A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: In the Kingdom of Dumb, Dumber, Dumbest?...

 

I should know by now that every time humans seem to take one step forward in the development of “new" communications technologies and technologies in general that there is, for the most part, no corresponding step forward in the use of those technologies by the masses. In fact, it often seems instead that most humans take several steps backwards when technological change occurs. I was reminded of this indisputable fact yet again today.

This morning I was looking at the 2017 Penguin Classics deluxe edition of Anne of Green Gables by the Canadian author L.M. Montgomery. I try to take a look at any new critical editions of Anne because Anne of Green Gables remains, long after I first read it in my youth, one of my favourite and most treasured books. Perhaps that is one of the joys or one of the curses for anyone who grew up, if in my case only in part, in English Canada. 

It actually took me several searches on Amazon to find the Penguin Classics edition of Anne. After several unsuccessful attempts—something that is quite common when searching for books or classical music CD's on Amazon these days—I finally found the book but only by going to the Penguin Random House page for the book and clicking on their link to Amazon. 

I must admit that I was rather disappointed in the new Penguin Classics edition of Anne. I was hoping that it would be more like the rival Broadview Editions and Norton Critical Edition editions of the book, but it wasn’t. The editor of the Penguin Classics Anne, Benjamin Lefebvre, a L.M. Montgomery specialist who directs the online L.M. Montgomery site on the world wide web, according to the Penguin classics author blurb, did write an introduction to the book, did write a textual note to explain his editorial decisions regarding the text of the book, and did provide suggestions for further reading on Montgomery and Anne for those interested in doing further research on the book and its author just as do the editors of the Broadview and Norton critical editions of Anne. However, the Penguin Classics Anne does not, as do the Broadview and Norton editions of the text which are also edited by Montgomery specialists, Cecily Devereux of the University of Alberta for Broadview and Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston of the University of Guelph, home of one of the important archives for Montgomery Studies, for Norton, offer annotated notes that provide essential context for the book. Given this, I won’t be purchasing the Penguin Classics edition of Anne of Green Gables.

The unfortunate limitations of the Penguin Anne wasn’t the only thing that I found interesting on the Anne of Green Gables Penguin Classics page on Amazon. Below in the “comments” section I happened upon a “review”of the Penguin Anne, a “review” that is actually a “reaction” rather than a review, something posters on Amazon and on YouTube, confuse and conflate, which I found even more interesting than the edition of the book itself. In this “review” "Laura from Spain" complains that the pages of the Penguin Deluxe Edition of Anne were not properly cut claiming, as a consequence, that the book was bad. 

"Laura from Spain’s” reaction—a “reaction that parallels most of those I have happened across on social media—to the Penguin Anne points up the fact that “Laura" was unaware of three empirical facts. First, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the history of books and the history and variations in how book pages have been cut across time and space. Second, she appears to be blissfully ignorant of the fact that all Penguin Classics Deluxe editions, which are done by Penguin US, have pages that are intentionally cut that way, that are cut in deckled fashion. See also the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Third, she seems blissfully unaware of the history of the deckled style of book pages, something she could have ascertained very easily by letting her fingers do the walking on the world wide web.

Ron once agaiin shakes his head in disbelief...

Life as Crisis Management: Going to the Grocery Store

Life is, like everything else, a double edged sword. On the one hand, living offers one the opportunity to learn and keep on learning throughout one’s life course. One can learn, for example, how to think critically, which books or newspapers to read so to expand one’s knowledge, how to critically observe life going on around one,  and that one cannot escape, at least in the core nation world, bureaucratic institutions that are the kissing cousins of high schools with their petty paternalisms, their socialisation for conformity, their petty gossip mongering, their petty rules, and their never ending lowest common denominator banalities.

Amongst the several things I have learned over the course of my life is that life is Sisyphean. Life is, in other words Sisyphean. It is about managing crises that never seem to end. It is about managing the proverbial stones that always seem to rolling downhill and threatening to crush us. 

This, the fact that life is crisis management,  is a lesson I relearn every week. This week I learned it after going to the grocery store. A bit of backstory first. A couple of years ago I stopped eating gluten. I had a negative reaction to a home made gluten pizza crust that caused me immense stomach and abdomen pain and the feeling that this might be it sending me scurrying to the emergency room at a local hospital. And while these stomach and abdomen pains and bowel movement issues continue I do think that stopping eating gluten has helped. It has, I think, diminished the pain in my knees, for instance.

Not eating gluten is difficult to say the least given that so many cereals, so much pasta, so many snack foods, and so many meat alternatives like Field Roast, for example, all things I have been eating for years, are made, at least in part, out of gluten. This meant that I had to find gluten free alternatives. So, I, for example, upped my consumption of gluten Beyond Meat and gluten free fake fish, increased my intake of vegetables, particularly kimchi, and fruits, found a non-gluten pizza crust, and looked for gluten free buns for Beyond Meat "burgers". The best gluten free buns I have found thus far are Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns.

The problem with Schar’s multigrain ciabatta buns is that they are not as readily available as the less tasty white ciabatta buns. I initially found them when I went over to Pittsfield, Mass at Big Y. Later I found them at a Price Chopper that was about five miles away and a Price Chopper close to me. Then I found them at the Coop.

I prefer to buy the Schar Multigrain ciabatta at the Coop for a number of reasons. They are more than a dollar cheaper at the Coop compared to Price Chopper and I get an additional discount on them when I go to elderly discount Wednesday’s at the Coop. There is—I am shocked, shocked—a problem in buying the ciabatta from the Coop: they are often not in stock on Wednesdays when I go to shop at the Coop even when they are on sale as I learned to my annoyance last week. Given this I decided to special order a box of the buns, something one can do quite easily at Honest Weight. 

This Wednesday when I asked if they had come in. They had so I bought a box of five. When I got home and opened the box later that day, however, I found that the label saying they were the multigrain chiabatta was wrong. They were instead Schar white ciabatta. So, I had to get in the car and drive back to the Coop for the second time that day. Thankfully, I was able to get the two packages of the multigrains that were on the shelves so I have some breathing space before I have to get more. 

I had managed yet another Sisyphean crisis in my life. And while I am not a prophet I can offer this full-proof prophecy: there will be more boulders rolling down the mountain that I will have to deal with. There always are.

 

Musings on Writing a Book and Publishing a Book: Another Chapter in Life as Crisis Management

As I have grown older—I am now retired, am sixty-nine, and will be seventy in November—one thing that has become quite clear to me is the fact that life, or more specifically a significant part of life—involves managing a never ending series of life crisis. Looking back I can see that a lot of my after I became a teenager was about managing crises: relationship crises, financial crises, and intellectual crises. All of these crises were made even more daunting by the fact that I have long been humanophobic, I have long had health problems, by the fact I lived and live in a core nation that transitioned from a modern industrial capitalist economy to a postmodern capitalist with all that entailed including deindustrialisation, globalisation, bureaucratic downsizing, and by an increase in poor paying and short lasting jobs. My England, Australia, Canada, and America was not my Dad’s England, Australia, Canada, and America

One of the many crises in my life, one that ebbed and flowed between the early 1990s and the early 2020s, involved a book I began writing on Mormon Studies in 1991 or 1992. It ebbed and flowed for a number of economic and cultural reasons including the fact that it is a book as much if not more about social  and cultural theory than it is about Mormonism, something that made my book project an even more daunting and difficult project particularly after I switched from graduate work in Anthropology and Sociology, social science disciplines with a strong emphasis on theory, to a discipline that is a social science to a few and a human science to the many and which has little interest in theory, History.

Another reason the project ebbed and flowed was technological. When I began work on my book the computer and its word processing programmes was in its infancy and had only recently replaced the typewriter, typewriter paper, and liquid paper for typewriter paper. Can you feel my pain? I initially learned computer on a Mac in the 1980s. Because I was a graduate assistant on a newsletter in Latin American Studies which was done on a PC, however, I had to learn PC and its Microsoft programmes. I would later learn the PC version of WordPerfect. I remained wedded to the PC until the early 2000s when, after a number of crises associated with PCs and particularly a Dell PC—I got an error message when I turned it on for the first time—I went back to Macs, a decision I have never regretted though it easier to do these days—now you can get Word for Macs, for instance—than it was in the early primitive days of computers. 

Doing my book at first on a PC led to a number of crises. Initially my book was typed in Microsoft Works. When Microsoft Word replaced Microsoft Works I transferred my book into Word. In the process, however, I lost every other of several hundred footnotes and parts of the text itself were sometimes made into an ugly mess. Don’t you just love it when one product of a corporation isn’t fully compatible with another product of the same corporation? To fix this problem, of course, required, the expenditure of a good deal of time, time limited by the fact that I was a graduate student and worked part-time because I needed the money. Despite the limitation of time and despite the fact that I had to use computers in a computer lab on campus since I did not own a computer, I did begin to try to reconstruct the missing footnotes.

Another crises related to the book was associated with the fact that I have never really been all that enamoured of graduate school education. I knew given my age—I started college late in life, something I am glad I did since I really wanted to go to college when I went and was serious about it—and left college because of relationship, financial, and intellectual crises related to that bureaucracy on several occasions. My ambiguous feelings about academic bureaucracies was the product of several things including the too often soap opera, Machiavellian, and limits on valid critical discourse atmosphere of post-graduate education, by my alienation from a bureaucracy where what one did was regarded as more of a job than a calling, by my alienation from the higher education stratification system, by a dramatic decline in my romanticism about academia, by the fact that I knew my chances of getting an academic job given my cultural capital was about nill given my post graduate educational background—I really didn’t want a full-time job in the academic beast anyway—and by the fact that I got a job as an acquisitions editor at a university press in 2000. All of these contributed, along with the technology issue, to me putting my book on hold in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

After getting a job in academic publishing my intention was to make a career of publishing. However, as I have written about elsewhere, my life in publishing was cut short thanks to the economic downturn after 9/11, and thanks, I suspect, to my ideological iconoclasm, an iconoclasm that didn’t play well in the publishing corporation in which I worked any better than it did in academia, As one of the last hired I was one of the first to be let go by the press. 

Though I tried to get another job in academic publishing and had two interviews with publishers my lack of success in getting another job in publishing led me to give up the search for another publishing position. As a consequence I decided to return to teaching as an adjunct and eventually I decided to finish my doctoral degree. By 2011 I had earned my doctorate and had a published a papers on the culture war surrounding the 1969 Woodstock Festival and on the theoretical problems associated with Buffy Studies, both of which required extensive effort and both of which I remain very proud of today. Another paper I wrote on Downton Abbey was slated for publication but I pulled it out of consideration for the anthology when the editor of the collection drained, from my perspective, all the life and soul out of my prose in his edits.

During my adjuncting years I started work again on the book, mostly because the manuscript was there, when breaks from work and energy permitted. It was work I did without support from foundations, the US government, or the administrative staff at the college at which I taught, perquisites that full time faculty sometimes get. The pandemic in the early 2020s helped me get the manuscript into shape. Footnotes were reconstructed and rechecked. Text was checked and rechecked, written and rewritten, and moved from one place to another. I then started to send the manuscript around to publishers. 

Several publishers were interested in it. Mormon Studies, after all, is a money maker for academic presses particularly for those that also target faithful demographics with what amounts to polemical and apologetic work. A few sent it out for review. As peer reviews sometimes are, one was one of the oddest I ever read but then so much criticism is not about the book someone else wrote but about the book the reviewer would have written.

Finally a publisher accepted the book for publication. There were some problems, however. My health has never been good. I have had serious asthma that hospitalised me regularly before the advent of Advair and Singulair, which have allowed my asthma to be finally controlled and allowed me to lead somewhat of a “normal” life. Additionally, once I hit my fifties and sixties I have been beset by muscular-skeletal arthritis, acid reflux, increasing difficulty breathing deeply because of chest and abdomen tightness, increasing vision problems, and bowel problems, all of which complicated working on the manuscript in a number of ways. Isn’t old age wonderful?

With the manuscript approved for publication I sent it in. The publisher wanted me to change the manuscript's English into American. I did it though I found this a ridiculous demand since academics are used to reading English English as well as American English given the global nature of the academy and intellectual life. This along with the occasional idiocy that is spell check, my haste due, in part, to the college I worked at eliminating my access to Word after I retired (my reward, along with the meagre remuneration I received for twelve years of teaching 100 and 200 level classes), and my problematic eyesight—I should have increased page size—made fixing the errors in the manuscript difficult if not impossible even though I did have someone else read the manuscript as well. It is always difficult, particularly with computer manuscripts, to see the errors of one’s manuscript ways. 

My haste to finish the manuscript also meant that I did not add material on anthropological studies of Mormonism that I wanted to particularly once I gave up hope, given how physically and intellectually exhausting doing this book was, that I would or could write a follow up book on Anthropology and Mormonism. There were also other things I wish I had added to the manuscript. Speaking of manuscripts, one can acess a more cleaned up and expanded version of the book in English English in the BYU Special Collections at the BYU Library. I am quite proud of this manuscript and regard it as the authoritative version of the book.

The book has now been out for almost four years. It has not gotten much critical attention though I have gotten three royalty cheques so presumably someone or some institution is buying it which is not a bad thing I suppose though it does make for more work at tax time. This state of affairs has not been unexpected. I am not an insider-insider, an insider-outsider, or an outsider-insider in Mormon Studies. I am not a member of the Mormon History Association or any other “professional” organisation and I am retired. I really don't want to be identified as a Mormon Studies scholar anymore than I want to be identified as an academic. I am, as I was in academia, an iconoclastic outsider-outsider and I like it like that.
 

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: The Musical “Expert” on Social Media

 

Over the years I have noticed that there are what I would call several subspecies or subgenres of reaction videos on the social media giant YouTube. One of the subspecies of music “reaction" videos  offered for “sale”on Patreon and YouTube are those by “experts" in vocal performance and music performance. The Charismatic Voice (Elizabeth Zharoff), Beth Roars, Maggie Renee, Aaliyah Capili, the Fairy Voice Mother (Lolli), and the Vocalyst (Bethany Hickman), for instance, are trained singers or singers in training who regularly break down the vocal performances of popular songs on YouTube. Another of the subgenres of YouTube “reaction" videos are those of classical musicians and classical composers who, like their vocal performance “reaction" video colleagues analyse popular music videos and performance for fun (or so one hopes) and profit. This group includes “reactors" like Doug Helvering and Virgin Rock.

Sometimes these social media “experts” tell us why they are “experts” in the field of music analysis. In every reaction video Maggie Renee does on YouTube, for instance, she makes sure to tell viewers, some of whom vote via polls on Patreon as to what piece of pop music Maggie Renee will react to next, that she is a Juilliard trained opera singer and this training at one of the elite music schools in the United States, along with her opera performances in less well known regional opera companies, something noted on her personal website, makes her an “expert" in the field of vocal performance. In her welcoming video to her YouTube page Elizabeth Zharoff, The Charismatic Voice, says she has degrees in voice, opera, and music production, According to Wikipedia Zharoff graduated from Oberlin and Curtis (also see her recent “My Story and Where We Go From Here” YouTube video where she recounts her burgeoning interest in pop music and shills for funding for her research). In her welcoming video to her Virgin Rock YouTube page Amy Shafer, LSRM, FRSM, and RYC, tells us that she is a trained harpist, pianist and teacher, and director of piano studies, and assistant director of harp studies at the Harp School, Inc. On rare occasions these “experts” tell viewers that they still have a lot to learn about both classical and popular music. Capili for instance, notes that she is a young Gen Z opera singer in training and, as a consequence, still has much to learn about the ins and outs of musical and vocal performances, something rare and refreshing in the social media world as far as I can tell from two years of ethnographic study of the medium.

Many of these reactors also use their YouTube pages to promote themselves and their careers. Virgin Rock, for instance, on her YouTube welcome page, offers viewers the opportunity to study one on one with her. The Charismatic Voice posts videos asking for monies to support vocal research (“The Most Important Video You Will Ever Watch”). Beth Roars’s "Symphony of 131 Nations” shows her performing this symphony with others presumably representing the 131 nations referenced in the title of the piece.

What is remarkable about several of these trained experts in music performance and composition, from whom one can indeed learn much about vocal performance, music performance, and music theory, is that so many of them appear to do little research on the music and the musicians they are “reacting” to and “analysing” and several of them seem to have little sense of popular music history. Interestingly, they also tend to ignore issues of technological manipulation including pitch correction and live not live “musical” performances, both of which are quite common in the world of pop music today, making one wonder whether this lack is a product of the fact that they don’t want to offend their revenue generating audience, most of whom, I suspect, are fan boys and fan girls rather than dispassionate analysts, with the truth (see Zharoff’s "My Story and Where We Go From Here" video retrospective on YouTube). I was recently reminded of this lack of historical knowledge and attention to historical context when I watched Shafer’s reaction to the 2001 System of a Down song “Chop Suey”

Shafer admits during the course of her reaction video to “Chop Suey" that she was confused by the song’s lyrical content. She gets the dynamic alterations in the song and comments on its alternation between its more folkish and calmer moments and its moments of speed and intensity. In the video Shafer mistakenly assumes that the song is parodic and humorous, a mistake that could have been avoided if she had actually done a bit of research on the band and the song before jumping off of a contextless hermetic interpretive cliff (the music studies variant of literary studies', film studies', and television studies' crystal ball textualism). Research could have revealed to Virgin Rock that System of a Down have been deeply influenced by Armenian folk musics, so she could have added heft to her been more general the statement that the calmer moments in the song have a folk like quality. Research might also have enabled her to grasp the biblical references ("Father into your hands I commend my spirit”, Luke 23:46) in the song, something that points up the fact that so many today no longer get a well-rounded humanities classical education which might enable them to grasp historical references including those from the Christian Bible. Additionally, research might also have enabled Shafer to understand that the title of the song was System of a Down’s response to real or perceived record company resistance to the original title of the song, "Suicide" according to one of the members of the band, or “Self-Righteous Suicide”, according to the producer of the record. “Suey”, (which band member Serj Tankian is seen presumably eating in the official video), one of the band members said, is suicide chopped in half. Knowing all of this might have helped Shafer understand the serious intent of the song and to better grasp the serious nature of the song’s dynamics. And it is so easy to do in the brave new world of digital media like the internet.

The Books of My Life: The Lives of Erich Fromm

 

According to historian Lawrence Friedman, author of several biographies on figures in the history in the history of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, the subject of his 2013 biography The Lives of Erich Fromm: Love’s Prophet (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013) lived many lives. He was, for example, a mostly secular Jew, a son. a husband, a student of the Bible, a student of the Talmud, an intellectual, a public intellectual, a sociologist, a social psychologist, a psychoanalytic analyst, an analysand, a student of human psychology, a student of religion, a social ethicist, a commentator on social issues, a member of the famous Frankfurt School, a specialist called to testify before the US Congress, a pundit, an anti-war activist, a celebrity, a critic of nineteenth and twentieth century political Zionism, a prophet of love and hope, a humanist, and an analyst of the human condition.  

Fromm, who was born in Frankfurt in 1900 and died in Locarno in 1980, lived all of his lives, as Friedman notes, in eventful times. He lived, for instance, through the rise of Hitler emigrating from Germany after seeing the writing on the wall. Many of his relatives weren’t as perspicacious. He lived through World War Two with its atrocities and its genocides in Europe and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lived through the Cold War with its latest iteration of great power politics and its potential for destruction on a mass scale thanks to the Bomb and the destructive power of mass murdering social engineers like Yosef Stalin. As Friedman notes these turbulent times helped make Fromm and made him into a critic of Freudian biologically grounded instinct psychology, something that made him a heretic in many Freudian circles including at the Frankfurt Institute which, thanks to the promptings of Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno, turned Fromm into a heretic and ostracised him as a consequence because off his interest in grounding psychology and psychoanalysis in broader economic, political, cultural, and demographic currents than Freud.

I first encountered Fromm as a biblical scholar and a social ethicist when I read his book You Shall Be as Gods (1966) as a teenager. The book appealed to me for a variety or reasons but primarily for its exploration of social ethics. When I was in junior high school I became an opponent of the Vietnam War and eventually all wars and like Fromm was interested in the social ethics of war and, like Fromm, was drawn to Quakerism because of its anti-war stance. I never became a Quaker because, like Marx, Groucho Marx, in the end I could never bring myself to join an organisation that would have me as a member. Despite this, however,  I have continued to have an immense respect for Quakerism and for Quaker activism. Additionally, as was also the case with Fromm, I was drawn to the question of why humans were so aggressive and waged wars on one another in, particularly in the 20th century brutal fashion, and what to do about human aggression and its wars.

Fromm’s attempt to answer the question of why human aggression, why wars, and why human brutality, particularly male brutality, drew him, not surprisingly away from the biological reductionism of Freud and toward Karl Marx and other social science analysts who focused their analyses on the impact of environment, on the impact of economic, political, cultural, and geographical factors on humans. In this he was of a piece with, as Friedman notes, others trying to integrate the psychological, the social, and the cultural such as wholistic American Anthropology,  the interdisciplinary Culture and Personality school of Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, Gregor Bateson and others, which was connected to wartime US military research, and Edward Sapir, Clyde Kluckhohn, Alfred Kroeber, and Karen Horney among others of a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary bent who were trying to decipher the mysteries of the relation between personality and culture, what Fromm called human social character. And like many of the early social scientists there was a strong normative, social engineering, and ethical and moral aspect to his attempt to grasp the human condition and transform it in order to make more healthy humans and more healthy societies. The human utopian impulse.

Fromm’s excursion into why humans behaved in the ways they did, as Friedman notes, really began at the Frankfurt School where he and other researchers were engaged in a massive and ultimately problematic (for a variety of reasons) quantitative and qualitative analysis of German workers and particularly the authoritarian tendencies one found among German workers including those on the left in the late 1930s and early 1930s. This study provided the foundation for Fromm’s most famous early book Escape From Freedom/Fear of Freedom in 1941 and a later closely related book The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness which he wrote toward the end of his life in 1973. 

These two books and virtually all of those in between were ultimately concerned with the human aggression and what to do about it. In his works Fromm traced human aggression not to the ego, the id, or the superego in isolation but to social factors that produced sadistic and masochistic authoritarian leaning humans who often, and paradoxically so, led many to surrender their freedoms to a charismatic authoritarian leader who gave them a sense of self-worth and hence an identity. Underlying this authoritarian personality, Fromm argued, was Fromm’s socialised version of Freud’s death instinct, necrophilia, a love of death, a social character trait that resulted, according to Fromm, in greed, egotism, acquisitiveness, violence, brutality, and war. Needless to say, Fromm’s take on necrophilia and its impact on humans and the worlds they have made might provide food for thought for those interested in understanding the rise of Donald Trump and others of his authoritarian and theocratic and fascist ilk including many university presidents at “research universities” like Columbia, NYU, and Indiana who, one assumes, are out to impress their boards of governance along with the right wing populist demagogues in the US Congress who are attacking them, with their hard and manly response to protests in their midst.

Fromm thought it was possible to overcome this culture of necrophilia, which he traced in part to modern capitalism, with its greed, its acquisitiveness, and limited sense of social solidarity with other humans through biophilia, the love of one's life and oneself, the consequent love of the lives of others, and the love of individual freedom and the enlightenment that came with it, all of which, he believed, would give rise to happier and healthier humans and happier and healthier societies and all of which he worked to promote during most of his life. The failure of the reforms of 1968, Friedman points out, would temper Fromm’s utopianism, a utopianism grounded in maternal love and, somewhat like that of Marx, in primitive “communism” its greater egalitarianism, somewhat.

One could, of course, explore other of Fromm’s lives as Friedman does in his fine intellectual biography of Erich Fromm. One could, for example, explore Fromm the author whose many books sold in the thousands, the hundreds of thousands, and the millions. One could focus one’s attention on Fromm the student of comparative political structures and his assessment that the two great powers of the post-World War II era, the USA and the USSR who, as he rightly notes, had a lot in common characterised as they both were by modern bureaucracies and somewhat different forms of modern capitalism. One could explore Fromm’s contention that societies like people can be characterised by greed, acquisitiveness, and necrophilia and so too can be insane something that has become clearer in the wake of the brave new digital media revolution and its social media. 

Anyone interested in any of Fromm's lives—Fromm as a twentieth century psychologist, Fromm as a twentieth century psychoanalyst, Fromm as influenced by anthropology, cultural anthropology, Fromm the twentieth century social ethicist and moralist—would likely profit from reading Friedman’s book, a book that, by the way, does not shy away from criticising Fromm for his sometimes too limited research when writing his books and his tendency to make giant leaps of analytical faith with limited reference to empirical realities. And while Friedman does explore what some might see as failures in Fromm’s personal life, he mercifully keeps this to a minimum, something that keeps The Lives of Erich Fromm from being a scholarly and academic version of a Rupert Murdoch gossip rag.

 

The Books of My Life: Identity’s Architect

 

As someone who has long studied the history, sociology, and anthropology of religion in core nation societies throughout much of his academic life it quickly became apparent to me that Western Christianity since the Reformation, despite its claims to be the world’s only true and universal religion was, empirically speaking,  characterised by sectarianism, characterised by division. Most Christian sects, in other words, be they Lutherans in their various and sundry forms, Calvinists in their various and sundry forms, Baptists in their various and sundry forms, or Evangelicals in their various and sundry forms, claimed and still oftentimes claim to be the one and only true form of Christianity. 

Another thing I quickly realised early in my academic career was that religion was not the only cultural meaning system that was characterised by sectarianism, by the belief that one's sect or group was the sole possessor of the truth writ large. Political culture in the West, for example, is also characterised by sectarianism as the many sects of Bolshevism each claiming to be the one true form of Bolshevik Communism point up. Interestingly, the Church of Anti-Communism in its various and sundry sectarian forms, which too claimed to have the truth on its side, accepted and fetishised the claim of Bolshevik Church of Lenin and his pope like successors that it was the one and only true variety of communism on the planet thereby ignoring, for a number of economic, political, cultural, and geographical reasons, the sectarian nature of the so-called political left and the fact that, empirically speaking, no variety of Bolshevism had a monopoly on the truth anymore than any particular variety of Christianity did.

Political culture, of course, is not the only form of extra-religious—religion is only one institutionalised and bureaucratised meaning system--sectarianism in the West. As Lawrence Friedman, who has made a career of writing biographies of psychologists and psychoanalysts including on the Menninger family and their clinic (charismatic to traditional and bureaucratic leadership in action?), Erich Fromm, and Erik Erickson, shows, intellectual and academic psychology is also sectarian. Virtually every sect within the institutionalised meaning system that is psychology whether Behavioural, Freudian, Neo-Freudians, Jungian, or Gestalt, for example, claims to have a monopoly on the truth or at the very least a monopoly on some aspect of the truth. In his Identity’s Architect: A Biography of Erik Erikson (New York: Scribner, 1999) Friedman explores one of the many Neo-Freudians, those who followed in the footsteps of the charismatic father of the psychoanalysis cult or new meaning system, Sigmund Freud, but who also felt compelled to revise Freud because of his lack of attention, at least in his earlier years, to broader political, economic, cultural, and geographic contexts to the chagrin of “orthodox" Freudians, the Danish born Erik Erikson.

For Friedman, who practises what Erikson, Fromm, and the Culture and Personality school both belonged to, preached, namely, the need to pay attention to broader social and cultural contexts, broader contexts in which human lives are situated, must be explored if we are to understand humans in general and Erikson in particular. Friedman argues that Erikson, who never knew who his father was—something that troubled him throughout the course of his life apparently—and someone who was Danish, German, and American if in someone different ways, became someone who was adept at crossing borders—national, theoretical, professional, disciplinary, ideological—was drawn almost inevitably because of these broader contexts to the study of identity and how identity was impacted and influenced not only by biology—a central dogmatic tenant of early Freud and his followers--but by the dynamism of a historically situated human life cycle from birth to death where identity was situated within broader spatial formations and influenced and impacted by them. Biography as the micro of the meso and the macro. 

Friedman does a nice job of exploring Erikson’s many identities across time and space. He notes that Erikson was an artist and a qualitative if not always rigorous social scientist who moved across the disciplinary boundaries of psychoanalysis, psychology, sociology, and history during his long life in his many publications including what many regard as his most important book, Childhood and Society (1950), and his Young Man Luther (1958), and Gandhi’s Truth (1969). He does an excellent job of showing us Erikson the Dane, Erikson the German, Erikson the American, Erikson the romantic, Erikson the therapist, Erikson the clinician, Erikson the teacher, Erikson the academic, Erikson the sometime activist, Erikson the writer, Erikson the husband and father, Erikson the confidante, Erikson the confident, Erikson the self doubter, Erikson the mystic, and Erikson the prophet, all Erikson’s influenced by the broader social and cultural environments he moved through during the course of his life from Freud’s Vienna to FDR’s New Deal, World War II, the Holocaust, the Cold War, Vietnam, the backlash to colonialism, and Watergate, to mane a few. He does an excellent job of pointing out what he sees as the strengths and weaknesses of Erikson including his attention to historical and ethnographic contexts, his development of a modern and perhaps even postmodern understanding of identity and, along with William Shakespeare and Soren Kierkegaard, both of whom Erikson read, of the modern human life cycle, his less than rigorous approach to the stuff of society and culture, the limitations of his understanding of Gandhi’s India, his perhaps too great an emphasis on the universality and linearity of the human life cycle, and his contradictions, something all humans, of course, are, to name a few.

The problem I had with Friedman’s biography of Erikson is the same problem I have with most biographies I have read, there is a lot of what I regard as insignificant components amidst the significant details of a life making the book longer and more gossipy than it, in my opinion, needs to be. This was, for me, less a problem in Friedman’s more intellectually oriented biography of Fromm, another refugee from Germany. Those interested in the history of the social sciences and the history of psychology and psychoanalysis, the practise of psychology and psychoanalysis will find much of interest in Friedman’s well researched and documented biography of a key figure in 20th century intellectual culture, Erik Erikson.