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: Kibbutz

 

When I was young in the 1970s I, if memory serves, I recall that I romanticised the Israeli kibbutz movement, specifically the "secular" Israeli kibbutz movement, and I romanticised "secular" Zionism and, as a logical consequence, the state of Israel. However, experience with the kibbutzim in the 1970s along with rising cynicism related to the anti-Vietnam war movement, governmental responses to the peace movement, government and corporate lying, capitalist flim flammery, the negative as well as positive wages of secular and religious zionism, and a host of other de-romanticising currents in the post-sixties era, cured me once and for all of romanticism, utopianism, saint making, and a missionary zeal to change the world, at least beyond the occasional armchair intellectual varieties of each.

Despite all of this I still have an interest in communal movements like those of the Hutterites, which has been around for hundreds of years, and the kibbutzim, both of which show that there are viable and workable political, economic, and cultural alternatives to dominant and mainstream forms of political, economic, and cultural organisation and action. Given this continued interest in the kibbutzim, moshavim, and workers cooperatives, it should not be surprising that I finally got around to reading one of the classic works of social science on the kibbutz, Melford Spiro's Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, augmented edition, 1970. Kibbutz would turn out to be the first of a three-book trilogy Spiro would write and periodically update between the 1960s and the 2000s. Kibbutz was updated in 1963 and 1970. The second, Children of the Kibbutz, was published in 1958 and updated in 1965 and 1975. The last, Gender and Culture: The Kibbutz Revisited, was published in 1979 and updated in 1996.

All three of Spiro's works on the secular and socialist kibbutz he gave the anonymous name Kiryat Yedidim to, are grounded on Spiro and his wife's almost a year's worth of ethnographic fieldwork in 1951 at Kiryat Yedidim and periodic returns to the kibbutz in the 1960s and 1970s. Spiro's Kibbutz, however, is not simply an ethnography. Spiro not only explores the contemporary economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of Kiryat Yedidim during the year he was there, he also explores the history of Kiryat Yedidim and its relation to broader Israeli societym if too briefly. Spiro provides us with a short prehistory of Kiryat Yedidim. He explores the romantic, romantic socialist, and romantic zionist background of Yedidim's founders who immgrated from Poland to Palestine in the 1920s. He explores the harsh environment of central Palestine that the kibbutz grew up in and the changes it experienced as it grew up. He explores the communal agricultural dominated economic system of the kibbutz. He explores the participatory democratic political organisation of Yedidim with its rotating offices. He explores the migrations or aliyas of later generations to the commune and the cultural tensions this sometimes brought.

Spiro's attention to tensions point up the fact that Spriro's Kibbutz is not grounded in a purely equilibrium, consensus, or static approach to social and cultural formations. While Spiro notes, for instance, that high social status attached to agricultural work in a commune where the founders romanticised and celebrated agricultural work and going back to nature, he also explores the lower status service sector of Yedidim and the need to rotate these jobs because many did not want to do them, and the tensions that seemed to be inherent in this sector of the Yedidim  economy. He explores the somewhat gendered, as we would call it today, nature of the service sector and the tensions this brought. He explores socialisation practises in the kibbutz, particularly as it relates to child rearing and schooling, and the tensions these sometimes brought.

One of the most interesting, at least to me, aspects of Spiro's Kibbutz is his contention, a contention I find compelling, that Kiryat Yedidim and other similar kibbutzim, are akin to religious sects. Religion, after all, at least on one level, is about meaning and "secular" social forms, including social movements like the kibbutz movement, also give meaning to the world around and to their place in the world around them. As Spiro notes, the meaning system, some of the symbol system, and some of the rites of passage associated with the commune, were grounded in a meaning system that was messianic, millennial, millennialist, evangelical and ethnocentric. Yedidim's kibbutzniks believed that were a city on a hill, a light unto the world, an instantiation--Yedidim and other kibbutzim created an institution and organisation grounded in these cultural ideologies--of how the world could potentially be not as it was but as it was realistically imagined and concretely put in place.

Spiro's book is not without its problems. His prophetic abilities, for instance, are sometimes less than perfect as he himself notes in the updates to the book. In the original text of Kibbutz Spiro contends that a transformation in Yedidim's Soviet Union as messianic and missionary ideologies would lead to a transformation of the commune, if not its end, if they declined and vanished proved wrong. He emphasises the tensions female "gossip" brought at Kiryat Yedidim but he does not explore the role male "gossip" might have played in raising tensions in Yedidim. He doesn't square the circle between the respective impacts of nature and nurture, broader economic, political, and cultural factors, on tensions over family, child rearing, service sector work, which was becoming gendered with more women doing service work and less doing agricultural labour, as I noted earlier. He doesn't compare the kibbutz movement with one of its perhaps closest relatives, Hutterite communes and communalism. He doesn't give as full an exploration and explanation of the various kibbutzim federations as I would like to have seen. Still, Spiro's book is a very interesting historical, social and cultural anthropological, and sociological approach to the Israeli commune movement, and I highly recommend it. Essential reading for anyone interested in alternative social systems and communal and cooperative forms of organisation.

 

Socialism and the Idiocies of Human Life...

You have to love an article like this (http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/06/20/what-are-the-ndp-talking-about-when-they-talk-about-socialism/). Why? Because the first sentence in this article is historically and culturally inaccurate.

According to the National Post, one of Canada's self-proclaimed national newspapers along with the Globe and Mail, socialism was once a social movement defined by its belief that the state ownership of industry and the equitable distribution of wealth were moral, political, and economic goods. Can you say fairy tale? In reality socialism has always been a social movement made up of different visions and versions of socialism. Socialisms rather than socialism, in other words. Getting empirical and historical I give you communal socialism (Owen, Fourier), Christian socialism (Rauschenbusch, Niebuhr), Scientific socialism (Marxism), and Democratic socialism (Michael Harrington, Bernie Saunders). In historical fact, socialism has always been about as sectarian as Christianity with its multitude of churches, denominations, and sects, including its 40 plus versions of Anabaptism. I have always appreciated this last fact because there have always been so few Anabaptists in the world, 1.6 million at last count, but they have created 40 different Anabaptist groups all of who think they are the one true version of Anabaptism and Christianity..

While there are problems with this National Post article on the NDP, the Canadian social democratic party that arose out of the merger between the largely rural Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress, and socialism it is far superior in its historical understanding of socialism than many of the Facebook posts underneath a link to this article on Facebook. For ideologues and demagogues Leigh Patrick Sullivan and C.G. MacKay socialism "means" and "equals" failure". Not to be outdone poster Andrew Horton raises the linguistic stakes by claiming that socialism equals "epic failure". Unfortunately, but understandably Messers Sullivan, MacKay, and Horton have to ignore real history in order to make such statements. Quite clearly to anyone with historical eyes, ears, a sense of smell, and a sense of touch, Scandinavia, where socialism has dominated since the 1930s, has given us the social democratic success stories of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland, all of which, simply to focus on economics, have some of the highest standards of living in the Western World.

One of the most unfortunate forms of historical amnesia on posting boards, all generated by ideology and demagoguery rather than empirical historical analysis, by the way, is this historically bizarre equation of socialism and bureaucratisation. Historically, of course, Paternalistic bureaucracies have existed at least since the 300s of the current era if not before. I give you the Orthodox Church, the Catholic Church, and the Chinese imperial apparatus, paternalistic bureaucracies all.

Modernity, as Max Weber pointed out over almost one hundred years ago, transformed bureaucracies as efficiency, effectiveness, professionalism, merit, modern military structure and strategy, and notions of progress came to dominate the modern world. Today bureaucracies, be these political (governmental apparatus like the federal and provincial governments of Canada), economic (GE, Apple, Microsoft, Caterpillar), educational (UofT, SUNY, the University of Notre Dame), intellectual (the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation), religious (the Baptist Church, the United Church, Coral Ridge, the Union of Reform Judaism), journalistic (the National Post, the NY Times), etc. are all bureaucracies rent through with the ideologies of modernity (in their "meritocratic" form) and are all products of the modern world. As anyone with eyes can see "modern" "meritocratic" bureaucracies have "triumphed" and rule the modern from Vancouver to New York to Copenhagen, to Moscow, to Melbourne, to Auckland. Meritocratic bureaucracies, in other words, are as modern as capitalism, socialism, and liberalism and more than compatible with all of them.

Finally a word on the equation of Hitler and socialism that one finds in a blog by John J. Ray linked to by another Facebook poster under the aforementioned National Post article named Graham Martin (http://matiane.wordpress.com/2010/07/26/hitler-was-a-socialist/). This linkage of Nazism and socialism, of course, is not new. Conservative ideologue and demagogue Thomas Sowell made it in a editorial I happened upon several years ago, for example. It is so used and abused, in fact, that it has become a cliche. It is a curious equation even if we admit, as we historically must, that socialism is and has always been multiple.

So what is Nazism? Nazism is a fascinating bird. Historically Nazism has been seen as a type of fascism, other forms being Mussolini's fascism and Franco's fascism (love that alliteration). On one level, fascism and hence Nazism is conservative. It looks back to a golden age in the past be this Rome in Mussolini's case or German racial purity in the Nazi case. On another level, however, fascism is a product of the modern world along with liberalism (of the laissez faire and social insurance varieties), socialism (of its many flavours), and, perhaps most importantly, nationalism. Nazism is a form or ultra nationalism. It is a form of ultra nationalism (Germans as the superior race) that explains any national problems by pointing to the pollution of the fit Aryan body politic by racial and political outsiders and inferiors such as Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and socialists. And it is a form of ultra nationalism that sees this struggle between Aryans and diseased others, particularly Jews, in apocalyptic terms (the cosmic struggle between good aryans and evil others, particularly Jews and Jewish-Bolsheviks) as a struggle for control of this world. The apocalypticism here should remind us that Christianity with its apocalypticism and its anti-Semitism, was an important cultural factor in the rise of Nazism and the creation of its culture. Christian primitivism, with its hope of returning to an original order, an original golden age, to the utopian garden of Eden, and Christian apocalypticism, with its prophetic vision of a battle between good and evil for control of the world, merged in nineteenth and twentieth century Christianity (a final apocalypse followed by a return to a paradise where the lion will lie down with the lamb) and twentieth century Nazism to produce, in each case, two kinds of conservative modernism.

Nazism is not alone in its utopianism. For laissez-fair liberals it was and is the free market and the belief that free markets will spread the wealth. For socialists utopia was, remember there were and are different socialisms, the commune, the industrial anarchic paradise where one could philosophise, fish, and work all on a given day, and the cooperative, democratic, and just society. Like other modern supposedly secular movements socialisms had their own vision of a golden age in the past to which it to some extent wanted to return, for marxian socialism it was the cooperative society of the hunter-gatherers with industry.

The moral of this tale? Nazism is very different from socialism socially, culturally, and intellectually despite the fact that Nazism, socialism and liberalism (of the laissez-faire and social insurance varieties) are all, to a great extent, products of the Enlightenment. They are products, at least in part, of the Enlightenment because they are all rent through with ideas and ideals of liberty, fraternity, equality, happiness, property, justice, citizenship, etc. The problem is that these Enlightenment ideas and ideals were never consistent and were always contradictory (even for the "great" John Locke). Liberty and equality and justice simply, particularly under the impact of industrialisation and capitalism, aren't harmonisable though the various ideologies that arose out of the Enlightenment try to harmonise them or at least some of them.

Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if people used real history rather than kneejerk and often fear based ideological demagoguery to analyse things like socialism and to understand the world? Well yes but it is not part of the nurtured "nature" of most humans. That said over the years I have observed that those who describe themselves as leftists (a very different animal, historically, from liberals, by the way) have a much better grasp of history than those on the right. I think this is because those on the right (like most religious folk) tend to ground their "analysis" in myth, nationalist myths and economic myths, in particular, and use these myths to make and remake history in their own image, while most people on the left start from the historical facts and, even when they twist and manipulate this history, still remain grounded in a kernel of historical truth.