is the linear political spectrum model that serves as its visual description. The purpose of this article is to show how the linear political spectrum model fails to conform to actual world politics as they are practiced today. We need a whole new spectrum model to do justice to the political and economic realities of today.

Linear Version of the Political Spectrum

In his textbook on Political Ideologies Andrew Heywood presents a linear perspective that looks like this:

Communism Socialism Liberalism Conservativism Fascism

There are many problems with this model. Let’s start with the more quantitative ones and then we will move to qualitative problems. Then I will provide lots of examples of how the linear political spectrum fails when applied to real-world politics of today. Lastly, I will show how this linear political spectrum really serves two points on the political spectrum: neoliberal libertarians and new deal liberals.

Quantitation problems

For one thing, to the left of communism should be anarchism. Anarchism has been a serious ideological movement for at least 200 years, beginning with William Godwin, and millions of people have fought and died for it. Secondly, within communism there should be delineated the different kinds of Leninism, including Trotskyism, Stalinism and Maoism. Third, it is unfathomable to have only one kind of liberalism on this spectrum. There is FDR liberalism but there is also centrist liberalism. But more importantly there is libertarianism that has no representation at all on the spectrum. Yet libertarianism has been predominant for over 40 years as an economic doctrine over most of the world. As we shall see later, it benefits libertarians to present themselves as more or less the same as New Deal liberals. Lastly, conservatism should also be divided into old paleoconservatives and new right-wing conservatives.

Qualitative problems

In contemporary Mordor politics, even this five-fold division of the spectrum is too much. The political spectrum consists of only liberals (Democratic Party) and the conservatives (Republican Party). Both socialism and communism is conveniently ignored even though thousands of people in Yankeedom claim to be socialists. The last time I checked, the Democratic Socialists of America had 90,000 people. Fascism was mostly ignored until the presence of Trump supporters brought fascism out of the closet of political scientists.

But are liberals (Democrats) and conservatives (Republicans) truly opposite from each other? Political sociologist William Domhoff says that in practice there are differences between the two when it comes to culture and politics (gun control) religion, race and gender politics.

But where the two parties are the same is far more significant. These similarities have at least to do with:

Support of capitalism as an economic system domestically;
Agreeing never to discuss socioeconomic class in the way sociologists would;
Unwillingness to engage third parties in political debate;
Support of imperialism around the world;
Support of the installation of right-wing dictators;
Support of Israel elites despite 50 years of Zionist fundamentalism; and,
Opposition against socialism around the world whether it be Leninism or social democracy.

Furthermore, are the differences between political tendencies just matters of quantitative gradation (as in the linear model) or are there qualitative leaps which are not represented? Under the linear political spectrum, the difference between Social Democrats and New Deal liberals is presented as being quantitative or even identical when it is not. For example, Bernie Sanders whose policies are clearly New Deal liberal, could get away with saying he was a social democrat. A real social democrat historically is Eugene Debs. Debs clearly talked about class warfare and abolishing capitalism. This is not something New Deal liberals, including Bernie Sanders, ever talk about.

The part of the political spectrum that is socialist is a qualitatively different form of economic system.There is a qualitative leap. Social Democrats, the different kinds of Leninists and anarchists are bitterly divided among themselves over the place of state, market relations and the role of workers. Yet they agree that basic resources, tools and means of harnessing energy should be collectively owned and that capitalism cannot be reformed. All socialists believe that whether in the short-run or the long run, workers are capable of running society without bureaucrats, or managers.

Once the separation is made between those advocating socialism and those hoping to preserve capitalism, a chasm exists that is not represented on the political linear political spectrum.

What this means is that:

There are far more commonalties between liberals and conservatives than there are between liberals and socialists because capitalism divides them; and,
There are far more commonalities between liberals and fascists than between liberals and socialists because both liberals and fascists support capitalism.

The Linear Political Spectrum is too Simple for Today’s Complex Politics

China forming alliances with non-socialist countries

These days there are some very complex political configurations that defy the linear political spectrum. For example, China, which claims to be socialist, is forming alliances with countries that are clearly not socialist such as Russia, and a theocracy such as Saudi Arabia. According to the linear political spectrum model, China should only form alliances with other socialist countries like Venezuela and North Korea.

Social Democrats (socialists) forming alliances with imperialists

Secondly, the supposedly left-wing German Social Democrats and Greens and the Swedish Social Democrats have not lined up with China. If the linear political spectrum was accurate, Social Democrats would support Communist countries because they were fellow socialists. Instead, these Social Democrats have aligned themselves with right-wing Democrats of imperialist Yankeedom.

Right-wing governments support a socialist country

Thirdly, the countries that have supported Russia, and indirectly China, (moving towards a multipolar world against the imperialists) have been right-wing rulers such as Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil and to a lesser extent, Viktor Orban in Hungary. The linear political spectrum would predict that right-wing states with fundamentalist fascists in power would be rabid anti-communists, but they are not – at least internationally. My claim is that the linear way of framing political life cannot do justice to the complexity of current political life

The Linear Political Spectrum Serves as an Ideological Tool to Support Two Points on the Spectrum – Either Neoliberals or New Deal liberals

The Recent elections in France

As many of you know, there was a recent election in France that was very close between Macron, Le Pen and the left wing candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Macron got 27% of the vote. Le Pen got 23% and the Mélenchon got about 21 ½%. The left-wing candidate failed by one point short of qualifying for the second round. So the French had to decide between the neoliberal Macron and the more conservative (or supposed fascist) Le Pen. Suddenly the neoliberal Macron discovers the linear political spectrum and presents himself, not as the center right candidate that he is, but closer to the Enlightenment values of New Deal liberalism. This is a prime minister who has presided over cuts to the French welfare system, tried to raise the retirement age and brutalized the Yellow Vests protesters for two years. Now he sings liberty, equality, fraternity. “Behold” this choir boy of Brussels, says “we have to watch out for the fascists.” It is true that Le Pen’s father was a fascist, but that doesn’t make her one. Is Le Pen’s stance against immigrants and refugees? Yes. But how does that compare with Macron in practice. Has he treated immigrants and refuges well? Hardly! Further, a comrade of mine who has lived in France for many years said that Le Pen’s program was considerably to the left of Macron. In addition, Le Pen was more likely to be pro-Russian. Sadly, the French people were tricked by Macron’s claim to define what fascism is and re-elected him. This is one case of letting a neoliberal define for socialists what a fascist is.

The Democratic Party defining what is and isn’t fascism

The Democratic Party has nothing to do with New Deal liberalism

In the 2016 election, the Democratic Party had a candidate who claimed to be a socialist. Every real socialist knew that Bernie Sanders was not a socialist and at best was a New Deal liberal. Since Lyndon Johnson the Democratic Party has slid from moderate left to center-right neoliberals. In 1985 Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council moved consciously away from anything like the FDR program (see Century of the Self Part IV by Adam Curtis) and that includes the eight years of Chicago boy, Baraka Obama. In 2016, the party gave a resounding “no” to New Deal liberal Bernie Sanders as they have done for 50 years. However, the public was 50 years behind the times. When most people voted for a Democrat, they thought they were getting a New Deal liberal. For sixteen years (Clinton and Obama) the party kept disappointing them. The Democratic Party has used the public’s out of date picture of the linear political spectrum to shove austerity programs down the throats of people in the name of liberalism. The public still does not know the difference between a New Deal liberal and a neoliberal, but it knows that the Democratic Party gives them nothing and I predict they will vote them out next month and in 2024.

Not such strange bedfellows: neoliberalism is right next to fascism on the political spectrum

Many people do not understand how fascism occurs. It’s as if suddenly a charismatic leader arises politically without rhyme or reason and this provokes a mass hysteria with people temporarily losing their minds and swooning over the dictator. The truth of the matter is that fascism is a product of a crisis of capitalism. There has been no fascism before the 20th century. Fascism began in the 1920s in response to a crisis in capitalism after World War I and throughout the twenties and into the 1930s. During such a crisis both liberal and conservative centrist parties lost credibility and withered, and the choices were either socialism or fascism. In fact, in the early thirties both the Democrats and Republicans wrote about how much they admired Hitler.

If the ruling party is a right-wing party, it is possible that a new deal liberal party might be a substitute for fascism, at least for a time. In Yankeedom, both Clinton and Obama provided nothing but wars and finance capital accumulation austerity for 16 years. Yet the public did not turn to fascism. But by 2016 the lower middle class and some working-class people had had enough and elected a fascist. Why? Because Trump promised to bring back American jobs and appealed to working class people who were pushed to the margins. Small businesses were even more difficult to start up and those that existed were struggling against the large corporations. Trump’s appeal was to economic issues. Meanwhile Democratic neoliberal Hillary Clinton haughtily called these lower middle class and working-class people “deplorables”. The party embraced identity politics and lost.

But fascism would not have won if the Democratic Party did not propose a New Deal liberal like Bernie Sanders. I’m convinced that had the Democratic Party gave Sanders their candidacy, he could have easily beaten Trump. What am I saying? The Democratic Party co-creates fascism by not running New Deal liberal candidates. My prediction is that with Uncle Mortimer as president almost two years in, by 2024 if Mordor is still standing, we will have a fascist president, whether it is Trump or someone else and the Democratic Party will be to blame. This is an example of a neoliberal party (Democrats) taking advantage of the public’s association of liberals with FDR to use that association to get themselves elected by carrying out a right wing-libertarian program.

Neoliberals support right-wing dictators and fascists internationally

Neoliberals in Mordor have supported right-wing dictators all over the world for 70 years. See William Blum’s book Killing Hope. In fact, the CIA is considered a liberal part of the Deep State. This doesn’t change whether Mordor’s regime is liberal or conservative. The most recent example is the Democratic administration’s support of Ukrainian fascists on and off for the past 70 years.

If the linear political spectrum were accurate neoliberalism would be right next to fascism on the political spectrum. So, I am saying that the linear political spectrum supports the ideology of Neoliberalism by:

Denying its existence in the political spectrum by not including it as a category;
Implementing right-wing neoliberal policies while pretending its legacy is New Deal liberalism.

Centrism is Bankrupt in Extreme Capitalist Crises

The linear political spectrum also makes it appear that the middle of the political spectrum is politically superior because it is not extremist. It is moderate, not hysterical like the fascism or communism. What this ignores is that when there are extreme economic, political or ecological conditions, the centrist political solutions don’t work. The center doesn’t hold, it caves in. In certain periods of history to be a moderate is unrealistic. Gradualist trial and error won’t cut the mustard because a storm is brewing. In the conditions of our time, extremes are the only answer because capitalism has brought us to this point and neither liberal nor conservative solutions have worked. The linear political spectrum arose during naïve political times when economics was thought to be separate from politics and political scientists papered over these extreme conditions which they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. We need a new non-linear political spectrum which:

Is inclusive of many more political ideologies than the five at the front of this article;
Is economic as well as political;
Accounts for qualitative leaps – which is the difference between socialism and capitalism;
Decenters the spectrum so that both moderate and extreme solutions would seem reasonable. This means that all political tendencies would have be seen as having pros and cons. The way it stands now, liberals and conservatives are seen as virtuous and communism and fascism are seen as having vices.
Flexible enough to make room for alliances between the extremes on the political spectrum such as China and Saudi Arabia, or between India (fundamentalist) and China. The spectrum should not be limited to ideologies that are next to each other on the political spectrum.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Are Socialists Going to Let Neoliberals Define Fascism? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

Weaving the Dialectical Spiral into Individual Development

Bruce Lerro — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:09:41 +0000

Orientation

Anyone who has taken a class on child, adolescent or adult development knows of Erik Erikson’s eight stages of psychosocial development, Jean Piaget’s four stages of cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development. But as a Marxist I want to know if any of these stages can be organized according to a dialectical spiral? After all, Engels argued that there was a dialectic in nature. Marx and Engels presented a theory of society that was dialectical. Primitive communism was the thesis, slave, feudal and capitalist societies were the antithesis and socialism/communism were the synthesis. The synthesis was a qualitative leap beyond both the thesis and antithesis. The good news is that psychologist Robert Kegan wrote a book called the Evolving Self and sure enough, his model was organized around a dialectical spiral and it included Erikson’s, Piaget’s and Kohlberg’s stages.

The foundation of this article comes from one I wrote over 20 months ago call Spirals of Becoming: The Search for a Dialectical Spiral in the Individual Life Cycle. That article was more about the search for dialectics as a fifth stage of cognitive development. I discussed Kegan’s work as part of my search for cognitive development but it wasn’t center-stage. In this article I center on Kegan’s dialectical spiral, not as a stepping stone to understand cognitive development, but as a model for understanding psychological development as a whole – biologically, socially and epistemologically. While I praise some of his work, I point out his theory does not have a dialectical understanding of society, history, culture and class. I use the socio-historical theory of Vygotsky, Luria and Leontiev to be more inclusive of the whole world, or all adults as opposed to middle-class and upper-middle class westerners.

Kegan’s three-fold identity of a human being

Robert Kegan is a neo-Piagetian and claims that human beings go through three processes of development. One is as a biological organism which has to adapt to the environment. Secondly, as a psychological being the individual self is in a reciprocal relationship to society. Lastly, individual development has epistemological meaning at all six stages of his model. The individual goes through various crises in meaning-making.

How is Kegan’s model dialectical?

Spiral of differentiation and integration

For Keagan there is a life-long tension in the individual between the desire to differentiate from society and a desire to become increasingly community oriented and integrated. These are the two poles through which the spiral swings back and forth. But why the swing? Differentiation pushed also for turns into isolation, fragmentation and dissociation. And this lopsidedness towards differentiation calls forth meaning-making strategies which are more integrated. Conversely, too lopsided of an integration leads to the experience of being smothered, fused and enmeshed in communities. “But” you might say “this just sounds like a circle or a cycle? What makes it a spiral?” The cycle becomes a spiral because as it ascends with age to become more differentiated and more complexly integrated. Another way to say this is that “I” that the individual becomes is increasingly autonomous while his community expands far beyond what he expected.

Hierarchy of evolutionary stages

As I pointed out in my previous article, Kegan has six stages in which integration and differentiation spiral off into higher and higher levels.

incorporative (center of the spiral)
impulsive (integration 1)
imperial (differentiation 1)
interpersonal (integration 2)
institutional (differentiation 2)
interindividual integration 3)

For example, the integrative stage of the interpersonal is a higher version of integration than the impulsive stage. This is because the integrative stages involve more people and because people are more interdependent. So too, the interindividual stage is a higher version of integration than the interpersonal. At the interpersonal stage the community is composed of fellow teenagers, whereas the inter-individual stage the community is composed of the entire human species.

Also, the institutional stage of differentiation is more complex than the imperial stage. Why? Because at the imperial stage skills like playing a musical instrument or acting in school plays are honed on a voluntary basis and they can be refined or abandoned based on whim. Additionally, there are no serious consequences for bad performances. At the institutional stage, however, many years of schooling may be involved in preparing for life in a work setting and there certainly are negative consequences for a bad performance. Lastly, at the interpersonal stage people’s interests and skills are enmeshed. You can be interested in a particular musical instrument and even if you are not very good, you can still play. At the institutional level, we have to face that although our interests in the flute may be high, we are not good enough to be a professional. So too, we may be skilled in certain areas such as counseling but have little interest in it. This happened to me with psychological counseling.

Here is a summary of how Kegan’s stages line up with Erikson, Kohlberg, and Piaget:

Four Theories of Individual Development The stages are built on each other so that skipping stages is impossible.

Though the stages can’t be skipped that doesn’t mean that the expectations, tasks and skills are necessarily fully completed before moving to the next stage.
The stages have an interpenetrating relationship with society, not only an intrapsychic maturation process.
Events have significance depending on in which stage they occurred.
The higher stages reject, preserve and transform aspects of the lower level.

The criteria for development

The higher stages include an increase in power over the society.
The higher stages include an increasing differentiation and integration.
Higher stages include more self-knowledge (self-reflectiveness).
Higher stage have an expanding community.
Higher stages have an increasing accumulation of consequences (baggage).

Every stage has a culture of embeddedness

Every evolutionary stage has a set of people who keep afloat, support and interact with the evolving individual. There are three possible kinds of cultures of embeddedness. Conventional cultures of embeddedness include parents, relatives, teachers, friends, lovers and workmates. When the conventional cultures are unable or unwilling to do their job, subcultures take their place. These included foster homes, reform schools or jails. Subcultures are not always bad. Many years ago when I played baseball at the sandlots, we were lucky enough to have an older, ex-minor league baseball player join us. He brought bats, balls, gloves and umpired our games. Many of these kids were from broken homes and Joe Austin was a substitute for missing conventional cultures of embeddedness. Countercultures of embeddedness include the hippie movement, the women’s movement and psychological, political or spiritual cults. Today, since Kegan wrote his book, we might include the New Age movement and the Neopagan movement

Functions of the cultures of embeddedness resemble Hegel’s dialectical criteria for development

Ideally the cultures should ”incubate” the individual through the three moments in between exchange. They must confirm, contradict and provide continuity.

Confirmation: the people in the culture of embeddedness recognize and affirm the new stage of development and provide material nutriments and dialogue to solidify their presence in the stage. They provide structure without making the structures rigid.
Contradiction is promoting and provoking the opposite tendencies of the stage someone is in. At this stage once the confirmation stage is solid enough, the culture of embeddedness starts promoting and agitating for the skills necessary for the next stage. That might mean promoting independence if the individual is at the integrative stage or promoting community if the individual is in the differentiated stage.
Continuity means preservation. This function is to make sure that what has been attained in the confirming stage is not swallowed up or abandoned as the person gets swooped up by all the contradictory events in his life. It both preserves the confirmation stage but also carries it forward to a new level. It reminds the individual of their history in overcoming past crises at earlier stages.

Malfunctions of the cultures of embeddedness

There are two ways in which the cultures of embeddedness can fail. One is to be overly involved and the other is not to be involved enough. Over involvement is the refusal to let go and rigidly stay in a one holding environment while lacking the flexibility to move to another function. Another form of over-involvement is to fail to “move over” and make room for the company of new cultures of embeddedness. An example would be a mother or father who refuses to accept that their sons or daughters have friends who are now more important to their children. These adults might also lose their identity when their son or daughter moves out.

Under-involvement

Is where the people in the culture of embeddedness unintentionally or intentionally do not understand the different functions of the cultures of embeddedness and fail to support the individual. Another problem can be that you could either perform the three functions at the earlier stages of development but not know how to perform the same functions at a later stage. For example, a parent may perform the functions very well for children between the ages of 7 to 11, but not know how to perform the functions of dealing with a teenager.

Epistemology: Meaning-making is evolving

In between events that occur in our world at any of Kegan’s stages and our responses to them, there is meaning-making. At the most fundamental level that we engage, we organize what happens to us. We construct what it means. Each of the six stages is an “evolutionary truce”, a weigh-station in how meaning is made at a given period of time within the stage. Meaning-making is the accumulating process of a life-long saga of making meaning. At every stage, we gain meaning, protect it, enhance it, relativize it, lose it and find new meaning in a new stage. Meaning making is a combination of possibility (what we can be or wish to be) and necessity (what we become in reaction to constraints and crisis).

Crisis

Is where meaning-making comes to a head and a solution must be found. The old meaning-making doesn’t work anymore but no meaning identity is in sight. A good example of this would be a teenager who has spent twelve years of her life as a student, facing that she is graduating and will shed her student identity while having no idea what it means to be a worker. Another example might be of a woman who is facing the break-up of a marriage when for her entire adult life she has been with lovers or her married partner and has never been single. My last example is an electrician who has worked their whole adult life and has an accident where he now lacks the physical mobility to climb up telephone poles or snake around the nooks and crannies of a house. Under these conditions they reach the limit of how they know the world. This type of conditions is what the Chinese call a “dangerous opportunity.” If the crisis is survived there is a qualitative leap in the developmental spiral. Even during the crisis a new stage shows glimpses of exhilaration, relief and hope.

Description of the phases

Incorporative

In the United States, the culture of embeddedness exists primarily with the mother, with the father as a back-up. In collectivist cultures in an extended family, the culture of embeddedness may be the result of the mother’s brother or other relatives living in the house. At this stage, the experience of the child is just to get used to being separate from the mother. Psychologist Margaret Mahler says this process can take up to two years. The baby takes everything into their mouth. As Piaget writes, the child is in complete assimilation, bending reality to shape its needs. At Piaget’s sensory motor stage, all learning is through the body as they hurl themselves at the world, taking action and developing motor skills.

Meanwhile the caretakers are doing their best to establish a culture of trust (Erikson) and providing close physical presence, plenty of eye-contact, holding, nuzzling and making themselves available to the child. At the same time, in the contradictory stage, the parents do not meet every need and will stop nursing, carrying the child less and support acts of independence. As the child moves into the “terrible twos” the parent supports this movement for independence and insists on the baby’s inclusion as being part of a family culture. A crisis in this stage may be if the mother has gotten ill, or worse died, and was unable to perform any of the functions of the culture of embeddedness.

Impulsive

At this stage, the culture of embeddedness has expanded beyond the immediate caretakers and includes relatives, neighbors or friends of the parents. The child has gotten used to these people and is no longer afraid of them. At this stage the child has learned the magical meaning of the word “no”. They assert sexuality through playing with themselves and have fully learned to manipulate tools (including spoons) and mastered language. No distinction is made between wishes and other needs.

One of the functions of the confirmation culture of embeddedness in this phase is to encourage fantasy and imagination by providing the child with toys which allow the child to make the toy their own. These are what have been called the “magical years” when the child plays with their imagination. George Herbert Mead has called this the pretend stage. The child must also learn to play with others and learn the conditions for cooperation as well as competition. The contradictory stage is for the caretaker to set limits by excluding the child from the marriage bed as well as encouraging the child to play outside the house. In terms of continuity the child is allowed to enter the cultures outside the home while still being available. A big crisis of this stage is the dissolution of a marriage between the ages of 5-7.

Imperial

As the child goes to school, the culture of embeddedness expands to include teachers, schoolmates and neighborhood kids. At this phase the child needs to have mastered controlling their impulses. At Piaget’s concrete operational thinking stage, the child’s mind makes its first attempt to discipline the body by learning to play a musical instrument, make things in wood shop as well as toying with fixing things. The child’s understanding of the relationship between competition and cooperation is played out through organized games or sports. People are understood as more than simply instruments of organized needs.

In terms of holding environments, the child is confirmed by encouraging to not just make things, but to master them (Erikson’s industry vs inferiority stage). The caretakers may buy the child a musical instrument, good quality art supplies and/or a good quality baseball glove. The child’s culture may perform the contradictory culture of embeddedness by encouraging the child to treat other kids as ends in themselves rather than being genuinely interested in others. The culture of embeddedness will allow the school culture to lead but will be available to process problems at school. These are not only between other students, but in clarifying and engaging the competition between teachers and parents in the child’s eyes. About the biggest crisis at this phase would be if the parents either switched schools within the same city or the parents had to move because of work obligations.

Interpersonal

At this stage, hormones kick in and relationships with friends and potential lovers overshadow the previous cultures of embeddedness. Cultures of embeddedness might also include gangs. This stage corresponds to Erikson’s identity vs role confusion. This phase is mostly unique to industrial capitalist countries where role models from music, sports and movies pulls teenagers in unrealistic directions. In collectivist culture there is far less role confusion because teenagers are expected to carry on the work of their parents. In this integrative stage the differentiation that was built up from the imperial stage is likely to be overwhelmed by the desire to fit in and be approved by others. There is also a difficulty in trusting oneself to evaluate whether or not they should try LSD, join a gang to rob a liquor store, wear makeup or wear pants instead of skirts. There is also much solidarity between teenagers against the adult world. Again, this is unique to the West. What work is done at this stage is likely to have less meaning because, with exceptions, there is not enough specialized trainings.

The job of the cultures of embeddedness here is to encourage the interdependence that goes with teenage life. At the same time they should support the desire for independence that goes with going to college, as well as ambition in seeking a career counselor in finding the right fit for work. The culture of embeddedness supports continuity in reminding the late teenager of the skills they developed during the industry stage and building confidence that they should be kept alive as they enter adulthood even if it is not in the form of paid work. Crisis may occur with the disappearance of cultures of embeddedness if the individual goes away to college. Crisis is also likely if the individual joins the military. Boot camp systematically attempts to undermine all previous cultures of embeddedness in their attempts to re-socialize the individual.

Institutional

In this phase the individual is involved in starting their work-life, getting married and likely to raise children. These days people’s first jobs are not likely to be their last, so we can expect that while the skills they use through college training may be relatively stable, the settings in which they take place will probably change. For example, it may take time for a grammar school teacher to figure out which grade level they are best suited to teach. It may take five years of work for a counselor to understand that they like to work in groups rather than one-on-one or that they prefer to work with people in institutional settings rather than private therapy. If the person is lucky enough to be middle class (either self-employed) or a middle manager, they relate to their occupation as a “career” rather than as a job. When work is too narrowly defined and combined with a mediocre or bad marriage this can lead to the person becoming a workaholic.

In the confirmation phase of the culture of embeddedness workmates and human resource departments support the individual in their work. They provide them with professional training and reward them both financially and emotionally with recognition and reward, as in Maslow’s self-esteem level. But in more visionary cultures of embeddedness, this individual would be challenged to move into some kind of socially responsible activity of their job. At best they might even convince them to work for a new organization which is carrying out more socially responsible activities. Crises may occur if their job is dissolved because of the company’s failure to make the job high priority or if they are a victim of a company buy-out by a venture capitalist.

Interindividual

This is a visionary stage that most people fail to reach. The culture of embeddedness has expanded beyond the local to include regional, national and international levels.

At this stage the individual has moved beyond Piaget’s formal operations to include a new dialectical way of thinking (see my previous article). At the moral level the individual has moved from conventional to post-conventional morality, where conventional laws are challenged as a basis of morality. Finally, the person has moved beyond caring for the next generation of family, to caring about the human species as a whole and what becomes of us. People like Gandhi, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King are examples of people who reached the interindividual stage. Work has expanded to become life work. They are inspired and inspire others through political or spiritual peak experiences. Life work becomes linked to deep time and deep space. Deep time is thinking of how their work links to the next stage of human history.

Enter Lev Vygotsky and Criticism of Kegan’s Theory

If the communist psychologist Lev Vygotsky were alive today, he would be very appreciative of Kegan. First he would say the tension between the poles of the dialectic between differentiation and integration is part of the human condition. Secondly, he would appreciate how Kegan’s cultures of embeddedness expand from the family to friends, schoolmates, work mates and possibly into regional and even international cultures of embeddedness. Thirdly, the functions of the cultures of embedded of confirmation, contradiction and continuity are like Hegel’s description of the dialectical spiral of contradiction and preservation. Fourth, Kegan’s movement from stage to stage are qualitative leaps rather than simply gradual transitions.

However there are a number of significant problems in Kegan’s work all of which have to do with social macro-structures that Kegan does not discuss. They are:

An atomistic, as opposed to a dialectical, relationship between the individual and society.
A lack of the importance of history in individual development.
Neglect of the cross-cultural implications of his theory.
No mention of how social class might impact individual development.

Atomistic concept of the relationship between society and the individual

Kegan treats our social nature similarly to Piaget. He treats it as an add-on at the end. For example, Vygotsky would say the mother or father are not simply private individuals who decide together the way the baby is socialized. The parents are members of a particular kind of society, a capitalist society, which socialized all its individuals in that direction. Parents raised in state-capitalists and socialist societies would have socialized their children differently. Kegan’s model moves from micro-groups and only becomes macro at the end of the developmental line. Vygotsky would argue first there is macro-socialization of parents, then a micro-internalization application to their children and finally a return to the macro on a higher level in the form of children turned workers as young adults.

Lack of importance given to world-history in individual development

If people who lived during the Middle Ages had developmental psychologists on hand these stages of development would be very different. The fact that feminism hit the West in two waves, 1830 to 1860 and then in the twelve year period from 1968 to around 1980, has affected women’s opportunity to develop into the institutional stage. In the same Middle Ages before the printing press, most people could not read or write. Without writing individuals would never have developed Piaget’s formal operational stage which is the foundation for Kegan’s institutional stage.

Cross-cultural insensitivity

The last three stages of Kegan’s model, the interpersonal stage, the institutional stage and the interindividual stage would not have developed in a collectivist society and collectivists compose at least 70 – 80% of the world’s population. The interpersonal stage is about alliances being formed by teenagers against the adult world. But in collectivist societies teenagers are put to work with adults for most of their teenage life. There is little opportunity for teenagers to form a distinct identity from the adult world. Consequently, there is no “storm and stress stage” of teenage life. As mentioned earlier, collectivists are less confused about roles (Erikson’s stage) because they are expected to do the same work their parents did.

When it comes to Kegan’s institutional stage, we have to keep in mind that collectivist societies do not have a Protestant work ethic that accompanies this stage. For them, work is a curse. It is leisure time that is held up as a virtue to be emulated. Lastly, for the most part collectivists do not have a visionary stage of development. Most collectivists around the world are peasants and peasants, with rare exception, do not produce visionaries. People like Gandhi in India were Western-trained. He didn’t start making trouble for the British until after studying law there. In the West individualism goes all the way back to the Middle Ages and it is individualists who inspire science, the Enlightenment and even socialism. All these go with Kegan’s interindividual stage. Collectivists don’t have such a stage.

The absence of social class in Kegan’s model of development

There is little or no mention of how socioeconomic class (working-class or poor) would impact any of Kegan’s concepts. By default, it seems that his model for social class are educated middle and upper-middle class people. For example, all the talk about the fifth institutionalist stage is about a career. Typically working-class people don’t identify with a career. For them work is a job.

Other questions Kegan doesn’t ask about social class are the following. Would the polarity between differentiation and integration be as vital for poor and working class people? Are working-class and poor people just as interested in autonomy and differentiation? What differences might there be in who is in the various cultures of embeddedness? It there a difference in the conformation, contradiction and continuity processes within the functions? Are there more or less sub-cultures of embeddedness in a working-class person’s life? What about countercultures of embeddedness? Are working class and poor people more or less likely to use them?

In Kegan’s counter-culture of embeddedness there is no mention of socialism or communism. This is a huge oversight given the thousands or even millions of people who have lived in existing socialist societies.

Lastly, we said that there is a downside to differentiation which is dissociation, amputation and fragmentation. Are working class people more or less likely to experience this? Conversely, the downside of integration is enmeshment, fusion or the experience of being smothered. Are poor and working-class people more or less likely to experience this? These class questions are very interesting and unfortunately Kegan leaves these unanswered. A communist psychology could answer them robustly.

• First published at Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

The post Weaving the Dialectical Spiral into Individual Development first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.