Current Social Theory

Are European countries ruined by Socialism and beyond belief? Let’s look at that. To begin, they all have a huge homeless population. People are forced to work for such low wages that those wages must be supplemented by government welfare programs (food supplement programs). The medical care system is a byzantine patchwork system that leaves people begging for donations so they can get lifesaving care and/or avoid bankruptcy.

If this is not bad enough, insurance companies routinely deny care, even though people pay the insurance companies to cover them in times of need. Only the wealthy can really afford to go to college. Many students are forced to take out predatory student loans, the balances of which rival mortgage payments that will follow them for their lifetimes. In this type of system, school teachers are typically poorly paid. It is not uncommon to find college-educated people reduced to living in tents and cars because they can’t afford to rent or own a home. They have children going to bed hungry and the schools take trays of food from them in school because they can’t pay for it. What remains of the chronically underfunded public school system is slowly being turned into private religious indoctrination. Young school children are often shot in their classrooms and thus they don’t live to see their parents again. Public roads and public transportation are also a disaster. These systems belong in a third-world country. People work in schools and across industry and government, who aggressively deny science because of what the bible says. They continue to spend millions of taxpayer dollars to fight senseless wars that bomb mostly brown people who are even more disadvantaged into oblivion.

To top it all off, this entire system is run by a small group of oligarchic billionaires, who have organized the system to benefit themselves to the detriment of these countries. This makes the general population very angry. Not surprisingly, they respond by lashing out at anyone and everyone by arming themselves to the teeth such that there are more guns than people.

Oh wait, my bad, This is  not how socialist European countries operate; this is how the USA operates.

Social Democracy

What exactly is a Social democracy? Simply put, this is both a political and economic ideology that seeks to achieve social justice and equality within the framework of a capitalist economy. Social Democrats advocate for a balance between regulated capitalism, a well-funded welfare state, and policies that promote social justice that is further typified by an equitable distribution of wealth.

Most European countries, with a few exceptions, operate mixed market economies with different levels of support for welfare state programs. At the same time, their citizens tend to be well-educated and enjoy good health thanks to established universal healthcare programs (or as many in the U.S. like to say “socialist” healthcare). Put another way, 32 out of 33 industrialized countries in the world have universal healthcare programs, save the U.S. as the distinctive outlier that has chosen to operate a for-profit system dominated by insurance companies.

In the European system, people don’t die because they can’t afford to pay for things like insulin. In addition, they enjoy open borders, and have low crime rates. Perhaps even better, their citizens don’t have to worry about being victims of mass shootings. In countries that permit gun ownership, those households that own guns must be trained on gun safety and use. Lastly, their homeless rates are low, as are their unemployment rates.

Conclusion

To summarize, people who are quick to assume that nations with social safety nets have been destroyed by dreaded “socialism” need to take a hard look in the mirror at their own society. Examine why is it that so many (Americans) are prone to knee-jerk reaction (without having done any  research) to dismiss a mixed economy approach. Could it be that the corporations and political bureaucrats, who all benefit handsomely from the current market-dominated approach, stand to gain much from ongoing efforts to convince people that this system is the best system?

Alternatively, imagine living in a country where people pay taxes to guarantee access to the important things, while also ensuring that people who need help can get it.

The question seems simple enough. But how you answer it actually offers quite a bit of insight into a variety of things like your family upbringing, socialization, information literacy (ability & desire to access evidence-based information), educational attainment, victimization experience, and social dominance orientation. A second and closely related question – Who is poor? – tells us more of the same.

As a social scientist, who teaches college students, I find that student “beliefs” are often at odds with evidence and fact. This is because students tend to rely on information from close associates (friends and family). This traditional source of “received wisdom” can be hard to step back from, especially if it puts one at risk of social conflict with those same close associates. In other words, some find social conformity is the better option – its’ better to stay on good terms with friends rather than stand up for what may be right and true. Given this, here are some of the common beliefs about poor people:

• Poor People Are Lazy
• Poor People Don’t Want to Work Hard
• Poor People Can’t Manage Money

While I might agree that there are some people who are poor because of these things, there is quite a bit of research that contradicts this. But before I go into this research, I want to acknowledge how tempting it is to believe that while people are sometimes errant in their beliefs for reasons like lacking access to good sources of information, there is another more insidious explanation – people become deeply invested in their beliefs because they are emotionally satisfying. Briefly put, sharing beliefs with a group of like-minded others feels good. Expressed shared beliefs help people to cement social group affiliation by demonstrating solidarity with group ideals.

How people the resolve the mental contradiction between what they believe to be true when they are confronted with contradictory facts, statistics, research, etc. tells us a lot about that person. Psychologists have a term for this internal mental contradiction – they refer to it as “cognitive dissonance.”

Cognitive Dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

Research on Why People are Poor/Remain Poor

The research on this topic is wide ranging, but I will list a few studies as well as policies that aim to address the matter. In one instance, researchers at the London School of Economics undertook study to answer the question “Why Do People Stay Poor?” (2020 released paper). They found that it was the initial lack of wealth and not motivation or talent that keeps people in poverty.  To test this, the researchers randomly allocated wealth (i.e. livestock) to female villagers in Bangladesh. After doing so, they waited to see how the wealth transfer would impact their future finances.  Their paper concluded:

[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.

Put another way, many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive. This is what researchers refer to as the “Poverty Trap.” Their lack of money and assets is so overwhelming that spend all of their time taking care of day-to-day survival problems; this prevents them from adopting a “future planning” mindset and investing effort in acquiring training/capital to work in higher paying jobs.

First generation college students are no doubt familiar with some of these strains. Yet there are still others who have never been in these circumstances who cannot possible relate to the idea that an individual might not be able to simply work themselves out of difficult circumstances.

Forms of Capital

Sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu use what is called the Forms of Capital Model to talk about this in more detail. Bourdieu’s contribution is that he effectively expands the notion of capital beyond its more narrow economic conception, where he emphasizes material exchanges to include “immaterial” and “non-economic” forms of capital. Bourdieu distinguished three forms of capital (economic, cultural, and symbolic). We might elaborate this a bit to think of the kinds of capital that individuals might lack as follows: financial capital (money), social capital (it’s not what you know but who you know), cultural capital (knowing the right things so you fit in; having access to cultural goods/materials; symbolic association, tastes, values and ethics), and human capital ( resources like education, emotional resilience, physical health, and self-esteem). Some of these things are conspicuously acquired whereas others are transmitted through indirect means that are less tangible. Having access to one form, all, or none can make a major difference in a given individual’s ability to be successful. In short, it’s not all about “hard work” to resolve the problem of being poor.

In another study, published in the journal Science (2013), researchers from the University of Warwick, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia found that poor people struggling with finances were subject to cognitive strain equivalent to a 13-point loss of IQ, equivalent to a full night’s sleep lost. Theirs is one of multiple studies that suggests poverty can harm cognition and decision-making. Poor people who are stressed and living in a scarcity mind-set have a harder time processing information to inform decisions. Poor results, thus, are not caused by lack of intelligence or personal discipline. They are a consequence of being poor such that being born into poverty disposes many people to become caught up in a cycle of poverty that can span generations if significant help is not provided. 

Policy Remedies

For those who design and implement antipoverty initiatives, it’s important to recognize 1) who is poor; and 2) why people are poor. Absent an understanding of the complexity that attends to the issue of poverty, we cannot begin to undertake effective steps to resolve the problem.

Discussion Questions

What has been your traditional understanding of why people are poor? What narratives have you relied on to explain the persistent poverty and relations of social inequality?

Close you eyes and conjure a picture of someone who is poor. What does that person look like? Are they male or female? Black, white, other? Young or old?

Where do poor people live in your town? Are they visible or invisible to you as you make you daily travels?

Hang on – here we go! We are inventing new pedagogies and ways of learning and being together online. My idea for this student-focused teaching and learning space is to keep it “fluid” – kind of the way life is now in the “new normal.”

As we move forward, I want to encourage all of my students, first and foremost, to stay safe and take of their families. In the meantime, I would like to encourage you to send me pix, memes, and articles of interest that we can all read together and comment on as we try to come together as a learning community.

In the upcoming days and weeks, I will develop different sub-categories and sections that speak to the focus of the different classes we are taking together – Juvenile Delinquency, Organized Crime, and Race and Ethnic Relations. I’m going to continue to post and link you to writing and research by public health researchers as well as researchers in the social sciences in general that I think you might find interesting as well as helpful to your understanding of these rapidly unfolding events.

Italian Ground Zero – Lombardy & Bergamo

One of the reasons I have been on top of this is that I was a panel organizer for a research conference that was supposed to take place in Bergamo, Italy this summer. Dr. McLean and I, along with scholars from across Penn State, Italy, Iran, and France, were all scheduled to discuss our current research at a June meeting. The title of our panel was: “Public Health Interventions: Global Problems, Local Solutions,” where we intended to talk about local approaches to solving global public health problems – prescient indeed!

In light of these plans, I was following the reports and talking to friends on the ground in Italy as early as February. Since that time, most people in the U.S. have been enraptured with the “it’s just the flu” narrative; that was never true. But it didn’t stop people from believing what they wanted to hear (too many in the news media are continuing the trend of providing ongoing happy talk).

Here is a photo from Bergamo published during the third week of March 2020. It shows Italian military vehicles removing dead bodies that are too numerous to be handled effectively by local crematories:

While it is true that the outbreak started in China, there is no reliable data that has been released by China that we can use to evaluate or compare to judge our own response. The Italian case, however, provides us with some evidence that we can act on now.

Here are a few articles for you to check out and get you started. I’ll keep a rolling list of articles at the end of this post and build it out as time permits:

“2 Regions of Italy took Different Approaches to Fighting the Coronavirus,” by Holly Secon

“Coronavirus, Italy’s Hardest Hit City,” by Stuart Ramsay

“A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure from COVID-19,” by Lizzie Presser

“At War with No Ammo: Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear is Dire,” by Jacobs, Richtel, and Baker

Welcome to the Quarantine

What does it even mean to be quarantined? A lot of you may be asking this question and finding it surreal to discover that this means different things to different people.

Simply put, a quarantine is a type of restriction put on the movement of people and goods. The intent is to prevent the spread of disease or pests. Such a measure is often used in connection with preventing the spread of disease and illness. Quarantines are also used to prevent the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

Here is a link to the CDC’s website that explains quarantines and contains additional information that you might find useful.

“Social Distancing” (which is really physical distancing) has already been proven to help contain and slow the spread of the disease. Unfortunately, it does not prevent the spread of disease. Until a cure is found or a vaccine is produced, this is a practice you can engage right now to protect yourself and those with whom you live. That is to say, the best thing you can do to help is stay at home and simply do nothing.

This link to the Johns Hopkins Medical School is an excellent source of information that you can turn to in order to learn more about things like social distancing, quarantining, self-isolating, and a protective practice you might have heard of called “flattening the curve.”

And here’s a video…just because:

Epidemics of Injustice: Race, Ethnicity & COVID-19

Even as we are in the early stages of going down the road of addressing the pandemic spread of disease, the racial and ethnic contours of COVID-19 are becoming readily apparent. You may, for example, be sitting in your home now, performing your work or school work from the comfort of your desk. A challenging as this might be for some of you, there are many others who do not have the luxury of performing their work from home.

As this article notes, “just 16.2% of Hispanic workers and 19.7% of black Americans are able to work from home….whites and Asian workers have the highest rates of access to remote work.”

By way of contrast, people who work in restaurants/food service, retail, and perform care work are disproportionately black, brown, and female. They are also among the lowest-paid workers and the least likely to either: 1) have health insurance; and 2) be able to call off work for reasons of illness.

Racism is a Public Health Crisis

Systematic (structural) racism is making Coronavirus far more deadly in the Black community when compared to others. Black coronavirus victims in Chicago are dying at disproportionately high rates. This is a problem that Chicago Governor JB Pritzker said is due, in part, to “decades, frankly, maybe centuries, of inequality of application of health care to people of color.” As it stands now, seventy percent of people dying in Chicago are black, whereas 30% of the people dying state-wide are black. For more on this click here.

Black men don’t feel safe wearing masks: ” I, a Black man, cannot walk into a store with a bandana covering the greater part of my face if I also expect to walk out of that store. The situation isn’t safe and could lead to unintended attention, and ultimately a life-or-death situation for me. For me, the fear of being mistaken for an armed robber or assailant is greater than the fear of contracting COVID-19. ” for more on this click here.

Coronavirus & Finances

Hispanics are more likely than Americans overall to see coronavirus as a major threat to health and finances.

“The spread of the coronavirus has the potential to hit many of the nation’s nearly 60 million Latinos particularly hard. Although the Latino unemployment rate dipped at the end of 2019 to a near-record low, many Latinos work in the leisure, hospitality and other service industries – and they are less likely to have health insurance. Latinos were hit especially hard by the Great Recession more than a decade ago, and some workers have only recently seen their median personal incomes bounce back and exceed pre-recession levels.

Large majorities of Hispanics and the general public (both 70%) say the new coronavirus poses a major threat to the U.S. economy. But on other questions, Latinos’ concerns are more pronounced than those of the wider public.” Pew Study

Local Experts – UPMC

Since many of you might have some time on your hands, you might be wondering how you can also tune in to local sources of information. In the Pittsburgh area, UPMC has been and continues to be a leader on the infectious disease front. You can opt in to get COVID information texts from UPMC by texting “COVID” to the number “919-39.”

The good news from UPMC is that even as COVID-19 infection rates continue to rise in other parts of the region and across the country, their testing data indicates that the virus is not as widespread in the Pittsburgh communities served by UPMC. Early social distancing had a positive impact, as it helped infection control experts at UPMC track down local cases and contain clusters. People must, however, continue to be vigilant by staying at home and following social distancing guidelines, as this is crucial to ongoing virus mitigation efforts.

REMEMBER – YOU CAN BE A CARRIER AND TRANSMIT THE VIRUS EVEN IF YOU DON”T HAVE SYMPTOMS

Public health experts are learning more about the rapid spread of COVID-19 every day — and they’re warning people to stay inside even if they feel healthy. The reason: Asymptomatic transmission.

Podcast

Megan Freeman, MD, is a fellow at UPMC specializing in infectious disease. Learn more about her coronavirus research on the “That’s Pediatrics” podcast.

Vaccine

Scientists at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. A paper on the vaccine appeared on April 2 in EBioMedicine. It is the first study on a potential COVID-19 vaccine to be published after peer-review from scientific experts (in other words, it is the first time the UPMC scientists’ findings were published and subject to critique from fellow scientists at outside institutions). 

When the vaccine was tested in mice, it helped produce antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be enough to neutralize the virus.  
The research team calls this vaccine PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine. 
 
Scientists also use a new approach to deliver the drug, called a microneedle array, to increase potency. This array is a fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny needles that deliver spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is the strongest. The patch goes on like a Band-Aid^®, and the needles, which are made entirely of sugar and protein pieces, simply dissolve into the skin.

You can learn more about UPMC’s vaccine by following this link.

What To Do If You Need Help

If you believe you were exposed to the coronavirus but aren’t showing symptoms, call your doctor for advice. Practice routine precautions, such as social distancing.
  
If you have symptoms that are flu-like, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath, call your primary care doctor. If you do not have a doctor, use UPMC AnywhereCare. A video visit from home limits the spread of infection, and, if needed, UPMC can guide you safely to the next care site. 
  
UPMC Urgent Care and Primary Care walk-in locations cannot collect specimens or test for COVID-19. They are open to treat minor illnesses and injuries.
  
If you are experiencing severe symptoms, such as trouble breathing, you should visit an emergency department in your community for immediate care.
  
If you can, call ahead of time so staff may prepare for your arrival and prevent the spread of any illness. Do not delay if you have severe breathing problems.

Visit the UPMC COVID-19 Facts page for more information.

Coronavirus & the Justice System

Not surprisingly, the Coronavirus is having a major impact on the entire criminal justice system – from courts to jails & prisons, policing and beyond. In what follows, I will share with you some recent writing on issues that are affecting the U.S. criminal justice system.

Jails & Prisons

Prison-reform groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Allegheny County and county jail warden Orlando Harper Tuesday, warning that the facility is poised to suffer a severe outbreak of COVID-19 unless it takes more drastic measures. Hours later, the urgency of the issue was underlined when the county announced that an inmate had tested positive for COVID-19, about two weeks after a jail employee was diagnosed with the disease. For more on this click here.

Foster Care

Sadly, and not surprisingly, Coronavirus is leaving many children with no place to go. As Eli Hager of the Marshall Project reports in their article:

“The foster care system, built on frequent movements of children from one home to another and regular in-person supervision, has been especially wracked with confusion and dread by the coronavirus crisis.

In some states, investigators of child abuse…are so fearful of spreading the illness from home to home that some are trying to do their investigating from the front door, or even over videochat, instead of going inside.

Afraid of bringing the virus into their families, some foster parents are also refusing to accept new children, even if there is no indication they have the virus. Two youth advocates said in interviews that in this climate, they fear foster children are at risk of becoming “the new lepers.”

And across the nation, most visits between birth parents and their children in foster care have been suspended or switched to phone calls, at a time when youth are more in need of reassurance and love than ever. In a handful of places, face-to-face family time is still allowed—but with no touching, even when the visit is with a baby.”

For more on this, follow the link to the article.

Coronavirus and Job Loss

“As measures to slow the pandemic decimate jobs and threaten to plunge the economy into a deep recession, young adults….are disproportionately affected.” Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs. For more on this click here.

College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are.

When they were all in the same dorms and eating the same dining hall food, the disparities in students’ backgrounds weren’t as clear as they are over video chat. Check out this free article in the New York Times.

“I’m in Highschool Again”: Virus Sends College Students Home to Parents

New York Times article explores the social dynamics of students who were suddenly uprooted from school and returned home to live with parents. Link here.

Dying of Whiteness During the Pandemic

Jonathan Metzl, author of “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland,” is a featured author in a podcast produced by the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, who invited him to explain how this social dynamic “has been on steroids since this pandemic started.”

Anti-stay-at-home protests fit a historical pattern. They demonstrate how the politics of racial resentment, which Metzl discusses in his book, animate public discourse on issues of importance. Policies that would save lives and bolster public health continue to be opposed by white working-class people. This occurs even when those policies would help ensure their own health.

You can listen to the podcast for free here.

Class of 2020

Questions for Reflection – Reflect on Your Beliefs and Biases

Personal beliefs determine how an individual sees the world, other people, and oneself (Nelson & Guerra, 2014). Our beliefs and unconscious biases determine our actions and practices, and these actions inform how systems develop and operate, including our current education system (Berg, 2018). For people, including leaders, to feel comfortable addressing issues of bias, inequity, and race, they first need to have a heightened understanding of their own identities, values, assumptions and biases (Brown, 2004; Gooden & O’Doherty, 2015). As part of this self-exploration, they must cultivate and maintain a deep understanding of how privilege, power, and oppression operate, historically and currently in school and society (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2017).

Without a firm self-examination of one’s own identity and role in historically inequitable structures, people risk reproducing inequities inside and outside their schools and systems (Jones & Vagle, 2013; Brooks, Jean-Marie, Normore & Hodgins, 2007; Rigby & Tredway, 2015). For aspiring leaders of diverse communities, such critical self-reflection should be an ongoing, lifelong process (Brown, 2004). [source for this paragraph is the New York Leadership Academy].

Questions:

How are you feeling about social distancing? What’s your response to the increased need for these strict measures?

To some extent, we are all experiencing trauma, though not in the same ways. Some of us are more privileged than others. What are your privileges in this current situation? How are you using your privilege to support other family members, other students, and potentially other families?

Have you noticed or become aware of incidents of discrimination against people who identify as Asian, Black, or Hispanic in your school community? How are you responding or talking about those incidents with your team and your community?

Now that many of you are not living on the building seeing staff and professors every day, what have you done to try to keep your energy and motivation at the level it needs to be? What are you doing, or will you do, to continue to build culture and relationships with your community?

Articles

Most Brown and Black Americans are Exposing Themselves to Coronavirus for a Paycheck, by Chris Moody

Hispanics More Likely than Americans Overall to See Coronavirus as a Major Threat to Health and Finances, by Krogstad, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Hugo

Seventy Percent of People Dying from Coronavirus in Chicago are Black, by Kelly Bauer

Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs, by Anna Almendrala

“Allegheny County Jail Sued in Class-Action Lawsuit As First Inmate Tests Positive for COVID-19,” by An-Li Herring

The Resistance is German & Jewish – The Frankfurt School

In the fear-fueled years after the end of World War I, an intellectual “resistance” enclave was established in Germany – The Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung) – in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. “The Frankfurt School,” as they became known, were  interested in developing studies of Marx and Freud in Germany as part of an effort to understand why we live in the sort of regressive, oppressive systems of social control that we do. 

That they devoted themselves to “social research” is indicative of their collective concern that the insights of philosophy should be tested and perhaps even be modified by empirical investigation. Some of the primary figure heads who helped shape the school (as well as the field of Critical Theory) worked inside as well as outside the Institute. They include philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Members of the Frankfurt School include Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Friedrich Pollock, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Lowenthal. Also noteworthy are contributions from Erich Fromm and, some might argue more remotely, Walter Benjamin. Their critique of fascism and social change spanned a broad range of academic disciplines that include sociology, psychology, economics, political science, and literature.

The Institute was originally concerned with the German concept of critique that descended from Immanuel Kant, who was focused on the task of rescuing reason from what he believed was a proneness to “self-deception.” To advance Kant’s work, the Frankfurt School shifted the focus on deception from within the human mind toward outlying social forces that had been  transformed dialectically into the opposite of how they originally appeared. With that, reason became unreason; civilization yielded to barbarism, and so on.

A central area of intellectual focus for the school was the study of how  capitalist societies emerged. Drawing from a combination of Marxism, psychoanalysis, and Weberian economics, members of the school applied concepts from this work to the study of societal change. They developed   what is now known as “Critical Theory” in opposition to “traditional theory.”

Critical Theory, as Max Horkheimer once said, aimed to “liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them.”

During the run-up to World War II and the time period of 1933, the Nazis forced the Institute to close and move to the United States; its members found a new home at Columbia University (note that the Institute returned again to Frankfurt in 1949). Later, after World War II had commenced, the Frankfurt school was among the first to  sound the alarm bells. Their worst fears had been realized: Hitler’s army and the ideology of German fascism had been unleashed on the world.

Critical Theory Today

Critical theory continues to retain its power to shed light on the social dynamics that make up the current political constellation. Its theories and concepts remain  salient for those interested in understanding why  regressive and oppressive political movements continues to resonate with Americans and many others. In light of this, we we might say that the philosophical impact of the Frankfurt School is apparent now more than ever.

In the United States things are especially complex. The current political right wing’s favorite insult is to refer to someone as a “Cultural Marxist.”  Used as a term of disparagement, it is routinely deployed as a weapon against critical thinking. Why? Let’s keep reading.

Despite this criticism, the ideas are well worth considering, even as they have been shown to be flawed in some aspects. Contemporary audiences, both inside and outside of the the social sciences and humanities, have recently returned to the canonical works of Critical Theory to study the rise of  mass culture and  authoritarianism in their own time (some have gone so far as to label this development “Trumpism,” but I would advise a word of caution here, because what is happening in the U.S. and beyond is much larger than just on person). At any rate, studies of authoritarianism have suddenly become fashionable again.

Theodore Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality ( published in 1950), which was written with colleagues Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford, was one of the first scholarly works that explored authoritarianism. The purpose of the authors’ study was to try to assemble an extensive psychological and sociological profile of the “potentially fascistic —-individual.”

The book essentially asks: What makes a fascist? What are the key character traits that make someone identifiable as a fascist? They posited a Freudian explanation of authoritarianism, where they posited that an insecure and threatening childhood environment created authoritarian adults. In this respect, Adorno et al.’s The Authoritarian Personality is not only one of the most significant works of social psychology ever written, it also marks a milestone in the development of Adorno’s thought, as it reveals him attempting to grapple with the problem of fascism and explain the reasons for Europe’s turn to reactionary politics.

Methodologically speaking, Adorno based his work on  questionnaires and subsequent interviews with American subjects. Another group of scholars pursued a similar study. Leo Lowenthal and Norbert Guterman’s 1949 book, “Prophets of Deceit,” studied the Father Coughlin (a Roman Catholic priest), a sensationalistic pulpit-based ideologue, whom they believed demonstrated how “large numbers of people would be susceptible to psychological manipulation.”

Adorno’s study, however, contained many flaws. Chiefly, it is criticized for the scientific  basis of the book’s acclaimed “F” type personality, which was determined to be unfalsifiable. An F-type person, according to him, was understood to possess specific identifiable character traits, such as: compliance with conventional values, non-critical thinking, compliance with authority, and an absence of introspectiveness.

Nonetheless, despite this criticism, this work led to ongoing efforts to study and authoritarianism in populations. Erich Fromm undertook  a study of working class attitudes and beliefs as part of an effort to understand the contradictions between their professed attitudes and their character traits. Although his study findings were statistically inconclusive, he nonetheless estimated that the working classes would not resist a fascist takeover.

Survey: One-Third of Republicans Favor Leaders Unchecked by Courts or Congress

Academic Research on Authoritarianism

Alex Ross wrote in a New Yorker essay in 2016 that “THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL Knew Trump was Coming.”  To this the philosopher Martin Jay adds, “much has been made of late of the prescience of the Frankfurt School in anticipating the rise of populist nationalism in general and Donald Trump in particular. By and large, the focus has been on their critiques of the culture industry, the authoritarian personality, the techniques of right-wing agitators, and antisemitism.” However, he goes on to write that there is another aspect of their legacy that has “been largely ignored, which supplements their insights into the psychological and cultural sources of the problem, and deepens their analysis of the demagogic techniques of the agitator. I’m referring here to their oft-neglected analysis of what they (The Frankfurt School) called a “racket society” to explain the unexpected rise of fascism” (Jay, 2020).

According to Jay, “the America to which Horkheimer and his colleagues had fled in 1934, the words “rackets” and “racketeering” had been coined to indicate the increasing prominence of “organized” or “syndicated” crime. Surviving the end of Prohibition, it thrived in such illegal enterprises as prostitution, drug-dealing, numbers-running, and gambling, and easily spilled over into other forms of corruption, including political.” Jay asks questions that have become more than prescient in the current political moment, as he asks: “But what if a whole society, the Frankfurt School wondered, had been corrupted by the racket model, turning to bonds of personal loyalty forged through protection against the threats of an increasingly harsh world? What if universal moral norms and the abstract rule of law had been supplanted by transactional and concrete relationships between patrons and clients? What if the role of classes — both in terms of struggle between and solidarity within — had been replaced by other hierarchical relations of domination outside of those generated by the economic mode of production? What if the era of bourgeois capitalism had only been an interlude between two epochs in which the mediation of the impersonal marketplace had been unnecessary to secure subordination and compliance? (Jay, 2020).

Criticism from Ross and Jay represents an off-shoot critique of a much larger and well-developed scholarly literature on authoritarianism. One of the major findings of this body of work is that authoritarianism is strongly associated with political conservatism. Some social scientists have gone so far as to consider authoritarianism the psychological basis of conservatism, whereas others simply describe it as a particularly militant variation of political conservatism; one that demonstrates a strong aversion to social change.

A recent Pew research study revealed that many Americans have autocratic/authoritarian leanings. One of the key predictor variables in the study, which measured authoritarian dispositions, was “education.” Higher levels of education were found to be associated with people who expressed more pro-social support for democratic forms of government.

“Political Party” affiliation was another variable that revealed interesting findings. Republican party affiliation was associated with people who preferred the “strong man”/anti-democratic model of government, which is the preference of authoritarians and autocrats. Follow this link to an article in Foreign Policy magazine that discusses findings from the study.

In a recent book, Wendy Brown, Peter Gordon, and Max Pensky look at how “freedom” has become a rallying cry for what are decidedly un-emancipatory movements.

Gordon, for example, dismantles the idea that fascism is rooted in the susceptible psychology of individual citizens, as he argues that we must look to the broader cultural and historical circumstances that lend it force.

Pensky brings together the unlikely pair of Tocqueville and Adorno to explore how democracies can buckle under internal pressure.

The essays included in this work do not seek to smooth over the irrationality of the contemporary world, nor do they offer the false comforts of an easy return to liberal democratic values. Rather, the three authors draw on their deep engagements with nineteenth–and twentieth–century thought to investigate the historical and political contradictions that have brought about this moment, as they respond to the  demands of the current political moment (Brown, Gordon, Pensky, 2018).

Researchers have argued since 1973 that political conservatism as an ideological belief system is significantly related to concerns about the management of uncertainty. One recent study conducted at NYU concluded that people respond to uncertainty in much the same manner as they do any threat —- they respond with fear. They refer to this as the “Uncertainty Threat Model of Political Conservativism.” The results from their structural equation models demonstrated consistent support for the hypothesis:

H1: “uncertainty avoidance (e.g., need for order, intolerance of ambiguity, and lack of openness to experience) and threat management (e.g., death anxiety, system threat, and perceptions of a dangerous world) each contributes independently to political conservatism” (as opposed to liberalism) (Jost and Napier, 2011).

But what is meant by “threat?” A wide range of studies have noted that threats might include: personal threats; threat of personal failure; threats perceived to occur across society; socially learned and experienced threats; external/internal fear and anxiety; conforming in-groups threatened by unconventional out-groups; individual as well as collective threats; personal insecurity caused by the threat of terrorism; and differentially perceived economic threats, precarity, and economic insecurity (for more on threats perceived by working class Americans, see an older study published by Seymour Martin Lipset, “Democracy and Working-Class Authoritarianism”). In the case of the latter, Lipset hypothesizes that low status and low education predispose individuals to favor extremist and intolerant forms of political and religious behavior (Lipset, 1959).

According to Lipset:

• Authoritarian predispositions and ethnic prejudice flow more naturally from the situation of the lower classes than from that of the middle and upper classes in modern industrial society.
• The lower-class way of life produces individuals with rigid and intolerant approaches to politics. These findings imply that one may anticipate wide-spread support by lower-class individuals and groups for extremist movements.
• In some countries, working- class groups have proved to be the most nationalistic and jingoistic sector of the population.
• The social situation of the lower strata, particularly in poorer countries with low levels of education, predisposes them to view politics in simplistic terms of black and white, good and evil. Consequently, they should be more likely than other strata to prefer extremist movements, which suggest easy and quick solutions to social problems and have a rigid outlook rather than those which view the problem of reform or change in complex and gradualist terms and which support rational values of tolerance.
• The insecurities and tensions which flow directly from economic instability are reinforced by the particular patterns of family life associated with the lower strata. There is more direct frustration and aggression in the day-to-day lives of members of the lower classes, both children and the adults.
• A comprehensive review of the many studies made in the past 25 years of child-rearing patterns in the United States reports that their “most consistent finding” is the “more frequent use of physical punishment by working-class parents.” The link between child rearing practices in lower-class families and adult hostility and authoritarianism is suggested by the findings of investigations in Boston and Detroit that physical punishments for aggression, characteristic of the working class, tend to increase rather than decrease aggressive behavior.

In another study, Feldman and Stenner used child rearing questions from the 1992 American National Election Studies (ANES) to estimate authoritarianism. They  found that “authoritarianism and perceptions of environmental stress [i.e., threat] interact in creating intolerance.” Put another way, threat did not make individuals more authoritarian. Rather, according to the authors’ hypothesis, it activated intolerant authoritarian behaviors in individuals who were already predisposed to authoritarianism.

Given the nature  of modern life and how we are surrounded by evidence of its danger  from things like terrorism, mass shootings, school shootings, pandemic illness, it is perhaps not surprising that some people have become more antagonistic towards others whom they perceive hold different beliefs and values. More often than not, they have become more fearful of the Other. This easily gives way to an “us vs. them” mentality, leaving many Americans in a constant state of fear, if not actual war, inside their own heads. Some feel they must carry guns to buy a sandwich, whereas others feel the need to build literal walls to protect themselves from immigrants and perceived hostile Others.

Telling people that they should simply stop being so afraid is not likely to yield results. Because everything in their experience, which feeds their anxious worldview, shapes their sense of self, and informs their “gut experience,” tells them otherwise. For many people, being afraid and staying on alert 24/7 seems fully rational, if not  instinctive.

Social science researchers, on the other hand, would perhaps argue differently, advising people that they should be more afraid of the kinds of things that might actually kill them – i.e. not having adequate health insurance, not having access to clean air and water, owning a handgun that they potentially use on themselves, and quite literally working themselves to death.

Who Were (Are) They?

First Generation

Listed here is a more extensive list of prominent figures of the first generation Critical Theorists. They include: Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodore Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), Otto Kirchheimer, and Eric Fromm (1900-1980).  First generation critical theorists devoted their work to concerns with the elaboration of Hegel’s dialectics and what is often referred to as the “Weber-Marx-Freud synthesis.”

Second Generation

From the time period of the 1970s, the second generation was led by Juergen Habermas, whose writing contributed to fostering a dialogue between the so-called “continental” and “analytical” philosophical traditions. Under Habermas’ influence, there was an effort to develop a more specific focus on understanding the conditions of human action, which were  coordinated through speech-acts. This work was further complemented by the works of others, including Klaus Günther, Hauke Brunkhorst, Ralf Dahrendorf, Gerhard Brandt, Alfred Schmidt, Claus Offe, Oskar Negt, Albrecht Wellmer and Ludwig von Friedeburg, Lutz Wingert, Josef Früchtl, Lutz-Bachman.

Third Generation

Now, it is possible to speak of a “third generation” of critical theorists, symbolically represented in Germany by the influential work of Axel Honneth [for a comparison between the “inner circle” of the first generation, and the outer circle, see Axel Honneth, “Critical Theory,” in Social Theory Today, ed. A. Giddens and J. Turner (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 347ff. The focus of the third generation theorists, following the works of Honneth, was a return to Hegel’s philosophy (especially Hegel’s notion of “recognition”) which was understood to be a cognitive and pre-linguistic sphere grounding intersubjectivity. This group of scholars is represented by a large group of people, inside and outside of Germany, including figures such as  Stanley Aronowitz, Andrew Arato, Kenneth Baynes, Seyla Benhabib, Jay Bernstein, Richard Bernstein, James Bohman, Susan Buck-Morss, Jean Cohen, Fred Dallmayr, Peter Dews, Alessandro Ferrara, Jean-Marc Ferry, Nancy Fraser, David Held, Agnes Heller, David Ingram, Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Thomas McCarthy, David Rasmussen, William Rehg, Gillian Rose, Steven Vogel, Georgia Warnke, Stephen K. White, Joel Whitebook, and others. Many among them studied with Habermas and/or Marcuse.

Areas of Intellectual Focus

Under Horkheimer’s leadership, members of the Institute aimed to address a wide variety of economic, social, political and aesthetic topics, ranging from empirical analysis to philosophical theorization. As we find to be the case in a lot of contemporary scholarship, there was a great deal of concern with the contradictions of public life. To this end, the scholars focused on the complex interplay of the psycho-dynamics of fascism, the manipulation of public opinion, the substitution of information for knowledge, material excess, mass-consumerism, and the breakdown of communication. 

Erich Fromm helped cement the Institute’s focus on the psycho dynamics of capitalism, however, it was his revision of Sigmund Freud’s ideas that caused him to have a bit of a falling out with Horkheimer. Fromm argued that the key problem of psychology was how individuals relate to one another and to the society around them, as opposed to deterministic fixation at libidinal stages (anal, oral, genital, etc.) indicated by Freud’s theory (Durkin, 2020).

Briefly put, the Frankfurt School theorists saw advanced capitalism and its accompanying instrumental rationality as contributing to the deterioration of all social life.

Mass Culture

The idea that culture is mass produced by “the culture industry” was one of the major ideas explored by the Frankfurt School, especially by Adorno and Horkheimer.They argued that the culture industry (and the culturally homogeneous/generic products it produces) is killing the desire that might allow people to freely imagine a better world. Sadly, they observed that the masses were oblivious to the mass controlled culture in which they lived (i.e. why does anyone care about or watch the Kardashians?).

According to this view, people will never be able to create an ideal society, one designed to serve human needs (as opposed to the needs of capitalist corporations) as long as they are stuck living and laboring in a a commodity-driven culture. That’s another way of saying that we all live and work on a capitalist plantation.

Put another way, they were concerned that mass society was making people comlpascent; that people were passively accepting what mass culture produced, without thinking critically about the social process as well as their own human potential. Mass culture and its commodities were getting in the way of people imagining as well as working to create different forms of social organization that could help everyone (not just a few) attain a better life.

Later, the founders of the Institute were  joined by Erich Fromm, who was also interested in culture, though his approach took into account the psycho-social dynamics of social class as a component in theory-building. In particular, Fromm’s psychoanalytic theory, which he conceived at the Institute, constituted a major development and contributed greatly to the school.

The Frankfurt School provides us with useful perspectives that we can use to study contemporary society; it also provides the intellectual underpinning of critique in the academic field of Cultural Studies. We might further combine the work of this school with the theoretical innovations provided by Poststructuralist/postmodern theorists like Foucault, Baudrillard, and Jameson to analyze key developments in our  present moment – mass consumerism, mass incarceration, social media, fashion & culture, computer and information technologies, as well as new forms of knowledge and power, and subjectivity and identity.

The “Critical” Method

The academic influence of the “critical” method was far-reaching in terms of the educational institutions that set out to apply this way of thinking to the study of social problems.

Key areas of focus included a critique of modernities and capitalist society, the perceived pathologies/problems of society, and the definition of social emancipation, where there was an effort to specify the terms under which people might remain free (or forfeit freedom)

Critical Theory reflects a very specific interpretation of Marxist philosophy: it reinterprets some of Marx’s central economic and political notions, including the ideas of commodification, reification, and fetishization. In doing so, it helps us to think about the world in terms of power relations and how individual humans are constituted as subjects, who are subject to those relations or power.

Philosophical Roots of Critical Theory

Critical theory draws from Kantian rationalism and Marxist  Hegelianism, which postulates the following:

• humans are rational beings; the world of the real comes not from our senses, but from our rational capacities; therefore, a rational society is possible.
• social systems are presented with constant challenge and contradiction; these contradictions produce new syntheses, and out of this change (progress) occurs [dialectical thinking].
• Progress does not occur as a result of straight means-end logic (formal rationality); means-end logic is what underlies repression and domination in society; this leads to totalitarianism.
• Events are not discrete and isolated; events are part of a social process that implies constant change.

Critical Theory incorporated Hegel’s dialectical concept of Self and Other:

• Critical Theorists see social progress as contingent upon a self that is able to take/see itself as an object – so to act self-consciously.  Failing to do this, they warn,  guarantees we are all doomed to repeat the errors of the past.

The Problem of Enlightenment

Critical theorists (Horkheimer and Adorno in particular) were concerned with the problem of “Enlightenment” within modernity and post-modernity. So for example, the central premise of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment was that “something went wrong with the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment, in their view, became totalitarian; its force and focus was now directed toward controlling nature and humans.

Enlightenment, it turns out, created a culture that was superficially appealing even as it violated individuality by compelling conformity. Interestingly, the potential of the individual was not being destroyed by fascism alone; rather, it was the positivist turn of modern science within the Enlightenment movement that was doing the most damage.

Horkheimer and Adorno argued that the only way to get out of this modern version of hell is to engage in a Critical Theory of Society – that this is will be our only hope to achieve social transformation and progress.

What is “Dialectical” thinking?

Dialectical thinking is a form of analytical reasoning that pursues truth and knowledge as such through a process of reconciling discursive conflict. Social change, in other words, is understood to occur through contradiction, where oppositions are made to clash more or less. Another way to think about this is that opposites attract, change takes place, and then you end up with a third order situation that is not like either the first or the second order that clashed.

Dialectics/the dialectical method can be illustrated as a form of a discourse between two or more people, who hold different points of view. In classical philosophy, the dialectic represents a form of reasoning based upon dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, where one advocates propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses). The outcome of such a dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant proposition, or a synthesis, or a newly formulated combination of the opposing assertions.

Hegelian dialectic follows this logic, however, it is usually presented as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, which gives rise to its reaction, an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; the tension between the two are resolved by means of some form of synthesis. Although this model is named after Hegel, he himself never used that specific formulation. Hegel attributed the terminology to Kant. Carrying on Kant’s work, it was actually Fichte who greatly elaborated on the synthesis model and made it popular.

Summary of Dialectics

• Dialectics originated with Plato (dialogues)

• Kant also uses the dialectic (but different than Hegel does)

• In Hegel/Marx, the dialectic is about a relationship between subject and object.

• Horkheimer/Adorno examine the dialectic of reason and un-reason, as they look at how modernity’s promise of progress produces new forms of barbarism and violence.

• Marcuse looks at the dialectic of the individual and society; technology and domination.

Critique of Mass Culture

The critique of mass culture, however, remains as what is perhaps its most well-known social criticism. Writing for The New Yorker, Alex Ross says “Adorno believed that the greatest danger to American democracy lay in the mass-culture apparatus of film, radio, and television.” Indeed, in his view, this apparatus operates in dictatorial fashion even when no dictatorship is in place: it enforces conformity, quiets dissent, mutes thought. Nazi Germany was merely the most extreme case of this, which was essentially a late-capitalist condition, where people surrendered real intellectual freedom in favor of a sham paradise of personal liberation and comfort.

Watching wartime newsreels, Adorno concluded that the “culture industry,” as he and Horkheimer called it, was replicating fascist methods of mass hypnosis. Above all, he saw a blurring of the line between reality and fiction. In his 1951 book, “Minima Moralia,” he wrote:

Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power, a process that truth itself cannot escape if it is not to be annihilated by power, not only suppresses truth as in earlier despotic orders, but has attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false, which the hirelings of logic were in any case diligently working to abolish. So Hitler, of whom no one can say whether he died or escaped, survives.** **” (Ross)

Psychoanalysis, and the Nietzsche/Marx/Freud Synthesis

From the beginning, psychoanalysis in the Frankfurt School was conceived in terms of a reinterpretation of Freud and Marx. Its consideration in the School was clearly due to Horkheimer, who encouraged his researchers to direct their attention to the subject.

It was Fromm, nevertheless, whose incisive critique best produced an advancement, in terms of thinking on the subject. Fromm’s major aim and contribution was his effort to synthesize Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, which he said was “the missing link between ideological superstructure and socio-economic base” (Jay 1966, p. 92). Fromm attributed the rise of Nazis and fascism to the notion of threat. According to him, people who felt isolated, powerless, and insecure were people who  “escaped from freedom” by submitting to Nazi authoritarianism.

A radical shift occurred again, in terms of the School’s interests, when Fromm departed the Institute in the late 1930s. Despite retaining psychoanalysis as an area of interest (and in particular Freud’s instinct theory) there was almost at total abandonment of the study of Marxism and a turn away from the linking of psychoanalysis to social change. Fromm’s insight into the psychic (or even psychotic) role of the family was effectively sidelined We see this reflected in Adorno’s later paper “Social Science and Sociological Tendencies in Psychoanalysis” (1946), as well as Marcuse’s book Eros and Civilization (1955).

Fascism, Families, and Authoritarian Personalities

In retrospect, the move away from a focus on families was an unfortunate development, considering it was interest in the family as an agent of socialization, which proved to be so crucial to the School’s empirical studies in 1940 that culminated in Max Horkheimer and Theodore W. Adorno working together on “The Authoritarian Personality.“

It should be noted here that Nietzsche’s influence, particularly his critique of Enlightenment, was significant. According to Rolf Wiggershaus, Adorno aimed to correct/supplement Marx through the use of Nietzsche as a thinker concerned with the “totality of happiness incarnate.” Horkheimer, likewise, supported this view, to the extent that he saw in Nietzsche a critic of the “entire [bourgeois] culture of satiety” (Wiggershaus).

Horkheimer, says Wiggershaus, shares Nietzsche’s (as opposed to Marx’s) “distrust of the bourgeoisie” (Adorno); he also shares their detachment from the proletariat and social democracy, and merely avoids speaking of the superman (Nietzsche’s “aristocratism”), since there are those who would allege that, without class-rule and mass-domination, the characteristics and higher culture of the superman would be impossible. Horkheimer sees in this only a problem of release from stultifying toil. He concludes that if Nietzsche had realized that an extremely advanced domination of nature would make stultifying toil superfluous, he would have realized that his conviction that “all excellence [develops]. . .only among those of equal rank” means that either all or none would become supermen.

Thus, in a sharp criticism of Nietzsche, Horkheimer wrote: “Beneath [Nietzsche’s] seemingly misanthropic formulations lies . . . not so much this [elitist] error but the hatred of the patient, self-avoiding, passive, and conformist character at peace with the present.”

Adorno also said he did not want to adopt Nietzschean concepts like “love” and “longing.” Indeed, he and Horkheimer valued Nietzsche above all for his frankness concerning the instinctual nature of cruelty, for his attentiveness to the stirring of repressed instincts without minimizing rationalization. No philosopher, in their view, had brought such anti-Christian, antihumanistic furor to his age as the pastor’s son Nietzsche, who interacted almost exclusively with the educated, patricians, and petty nobility.

Likewise, they found no philosopher had attempted so resolutely, without regard for socio-historical trends, to negate and destroy his own origins and training.

On the issue of race, Adorno and Horkheimer insisted in a 1942 discussion that Nietzsche must be rescued from fascist and racist appropriations. They found in his work, perhaps more than any other philosopher, their own fears and desires confirmed and accentuated.

What’s Up with All This Critique of Capitalism?

Some might say, “Why all the hate for capitalism? Don’t you like money? Because I like money! Capitalism has brought about great innovations!” And so on and so on. Critical Theorists took a different view, because they were focused on analyzing social organization, and most especially systems of social control, which condition how people think, act, and form their basic beliefs about the world.

Most historians, including Marxist historical materialists, locate the rise of industrial capitalism in 18th century Britain. This European centered view, unfortunately overlooks the numerous forms of global commercial organization that thrived for centuries before this time (i.e. Venice, Istanbul, Spain) as well as the use of slavery to further economic enterprise. Nonetheless, the view taken by Critical theorists, like Marx before them, was that capitalism contained the seeds of totalitarianism and authoritarianism; as a social system, it did a better job of controlling people than markets and when left to its own devices (i.e. no government intervention), it would ultimately enslave people.

When you look at things this way, the picture that emerges in regards to capitalism ventures into dark territory. A better question than “Is Capitalism Good (or bad) is “Why does capitalism have such a firm psychological hold on people?” “Why do so many working class people, who are getting abused by this system, stand among its most vocal supporters?” You have to get to the root of this problem in order to nurture any hope of emerging from the contradictions imposed by capitalism.

Critical School Theorists  developed a compelling synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxist thinking in order to try to understand why we still regressive oppressive systems of social organization. They encouraged us to reflect on why it is so hard for people to recognize that capitalism, as a system of social organization, is a major barrier to creating human self-fulfillment and happiness. The answer they came up with, derived from psychoanalysis, was simply this: that capitalist ideology is socialized and thus internalized (into the super-ego). That’s another way of saying that people have become more or less brainwashed to act against (vote against) their own best interests.

Where it gets more interesting is how there are people who have mastered the con of playing the the role of the Super-ego: they act like an authoritarian father and either make demands, make people feel guilty, and correspondingly make them feel loved when they conform. This is often why the the working class continues to act against their own best interests. In essence, they complete the work of the authoritarian father figure, who despite their claims of strength are not strong enough to accomplish this feat alone.

This explanation goes a long way in explaining why many of us, despite all of our education, remain in the thrall of capitalism and hence throw our weight behind the authorities who are constantly telling people that they should love it and that anyone who is against it is a “loser.” Again, the questions we are still left with are compelling: Why are people so easily cowed by authority? Why do they conform? Why don’t people stand up for themselves?

Criticisms of Critical Theory

One critique of Critical Theory making the rounds of late is that the Frankfurt School, a group of Marxist communist philosophers and sociologists, was at a loss regarding how to reinterpret Marx and help working people achieve class consciousness, so they could, in turn, initiate Marx’s theorized revolution.

The leaders of the school turned their attention to the cultural institutions of society. It is not an unfair criticism to say that Adorno was excessively pessimistic, offering almost no way out of the problem of culture and its ability to dominate the thinking of the masses. Put another way, critics have said that their view culture comprises a totalizing system. Of course, they advocate escape, even as they also lament that escape is impossible.  Their views, while compelling, are not backed up by empirical data, nor are they generalizable.

Critics, likewise, have argued that the products of mass culture would not be popular if people did not enjoy them. Culture is in this sense self-determining – people get what they desire.

Traditional Marxists accused the Critical theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Marx without feeling the obligation to apply theory to the project of political action, or what Marx referred to as Praxis. Here again, it is argued that Critical Theory offers no practical solutions for societal change.

Positivist philosophers and social scientists accuse Critical theorists of not submitting their theories to empirical tests (they base this critique on Karl Popper’s revision of Logical Positivism). And in this they are correct. But that does not mean that the ideas fully lack merit. Counter-arguments leveled against positivists are that they are invested too heavily in the idea of standpoint objectivity – that they can magically stand outside of the field they are studying and construct variables to study that are completely without bias (very difficult as often the categories and variables they study are infused with one form of bias or another). This counter-critique also holds merit.

More recently, neoconservative critics in the United States have dismissed the entire canon of Critical Theory to what they have termed “Cultural Marxist” rubbish. They have reduced the complexity of thought on offer by a school of diverse thinkers as a refuge for “political correctness.” Of particular annoyance is how Critical Theory and its proponents tend to be e people who reject plain language and simple expression, preferring (or so it is argued) obscurantism and long-winded justifications for dubious schemes of social engineering.

In his book, The Death of the West, former Fox television personality and political pundit Pat Buchanan argues “the Frankfurt School must be held as a primary suspect and principle accomplice in the titular catastrophe.”

Nonetheless, Frankfurt School critical theory, contrary to the claims of many critics and media polemicists, can help put into context what appear to be the rising tide of authoritarian tendencies on both the right and left of the political spectrum. Though, to be sure, the aims of the two polarized camps are not the same.

Adorno was, in fact, very concerned about the bureaucratizing tendencies of capitalism (as was Weber) and its effects on social equality, politics, and culture.  He thought that overly bureaucratized governments could inspire left as well as right-wing totalitarianism. At the same time, he  worried this culture similarly might foster right and left-wing fascism.

Tyranny from the left, unmoored from disciplined and systematic intellectual reflection, is perhaps one example of what happens when people rise up against an over-administered society. Alternatively, tyranny from the right, which has also given up on reflective engagement and similarly decries government overreach, leads us to the same place. The way out; that is, the escape, cannot be a world with no government, no social order, and no social bonds between people. How we negotiate the ground between the extremist poles will determine where we go from here.

Summary

Whenever plainspoken self-proclaimed truth tellers tell you that complex social problems can be solved with simple “common sense” solutions, you  should let that be a warning that you’re about to get “played.” If you find the logic of plain-spokeness and simplicity appealing, take a moment and ask yourself – why? What is the appeal?

Reading Critical Theory can be difficult, but the theories and the ideas contained in them are compelling even if they aren’t perfect. Unlike conspiracy theory, which offers simplified full-circle solutions to every problem (blame it all on the lizard people), critical theory says “life is complicated…humans are complicated.” At the very least, Critical Theory aims to speak truth to power, as they attempt to mobilize people to action, this way people don’t sit back and accept government gridlock, status quo inertia, and social policies that only serve the wealthy and privileged. Who would be threatened by that?

Keep thinking. Take all the time you need.

Sources

Martin Jay, The dialectical imagination : a history of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research, 1923-1950 (Boston : Little, Brown, 1973) – provides a history overview.

Susan Buck-Morss, The origin of negative dialectics : Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York : Free Press, 1977)

Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History, Theories and Political Significance, trans. M. Robertson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994)

Helmut Dubiel, Theory and Politics: Studies in the Development of Critical Theory, trans. Benjamin Gregg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985)

Zoltán Tar, The Frankfurt School: The Critical Theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977)

Joel Anderson, “The Third Generation of the Frankfurt School.”

Alex Ross, “The Frankfurt School Knew Trump Was Coming.”

Martin Jay, “Trump, Scorsese, and the Frankfurt School’s Theory of Racket Society,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020.

Stephen M. Sales and Kenneth E. Friend, “Success and Failure as Determinants of Level of Authoritarianism,” Behavioral Science 18(3) (May 1973), 163.

Glenn D. Wilson, The Psychology of Conservativism (New York: Academic Press, 1973).

More Reading

Additional reading might be found on the blog – Introducing the Frankfurt School

For information on the current activity of the Institute, see the following website linked here.

Discussion Questions

How can we use the tools provided by Critical Theory to understand some of the more pressing problems that characterize the present moment in regards to culture and politics? Problems like police brutality, war, racial antipathy, the disappearance of the middle class, and other problems in connection with social inequality.

If the project of modernity was to achieve Enlightenment, do you think this vision has been fulfilled?

What role do you see science playing in this process? Has science been put to good use in a way that allows us to be self-reflective and democratic, or has it too occasioned “new forms of barbarism?”

Researchers have found that social isolation – in a word “loneliness” – is a worldwide social problem. According to studies in Britain and the United States, roughly one in 3 people over the age of 65 live alone. U.S. Census Bureau statistics cite that 11 million (or 28% of people aged 65 and older) lived alone in 2010 (Stevenson, 2017). This actually makes sense when you think about it – as people get older, the likelihood that they will live alone increases. Now, take into consideration another trend – increasingly more adults do not have children. The result is the problem is only going to exacerbate, given how there will be fewer family members available to provide care to aging seniors.

Other studies have found overwhelming evidence that links loneliness to physical illness, cognitive decline, and disease. In light of this, loneliness can and should be seen as a potential public health problem. With that, it is important that we study people who live alone.

Not everyone, however, who lives alone is isolated. Social support and social connection vary considerably across populations and this may vary greatly, based on gender, race, and social class. This is essentially the argument presented by Eric Klinenberg, whose research takes a more expansive approach to understanding social isolation. For Klinenberg, social isolation and solo living arrangements are an indicator of social change.

Who is lonely? Who lives alone?

While living alone does not inevitably lead to social isolation, the research shows that it is certainly a predisposing factor. Loneliness affects people of all ages, young as well as old, suburban and urban dwellers, and men as well as women.

According to Klinenberg, living alone and being “lonely” are not always the same thing. Historically, his work documents how during the mid-century time period in the United States, approximately 4 million Americans lived alone.  Put another way, slightly less than 10% of U.S. households were one-person households. This type of living arrangement typified life in the Western region of the country – places like Alaska, Montana, and Nevada, which were settled by migrant men (Klinenberg, 2013).

Times have, however, changed. Now, census estimates indicate there are more than 32 million people living alone in the United States. Again, this figure represents approximately 28% of all American households. Regionally, instead of seeing this pattern of living predominate in the West, it is now more common in big cities throughout the country – places like Seattle, and San Francisco, and Denver, and Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and Chicago (where between 35 and 45% of the households have just one person). Manhattan exemplifies the pinnacle of solo living, where about 1 of every 2 households is a one-person household.

In spite of this what appears to be a major sea change in living arrangements, these increased rates are still lower than rates of solo living in European cities. Manhattan exemplifies the pinnacle of solo living, where about 1 of every 2 households is a one-person household. The increased rates in the U.S., however, are lower than are solo living rates in European cities (Stromberg, 2012).

After conducting more than 300 interviews, Klinenberg and his team learned that everyone is connected in some way to a family member or friend who lives on their own. Ironically, given how this living arrangement has become commonplace, that means that it is not always questioned, nor is it necessarily claimed as a social identity. Americans, in particular, are quite anxious about isolation. As Klinenberg points out, we believe in self-reliance, but we also long for community. When we discover there is someone in our life who lives alone, the tendency is to worry there’s something wrong; that the person may have difficulty coping and that they don’t have what they want or need. Much of this can be attributed to the rugged individualism that infuses our public discourse often belies a strong desire for community and social bonding (Stromberg).

Lonely Men

A survey published by AARP in 2010 found that one in three adults aged 45 or older reported being chronically lonely. Just a decade before, only one out of five said that. And men are facing the brunt of this epidemic of loneliness. Other research shows that between 1999 and 2010, suicide among men age 50 and over rose by nearly 50 percent. The New York Times reports that “the suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000” (Green)

Professor Way’s research illuminates what may very well be nothing less than the central source of our culture’s epidemic of male loneliness. Driven by our collective assumption that the friendships of boys are both casual and interchangeable, along with our relentless privileging of romantic love over platonic love, we are driving boys into lives Professor Way describes as “autonomous, emotionally stoic, and isolated.” What’s more, the traumatic loss of connection among boys is directly linked to our struggles as men in every aspect of our lives (Green).

These boys declare freely the love they feel for their closest friends. They use the word “love” and they are proud to do so.

Way’s work shows us that in early adolescence, boys express deeply fulfilling emotional connection and love for each other, but by the time they reach adulthood, that sense of connection evaporates. This, she explains, is a catastrophic loss — one that we assume men will simply adjust to. They do not. Millions of men are experiencing a sense of deep loss that haunts them even if they are engaged in fully realized romantic relationships, marriages, and families.

No Homo

The Man Box

Lonely Seniors

It is not uncommon for many of our elderly citizens to lead sad, lonely, and isolated lives. Mary Tony is one example of such a person. Tony is 98 years old and spends almost all of her time by herself. Voyager Films stopped by her house to film her on a typical day.

The goal, of course, was to capture a glimpse of how Mary went about the process of navigating a day in her solo life. During the course of filming, Mary admitted that she doesn’t communicate too much with her family members. Likewise, she noted an absence of the kind of friendships that are typical of nursing home environments. While it is not uncommon for people Mary’s age to live out their lives in retirement homes, keeping company with peers and enjoying organized activities — many like Mary chose a solitary life, preferring the familiar surroundings of their homes. “Aging in place,” as it is often termed, people like Mary struggle to find meaning in their days.

Because she tends to sit by herself at home all day, Mary said she found it necessary to come up with different ways to stay occupied. One way she does this is by stripping the junk mail that she receives. After stripping it, she uses scissors to slice the mail into tiny pieces. Afterward, she puts the tiny pieces inside bags and sets them aside for the trash. Watch this short film clip produced by Voyager Films, which poignantly illustrates aging seniors face, who are sometimes forgotten.

What Can be Done?

According to Dr. Carla Perissinotto, a geriatrician at the University of California, San Francisco, “it is no longer medically or ethically acceptable to ignore older adults who feel lonely and marginalized. Using data from a large national survey of older adults, Dr. Perissinotto looked at the relationship between loneliness and health outcomes. She found that individuals who reported they were lonely had higher rates of declining mobility, they exhibited difficulty performing routine tasks, and they experienced death as an outcome during the 6 year follow-up period. These outcomes were found to remain significant even when controlling for socio-economic status, depression, and other health problems (Hafner, 2016).

Twenty Facts About Senior Isolation

(re-blogged from Sarah Stevenson, “20 Facts About Senior Living,” Senior Living Blog)

1. Senior isolation increases the risk of mortality.

According to a 2012 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, both social isolation and loneliness are associated with a higher risk of mortality in adults aged 52 and older.

One possible explanation: “People who live alone or lack social contacts may be at increased risk of death if acute symptoms develop because there is less of a network of confidantes to prompt medical attention.” Efforts to reduce isolation are the key to addressing the issue of mortality, said the study’s authors.

2. Feelings of loneliness can negatively affect both physical and mental health.

Regardless of the facts of a person’s isolation, seniors who feel lonely and isolated are more likely to report also having poor physical and/or mental health, as reported in a 2009 study using data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.

Connecting seniors with social resources, such as senior centers and meal delivery programs, is one way to combat subjective feelings of isolation.

3. Perceived loneliness contributes to cognitive decline and risk of dementia.

Dr. John Cacioppo, a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Chicago, has been studying social isolation for 30 years. One frightening finding is that feelings of loneliness are linked to poor cognitive performance and quicker cognitive decline.

We evolved to be a social species, says Dr. Cacioppo – it’s hard-wired into our brains, and when we don’t meet that need, it can have physical and neurological effects.

4. Social isolation makes seniors more vulnerable to elder abuse.

Many studies show a connection between social isolation and higher rates of elder abuse, reports the National Center on Elder Abuse. Whether this is because isolated adults are more likely to fall victim to abuse, or a result of abusers attempting to isolate the elders from others to minimize risk of discovery, researchers aren’t certain.

A critical strategy for reducing elder abuse is speaking up: abuse, neglect and exploitation often go unreported. As for prevention, maintaining connections with senior loved ones helps us ensure their safety.

5. LGBT seniors are much more likely to be socially isolated.

LGBT seniors are twice as likely to live alone, according to SAGE (Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders); they are more likely to be single and they are less likely to have children – and they are more likely to be estranged from their biological families.

Stigma and discrimination are major roadblocks to support for LGBT seniors, but there are more and more community groups and online resources devoted to helping these elders avoid isolation.

6. Social isolation in seniors is linked to long-term illness.

In the PNAS study mentioned above, illnesses and conditions such as chronic lung disease, arthritis, impaired mobility, and depression were associated with social isolation. Ensuring appropriate care for our loved ones’ illnesses can help prevent this isolation.

For homebound seniors, phone calls and visits can be a critical part of connecting with loved ones. Others may find that moving to an assisted living community addresses both issues – the need for ongoing care and the desire for companionship.

7. Loneliness in seniors is a major risk factor for depression.

Numerous studies over the past decade have shown that feeling loneliness is associated with more depressive symptoms in both middle-aged and older adults.

One important first step is recognizing those feelings of loneliness, isolation and depression and seeking treatment – whether it’s on your own behalf or for the sake of a loved one.

8. Loneliness causes high blood pressure.

A 2010 study in Psychology and Aging indicated a direct relationship between loneliness in older adults and increases in systolic blood pressure over a 4-year period. These increases were independent of race, ethnicity, gender, and other possible contributing factors.

Early interventions for loneliness, say the study’s authors, may be key to preventing both the isolation and associated health risks.

9. Socially isolated seniors are more pessimistic about the future.

According to the National Council on Aging, socially isolated seniors are more likely to predict their quality of life will get worse over the next 5-10 years, are more concerned about needing help from community programs as they get older, and are more likely to express concerns about aging in place.

The National Association of Area Agencies on Aging (n4a) says community-based programs and services are critical in helping ward off potential problems and improving quality of life for older people.

10. Physical and geographic isolation often leads to social isolation.

“One in six seniors living alone in the United States faces physical, cultural, and/or geographical barriers that isolate them from their peers and communities,” reports the National Council on Aging. “This isolation can prevent them from receiving benefits and services that can improve their economic security and their ability to live healthy, independent lives.”

Referring isolated older adults to senior centers, activity programs, and transportation services can go a long way toward creating valuable connections and reducing isolation.

11. Isolated seniors are more likely to need long-term care.

Loneliness and social isolation are major predictors of seniors utilizing home care, as well as entering nursing homes, according to a 2004 report from the Children’s, Women’s and Seniors Health Branch, British Columbia Ministry of Health.

The positive angle of these findings, says the report, is that using long-term health care services can in itself connect seniors with much-needed support. Particularly for seniors in rural areas, entering a care facility may provide companionship and social contact.

12. Loss of a spouse is a major risk factor for loneliness and isolation.

Losing a spouse, an event which becomes more common as people enter older age, has been shown by numerous studies to increase seniors’ vulnerability to emotional and social isolation, says the same report from the British Columbia Ministry of Health. Besides the loneliness brought on by bereavement, the loss of a partner may also mean the loss of social interactions that were facilitated by being part of a couple.

Ensuring seniors have access to family and friendship support can help alleviate this loneliness.

13. Transportation challenges can lead to social isolation.

According to the AARP, “life expectancy exceeds safe driving expectancy after age 70 by about six years for men and 10 years for women.” Yet, 41% of seniors do not feel that the transportation support in their community is adequate, says the NCOA.

Having access to adequate public transportation or other senior transportation services is key to seniors’ accessing programs and resources, as well as their feelings of connectedness and independence.

14. Caregivers of the elderly are also at risk for social isolation.

Being a family caregiver is an enormous responsibility, whether you are caring for a parent, spouse, or other relative. When that person has Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, or a physical impairment, the caregiver may feel even less able to set aside his or her caregiving duties to attend to social relationships they previously enjoyed. This can trigger loneliness and depression.

Seeking support, caring for yourself, and even looking for temporary respite care can help ward off caregiver loneliness and restore your sense of connection.

15. Loneliness can be contagious.

Studies have found that loneliness has a tendency to spread from person to person, due to negative social interactions and other factors. In other words, when one person is lonely, that loneliness is more likely to spread to friends or contacts of the lonely individual. Making things even worse, people have a tendency to further isolate people who are lonely because we have evolved to avoid threats to our social cohesion.

It’s a complicated situation, and simply telling seniors to engage in more social activities may not be enough. Considering our loved ones’ needs as individuals is a valuable first step to figuring out how to prevent or combat isolation.

16. Lonely people are more likely to engage in unhealthy behavior.

A 2011 study using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) found that people who are socially isolated or lonely are also more likely to report risky health behaviors such as poor diet, lack of physical activity, and smoking. Conversely, social support can help encourage seniors to eat well, exercise, and live healthy lifestyles.

Living in a community situation can be an effective barrier to loneliness, and most senior communities specifically promote wellness through diet and exercise programs.

17. Volunteering can reduce social isolation and loneliness in seniors.

We all know that volunteering is a rewarding activity, and seniors have a unique skill set and oodles of life experience to contribute to their communities. It can also boost longevity and contribute to mental health and well-being, and it ensures that seniors have a source of social connection.

There are plenty of opportunities tailor-made for seniors interested in volunteering.

18. Feeling isolated? Take a class.

A review of studies looking at various types of interventions on senior loneliness found that the most effective programs for combating isolation had an educational or training component: for instance, classes on health-related topics, computer training, or exercise classes.

19. Technology can help senior isolation – but not always.

Even though modern technology provides us with more opportunities than ever for keeping in touch, sometimes the result is that we feel lonelier than ever. The key to finding technological interventions that really do help, says Health Quality Ontario, is matching those interventions to the specific needs of individual seniors.

One simple strategy that does help: for seniors with hearing loss, simply providing a hearing aid can improve communication and reduce loneliness. Phone contact and Web-based support programs were less consistent in their effectiveness, but for some, they might provide a lifeline.

20. Physical activity reduces senior isolation.

Group exercise programs, it turns out, are a wonderfully effective way to reduce isolation and loneliness in seniors – and of course they have the added benefit of being great for physical and mental health. In one study, discussed by Health Quality Ontario, seniors reported greater well-being regardless of whether the activity was aerobic or lower-impact, like stretching.

Senior isolation is neither inevitable nor irreversible. Getting the facts can help us prevent loneliness in our senior loved ones as they face the life changes of aging.

Note: Twenty Facts by Sarah Stevenson

Sources

Stromberg, Joseph. “Eric Klinenberg on Going Solo: The Surprising Benefits, to Oneself and to Society, of Living Alone.”  Smithsonian Magazine,  February 2012.

Klinenberg, Eric. Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone. New York: Penguin, 2013.

Hafner, Katie. “Researchers Confront an Epidemic of Loneliness,” The New York Times, September 2016.

Stevenson, Sarah. (2017) “20 Facts About Senior Living,” Senior Living Blog

Filming Mary Tony by Voyager films.

Discussion Questions

Do you know anyone that lives alone that gives you pause for concern? Is that person a senior? Have you ever given much thought about how they navigate their solo life?

What do you think we might do as a society to help? What kinds of programs or living arrangements do you think might help improve the problem? How might cities and towns develop programs to promote social interaction and social bonds?

Or do you think, alternatively, that governments should not play a role in the lives of seniors?

Why Do Women Often Dislike Other Women?

As illogical as it might seem on the surface, many women share all manner of sexist and derogatory beliefs about women. Female misogyny has, for example, been central to the conservative political movement for decades now. A reliable path to power for a conservative woman who wants a career in politics is to be a spokeswoman for female misogyny, using her gender as cover to advance anti-feminist goals, such as stripping away reproductive rights, fighting women’s equality in the workplace and even, disturbingly, undermining efforts to reduce sexual harassment and violence.

Since the 1970’s, when Phyllis Schlafly was organizing efforts to stop the Equal Rights Amendment and even today, many anti-choice leaders remain women (i.e. Sarah Palin). One need only look as far as the Fox Network, who employs a mostly female panel show to excuse sexual harassment (“they’re complimenting you) and bash feminists. Female anti-feminism claiming to be “pro-woman” has in this manner become a critical component of right-wing media ecology. Though oddly enough, one of the more prominent among the Fox crew of women – Gretchen Carlson – filed a law suit against her boss, Roger Ailes, claiming she was sexually harassed, by him and other male employees.

While some might write this off as merely a cynical money and power grab by heartless women that are willing to throw other women under the bus (though some of it probably is), there is more going on here than meets the eye. Anti-feminist female punditry works in no small part because there are a lot of women in the U.S. who sincerely agree with these sexist ideas [Note: Schlafly recently endorsed Donald Trump for President].

Who is a “Good Woman?”

On its surface, this kind of logic doesn’t seem so offensive. After all, we all accept that there are good people and bad people. Are feminists saying that women are somehow exempt from that? Of course not. The issue here is that women are being judged by unfair, irrational standards that are nothing like that by which we judge men. What makes you a “good” woman in sexist thinking has little to do with whether you’re kind or even smart, but has more to do with adherence to unfair gender norms.

Women are judged more by their sexuality or their submissiveness than their actual character. So someone gets more points for being a virgin or being a doting housewife than they do for being smart and talented at their job. Or, in the case of Donald Trump, women are judged by their adherence to his very narrow views of what constitutes “fuckable,” and the rest are a waste of oxygen.

Another measure, at least in sexist thinking, of how good a woman is also has to do with how much she puts up with this crap. Women who smile politely or giggle indulgently when men say sexist or derogatory things are “good,” whereas women who talk back are bitches.

If you are a women that is caught up in this way of thinking, it’s very intoxicating to imagine that you’re one of the good ones, and to reinforce your status as a “Good Woman” by ganging up on the supposedly” bad” ones. There are a lot of benefits to being a female sexist, from that rush of self-righteousness you get from calling some other woman a slut to getting male approval when you agree with sexist men around you, for example, that Donald Trump’s nasty jokes about women are all in good fun.

Sadly, there are a lot of women, especially those living around conservative men,who find themselves agreeing with sexist community norms because it is simply less stressful. No one likes being told over and over again that they have a mouth on them or that they’re a bitch.

A recent footnote on Schlafly: For decades since the 70’s, Schlafly made it her mission to degrade and reduce women to submissive household slaves who have no other duty than to take a husband, become an incubator for fetuses, and leave jobs, politics, and education to the men. All of that should have been enough to make Schlafly a national pariah banished to the extreme fringe of society where she would never be seen or heard from again, but it apparently wasn’t. Now, it appears her downfall is finally near. As it turns out, Schlafly’s own daughter and several members of the Eagle Forum board who support Presidential candidate Ted Cruz are making an effort to oust the 91-year-old anti-feminist icon, all because she supports Donald Trump. While some might view Trump as an anti-women ignoramus, he can now claim to have done at least one good thing for women and our nation as a whole by duping Phyllis Schlafly into supporting him and destroying her own power in the process.

I Am Not a Feminist

The sad truth is some women get a kick out of policing and putting down other women. They may not get the status of men, but they can at least feel like they’re higher on the totem pole than some woman who flouts conservative gender norms about how women are supposed to dress, talk and behave. Alternatively, others feel redeemed that they have advanced (thank you feminists for paving the road) and are “beyond gender” by not advocating for a woman-centered politcs. Check out the “I Am Not a Feminist” social media meme, which traffics in the stock and trade of disavowing feminism on the basis that to identify as such is akin to being a “man-hater.”

Sluts Need Shaming

Not surprisingly, the anti-choice movement in particular is stuffed to the gills with women who are will to indulge in shaming politics; and it’s not because they actually believe the hype about an embryo being the same thing as a baby. Rather, it’s because policing other women’s sex and parenting behavior makes them feel good about themselves – like they are righteous and godly women trying to corral all those wayward sluts.

Slut shaming: the act of criticising a woman for her real or presumed sexual activity, or for behaving in ways that someone thinks are associated with her real or presumed sexual activity.

Slut-shaming is the experience of being labeled a sexually out-of-control girl or woman (a “slut” or “ho”) and then being punished socially for possessing this identity. Slut-shaming is sexist because only girls and women are called to task for their sexuality, whether real or imagined; boys and men are congratulated for the exact same behavior. This is the essence of the sexual double standard: Boys will be boys, and girls will be sluts.

In other words, if you are a heterosexual girl or young woman, you are damned if you don’t and damned if you do. If you refrain from any expression of sexiness, you may be written off as irrelevant and unfeminine. But if you follow the guidelines, you run the risk of being judged, shamed and policed (by both men and women).

The same trope often operates in the military, where if we recall in the film Invisible War, the women were accused of being “dykes” or “sluts” for the simple transgression of wearing makeup in uniform, as well as for confounding gender norms by volunteering service.

Slut-shaming is far more harmful than simple name-calling — although being denigrated publicly in itself can be traumatic, as the suicides of a number of slut-shamed girls attests. Once a girl or woman is regarded as a “slut” or “ho,” she becomes a target for sexual assault. And if she is sexually assaulted, she may be assigned the “slut” or “ho” identity ex post facto to rationalize the crime and to protect the assaulter.

Take for example the girl who was raped at a party by football players in Steubenville, Ohio in 2013. She was vilified by strangers and peers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, where they could only make sense of the horrible crime by assigning the “drunken slut” label to the victim.

Likewise, Rush Limbaugh famously slut-shamed Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke for having the temerity to speak about gender equality by expressing her support for mandating insurance coverage for contraceptives and birth control.

Limbaugh argued:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Susan Fluke [sic], who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps. (interruption) The johns? We would be the johns? No! We’re not the johns. (interruption) Yeah, that’s right. Pimp’s not the right word. Okay, so she’s not a slut. She’s “round heeled”. I take it back”

He continued and stated:

“Can you imagine if you’re her parents how proud of Sandra Fluke you would be? Your daughter goes up to a congressional hearing conducted by the Botox-filled Nancy Pelosi and testifies she’s having so much sex she can’t afford her own birth control pills and she agrees that Obama should provide them, or the Pope.”

As we’ve seen, slut-shaming is not really about women’s sexuality. It is grounded in the belief that men get to assert themselves, and women do not. It may be getting a lot of attention these days, but slut-shaming is really just a catchy way to signify old-fashioned sexism.

Virgins & Vamps

In her book Virgin or Vamp Helen Benedict conducts an in-depth analysis of the print media’s handling of sex crimes to make an argument about competing dualisms are used to characterize women as the “good” virgin and the “bad” vamp. Focusing on four widely reported rape cases, Benedict dissects the attitudes and language found in newspaper and magazine reports of the incidents. Here, she addresses the press’s tendency to misrepresent rape, denigrate victims, and invade the privacy of its subjects, while also pointing out the press’s critical role in informing and educating the public.

Benedict argues that the press overwhelmingly engages in the perpetuation of the myth of rape victims as falling into one of the two categories in what represents a variation of the familiar “Madonna/whore” dichotomy. Such extreme coverage, argues Benedict, perpetuates myths that are harmful to the victims of these crimes (and sometimes to the accused).

To illustrate, Benedict chooses the 1978 Rideout case of marital rape; the New Bedford, Mass., the gang rape that was the basis of the film The Accused; the murder of Jennifer Levin in the so-called “Preppie Murder Case”; and the “Central Park Jogger” trial of 1989-90. Each of these events was accompanied by lurid stories, which pit either a loose or a virginal woman against an unwilling or monstrous man.

Benedict begins with an informative overview of the press’s handling of sex crimes since the 1930’s. Here and throughout, she takes into account the intersections of race and class with gender. Too often she finds that reporters and editors denigrate women victims by using words such as “girl” and “bubbly.” Likewise, she calls attention to how alleged rapists’ defense lawyers rely on the “she was asking for it” line of argument and how press coverage play along, invariably going out of their way to highlight the most sensational aspects of sex-crime trials.

With the rise in reported rapes, Benedict warns myth-mongering stories are bound to increase and proliferate in the future.

Amber Rose and Blac Chyna put their haters on blast at the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards in Los Angeles. The two women showed up to the award show red carpet wearing matching skin-tight nude ensembles emblazoned with derogatory insults like “bitch,” “gold digger,” “stripper” and more. “They call us sluts and whores all the time, so we just embrace it,” Rose said. “I have slut written across my vagina.”

Sources

Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, by Helen Benedict. Oxford University Press (1992).

“The Mystery of Republican Women Backing Sexist Trump: They’re Female Misogynists Who’ve Grown Up To Accept Repression,” by Amanda Marcotte. Last Accessed May 2016

“The Truth About Slut Shaming,” by Leora Tanenbaum Last accessed May 2016

Discussion Questions

Do you have an experience of feeling trapped by the competing dualisms exemplified by this logic? What was your experience and how did you navigate the contradiction?

How do these logic systems potentially hurt both men and women?

Much has been made of Donald Trump’s campaign for the U.S. Presidency as well as his seeming popularity and rise in polls. Questions abound, such as “Is Trump like Hitler?” or “Is Trump like Mussolini?” The crux of what is happening, however, has nothing to do with parsing the political distinctions between fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany, or unpacking the ways Mussolini was unlike Hitler. Rather, we might look closer into the process of how violent and repressive group social identities may be formed.

What is “Authoritarianism?”

Frederick Solt defined authoritarians are those with “unhesitating obedience to orthodox authorities—and indeed their demands that their fellow citizens similarly obey—such authoritarian individuals are thought to have provided a crucial base of mass support for some of the worst political disasters of the past century, from aggressive wars to genocide.”

Solt cites empirical research on authoritarians being “more intolerant of ethnic, religious, sexual, and political minorities.” According to him, their greater respect for authority “yields ready support” for the aggressive use of police and military force. Higher levels of authoritarianism “make individuals more likely to condone and even endorse illegal and blatantly undemocratic government.”

What is “Totalitarianism?”

Totalitarianism generally refers to centralized control by an autocratic authority; it is a political concept that holds that citizens should be totally subject to an absolute state authority.

What is “Fascism?”

Fascism generally refers to an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. In practice, we can see it operating in extreme right-wing, authoritarian governments, where there is strict intolerance for oppostional views. As a social movement, Fascism came into prominence in early 20th-century Europe under the influence if national syndicalism. One form of Fascism originated in Italy during World War I; it later spread to other European countries.

Fascism opposes liberalism, Marxism, and anarchism. If we look at it from the perspective of the traditional left-right paradigm, Fascism is identified with the far right.During the time period of World War I, Europe underwent massive changes in connection with the Great War; changes in terms of social organization, the state, and technology. Given how the entire society was mobilized for war, distinctions between civilian and combatant easily gave way. As a result, a form of “military citizenship” evolved. Everything in society was oriented towards supporting the war, economics, logistics, and even human procreation. The state, furthermore, achieved unprecedented power to intervene in the lives of citizens.

In terms of ideology, Fascists tend to believe that liberal democracy is obsolete; that it can’t be administered effectively and what is needed is a strong leader backed up by an authoritarian/totalitarian one-party state. Such a leader operates, more or less, as a dictator. A martial system of government is typically formed by members of a fascist governing party who work to forge national unity at all costs.

Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature; political violence, war, and even imperialism are understood to be within the normal range of options that may be exercised in order for the state to achieve its nationalistic goals. Fascists advocate a what might be thought of as a  mixed economy, through a combination of protectionist and interventionist economic policies.

Efforts to lable someone a “fascist” have, at least since the end of World War II, been met with skepticism (the rhetorical move is generally associated with hyperbole). Nevertheless, that does not mean that it is inappropriate to invoke use of the term. Why? Because in contemporary American society, we are witnessing a resurgence of what experts have identified to be “neo-fascist” and “post-fascist” groups. The candidancy of Donald Trump has, furthermore, embraced some of the toxic rhetoric of white supremecists, go so far in many instances to “re-tweet” the actual words of leaders associated with these groups. To be fair then, critiques and comparisons of Trump with Nazis and Nazism are not out of line because they share unusual points of resonance.

Alexander Billet explores the aesthetics of Fascism in Trump’s campaign in his article entitled  “Donald Trump and the Aesthetics of Fascism: What a 20th-century Marxist art critic can teach us about a very 21st-century candidate.” His article points to “The Freedom Kids,” who Trump trotted out on one of his campaign stops.

Cowardice

Are you serious?

Apologies for freedom, I can’t handle this.

When freedom rings, answer the call!

On your feet, stand up tall!

Freedom’s on our shoulders, USA!

Enemies of freedom face the music, c’mon boys, take them down

President Donald Trump knows how to make America great

Deal from strength or get crushed every time

According to Billet, “This is a cartoon version of American nationalism. The sheer absurdity of the performance is stunning. And yet, Trump’s supporters will surely both love it and accuse anyone who doesn’t of being a terrorist and a communist.”

Trump’s Aestheticization of Politics (reposted from article by Alexander Billet)

All of this points to one of the reasons why the discussion about Trump and fascism is such a difficult one to resolve. More than any other American presidential candidate in recent memory, Donald Trump understands the ideological power, the raw manipulative magic, in politics as aesthetics.

The phrase “the aestheticization of politics” is borrowed from the late Marxist philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s work has experienced a resurgence in interest over the past year. Partially, this has to do with the 75th anniversary of his death (suicide, poignantly enough after the news that he was about to be basically handed over to the Nazis). But what really animates the timeliness of his writings is the brilliant way he was able to diagnose just how capitalism saturates itself into the fabric of culture.

In his 1936 essay “The Work of Art In the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin charted the way in which technology had forever changed art. The ability to reproduce an image or a sound countless times had created the potential for the democratization of art. But that democratization was prevented by the means for that reproduction remaining the hands of a few. Thus, it was possible for undemocratic regimes and governments to use art for their own benefit the way it hadn’t been previously feasible.

Benjamin was writing with Nazi Germany in mind. This was a regime that knew how to deploy aesthetics ingeniously. Even as Hitler and the Third Reich railed against the poisons of modernity, they both used the latest technology to relay their message. They grabbed people’s attention and held it, igniting their imaginations and providing them with a sense of ownership over a system that would just as soon see them driven into dirt. Says Benjamin:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

The crisp, angular uniforms for party members cranked out by the thousands, the massive orchestrated rallies, the technologically innovative films of Leni Riefenstahl—these are all perfect examples of how fascism aestheticized politics to its own end. All employed the rhythmic regimentation of life, the fetishization of raw power and sacrifice for the Fatherland. Violence was not celebrated for its own sake, but was seen as a necessary and fascinating virtue, even beautiful for its ability to mobilize people’s minds and bodies.

The resemblance between these and the Freedom Kids performance, or Trump’s descriptions of a “great, beautiful wall” along the Mexico border, are clear. All equate freedom with the ability to exert absolute power. All are the intended substance of the vague slogan “Make America Great Again.”

But the aestheticization of politics does not (by itself) equal fascism. Benjamin’s argument is that fascism represents merely theintroduction of aesthetics into politics. On the one hand, he is arguing that the manipulative link between politics, art and fascism is not strictly causal. On the other, he’s saying that the ability to make human suffering pretty for political gain is something that can persist well beyond the decline of classic fascist dictators like Hitler, Mussolini or Franco.

In fact, if there is anything we can say about the aestheticization of politics in our own age, it is that it’s alarmingly quotidian. Contemporary cultural critics like Terry Eagleton, Martin Jay and others have observed this in their own writings. David Harvey, in his 1990 book The Condition of Postmodernity, argues that neoliberalism and its postmodern cultural logic have made meaning and coherence flexible, relative, accountable not to facts, but to subjective feelings. In this landscape, the aestheticization of politics is more effortless than ever.

Telescope this forward to today. Social media has made the individual persona or narrative, regardless of truth, endlessly reproducible through the electronic channels of Twitter and Facebook. Trump clearly knows this. And his time on The Apprentice proved that his Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous manner was ultimately adaptable to a 21st-century cultural tenor. He has a bottomless bank account to back it up. Add in a white, increasingly old middle class, palpably anxious about whether their days are numbered that can seal themselves in a media bubble echo chamber should if they really want to, and you’ve gone a long way toward explaining what’s underneath Trump’s poll numbers—and what makes him somewhat exceptional.

His media strategists are masters at detaching meaning from fact, making words accountable only to themselves and how loudly they’re shrieked. This makes him a quintessentially postmodern candidate contrasted to an age when the cold, everyday facts of collapse, crisis and apocalypse are unavoidable.

Trump taps into a vein of very real fear, and uses virtually any unmoored fact he can find to mobilize it. It is precisely why, though it is quite incorrect to label his right-wing populism as “fascist,” it is not impossible that he could pull a Father Coughlin. That there are open white supremacists campaigning for him shows that the raw materials are there, waiting to be pieced together. That his campaign is able to employ an “aesthetic strategy”—though they would likely never acknowledge it—reveals an ability to do so.

What can be done then? Benjamin, in his essay, posits an intriguing alternative to an obvious “anybody but Trump” voting strategy: Against the aestheticization of politics, the left “responds by politicizing art.” It sound likes classic academic hairsplitting, but what each represents is one of the elements that has set apart our side as more thoroughly democratic and bottom-up.

The Freedom Kids’ song employs a beat that is simple and one-dimensional, easy to follow, lulling the listener into a sense of security and predictability. It uses buzzwords and phrases that occupy a specific place in the heads of Trump’s target audience and are guaranteed to get a rise: “cowardice,” “apologize for freedom,” “c’mon boys,” “enemies of freedom,” and yes, “make America great.”

Never is there any mention of what these mean or the potential human toll underneath them. That’s deliberate. They are intended to whip resignation and fear into a highly emotional and irrational powder-keg that can be ignited or dampened as those as the front of it see fit. Trump is in control, and he wants us to both know this and take comfort in it.

By contrast, the left has a rich and vibrant history of using art, music, literature and performance to gain critical distance, to question why life is the way it is, to make it weird, unfamiliar, anarchic and atonal so that we might see just how little our present condition makes sense. This is art intended to challenge and polarize. It is a disruption; a fundamentally democratic disruption that pulls back the wizard’s curtainand reveals the cold, Machiavellian machinations of political and economic elites for what they are. It is a tradition that runs through the revolutionary romanticism of William Blake, socialist surrealists like André Breton, Benjamin Péret, Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, and the best examples of psychedelia, graffiti art and punk rock.

It is an alternative that flips Trump’s logic upside down, be it through individual pranks or concerted mobilization. It can be found in the counter-protests that are starting to follow him wherever he goes. Or in workers’ unionization efforts and threats of strikes at his casinos (a fitting rebuke to a man whose solution to the Greek debt crisis is to build a hotel on top of the Parthenon). Or the work of Sarah Levy, the Portland, Oregon artist whose painting “Whatever” took the Donald’s words about Megyn Kelly’s menstrual cycle and turned them (literally!) inside out.

The Freedom Kids’ handlers would love nothing more than for us to smile gleefully when the doomsday button is finally pushed. Our side, conversely, must regain the confidence to smash and reshape reality, and push back against the Right’s weaponized fatalism.

Trump’s Authoritarianism & the “New Wave” – It Can Happen Here

Paula Young Lee’s article shifts focus as it takes a look at Trump’s authoritarianism. According to Lee, “Americans struggling to understand Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican primaries should consider that totalitarianism has already happened on U.S. soil—not as a political movement that swept the nation, but in the petri dish of one high school. The frightening but enlightening story is recounted in The Wave (Die Welle), a gripping 2008 German film that shows how a study in group psychology unexpectedly revealed the seductive lure of fascism. The plot is based on true events that took place in 1967 in a Palo Alto, Calif. high school.

The Wave commensed when “history teacher Ron Jones conducted an experiment with his class of 15-year-olds to sample the experience of the attraction and rise of the Nazis in Germany before World War II. In a matter of days the ‘Third Wave’ experiment began to get out of control, as those attracted to the movement became aggressive zealots.”

For the American teenagers caught up in the Third Wave, the startling discovery was how easily this particular strain of group-based identity could coalesce and harden, descending into cruelty and drowning them in a darkness they didn’t know existed. (In 1976, Ron Jones wrote a short story detailing what happened, and there also exists a 2012 documentary, The Lesson Plan, based on the events.)

“Be careful who you follow,” warns Mark Hancock, who was in Jones’ classroom, “because you never know where they might lead you.” For the students, the events of 1967 remain an abject lesson in “the psychology of leaders and followers, when passion for one’s cause leads to intolerance and persecution of others, extremist political and religious groups, cults, gangs, bullying, etc.”

Lee says “the world is now watching the Wave unfold in real time across the U.S. Given the steady amplification of violence at Trump rallies, it is impossible not to notice the parallels between Donald Trump’s ascent to political prominence, and the swift spread of the Wave under Ron Jones/Herr Wenger. Appealing to a disenfranchised working class angered over jobs and immigration, Trump plays to unspoken hopes that he will upend the racial hierarchy destabilized by President Obama and reassert the primacy of whiteness, as Slate’s Jamelle Bouie has argued.”

“Trump’s campaign is itself the monstrous love child of pop culture married to ignorance. The “poorly educated” people Trump “loves” are simultaneously disgusted and enthralled by a media machine cynically profiting off their fears. Covert operators—all white, mostly male—who’ve managed to infiltrate Trump rallies have attempted to describe the peculiar energy there. They enter with vague expectations of entertaining weirdness and exit with their faith in humanity shaken to its core.”

“This isn’t politics,” says Lee, “it’s pure spectacle, right down to the messages from its leader. Trump paradoxically claims his lies are true, because to confirm a lie requires an ontological framework that assumes the possibility of truth. Eliminate truth, dismiss reality as so much media bias, and you automatically eliminate the lie, too.”

Un-Reason & “Un-truth”

As Horkheimer and Adorno argue in Dialectic of Enlightenment, we are potentially entering an era distinguished by new forms of Barbarism and un-reason. Lee argues similarly, using more plain-spoken language: “if Trump is the first political candidate to understand we have entered the Age of Untruth— an age from which there is no turning back—it is also the case that his adherents are attracted to the glittering promise of a return to authoritarianism for precisely that reason. The greater the epistemological uncertainty, the more vital the need to externalize order through abstract systems such as the Church and the Law, which create bright lines of difference between “us” and “them.”

“By orchestrating the chaos and calling it “beautiful,” Trump invokes the aesthetics of popular performance in order to legitimize inchoate feelings of anger and despair. Meanwhile, political commentators have been calling on Trump to start “acting presidential,” as if being a good actor was a necessary and sufficient condition of being the leader of the free world. What does acting presidential actually mean?

In Trump’s case, it means he is likely to eventually step in and impose order on the chaos he created; he will demand that his followers control themselves, but this will succeed only if Trump commands absolute power over their hearts, minds, and bodies. Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action.”

Social Class, Authoritarianism & Fascism

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Trump, seemingly out of nowhere, become so popular?

What’s made Trump’s rise even more puzzling is that his support seems to cross demographic lines — education, income, age, even religiosity — that usually demarcate candidates. And whereas most Republican candidates might draw strong support from just one segment of the party base, such as Southern evangelicals or coastal moderates, Trump currently does surprisingly well from the Gulf Coast of Florida to the towns of upstate New York, and he won a resounding victory in the Nevada caucuses.

To get at the answer here, we have to think about why people like, relate to, and/or sometimes act like authoritarians.

Solt takes a social learning approach to argue that “contexts of greater economic inequality shape experiences with authority in ways that can be expected to increase authoritarianism.” He says:

“Societies with higher inequality have unequal distribution of power, creating hierarchies of wealth and authority; the greater the economic inequality, the more widespread the authoritarianism. Insecurity plays a vital role here. reflexive deference to traditional authority (church, state, etc.) becomes a coping mechanism for social and economic isolation, powerlessness, and above all, fear. These can all be countered by “clinging to the refuge of unquestioning obedience to authority.”

Amherst Study

Last September, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst named Matthew MacWilliams realized that his dissertation research might hold the answer to not just one but all three of these mysteries. MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear. So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump.

His research was based on polling a large sample of likely voters, where he looked for correlations between support for Trump and views that align with authoritarianism. What he found was astonishing: Not only did authoritarianism correlate, but it seemed to predict support for Trump more reliably than virtually any other indicator. He later repeated the same poll in South Carolina, shortly before the primary there, and found the same results, which he published in Vox.

As it turns out, MacWilliams wasn’t the only one to have this realization. Miles away, in an office at Vanderbilt University, a professor named Marc Hetherington was having his own aha moment. He realized that he and a fellow political scientist, the University of North Carolina’s Jonathan Weiler, had essentially predicted Trump’s rise back in 2009, when they discovered something that would turn out to be far more significant than they then realized.

That year, Hetherington and Weiler published a book about the effects of authoritarianism on American politics. Through a series of experiments and careful data analysis, they had come to a surprising conclusion: Much of the polarization dividing American politics was fueled not just by gerrymandering or money in politics or the other oft-cited variables, but by an unnoticed but surprisingly large electoral group — authoritarians.

Their book concluded that the GOP, by positioning itself as the party of traditional values and law and order, had unknowingly attracted what would turn out to be a vast and previously bipartisan population of Americans with authoritarian tendencies.

The upshot of all of this research is that social class and psychological pre-dispostions matter – and they have obvious implications for democracies with growing inequalities – increasing inequality will promote the social conditions that lead to support for authoritarians.

Most troublingly, the research also shows that authoritarians prefer the use of force to diplomacy. At home and abroad. Think about that.

Sources

“An Erie Early Warning of Trump’s Authoritarianism,” by Paula Young Lee. Last accessed April 2016.

“Authoritarianism’s Hidden Root Cause,” by Mathew Willis. Last accessed April 2016

“The Rise of American Authoritarianism,” by Amanda Taub. Last accessed April 2016

“Donald Trump and the Aesthetics of Fascism: What a 20th-century Marxist art critic can teach us about a very 21st-century candidate.”  by Alexander Billet. Last accessed August 4, 2016.

Discussion Questions

What parallels can you draw between the arguments presented in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Donald Trump’s political candidacy?
Set aside the Hitler/fascism comparisons – how do you see Trump exemplifying an “authoritarian” personality? What is it about him that resonates such mass-appeal?

What do you think will happen if Trump is not elected? Where will all the angry people direct their anger?

Generally speaking, of the four front-runners for political office, one on the GOP is a man who thinks God talks to him; the other is a egotist who essentially thinks he’s God. Forget about the candidates for a moment, what does this say about U.S. society, when we consider how many people do not appear to be turned off by this kind of thinking?

 

 

 

 

Life in the “Bubble” 

Not long ago, an article published in The Atlantic called attention to a problem that you might not have given a lot of thought to – the problem of how many of us live in social “bubbles.” According to the author, Derek Thompson, “one of the most useless political observations since the election is that liberal elites live in bubbles. It is useless, not because it’s wrong—they often do—but rather because it’s like saying “liberal elites live in the biosphere.”

Living in bubbles is the natural state of affairs for human beings. People seek out similarities in their marriages, workplaces, neighborhoods, and peer groups. The preferred sociological term is “homophily”—similarity breeds affection—and the implications are not all positive.

White Americans have 90 times more white friends than they have black, Asian, or Hispanic friends, according to one analysis from the Public Religion Research Institute. That’s not a description of a few liberal elite cliques. It’s a statistic describing the social networks of 200 million people. America is bubbles, all the way down.

The implications of Americans’ social and geographical sorting are complex. In politics, it creates circumstances where more than half of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton supporters don’t know anybody voting for the other candidate.

Social Class Bubbles

There’s a new upper class that’s completely disconnected from the average American and American culture at large, argues Charles Murray, the libertarian political scientist and author. This notion of “the bubble” was explored by Murray and Paul Solman, business and economics correspondent for PBS NewsHour, who talked with Murry about his popular quiz “Do You Live in a Bubble?”

So for example, does the term “Branson” make you think of the knighted founder of Virgin Records, or the family vacation town in Missouri? Do you watch Empire? Have you been fishing lately? Would you ever buy clothes at Target? Can you identify military rank insignia? Have you ever met a refugee? Eaten at Applebees? Your answers potentially say something about whether or not you may be living in working class or upper-middle-class bubbles.

You can listen to the discussion by listening to Brian Lehrer’s WNYC show (March 30, 2016), which featured a discussion on the topic. Even better, you can take the “bubble” quiz here.

Working-Class and Middle-Class Bubbles

Murray’s “bubble” exercise gives us an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which we all self-select the experiences and people that inhabit our social worlds. Put another way, it forces us to confront the degree to which, as many sociologists are fond of saying, our sense of what is real and true about the world is in many respects “socially constructed.” That is to say, our social worlds are “made” not given; worse is, we often take for granted that our experiences and understandings are “natural” when they are not natural at all.

One of the topics that came up during Lehrer’s discussion with Solman was the subject of “Trumpism.” Many people, in the wake of the 2016 election results, questioned how a candidate like Trump could generate so much appeal when they didn’t know even one person that supported him. The answer to this lies buried within the concept of “social bubbles.” To be sure, Trump draws support across social class categories. Nonetheless, he primarily remains identified with a working-class white constituency – the people who are most angry about the current state of affairs in the United States.

Soloman suggests there is strong, if not always articulated, antipathy towards these people that some people think of as the “Homer Simpson” crowd. Upper-middle-class people look down on them as being inarticulate, not sophisticated, uneducated people, who live in “fly-over” country. While this may be true on some level, it only adds to the anger, which is often justified. Trump, for all his short-comings, speaks to that anger, even if he does not himself represent and walk the path of a working class person.

Sources

The Brian Lehrer show, WNYC, program discussing Murray’s “bubble” quiz.

The “bubble”  quiz.

“Everybody’s in a Bubble, and That’s a Problem,” by Derek Thompson

Discussion Questions

Where do you fit in all of this? Do you live in a bubble?

What results did you get when you took the quiz and how do you explain them?

How do your social relations (people and experiences) contribute to the way you think about the world?

To what degree do you think your social networks may be segregated by social class, race, gender, and sexuality? Or are they diverse?

Can you see how your social “bubble” potentially impacts the way you think about important issues?

Do you make an effort to talk to people who think differently about important issues than you do? What happens if/when you do that? Does it make you uncomfortable to confront ideas that are unlike and/or opposed to the way you traditionally think?

We Are All Bored – My Dinner With Andre

The film My Dinner With Andre consists of one meal and one conversation between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, which takes place at an upscale restaurant in New York. Gregory tells Shawn of his varied (and in some cases, quite bizarre) experiences since abruptly leaving the theatre five years prior. The two men then dive into a lengthy discussion in which Gregory skewers modern life as insincere and complacent, and Shawn defends it, asserting that humans should be entitled to certain creature comforts in their lives. By the end of the discussion (and the film), the two men essentially agree to disagree, and yet Shawn seems particularly moved by the exchange, connecting Gregory’s ideas to his own childhood and life on the cab ride home.

Two theme questions tie the entire dialog together: (1) should we live spontaneously in the moment, disconnecting ourselves from the totalitarian social forces of culture and rational purposive action; and (2) what does it mean to be human in the modern world?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68JLWyPxt7g

Structure/Format

In Act 1, Wally displays reluctance to meet with Andre, thus creating the tension that is carried throughout the film. For about a half hour, Andre, with brilliant story-telling ability, describes his quests around the world in an attempt to find meaning. In Act 2, Andre defends his philosophy of life (point 1 above), while Wally uncomfortably listens and politely even concedes some points. In Act 3, Wally reveals his true opinion of Andre’s views and, defending common sense, hammers away at Andre’s notions of purposeless action, outposts of enlightenment, and the supernatural.

The discussion is intense and thought-provoking, as the two men invite the audience to participate with them, pondering what it means to be human in our ever-changing modern society. Andre, the spiritualist and skeptic, asserts that the life lived by most New Yorkers in modern times is like living a dream: people only experience what they want to experience and perceive what they want to perceive.

Andre suggests that people must simplify their lives in order to fully experience reality; that the path to enlightenment is to eschew unnecessary material comforts in exchange for “real” – if not necessarily pleasant or comfortable – experiences, feelings, and emotions. Shawn doesn’t exactly disagree with Andre, but he argues that not everybody is capable of climbing Mount Everest in order to experience “real life,” nor should they have to. He contends that people can live perfectly simple and content lives even with their electric blankets and morning coffee and New York Times.

In truth, both men make excellent points, and that’s part of the point of “My Dinner With Andre:” in modern society, one must find a way to strike a balance between the material comforts that make us happy and the simple and “real” experiences that keep us grounded. Shawn and Gregory both represent extremes at the end of each spectrum, and the conversation aims to strike a harmony between them by proving that neither man can completely disprove the other’s argument.

Andre listens graciously to the attack. Both leave the dinner unconvinced of the others’ views, but rewarded by the debate. Like philosophy itself, this movie is for selective audiences, which the filmmakers themselves clearly understood.

“My Dinner with Andre” has influenced two other philosophical movies. In “The Quarrel” (1991), a conservative and a liberal Jew discuss the moral implications of the Nazi Holocaust. In “Mind Walk” (1991), a poet, politician and physicist discuss the relation between quantum physics and environmentalism.

Philosophy – Perception in the Life World

The existential-phenomenological tradition in philosophy is asserting a major influence here, particularly the German romantic and hermeneutic traditions – they explore among other ideas the notion that we are thrown into being, thrown into interpretation, and that meaning is both constructed and revealed through responding to that thrownness with “givenness,” attentiveness and care.

Heidegger, for one, aimed to turn away from “ontic” questions about beings to ontological questions about Being, in order to recover the most fundamental philosophical question: the question of Being, of what it means for something to be. Heidegger, Kant, Hegel, Husserl thus were all philosophers that were motivated by a derire to explain the world and our place as humans in it.

Heidegger approached the question through an inquiry into the being that has an understanding of Being. Human being is understood in terms of his concept Dasein (“being-there”). Dasein, Heidegger argued, is defined by “Care” in a practically engaged and concernful mode of Being-in-the-world. This conceptual framework stands in contradistinction to Rationalist thinkers like René Descartes, whose notion of cogito ergo sum, located the essence of man in his rational thinking abilities. Descartes says rationalism and empiricism, which are at the heart of the modern scientific method, can save us as a species.

For Heidegger thinking is thinking about things originally discovered in our everyday practical engagements. The consequence of this is that our capacity to think cannot be the most central quality of our being because thinking is a reflecting upon this more original way of discovering the world. In the second division, Heidegger argues that human being is even more fundamentally structured by its temporality, or its concern with, and relationship to time, existing as a structurally open “possibility-for-being.” He emphasized the importance of authenticity in human existence, involving a truthful relationship to our thrownness into a world which we are “always already” concerned with, and to our Being-towards-death, the Finitude of the time and being we are given, and the closing down of our various possibilities for being through time.[10]

Later, we add Nietzsche, Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse to the list, all of whom are chaneling these concepts and arguments to some extent in their work.

Discussion Questions

How do the people you interact with on a daily basis create their own prison based on a cultivated lack of social awareness – their own limited knowledge bubble that insulates them from full knowledge of what is “real” and how the world works for people that live outside of their bubble. How can you connect Marcuse and/or Dialectic of Enlightenment to the movie clip?

Wally states near the end of the film that in the normal world of jobs, bills, and other responsibilities, there’s no need to seek the awareness-outposts that Andre describes as “Mt. Everest.” Happiness, he says, can be be effectively achieved my remaining within the comfort of our daily routines. Is Wally correct about this, or is he just a content robot? More pointedly, do you ever feel that maybe you are becoming a content robot?

Do you ever think of escaping New York…or Pittsburgh? Do you ever think about escaping the world that is comfortable and familiar to you or does the idea of that scare you?

Do you ever think you might be “trapped” in a prison of your own making?

What Was the “Enlightenment?”

Generally speaking, we might think of the Enlightenment time period as an elite 18th-century cultural movement that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. Some people like to think of the Enlightenment as the beginning of modern philosophy. It was important because the ideas that came from this movement influenced future democratic governments.

The Enlightenment period in the history of western thought and culture stretches roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century; it was characterized by dramatic social revolutions in science, philosophy, and politics. These revolutions helped to sweep away the dark medieval world-view and ushered in the light that is thought to typify the modern western world.

Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason. Theory is one thing, however, as the notion of “all” is, in practice, a matter infused with controversy and debate.

The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the new science progressively undermined not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos, but, with it, the entire set of presuppositions that served to constrain as well as guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, even as it aimed to account for a wide variety of phenomena through appeal to a relatively small number of mathematical formulae, promoted philosophy (broadly understood to include the natural sciences) over the handmaiden of theology. The basic idea here was to overcome archaic ways of thinking, which were constrained in purpose as well as methods, with an independent force of power and authority; one sufficiently powerful to challenge the old and construct the new in the realms of both theory and practice on the basis of its own principles.

D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence,” because of the extraordinary intellectual progress that typified the age, the advances achieved by the sciences, and the enthusiasm for social progress, and because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy could dramatically improve human life.

Who Are the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment?

France

The Enlightenment is associated with the French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “philosophes”- Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Montesquieu, and others. They constituted an informal society of men of letters who collaborated on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment centered around the project of the Encyclopedia. But the Enlightenment was even more ambitious than this suggests.

Scotland and Germany

In addition to the English and French movements represented here, there was a significant Scottish Enlightenment. Key figures were Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid as well as a similarly influential German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung) including Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant.

All of these different Enlightenments spurred by different thought leaders might be thought of as nodes of thought within a disparate and varied course of intellectual development. Enlightenment philosophy is in this manner perhaps better understood in terms of general tendencies of thinking; not in terms of specific doctrines or theories.

The David Hume statue on its pedestal outside of St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland (photo credit: sandra trappen)

Immanuel Kant

At the foundation of Kant’s system is the doctrine of “transcendental idealism,” which emphasizes a distinction between what we can experience (the natural, observable world) and what we cannot (“supersensible” objects such as God and the soul). Kant argued that we can only have knowledge of things we can experience.

Only late in the development of the German Enlightenment, when the Enlightenment was near its end, does the movement become self-reflective; the question of “What is Enlightenment?” is debated in pamphlets and journals. In his famous definition of “enlightenment” in his essay “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784), which is his contribution to this debate, Immanuel Kant expresses many of the tendencies shared among Enlightenment philosophies of divergent doctrines.

Kant’s Three Questions:

Kant can be said to have tried to answer three fundamental questions: What can I know?; What ought I to do?; and What may I hope?  (Critique of Pure Reason, 1787)

Accordingly, in answer to the question, “What can I know?” Kant replies that we can know the natural, observable world, but we cannot, however, have answers to many of the deepest questions of metaphysics. Humans are, in other words, limited by our senses, scientific instruments, and the sum of all the recorded knowledge of the human race limited by the time and discretion a mortal being has to assimilate and remember such knowledge. Setting oneself on a path to know such things, however, must be accomplished with considerable abridgment, and what you can know is not known best by limiting yourself to a knowledge of symbolic works, oral or written (i.e. religious texts). These are tools of finite minds incapable of knowing the entire truth about anything.

The answer to the second is – Hang in there and do what you are good at!

The answer to the third is to try and live a long and prosperous life; one that is diverse and rich in both experience and sensation, and to also use your talents and abilities in a manner that affords enjoyment to others trying to do the same with their own lives. All around good advice, yes?

On Enlightenment

For Kant, Enlightenment liberates us from authority. Those who hold authority—have mystery. The priest has special access to the mystery of religion; it is through him where God comes towards us. The Enlightenment says that human reason is capable of answering all the questions that the previous authorities claimed they had answers to. When you have a rational claim, you’ve laid a path that someone else can easily follow to the same conclusion. The light of the Enlightenment is that it leads to knowledge. For Kant, Enlightenment holds out the promise that it can free us from authoritarianism; for we now have a way to understand the light of the world that is derived from our own human rational capacities.

Kant likewise defines “Enlightenment” as humankind’s release from its self-incurred immaturity; “immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.” Enlightenment is the process of undertaking to think for oneself, to employ and rely on one’s own intellectual capacities in determining what to believe and how to act. Enlightenment philosophers from across the geographical and temporal spectrum tend to have a great deal of confidence in humanity’s intellectual powers, both to achieve systematic knowledge of nature and to serve as an authoritative guide in practical life. This confidence is generally paired with suspicion or hostility toward other forms or carriers of authority (such as tradition, superstition, prejudice, myth and miracles), insofar as these are seen to compete with the authority of reason.

Enlightenment philosophy tends to stand in tension with established religion; that is, it holds out the promise to release people from the self-incurred immaturity of the age as dictated by religion. Daring to think for oneself, awakening one’s intellectual powers, inevitably requires opposing the role of established religion in thought and action. The faith of the Enlightenment – if one may call it that – is that the process of enlightenment (of becoming progressively self-directed in thought and action) through the awakening of one’s intellectual powers, leads us all to a better and more fulfilled human existence.

These views describe the main tendencies of Enlightenment, which might be broken down as follows: 1) The True: Science, Epistemology, and Metaphysics in the Enlightenment; 2) The Good: Political Theory, Ethical Theory and Religion in the Enlightenment; and 3) The Beautiful: Aesthetics in the Enlightenment.

Horkheimer & Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment

In their classic text, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno contest Kant and the positivity of Enlightenment.

They argue the concept of reason was transformed into its opposite – an irrational force – by the Enlightenment. As a consequence, reason came to dominate not only nature, but also humankind itself.

As major representatives of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer and Adorno were the major architects of Critical Theory, who engaged in a project to interpret Marxist philosophy. More pointedly, they aimed to reinterpret Marx’s important economic and political ideas: commodification, reification, and fetishization, which they incorporated into their critique of mass culture.

Critical theory draws from a combination of: Kantian rationalism, Marxist Hegelianism, dialectical materialism, and historical materialism to critically engage the following ideas:

• the notion that humans are rational beings; the world of the real comes not from our senses; that from our rational capacities a rational society is possible.
• the idea that social systems are constantly challenged by their contradictions; contradictions produce new syntheses, and out of this change (progress) occurs [this is the essence of dialectical thinking].
• progress does not occur as a result of straight means-end logic (formal rationality); means-end logic is what underlies repression and domination in society; it leads to totalitarianism.
• the materialist conception of history, which is to say, the theory of history that connects the material conditions of a society’s primary mode of production (its way of producing and reproducing) to the means of human existence—these are Marxist terms which are used to describe the union of productive capacity with the social relations of production, as they are understood to fundamentally determine social organization and development.
• theoretical frameworks are use to explain social events as not discrete and isolated; rather, they are understood to be part of a social process that implies constant challenge, contradiction, and change.

The Problem of Enlightenment

Critical theorists (Horkheimer and Adorno in particular) were concerned with the problem of “Enlightenment” within modernity and post-modernity. So for example, the central premise of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment was that “something went wrong with the Enlightenment.” Enlightenment, in their view, became totalitarian; now it’s all about controlling nature and humans.

Enlightenment, furthermore, created a culture that violates individuality by compelling conformity. The potential of the individual is not being destroyed by fascism alone; rather, it’s the positivist turn of modern science and the Enlightenment that influences individuals and the world they live in, disposing them to become fascist.

The only way to get out of this modern version of hell is to engage in a critical theory of society – this is the only way to achieve transformation and social progress.

Faced with the unfolding events of the Holocaust, Dialectic of Enlightenment begins with the words:

“Enlightenment, as understood in the widest sense as the advance of thought, has always aimed at liberating human beings from fear and installing them as masters. Yet the wholly enlightened earth is radiant with triumphant calamity.”

Again, the book here alleges that something went wrong with Enlightenment; the authors aim to discover the motives behind humanity’s seeming retrogression, which undercuts progressive claims of civilization.

Another focal point of the book is its critique of instrumental reason         (a concept H&A borrowed from Max Weber). Their formulation of the concept distinguishes how reason was employed for the purpose of mastering and dominating nature.

A related concept that they explore – “reification” – is drawn from Georg Lukacs; it refers to the process of the “objectification” of nature through this use of instrumental reason.

H&A’s critique of positivism and capitalism follows straightforwardly from here, as the Dialectic reveals their philosophical position: totalitarian states and state capitalism are one and the same; they institutionalize reason in a such a way as to realize the goal of transforming nature (including humans) into objects for the “commodity fetish”.

Their critique, furthermore, constitutes the basis of a grand narrative, which takes the point of view of the totality.  Grand theorizing, which is itself often criticized – was intentionally undertaken as a means to overcome more traditional academic disciplinary boundaries (and to this very day, many in academe don’t like that) by combining the study of history and philosophy with the study of society.

Clearly, H&A were not optimistic about the Enlightenment; the major project of the book was to demonstrate how the entire project of rationality with Enlightenment thinking was self-destructive right down to the core. Ultimately, what they leave us with is a sense of the underlying change dynamics that drive how the social order reproduces itself.

Book Organization

Section 1 deals with the concept of Enlightenment

Section 2 reveals Enlightenment to be a myth.

Section 3 addresses the submission of the subject,  who makes the object its master.

Section 4 focuses on the “Culture Industry” as the mediator of all social action and knowledge.

Section 5 traces the descent of humanity from Enlightenment into barbarism.

Historical & Theoretical Context of Their Work

In order to understand the emphasis that Horkheimer and Adorno placed upon the imperative need to undertake analysis of the nature of mass culture in contemporary society, it is necessary first of all to situate their “cultural theory” within the wider context of their theory as a whole, which is given its fullest expression in Dialectic of Enlightenment.

At the heart of their work lies a deep discomfort with the nature of modern capitalist society. They drew heavily upon a Marxist framework of analysis, seeing capitalism as fundamentally exploitative, and believing that it must be overthrown for humanity to achieve its full potential.

However, upon witnessing the rise of fascism, failure of socialism and dominance of monopoly capitalism, they argued that critical theory must move beyond a traditional Marxist emphasis on the mode of production (MOP) alone, which they felt was unable to satisfactorily account for these developments.

Marx’s emphasis on the economic base, they argued, led to the conclusion that capitalism was doomed to be replaced by socialism. However, H&A believed Capitalism’s more logical endpoint to be the creation of a ‘verwaltete velt’, in which mankind subjected itself to irrational rule in an entirely rational manner. H&A argued that as mankind had increased his technical mastery over nature humanity itself had become caught up in this process of domination. In such a society, the genuine aim of enlightened reason – to critically negate what is given – had been eradicated, allowing for the use of entirely rational methods to carry out the most irrational of goals, such as genocide or war.

Their belief in the importance of the need to understand the process of rationalization led H&A to expand the project of critical theory beyond a focus on political economy alone. In their view, it was necessary to uncover the processes which were leading to the creation of an entirely rationalized social totality, dominated by the logic of the market.

In other words, their critique focused on the social totality – where previously distinct spheres of culture, politics and the market were increasingly merging – revealed how this came to play a central role in the maintenance of the whole. Culture in such a society, they claimed, could not be seen as a mere epiphenomenon determined by the base; for it played a role in the creation of the base itself.

Political economy (Marx’s focus) declined in relative significance and the need for a critical analysis of culture became more pressing.

The Culture Industry

In this famous chapter, Horkheimer and Adorno set out to show how Enlightenment became a force of mass deception. Moving from this central thesis, they proceed to an explanation whereby they explore the dialectical relationship between culture and technics as part of a critique of the commodification of culture in modernity.

They use the term “culture industry” to describe the commodification of cultural forms that had resulted from the growth of monopoly capitalism. Popular culture, as they explain it, was constituted as a single culture industry whose purpose is to ensure the continued obedience of the masses to market interests.

Culture might thus be thought of as a “factory” churning out standardized cultural goods — television, film, newspapers, magazines and other forms of entertainment. Their purpose is to manipulate mass society into passivity. Human critical thinking capcity (reason) is eliminated.

Culture, according to the authors, has evolved to the point that it is the central mediator of what we know and how social change takes place.

The Culture Industry cultivates false needs: these are needs created by and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, by way of contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness [Marcuse was the first among the Critical theorists to demarcate true needs from false needs in Eros and Civilization].

Adorno, furthermore, believed the culture industry was a system; that society was controlled though the top-down creation of standardized mass culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. These cultural processes, constituted as such, have the power to penetrate the very roots of our psychic and social formation as individuated subjects. The easy pleasures available through the consumption of popular culture make people docile and content, no matter how difficult their life/economic circumstances.

The Subsumption of Art Under Capital

H & A present an argument, where they contrast the emancipatory potential of what they term ‘genuine’ or ‘autonomous’ art, and the products of the culture industry, which play the opposite role. By uncovering the social conditions that gave rise to both forms of art, they claim to reveal the impact that commodification has had upon art itself, and hence on society as a whole and our very consciousness.

Enlightenment, they argued, brought about the social conditions that now represent the subsumption of the previously relatively autonomous realm of culture into a market  governed by instrumental logic.

Having been subjected to the intersection of the commodity form, instrumental rationality, and a social processes of reification, individuals increasingly experience themselves as exchangeable “things” within a social arena dominated by principles of market exchange.

Art suffers as a result, because it becomes a consumer good like any other consumer good. Ultimately, there is a loss of autonomous art through the process of commodification, where there is an increasing convergence of art, advertising, and marketing.

This results in a condition of universal spectacle and narcissistic consumerism (i.e. Kanye and the Kardashians) which precipitates regressive forms of failure to achieve, as well as a subject ego that increasingly defines itself based on the objects it acquires. In other words, autonomous subjectivity is dissolved and replaced by commodified forms of “pseudo-individuality.”

Adorno’s analysis allowed for a critique of popular mass culture from the left as well as the right. From both perspectives — left and right — he believed the nature of cultural production was the root of social and moral problems, which was a result of the consumption of culture.

A central tenet of Adorno’s argument is the idea that under certain social conditions, art can provide an alternate vision of reality. He argues that autonomous art has the capacity to highlight the inequalities and irrationality of the status quo, by presenting an ideal vision of what mankind can aspire towards. As such, it has an emancipatory character.

While the conservative critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, H&A located the problem not with the content of culture, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects [recall how the conservative critique of the 1960’s “counter-culture” located degeneracy in the culture itself and social groups, rather than in the forces of production].

The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualized this phenomenon as “pseudo-individualization” and the “always-the-same.”

Under conditions of generalized commodity exchange, Adorno and Horkheimer claim that all aspects of cultural practice, technique, and meaning-making – whether high or low, elite or popular – become subsumed within the industrial system of production, exchange, and consumption. This commodification of culture results in the general homogenization of cultural artefacts and the instrumentalisation of autonomous art.

Religion, Belief, and the Death of Reason

During the time that this book was written, religiosity was on the decline in Germany. Horkheimer and Adorno wrote: “the sociological theory that the loss of the support of objectively established religion, the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialization, have led to cultural chaos is disproved every day; for culture now impresses the same stamp on everything.”

The drive to “disenchant” the world (Max Weber’s term) reflected the ongoing tendency to wrest rational control from what previously could only be seen as blind fate — was always closely associated with the Enlightenment’s attack on the institutional privileges and intellectual status accorded to religion.

The story is well known. Kant saved faith from Hume and philosophy from dogmatism by curtailing the speculative pretensions of the one and the reach of the other. At the same time, he submitted religion to the court of reason and thus left space for autonomy.

The Left Hegelians (particularly Feuerbach and Marx) took the humanization of the world a step further by reducing metaphysics to anthropology and religion to need. The history of religion became the history of man’s alienated but authentic hope, a hope that needed to be reclaimed not in relgious terms, but in the name of freedom.

Nietzsche — the apostate son of a Lutheran pastor — launched his own, anti-Hegelian critique of metaphysics. He sought to psychologize the urge for atemporal, necessary, and universal Truth; that is, he sought to cure the nostalgia for a sovereign God and a sovereign Subject by revealing them both to be fictions of grammar and bad faith.

To this day, we find the emancipatory interest in overcoming metaphysics pursued literally by Left Hegelians and rhetorically by Nietzscheans, Marxists, Heideggerians, as well as by Leftists and Deconstructionists.

But also in the current day, we see a resurgence in belief-based metaphysical thought, which is often coupled with a critique of science that reduces it to speculation and theory.

Now, it goes without saying that metaphysics — the study of extra-sensory reality — is not always the same as religion. But, from his first book on Kierkegaard to his final completed work, the Negative Dialectics, in which he launches a critical recovery of metaphysics itself, Adorno returns again and again to themes derived from metaphysics and theology.

In a short essay on music, which was written 10 years after DoE and 10 years before Negative Dialectics, Adorno differentiates music from what he calls intentional language that is, the instrumental language of everyday communication:

“The language of music is quite different from the language of intentionality. It contains a theological dimension. What it has to say is simultaneously revealed and concealed. Its Idea is the divine Name which has been given shape. It is demythologized prayer, rid of efficacious magic. It is the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, not to communicate meanings… Music points to true language in the sense that content is apparent in it, but it does so at the cost of unambiguous meaning, which has migrated to the languages of intentionality.”

True language is thus not the language of meaning, of information, of communication between people. It is the revelation of the absolute (the dream of a language beyond intention derives directly from Walter Benjamin).

Criticism of Horkheimer & Adorno

As I already addressed in a post on the Frankfurt School, H&A were not without their detractors. Many found their theories to be needlessly abstract and overwhelmingly negative, to the extent they offered no focused substantive answers that would suggest how we might “escape” the social forces they describe.

Even today, scholars of critical theory regard the philosophical exercises of the founding authors to be more or less marginal works― lapses of judgment for thinkers who are otherwise celebrated for their mastery of dialectics. The following passage comes from a jacket description of a book by Peter E. Gordon, Adorno and Existence, where the following passage alludes to this struggle:

“In the case of Adorno, his persistent fascination with the philosophical canons of existentialism and phenomenology suggests a connection far more productive than merely indicating antipathy. From his first published book on Kierkegaard’s aesthetic to his mature studies in negative dialectics, Adorno was forever returning to the philosophies of bourgeois interiority, seeking the paradoxical relation between their manifest failure and their hidden promise. Ultimately, Adorno saw in them an instructive if unsuccessful attempt to realize his own ambition: to escape the enchanted circle of idealism so as to grasp “the primacy of the object.” Exercises in “immanent critique,” Adorno’s writings on Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger present us with a photographic negative―a philosophical portrait of the author himself. 

What Can We Take Away From This Complex Work?

Enlightenment is not what it objectively seems to be. It failed on its promise to free humans from myth, for it creates its own myth – that we must achieve freedom from nature.

Sociology, as a discipline, has traditionally made the mistake of assuming that humans and nature constitute binaries, rather than seeing humans and nature as one [remember, it was Marx that told us the first level of “alienation” is the alienation of humans to nature].

Knowledge-seeking does not occur through a neutral acquisition of information [sorry, Weber & Durkheim]; it’s connected to power: power over nature, and power over each other.

The critique of subjectivity (the ability of a subject to be reflective and act self-consciously) is particularly important. H&A show us how the transcendental subject/self was effectively broken as society became more complex : in modern society the mind/ego/self are divorced from the body. This creates a false separation of the body from nature and matter.  The result is that man fears annihilation and compensates with a  desire to dominate and  survive, though such a process of living is ultimately a self-alienating activity.

Modern society elevates knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, as achievement that is synonymous with unequivocal progress.  We take the mythology that was once used to describe nature and do the same to science.

Science and reason are in danger of being subsumed under capitalism; they are no longer pursued for enlightenment purposes, but to dominate nature and to ultimately serve capital.

Sources

Blog post & Summary of Dialectic of Enlightenment. Last accessed March 2016.

Sandra L. Trappen – notes from lectures with Stanley Aronowitz

Discussion Questions

Do you think there is such a think as a “culture industry” or does the concept fail to fully articulate and/or describe the social dynamics of culture in our modern time?

How do we escape; that is, get outside culture?

How might you use Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the culture industry to critique developments in our contemporary culture (think about the Kardashians, or about professional sports, reality television, or anything really).

Do you think that being willing to critique or to examine the social, political and cultural structures within the society in which we all live (as done in the social sciences) is a radical “leftist” project? Does challenging authority make you uncomfortable?

The rise of fascism’s rise in Germany prior to World Wars I &II provides us with an example of passive revolution; important social institutions and structures were manipulated to such a degree that they fostered a false consciousness that ultimately prevented a leftist socialist revolution. In Italy, Mussolini made himself out to be socialist leaning populist, but upon assuming power he established a new capitalist hegemony. Hitler’s party was a nominal “Workers’ Party,” though by 1941 Germany was as right-wing (economically) as Italy. Social movements in both countries revolved around how Hitler and Mussolini reacted to the tragedy of WWI and its destruction of the techno-utopian and optimistic thinking of the period. The two leaders successfully converted populist anger into populist action against the enemies of the nation. The “collectivity” both nations represented constituted an effective subversion of the “collectivity” leftists at that time said would propel the proletarian revolution. With that, do you see any parallels in our current time period? If so, what role does culture potentially play in manufacturing passivity/consent and populist anger among members of the U.S. population?  

Ironically, conservatives in the United States tend to sneer and even mock science, even as they eagerly deploy it in the service of things that they value: war, torture, invasion, police intimidation and brutality, and the mass surveillance of American citizens. Universities are moving in the direction where they value positivism to the extreme – research methods and theories not deployed in the service of revealing probabalistic outcomes are considered inferior and not worthy of study and funding. The “arts” of the Liberal Arts are being expunged by administrators who pay lip service to “critical thinking” pedagogy. How can we call upon critical theory to show how “Enlightenment” is under attack again? How has reason itself become subverted yet again? 

Biography

Herbert Marcuse rose to fame in the US during the tumultuous time period of the late 1960’s when civil rights were being contested and the counter-cultural movement was ascendant. A German philosophy professor by trade, he emigrated to the US in 1934 in order to the flee the Nazis in Germany. Originally born in Berlin in 1898, he received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. In the late 1920’s, after reading Being and Time by Martin Heidegger, Marcuse returned to Freiburg University, a school where he at one time attended lectures by Edmund Husserl, to study under Heidegger.

Marcuse’s first book appeared in 1932 with the title Hegel’s Ontology and the Foundation of a Theory of Historicity. Upon reading and reviewing Marcuse’s book, Theodore Adorno convinced Max Horkheimer of Marcuse’s potential as a critical theorist. Later, in 1933, Marcuse was recruited to work for the Institut für Sozialforschung (Institute for Social Research). Unfortunately for Marcuse and other members of the Institute, this was right around the time that Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

After offering his services to United States government during World War II, Marcuse eventually went to teach at different American universities, including Columbia, Harvard, and Brandeis before finally settling down to teach at the University of California, San Diego.

His “philosophy” – both then and now – was considered radical. His books and essays called for social transformation. He argued that human potential and emancipation were being prevented by capitalism and that even as liberal capitalist societies told themselves they were free and democratic, they had, in reality, become authoritarian.  Perhaps most important, the imperialistic tendencies of the U.S. had, in his view, evolved alongside the ever-expanding market economy. The “good war” and the “good life” were inextricably bound in the American psyche and it has remained that way ever since.

Intellectual Tradition

Marcuse’s intellectual forebears were not the dreamers and visionaries who populated the heritage of the American left and gave it moral authority (he was born, after all, into an assimilated Jewish middle-class family in Berlin).  Marcuse’s mentors were the towering figures of philosophy – Hegel, Marx, and Freud.

Why Do We Read Marcuse?

Should we even care about Marcuse today? The 60’s and 70’s are long gone, so why does it matter that we read Marcuse? Why bore us with the outdated ideas of another dead European male?

To be sure, Marcuse’s stature and interest in his work have diminished even as scholarly interest in other Frankfurt School figures has intensified. Consider Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, both of whom dealt directly, explicitly, and frequently with cultural questions, and far less with political ones. Marcuse, more than others, is associated with the crisis of Marxism. The “crisis” can be defined as Marxism’s historical entanglement with the tyrannies of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as its failure to explain capitalism’s assumed imminent demise, given how we see that capitalism retains a capacity to generate mass acceptance, even allegiance, despite evidence to the contrary; it continues to generate crises and promulgates human suffering as it stands in the way of systematic change.

Marcuse was viewed as the philosopher of sexual liberation. He embodied the zeitgeist of the era in his argument that, despite material affluence, there were deep patterns of class, gender and racial inequality and exploitation. These were held in place via the repression of sexual desire, and of emotional and creative expression. Marcuse was once asked to do an interview for Playboy magazine, though he turned down the magazine for reasons that are consistent with his philosophy. Sexual desire is structured by social norms. Marcuse saw the magazine as tending to objectify and commodify it participants – its readers and the women featured within it (the “bunnies”). In Marcuse’s view, this undermined the possibility of fully connecting our sexuality to our humanity.

Marcuse remains relevant as a social theorist for many reasons. One is his strong critique of consumerism, which he argues represents a form of social control. He famously argued that consumerism and the expansion of market economies led to a new kind of social pattern in which our deep drive for freedom and humanistic development was traded off for material comfort in an affluent society. Further, it is as a result of this as well as efforts to repress sexual desire, emotional expression and creative potential we had learned to “find [our] soul” in our “automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment”. And I might add here that many Americans find consumer comfort in guns. This authoritarian pattern led people to become increasingly alienated, some might even say they are in “pain” – physically and psychically, as they feel disconnected from themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, co-workers, and fellow Americans.

Marcuse suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian, as “the masses” are continually dictated to by powerful individuals, whose social positions permit them to shape our general perceptions of freedom. As a result, we are presented with choices – “false choices” – that encourage us to “buy” our happiness.

Freedom to choose does not produce the state of “freedom” desired by the masses; rather, it induces a profound state of “unfreedom,” as consumers act irrationally, working more than they are required to in order to fulfill actual basic needs. Within this destructive system, fostered by capitalism, they ignore the psychologically destructive effects of wasteful consumption, environmental damage and the damage to human health, as they strive to find a social connection through the acquisition of material goods.

Limitations

One limitation of Marcuse’s work should be obvious to students of history. Considering how One-Dimensional Man was written on the eve of what would become a wave of radical struggles and protests in the 1960’s – a movement that aimed to shake the foundations of the dominant system – it is apparent that Marcuse failed to foresee this rupture. Critics of Marcuse assert that he made this mistake because he gave insufficient attention to marginalized groups, both within America and worldwide; an oversight due to the fact that as a Marxist, his focus was on the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Alternatively, had he given more attention to issues of race and/or decolonization struggles, protest movements throughout the world (i.e. Africa), the theoretical contradictions of a theory based on systemic closure would have perhaps been clearer. Marcuse, it is fair to say, exaggerates to some extent the degree to which the system closure prevents imaginative escape and/or radical movements.

Another limitation is that like the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci before him, Marcuse risks being a Marxist who explains that others don’t become Marxists with the insulting answer that they’ve been indoctrinated and therefore cannot make their own decision to become Marxist. Nonetheless, he might not be entirely wrong, given how effectively he argues that modern technological society provides many pleasant benefits and entertainment diversions for those willing to forego the revolution and live lives of contentment within the status quo. Think about our present time period and how it appears that our contemporary media have lulled an entire nation into a mental torpor, where many are no longer capable of exercising critical consciousness. Students, in particular, are derided as “snowflakes” who need “safe spaces.”

Despite these shortcomings, if we value having a healthy democracy, we must read One-Dimensional Man. As Douglas Kellner notes, Marcuse “rarely discussed the theme of democracy or the democratization of society.” So why then insist on reading Marcuse if we value a healthy democracy? What Marcuse provides is not a ‘how to’ manual for establishing a flourishing democratic process; rather, he offers “comprehensive philosophical perspectives on domination and liberation [and] a powerful method and framework for analyzing contemporary society.” Marcuse, now as much as ever, is important because he offers a new way of looking at our contemporary world.

Technology and the Individual

Stanley Aronowitz offers a short summary of Herbert Marcuse’s thinking on this subject, where he explains Marcuse’s thesis is that “technological rationality has been transformed into a kind of domination.” Ironically, as Aronowitz points out, critique of such a system was to some degree foreclosed by the very successes of the repressive system; so much so, that critique presented itself as an absurdity to the general population.

In his essay “Some Social Implications of Modern Technology,” Marcuse examines technology in a broad sense. He defines technology as more than just “the technical apparatus,” which he calls “technics.” For Marcuse, technology is “a social process” in which men are inseparably involved. The most significant implication of the technological process is the creation of dominative “technological rationality,” similar to but distinct from Horkheimer’s idea of subjective reason.

In this essay, Marcuse studies the impact of technology, which he traces to changes in the individual and his rationality. He constructs the rationality of the individual in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and contrasts this “individualistic rationality” with the modern “technological rationality.” Individualism was based on autonomous self-interest, whereas technology makes self-interest completely heteronomous, achieved only by “adjustment and compliance.” Individualistic, rational self-interest was motivated towards finding “forms of life”; therefore, in the service of the realization of this interest, reason was critical of the world as it is (Marcuse 139-40). Technological rationality is instrumental; it is motivated towards efficiency, and technology makes any critical protest irrational. Marcuse uses Lewis Mumford’s phrase, “matter-of-factness” to describe an attitude of empirical rationality that in the age of technology becomes a dominating force over man. Through these social dominations of technology over the individual, man’s autonomy is erased—not by force, but rather by his identification with the apparatus, by a fetish of technique.

Marcuse is primarily concerned with the fate of the individual. One of the methods by which technology removes the dignity of the individual is by sublimating him into a crowd. Marcuse is critical of the crowd, which reduces the individual to a “standardized subject of brute self-preservation.” That is, he is an atomic and standardized force whose only expression is self-interest. The specialization of professions does not contradict this standardization, because a man merely becomes one of several replaceable tools in the toolbox. Thus, specialization is simultaneously a force for standardization as well as division.

Truth, which as individualistic truth was once whole, is split into technological and critical truth. Technological truth is that set of values that “hold good for the functioning of the apparatus—and for that alone.” It is a truth concerned only with the goals of technological rationality, namely efficiency. Critical truth is antagonistic to the apparatus; it is autonomous and objective. However, Marcuse points out, the two truths are not completely contradictory, as technological truth often transforms critical truths for its own purposes. Critical truths are adopted by their opposition and thereby made impotent. This adoption is symptomatic of the way critical forces have been “incorporated into the apparatus itself—without losing the title of opposition.” Marcuse cites the example of the labor movement, which has changed from a truly critical force into a “business organization with a vested interest of its own” in the system.

But technological rationality does affirm critical rationality in two cases. First, technology “implies a democratization of functions.” Democratization is subverted, however, by hierarchical private bureaucracies that enforce division. Second, technics’ potential triumph over scarcity could allow for a “free human realization,” in which man can realize his true self in the freedom from “the hard struggle for life, business, and power.” Marcuse closes with an image of this state, in which humans “are nothing but human” and allowed to live on their own terms. This autonomy of man is Marcuse’s Utopia, characterized not by “perennial happiness” but by the affirmation of man’s “natural individuality.” Technology, though it constricts individuality in the many ways Marcuse describes, is also necessary for its full realization.

One Dimensional Man

One Dimensional Man was written in 1962, but much of it reads as if it could have been written about the state of the world’s problems today: the flattening of discourse, the pervasive repression behind a veil of ‘consensus’, the lack of recognition for perspectives and alternatives beyond dominant frames of thinking, the closure of the dominant universe of meaning, the corrosion of established liberties and lines of escape, total mobilization against a permanent Enemy built into the system as a basis for conformity and effort.

The largest difference from the present situation is that, contrary to thirty years of neoliberalism and the latest wave of cuts, Marcuse was writing at a time when the welfare state was growing and ordinary people were becoming more affluent. This gives a different sense to the repressive aspects of the context. Marcuse gives an impression of people lulled into conformity, rather than bludgeoned or tricked.

The ‘one dimension’ of the title refers to the flattening of discourse, imagination, culture, and politics into the field of understanding, the perspective, of the dominant order. Marcuse contrasts the affluent consumer society of organized capitalism with a previous situation of ‘two-dimensional’ existence. The two dimensions exist on a number of levels, but for Marcuse express a single aspect: the coexistence of the present system with its negation.

Put another way, Marcuse’s analysis introduces us to two ideal types that characterize advanced industrial society: the one-dimensional type and the dialectical type. Each of these two types corresponds to two dimensions of the advanced industrial society: civilization and culture.

The tone of One-Dimensional Man is doubtless pessimistic. History, in Marcuse’s view, seemed to be moving on the side of the “omnipresent system which swallows up or repulses all alternatives,” leaving us in a state of domination and perpetual “unfreedom.”

In a letter to the New York Review of Books, George H. Fromm and William Leiss et al. outlined the major themes of the book as follows:

1)The concept of “one-dimensional man” asserts that there are other dimensions of human existence in addition to the present one and that these have been eliminated. It maintains that the spheres of existence formerly considered as private (e.g. sexuality) have now become part of the entire system of social domination of man by man, and it suggests that totalitarianism can be imposed without terror.

(2)Technological rationality, which impoverishes all aspects of contemporary life, has developed the material bases of human freedom, though it continues to serve the interests of suppression.There is a logic of domination in technological progress under present conditions: not quantitative accumulation, but a qualitative “leap” is necessary to transform this apparatus of destruction into an apparatus of life.

(3)The analysis proceeds on the basis of “negative” or dialectical thinking, which sees existing things as “other than they are” and as denying the possibilities inherent in themselves. It demands “freedom from the oppressive and ideological power of given facts.”

(4) The book is generally pessimistic about the possibilities for overcoming the increasing domination and unfreedom of technological society; it concentrates on the power of the present establishment to contain and repulse all alternatives to the status quo.

The Two Dimensions

For Marcuse, human societies are made up of two dimensions that are in constant tension with each other. These two dimensions are civilization and culture. In our everyday language, we generally think of civilization and culture as synonymous. Marcuse asks us to consider them as two distinct concepts.

• Civilization is the current material structure of life in the society, the real existing society, the current political, economic, and social arrangements. It is the material state of affairs, the status quo.
• Culture is “the complex of distinctive beliefs, attainments, traditions, etc., constituting the ‘background’ of a society…[which] appears as the complex of moral, intellectual, [and] aesthetic goals (values)…a society considers the purpose of [its] organization.”

In the advanced industrial society, this tension between civilization and culture is systematically reduced. The tension is reduced by a type of colonization of the actual content of the culture. This difference between the two dimensions – the gap between them – is for Marcuse crucial to the possibility of social change. According to Marcuse, the gap separates the possible from the present, making it possible to imagine situations radically different from the current system. The elimination of the gap makes it impossible to think beyond the system’s frame, thus making it impossible to think of alternatives except as repeating current social relations. The two dimensions produce a gap or distance between what can be thought and what exists, a gap in which critical thought can flourish. They rely on an ‘unhappy consciousness’, discontented with the present and aware on some level of its problems.

Marcuse believes the gap has been closed by a process of almost totalitarian social integration through the coordination of social functions and the rise of consumerism and administrative thought. Marcuse portrays this process as happening in a number of ways. One of these is that consumer culture infiltrates lifeworlds and public opinion comes into the private sphere: the system’s perspective comes into the home through television, radio and consumed goods with particular messages; it comes into communities through the inescapable news headlines outside newsagents, the dominance of ‘public opinion’ and the interventions of state officials.

As Marcuse states, “the result is the familiar Orwellian language (‘peace is war’ and ‘war is peace’, etc.), which is by no means that of terroristic totalitarianism only”. Not only could such a reduction of the conceptual content of cultural values effectively restrain their humanizing potential, but these same concepts now having their inner content rewired can help to further support the civilization (i.e. the status quo) or work regressively.

The reason this absorption of the two dimensions into the one dimension (i.e. civilization/established order) is different in the advanced industrial civilization is because of their technological capabilities. Marcuse states:

This liquidation of two-dimensional [reality] takes place not through the denial and rejection of the ‘cultural values’, but through their wholesale incorporation into the established order, through their reproduction and display on a massive scale.

By looking at Marcuse’s framework for understanding the two general ways of thinking, we can see how inhabitants of advanced industrial society become subject to social forces that lead people to acquire one way of thinking about the other, we will see how his ideas are revelatory in such a way that they generate crucial insights into problems we face today.

With the more technologically advanced societies, the reduction of culture to civilization risks becoming totalized. With technology aiding an unprecedented ability for mass communication “the advancing one-dimensional society” threatens to sweep away all remnants of the historically meaningful content of cultural values.

Marcuse’s framework, where he sets up two poles that represent different ways of thinking – one-dimensional and dialectical – has in our current time fallen out of favor, because it reduces conflict to a binary social dynamic. His types, nonetheless, can still be useful if we think of them as ends of a spectrum. As social beings, we do not engage either one-dimensional or dialectical thought as a pure ideal type, but instead may drift from one to the other way of thinking, depending on the social context.

Characteristics of the Different Ways of Thinking

What are the characteristics of these types of thinking? Again, it is important to remember that Marcuse is not referring to the actual content of the thought here (i.e. what you think). Rather, he is concerned with the manner in which you think (i.e. how you think, the way you think). Thus, even though Marcuse’s political stance is Marxism, you need not believe these tenets to be a dialectical thinker. Marcuse cites conservatives and liberals, including Edmund Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill, as possessing dialectical ways of thinking. Dialectical thinking proceeds from the conflict and resolution of opposites, which comprise the person’s consciousness in these modes.

Dialectical thinking possesses historical consciousness, whereas one-dimensional thought lacks this habit of mind. Marcuse states that historical consciousness “discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the way of life.” The one-dimensional type, however, cannot get beyond the ‘given’. The current status quo of the civilization reflects the prevailing economic, political, and social ordering of things. Thus, we see that the one-dimensional type lives in the dimension of civilization and not of both civilization and culture. One-dimensional thought can’t get beyond the given facts of the established status quo (i.e. civilization).

True Needs & False Needs

Marcuse argues that “advanced industrial society” created “false needs,” which integrated individuals into the existing system of production and consumption via mass media, advertising, industrial management, and contemporary modes of thought. These are different from “true needs” that individuals need to maintain satisfaction.

Slaves With White Collars – The Philosophy of Fight Club

We can look at a film like Fight Club and read it as a Marxist/Marcusian critique of late capitalist society. The film’s narrator/protagonist starts out as a corporate functionary – someone not particularly important, who is working in the bureaucracy of techn0-rationality that Marcuse calls attention to in his work. The character defines himself through his consumer choices  that reflect false needs. Subsequently, we meet his alter-ego, Tyler Durden (played by Brad Pitt), who emerges on the scene to show by example how he might live a more authentic life and thereby escape a life of conformity and endless unsatisfying consumerism. Durden warns in the first clip –  “the things you own end up owning you.” The second clip more succinctly expresses the same message; it calls attention to the dangers of advertising that create false needs.

While “Project Mayhem” in the movie aims to destroy conformity and mindless consumerism; the way it proposes to do so is not through a benign politics of rejection – it suggests a combination of anarchy, terrorism, and fascism as the preferred path of resistance.

Slaves Who Are Not People – Bladerunner

Although we do not often think of it this way, Harrison Ford’s character in the movie Bladerunner is a futuristic policeman who is essentially a “slave catcher.” In the words of writer Sarah Galiley:

“There are cops, and there are little people.

There is a whole class of slaves. It is illegal for them to escape slavery. The cops are supposed to murder the slaves if they escape, because there is a risk that they will start to think they’re people. But the cops know that the slaves are not people, so it’s okay to murder them. The greatest danger, the thing the cops are supposed to prevent, is that the slaves will try to assimilate into the society that relies on their labor.

Assimilation is designed to be impossible. There are tests. Impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. The tests measure empathy. It is not about having enough empathy, but about having empathy for the correct things. If you do not have enough empathy for the correct things, you will be murdered by a cop who does have empathy for the correct things. 

In Blade Runner, an absurdly young Harrison Ford is a hard-boiled, world-weary kind of man named Deckard, and he is given a choice. He can be exactly as small as everyone is, or he can catch some escaped slaves for the police. He decides to catch the escaped slaves.

Except that ‘catch’ means ‘retire,’ and ‘retire’ means ‘murder.’

Deckard feels that he has no choice in this matter. He says it himself, and the person giving him the choice confirms that he is correct: no choice. But of course, there is always a choice. Certainly, the escaped slaves who he is chasing see that there is a choice. He can be power or he can be vulnerable to power. He chooses power. And power means murder”

Ford’s character murders an escaped slave in one scene. Soon after a police vehicle is heard hovering overhead.  and the police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.

The police vehicle repeats the same two words over and over, in the same tone the crossing light uses to prompt those who can’t see the walk signal: Move on, move on, move on.

So the crowd moves on. The story moves on. And Deckard moves on.

He still has work to do. One down. The rest to go.

He murders other escaped slaves before the end of the film. He finds where they are hiding, and he murders them.

It is important, in the world of the film, to remember that the things he is murdering are not people. That it is their own fault for seeking free lives. That the cops are just doing their jobs.

It is important to remember to have empathy for the right things.

Gailey goes on to explain that there is one escaped slave who Deckard does not murder. She asks him if he thinks she could escape to the North, and he says no. Whether that is true or not, we as the audience do not get to find out, because she does not escape. She does not escape because he decides to keep her. He is asked to murder her, and instead, he decides to keep her for his own.”

By the end of the movie, you find that if “you subtract the flying cars and the jets of flame shooting out of the top of Los Angeles buildings, it’s not a far-off place. It’s fortunes earned off the backs of slaves, and deciding who gets to count as human. It’s impossible tests with impossible questions and impossible answers. It’s having empathy for the right things if you know what’s good for you. It’s death for those who seek freedom.

It’s a cop shooting a fleeing woman in the middle of the street, and a world where the city is subject to repeated klaxon call: move on, move on, move on.”

The Welfare State & The Warfare State

The form of political integration that takes place in advanced capitalist societies, according to Marcuse, is the Welfare-Warfare state. The Welfare-Warfare state, he says, creates in administered life for the individual, which makes it pointless for them to insist on self-determination. Freedom (as well as revolution) become superfluous.

Bear in mind now that Marcuse is questioning the Marxist doctrine that historical crisis/the crisis of capitalism is inevitable. He uses this particular construct to explain why individuals in mass capitalist societies have no interest in overthrowing those societies. Sadly, he implies that many people are no longer able to think for themselves. This is because man in mass society has no inner life. He is distracted. He thinks that he is happy. Or he may simply have become ambivalent. Either way, this type of person is a product of what Marx originally referred to as false consciousness. Individuals who suffer from false consciousness find it subsequently difficult to develop a revolutionary consciousness. No longer slaves bound by literal chains; the mind makes its own chains. People find ways to become content in their misery.

How Do We Achieve Freedom and Emancipation From Domination?

Marcuse was less committed to the status quo and far more willing to foresee that the eclipse of the liberal state might be positive – a way to discover and explore the instinctual life of freedom. Power to the people would enable them to snap open the notorious “mind-forg’d manacles” that had so horrified William Blake. Once the domination of technocracy was overcome, Marcuse believed, the people would be free to discover their authentic needs. What the people really wanted could not be reduced to the balloting in the Electoral College, or to other civic institutions that presumably recorded and validated public opinion. Yet there is something rather unsavory about Marcuse telling his readers (and their fellow citizens) that they are trapped in the coils of ersatz satisfactions and values, a condition that the author is smart enough to realize.

Systemic integration and/or social control is now based on satisfying rather than frustrating needs, the trick being that the social system satisfies needs that it itself creates. Marcuse could also have mentioned the ways in which work, family and consumption tend to eat up all the available hours in the day, so people no longer have time for introspection, creative pursuits, diversification of lifeways, or ‘functionless’ socializing – so that, as Hakim Bey puts it, simply finding the time for a group to be together without a basis in work, consumption or family is already a difficult task, and an act of resistance.

More theoretically, Marcuse also argues that prevailing needs can never provide a supreme basis for legitimacy, since the critique of a system also critiques its socially-produced needs. This system has various ways of managing dissent so as to maintain authoritarian closure. ‘Repressive tolerance’, for instance, is a practice whereby dissident perspectives are permitted only by being reduced to ‘opinions’ held as if as private property by individuals, ‘opinions’ the person is entitled to, but which have no pull on others, which nobody is obliged to take seriously as claims to truth, and which the dissident is not entitled to act on.

In 1964, Marcuse looked for the agents of change among those without stakes in an “advanced industrial society.” Three decades after the German proletariat had failed to stop Nazism, Marcuse’s revolutionary faith was limited. It was invested in “the substratum of the outcasts and outsiders, the exploited and persecuted,” and even in “the unemployed and the unemployable.” To this list, he might add oppositionists who were marked neither by homogeneity nor unity: the middle-class white youth who formed the New Left in Europe as well as the United States; the black underclass in the ghettoes; the National Liberation Front in Vietnam; and the Cuban revolutionaries. Marcuse praised them all for subscribing to what he called “the Great Refusal.”

Scarcely a decade after the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale had topped the non-fiction best-seller list with The Power of Positive Thinking (1952), Marcuse invoked the virtues of negative thinking, as a counterweight to “the most efficient system of domination,” which was how he described democracy.

Most devastating for his reputation as a social prognosticator was his failure to anticipate the significance of the reaction to the sixties that the right would soon advance and benefit from. Two years after Marcuse’s death, Ronald Reagan would take his first oath of office. But just as noteworthy has been the rise, which Marcuse did not foresee, of the New Right in Europe. He had certainly grasped the significance of the failure of the working class to follow the Marxist script. But he may not have anticipated how effectively politicians like Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France and Jörg Haider of Austria’s Freedom Party would appeal to voters in that class.

Sources

Excerpts from this post appear in Stephen Whitfield’s article Dissent Magazine. Find the article here.  March 2016.

“This Future Looks Familiar: Watching Blade Runner in 2017,” by Sarah Gailey

Additionally, content is provided by Michael Hartley’s article, “Marcuse on The Two Dimensions of Advanced Industrial Society and The Significance of His Thought Today.” Last accessed March 2016.

“In Theory – Herbert Marcuse: One Dimensional Man?” by Andrew Robinson. Last accessed March 2016.

Discussion Questions

Reflect on our present moment in time and as you think about politics and culture – what analogies can you make using Marcuse’s work to shed light on current events?

How might we see a vision of Marcuse’s man of mass society summoned by the former President Bush, when he exhorted everyone in th U.S. in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to go shopping?

How might you use Marcuse’s work to make sense of the presidential election? What about the rise of social media and computing technology?

How do you find the politics of conformity exert the most pressure on you?

How might we compare Marcuse’s argument to the arguments advanced by Communication Theorists like Marshall Mcluhan and Neil Postman?

Depicted here is the old Athens Lunatic Asylum (now a conference center and art gallery). An ominous structure, the complex of buildings remain standing today, situated high on a hill overlooking Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. As a college freshman in the early 1980’s, your professor was a volunteer here, where I worked in the locked men’s ward.

History

Early psychiatric asylums were imposing structures. Hundreds to hundreds of thousands of patients were held in these buildings for everything from depression to criminal behavior, and then there were those who, medically speaking, suffered from no mental condition at all. Historical records document one of the more common “afflictions” for which people were committed in the Athens Lunatic Asylum was “excessive masturbation.”

These were improvements, however, over no treatment or the condemnation to prisons, which had previously been the norm. Yet eventually many of these new psychiatric facilities saw an unmanageable increase in the number of patients. Staff and investigative journalistic reports indicated the overuse and unnecessary use of treatments in order to manage these growing populations. However, it was not until the 1990s when many of these expansive asylums were completely overhauled into modern medical centers or closed because of underuse, underfunding, or scandal.

Much was learned during that period in psychiatric history, but much remains to be done in terms of advancements and understanding of medical disorders globally. Stories of abuses, tragic deaths, and murders can be found in old newspaper archives for many of these buildings that remain as towering ghosts. Most of the structures have crumbled, but like the memories of their patients, they remain.

This particular asylum was built in 1852 and enlarged on several subsequent occasions in 1859, 1866, 1881 and 1902. Finally closed in 1989/1990, it was bought by a property developer, who a few years later converted half of the site into houses. The main asylum buildings are Grade II listed buildings, which means they are protected and cannot be changed or demolished [we used this lower-level corridor to move between the buildings when the weather was bad. imagine walking here at night!]

Erving Goffman

The full title of sociologist Erving Goffman’s work is Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. The book, although somewhat dated at this point, was considered during its time to be a key text in the development of deinstitutionalization in the United States; it represents one of the first sociological examinations of the social dynamics bound up in being a mental patient.

Theory & Methods

Goffman’s book conveys the substance of his participant observation field work and outlines a theory of what he calls the “total institution.” From Autumn 1954 to the end of 1957 Goffman was a visiting member of the Laboratory of Socio-environmental Studies of the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Goffman conducted field work at St. Elizabeths Hospital, where he posed as a pseudo-employee of the hospital (he was fired to assist the athletic director). This permitted him to make observations and collect ethnographic data on selected aspects of patients’ social life. As it is typically the case with most participant observation studies, controls, measurements, and statistical evidence were not used.

The focus of this book, as Goffman makes clear, is the world of the patient – not the world of the staff. To this end, Goffman made his personal bias a matter of record, for he admitted he arrived at the hospital with no great respect for the agencies involved with psychiatric practice nor for the discipline of psychiatry.

According to David Mechanic, “Goffman brought to the hospital his own personal biography and assumptions, which shaped how he saw events. To a middle-class, independent-minded professor, who strongly valued personal autonomy and the right to be eccentric, the regimentation of the mental hospital must have looked repressive indeed. Later in Goffman’s life, after he had to live through an episode of mental illness involving another person close to him, he is said to have remarked that had he been writing Asylums at that point, it would have been a very different book.”

 

The concept of the total institution is perhaps the most significant theoretical contribution of the book; students of social theory might notice that, as a construct, it shares much in common with Max Weber’s “Ideal Type.” For Goffman, a total institution is a place of work and residence where large numbers of similarly situated people, cut off from the wider community for a considerable time, come together to live an enclosed formally administered life [Note that as we move forward and later take up the work of Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish, we will see yet another example of how a theorist discusses total institutions, which Foucault describes as “complete and austere institutions”].

Goffman’s Typology of Total Institutions – 5 Types

1. Institutions established to care for people felt to be both harmless and incapable: orphanages, poor houses, and nursing homes.
2. Institutions established to care for people felt to be incapable of looking after themselves and a threat to the community, albeit an unintended one:leprosariums, mental hospitals, and tuberculosis sanitariums.
3. Institutions organized to protect the community against what are felt to be intentional dangers to it, with the welfare of the people thus sequestered not the immediate issue: concentration camps, P.O.W. camps, penitentiaries, and jails.
4. Institutions purportedly established to better pursue some worklike tasks and justifying themselves only on these instrumental grounds: colonial compounds, work camps, boarding schools, ships, army barraks, and large mansions from the point of view of those who live in the servants quarters.
5. Institutions designed as retreats from the world even while often serving also as training stations for the religious; examples are convents, abbeys, manasteries, and other cloisters.

Intellectual Focus

A key part of Goffman’s work can be described as “close observation of individual behavior in a social context.”  There are two important ends here — individual behavior and social context.  Goffman wants to shed light on both poles of this description.  In particular, he almost always expresses interest in the social norms that surround action — the expectations and norms through which other people interpret and judge the individual’s conduct.

In Asylums, Goffman is mainly focused on providing descriptive detail as he aims to account for the institutional socialization process that occured when someone was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital. He defines this process as “institutionalization.” He looks at the process and effort that is required in order to instill and maintain predictable and regular behavior on the part of both “guard” and “captive,” suggesting that many of the features of such institutions serve the ritual function of ensuring that both classes of people know their function and social role – this is how they are inescapably institutionalized.

The central feature of total institutions, in Goffman’s view, was that they broke down barriers separating sleep, play, and work. The totalistic features of asylums, he wrote, could be be found in other institutions, namely commercial and medical establishments [and I would add here prisons too].

The handling of many human needs is another key factor of the bureaucratic institution. According to Goffman, the institutionalization process socialises people into the role of a “good patient.” That is, someone who is ‘dull, harmless and inconspicuous’, which in turn reinforces notions of chronicity in severe mental illness. Related to this is a process that Goffman describes as the mortification of the self. A patient’s notions of self was subjected to a dramatic change for the worse due to the debilitating atmosphere in all total institutions, regardless of how therapeutic or non-therapeutic a hospital intended to be.

While people come from a social context in which they have some sense of a personal identity and occupy different roles, these aspects of their lives are systematically stripped from them as their sense of themselves are mortified, pathogolized and negated, leading to what Goffman defines as “disculturation.” Here, instead of curing or reducing the illness, this process leads to demoralization, skill deterioration and role dispossession and renders people less capable of managing life in the outward world. Goffman notes that in addition to disculturation from their identity and previous roles, acculturating patients and inmates to life in a total institution does little, if anything, to prepare them for the contingencies they will encounter again upon  discharge; it prepares them only for remaining within the institutional setting.

 

Goffman concludes from his investigation that taking a mentally ill person out of his or her life context, hospitalizing him or her to a psychiatric hospital and then returning the person to the same life context is similar to taking a drowning man out of a lake, teaching him how to ride a bicycle and putting him back into the lake.

During the “inpatient phase,” patients arrive at a realization that society has forsaken them.

Over time patient/inmates acquire strong feelings about their time spent there, which they tend to think of as time taken from one’s life or time wasted.

Human needs in the asylum are handled in an impersonal and bureaucratic mode.

The social distance between the staff and inmates is great; each group develops and antipathy, where they tend to be unfriendly toward the other.

The book concludes that adjusting the inmates to their role has at least as much importance as “curing” them. In the essay “Notes on the Tinkering Trades” Goffman concluded that the “medicalization” of mental illness and the various treatment modalities are offshoots of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution; that the so-called “medical model” for treating patients was a variation on the way trades and craftsmen of the late 19th century repaired clocks and other mechanical objects.

 

Other Studies & Perspectives

Asylums is one of a number of books published in the 1950s and 1960s that explored the characteristics of psychiatric hospitals, which doubtless had a major impact on patients and affected the course of their illness. Other prominent works include studies by Stanton and Schwartz (1954), Belknap (1956), Dunham and Weinberg (1960), Strauss et al. (1964), and Scheff (1966). These studies all relied on qualitative data in describing the meaning of psychiatric hospitalization for patients, criticized the psychiatric hospital and charged that it had a harmful effect on them.

Belknap (1956), Dunham and Weifiberg (1960), Goffman (1961), Cumming and Cumming (1962) pointed out the fact that closed institutional regimes, with their common accompaniments of neglect, pauperism, and authoritarianism, were not only inhumane but harmful. As was the case in Goffman’s work, the hospital was portrayed as an authoritarian system that forces patients to define themselves as mentally ill, change their behavior and thinking, adjust to institutional life, accept restrictions and suffer humiliations.

Franco Basaglia, a leading Italian psychiatrist who inspired and was the architect of psychiatric reform in Italy also defined the mental hospital as an oppressive, locked and total institution, in which prison-like punitive rules are applied to patients, so that the person’s self-concept is gradually broken down in such a way as it eliminates its subjective contents. Patients, doctors, and nurses are all similarly subjected (at different levels) to the same process of institutionalism.

 

Critics, however, cast doubt on Goffman’s claims and question the acuracy of his critique. Numerous studies have been done relevant to Goffman’s depiction of the experience of the mental patient, using patient surveys. None of these studies has the theoretical brilliance of Goffman’s work or the quality of his insight, but they consistently fail to replicate his view of the patient’s experience (Linn 1968a, 1968b; Weinstein 1979, 1983, 1994).

One critic, Raymond Weinstein, reviewed the empirical literature and presented a report that examined the importance and applicability of Goffman’s Asylums three decades after its first publication. Goffman’s book, he writes:

“Achieved classic status due to its extensive academic citation, anthology reprinting, use in legal proceedings, and public influence. However, over the years the accuracy and generalizability of Goffman’s total institution model of mental hospitals have been seriously questioned.

An analysis of the criticisms of Goffman’s theories, methods, and conclusions suggested that his work was biased and deficient in a number of ways but at times was misinterpreted or misrepresented. As a research study Asylums may be outdated and of little value to mental health practitioners due to the revolutionary changes in psychiatry that have occurred since the mid-1950s. As an academic work, however, Asylums continues to enjoy a high reputation perhaps because of its theoretical utility and teaching value as well as the popularity of Goffman’s many other published works. The total institution model may have been limited from the start and doubts remain as to its validity today, but the longevity of Asylums is assured as Goffman’s picture of mental hospitalization is firmly planted in the minds of sociologists, psychiatrists, patients’ rights advocates, and students of formal organizations.”

It is the view of Weinstein and a number of other researchers that most patients did not report feeling betrayed; many, in fact, reported being helped by hospitalization, and viewed the hospital as a refuge from impossible problems and stresses. Moreover, some patients from disadvantaged backgrounds viewed the hospital experience as less coercive and less depriving than their usual life situation. The studies do provide evidence of stigma associated with mental illness but negate the profoundly negative conception of the experience depicted by Goffman.

Goffman’s observations, nonetheless, remain credible because readers of his analysis find his depictions meaningful and convincing, because he makes it easy for them to see themselves as the hypothetical patient in the context he describes. Goffman in this respect conveys a certain kind of “truth” that cannot be easily dismissed. This type of contextual credibility is often persuasive, having the quality of verstehen embodied in the methodology of Max Weber.

 

Sources

Erving Goffman (1961) Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates.

Raymond M. Weinstein (1994) “Goffman’s Asylums and the Social Situation of Mental Patients.” Psychiatry, (Nov): 57 (4):348-67.

David Mechanic (1989) “Medical Sociology: Some Tensions Among Theory , Method, and Substance,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Vol. 30 (June): 147-160.

Cynthia Pelayo (2013) Essential  Guide: Abandoned Insane Asylums. Downloaded from http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abandoned-insane-asylums  Last accessed Feb 13, 2016.

Discussion Questions

Institutional social settings establish the categories of persons that are likely to be encountered there; the routines and rules of social intercourse are established in these settings and they permit us to get on with our business without having to committ too much special attention or thought. What are some of the institutional social rules that govern social interaction in college that you picked up on? How did you become “institutionalized” and learn how to assume the role of the “good student?”

Describe a different social setting (using any or as many of Goffman’s concepts as you can) in which you have been a participant, such as at a hospital, prison, or any other structured institutional setting. Be sure to cite a specific concept and explain how it applied to your experience.

How might Goffman’s work be used to explain what academics refer to as the “School to Prison” pipeline?

How might our present patterns of incarceration in the United States reflect some of these echoes from the past?

Why Everyone So Turnt?

When Beyoncé took to the field during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show, she had a political message to convey. No everyone, of course, agreed with the message, nor did they interpret it the same way. Some people were inspired. Others read the perfomance as a call to violence.

Clad in a black leotard with a gold embellished jacket, Beyoncé was flanked by dancers who sported afros and black berets – a clear reference to the Black Panther Party (2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party). Not everyone appreciated the message. Perhaps most telling, by focusing on superficial comparisons between her dancers and the Black Panthers, they betrayed a lack of understanding of history; they failed to appreciate the details and the nuances of that history, of which Beyonce demonstrated clear understanding with regard to the role they played int the struggle for civil rights in the United States.

The Black Pather history, to be sure, was willfully invoked. Though Beyoncé’s outfit was intended to evoke a similar fashion statement made by Michael Jackson. And if this was not enough to disturb critics, Beyoncé and her backup dancers together gave a salute and formed an X formation, which the Twitterverse quickly declared to be a reference to Malcom X.  Later that night (and some might say adding insult to injury), her dancers were filmed in a video that was posted on the Black Lives Matter Twitter page. In the video clip, the dancers held up a sign that read “Justice 4 Mario Woods” [Woods was shot and killed in San Francisco by police officers on the afternoon of Dec. 2, 2015].

Photo Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports

Doubtless, Beyoncé was  making a political statement. And despite the fact that many praised her for this, critics acused her “politicizing” the Super Bowl. One such critic, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was interviewed on the Fox network and had this to say: “I think it was outrageous.”  He further added that didn’t “get it” from an artistic standpoint and didn’t agree with Beyoncé’s support of “Black Lives Matter.”

“The halftime show I thought was ridiculous anyway. I don’t know what the heck it was. A bunch of people bouncing around and all strange things. It was terrible,” Giuliani said.

Giuliani went on to explain his view that the performance was offensive to “middle Americans,” whom he said expect the Super Bowl to provide “wholesome” family entertainment. Giuliani rejected the political statement. “This is football, not Hollywood,” he said, “and I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive.”

Beyoncé shown wearing a bandolier of bullets, similar to the one famously worn by Michael Jackson when he performed in the Super Bowl during his 1993 world tour.

Formation – “I Came to Slay”

One day before taking the stage with Coldplay and Bruno Mars at Super Bowl 50, Beyoncé released the music track and video “Formation” — her first new single since 2014. Set against the backdrop of New Orleans, the video includes references to Hurricane Katrina, Creole culture and police brutality — oh, and hot sauce! Her daughter, Blue Ivy, also has a cameo.

The video, much like her superbowl performance, was interpreted as a rallying cry for the “Black Lives Matter” movement. That “Formation” references Black Lives Matter is clear; it includes an image of Beyoncé on top of a sinking police car, walls strewn with “Stop Shooting Us” graffiti, and a young African American boy in a hoodie dancing in front of police officers. The title of the track itself, “Formation,” evokes military parlance for a coordinated assembly of soldiers. Beyoncé’s critique, however, does not stop and end here. She used her performance to give a vocie to other issues and problems like racism.

Colorism, Complexion, and Worth

Academics, while generally positive about Beyoncé’s performance, have called attention to problems with her representation of race and ethnicity in Formation. Yaba Blay, a dark-skinned, New Orleans-bred scholar, whose research addresses issues of skin color and identity politics, suggested there may be problems afoot with regard to race and representation. Beyoncé, she points out, was also sending about complexion and worth. Blay notes: “While Bey let all the folks who’ve been talking crazy about Blue Ivy’s hair have it with, “I like my baby hair, with baby hair and afros,” I can’t help but wonder why the two little girls in the video playing with Blue are significantly darker than her and dressed like old women afraid of the sun while Blue shines, hand on hip, in a sundress.” I cheer Bey on as she sings, “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.” But I cringe when I hear her chant, “You mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas bamma” about her Alabama-born dad and her mom from Louisiana. This is the same reason I cringed at the L’Oreal ad that identified Beyonce  as African-American, Native American and French and why I don’t appreciate her largely unknown song “Creole.” Having grown up black-Black (read: dark-skinned) in colorstruck New Awlins, hearing someone, particularly a woman, make a distinction between Creole and “Negro” is deeply triggering.This isn’t just for me but for many New Orleanians.

For generations, Creoles—people descended from a cultural/racial mixture of African, French, Spanish and/or Native American people—have distinguished themselves racially from “regular Negroes.” In New Orleans, phenotype— namely, “pretty color and good hair” —translates to (relative) power.”

“In this context,” Blay continues, “people who are light skinned, with non-kinky hair and the ability to claim a Creole heritage have had access to educational, occupational, social and political opportunities that darker skinned, kinkier-haired, non-Creole folks have been denied. In many ways, among those of us who are not Creole and whose skin is dark brown, the claiming of a Creole identity is read as rejection. And I’m not just talking about history books or critical race theory. I’m talking about on-the-ground, real-life experiences.”

And so she concludes: “So while it may seem innocent that Beyoncé describes herself as a mixture of Creole and “Negro,” this particular celebration of her self invokes a historical narrative that forces some of us to look at her sideways. Even in the midst of her Blackest Blackity Black Blackness, we find remnants of anti-Blackness. And yet, we still rock with her.”

Comparing the Black Panthers to the KKK

People questioned Beyoncé’s use of Black Panther-type uniforms, whereupon they invoked a comparison with the KKK. They asked “would it be acceptable if a band – a white band – came out in hoods and white sheets? The problem here lies in the false equivalency that is suggested; equivalence between the Black Panthers and the KKK.

On the contrary, not only is this a false equivalency, it is overtly reductionist to suggest both are simply subversive hate groups that practice racial antipathy towards groups defined as their racial opposite. A brief history lesson is in order (though I would encourage you to look into this history in greater depth):

The Ku Klux Klan started in the south in the late 1800’s.The Klan is primarily a white supremacist group, but it was and remains a hate group, guilty of terrorist acts and hate crimes. Donning their famous “white sheets,” it is estimated that the KKK was, for a period of more than 100 years, responsible for terrorizing, raping, castrating, burning, and murdering thousands of black people in the U.S.

The Black Panthers were created to fight for the civil and economic right of African Americans in the U.S. They also wanted to address the police brutality and economic injustice in the Black community. So for example, they developed programs to address black unemployment and stop childhood hunger. In contrast with Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers rebuked his calls for non-violence as ineffectual, and called instead for blacks to defend themselves by taking up arms. In their view, social, political, and economic institutions were not serving black people, and so they were willing to use violence if necessary to bring about social change.

While the acts of violence by both groups are inexcusable, the actions conducted by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were far worse that those of the Black Panthers. The KKK had the funding and resources to attack large groups of blacks in addition to other ethnic groups they hated, without fear of intervention by the community and law enforcement. In other words, the Klan enjoyed a structurally advantaged position from which they projected power over minority groups in the U.S. The Black Panthers did not occupy a similar equivalent structural position of power; they were not practicing “reverse racism” against whites. Rather, they sought to defend themselves against people that they saw engaged in systematically sanctioned activity aimed at oppressing them.

Nonetheless, while the Black Panther Party believed in Black nationalism and Black culture, it did not believe either will lead to Black liberation or the overthrow of the capitalist system.

The Klan, on the other hand, targeted entire racial groups; this poses a direct contrast with the Black Panthers, who directed their violence at people that they believed had intent to harm them. It is also worthy of note that the Black Panthers allowed members of other races to join their cause, provided they were willing to take up arms.

Twitter Breaks It Down

What’s Race Got To Do With It?

It took a comedian from the Daily Show to put the controversy into perspective. Jessica Williams, perhaps more than any other journalist, managed to call attention to the contradictions – and in many cases the outright hypocrisy – of media coverage of  Beyoncé’s performance. She gave Fox’s Stuart Varney and everyone who agrees with him the answer they didn’t want to hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GWsf4KYWVQ

“Race was brought in,” she said “because Beyoncé was brought in and, brace yourself, you might want to sit down for this, but Beyoncé is… black! And as a black person, you walk around every day constantly reminded that you are black. Beyoncé is black and this song is her message. And good artists get their message across, whether they’re playing for three people in a bar or hundreds of millions at the Super Bowl.”

Challenging Guiliani’s interpretation (and disgust) of the performance, Williams conceded one point in regards to the issue of wholesome entertainment:

“The fans deserve wholesome entertainment……like watching 300-pound men give each other concussions while the crowd cheers like we’re extras in Gladiator?”

“So, what is wrong with Beyoncé, everyone? Were you not entertained?”

Black Lives Matter activist Erika Totten said Beyoncé’s message accomplished exactly what the movement is supposed to. “I think [the message] absolutely belongs in the Super Bowl,” Totten said. “Our goal is to disrupt the status quo and bring the message wherever the message may not be heard.”

Meanwhile, “Black Lives Matter” activist Deray McKesson hailed the star’s performance, tweeting “At its core, she is reminding us that economic justice is a key component to liberation work.” And he cannot recall a time when Beyoncé brought a political message to a spotlight as mainstream as the Super Bowl.

Bakari Kitwana, the CEO of Rap Sessions and author of the “Hip-Hop activism in the Obama Era,” says that while mainstream stars like Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z have not necessarily portrayed themselves as activists, they are evolving and they have access to mainstream platforms. “There’s definitely an evolution going on with Beyoncé. It shows you how smart she is. She’s tapping into the same consumer culture that she’s always tapped into but she’s doing it with some political overtones.”  “In terms of Black Lives Matter, we’re in this really hyper politicized movement where blackness is being discussed in the mainstream, so it’s a smart move for her to play with that type of imagery,” Kitwana said. “it achieved what it was meant to do. People are talking about it.”

 Why is Black Empowerment Always Construed to be Anti-Police?

One of the more  troubling narratives that emerges from the controversey is how Black empowerment is conflated with the position of being “anti-police.” Realistically speaking, however, U.S. history more or less furnishes the reasons for this: policing in the U.S. was founded on the formation of what were known as “slave patrols.”  White plantation owners hired and paid white law men to capture and return to custody runaway slaves, who even after the Civil War were still treated as property. The institution was in this sense founded upon an ideology of white supremacist capitalism.

Today, some might argue not much has changed since that era – that police are still working on behalf of the moneyed classes, where they continue to focus their policing efforts on black people. Order and control of black bodies is prioritized over social justice.

Blacks, in turn, established their history as one that resisted (and continues to resist) that opression. Claiming their power has in this in respect always meant resisting the police.

A History of Violence

Last but not least, we might want to reflect on the collective outrage that is being focused on an entertainer using their art and public platform to make a statement about police violence. That this occurs as part of a sporting event that glorifies as well as embodies interpersonal violence says a lot about the people who are doing the complaining. The real outrage should be reserved for the almost daily killings of American citizens at the hands of police in this country.

To say that this violence does not discriminate is to miss the point: blacks are killed at a rate documented to be more than 20 times the rate of other racial/ethnic groups in this country. For many people, not only is this not problematic, it is assumed to be deserved. Failure to obey = death. Black violence is taken to be pathological, whereas police violence, if it is recognized at all, it assumed to be normal and appropriate.

Rather than channeling outrage at a black woman’s dance performance, maybe it’s time to take a hard look at how violence is more than a spectacle – it is institutionalized and fundamentally ingrained in American culture.

Sources

Information contained in this post was derived in part from the following articles:

Yaba Blay (2016) “On ‘Jackson Five Nostrils,’ Creole vs. ‘Negro’ and Beefing Over Beyonce’s ‘Formation.'” Published in “Colorlines.”

Fox News online – Downloaded from http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2016/02/08/beyonce-references-black-panther-party-at-super-bowl-halftime-show Last accessed Feb 2016.

CNN News online – Downloaded from http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/08/politics/beyonce-super-bowl-black-lives-matter/ Last accessed Feb 2016.

Discussion Questions

What did you think of the performance?

Did you like it or were you offended? Please explain.

How do race, class, and gender operate together, both in terms of the performance as well as in people’s different responses to the performance?

Do you think it is appropriate to conflate Black power/empowerment with the political position of being anti-police?

Do you think being “pro” police accountability is the same as being anti-police?

How does Beyoncé and her work embody the “contradictions” of capitalism?

You all might recall from Introduction to Sociology courses that Max Weber introduced the term “life chances” to describe probable outcomes, given certain factors, that an individual’s life will turn out a certain way. According to this theory, life chances are positively correlated with one’s socioeconomic status.

I want to suggest now that we think about “life chances” and education, particularly in light of the so called “choices” that students are assumed to make about which university they will attend. An article published in Inside Higher Education looks at this topic and reports the following. Ellen Wexler writes:

If only tuition were lower, and high school students were armed with better data. That’s the idea that has guided the policy discussion about college access and affordability: to make better enrollment decisions, the story goes, students need money and information. But that narrative misses an important point about how students make decisions: for many students, where they go to college depends largely on where they live, according to a study commissioned by the American Council on Education.

The majority of incoming freshmen attending public four-year colleges and universities enroll within 50 miles of their home, the study found. And the farther students live from any particular college, the less likely they are to enroll.

“The zip code that a child is born into oftentimes determines their life chances,” said Nick Hillman, an author of the study and assistant professor of education leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Place matters because it reinforces existing inequalities.”

At public four-year colleges, the median distance students live from home is 18 miles. That number is 46 miles for private nonprofit four-year colleges, and only eight miles at public two-year colleges.

But when it comes to college choice, Hillman thinks geography is overlooked. Policy makers focus too much on expanding students’ awareness of their possible choices, he said, without realizing that students’ options are already limited.

The study points to tools like the College Scorecard, which are intended to help students make informed, thoughtful decisions about where to enroll. But if a student needs to stay close to her family, what will she gain by learning that the perfect institution is hundreds of miles away?

“The conversation pretty much ends with, ‘Hey, get better information in the hands of students,’” Hillman said. “But the way that prospective students use information is very different depending on what kinds of students you’re looking at.”

The crux of the problem is a misalignment of expectations: from policy makers’ perspective, students would attend college at whatever institution is best for them. But for some students, location is nonnegotiable — and often, that means their options are dramatically limited.

For upper-class students, having more information might help; they have the flexibility to travel, and they can afford to shop around. But it isn’t enough for working-class students, who may need to choose from the options available nearby.

“Most of the conversations today overlooks the working-class student and prioritizes the upper-class student,” Hillman said. “It’s just really frustrating from the academic side — and even more frustrating from a policy angle.”

Education Deserts

And for working-class students who want to stay close to home, what happens when there aren’t any colleges nearby? No matter how well-informed these students are, they don’t end up with many options.

These are students who live in what the study calls “education deserts.” An area qualifies as an education desert if there aren’t any colleges at all, or if one community college is the only broad-access public institution nearby.

An education desert can include private and public colleges that are particularly selective. That’s because local residents may not be accepted into those colleges — which means they have even fewer options. And if there’s only one community college within commuting distance, that’s likely where those residents will end up.

The dark shaded areas in this grahic represent “Education Deserts” for student commuters.

“The role of community colleges is paramount,” said Lorelle Espinosa, assistant vice president at ACE’s Center for Policy Research and Strategy. “We need to be thinking about the institutions that exist in these places and making sure they are equipped to serve students.”

Policy makers need to focus on solutions that will help all students, she added, not just those with the freedom to travel.

Most of the country’s education deserts are in the Midwest and Great Plains states, the study found. Community colleges enroll over half of students who live in education deserts, while private institutions account for less than 15 percent of education desert enrollments.

“Every state should have a good inventory of their deserts,” Hillman said. “They should know exactly what colleges are operating in these areas, to what extent they’re serving their communities.”

And after that, Hillman thinks policy makers should look at how they fund their colleges in education deserts, perhaps switching from performance-based models to equity-based models. In areas where opportunity is slim, he said, policy makers need to focus on building up the colleges that serve their communities.

Hillman’s family lives in northern Indiana, where only a few broad-access public colleges serve large numbers of students. But not all policy makers have lived in an area where opportunities are so slim. And that, Hillman said, is why they overlook geography: many of them traveled far from home to attend college, and many of their children have done the same.

“Policy makers are not in tune with the reality of how working-class families make decisions,” he said.

Sources

“Geography Matters,” by Ellen Wexler.

Downloaded from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/02/03/when-students-enroll-college-geography-matters-more-policy-makers-think?utm_content=buffer83574&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=IHEbuffer Last accessed Feb 3, 2016.

Discussion Questions

How much did geography factor into your decision of what college to attend? Did you choose a school that offered a particular professional or social environment, one the had a “best in class” program, or simply a school that was commuting distance from your neighborhood?

If you chose a local school, did ever enter into your thought process that you might want to attend a non-local school. If so, what prevented you from attending a non-local school?

 

While many of us don’t suffer from clinical levels of anxiety when using a public toilet, this particular social space is, nevertheless, fraught with contradiction, anxiety, and taboo. The public toilette, hidden in plain sight, inspires a wide range of compensating behaviors and personal social rituals—i.e. leaving a proper amount of space at the urinals, avoiding conversation even with people you know, flushing toilets to eliminate sounds and smells. This somewhat bizzzare realm of ritualistivc behavior is well-known to those who experience them, if not daily at an office, then in other places – schools, bars, restaurants, ball parks, and airports.

The public collides uncomfortably with the private in the bathroom as it does nowhere else, and the unique behaviors we perform stem from a complex psychological stew of shame, self-awareness, design, and gender roles. If you boiled this stew down, though, it’d come down to boundaries—the stalls and dividers that physically separate us, and the social boundaries we create with our behavior when those don’t feel like enough.

In an increasingly sex-positive culture, it seems like bathroom issues are the last thing most people are reluctant to talk about. Serious attempts to research bathroom behavior or design have been done by just a few people who have been willing to break the taboo. One of these, Nick Haslam, author of Psychology in the Bathroom, explains that we attach “shame and secrecy” to the bathroom from a very early age, and that some of that is evolutionary.

“Part of that is surely due to the fact that we are socialized from an early age to control excretion and taught that failures of control are embarrassing and humiliating,” he told me via email. “And from an early age we learn that excretion is something you do on your own, behind closed doors…Another reason for the taboo is perhaps an entirely adaptive and evolved aversion to bodily waste, which is linked to disease and contamination. To some degree there will always be some anxiety and disgust attached to excretion for this reason.”

But he also notes that talking about bathroom issues wasn’t always this taboo. If we’ve talked about it before, we can talk about it again, and in talking, maybe find ways to ease some of the anxieties people feel in public bathrooms, and reduce the need for us to be so vigilant about policing our behavior.

History

Until the 1800’s, there was little expectation of privacy while using the bathroom. Economic prosperity and religious notions of modesty made the desire for a private space in which to do one’s business more widespread. Today, most people living in developed countries expect privacy in the bathroom. Paradoxically, most bathrooms outside of private homes are designed for multiple, simultaneous occupants.

In his 1976 book, The Bathroom, Alexander Kira wrote: “Most of our feelings about the body, sex, elimination, privacy, and cleanliness are magnified in this context of ‘publicness,’ for the fact of publicness, with its inevitable territorial violations and loss of privacy, increases our apprehensions.” We want privacy for our own elimination, and privacy from other people doing theirs.

“Toilet activities are highly personal and ordinarily occur backstage of life,” says Harvey Molotch, a professor of sociology and metropolitan studies at New York University and co-editor of Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing. “You have this really harsh tension between the public and the private, which I don’t think exists anywhere else. That’s troublesome, it has to be settled in some way.” How it’s usually settled in the U.S. is with metal partitions, which Molotch says are “just made with the flimsiest crap.” This is just for stalls of course—men’s urinals typically have even less substantial partitions, if indeed they are divided at all. Obviously, these physical boundaries, though they may protect you from being seen (or may not, entirely, if there are gaps in the stall door), do not protect you from being heard, or smelled.

Because these physical boundaries alone are, for most of us, insufficient, we have to reinforce them with our behavior. A 1985 study called “Meanwhile Backstage: Public Bathrooms and the Interaction Order” notes that “it is not physical boundaries, per se, that define a space as a stall but the behavioral regard given such boundaries.” This is why conversation usually ceases once you enter a stall (and if you do dare to talk, it’s normally to a friend, not a stranger), why we say “Sorry” and quickly retreat if we accidentally open an occupied stall, why we politely ignore any sounds or smells that emanate from nearby stalls—because we want others to do the same for us. These are generally understood behavioral guidelines, but the situation is very different in men’s and women’s bathrooms.

Gendering the Toilet

Biologically speaking, men and women don’t need separate bathrooms—they’re using them for the same reasons. While there are a few functional differences—many men prefer to pee standing, women need receptacles to throw away tampons and pads—it’s not hard to imagine a unisex bathroom that would, at least in theory, work for everyone. In reality, an ingrained sense of modesty about concealing our bodies from the opposite sex might prevent such a bathroom’s success, but many single-user public bathrooms are already unisex.

As prominent sociologist Erving Goffman noted in his 1977 essay The Arrangement Between the Sexes, “the functioning of sex-differentiated organs is involved, but there is nothing in this functioning that biologically recommends segregation; that arrangement is totally a cultural matter.” This culturally agreed-upon separation creates unique single-sex spaces. There is perhaps no other arena that so stridently reinforces gender separation and difference.

“Public toilets…frequently instantiate the most literal and entrenched social division—the division of people into two unchanging sexes,” writes Ruth Barcan, senior lecturer in the department of gender and cultural studies at the University of Sydney, in her chapter for Toilet. “This form of segregation is at once immensely naturalized and immensely policed, the most taken-for-granted social categorization and the most fiercely regulated.”

“When men and women are exclusively in the company of their own sex, for women it’s often liberating; for men it’s often anxiety-inducing.” The nature of these single-sex spaces affects men’s and women’s attitudes toward using the bathroom, as well as their behavior in them.

The arrangement works out in women’s favor, according to Sarah Moore, a senior lecturer at the Royal Holloway University of London’s Centre for Criminology and Sociology. In the bathroom, people are free of the typical gender hierarchy of the co-ed public sphere—in which men are at the top. “This shines a light on what it means for men and women to be exclusively in the company of their own sex,” Moore told me in an email. “For women this is often liberating; for men it’s often anxiety-inducing.”

In a study published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2012, Moore, along with Simon Breeze, observed 20 public toilets in London and Bristol, and interviewed the men and women who used them. She found that though both sexes had plenty of complaints, women’s were more about the cleanliness and quality of the facilities than anxiety about other occupants. They were more relaxed and social overall, chatting with strangers in line, watching doors for each other, sharing makeup.

Men, on the other hand, were on edge. Moore goes so far in the study as to say that for men, public toilets are “nightmarish spaces.” The anxiety they reported was centered around “watching”—being watched by other men, or being perceived to be watching other men—and that this watching was linked to the possibility of sexual violence.

Photo Credit: Sandra Trappen, taken in Venice Italy, 2014.

The Male Gaze in the Bathroom

The theory Moore lays out is that, in public, the gender hierarchy makes women the ones who are watched (under the “male gaze,” as it were). But in the bathroom, sans women, men worry about being the object of another man’s gaze, a feeling they don’t often confront in other places. This can make them fearful, even if there’s no real threat present.

“Many of the men we interviewed felt that they’d experienced implied violence (things like odd and overly-long looks that they felt to portend sexual violence),” Moore says. “This could just be a perception of course. Once we start feeling unsure of a space, we’re perhaps more likely to read danger into a situation that was actually perfectly fine. Here’s what I think: The threat of sexual violence in men’s public bathrooms is actually minimal; it’s the nature of that threat—not just to men’s safety, but to their sense of masculinity—that prompts feelings of anxiety.”

And from this anxiety is born the famous urinal rule. It is well-known, even among women who have never had occasion to use a urinal, that it is expected that men not use a urinal directly next to someone else. (Some women I’ve spoken with have said they prefer to have an empty stall as a buffer between themselves and others also, but it is a much stronger norm in men’s bathrooms).

Good, “OK,” and bad urinal design, according to Soifer (Courtesy Steve Soifer)

“Toilet etiquette requires that one adopts an attitude that resembles that of the perfectly alone individual in Sartre’s writing.” The vulnerability and exposure of using a urinal seems to create the need for additional social boundaries, in place of even “flimsy” physical ones.

A famous, though ethically questionable, study from 1976 found that invading this socially agreed-upon bubble of personal space made it much more difficult for men to pee. To discover this, one researcher hid in a bathroom stall and watched men at the urinals through a periscope, timing the “delay and persistence” of urination when a confederate came into the bathroom and stood right next to or one urinal removed from the unknowing participant. The closer the confederate was, the longer the delay before the man was able to go, and the less time he peed overall. Whether he would have been able to go at all had he known someone was spying on him through a periscope, no one can say.

Making Eye Contact and “Dropping Trou”

The Goffman-coined term “civil inattention” is the scientific way to describe how men often treat each other at the urinal, and how people treat strangers in the bathroom generally. While one person might acknowledge another with a glance, he then immediately withdraws his attention. As the 1985 study put it, “through this brief pattern of visual interaction, individuals both acknowledge one another’s presence and, immediately thereafter, one another’s right to be let alone.” When forced through circumstance to use adjacent urinals, this civil inattention gets bumped up to what the study calls “nonperson treatment,” in which someone simply treats his neighbor as if he does not exist.

Existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book Being and Nothingness, wrote about the self-consciousness that can arise when one feels like one is being watched: “What I apprehend immediately when I hear the branches crackling behind me is not that there is someone there; it is that I am vulnerable, that I have a body which can be hurt….in short, that I am seen.”

In the bathroom, feeling that you are seen can leave you too self-conscious to go. A social contract not to look at one another, to treat each other as objects, may help alleviate that. As Moore writes in her study, “Toilet etiquette requires that one adopts an attitude that very closely resembles that of the perfectly alone individual in Sartre’s writing.”

The urinal rule and its obsession with not-looking may be a behavioral boundary designed to enhance bathroom-goers comfort and sense of privacy, but it also smacks of homophobia, especially when you consider Moore’s finding that many men worry about sexual violence in the bathroom. Nolan Feeney, a former colleague of mine, expressed discomfort with the connotations of the urinal rule.

Why I am Afraid of the Bathroom – Homophobia and Transgender Anxiety in the Bathroom

The urinal rule may be designed to enhance comfort and privacy, but it also smacks of homophobia. “What is the implication here?” he asked. “That guys aren’t going to respect each other’s privacy? That proximity leads people to take a sneak peek? Some people are pee-shy, and that is totally understandable, but the take-away of the informal rule of urinal space often isn’t that some dudes like their space, it’s that some dudes—particularly queer dudes—can’t be trusted.” Moore says some of the answers she got in her study were homophobic, but that it was generally not because they feared other gay men but because the men themselves wanted to “reinforce that they weren’t gay.”

Molotch adds that “homophobia is certainly playing a role, and helps to make it very tense.”

Public bathrooms are also often fraught with tension for transgender people, who, if they want to use the bathroom designated for their true gender, may be bullied or derided for doing so. But using the bathroom of their birth gender is similarly stressful. A school in Thailand solved this problem by offering students a “transsexual toilet,” and gender-neutral bathrooms are becoming increasingly common as a way of addressing this issue—even mandated by law for all new or renovated buildings in Philadelphia.

Carl Charles writes:

“As a transgender person, I don’t take small things for granted. I appreciate the store clerk who calls me “sir,” my colleagues who don’t struggle with my name or pronouns, and most important to my daily routine, I appreciate every uneventful trip to and from the bathroom.

To cisgender (non-transgender) people, going to the bathroom is a small thing, a normal and thoughtless part of their day, as routine as breathing air. To me, many other trans people, and anyone who doesn’t fit rigid norms of masculinity and femininity, just locating a bathroom  where we will be safe causes anxiety, fear, and takes a great deal of time and effort.

There is widespread fear about trans people being able to go to the bathroom like everyone else does. Fear of how we might be different. Misinformation that somehow letting us go to the bathroom will make other people unsafe. Though there is no data to support that fear, there is data to show that trans people continue to be bullied, harassed and worse just for simply existing.”

Single-person restrooms are another option to ease bathroom tension, for the LGBT community as well as for paruretics, for whom social rituals are not enough to ease their anxiety. “Nothing gives me more happiness when I walk into a place and they only have a single stall bathroom,” Sanchez says. “There’s no stress, I can just relax. It’s like a spa.”

We Just Need to Pee

Not long ago, a law was passed in Texas that its proponents argued was designed to simplify where people can lawfully use public restrooms in the state. The law was drafted as a response to controversial city ordinances, such as the HERO (Housing Equal Rights Ordinance) ordinance in Houston, which opened bathrooms, showers, and dressing facilities to all, regardless of gender, gender identity, or gender expression. Plano, Texas passed a similar ordinance in December 2014. And North Carolina, as of March 2016, passed its own version of the law.

Briefly put, the bill and now law criminalizes the acto of entering a shower or toilet facility designated for the opposite sex. The legislation, furthermore, makes it a state jail felony offense for an operator, manager, superintendent, or other person with authority over a “building” to allow an individual who is 7 years or older to repeatedly enter facilities designated for persons of the opposite gender. “Building” is defined under the bill as “a public building, schoolhouse, theater, filling station, tourist court, bus station, or tavern.”

House bill 1748 defined gender as follows: “the gender established at the individual’s birth or the gender established by the individual’s chromosomes.” A male is defined as “an individual with at least one X chromosome and at least one Y chromosome.” A female is defined as “an individual with at least one X chromosome and no Y chromosomes.”The “Bathroom Bill” further provides that “If an individual’s gender established at the individual’s birth is not the same as the individual’s gender established by the individual’s chromosomes, the individual’s gender established by the individual’s chromosomes controls under this section.”

In the words of one legislator, the author and sponsor of the bill Rep. Debbie Riddle said:

“My ‘Bathroom Bill’ is simple common sense – men go to the men’s room, and women go to the women’s restroom. It protects the privacy and safety of women and children.” She continued “It is sad we even need a bill like this in today’s society.” 

Not to be overlooked is the fact that the Texas law not only impacts trans identified people, it effectively guts ordinances that were designed to protect ALL people. That’s because the suspended  ordinances were originally designed to protect equal access rights for everyone, not defined narrowly in terms of restrooms, but also for public accommodation, housing, city employment, city contracting, and private employment.

As part of a campaign to to fight the passage of the then bill, activists circulated selfies taken in bathrooms to point up the visual absurdity of creating such a law. For example, under the new law, the person depicted in the photo below is technically/legally compelled to use a women’s restroom, or they will face criminal felony sanction.

Poop & Pee Paruretics

Sanchez first had to face her fear of pooping in public when she attended a summer program at a Philadelphia college in high school, and had no choice but to use the standard dorm bathroom. “I was forced to poop while other girls were showering,” she says. “Probably for four days I just refused to poop, which is obviously unhealthy. And I was apparently not the only one. Some other girl on my program got sent to the hospital because she went seven days without releasing the contents of her colon.” This is why she developed her iPod strategy, which she carried into college. She says this traumatizing experience left her anxious about peeing in public bathrooms too, whereas before she’d been okay with it [Note: paruretics/paruresis refers to people who suffer from an anxiety disorder that makes it difficult to urinate in public. The condition is also known by many colloquial terms, including “bashful bladder,” “stage fright,” and “shy bladder syndrome”].

Now, in the workplace, she has new strategies. “I walk in, I immediately scan every door,” she says. “I take in the situation and if there’s nobody in there, I start running. I sit down and am immediately yelling at myself ‘Go, go, go, you can do it, goooooo!” But if someone comes in before she’s able to pee, it’s over. As she explains, “paruretics have all sorts of routines. One of the classics is, if you walk in after someone, you wash your hands until they leave.” “I call it my failure to launch,” she says. In that case she’ll either wait for the person to leave, or pretend that she’s already finished, flush, wash her hands, and leave.

Soifer has seen similar strategies among paruretics he’s worked with. “There’s all sorts of routines, we’ve all developed them,” he says. “One of the classics is, if you walk in after someone, you wash your hands until they leave.” Soifer runs weekend-long workshops for paruretics, using a “pee-buddy” system to ease them into being comfortable going with someone else nearby. Over the course of the weekend, their assigned partner will get nearer and nearer to them as they go, and the weekend often ends in a trip to a highly-trafficked public bathroom, such as one at a baseball park. This desensitization can help immensely.

“My mom always joked, ‘You’ll get over these bathroom anxieties when you get pregnant,’” Sanchez says. “’You won’t care that people are listening to you, because you’ll have to pee that badly.’” So far, she says that her bathroom anxiety was at its lowest when she had an internship at a magazine that offered free tea in its kitchenette. “I was drinking so much tea, and I had to go to the bathroom so often, and it was so urgent that I didn’t care.”

Though, depending on the extremeness of someone’s paruresis, they may never be comfortable using a public bathroom, design can help. A frequent complaint I’ve heard (not just from paruretics) is that American stall doors don’t reach from floor to ceiling, as many European ones do. According to Soifer, more substantial urinal dividers help immensely as well.

“My favorite public restrooms to go to are movie theaters, bars, and really loud restaurants,” Sanchez says. “At the movie theater there’s always, like, 1000 people in the bathroom, so nobody knows which stream is my stream. At bars they always have music playing, so that sort of cancels out my stream.”

Japan has found an innovative way to deal with the noise issue, in the form of a device called the Otohime or “Sound Princess.” It plays the sound of a flushing toilet, to mask whatever sounds a person may be making, as an alternative to the apparently popular practice of flushing the toilet constantly to hide one’s sounds. The Sound Princess is installed on the wall in some Japanese bathrooms (mostly women’s) and there is also a portable version available for purchase.

Unfortunately, Molotch says, despite the positive effects design can have on people’s comfort level in the bathroom, it’s rarely given much thought.

“I’ve been on a lot of building committees for major university buildings, and the thing that is least talked about is the public restroom,” he says. “If someone were to bring it up, it would cause giggles…In architecture firms, the lowest-ranking person designs the bathroom.”

This unwillingness to seriously discuss public restroom design can stifle innovation, and leads to the relatively homogenous bathrooms we see in most buildings, which, Molotch says, “looks like all the same stuff from Staples.” And as we’ve seen, many aspects of the generic American public bathroom can exacerbate people’s anxieties.

Barbara Penner, a senior lecturer in architectural history at University College London contributed an essay to the Molotch-edited Toilet describing how the bathroom taboo has blunted scholarly work as well.

“The refusal to deal openly with the realities of toilet use can have calculable and devastating impacts on local ecosystems, health, and living standards in developing countries,” Penner writes. “But…we in the so-called civilized countries suffer from this blinkered approach as well.”

Despite our evolution as civilized humans who can send spaceships to Mars and contemplate the nature of our own existence, we all still have to shit. And yet, it’s something nearly everyone is ashamed of and disgusted by. The popular Japanese children’s book, “Everyone Poops” (which caught on in the U.S. despite this taboo) offers an equalizing message to kids newly using the toilet. But this message doesn’t seem to be something we internalize as adults. This is because, as Haslam writes in his book, “defecation and urination… are processes that remind us of our animality and our vulnerability to death and decay.”

“At least according to one psychological theory (a theory called “terror management”) people feel threatened by reminders of their own mortality,” Haslam says. “In theory, at least, signs of our “creatureliness” (essentially how we are similar to other animals) remind us of our mortality and to defend ourselves against this realization we invest in being cultured and civilized (i.e., our uniquely human attributes).”

Bathroom boundaries also help us keep these creaturely processes separate from our public selves. That’s not to say such measures are sufficient to save us from embarrassment. Though others may ignore what’s happening in our stall, we know that they know and they know that we know that they know, etc. To apologize, “the offending individual may offer a subtle self-derogatory display as a defensive, face-saving measure,” the 1985 study reads, such as making a disgusted face, or even a self-deprecating joke, if you know the other bathroom occupants.

The Sacred & the Profane

“Through such subtle self-derogation, offending individuals metaphorically split themselves into two parts: a sacred self that assigns blame and a blame-worthy animal self,” the study says.

We re-sacralize our bodies (and, you know, protect from germs) after these “dirty” acts by washing our hands, and harshly judge those who don’t. Even though, in a 2013 survey, 70 percent of Americans admitted they just rinse their hands without using soap. The expectations for our “sacred selves” may here be somewhat divorced from reality.

Even the word “bathroom” is a sanitizing term. No one is actually bathing in public bathrooms. (Well, maybe at rest stops on cross-country Greyhound bus rides.) “Restroom” is another term that refuses to describe the thing it refers to. (My dad has taken to humorously saying he needs to “go rest” whenever he goes to the bathroom.) Same with “powder room,” “water closet,” “can,” “loo,” and “little boys’/girls’ room.” Perhaps the only nickname for the bathroom that actually refers to its function is “crapper.” (Which also refers to the plumber Thomas Crapper, who helped popularize the flush toilet.) And Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation’s preferred term, “whiz palace.” Neither of which you would (probably) say to your boss, or in any situation in which you’re hoping to be taken seriously. It’s unbecoming, unprofessional to acknowledge what you do in the bathroom, even if everyone else is doing it too.

Saving Face: Frontstage/Backstage

“Much of what we do in public bathrooms is what we must not do elsewhere but what we must do somewhere.” Engaging with our animal selves means dropping our public face, which we must then put back on when we leave the stall. So we check ourselves in the mirror before leaving the bathroom. It seems this appearance check almost always happens on the way out of the bathroom, never on the way in. It’s a chance to reset, before returning to a place where the public is only public, not colliding with the private in awkward uncomfortable ways. Molotch notes that men are less comfortable performing this check openly, and the lack of opportunity to “recover” their public faces may contribute to bathroom anxiety.

“Men are not supposed to care how they look cosmetically, so a man has to walk past the mirror and adjust his hair or collar without calling attention to the fact that he’s doing that,” he says. “It’s very funny. It’s a very specific choreography they do. They’re walking out of the bathroom, the mirrors are there, and without breaking pace, they catch a glimpse of themselves and move their hand up to their hair to adjust it.”

The 1985 study explains that the bathroom is the ideal place for these adjustments to our appearance because, while still semi-public, is considered “backstage” of life. Adjusting our hair or makeup at a restaurant table, for example, would divert our attention from what’s happening around us—we want our frontstage public face to be poised and ready.

Indeed, though the bathroom’s unique nature can be anxiety-inducing, the behavioral regard given to the space, and its emphasis on privacy, can also make it a safe place to drop our public personas and do vulnerable things like fix our faces. Or cry.

Once you’ve laid claim to a bathroom stall, others typically respect that claim, using all of the behavioral rituals outlined above. This transforms the stall into “the occupying individual’s private, albeit temporary, retreat from the demands of public life,” according to the study. This makes the bathroom feel like the safest place to cry, or work through other emotions one doesn’t want on display, when there isn’t the option to go home.

Public bathrooms can be places of comfort or unease, places where women can relax, where men feel fearful, or where those outside the gender binary feel judged and uncomfortable. But all the social rituals and face-saving strategies are often so much duct tape over a hole we could more effectively patch if we were willing to talk about the bathroom long enough to innovate.

“How does one redesign a taboo?”

“How does one redesign a taboo?” Penner asks in her essay. “The question remains pertinent, as toilet taboos have proved remarkably resilient in the face of change—the final frontier of taboos, now that sex is no longer unspeakable in public.” “Look at how we talk about sex as a society, and we can’t talk about bathroom problems? It’s kind of out of whack if you ask me.”

“The bottom line is we’re a puritanical society,” Soifer says of of the U.S. “We still have these standards that are almost unconscious I think.”

Sources

This post is excerpted from The Atlantic, “The Private Lives of Public Bathrooms: How psychology, gender roles, and design explain the distinctive way we behave in the world’s stalls,” by Julie Beckapr, 2014.

You might also check out the book “Toilet: Public Restrooms and the Politics of Sharing” by Harvey Molotch (Editor), Laura Noren (Editor)

“Why I Am Afraid of the Bathroom, ” by Carl Charles. Posted on the American Civil Liberties Union website. Last accessed April 6, 2015. Downloaded from: https://www.aclunc.org/blog/why-i-am-afraid-bathroom

“The New Transgender Panic: Men In Women’s Bathrooms,” by Paisley Currah. Downloaded from http://paisleycurrah.com/2016/03/31/the-new-transgender-panic-men-in-womens-bathrooms/ Last accessed April 2016.

“Texas ‘Bathroom Bill’ Criminalizes Entering Facility of Opposite Sex. Downloaded from http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/03/22/texas-bathroom-bill-criminalizes-entering-facility-of-opposite-sex/ Last accessed Feb 1, 2016.

Discussion Questions

How do you negotiate issues of privacy and social space in public restrooms? Is this a problem to which you have devoted much thought?

Where/how did you learn the “social rules” of negotiating this very private public space? Can you think of a time when you felt uncomfortable in a public toliet?

Do you feel anxiety when using bathrooms that are not rigidly bound by more traditional binary gender categories?

What do you think about the latest public controversy in regards to the “bathroom” bills.

Rock & Roll Toilet, East Village, New York City

Left: transgender activist, model, and vlogger Aydian Dowling; right: musician and entertainer, Adam Levine

What’s going on with gender these days? A recent study documented that half of all Millennials believe that gender exists on a spectrum and shouldn’t be limited to the categories of male and female. These findings were reported in  Fusion’s Massive Millennial Poll, which surveyed 1,000 people aged 18-34 about everything from politics to dating to race issues. Poll results also suggest young people are moving away from a binary conception of gender, a major shift from previous generations.

According to the study, 57 percent of female Millennials believe that gender falls on a spectrum, compared with 44 percent of men. And Millennials in the Northeast were even more likely to say so – up to 58 percent! (In the South, that number fell to 42 percent.)

The poll also found a respondent’s race identification was associated with substantial differences with regard to views of gender identity. White Millennials were the most likely to support the concept of a non-binary gender system: 55 percent of whites said gender is on a spectrum, compared to 47 percent of Latinos and 32 percent of African Americans.

Transgender and Non-Binary IDs

Non-binary people are people who don’t feel male or female. They may feel like both or something in between. Likewise, they might think of their gender as changing over time or they may not relate to gender at all.

Countries like India recognize a third gender, but in the U.S. there is no such federal recognition or policy that recognizes non-binary gender identification. Increasingly, some cities are creating ID cards for municipal services that do not include gender. San Francisco and Oakland CA, for example, both have municipal ID cards that don’t specify gender at all.

Young people entering universities today are also more likely to see gender-neutral restrooms, ID cards, and on-campus housing options. In recognition of this trend, students at San Francisco State University have housing options that include “other gender-identity roommate pairings, regardless of biological sex.” Recently (2013), Colorado College made national headlines when a job seeker complained the job application asked applicants to check one of five genders: “not disclosed,” “male,” “female,” “transgender,” or “queer.”

A recent BBC News program discussed the story of Leo. At the time of the program, Leo was 10 years old. For most of his life he lived as a girl, but at one point he began to speak openly about having a sense that this didn’t feel quite right. With research help from his parents, he’s decided he is non-binary, even though dresses as a boy and has adopted a male name. Leo explains:

I’m not a boy.

I thought I was a boy because I’m not entirely a girl. We tried that for a bit, and I thought: “No, this is not right.”

Then we did some research and we found the word is gender non-binary… and it really works; it’s just me.

I don’t know what age I was when I identified that I wasn’t feeling right.

Actually, I told my teacher first. I got really frustrated because I asked why none of the girls got boys’ parts in a play that we were doing. It wasn’t right.

I pulled her over and said: “I’m not a girl.”

For more on Leo’s story, refer to the program link.

Gender as a Spectrum

Gender is Socially Constructed

Historically, many feminists and sociologists have understood sex, gender, and even terms like ‘woman’ as gender terms that depend on social and cultural factors. They distinguished sex (being a female or male bodied person) from gender (being/presenting as a woman or a man), although most language users treat the terms sex and gender interchangeably. Recently, efforts to make a distinction between the two have come under attack, as many people find the idea that something that appears so fundamentally grounded, like sex and gender, may, in fact, not be at all stable.

The existentialist philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir famously claimed that “one is not born, but becomes a woman.” In her work “The Second Sex,” she discusses how the traditional ways that we have tended to think about sex and gender are not “natural” but are rather a product of socialization. In other words, females (sex) become women (gender) through a social process, where they learn to acquire feminine traits and perform what is recognized as natural feminine behavior. Masculinity and femininity are, in this respect, understood to be the products of nurture and how individuals are brought up.

Both femininity and masculinity are in this sense products of a nurturing/social learning process. They are causally constructed.  In other words, we understand social forces have a causal role in bringing gendered individuals into existence or that they shape the way we are qua women and men. And the mechanism of construction is social learning (Haslanger 1995, 98) [For more on this, see social learning theory. Social learning theory combines cognitive learning theory (which posits that learning is influenced by psychological factors) and behavioral learning theory (which assumes that learning is based on responses to environmental stimuli). Psychologist Albert Bandura integrated these two theories and came up with four requirements for learning: observation (environmental), retention (cognitive), reproduction (cognitive), and motivation(both). This integrative approach to learning was called social learning theory (Psychology Today)].

Feminist theorist Kate Millett argues further that gender differences have “essentially cultural, rather than biological bases” that result from differential treatment (1971, 28–9). For her, gender is “the sum total of the parents’, the peers’, and the culture’s notions of what is appropriate to each gender by way of temperament, character, interests, status, worth, gesture, and expression” (Millett 1971, 31). Feminine and masculine gender-norms, however, are problematic in that gendered behavior conveniently fits with and reinforces women’s subordination so that women are socialized into subordinate social roles: they learn to be passive, ignorant, docile, emotional helpmeets for men (Millett 1971, 26). The idea here is that since these roles are merely learned, we can create more equal societies by ‘unlearning’ social roles. Feminists, she says, should aim to diminish the influence of socialization.

Gender is Performative

One of the central concepts of gender theory is the idea that gender is “constructed.” Theorists like Judith Butler take that one step further to argue that your gender is constructed as a direct result of your repetitive perfomances of gender – things you do and discourses you engage in which have the effect of creating a “subject” position for you.

Butler is thus questioning the belief that certain gendered behaviors are natural, as she illustrates how one’s learned performance of gendered behavior (what we commonly associate with femininity and masculinity) is an act of sorts; it’s a performance imposed upon us by the norms bound up in heterosexuality. Her theory does not accept gender identity as being stable and/or coherent. Rather, she understands gender is “a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief” (Gender Trouble). To say that gender is performative is to argue that gender is “real only to the extent that it is performed” (Gender Trouble).

What is at stake here, of course, is the ideology of hegemonic heterosexuality. And this is precisely what makes many people so uncomfortable. Because it means they can’t take for granted things like their gender that they have always accepted as natural and normal.

For to claim that “all gender is like drag, or is drag, is to suggest that ‘imitation’ is at the heart of the heterosexual project and its gender binarism, that drag is not a secondary imitation that presupposes a prior and original gender, but that hegemonic heterosexuality is itself a constant and repeated effort to imitate its own idealizations. That it must repeat this imitation, that it sets up pathologizing practices and normalizing sciences in order to produce and consecrate its own claim on originality and propriety, suggests that heterosexual performativity is beset by an anxiety that it can never fully overcome….that its effort to become its own idealizations can never be finally or fully achieved, and that it is constantly haunted by that domain of sexual possibility that must be excluded for heterosexualized gender to produce itself” (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter).

Sources:

Check out R.W. Connell’s “Social Organization of Masculinity.”

Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” and “Bodies That Matter.”

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

BBC News program, “I’m a non-binary 10-year-old.”

Fusion’s Massive Millennial Poll surveyed 1,000 people between the ages of 18 to 34, with a general population sample and an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.1 percentage points. The interviews were conducted via telephone from Jan. 6 to Jan. 11. For more information on Fusion’s research methodology and poll results, refer to their proprietary website.

Psychology Today article

Discussion Questions:

What is your gender identity?

How did you get the gender identity that you have?

What are some examples of your own gender expression?

Can you share an example of how you might “perform” your gender?

Do you understand your gender as an ongoing identity project, or is it something that you don’t particularly think about? In other words – “it is what it is.”

The Princess Problem

It’s easy to spot the girls’ section of a children’s clothes shop because most of it is pink and oriented towards the consumption of “princess” merchandise. A lot of parents complain that even when they insist that their daughters wear something different, pink seems to hold an irresistible allure for them. But is that really true? Is it inevitable that girls are born to grow up to prefer pink?

According to research the answer is “no.” Various studies have examined the issue of color preferences in different age groups. In the US most have found that babies and toddlers, whether male or female, are attracted to primary colors like red and blue. Pink doesn’t feature particularly high on the list, although it is more popular than brown and grey. Some studies of this age group have found blue is favored, others red, but they rarely find any strong gender difference expressed.

Hard-wired colors?

Cultural norms may also shape color preferences. In cultures where pink is considered the appropriate color for a baby girl and blue for a baby boy, babies become accustomed from birth to spending time wearing or even surrounded by, those colors. This makes it hard to know whether any preferences expressed later on are hard-wired. But a study from 2011 tried to get closer to discovering what’s going on.

When one-year-old girls and boys were shown pairs of identical objects such as bracelets, pill boxes and picture frames, but with one object pink and another of a second color, they were no more likely to choose pink than any other color. But after the age of two the girls started to like pink and, by four, boys were determined in their rejection of pink. This is the precise time when toddlers start to become aware of their gender, to talk about it and even to look around them to see what defines boy and what defines a girl. But just like adults, even very small children show biases towards their own group.

This group bias was also seen in another study where three-to-five-year-olds were given red or blue t-shirts to wear at a nursery. For one group, the red and blue t-shirts were constantly referred to, and by the end of three weeks the children liked everything about their own color group better. And that was just three weeks.

Gender becomes a key topic of discussion from early pregnancy onwards. When we hear the news of the birth of a new baby, there’s just one thing we want to know. Is it a boy or a girl?

You could argue that it doesn’t really matter what color babies are exposed to the most, but research tells us it can affect the way we, as adults, treat them. There’s one famous study showing that women treated the exact same babies differently depending on whether they were dressed in pink or blue. If the clothes were blue they assumed it was a boy. In recognition of this, they played more physical games with the perceived “boy” child and encouraged them to play with a squeaky hammer. Girls on the other hand, identified by their pink clothes, provoked soothing gestures. The women alternatively chose a doll for them to play with.

Keep in mind, no one is saying that pink is inherently a problem. Pink is not the “color of oppression,” as some have sarcastically noted. The problem is with the marketing of pink, because marketing is reducing girls’ choices.

Code Pink

In the marketplace, products that are pink and princessy now dominate girls’ sections for toys, clothing, and, well, almost everything. The marketing is so insidious that moms who were interviewed complained that it is virtually inescapable. Very young children are being socialized to think that “pink” and “princess” are the ONLY good choices for girls. So in other words, it wasn’t that the mon’s didn’t want their daughters to like pink or princesses. Far from it. It was just that they didn’t want their daughters to ONLY like pink or princess.

Pink princess marketing is forceful, even relentless, as it’s backed by many billions of marketing dollars. One might effectively argue that it’s not really a choice anymore; it is instead proscriptive. That is to say, it’s coercive, moreover, it takes deliberate advantage of a developmental phase that industrial psychologists are well aware of. Approximately two-thirds of preschool girls go through a phase in which they believe that their sex (the fact that they are girls) fully depends on external factors, like how they dress, because they don’t understand that sex is determined biologically. Fearful of losing their gender identities, and declaring their joy in being girls, they latch onto the most obvious stereotypical markers of their gender.

Teaching girls that they must subscribe to a conforming appearance, that they must look a certain way in order to be legible –to be a good girl — is not only disempowering, it can be destructive any effort to cultivate an independent and strong identity in young girls. Too often, it empowers young boys to be the “gender police,” as girls are called out for not nonconforming appearances and aesthetics.

Pink Prison

Gender Conformity

Also a problem: The minority of girls who actively reject things that are stereotypically “girly” because they are gender-nonconforming (approximately 1 in 10 children, according to a recent Harvard study) are left out, socially outcast, and treated by peers and even adults as somehow defective. The Harvard study suggests that such children might leave childhood with PTSD!

The pressure to conform with male aesthetic preferences and gender stereotypes can have a major impact on a child’s early development. Even if the idea of color seems trivial, the way people act around color is not. Children are then left to negotiate the color trap as they are forced to confront these cultural stereotype in schools and across playgrounds throughout the United States and beyond. Social sanctions can easily give way to abusive behavior that sadly goes hand-in-hand with insisting girls must always look or “appear” a certain way in order to merit social recognition and not be labeled a gender deviant.

Boys, while not immune from similar gender stereotype pressures, do not suffer equally, because they are generally socialized to be powerful. Their social validation and self-esteem is, by way of contrast, generally grounded in their actions and accomplishments. Boys do, whereas girls are. Appearance standards thus are less of an issue for boys.

Likewise, it is boys and young men who, more often than not, are the ones calling out the girls when they don’t play their proper role or subscribe to the appearance standard, as is illustrated in the following video. This four year old girl offers an impressive response when a boy in her school commented on her appearance.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBhe8Ei8tnE

“I didn’t come here to make a fashion statement.” “I came here to learn not look pretty.” The wisdom of a child. We could all learn from her example.

Sources:

Article by Rebecca Hains, last accessed March 2015, downloaded at http://rebeccahains.com/2014/03/29/whats-the-problem-with-pink-and-princess/

Rebecca Hains is a media studies professor at Salem State University. She is an expert in children’s media culture, media literacy, and media criticism. The article is based on her book, The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years.

Discussion Questions:

What do you think about the arguments upon which this research is based? How does it resonate/not resonate with your own experience?

Do you feel like your gender is something that comes “natural” to you, or do you feel there are aspects of gender culture that cause you to feel uncomfortable and/or “boxed in” as a result of public pressure and cultural expectations to conform in different ways?

Do you look to your gender as a source of power to express yourself? Or do you feel disempowered?

As Aviva Dove-Viebahn explains in “Feminism in a Mad World” in an issue of Ms. magazine, the show Mad Men has become “a hot topic on the feminist blogosphere and around water coolers everywhere, alternately lauded for its strong female characters and criticized for its nostalgic rendering of the halcyon days of sanctioned workplace misogyny.” The show’s creator, Matt Weiner, has insisted that by realistically depicting women’s oppression at home and in the workplace, his show ascribes to the feminist agenda.

Mad Men itself might ascribe to the feminist agenda, but thanks to its pervasive impact on pop culture, the show is crafting a whole new generation of would-be Bettys (Don Draper’s stylish wife) not Peggys (the show’s ambitious “career girl”).

Betty Draper

Mad Men has entered the popular consciousness (and checkbook) to an almost frightening degree: Last summer, companies as diverse as Banana Republic, Clorox, Vanity Fair and Variety signed with the show. This July, Mad Men Barbie hit the market, featuring a set of “key players from the Sterling Cooper Advertising Agency.” But we’re left wondering: Hey, where’s the Peggy doll? Where indeed. People have become obsessed with “the Mad Men look,” but certainly not with Peggy’s sensible shoes.

Peggy doing her career girl “thang”

Don knew how to brand at home and in the office, and so it’s not surprising that this is reflected in the show’s sets and costumes, which are appropriately visually stunning. Yet the aesthetic elements that many adore about this period in American History (the mid-century) all signify a world of masculine privilege predicated on sexism, racism, homophobia–those infinite “isms” that said it was okay for the boys of Sterling Cooper to drink gin-and-tonics in the mid-afternoon while their maids detail the suede upholstery.

Mad Men consumerism replicates the physical trappings of that era with some disturbing cultural implications. The wives who tend to their Mad Men are allowed to grow up–but just barely. Stuck in the suburbs and squeezed into polyester garden party dresses, their emotions denied by their husbands and buried in their beehives, these women have to muffle their sovereignty. So when men and women try to reclaim the look of this past, they are also emulating the privileged patriarch/woman-child social roles that distinguish the celebrated signature style of repression and subservience.

Young women, who might identify with the perceived glamour and style of the era, should watch Mad Men and ask themselves if this is a world to which they want to return. Is it a world where they can see themselves thriving? Some might think so.

Men should also ask themselves if/why they might similarly identify. What is the reasoning?

Far from being a simple/trivial TV show, Mad Men provides a cultural touchstone for making contemporary nuanced arguments about persisting sexism, e.g. where it comes from and why it lingers. Thus, we might compare and contrast the overt patriarchy of the past with the more covert patriarchy of the present.

Things Women Couldn’t Do in 1960

Get a credit card

Up until 1974, banks and credit card companies could refuse credit cards to single women; and they often required married women to get cards in their husband’s names.

Get an Ivy League education

Harvard didn’t admit women until 1977; Yale and Princeton admitted their first women undergrads in 1969

Legally use contraceptives with a husband in every state in the U.S.

It’s only as recently as 1965 that the Supreme Court made it illegal for states to ban married couples from using contraceptives.

Keep a job while pregnant

Laying off women employees who were pregnant was legal until 1978

Seek legal redress if you are sexually harassed on the job

U.S. Courts did not recognize workplace sexual harassment as an offense until 1977

Refuse to have sex with a husband

Until the 1970’s, marital rape wasn’t illegal. Rape was defined in all U.S. states as follows: “a male who has sexual intercourse with a female not his wife is guilty of rape if….”

Get easy access to contraceptive pills

Oral contraceptives were approved by the FDA in 1960, but wasn’t until years later that they were made widely available

Serve on a jury

It wasn’t until 1970 that women were allowed to serve on juries in all 50 states.

Become an astronaut

Women were first admitted as astronaut candidates in 1978, including Sally Ride, who went on to become the first woman in space.

Officially enter the Boston Marathon

The Boston Marathon was not open to women runners until 1972

Get a legal abortion

The first state to allow legal abortions was Colorado in 1967. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision made terminations legal nationally in 1973.

Get a divorce easily

Before the 1969 No Fault Divorce law, divorce could only be obtained if you proved your spous had committed serious faults such as adultery. This law had a negative impact on men as well as women.

Get emergency contraception

The emergency contraception known as “Plan B” wasn’t approved by the FDA until shockingly late – 1998. And until 2013, you couldn’t buy it at a drugstore, you had to first obtain a prescription from a doctor.

Work in many military jobs

Women could not attend any U.S, military academy until 1976, when women were first admitted. In 2015, 16% of the graduating West Point class is made up of women. Female recruits were not “technically” allowed to serve in combat zones/roles until 2013.

Have paid maternity leave

As of 2015, the U.S. is the only developed county in the world that does not require employers to provide some period of paid leave when a woman has a baby.

Become a supreme court justice

There wasn’t a law on the books that prevented women from serving on the Supreme Court, but no women were appointed until Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981. As of 2015, there are three women serving out of nine SCOTUS judges.

Get a job without being rejected for being female

Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was perfectly legal to discriminate against women on the grounds of gender when considering whom to hire and promote.

Marry another woman

The U.S. movement to gain civil marriage rights for same-sex couples began in the 1970’s, but it wasn’t legal anywhere until 2004, when Massachusetts became the first sate to legalize it. Now, in 2015, same-sex marriage is legal in 36 U.S. states. Of course this legal barrier applied to men as much as women.

Compete as a boxer in the Olympics

Women couldn’t box in the olympics until 2012.

Sources:

Article by Anna Kelner, MS. Magazine, 2010. Last accessed March 2015. Downloaded from http://msmagazine.com/blog/2010/07/22/the-mad-men-effect-bringing-back-sexism-with-style/

Offbeat Topics. Last accessed April 2015. Downloaded from http://offbeat.topix.com/slideshow/15483/

Discussion Questions:

What does the show convey about proper roles/jobs for men and women?

How can we de-construct the power dynamics of the show. Are only the men powerful? If not, how is power perhaps articulated differently for men and women?

What does the show tell us about patriarchy and privilege?

How do the men and women in the show “perform” their gender?

Do you find the show and/or it’s cultivated aesthetic appealing? If so, please explain. If not, why not?

Who is a Feminist? This is a question I always ask students in my introductory courses. The response pattern in a class of 30 is typically less than 5 students identify as feminists. And of this small group, sadly almost none identify as men. What gives? Why is the word feminist so controversial? What does it mean to be a feminist? Or should I say: What do people perceive that it means to be a feminist?

The following chart provides an illustration of responses from women voters who self-identify as “feminists.” On the right side of the chart, you can see how the numbers change (they go up) when women are asked about their identification a second time after they are provided with a simple definition of feminism (see below).

We might also simply define it this way:

Feminism is the belief that women are and should be treated as potential intellectual equals and social equals to men.

While the basic idea seems easy enough to grasp, people try nevertheless to “thread the needle” so to speak, when it comes to defining as feminists. They seem to be willing to concede agreement with the general notion of equality, even as they reject feminism in practice, which has for more than 50 years been a powerful advocate for women’s equality. Again, what gives here?

A recent spate of celebrities have made attempts to “re-brand” feminism to some extent by drawing attention to issues and problems in ways that academic feminists have not always been able to argue as effectively – celebrities have called attention to the issues using humor and style. This includes people like Ryan Gosling, whose feminist advocacy has been famously “memed,” Beyonce, Emma Watson, Aziz Ansari, and Matt McGory among others.

Queen Bey – Entertainer, Mother, Wife and Feminist

Unconvinced?

Still feel uncomfortable declaring yourself a feminist? Well, at least you are in good company. Malala Yousafzai, the young woman from Pakistan, who recently won a Nobel Peace Prize was  asked: “Would you consider yourself a feminist?” She hesitated at first, then offered the following answer: “Well, I fight for women’s rights.”

Now, you might wonder why a world-famous emissary and forceful advocate and for the rights of women and girls would hesitate to use the word “feminist?” I would venture a guess that she hesitates for the same reason many college students do – because of the polarizing and often extreme feelings/debates the term “feminist” conjures.

Historically speaking, to identify as a feminist has meant that one must also identify with a legacy of politically charged issues with which feminists have historically championed and addressed through advocacy politics. These issues, taken at face value, should not be controversial – but they are. And sometimes they are even controversial among feminists!

• the right to vote
• the right to hold public office
• the right to work
• the right to work for fair wages/equal pay
• the right to own property
• the right to an education
• the right to enter contracts
• the right to have equal rights in marriage
• the right to have maternity leave
• the right to have bodily autonomy and integrity
• the right to have reproductive rights (access to contraception and abortion)
• the right to protect woman and girls from rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence

Many people, and sometime young women in particular, operate under the mistaken impression that  issues like the ones listed here are “settled issues” – quaint relics from the past that we no longer have to worry about because discrimination no longer happens, or that the issues are no longer the big deal that they once were. The actual facts, as such, are another matter. They are not settled. Far from it.

Feminist movements continue to campaign for many of these rights. And not just around the world. Feminist issues are not a problem of the global south or a problem of women who live in poor countries. Some of the basic rights listed here are under constant attack at the state and federal levels of government in the United States. Sadly, both men and women are implicated in efforts to curtail the rights of women.

Not Just Feminism, but Many “Feminisms”

If you can handle the idea that there are as many different “feminisms” as there are issues of concern, then you might be able to go another step further, where you might see how feminism can be defined as a collection of different movements and ideologies that share a common goal: to define, establish, and achieve equal political, economic, cultural, personal, and social rights.

Feminist theory, which emerged from the different feminist movements of the past (sometimes referred to as 1st, 2nd, and 3rd wave feminism) has aimed to understand and document the  multi-faceted nature of gender oppression and social inequality by taking a close look at the different social roles women play, their lived experiences, and the public institutions that potentially work to champion women’s rights. But here again, stereotypes of “who is a feminist” have too often prevailed due to the lack of knowledge and understanding.

Take, for example, the 3rd wave feminist pictured below. What we have here, unfortunately, is a reductive stereotype: a caricature of a woman activist that sells short the diversity of thinking, writing, and being, as advocated by modern feminists. This stereotype is, admittedly powerful. But it’s also dangerous because it is designed to trivialize and render impotent the critiques and arguments of contemporary feminists, who try to draw attention to women’s issues and talk about them in complex ways.

So then, just to be clear, not all feminists are alike. They don’t look alike, nor do they think alike. Thus, while many feminists might agree that women’s empowerment is essential, they don’t always agree on the best way to achieve this through policy and practice.

Even more important, not all feminists are women. Yes, really. Men can uphold similar values and demonstrate concern with women’s issues, which means men can be feminists too! Just like our brofriends, Ryan Gosling and Tom Hardy:

Academic Feminism – Intersectionality

Some forms of feminism have been criticized for only representing white, middle-class, educated perspectives. This critique led to the creation of ethnically specific and multiculturalist forms of feminism. Feminist theory has developed different theories and uses different conceptual tools across the disciplines and through direct action to address these different issues. Think about our class discussions about the idea that gender is “socially constructed,” or that gender is “performed.”

Intersectionality theory studies the intersections of different forms of oppression, domination, and discrimination. This theory was first advanced by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989 (though it traces its roots to the 19th century). The theory looks at how social identity is experienced along multiple and simultaneous axes: gender, race, class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, caste, species. These social identity categories work together in different ways to contribute to systematic social inequality. Intersectional feminist theorists find that the classical ways of conceptualizing oppression within society do not act independently of one another. Instead, forms of identity and oppression interrelate; they create an interlocking system of oppression that reflects the “intersection” of multiple forms of identity, which result in different forms of discrimination.

The work of Patricia Hill Collins furnishes us with another example of this type of theorizing. Collins, a leading voice for Black Feminism, argues that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood simply in terms of being black and being a woman, considered independently; rather, to fully appreciate the social dynamic, one must include the interactions of other variables like social class, which might radically alter that experience.

Simply put, social identities like race, class, and gender are always interacting and producing different experiences for different women. Not all women have the same experiences.

Men Too

Feminist advocacy is mainly focused on women’s rights. Early scholars were clear that their focus was to “radically center” the experiences of women in society. But even authors like bell hooks concede that in order for feminism to grow and flourish, it is necessary to draw men into the conversation. Conversations about feminism might, for example, include men’s liberation, because men are also harmed by traditional gender roles.

Scholars like Michael Kimmel and R.W. Connell have focused on social issues and problems as they relate to  the problem of what they call “hegemonic masculinity.”  This term is used to explain how and why men maintain dominant social roles over women and other gender identities, which are perceived as “feminine” in a given society.

As a sociological concept, the hegemonic nature of “hegemonic masculinity” derives its power from the theory of cultural hegemony advanced by Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, which analyzed power relations among the different social classes of a given society. “Hegemonic” thus not only refers to the culturally dynamic means by which a social group claims and sustains a dominant position in a social hierarchy; it refers to a distinct cyclical pattern that illustrates how hegemonic relations are produced, reproduced, and sustained to the detriment of woman AND men.

Many sociologists, however, have criticized this definition of hegemonic masculinity for reasons that it may imply a fixed character-type; they find it analytically limiting because it runs the risk of excluding complex and different competing forms of masculinity.

As a result, hegemonic masculinity was reformulated to include gender hierarchy (patriarchy – men on top), a more broad spectrum of masculine configurations, the concept and process of embodiment, as well as the psycho-social dynamics of different varieties of masculinity.

Despite the fact that there are academic disagreements, the concept of hegemonic masculinity remains useful for understanding gender relations, because it is applicable to understanding a range of different areas of social life that are of particular interest to social scientists: education, life-span issues, criminology and deviance, health and illness, institutions, work and occupations, and understanding the different representations of women and men in mass media and communications.

Still not sure if you are a feminist? Here’s one feminist’s attempt to break it down into something more simple:

So go ahead. Say it. “I am a feminist.” Or don’t.

Sources:

Discussion Questions:

Do you define as a feminist? If not, why not?

When you look at the simple definitions provided, does it change your perspective on feminism? Does it make it easier or have no impact on your understanding of feminism, feminist issues, or feminist causes?

If you define yourself as a woman, can you think of a time you modified your behavior or took away from your own empowerment to appear more appealing to men? Has it ever been suggested to you that you should walk different, talk different, or put less effort in careers or academics because you want to be perceived as “lady-like?”

If you define yourself as a man, can you think of a time where rigid social constructs in regards to how you present as a male in society make you feel uncomfortable or even stressed? By this I mean, emphasis on being the sole bread-winner in a household, demonstrating masculine strength, and by way of contrast, not demonstrating inclination toward “book learning” and/or developing and demonstrating emotional capacity.

The always provocative Emma Watson

For men of working age, not working tends to be a distinctly unpleasant experience. They exercise less than when they had a job, and they say that their relationships with family members worsen — despite having more time to spend with those relatives.

For women, the situation is more complicated. They’re more likely to say that their health and their relationships with friends and family have improved since they stopped working.

In a similar vein, the geography of female employment and nonemployment tends to be more complicated than the male geography.

The towns and counties where the lowest share of men between the ages of 25 and 54 are employed tend to be some of the tougher places in the United States to live, including Appalachia, Northern Michigan, the Deep South and the interior Southwest.

The places with low levels of female employment have a lot of overlap with these high-poverty places, as an Upshot analysis of census data shows. That’s hardly surprising: Lack of employment has a strong and obvious correlation with poverty. Yet the geographic patterns of female work also have more nuances than the male patterns.

Female employment rates are relatively low in some fairly affluent areas, including Utah and other heavily Mormon areas — as well as on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The East 80s and the suburbs of Salt Lake City may be very different places, but both have local cultures with a bent toward stay-at-home parenting, which still is far more likely to be done by mothers. In this way, they are extreme examples of a national trend: a modestly increased interest in full-time parenting in recent years.

On the other hand, female employment rates are notably high, especially compared with male rates, in New England and parts of the upper Midwest, which tend to be fairly well off. Female rates are also comparatively high in a swath of lower-income rural areas across the middle of the country. In all these places, education — the fact that women are now more educated than men — plays a big role in these contrasts.

Over all, the share of prime-age women with jobs rose throughout much of the latter decades of the 20th century, driven by the feminist movement. But the generally disappointing economy of the last 15 years — combined with the uptick in stay-at-home parenting — has caused the rate to fall since 2000.

Currently, about 30 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 54 are not employed, compared with 26 percent in 1999. By contrast, female employment rates have continued rising in most rich countries. The employment for prime-age men in the United States has been falling for most of the past half-century.

Throughout much of New England, employment rates for prime-age women — relative to their national average — are higher than rates for prime-age men. To be clear, men in New England between the ages of 25 and 54 are more likely to be working than their female counterparts. But female employment rates in some areas exceed the national average, while male rates tend to trail the national average. Why? New England is a highly educated region, with a large number of white-collar jobs, and women nationwide now are more likely to graduate than men.

New England also has a history as a center of manufacturing, which has long been male-dominated. As factories have closed in recent decades and white-collar work has expanded, women have been in a better position to take advantage. The pattern is evident in and around Boston and Burlington, Vt., but it’s especially strong in New Hampshire. In the northern part of the state, the prime-age nonemployment rates are nearly identical for the sexes, both around 25 percent.

For men, nonemployment rates tend to be higher in poorer areas. That’s true for women, too — but their nonemployment rates can also be high in the richest areas.

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, about half of the women who live on the blocks adjacent to Central Park do not work. On this strip — one of the wealthiest areas of the city — the chance a woman does not work is about as high as it is in some of the poorest parts of the country.

Sources:

The full text for this article can be accessed at New York Times Interactive. Last access Feb 2015. Downloaded from http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/06/upshot/where-working-women-are-most-common.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=0#/11/40.71/-74

Discussion Questions:

What do the women in your family do for work? Are they employed in a professional or semi-professional capacity or do they not work at all?

What social factors do you believe had the greatest influence on their choice (or lack of choice) of occupation?

If you grew up with a mother or mother figure in your household, did that person ever lose their job? If so, can you describe the impact on your family?

How might have the career choices of the women in your life impacted your decisions about what is possible and desirable for you, in terms of your own potential career trajectory?