The Little Red Blog

Sunday Sermon: The Death of Character

{Let us conclude 2023 with a reminder of our ongoing failure to live up to the standards of the moral scolds among us, and our failure to emulate the good example of our ancestors, men and women of unassailable Christian character. James Davison Hunter’s eulogy for “character” was written twenty-five years ago, while Bill Clinton occupied the White House; the subsequent political ascendancy of Donald Trump suggests that Hunter may have been on to something.}

James Davison Hunter, from The Death of Character (2000):

Character is dead. Attempts to revive it will yield little.

The social and cultural conditions that make character possible are no longer present, and no amount of political rhetoric, legal maneuvering, educational policy making, or money can change that reality. Its time has passed. Character is formed in relation to convictions and is manifested in the capacity to abide by those convictions even in, especially in, the face of temptation. This being so, the demise of character begins with the destruction of creeds, the convictions, and the “god-terms” that made those creeds sacred to us and inviolable within us.

This destruction occurs simultaneously with the rise of “values.” Values are truths that have been deprived of their commanding character. They are substitutes for revelation, imperatives that have dissolved into a range of possibilities. The very word “value” signifies the reduction of truth to utility, taboo to fashion, conviction to mere preference; all provisional, all exchangeable. Both values and “lifestyle"—a way of living that reflects the accumulation of one’s values— bespeak a world in which nothing is sacred. Neither word carries the weight of conviction; the commitment to truths made sacred. Indeed, sacredness is conspicuous in its absence. There is nothing there that one need believe, commanding and demanding its due, for “truth” is but a matter of taste and temperament. Formed against a symbolic order made up of “values” and differing “lifestyles” is the Self—malleable, endlessly developing, consuming, realizing, actualizing, perfecting—but again, something less than character.

The implications are simultaneously liberating and disturbing. There is unprecedented individual freedom that few would be willing to relinquish. But there is also a license that disparages self-restraint and responsibility toward others. This ambivalence is an inescapable feature of our time. They are fused inextricably. Whatever benefits such a fluid and temporary moral universe may offer, they fail to lessen our dismay when we witness random, and senseless violence; our outrage when we see open displays of corruption; our indignation when, we observe a flouting of basic standards of decency; and our sadness as we watch callousness when compassion and mercy cry out. But why should we be surprised? When the self is stripped of moral anchoring, there is nothing to which the will is bound to submit, nothing innate to keep it in check. There is no compelling reason to be burdened by guilt. Dostoyevsky had it about right; everything becomes possible’—every violence, every deed of corruption, every mockery of justice, every act of indifference—because there are no inhibiting truths. What is more, the indigenous moral institutions of our society that have long sustained those truths are fragile at best, irreparable at worst. It is in the evacuation of depth, stability, and substance, of culture where we witness the death of character.

The causes of our dilemma have little to do with individual moral, failure. This is an important point. There are, in fact, larger historical forces at work. The demands of multinational capitalism, for example, have created conditions that make a coherent self that, unites history, community, and subjectivity all but impossible. Pluralism and social mobility undermine the plausibility and coherence of personal beliefs and their capacity to provide a stable sense of meaning. A steady diet of the contemporary communications media and popular culture undermines our very sense of what, is real. The list of factors contributing to this dilemma is formidable; against any of them, individuals have little control. At the same time, character in America has not died a natural death. There has been an ironic and unintended complicity among the very people who have taken on the task of being its guardians and promoters. Some are clearly hucksters, hawking techniques of moral improvement for profit in the swarming and ever-changing values market. Most, however, are deeply earnest, motivated by a belief that if we just try hard enough and work together, we can somehow fill the values deficit that has occurred in our culture in recent decades. All offer quick bromides on how to raise a moral child, how to give your child great self- esteem, how to raise decent kids, and how to prepare kids for adolescence.

But whether sincere or cynical, this mixed array of moral guardians in itself demonstrates our incapacity to cultivate the character for which they call The end is the reduction of moral exhortation into a peddling of sterile abstractions, weary platitudes, and empty maxims: “Be cool, follow the rules,” “Just say no,” “Just say yes,” “Just don’t do it,” “Do the right thing.” More ironic still is the complicity of the moral education establishment, those who have given their professional life to the task of moral education. Their mission, of course, is to bring about moral improvement in children and in society, to change the world for the better through moral instruction. As it is currently institutionalized, moral education does just the opposite of what it intends. In its present forms, it undermines the capacity to form the convictions upon which character must be based if it is to exist at all.

We say we want a renewal of character in our day but we don’t really know what we ask for. To have a renewal of character is to have a renewal of a creedal order that constrains, limits, binds, obligates, and compels. This price is too high for us to pay. We want character but without unyielding conviction; we want strong morality but without the emotional burden of guilt or shame; we want virtue but without particular moral justifications that invariably offend; we want good without having to name evil; we want decency without the authority to insist upon it; we want moral community without any limitations to personal freedom. In short, we want what we cannot possibly have on the terms that we want it.

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James Davison Hunter, The Death of Character (Basic Books, 2000)

James Davison Hunter - Wikipedia

Saturday Lecture: All Truth Is Social

{Richard Bushman is a Mormon scholar and a respected historian of nineteenth-century America. In the following excerpt, he acknowledges the difficulty of pursuing ‘objective’ scholarship in the face of the myriad personal and social factors that influence everything from our choice of subjects to our selection, arrangement, and interpretation of facts.}

“We all have our tribes.” (Richard Bushman)

Richard Bushman (from “The Social Dimensions of Rationality”):  

We live at a moment in history when the Enlightenment dream of scientific scholarship has been eaten away by doubts about the possibility of scholarly objectivity. A host of thinkers (many of them French) have called into question the very possibility of dispassionate inquiry. They argue not merely that objectivity is an impossible achievement for human beings, who can never detach their minds from the rest of their being, but that the pretense of objectivity is an exercise in self-aggrandizement. Objectivity, they say, disguises a play for power by those who pretend to the authority of objective scholarship when they are every bit as self-interested in the outcome as any religious [or ideological] apologist. The scientific authorities of an era, according to this theory, claim to speak only for truth against error, when in reality they stand to benefit by promoting their particular truth and vanquishing all others. No truth, not even the most rigorously scientific, is objective. All truth is colored by personal interest of some sort.

I am loath to go all the way with such postmodern thinkers, or to relinquish faith in some measure of objective scholarship. We can recognize utterly biased and self-serving scholarship that we know would not hold up under scrutiny, or history writing that is filled with factual errors. We want to reserve the right to correct such corrupted work in the name of some kind of objective truth.

But if we cannot go all the way with critics of the Enlightenment, we can at least admit that no scholarship, no truth, exists in a social vacuum. Though it is rarely mentioned in the work itself, all scholarship is tied to a community of some kind and bears the marks of that community’s influence. Scholarship is the product of people who are located in institutions—universities, research institutes, or circles of like-minded thinkers. They publish their work and want to have it read by others. Their reputations, promotions, pay raises, and appointments depend on how that work is received. When they write, they use the language, the mannerisms, the forms of their scholarly community. In taking an intellectual position, they silently, but inevitably, associate themselves with people of a similar outlook. Scholars take pleasure in hearing references to their work at scholarly meetings or seeing it mentioned in publications. In the scholarly work itself, a conclusion is presented as the outcome of careful scrutiny and rigorous analysis of the facts; but the assumptions, the perspective, the fundamental attitude of the work come from some community, from a society with which the scholar is implicitly and probably quite hopefully associating.

Every form of scholarship is rooted in a society, an imagined community of scholars, in which the teachers or writers live and move and have their being. We cannot take a position on a scholarly issue without implicitly forming or breaking a social relationship. Everything we write and say links us to other people, with all the tangled consequences for our self-esteem, our personal identities, our hopes and aspirations. There is a social and personal dimension to every form of rational discourse, which means that all beliefs, not only religious beliefs, are both rational and irrational.

For example, we may be persuaded rationally that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century production. There may be hundreds of facts we can invoke to sustain this position. But in making that assertion we are forming and breaking human relationships that unavoidably influence our thinking, just as the memories of a religious upbringing (or of a transforming conversion) coil around the work of Mormon apologists.  

I acknowledge my own subjectivity and the influence of a million personal associations. But this recognition of my own limitations makes me deeply skeptical of all who claim to escape their subjectivity, who think they have rid themselves of the prejudices of their tribe. We all have our tribes. The desire to form tribes, to join tribes, to triumph within our tribes, drives and shapes our scholarship. Every form of discourse, every rationality is rooted in a society and serves social purposes. Every truth is socially conditioned and socially motivated. All truth, religious and scientific, is of necessity social truth and is profoundly affected by human associations.

In what, then, can we put our trust? If truth always grows from a particular society, how do we choose among the perplexing confusions of multiple and confusing truths? If the Enlightenment quest has faltered, if the pursuit of knowledge seems mired in subjectivity, and if scholarship is entwined in the corrupting pursuit of power, what can we cling to? What can replace objective scientific truth as a foundation for culture and personal identity?

Where do we go, that is, when we are post-Enlightenment, postmodern, post-everything?

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 Richard Bushman - Wikipedia

If you have any interest in Mormon history, Richard Bushman should be one of your go-to sources, along with Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith.

Existential Wednesday: Patio Festivals in Suburbia

{Note: Questions have been raised regarding the ontological status (i.e., real or fictional) of Pascal, the existential Russian blue cat; in addition, some readers have suggested that Pascal appears to be a Russian blue kitten rather than a full-grown Russian blue cat. Pascal sincerely appreciates readers’ concerns and strongly suggests that they mind their own business.}  

Before returning to William Barrett’s Irrational Man, allow me to turn to the late Robert Nisbet and his book The Quest for Community. While The Quest for Community has been called (by Ross Douthat) “arguably the 20^th century’s most important work of conservative sociology,” the conservatism it (and its author) espoused was far from what passes for conservatism today.

That aside, I want to focus here on what Nisbet had to say about alienation, Barrett’s topic and one generally dismissed by conservative writers who considered it an affectation, nothing more than self-indulgent navel-gazing on the part of spoiled young people encouraged by pipe-smoking left-wing intellectuals. While alienation was not a prominent concern in the original 1953 edition of Quest, Nisbet singled it out in the 1960 revision:

“It has become steadily clearer to me that alienation is one of the determining realities of the contemporary age: not merely a key concept in philosophy, literature, and the social sciences (making obsolete or irrelevant many of the rationalistic premises descended from the Enlightenment), but a cultural and psychological condition implicating ever larger sections of the population.”

Nisbet offered this understanding of alienation: “I mean the state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible, or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility. The individual not only does not feel a part of the social order; he has lost interest in being a part of it.”  Alienation in that sense, Nisbet claimed, was becoming increasingly pervasive in mid-century America; “Not all the manufactured symbols of togetherness, the ever-ready programs of human relations, patio festivals in suburbia, and our quadrennial crusades for presidential candidates hide the fact that for millions of persons such institutions as state, political party, business, church, labor union, and even family have become remote and increasingly difficult to give any part of one’s self to.”

Referring to what he called “the Conservative revolt against rationalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century,” Nisbet went on to list the various kinds of alienation already identified by anti-modern thinkers. The first was “alienation from the past,” attributable to the rapid changes and the many novelties of modern life which engendered a myth of progress and a contempt for the past (countered by a romanticized fetishization of an imaginary idyllic past). Then, said Nisbet, there was “alienation from place and nature,” caused by the rootless mobility of modern life, by urbanization, and by ruthless exploitation of nature. Closely related, in Nisbet’s view, was “alienation from things, the kind that one can touch, be identified with, become ennobled or debased by, be driven to defend against attack.” ¹ In a culture awash with disposable things and marked by planned obsolescence, objects were ephemeral and of no lasting value.

Having highlighted the usual suspects in the rise of alienation, Nisbet offered what he believed was the root cause: the loss of community, specifically the sort of community that binds past, present, and future, thereby linking the generations. “Past and present have a creative relationship," he wrote, "not because of categories in men’s minds but because of certain social bonds which themselves reach from past to future.” Touching on a theme that would be the subject of Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd, Nisbet wrote, “Alienation from the past helps make the problem of coming to adulthood painful and baffling. How, apart from stable ties with preceding generations, can the image of adulthood be kept clear in a society?”

Nisbet elaborated:

“There are natural barriers between boyhood and manhood in all places and all times, but these become formidable only in a society where responsibility for making men has devolved almost exclusively upon the small and isolated conjugal family. Other ages had kindred, class, race, and other ‘genetic’ unities. Only the archaist would say these specific bonds are necessary, but it is difficult to see any new relationships in our fragmented and often atomized society that show signs of replacing the old ones.” ²

Continuing his analysis, Nisbet suggested that “Alienation from place and property turns out to be, at bottom, estrangement from close personal ties which give lasting meaning to each. Native health is hardly distinguishable from the human relationships within which landscape and animals and things become cherished and deeply implanted in one’s soul.”

The conclusion was clear: “Community is the essential context within which modern alienation has to be considered.” Thus, obviously, the title of his book: The Quest for Community. Alienation was not merely an existential condition to be solved by therapy for troubled individuals; it was also a social and historical condition, and it required political solutions.

Meanwhile—remember, Nisbet published the book in 1953 and updated it in 1960—the federal government, under President Dwight Eisenhower, was building our Interstate Highway System:

Authorized by the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the Interstates were designed to be an all-freeway system, with nationally unified standards for construction and signage. While some older freeways were adopted into the system, most of the routes were completely new construction, greatly expanding the freeway network in the U.S. Especially in densely populated urban areas, these new freeways were often controversial as their building necessitated the destruction of many older, well-established neighborhoods; as a result of the many freeway revolts during the 1960s and 1970s, several planned Interstates were abandoned or re-routed to avoid urban cores. ³ 

In New York, around the same time, Robert Moses imposed his own brand of social engineering:

His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island. In Moses's urban planning of New York, he bulldozed primarily Black and Latino homes to make way for parks, chose the middle of minority neighborhoods as the location for highways, and deliberately designed bridges on the parkways connecting New York City to beaches in Long Island to be too low for buses from the inner city to access the beaches. ⁴

The quest for community never materialized in postwar America; it was preempted by the quest for profit. Conservatives who joined Nisbet in emphasizing the importance of community (long before “communitarianism” became a fad on the Left) stood by and watched (cheered, in fact) as the capitalist Leviathan impose itself from sea to shining sea. ⁵ In the absence of community, alienated Americans, young and old, embarked on personal quests for “authenticity”. The results would be disastrous—but you don’t need me to tell you that.

--Pascal, the existential Russian blue cat

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 ¹ Bob Dylan: “Anyone can fill his life up with things he can see but he just cannot touch…” (“Dear Landlord”)    

² Christopher Lasch’s Haven in a Heartless World explored the issue in depth. Conservatives insist that the decline of the modern family is the result of permissiveness and moral relativism; Nisbet and Lasch, on the other hand, albeit with different emphases, both suggested that the “nuclear family” was first formed and then broken by the burdens of modernity. 

³ Jane Holtz Kay’s Asphalt Nation is a useful guide to the process of paving over a nation (should you want to do so in the future).

⁴ Robert Caro’s massive The Power Broker is the definitive biography of Robert Moses.

⁵ Both the Interstate Highway System and Robert Moses’ reign of “eminent domain” were examples, admittedly, of Big Government, against which those on the political Right rail incessantly. They were also examples, however, of Big Government as handmaiden to, and carrier of water for, conservatives’ beloved Capitalism, which benefited from such projects at the expense of taxpayers and of residents of impacted neighborhoods and towns. Capitalism and Big Government, however much they protest to the contrary, are joined at the hip.

Books Report: "Culture Against Man" (1963)

“I am concerned with our national character in a culture increasingly feeling the effects of a lopsided preoccupation with amassing wealth and raising its standard of living. What has our great concern with raising our standard of living done to us?”  (Jules Henry, Culture Against Man)

Jules Henry was trained as an anthropologist (by the likes of Franz Boas and Margaret Mead). He did extensive field work among tribes in southern Brazil, combining his anthropological observations with insights taken from Freud, producing what Henry called “the first anthropological monograph written from a psychoanalytic point of view.” For two decades, he taught sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. His status as a “social philosopher” was based on his ability to combine several different disciplines within the social sciences; it was also based on his 1963 book, Culture Against Man.

Foreshadowing the work of critics such as Neil Postman, Barry Schwartz, and Alfie Kohn, Jules Henry appreciated both the power of culture and the ability of men and women to shape it. As Harold Gould wrote, “Henry believed that culture is not a mechanical force outside the control of human will. On the contrary, it is human will expressed as the choices which men as collectivities make, which they transmit cross-generationally, and which they embody in institutional systems.” Culture Against Man was essentially an indictment of American society for having produced a culture detrimental to human flourishing.

Henry was writing in the years before the Sixties’ counterculture took hold; much of Culture Against Man was composed in the Fifties. In the book, Henry had a different notion of “counter-culture” in mind; when he used that term, he meant a culture that did the opposite of what culture is supposed to do, a culture that threatened rather than supported “social sanity”. Again, in the words of Harold Gould:

“Jules Henry realized that a “new society” had been born which was, fundamentally, the antithesis and the negation of the one which Weber described in his ‘Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’. The impulse controls which had been built into Western man by the sociological consequences of the Reformation had been, in Henry’s opinion, systematically eradicated by mass advertising and by mass indoctrination in the schools leading to a “consumption-oriented” in place of a “savings-oriented” man. Like the Old Testament prophets, Jules Henry vehemently decried the moral character of the new society which his vision beheld.”

“Impulse controls” would inhibit consumerism, which would inhibit production, which would inhibit or even cripple economic growth—and what else were we to live for or measure ourselves by if not economic growth? Here is Jules Henry’s fundamental claim:

“The orientation of man toward physical survival, to the exclusion of other considerations, has made society a grim place to live in, and for the most part human society has been a place where, though man has survived physically, he has died emotionally.”

Henry distinguished between “drives,” some of which are biologically innate, and “values,” all of which are of human invention. Our basic drives are for physical survival (food, water, clothing, shelter) and reproduction (sexual drive), but every culture inculcates and encourages certain other drives as well, which vary from culture to culture; those drives can include “drives toward achievement, competition, profit, mobility, and a higher standard of living.” Cultures inculcate and encourage values, too: e.g., “love, kindness, quietness, contentment, fun, frankness, and simplicity.”

The crucial difference, said Henry, is that, while values may guide our actions, drives tend to compel behavior, which is to say, drives are felt more urgently than values and are more difficult to resist. “Americans get heart attacks, ulcers, and asthma from the effects of their drives,” Henry claimed; whereas, in our culture, “values are merely ideas about good human relations, [which] give people direction [but] lack the compelling power of drives.” Compounding that difference is the fact that our culture—not all cultures, certainly, but modern American culture—is more affirming and supportive of drives, which it takes to be universal, than of values, which it takes to be a matter of personal preference. The result, wrote Henry, is that “If you are propelled by drives, American culture offers innumerable opportunities for you; but if you are moved mostly by values, you really have to search, and if you do find a job in which you can live by values, the pay and prestige are usually low. It is hard to find institutions other than the family which are supportive of values.” ¹

In Culture Against Man, Jules Henry took on an entire herd of sacred cows: industry, advertising, education, the “warehousing” of the elderly and the mentally ill, our for-profit medical system, and more. He believed that we, as a culture, had chosen to let our drives rule us with little or no guidance, much less resistance, from our values; our technological ingenuity fed both the insatiable appetites of the Market and the death cult of the military (Henry was writing during the Cold War; Culture Against Man was published just months after the “Cuban missile crisis” of 1962). ² “Technological drivenness” was how Henry characterized our military-industrial-consumer-entertainment complex, and he feared the worst from it.

Nevertheless, Henry felt obliged to conclude on a (perhaps forced) “note of optimism”: “Nature has destined man to move from one misery to another; but history proves that man has been forced by misery into enlightenment—although he has never accepted it without a bitter fight.  Perhaps, some time hence, Homo Sapiens, if he has not destroyed himself, will realize, through misery, that destiny of perfection Nature holds mysteriously in store for him.”

Wouldn’t that be nice?

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¹ I would add “the church” as a value-supportive institution.

² In fact, Henry accused American society of fostering a “culture of death” and of training “tens of thousands of the most acute brains in the country in thinking about a world charnel house. The forces of death,” he wrote, “are confident and organized, while the forces of life—the people who long for peace—are, for the most part, scattered, inarticulate, and wooly-minded, overwhelmed by their own impotence. Death struts about the house while Life cowers in the corner.”

Sources:

Jules Henry - Wikipedia

JULES HENRY 1904–1969 - GOULD - 1971 - American Anthropologist - Wiley Online Library

Books Report

Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them is an irresistibly charming memoir/travel piece/literary critique. Much of the material in The Possessed had previously been published in the New Yorker, Harpers, and N+1; much of the subject matter goes back to Ms. Batuman’s graduate school days at Stanford. The book’s publisher describes the author’s voice as “unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature,” all of which accords with my own impression. I am not normally inclined to read memoirs, travel pieces, or literary criticism, much less something that combines all three genres; I was drawn to this book because of its focus on Russia, but I was drawn into it by Elif Batuman’s voice, her humor, and her persona.  

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The House of Government, by Yuri Slezkine, is a tome of a different color. Subtitled A Saga of the Russian Revolution, the book is Tolstoyan in its length (1000 pages), its epic sweep, its novelistic detail, and its bewildering cast of characters, the only indispensable one of whom is, says the author, the titular House of Government:

During the first Five-Year Plan (1928-32), the Soviet government built a new socialist state and a fully nationalized economy. At the same time, it built a house for itself. The House of Government was located in a low-lying area called “the Swamp,” across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it consisted of eleven units of varying heights organized around three interconnected courtyards, each one with its own fountain.

Slezkine describes the House as “the vanguard’s backyard, a fortress protected by metal gates and armed guards”; he also characterizes it as “a place where revolutionaries came home, and the revolution came to die.” That last comment suggests that the book is something of an obituary, if not quite a eulogy; the House of Government—which still stands today, “repainted and repopulated”—was, in its heyday, the citadel of Bolshevism. Slezkine places certain grim facts at the very beginning of his narrative:

In the 1930s and 1940s, about eight hundred House residents and an unspecified number of employees were evicted from their apartments and accused of duplicity, degeneracy, counterrevolutionary activity, or general unreliability. They were all found guilty, one way or another. Three hundred forty-four residents are known to have been shot; the rest were sentenced to various forms of imprisonment.

The House of Government has garnered all sorts of praise, as well as its share of criticism; perhaps because, rather than praising the Bolsheviks or burying them, Slezkine humanizes them. Here, for instance, he quotes Aleksandr Vronsky on the fellowship of pre-revolutionary exile and on the lasting bond forged among “comrades-in-arms, fellows in freedom, and friends”:

“They are my family, my country, my cherished past and glorious future. They blossom in my soul like rare flowers on a mountain slope, right next to the edge of the snow. Here’s to our free, loyal fellowship, firm handshakes, sincere conversations on stormy nights, our laughter, jokes, bravery, daring, restless wanderings, our willingness to help each other at the cost of our lives, our certainty and faith in the bitterest of years, our marvelous, unique, valiant band!”

Maxim Gorky praised Vronsky’s memoir for revealing “the voice of a true revolutionary, who knows how to talk about himself as a real, live human being.” The problem, of course, was not that the Bolsheviks were not human beings; it is that they forgot or chose to ignore the humanity of their victims.

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Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld wrote In Praise of Doubt in 2009. Their intention was expressed in the book’s subtitle: How to Have Convictions without Becoming a Fanatic. They hoped, that is, to temper the intemperate nature of our public discourse; the evidence of the past decade suggests they failed. I will say more about the book in a separate post (or two); for now, I will simply praise the authors’ good intentions, especially those of Mr. Berger, who has spent most of his academic career trying, with mixed results, to disavow certain conclusions others have drawn from his 1966 The Social Construction of Reality.

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Lastly: I am endeavoring to re-read David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions, primarily because I think I was in argumentative mode when I first read it and therefore did not fully appreciate either Hart’s prose style or the subtlety of his thought. In addition, one chapter of the book is titled “Divine Humanity,” and that is a very Orthodox (and Russian!) idea which I would not likely have appreciated back then (the book was published in 2009). Hart’s writing has the same effect on me that Vladimir Lenin’s speeches were said to have had on listeners: even when I disagree with what he says, I find myself admiring both the strength of his conviction and the felicity with which he expresses himself.  

Saturday Lecture: "A Surfeit of Consciousness"

Peter Berger and Anton Zijderfeld, from In Praise of Doubt (2009):

Through most of history most human beings lived in communities that were characterized by a very high degree of cognitive and normative consensus—that is, almost everyone shared the same assumptions about what the world is like and how one should behave in it. Of course, there were always marginal types, people who questioned these taken-for-granted assumptions—individuals such as, say, Socrates. But such individuals were quite rare. In other words, there wasn’t much conversation between whatever diverse groups may have crossed each other’s paths. The walls of social segregation were very high.

Modernity, with increasing speed and scope, weakens these walls. It has resulted in an ever-increasing proportion of the population living in cities, many of them huge—and cities have always been places where diverse groups go to rub shoulders on an ongoing basis. With that worldwide urbanization has come the spread of ‘urbanity’—an urban/urbane culture that’s nurtured by plurality [diversity] and in turn fosters the latter.  Furthermore, there are massive movements of people across vast regions, again bringing very diverse groups into intimate contact with each other. Mass education means that more and more people are aware of different ideas, values, and ways of life. And, last but not least, modern means of mass communication—films, radio, television, telephones, and now the explosion of information through the computer revolution—have brought about an enormous increase in people’s ability to access alternative approaches to reality. As a result of these processes, all endemic to modernity, plurality has reached a degree unique in history.

What takes place under conditions of genuine plurality can be subsumed under a category used in the sociology of knowledge—‘cognitive contamination’. This is based on a very basic human trait: If people converse with each other over time, they begin to influence each other’s thinking. As such ‘contamination’ occurs, people find it more and more difficult to characterize the beliefs and values of the others as perverse, insane, or evil. Slowly but surely, the thought obtrudes that, maybe, these people have a point. With that thought, the previously taken-for-granted view of reality becomes shaky.

In addition, modernization has enabled science and technology to change the conditions of human beings fundamentally. One aspect of that transformation is the gigantic shift from ‘fate’ to ‘choice’. This shift affects not only the material aspects of human life, but also the cognitive and normative dimensions. Take a fundamental question such as, What are men and women? In the pre-modern community, there was hardly any choice in the matter. There was a clear and binding consensus about the nature of the two sexes, and about the norms following from this agreed-upon nature. Modernization has enormously increased the amount of choice in this area of life. Typically, a modern individual can choose whom to marry, how and where to set up the household, what occupation to train for, how many children to have, and how to raise those children. Again, there are entire systems to choose from—systems of marital relations, systems of education, and so on. Additionally, the modern individual can select a specific personal identity, such as traditional or progressive, straight or gay, disciplinarian or permissive. In much of the developed world, modern identity is chosen, a sort of project (often a lifelong one) undertaken by countless individuals.

This turns out to be a difficult proposition for many people. Individuals are led constantly to ask who they are and how they should live, and a vast array of therapeutic agencies stand ready to assist them in this formidable task. On the societal level the educational system, the media, and a multitude of ‘think tanks’ ask the same questions about the entire society: Who are we? Where are we going? Where should we be going? It could be said, without much exaggeration, that modernity suffers from a surfeit of consciousness.

Whereas, in the past the individual could go through life without too much reflection, today the individual is thrown back on his or her subjective resources: What am I to believe? How should I act? Indeed, who am I? Because so much of our behavior is chosen, the memory of choices will persist in the individual’s mind—and with it the awareness, though dim, that sometime in the future this choice could be reversed and replaced with a different choice. ¹

Jean-Paul Sartre proposed that ‘man is condemned to freedom’. As a general anthropological proposition, this is rather questionable. But as a description of modern humanity, it’s remarkable apt.

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¹ The anxiety, guilt, and self-doubt associated with, and occasioned by, constantly having to choose is explored by Barry Schwartz in his classic, The Paradox of Choice.

Hegemony and Its Discontents

{This post will conclude, for now, my foray into the furor over Cultural Marxism; but, as Jordan Peterson is my witness, I will be back.}

Michael Walsh, in his Introduction to his book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, declares:

Few ideas have proven more pernicious than those of the so-called Frankfurt School and its reactionary philosophy of “critical theory.” At once overly intellectualized and emotionally juvenile, Critical Theory—like Pandora’s Box—released a horde of demons into the American psyche. When everything could be questioned, nothing could be real, and the muscular, confident empiricism that had just won the war gave way, in less than a generation, to a fashionable Central European nihilism that was celebrated on college campuses across the United States. Seizing the high ground of academe and the arts, the new nihilists set about dissolving the bedrock of the country, from patriotism to marriage to the family to military service. They have sown “destruction, division, hatred, and calumny”—and all disguised as a search for truth that will lead to human happiness here on earth. ¹

If Walsh is correct that “when everything could be questioned, nothing could be real,” then our plight can be traced back at least to Descartes and his methodology of “radical doubt,” or even further back to the ancient Greek skeptics. Mr. Walsh, of course, is skeptical himself regarding the motives of “the so-called Frankfurt School”; he claims they have disguised their evil intentions “as a search for truth”. He has thereby unmasked them and revealed their true agenda—precisely the sort of thing “Critical Theory” endeavors to do.

Another salvo against Cultural Marxism comes from Jefrey Breshear, who writes:

The Critical Theorists held a common commitment to Neo-Marxism and the belief that Western civilization in general, and Christianity in particular, have been sources of imperialism and repression force throughout history. In their view, Western civilization was built on aggression, oppression, racism, slavery, classism, and sexual repression. Decades later, this ideology influenced the founding of the many “critical studies” programs in universities such as African-American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, Peace Studies, and LGBT Studies.

Students exposed to “critical studies” learn about “marginalization,” “exclusion,” “silencing,” “false consciousness,” and other aspects of what Antonio Gramsci called “cultural hegemony,” the basic contention of which is that the ruling class sets the limits of acceptable discourse.    

Breshear continues:

In retrospect, the Frankfurt School had a significant impact on the evolution of the American left over the past seventy-five years, particularly the kind of cultural Marxism that spawned the New Left movement in the 1960s. ² Since then, the left has launched an unremitting culture war of attrition that has largely succeeded in secularizing American culture and undermining traditional values and institutions, and much of its ideology, inspiration and tactics were gleaned from the Institute for Social Research.

The Left, of course, would deny that it has “launched a war”; proponents of “Critical Theory” see themselves as offering a kind of cultural self-defense and pushing back against the dominant cultural paradigm.

Finally, British philosopher Roger Scruton scolds Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School:

By constantly notching up the critique of American capitalism and its culture, and by making only muted or dismissive references to the real nightmare of communism, those thinkers showed their profound indifference to human suffering and the unserious nature of their prescriptions. Adorno does not explicitly say that the “alternative” to the capitalist system and the commodity culture is Utopia. But that is what he implies. And Utopia is not a real alternative. Hence his alternative to the unreal freedom of the consumer society is itself unreal—a mere noumenon whose only function is to provide a measure of our defects. And yet he was aware that there was an actual alternative on offer and that it involved mass murder and cultural annihilation. For Adorno to dismiss this alternative merely as the “totalitarian” version of the same “state capitalism” that he had witnessed in America was profoundly dishonest.

I grew up in the era under discussion, and I can assure Roger Scruton that there was no shortage of voices denouncing communism and its awful history. Scruton and other conservatives have long insisted that we in the West face a binary choice between consumer capitalism and Soviet-style communism; if we dare to criticize the one, we are told we are inviting, even enabling, the other. That rhetoric somehow retains its power; even today, a quarter-century after the demise of the Soviet Union, the specter of socialism continues to haunt the American mind. ³

The binary choice was, and is, an illusion; unfettered capitalism or totalitarian communism were not the only options then and they are not the only options now. Which is why “Critical Theory” can be such a useful tool in challenging us to find better ways of going forward—assuming, of course, that forward is the way “we” want to go.

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¹ Michael Walsh, if you have not noticed, tends towards the hyperbolic.

² I have no doubt that the “cultural Marxists” had some influence on the New Left of the Sixties, but I would not agree that they “spawned” it; to the extent they did, they had a lot of help. The New Left is often associated with Students for a Democratic Society; the group’s famous “Port Huron Statement” should be required reading for anyone who wants to opine on the New Left:

 http://www2.iath.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Manifestos/SDSPortHuron.html  

I suspect you will be amazed at how idealistic and how utterly not radical it seems.

³ “The Haunting of the American Mind” is an excellent title for a collection of meandering essays about American conservatives’ fear of “collectivism”. It might begin this way:

“A specter is haunting America--the specter of communism, aka collectivism, bolshevism, socialism, Cultural Marxism, and liberalism. The specter is large, it contains multitudes and it assumes many forms: from FDR’s New Deal to LBJ’s Great Society, from Medicare to Obamacare, from integrated lunch counters to besieged Christian florists, from welfare queens to super-predators, and from gun control to public health mandates about vaccines and masks. When American conservatives hear words like “collective” or “the common good,” they reach, often literally, for their guns.”

If that seems exaggerated to you, I direct you to a prime example of the frightening reality of contemporary American conservatism: https://americanmind.org/essays/red-november/ The author, a pseudonymous “Peachy Keenan,” clearly has aspirations to making a splash much like Michael Anton did in 2016 with his “Flight 93 Election”. I find “Red November,” which begins with “Don’t let the commies win,” terrifying.

The Urtext

Preface: Michael Minnicino’s seminal essay, “The New Dark Age,” first appeared in the Winter 1992 issue of Fidelio, from the Schiller Institute, a German-based organization founded by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the wife (now widow) of Lyndon LaRouche. The essay is widely considered the Urtext for opponents of “cultural Marxism”. *

In 2010, certain public events led Minnicino to address his former involvement in the LaRouche organization (cult?). In doing so, he disavowed, sort of, his essay on the Frankfurt School:

Actual free inquiry is impossible inside the LaRouche organization: too many possible conclusions or lines of research must be consciously or unconsciously dismissed because of LaRouche's prior "thoughts" on the matter. The same is true with my Frankfurt School work while I was in the organization. I still like to think that some of my research was validly conducted and useful. However, I see very clearly that the whole enterprise - and especially the conclusions -- was hopelessly deformed by self-censorship and the desire to in some way support Mr. LaRouche's crack-brained worldview. So, in that sense, I do not stand by what I wrote, and I find it unfortunate that it is still remembered.

With that mea culpa in mind, let us briefly consider Minnicino’s 1992 essay, “The New Dark Age”.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

“Who will save us from Western civilization?” (Georg Lukacs)

Everything you need to know about Michael Minnicino’s "expose" of Cultural Marxism you can glean from the following excerpts:

The Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a religious celebration of the human soul and mankind’s potential for growth. But the concept of the human soul has been undermined by the most vociferous intellectual campaign in history…

The cultural shift away from the Renaissance ideas that built the modern world began as a formal political conspiracy ¹ to popularize theories that were specifically designed to weaken the soul of Judeo-Christian civilization in such a way as to make people believe that creativity was not possible, that adherence to universal truth was evidence of authoritarianism, and that reason itself was suspect. This conspiracy was decisive in planning and developing, as means of social manipulation, the vast new sister industries of radio, television, film, recorded music, advertising, and public opinion polling. The pervasive psychological hold of the media was purposely fostered to create the passivity and pessimism which afflicts our population today.

So successful was this conspiracy, that it has become embedded in our culture; it no longer needs to be a “conspiracy,” for it has taken on a life of its own. Its successes are not debatable—you need only turn on the radio or television.

Our universities, the cradle of our technological and intellectual future, have become overwhelmed by Comintern-style New Age “Political Correctness”. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, our campuses now represent the largest concentration of Marxist dogma in the world. The irrational adolescent outbursts of the 1960’s have become institutionalized into a “permanent revolution”. Our professors glance over their shoulders, hoping the current mode will blow over before a student’s denunciation obliterates a life’s work; some tape their lectures, fearing accusations of “insensitivity” by some enraged Red Guard. Students at the University of Virginia recently petitioned successfully to drop the requirement to read Homer, Chaucer, and other DEMS (“Dead European Males”) because such writings are considered ethnocentric, phallocentric, and generally inferior to the more “relevant” Third World, female, or homosexual authors.

In Minnicino's telling, the Cultural Marxism conspiracy originated in Frankfurt in the 1920s at the Institute for Social Research (ISR), the brainchild of Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukacs. The ISR was intended to fill an analytical gap created by Marx’s materialism, which held that the life of the mind and of the human spirit—ideas and creativity—were merely byproducts of economic forces and therefore irrelevant to the Marxist program. Marxists like Lukacs wanted to apply a Marxist critique directly to culture; Lukacs spoke openly of the need to harness “diabolic” and “demonic” energies to create the kind of religious zeal that characterized early Christianity.

Michael Minnicino reduced all this to a caricature:

The task of the Frankfurt School was first, to undermine the Judeo-Christian legacy through an “abolition of culture”; and, second, to determine new cultural forms which would increase the alienation of the population, thus creating a “new barbarism”.

The Frankfurt School brought together, Minnicino alleged, a diabolical mix of “Communists, non-party socialists, radical phenomenologists, Zionists, renegade Freudians, and at least a few members of a self-identified ‘cult of Astarte’.” Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the group quickly ran afoul of Stalin, who terminated Soviet support for the ISR in the late 1920s and forced Lukacs to confess his deviationist sins. ³

With Lukacs back in the Stalinist fold, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse emerged as the prominent figures of the Frankfurt School; they each fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and emigrated to America, where they continued their work. The philosophers Antonio Gramsci and Walter Benjamin are also associated with the Frankfurt School, though their actual involvement was peripheral at best. ⁴ 

Marcuse, who worked for the US government in the 1950s as a “Soviet analyst,” gained his fifteen minutes of fame in the 1960s when he became a guru to America’s “New Left,” largely on the basis of his book Eros and Civilization. Adorno and Benjamin, on the other hand, were pivotal, or so Minnicino claimed, in “the shaping of the electronic media of radio and television into the powerful instruments of social control they are today.”

In “The New Dark Age,” Minnicino contended that Benjamin and Adorno sought to challenge the objective validity of all aesthetic, epistemological, and moral judgments; they conspired to separate the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, the better to deconstruct and “desacralize” them all. They observed that, while the miracles of modern media could make great art, literature, and music available to millions, the processes of mass reproduction and mass distribution would inevitably trivialize the resulting cultural “product,” making it just another commodity: consumers could choose from postcards bearing photos of the Mona Lisa or of Mickey Mouse, both for the same price.

All that, of course, is simply what capitalism does; it needed no help from a conspiracy of German emigres. Understanding the pernicious potential of mass media, however, enabled the cultural Marxists to use it to “demoralize” and further alienate the masses and to “disengage” the popular mind. Minnicino quoted Theodor Adorno (writing in 1938) on the effects of mass media on the general populace:

“Subjects develop certain capacities which accord less with the traditional concepts of aesthetics than with those of football or motoring. They are not childlike, but they are childish; their primitivism is not that of the undeveloped but that of the forcibly retarded.”

In other words: mass media makes idiots of us all, which makes it the ideal weapon for undermining Western civilization.

Contrary to Minnicino, however, Adorno and his colleagues did not promote commercial mass media; they denounced it and its debilitating effects, and they sought to unmask the corporate interests and political agendas behind it. While much of the Sixties’ counterculture was succumbing to the lure of “tune in, turn on, and drop out,” Adorno and Marcuse were working to keep young people politically engaged rather than distracted, misinformed, tranquilized, and alienated by corporate media.

With “The New Dark Age,” its inaccuracies notwithstanding, Michael Minnicino was said to have identified the forces stalking the academy: for cultural conservatives, “Frankfurt School” and “cultural Marxism” were henceforth to blame for America’s fin de siecle turbulence.

Minnicino’s eventual retraction attracted, as is customary, almost no attention at all.

http://www.talk2action.org/story/2011/7/26/161347/099

https://archive.org/details/TheNewDarkAgeTheFrankfurtSchoolAndPoliticalCorrectness/page/n7/mode/1up

*Journalist Andrew Woods traced the history of Lyndon LaRouche’s obsession with the Frankfurt School in a 2019 article for Commune: https://communemag.com/the-american-roots-of-a-right-wing-conspiracy/ Among other observations, he notes that the phrase “cultural Marxism” is a gloss on the Nazis’ fevered denunciations of “cultural Bolshevism”.

¹ There was, of course, no “formal political conspiracy”; preaching as he was to a paranoid choir, Minnicino chose his words accordingly.

² Since Minnicino later disowned his essay, I will not engage in extended rebuttal of his claims; suffice it here to say that his portrait of American campus life is beyond risible.

³ Stalin’s attitude toward culture resembled that of the character in a play by Nazi author Hanns Johst: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun.” (The actual quote is “When I hear the word culture, I release the safety on my Browning.” I prefer the misquote.)

⁴ Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 in a small town on the French-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis; his work received little if any attention until the late 1960s, when Hannah Arendt brought it to public attention. As for Gramsci, he spent the last decade of his life in Italian prisons, where he died in 1937 from mistreatment and deliberate medical neglect. His contribution to "cultural Marxism" was immense, and I will discuss it at length in a later blog.

"Nihilism without the Abyss"

{I continue to ponder the rise of Postmodern Cultural Marxism and its trusty sidekick, Political Correctness. In today’s episode, Allan Bloom, in the tradition of William F. Buckley Jr., makes a name for himself by biting the hand that feeds him.}

"We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part." (Allan Bloom)

"What a waste it is to lose one's mind, or not to have a mind is being very wasteful, how true that is." (Senator Dan Quayle, 1989)

In 1987, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind and became the most famous academic since Timothy Leary. Bloom’s book addressed what he called “the decomposition of the university,” as novelist Saul Bellow explained in his Foreword:

The heart of Professor Bloom’s argument is that the university, in a society ruled by public opinion, was to have been an island of intellectual freedom where all views were investigated without restriction. By consenting to play an active, ‘positive,’ or participatory role in society, the university has become inundated and saturated with the backflow of society’s ‘problems.’ Preoccupied with questions of Health, Sex, Race, War, academics make their reputations and their fortunes, and the university has become society’s conceptual warehouse of often harmful influences.

Bloom himself put the matter this way: “A liberal education is one that helps students to ask themselves and answer the question, “what is man?”  In our chronic lack of certainty, this comes down to knowing the alternative answers [to that question] and thinking about them. For modern nations,” Bloom continued, “which have founded themselves on reason in its various uses more than did any nations in the past, a crisis in the university, the home of reason, is perhaps the profoundest crisis they face.”

For Bloom, the crisis was best expressed by the approach of “deconstructionist” professors of literature “who say that there is both no text and no reality to which the texts refer.” ¹ Bloom also criticized contemporary “relativism,” even while acknowledging its link to tolerance and open-mindedness: “Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating.”

For Bloom, the point of students’ keeping their minds open was to allow professors to fill those minds with Truth and Wisdom. Echoing William F. Buckley, Bloom suggested that academic neutrality was impossible:

“Every educational system has a moral goal that it tries to attain and that informs its curriculum. It wants to produce a certain kind of human being. This intention is more or less explicit, more or less a result of reflection; but even the neutral subjects, like reading and writing and arithmetic, take their place in a vision of the educated person. Democratic education wants and needs to produce men and women [who are] supportive of a democratic regime.” 

Acknowledging that the history of American racism—slavery and Jim Crow—made it necessary to address and to correct “ethnocentrism,” Bloom believed that multiculturalism and diversity had become overemphasized, at the expense of traditional academic concerns and standards. Not everything was about race, he argued, or about gender. The problem went beyond the university; the entire society was kowtowing to such demands, “Much of the intellectual machinery of twentieth-century American political thought and social science was constructed for the purpose of making an assault on [the] majority. The very idea of a majority is done away with in order to protect the minorities.”

Bloom was exposing what he saw as the triumph of the “protected” class: all those victimized snowflakes clamoring for affirmative action, the shelter of “hate crime” legislation, and the provision of campus speech codes and “safe spaces”. These developments were consistent with the “values relativism” previously mentioned, a relativism which Bloom insisted led inevitably to nihilism.

Bloom located the source of these philosophical evils in the writings of a host of modern German philosophers: Nietzsche, Marx, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, Eric Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse. In fact, wrote Bloom, “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects.” ²

Even if American nihilism was, to quote Holden Caulfield, “phony,” Bloom found it troubling:

Although nihilism and its accompanying existential despair are hardly anything but a pose for Americans, they pursue happiness in ways determined by that language [caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on]: a search for an inwardness that one knows one has, but which seems to have no relation to the outer world. No wonder the mere sound of the Existentialists’ Nothing or the Hegelians’ Negation has an appeal to contemporary ears. American nihilism is a mood, it is nihilism without the abyss.

“Cultural Marxism,” which for Bloom was a misnomer, was but the latest iteration of nihilism: “The later Marxists in Germany,” he explained, “were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoise. In general, sophisticated Marxism [turned into] cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. But none of it came from Marx or a Marxist perspective; there is not a single element of Marx in any of it. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of ‘the last man.”

Whatever its origins, the academic plague had arrived and was devastating the American university:

As in the Middle Ages, the major student activity in social science is now to identify heretics. It has become almost impossible to question the radical orthodoxy without risking vilification, classroom disruption, loss of the confidence and respect necessary for teaching, and the hostility of colleagues. Racist and sexist are very ugly labels—the equivalents of atheist or communist in other days with other prevailing prejudices—which can be pinned on persons promiscuously and which, once attached, are almost impossible to cast off. Nothing can be said with impunity. Such an atmosphere makes detached, dispassionate study impossible.

Somehow, despite the intimidating atmosphere, Bloom was able to write The Closing of the American Mind. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy, Bloom’s book was hailed as a defense of classic liberal education against obnoxious students chanting, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!”  More than that, it was a wide-ranging philosophical polemic against Western modernity and its Nietzschean premises; it was also a best-seller that turned Bloom into a celebrity and a conservative icon. Neither Bloom nor his book were universally applauded, however; one reviewer compared Bloom to Oliver North (“vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic”) and said that The Closing of the American Mind was a book that “any decent person would be ashamed of having written”. Noam Chomsky called Bloom’s arguments “mind-bogglingly stupid,” while Camille Paglia credited Bloom with having fired “the first shot in America’s culture wars”.

One thing is certain: The Closing of the American Mind got people’s attention.

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https://theclosingoftheamericanmind.com/#TheGermanConnection

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Closing_of_the_American_Mind

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom

¹ Bloom was likely alluding to Stanley Fish’s Is There a Text in this Class?

² Interestingly, Bloom’s academic mentor was the German-born philosopher Leo Strauss.

Amitology, Anyone?

{Should we explore the thinking of Russian émigré sociologist Pitirim Sorokin? Of course we should! It would be wrong not to.} 

I have previously written a bit about Pitirim Sorokin, but here is a brief biographical refresher, courtesy of the online Britannica: 

Pitirim Alexandrovitch Sorokin, (born Jan. 21, 1889, Turya, Russia—died Feb. 10, 1968, Winchester, Mass., U.S.), Russian-American sociologist who founded the department of sociology at Harvard University in 1930. In the history of sociological theory, he is important for distinguishing two kinds of sociocultural systems: “sensate” (empirical, dependent on and encouraging natural sciences) and “ideational” (mystical, anti-intellectual, dependent on authority and faith). ¹ The first professor of sociology at the University of Petrograd (1919–22; St. Petersburg), Sorokin was expelled from the Soviet Union for his anti-Bolshevism. Before going to Harvard, he was on the faculty of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, where he specialized in rural sociology (1924–30). Among his writings are A Systematic Source Book in Rural Sociology, 3 vol. (1930–32); Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4 vol. (1937–41); Man and Society in Calamity (1942); Altruistic Love (1950); and an autobiography, A Long Journey (1963). 

So much for Sorokin’s curriculum vitae; what of his ideology, his worldview? Again, enter Britannica: 

Sorokin believed that the post-medieval Western sensate culture was in its last stages and that the study of non-sexual altruistic love as a science was needed to avert worldwide chaos. In his view, this necessity followed from his principle of polarization, according to which the moral indifference prevailing under ordinary circumstances is supplanted, for the duration of a crisis, by the extremes of selfishness and altruism.  

Sorokin did not believe the medieval worldview could be, or should be, resurrected; for that matter, he acknowledged the impressive accomplishments of “sensate” culture. He felt, however, that sensate culture was arriving at a dead end, undermined by its own contradictions and its own excesses; it needed, Sorokin believed, some leavening from such “ideational” elements as it still contained. In that vein, the “non-sexual altruistic love” he endorsed was—at least on its face—much like the agape of early Christianity: 

[In 1949] Sorokin founded the Harvard Research Center for Creative Altruism, which sought to understand the role of love and altruism in producing a better society. Much of the Center’s research was summarized in Sorokin’s second masterpiece, The Ways and the Power of Love. 

This book offered a comprehensive view on the role of love in positively transforming society. It surveyed the ideals and tactics of the great spiritual reformers of the past – Jesus Christ, the Buddha, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, etc. – looking for common themes and principles. 

We need, according to Sorokin, not only great figures like these, but also ‘ordinary’ individuals who seek to exemplify the same principles within their personal spheres of influence.  Personal change must precede collective change, and nothing transforms a culture more effectively than positive examples. What is essential today, according to Sorokin, is that individuals reorient their thinking and values to a universal perspective – to seek to benefit all human beings, not just oneself or one’s own country.   

Like agape and like the Golden Rule, “creative altruism” is a simple concept which becomes extraordinarily complicated in practice. Moreover, Sorokin believed that we must first escape the trap of “mechanistic materialism, flat empiricism, superficial positivism, and vulgar utilitarianism bound up with the growth of modern culture,” and to do that we needed to understand and then transcend the limitations of the sensate worldview. 

Years after writing The Crisis of Our Age, Sorokin attempted to develop a science of creative altruism, which he called “amitology”: 

Writing in 1951, Sorokin defined Amitology as the applied science or art of developing friendship, mutual aid, and love in individual and intergroup relations. Its goal was to stem the tide of Machiavellianism by providing a blueprint ("guidebook") for mutual service, cooperation, and amity. Amitology focused on determining the characteristics of the altruistic personality; the techniques for developing and using love as a force in social interactions; the influence of "significant others" on prosocial relationships; and the characteristics of an environment that promote altruistic actions. 2   

Neither “amitology” nor “creative altruism” seems to have captured the public attention; for that matter, even Sorokin’s fellow sociologists considered him naïve. Indeed, as Jay Weinstein has written, “The philosophy and techniques of altruism are rarely if ever part of our formal education. Even more serious is the fact that most people, even those who study sociology, have not had the opportunity to reflect on the phenomenon. One gets the impression that when people hear about altruism, they either disregard it as unimportant, or they believe that it is unattainable.” ³  

For whatever complex of reasons, we, as a society, seem to have decided that the single most important element in promoting social cohesion should be learned either by osmosis or in Sunday school.  

My modest proposal for today is that, alongside whatever efforts we make to build children’s healthy self-esteem, we ought to be teaching them as well to practice common, ordinary, everyday altruism. ⁴ As Pitirim Sorkin explained, “Great altruists alone cannot supply even the minimum amount of love and mutual help necessary for any surviving society...it must be furnished by thousands and millions of our plain "good neighbors." Each giving a modest contribution of love, in their totality they produce an enormous amount of “love energy”. Without this moral foundation of the deeds of the "good neighbors" no society can be satisfactory.” ⁵ 

Won’t we be our neighbors? 

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https://www.britannica.com/biography/Pitirim-Alexandrovitch-Sorokin Also see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitirim_Sorokin   

¹ Sorokin also identified a third sociocultural model: the “idealistic” model (also referred to as the “integralist” model, which term I prefer) which represented a stable—temporarily, at least—synthesis of the first two. No system, he said, was ever entirely monistic; there were always elements and traces of the out-of-favor system in existence, which elements would contribute to the eventual “integralist” synthesis, which would “harmoniously balance sensate and ideational tendencies.”  https://satyagraha.wordpress.com/2010/08/19/pitirim-sorkin-crisis-of-modernity/ 

² https://library2.usask.ca/sorokin/manuscripts/amitology 

³ https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0423/ccb41a8f740035b00909121c17159b99b632.pdf 

⁴ Practice, despite what you may have heard, rarely makes perfect, but it almost always brings about improvement. Just as important, it is practice which makes any behavior habitual, something we all learn when it comes to our bad habits but which we tend to forget in relation to good ones.

⁵ Pitirim Sorokin, Altruistic Love