It’s generally a symbiotic relationship. I love to be encatted, and they frequently oblige - tabby preferring the lap proper and tuxedo the lower leg. In the best case scenario, like when I’m stretched out on the sofa or in a chair with my feet up reading a book, this works out splendidly: the extended lap is shared and they can even snuggle. But if I’m using my laptop as Science intended – on my lap – there’s a situation. There simply isn’t room for both, and a battle can ensue.
So one afternoon last week, I was in a comfortable chair, feet on the ottoman, typing away. Tabby suddenly hopped up, marched into my lap – forcing me to push the laptop onto my shins - assumed the Sphinx position, and commenced purring.
Now, let me interject: tuxedo is a mischief maker. Not intentionally - he’s like the kid who starts a fire trying to see what’ll happen if you put various items in a microwave. He’s inveterately curious, hyper, and unpredictable, and I tend to worry when time goes by and I don’t know what he’s into or up to, especially if he’s in the land of feline delight and danger that is the cellar.
So my mistake was calling for him. Within minutes of his appearance, he spied tabby purring contentedly on my lap, and wanted in. After some thought, he jumped up onto the back of the chair and surveyed the terrain. His usual spot was gone, as I’d moved the laptop onto my shins and my lap was full of husky tabby. He proceeded to fake-innocently climb down my shoulder and pretend to look for space, stepping over tabby in a way he had to know would harsh tabby’s mellow and cause him to delap.
When tabby jumped down, as tuxedo no doubt anticipated, I moved the laptop back into its natural location, at which point tuxedo curled between my shins. But it was no sleep of the innocent. Tabby sat on the floor facing us, squinting annoyedly as only a cranky tabby whose meditative calm has been rudely disturbed can do.
He then stalked, a cat with a purpose, from the room. The look in his eye told me he hadn’t surrendered, but I couldn't anticipate his next move. Seconds later, we were startled as he flung his full 15 pooch-belly pounds against the cellar door, slamming it loudly and knowing we’d both jump at the noise.
Tuxedo scurried while I threw (er, placed gently) the laptop on the coffee table and ran to discover the source of the racket. After my pulse settled, I reclined once again in the chair. Shortly, tabby curled in my lap, leaving tuxedo in the cold.
Postscript: This wasn’t the end. Maneuvers continue.
Debunking has long been a key focus in humanistic movements. Two works I read recently, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Being
and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity
happened to cover this terrain in usefully complementary ways. These writers didn’t simply assert Truth as an abstract value to which others had to be subordinated. They arrived at their understanding of the vital importance of debunking through their commitment to human freedom* and fulfillment. This commitment led them to a nuanced approach to the concrete practice of debunking as a political and moral act. Their work reminded me of the great essay by Voltairine de Cleyre, “The Economic Tendency of Freethought.” All three provide valuable insights that can help us to develop a general method of approaching debunking in an ethical and effective way.
These thinkers all recognized the role of illusionary beliefs in maintaining oppression. “[T]he oppressor would not be so strong,” De Beauvoir argued, “if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed themselves; mystification is one of the forms of oppression; ignorance is a situation in which man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison” (p. 97).
Within their broader programs, they held disillusionment as a critical element of radical-humanist political action. Influenced by Freud and Marx, Fromm appreciated the critical role of debunking in both personal development and economic and political liberation. While Freud, he argued, had been too much a man of his age to carry the radical nature of his insights through to challenging “illusions about social reality,”** Fromm saw these “social rationalizations” as key to perpetuating oppression and argued thus tearing them down as essential to the radical humanist project.
Recognizing illusions as alienating, Fromm argued for the positive psychological and social effects of destroying them. On both a personal and community level, he argued, the awareness gained through debunking rendered people more secure in their identity and more energized and ready for action. He argued that this greased the wheels for debunking, as people will gravitate toward understandings that give them a firm grounding and empower them for effective action:
The strength of man’s position in the world depends on the degree of adequacy of his perception of reality. The less adequate it is, the more disoriented and hence insecure he is and hence in need of idols to lean on and thus find security. The more adequate it is, the more can he stand on his own feet and have his center within himself. Man is like Antaeus, who charged himself with energy by touching Mother Earth, and who could be killed only when his enemy kept him long enough in the air. (KL 688-692)
It’s interesting how much this idea contrasts with the notion – often heard in one form or another from accommodationists and on occasion even from gnus – that debunking and greater awareness necessarily lead to insecurity, weakening, and a diminished capacity for positive action.***
Fromm held, moreover, that the process of breaking down our own illusions itself, even though it can be hard work and even though it might lead to the recognition of the magnitude of problems and of our limitations when it comes to addressing them, is often a joyous one, consciously experienced as liberating. “[W]e must remember,” he reminded would-be debunkers, “that becoming aware of the truth has a liberating effect; it releases energy and de-fogs one’s mind. As a result, one is more independent, has one’s center in oneself, and is more alive” (KL 715-717). This is true - maybe especially true - even when we aren't consciously aware of the debilitating effects of our delusions prior to their being challenged.
Indeed, it was in the name well-being and human development that Fromm took on those who would accommodate mystification and shrink from debunking:
If avoidance of pain and maximal comfort are supreme values, then indeed illusions are preferable to the truth. If, on the other hand, we consider that every man, at any time in history, is born with the potential of being a full man and that, furthermore, with his death the one chance given to him is over, then indeed much can be said for the personal value of shedding illusions and thus attaining an optimum of personal fulfillment. (KL 717-720)
Of equal importance, “the more seeing individuals will become, the more likely it is that they can produce changes— social and individual ones— at the earliest possible moment” (KL 720-722). Debunking was valuable, he argued, “provided the insight into the hidden conflicts leads to a constructive solution and hence to greater well-being. This is what Marx expected if the working class would become aware of its own conditions. If the working class would get rid of its illusions, it would build a society that would not require any illusions (and this could be done, because the historical conditions were ripe)” (KL 693-697).
On the basis of this understanding, Fromm reached the strong conclusion that “the most important step in the art of being is everything that leads to and enhances our capacity for heightened awareness and, as far as the mind is concerned, for critical, questioning thinking” (KL 723-726). But both De Beauvoir and Fromm thought about debunking not in abstract but in practical, contextual terms, and recognized that even though it was necessary and important for individual and social freedom and well-being, debunking in the real world involved situations of uncertainty and difficult moral choices. They took the question of the values behind debunking in relation to other values seriously, thoughtfully considering whether debunking is warranted in every case.
De Beauvoir recognized this dilemma as “the problem touched on by Ibsen in The Wild Duck (which I’m now reading). An individual lives in a situation of falsehood; the falsehood is violence, tyranny; shall I tell the truth in order to free the victim?” (p. 142). Fromm asks similarly:
But what if the conflict cannot be solved? Is man not better off to live with illusions than with a painful truth that does not help him to liberate himself in real life? If, as Marx and Freud believed, the teachings of religion were an illusion, was it a necessary one in order to make it possible for man to survive at all? What would have happened to him if he had given up this illusion and experienced nothing but despair at seeing no chance for a more human social order and greater personal well-being? (KL 697-700)
Given the important role of challenging ideas in individual and social development and freedom, even the gentle Fromm (who was, to put it mildly, not particularly committed to the debunking of religion) comes down on the side of debunking even in some extreme cases. But that acceptance is always tempered by a deep respect for people and their experiences and attention to the details of each case. Using the case of telling a dying person the truth about their condition as an illustrative example, Fromm suggests that:
[I]t seems to me that the most concerned observers will refuse to choose, dogmatically, one or the other solution; they will agree that it depends on the personality of the dying person and that the judgment can be made only after one has tried to assess that person’s inner actual and potential strength and to understand his deepest, often unexpressed wish. It would seem to me inhuman to force upon him the truth in any dogmatic belief that it is necessarily ‘the best for him’. (KL 706-710)
Crucially, they challenged both the failure to address the question of outcomes and the naïve faith that conditions alone would guarantee a liberating effect. As Fromm noted, Marx contended that material conditions shaped the effects of debunking, and believed that in modernity these conditions made for propitious circumstances for debunking experienced as liberating and acting as a positive spur to social transformation. But both Fromm and De Beauvoir recognized, each in their own way, that positive outcomes for debunking are never guaranteed. Fromm made clear:
[M]ost individuals as well as social classes who cannot bear disillusionment without positive solutions will simply not listen to, understand, and certainly not agree with the disillusioning analysis, even if the critical thinker speaks with the voice of an angel. Examples in social and individual life of the strength of resistance abound and there is no need to cite any. (KL 710-714)
In addition to this resistance, people could trade one set of debunked false beliefs for others that are equally or even more dangerous, they could be disheartened or demoralized by their newfound awareness, or the debunking could lead to a dead end in terms of positive social change. The lack of guaranteed success or positive outcomes means that we have ethical choices to make in the process. These writers urged thoughtful consideration not just of the specifics of each individual “case” but of the sociopolitical context in which debunking is carried out.
But these authors also understood that we weren’t helpless in all of this, that our actions - our approach to debunking and other associated acts - can help to shape the outcomes in a positive direction, joining our debunking to humanistic projects. They provided an outline of a general method for debunking, to be adjusted to fit each situation.
The first element in this approach is the grounding of all debunking efforts in humanistic values. “The first point,” De Beauvoir makes clear, “is always to consider what genuine human interest fills the abstract form which one proposes as the action’s end” (p. 144). Abstractions alone, whatever they may be, don’t make the cut: “Politics always puts forward Ideas: Nation, Empire, Union, Economy, etc. But none of these forms has value in itself; it has it only insofar as it involves concrete individuals” (p. 144). The same can be said of Science and Reason.
Keeping the “genuine human interest” at the core of debunking in mind at all times is crucial. De Beauvoir warned of the pitfall of coming to regard as ends in themselves what are at best potentially means of human fulfillment. In response to the suggestion that technology is a humanistic end in itself, she argued that “technics [technology] itself is not objectively justified” but was only so when it “thrusts itself ahead of itself in order to thrust itself still farther ahead, that it aims at an indefinite disclosure of being by the transformation of the thing into an instrument and at the opening of ever more possibilities for man” (p. 79), with “man” similarly understood not in the abstract but in terms of the real fulfillment of the needs of those to or for whom its value is being asserted.
When we come to see abstractions or means as ends, we become particularly vulnerable to group narcissism: “We are Skeptics and we represent Science, the bringer of Technology. Behold.” De Beauvoir urged clarity about, and continuing attentiveness to, means and ends. She counseled that
an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to forget him on the way; if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once and for all; it is defined all along the road which leads to it. Vigilance alone can keep alive the validity of the goals and the genuine assertion of freedom. (pp. 152-153)
“In each case,” she argued, “it is a matter of defining an end and realizing it, knowing that the choice of the means employed affects both the definition and the fulfillment” (p. 149). If this seems to have similarities with a scientific approach, De Beauvoir makes that parallel explicit: “It is apparent that the method we are proposing, analogous in this respect to scientific or aesthetic methods, consists, in each case, of confronting the values realized with the values aimed at, and the meaning of the act with its content” (pp. 151-152). This prevents us from falling into the trap of seeing ourselves as the instruments of some transcendent value or process and forgetting the concrete effects of our actions and our responsibility for our choices.
Related to this is the need to work to realize and to educate people about the positive, constructive alternatives to the illusion-supported status quo. This concern appears quite frequently in Fromm’s discussion of the barriers to debunking, including the passages quoted above, for example his caveat when discussing Marx’s argument about the role of shedding illusions in spurring liberation - “provided the insight into the hidden conflicts leads to a constructive solution and hence to greater well-being” – and his reference to the resistance of “individuals as well as social classes who cannot bear disillusionment without positive solutions” (my emphasis). We see clearly here that Fromm isn’t arguing that resistance to debunking is an innate psychological mechanism but that it's often connected to the recognition of the practical uselessness of challenging false beliefs in the realization of human goals. Debunking in this view has to be connected to productive solutions to real human problems in actuality, and to be effective debunking has to make this connection explicit.
Given this, in order to debunk in an ethical and constructive manner, according to De Beauvoir, “[i]t would first be necessary to create a situation of such a kind that the truth might be bearable and that, though losing his illusions, the deluded individual might again find about him reasons for hoping” (p. 142). Perhaps the clearest statement of this is from Voltairine de Cleyre, whose activism in both the freethought and the anarchist movements and recognition of their interdependence left her no doubts about the fundamental failure of any debunking that isn’t rooted in a positive project of human fulfillment and social transformation:
[U]nless the freethought movement has a practical utility in rendering the life of man more bearable, unless it contains a principle which, worked out, will free him from the all-oppressive tyrant, it is just as complete and empty a mockery as the Christian miracle or Pagan myth. Eminently is this the age of utility; and the freethinker who goes to the Hovel of Poverty with metaphysical speculations as to the continuity of life, the transformation of matter, etc.; who should say, ‘My dear friend, your Christian brother is mistaken; you are not doomed to an eternal hell; your condition here is your misfortune and can't be helped, but when you are dead, there's an end of it’, is of as little use in the world as the most irrational religionist. To him would the hovel justly reply: ‘Unless you can show me something in freethought which commends itself to the needs of the race, something which will adjust my wrongs, “put down the mighty from his seat,” then go sit with priest and king, and wrangle out your metaphysical opinions with those who mocked our misery before’.
Connected to this, De Beauvoir noted the importance not simply of a thoughtful attitude toward debunking but of a short social distance and shared set of interests between debunkers and debunkees: “[G]enerosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid,” she suggested, “the less distinction there is between the other and oneself and the more we fulfill ourself in taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others” (p. 143). In other words, debunking will be more effective and useful to the extent that debunkers share experiences (particularly experiences of oppression) and interests with debunkees. (This is also a point touched on in Sikivu Hutchinson’s Moral Combat.)
Appreciating the inseparability of the spheres of debunking is another element of the method. Voltairine de Cleyre, fascinatingly, encourages us to think of freethought as anarchy in the realm of ideas, with all of the attendant associations. To those who oppose anarchism but also oppose the theocratic control of ideas, she argued: “[T]he whole combat of the seventeenth century, of which you are justly proud, and to which you never tire of referring, was waged for the sole purpose of realizing anarchism in the realm of thought.” It was on this basis, she contended, that political revolution (and in the future economic revolution) was possible:
Mark you! The seventeenth century made the eighteenth possible, for it was the "new order of thoughts," which gave birth to a "new order of things". Only by deposing priests, only by rooting out their authority, did it become logical to attack the tyranny of kings: for, under the old regime, kingcraft had ever been the tool of priestcraft…
Challenges to authoritarianism in thought are thus inseparable from challenges to political-economic authoritarianism. Furthermore, no area of belief should be artificially walled off from the democracy of thought. She defined freethought as “the right to believe as the evidence, coming in contact with the mind, forces it to believe. This implies the admission of any and all evidence bearing upon any subject which may come up for discussion.” And of course, “Among the subjects that come up for discussion, the moment so much is admitted, is the existence of a God.”
In addition to (and inseparable from) the indivisibility of religious, political, and economic debunking, Fromm argued for the indivisibility of internal and external awareness:
The capacity to see and— equally so— blindness are not divisible. The critical faculty of the human mind is one: To believe one can be seeing internally but blind as far as the outside world is concerned is like saying that the light of a candle gives light only in one direction and not in all. The light of a candle is reason’s capacity for critical, penetrating, uncovering thought. (KL 680-683)
Similarly, as I've already discussed in the case of love, Fromm argued that productive, humanistic acts can’t be practiced in isolation or compartmentalized to certain objects or areas. In addition, and like De Cleyre, he discusses credulity and skepticism in terms of submission and rebellion, and stresses the importance of cultivating habits of intellectual resistance:
Once one is aware of the crucial importance of non-submission (I mean here of inner non-submission and not necessarily of purely defiant, dogmatic disobedience), one will become very sensitive to the small signs of submission, one will look through the rationalization that justifies it, one will practice courage, and one will discover that once the problem and its central significance are recognized, one discovers by oneself many answers to the question. (KL 726-730)
He recommends a general “attitude…of deep distrust” (noting the difference between distrusting statements rather than people****):
Since most of what we hear is either plainly untrue, or half true and half distorted, and since most of what we read in the newspapers is distorted interpretations served as facts, it is by far the best plan to start out with radical skepticism and the assumption that most of what one hears is likely to be a lie or a distortion. (KL 732-735)
Each act of resistance and reason sets the stage for others. Finally, while it’s important to avoid seeing people as means to ends beyond themselves, it’s also important to remember that the debunking of illusions doesn’t just concern the debunkees. As all of these writers recognized, and as I’ve discussed previously, our illusions and faith-practices have effects that go beyond ourselves and harm others. De Beauvoir emphasized that no one can be truly free in isolation – “the freedom of one man almost always concerns that of other individuals” (p. 142); our freedom is dependent on many others overcoming their illusions.
While immediate effectiveness isn’t stressed as the driving factor behind these recommendations, it’s of course arguable that any and all of these suggestions should enhance the effectiveness of debunking methods. In any case, the authors saw these as interconnected: the potential effectiveness of a given method or action is not separable from the ethics of that method or action. In Part 3, I’ll draw on their insights to sketch out a general method for ethical and effective debunking.
*Both recognized the various forms of psychological evasion as the natural result of the human condition. Our freedom in a godless, nonteleological universe can be exhilarating, but this freedom and the ethical responsibility that derives from it are a heavy psychic burden to bear. So perennially finding means of evading the full recognition of this freedom and the accompanying weighty responsibility is natural and to be expected. But these evasive mechanisms, these authors argue, prevent our growth and sap our strength, keep us from acting truly ethically and often make us dangerous, and interfere with our understanding of and connections to ourselves and others. We don’t have to agree with every aspect of their larger philosophies to appreciate the importance of their emphasis on and insights concerning the various ways we try to “escape from freedom,” the harms caused by this evasion, and the means through which we might address the problem.
**Fromm provides an extensive and excellent critique of Freud in The Greatness and Limitations of Freud’s Thought.
***This contrast parallels the difference between the widespread view of science as alienating and Fromm’s vision of true science as, like love, the enemy of alienation. The common belief is reflected in the negative connotations of the word “disillusion” and Max Weber’s concept of “disenchantment.”
****Fromm is concerned to make the crucial distinction between falsehoods and liars. He offers that his recommendation of radical skepticism “may sound perhaps less misanthropic if I stress that I spoke of the truth of statements, not about people who are liars. It would perhaps be simpler, although less bearable, if most people could be thus qualified, but the fact is, a majority of people whose statements are untrue or half true believe sincerely that they are speaking the truth, or at least persuade themselves of this while they are making their statements” (KL 737-740).
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the ethics of debunking, particularly of debunking those myths that have a central role in people’s lives. (This has become an issue of even more concern to me since I’ve been writing on some nonreligious subjects about which many atheists hold certain ideas dear (I’ll come back to this in a while….) It seems to me that this has really been the central bone of contention between gnu atheists and accommodationists, and that both sides could stand to be more thoughtful about the issue. The terms of this ongoing debate have allowed people on both (or all) sides to avoid the practical, ethical questions associated with debunking.
The gnu atheists have failed in some key ways. First, we’ve too often espoused a commitment to abstract Truth at almost all costs, neglecting the basic fact that this commitment is worthless if it doesn’t serve worthwhile ends – human (and nonhuman) well-being, freedom, fulfillment, and joy. At its worst, skeptical debunking becomes a sterile and pointless truth-for-truth’s-sake game or an exercise in individual ego gratification or group narcissism.
My point here isn’t to try to identify one group as ill-motivated, but to point out that all of us, and anyone who takes up the task of debunking in any area, can easily succumb to this tendency. Nevertheless, I think the evidence shows that many gnu atheists are motivated by genuine, positive social aims. Many of us have discussed several times the political, psychological, and ethical reasons for opposition to faith-religion and for the promotion of non- and anti-faith alternatives
or shown through our actions where our commitments lie. We offer alternative visions that aren’t just weak substitutes for religion, and believe religion is unnecessary (and in many ways counterproductive) to well-being, freedom, fulfillment, and joy. Seen in terms of these humanistic visions, leaving religion behind and embracing a secular-scientific-skeptical approach is highly positive, and urgently necessary, for individuals and for society.
While we’ve sometimes done a passable job describing this positive vision in general, we haven’t always been so thoughtful in our approach to concrete situations. We’ve often conveyed an attitude toward debunking that comes across as cold and unsympathetic – an attitude that says, “We’re adults who can handle the truth. Anyone who talks about emotional pain experienced in challenges to faith or faith-beliefs is silly, sentimental, and condescending. Even if these experiences are real, they’re a small and temporary price to pay for the clear benefits of reality-based thinking.”
This is problematic for two main reasons. First, it gives the impression that we’re unfeeling and uncaring, making our claims that our debunking is rooted in humanistic concerns ring hollow and making exaggerated or wholly invented tales of obnoxious behavior sound plausible. Second, it’s based on a…faith in the inevitable and wholly positive outcomes of debunking that isn’t based on reality.
Moreover, it’s been easy, in view of the obvious damaging effects of religion and religious privilege, to lose sight of the circumstances of people’s lives, their fears, and the variety of ways that questioning and abandoning these beliefs is experienced. And, while it’s easy to focus on religious privilege, there’s a tendency to forget or ignore that this isn’t a particularly meaningful axis of privilege in the lives of every religious person and that its effects can be swamped by other forms of oppression.
Related to this, while gnus have rightfully insisted on the importance of debunking faith-religion, they’ve sometimes paid insufficient attention to the other areas in which activism is needed to realize this goal. I’ve described this interplay of epistemic and social justice activism before, so I won’t dwell on it again here. To reiterate: this is not to say that epistemic activism isn’t legitimate and important on its own, but even if this were our exclusive midrange goal in bettering the world, we couldn’t legitimately ignore the context of that activism or the social forces working against it.
Finally, gnu atheists have been too ready to fall back on the arguments that aggressive debunking is just our style, that the consequences of our words sent out into the anonymous internet aren’t our responsibility, and that we’ve heard from many people for whom our debunking had a salutary effect.
For their part, the accommodationists have made the reverse errors. They’ve largely failed to acknowledge or address the positive ethical dimension of debunking and the arguments for the humanistic necessity of epistemic activism, tending to suggest that all debunking of faith-religion is callous and wrong without making the case for this position. Exploiting the sometimes thoughtless presentation of gnu attitudes, they’ve promoted false tales of gnu meanness and insensitivity, encouraging the belief that such behavior is synonymous with debunking itself – that religious debunking is inherently cruel and unethical. This focus on real or imagined bad behavior has allowed them to avoid clearly staking out a position against epistemic activism or religious debunking itself and so to avoid defending this position against the arguments put forth by the gnus for the necessity and importance of this sort of activism.
Where gnus have sometimes overstated the effects of religious privilege in justifying their actions, accommodationists have tended to ignore or pay lip service to it. Where gnus have at times come across as coldly smug, accommodationists have responded with an attitude of sentimental condescension toward believers that’s fundamentally conservative. Where gnus have sometimes failed to appreciate that we act in a world in which it’s likely that our efforts will cause some short-term harm and in which we can’t guarantee the positive outcomes of our acts, accommodationists have often been short-sighted and tended to divorce immediate psychological-emotional distress from long-term growth and liberation, denying the importance of the latter both in general and in assessing the justification for the former.
If anti-faith activism isn’t seen in terms of projects – short-, medium-, and long-term – to advance well-being, freedom, fulfillment, and joy (both for religious people and nonbelievers), then of course it will appear pointless and gratuitously cruel. If it’s assumed that the result of debunking efforts will overwhelmingly be distress andor a retreat to religion, that this will be a permanent condition, that religion responds to enduring and ineradicable rather than culturally shaped and created needs, and that epistemic activists have no positive and liberating alternatives to offer, then of course anti-faith activism will seem callous and counterproductive. But none these assumptions is valid.
Due to these evasions, accommodationists, too, have equally failed to be upfront in specifying what they consider an ethical and effective approach to debunking faith and faith claims. My next post will discuss how a few thinkers have approached this difficult question.
Via MindFreedom, a statement from Juan Méndez, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
In a statement to a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 4, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment of Punishment called for a ban on forced psychiatric interventions including forced drugging, shock, psychosurgery, restraint and seclusion, and for repeal of laws that allow compulsory mental health treatment and deprivation of liberty based on disability, including when it is motivated by “protection of the person or others.”
The statement (available at the link above) discusses several areas in which human rights violations occur under the label of medicine or health care, but psychiatric practices are of special interest. Importantly, these “treatments” are now being viewed through the lens of human rights:
My main report focuses on certain forms of abuse in health-care settings that may cross a threshold of mistreatment that is tantamount to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The report sheds light on often undetected forms of abusive practices that occur under the auspices of health-care policies, and emphasizes how certain treatments run afoul of the prohibition on torture and ill-treatment.
…The significance of categorizing abuses in health-care settings as torture and ill-treatment and examining abuses in health-care settings from a torture protection framework provides the opportunity to solidify an understanding of these violations and to highlight the positive obligations that States have to prevent, prosecute and redress such violations. Furthermore, by reframing violence and abuses in health-care settings as prohibited ill-treatment, victims and advocates are afforded stronger legal protection and redress for violations of human rights.
Méndez calls for immediate and fundamental changes to prevent such violations:
Free and informed consent should be safeguarded on an equal basis for all individuals without any exception, through the legal framework and judicial and administrative mechanisms, including through policies and practices to protect against abuses. Any legal provisions to the contrary, such as provisions allowing confinement or compulsory treatment in mental health settings, including through guardianship and other substituted decision-making, must be repealed.
Specifically,
States should impose an absolute ban on all forced and non-consensual medical interventions against persons with disabilities, including the non-consensual administration of psychosurgery, electroshock and mind-altering drugs, for both long- and short- term application. The obligation to end forced psychiatric interventions based on grounds of disability is of immediate application and scarce financial resources cannot justify postponement of its implementation.
I hope we can get to a real discussion of these issues, but my experience leads me to doubt it. Greta Christina has a response to a commenter (I was reading the thread and…well, I don’t know what I was expecting, but I was following the conversation).
If the commenter wasn’t a troll, they were suggesting that GC’s response to her experience could affect its path. This could be obnoxiously voluntarist or merely a recognition that our responses to our mental states can have effects. The person might be suggesting that maybe a protracted climbing inside our subjective experience might not itself be the most productive response to distress. If so, I’d agree with that. But the commenter's motives and remarks aren't especially relevant.
GC’s response:
Dear Commenter,
I know you mean well, and I’ll try to take your comment in that spirit. But if you have no personal experience with mental illness, aren’t a trained professional in the field of mental illness,
The "trained professionals" of today are acting in the service of corporations and models with no scientific validity. There’s no such thing as “mental illness” in the sense of a brain disease. The idea that this distress is the same as diabetes is incorrect. It’s false. You should demand that the person prescribing you drugs explain and defend the scientific basis for it to your satisfaction as a skeptic.
and by your own acknowledgement don’t have any evidence to support the opinions you’re expressing about mental illness, please don’t give advice to mentally ill people on how to manage their illness.
It’s not an illness in the sense you think. You similarly lack evidence.
Writing publicly about my depression has been extremely helpful. It helps me process it and make sense of it. It helps alleviate the sense of shame I’ve been made to feel about it. It helps me normalize it, and frame it as simply another illness, like my cancer or the time I had pneumonia — which also helps alleviate the shame.
This is demonstrably false. Conceiving of psychological/emotional distress as a physical illness is stigmatizing (in addition to being false).
The fact that my writing about it helps others gives meaning to it, which makes it more tolerable.
It makes it tolerable to understand it, to give meaning to it in some way (as would any, including a religious, meaning). But the way you understand it is false and stigmatizing. It’s not the only way to understand or give meaning to your experiences, and it prevents other, productive understandings.
And when I write about my depression, I often get good suggestions and ideas on how to manage my depression from other people who experience it.
And they’ve been similarly influenced by the corporate culture of psychiatry.
When you have a voice in your head saying “I shouldn’t comment,” I urge you to listen to it. If you feel driven by compassion to say something, to “not stay silent and offer nothing,”
Hmm. The person is working from an understanding of your experience that might be in large part wrong. But then again, yours is wrong. I urge you to investigate the history of and scientific basis for this model of “mental illness.”
Michael Shermer, in his recent “reply” (it wasn’t much of a substantive reply) to Ophelia Benson, made reference once or twice to moral progress. Since I’ve written about this more than once in the past, I thought it would be a good opportunity to revisit the concept.
Thinking about moral progress takes you down a tricky, potholed path. The idea lends itself all too easily to apologies for imperialism and colonialism, to the smug notion that “we” Civilized White People have brought the rest of the planet’s population out of its primitive, backward ways, along an ever-advancing path toward Civilization. It also tends to confuse theory with social reality, discounting the very real forms of oppression that characterize contemporary "civilization."
Even more nuanced views which recognize many of the sources of contemporary bigotry to be of modern, elite origin tend to place white, straight, male “Westerners” in the moral vanguard. This ignores the obvious point that the most privileged, the prime beneficiaries of any system of oppression and exploitation, are the least likely to be progressive in challenging the situation (not that it doesn’t happen – of course it does, and these people tend to receive far more historical interest than the members of oppressed groups).
But let’s accept the idea that, over the past few centuries, barriers to the consideration of rights and participation – whatever their origin - have been falling. The movements against racism, sexism, homophobia, speciesism, ableism, imperialism, and religious privilege (specific and generic) have gained strength, marking progress at the level of moral theory and practice. This is true more broadly of the decline of authoritarian and hierarchical systems. (Again, this doesn’t mean the end of domination and exploitation in practice, but simply a decline in the explicit attempts to justify naked oppression. It’s an ongoing battle, always.)
What does this mean for us in the freethought movement? A lot! It means that we need to study the past, recognizing ourselves within the great sweep of the history of freethought and scientific progress, and to think about future generations. How will they regard our views?
Miranda Fricker writes about judging people in the past.We should think of ourselves as the past, because inevitably we will be. If we consider the arc of moral progress, and consider it a good thing, what do we think the most admirable of future generations will think of our views? How do our views fit historically?
I’ve had to revise my ideas about animal rights and psych rights considerably over the past couple of years, and have no doubt that not only my earlier views but some of my present ones will, to future generations, look quaint at best. The point, though, is the effort – to try to look back from the future and from the perspective of oppressed beings and to cultivate the habits of objectivity.
Now, Richard Dawkins likes to write about moral progress, but he’s not big on practicing what he preaches. Same with Michael Shermer. In my view, if we’re going to take moral progress seriously, here’s a relevant test:
Can your ideas be summarized or prefaced with “They want to take us back to a time when…” or “They want to continue a status quo in which…”?
“I want to continue a status quo in which women’s interests and talents are thought to be essentially different from men’s.”
“I want to continue a status quo in which women’s voices aren’t attended to with the same seriousness as men’s.”
“I want to move us back to a time when conference organizers didn’t think about the sex of invited speakers and so chose overwhelmingly men.”
“I want to move us back to a time when there were no harassment policies or cultural condemnation of sexism and each woman individually had to confront this on her own”.
“I want us to continue a status quo in which women who oppose sexism and misogyny are harassed, threatened, and subjected to a campaign of personal smears, sexist slurs, and denigration on the internet.”
If your ideas fit in this mold, you might be a reactionary.
From p. 7 of Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics
(1947!):
I have written this book with the intention of reaffirming the validity of humanistic ethics, to show that our knowledge of human nature does not lead to ethical relativism but, on the contrary, to the conviction that the sources of norms for ethical conduct are to be found in man's nature itself; that moral norms are based upon man's inherent qualities, and that their violation results in mental and emotional disintegration. I shall attempt to show that the character structure of the mature and integrated personality, the productive character, constitutes the source and the basis of 'virtue' and that 'vice', in the last analysis, is indifference to one's own self and self-mutilation. Not self-renunciation nor selfishness but self-love, not the negation of the individual but the affirmation of his truly human self, are the supreme values of humanistic ethics. If man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.
None of this is to imply that the basis for moral norms shouldn't be subject to vigorous debate; on the contrary, Fromm's basing humanistic ethics on rational knowledge requires such investigation and discussion. And over the next several months I'll challenge several fundamental aspects of his vision of human nature and needs. But I wanted to pause for a moment to appreciate the value of his project to ethics, politics, psychology, and human (and potentially nonhuman) well-being.
The charge of human exceptionalism is often deployed as part of a ‘Gotcha!’ argument by proponents of evolutionary psychology. If you criticize research in the field, the claims the research is argued to support, or the assumptions on which these are based, the argument goes, it’s because you’re clinging to an outdated notion of human exceptionalism which holds that nothing (or very little) about our brains or behavior is rooted in evolution – that we’re “blank slates” upon which culture writes all. So, opponents of specific methods, claims, and assumptions are portrayed as evolution denialists who refuse – for political reasons, of course – to acknowledge that we’re products of evolution like all other animals. There are two key and complementary responses to this charge, but appreciating them requires addressing some of the speciesism that distorts our thinking.
So your ‘null hypothesis’ is that homo sapiens are unlike other mammals? Have I got that right?
Why would this be your expectation? – noelplum99
First, if you’re going to use scientific terminology to make your point sound sciency, it’s a good idea to get it right. It’s Homo sapiens: both the upper-case initial letter of the generic name, and the italics, are required. Second, there’s a bit of a hint toward the answer in what you wrote earlier in the same comment:
When we observe other mammals we see differences between the sexes in terms of behaviour that are not clouded by culture in the same way they are with humans.
Now since you’re evidently not very bright, I’ll spell it out for you: the hypertrophy of culture in our species means that we are very limited in the extent to which we can legitimately extrapolate from what we see in other mammals when we consider behaviour, and specifically, behavioural differences between the sexes. With very limited exceptions, such as breastfeeding, there is no human behaviour unique to one sex, and even breastfeeding and similar examples are heavily influenced by culture in a way that has no parallel in other species.
The “hypertrophy of culture” for humans (and its specific implications for sex differentiation) is a key point that simply can’t be ignored. We’ve evolved to live and learn within human cultures, which means we have a highly developed capacity for cognitive and behavioral flexibility.
This doesn’t imply, though - and if I recall correctly Gotts has also alluded to this in the past - that human culture marks some magical line that clearly separates us from all other animals. The second response to the human-exceptionalism accusation is to point out that the capacity to learn, to develop, to live in cultures, to be flexible in our behavior is the result of evolution. These capacities didn’t originate with us, as many of our human myths claim, marking us as unique and special amongst animals.
[semi-gratuitous cat pic]
Many other species exhibit behavioral flexibility, are social, cooperate, teach and learn, play, experience emotions, and so on, and our own evolution built on the same structures. We can look to evolution to understand our capacity, and of course propensity, to learn, to be cognitively flexible in response to changing circumstances, and to live in cultures, just as we can look to evolution to understand other aspects of our physical selves.
It’s marvelous that evolution has produced this. The evolved physiological basis for our (and other animals’) cognitive and behavioral flexibility has to be immensely complex. That’s precisely the opposite of a “blank slate.” The “blank slate” metaphor (much less the “It’s probably X% cultural and Y% innate” business) doesn’t even make sense. A slate doesn’t absorb and change in response to what’s written on it; it doesn’t interact with the world at all. It’s a completely inapt metaphor for human culture and its evolutionary foundation.
Coming to terms with the evolution of cultural beings is a significant aspect of overcoming speciesism. And it should be noted that our flexibility and other adaptations related to culture have no doubt been accompanied by losses in other capacities. Moreover, these capacities and propensities have allowed humans to succeed so far - for a short evolutionary time - but might not serve us in the long run. Recognizing the tradeoffs and actual or potential disadvantages of our evolved cultural capacities, including cognitive and behavioral flexibility, plasticity, and learning, can help us to appreciate our connections to other animals and to reject the inaccurate natural/evolved/animal vs. cultural/unevolved/human dichotomy that underlies so many of the arguments about evo psych.
In recent arguments about evo psych, I’ve seen a lot of smug dismissals that take the form “How can you deny it? It’s Science - objective data!” As though the simple invocation of the word science or a scientific title magically granted a proposition or individual the power of objectivity. The casual refrain “Science has shown…” has to be the most preposterous substitute for real objectivity ever, all the more pathetic when followed - in true hyperskepticredulous fashion - by citations of anecdotes or appeals to common sense.
A sure route away from objectivity and toward biased thinking is believing that objectivity is a property you possess – that you’re inherently an “objective person” (Science has shown!* ;)). Few attitudes are more contrary to developing objectivity than the arrogant presumption that you already “have” it. As Fromm eloquently argued, objectivity is a practice, built on a foundation of humility. We accept that our prejudices and cognitive tendencies are going to affect our perspectives and perceptions, and do our best to mitigate it.
Objectivity isn’t something we have. It’s something we do.
* The link to the full PDF can be found on that page. The paper I’m referring to is:
Uhlmann, E.L., & Cohen, G.L. (2007). “I think it, therefore it’s true”: Effects of self perceived objectivity on hiring discrimination. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 104, 207-223.
** Critical thinking involves taking a critical eye to our own preconceptions and epistemic practices. It’s not about rebellion for rebellion’s sake, or the persona (much less self-image) of the brave, scientific pioneer or iconoclast bucking the alleged dogma. Critical thinking involves skeptically analyzing our own framing of and approaches to questions, the sources of our information and how these are differently evaluated, the reasons we reject information as valid or relevant, the bases on which we extrapolate and draw general conclusions from research findings, and so on. Critical thinking begins at home.
[This will be the last informational post for a while, after which I’ll dive right into criticism. In this post I’ll describe Fromm’s understanding of love, focusing on The Art of Loving.
I’ll also raise a few of the more important problems with his approach which I’ll discuss in more depth later.]
Love was central both to Fromm’s humanistic psychiatry and to his political vision. His approach to love stands out for its emphasis on action (and particularly his attention to epistemic practices), its insistence on a consistent and comprehensive application, and its recognition of the significance of the social context for the possibilities of loving.
What is love?
(I couldn’t resist.)
We’re often accustomed to thinking of love as a flighty emotion or a fugitive property sought and received from others. Fromm conceives of love very differently. Love, to him, is an attitude, an activity, a practice, “an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love” (TAoL, 43). Love is the highest form of relatedness to others and to the world, an active power “which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others…makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness” (19).
Loving is an act and habit of giving to the world. The loving person
gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other - but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness - of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. (23)
The loving person doesn’t give love in order to receive it, but “he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to make the other person a giver also and they both share in the joy of what they have brought to life” (23). (Fromm offers the examples of teachers learning from their students and performers energized by their audience. I’m also reminded of a bumper sticker about rescue animals I read about recently: it asks “Who rescued who?”)
The need for consistency across relationships
“If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.” - TAoL, 43
The most striking contrast I can think of to Fromm’s vision of love is Howard and Helga’s “Nation of Two” (Das Reich der Zwei) in Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night. For Fromm, love can’t be reserved exclusively for a specific object. People are only capable of loving another person if they’re capable of loving the whole world, including themselves. Genuinely loving someone requires this cosmopolitan attitude: “If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, ‘I love you’, I must be able to say, ‘I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself’” (43).
Importantly, this assumes a shared global identity:
In brotherly love there is the experience of union with all men, of human solidarity, of human at-onement. Brotherly love is based on the experience that we are all one. The differences in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all men. In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from the periphery to the core. If I perceive in another person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences, that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. (44)
This quotation hints at both the strengths and the weaknesses of Fromm’s approach. His vision of love urges people to love comprehensively, focusing on our fundamental commonalities rather than our differences. In fact, Fromm at his most expansive writes about the basis of all love being biophilia, a term he coined, meaning love of life itself. But in this passage he’s talking specifically about brotherly love, which is not synonymous with biophilia and which he distinguishes from other forms of love including biophilia.
Fromm – always a fan of taxonomy – presents separate discussions of the various forms of love, a presentation which works against his positive cosmopolitan vision. He discusses erotic love, maternal love, paternal love, (infuriatingly) love of God, and brotherly love: “The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love… By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life. This is the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it says: love thy neighbor as thyself. Brotherly love is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness.” (43-4)
It’s quite odd for someone to suggest that brotherly love underlies maternal love. This idea reflects a bias which leads to the caricaturing of parental love and its demotion to the realm of “the animal.” Fromm presents brotherly love as at once the foundation for and the pinnacle above all of the classes of love - the modern, rational, mature love to which we should aspire. In order to do so, he has to distort the picture, downplaying certain aspects and removing incongruent features from his presentation of the various forms of love (for example, describing “motherly love” as almost entirely focused on caring for physical needs).
Biophilia – the love of all life – doesn’t appear at all in The Art of Loving. Not only is it absent from the important classifications, surprising given its significance elsewhere in his writings, but the notion of brotherly love presented here, contrary to Fromm’s own suggestion, is anthropocentric, hierarchical, and exclusive. Fromm makes an effort to characterize it as a relation of equals:
Brotherly love is love between equals: but, indeed, even as equals we are not always ‘equal’; inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, the other powerful. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one’s own feet is the permanent and common one. (44-5)1
This stands it above the types of “natural” love – for children, family, animals – which are presented as less mature and developed. Brotherly love is proper to and practiced amongst humans, and in particular “brothers,” with all of the connotations of that metaphorical term.
Matters are made even worse by the inclusion of a whole section on “love of God.” Fromm was not a believer and made clear that he was presenting God as an abstract constellation representing love, justice, truth, and other prominent human values. But he proceeds in TAoL (and elsewhere) to discuss love of God as though it makes sense within his framework. This is completely bizarre when we take into account his frequent criticisms of a tendency toward abstraction in our culture and how it interferes with relatedness and contributes to – actually constitutes a form of - alienation.
To suggest that people should concern themselves with loving an abstraction (especially when it’s, circularly, supposed to be an abstraction of love!2) is bad enough, but it’s most disappointing in that this section could have been about biophilia. He never does talk specifically about what a mature, reason-based relationship with other animals and the rest of the natural world would look like; and the examples of such relationships he does offer, as I’ll show, are almost always incompatible with what he writes about loving relationships with other human beings.
So there are serious problems with Fromm’s typology-hierarchy of love, his inclusion of “love of God,” and his exclusion of nonhuman love. Fortunately, he offers an extended discussion of a practical approach to love which isn’t really bound in any meaningful way to his flawed concept of brotherly love, and this model is easily expandable. This expansion of his formulation, correcting for sexism and speciesism, is consistent with the most valid and useful aspects of his thinking about love – its emphasis on comprehensiveness and consistency across relationships and its focus on patterns of action and a general way of relating to the world.
The practice of love
Fromm saw loving as an art, a discipline, an approach to life. He thought that it could be understood with reason and that we could cultivate these talents within ourselves. Again, from his perspective it was needless to work on maintaining loving relationships with particular individuals, much less to try to “find love” with a particular person, if we weren’t willing to make our development as comprehensively loving people a central part of our lives, dedicating our lives to loving.
He described some general requirements – discipline, concentration, patience, courage, determination, activity, focus, the mastery of related skills, an effort to fight alienation – that I won’t spend time on here. Most important are what Fromm considers the four basic elements “common to all forms of love”: care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge (24).
Four aspects of these fundamentals are central. First, they reflect Fromm’s conception of loving in active, practical, concrete terms rather than as a passive affect or an abstraction. Second, the four have to be practiced in concert – each complements the others and constrains or counteracts their potentially negative aspects. Third, arguably all but certainly the last two of the elements are epistemic in nature. (As I’ve argued, this makes the consideration and analysis of science and faith in relation to love both possible and essential.) Fourth, despite the problems with Fromm’s hierarchical taxonomy of forms of love, his basic description of love as a practice is not exclusive; it’s open to and in fact calls for the broadest application. So it doesn’t require any reworking of Fromm’s terms to break through his biases and to expand his ideas about the art of loving to include nonhuman animals.
The first fundamental element of love is care, or a concern for others which Fromm defines and describes in terms of concrete actions. He argues, for example, that people wouldn’t generally accept the claim of a mother (of course) to love her child if she neglected the child. He offers one good illustration that starts to take us back in the direction of biophilia:
It is not different even with the love for animals or flowers. If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in her ‘love’ for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. (25)
The use of single quotes around love in this case suggests, unfortunately, that the example is simply offered to illustrate the importance of care in action rather than reflecting a real inclusion of nonhuman animals in the sphere of love proper. (He then attempts a horrible illustration from the Old Testament – the story of Jonah and Nineveh.)
Related to this is the element of responsibility, “my response to the needs, expressed and unexpressed, of another human being.” “The loving person responds,” Fromm writes. “The life of his brother is not his brother’s business alone, but his own. He feels responsible for his fellow men, as he feels responsible for himself” (26).
The third essential element of love is respect. Fromm argues that practicing respect keeps care and responsibility from shading over into domination and possessiveness. He’s concerned to distinguish genuine respect from its authoritarian connotations: “Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is” (26).
Respect is fundamentally incompatible with domination and exploitation:
I want the loved person to grow and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need him to be as an object for my use…. Respect exists only on the basis of freedom: ‘l’amour est l’enfant de la liberté’ as an old French song says; love is the child of freedom, never that of domination. (26-7)
Last, and of great interest here, there’s the element of knowledge. Fromm recognizes a positive motivation behind some cruel, destructive acts, as when children dissect animals to study them: “The child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life” (28). But, repeatedly in TAoL and elsewhere, he emphasizes that knowledge, like respect, can’t emerge in relationships of domination and exploitation; true understanding “is possible only when I can transcend the concern for myself and see the other person in his own terms” (27). (As I discussed in a recent post, the history of the biological sciences provides evidence for this argument: our practices of domination and exploitation of nonhuman animals have fostered speciesist ideologies which have impeded the advance of knowledge about evolution and about animals, including ourselves.)
Developing real knowledge, the real understanding that forms an essential part of love, requires fighting narcissism and cultivating objectivity. This means recognizing and working to resist our tendency to distort our understanding of others in a manner in keeping with our perceived interests:
[T]he main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one.
…The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture which is formed by one’s desires and fears. (109)
I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person’s reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears. (111-12)
The concerns and concrete practices emphasized by Fromm as essential to loving relationships and a loving character are the fundamentals of science, and appreciating that is fairly urgent at a time when so many people want to contrast science’s so-called coldness and alienation with the alleged warmth of religion and argue that science needs to be “infused” with a spirit of compassion and care. Fromm is very explicit in TAoL about the necessity and fundamentality of the epistemic elements of love: “[L]ove being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, it requires the development of humility, objectivity and reason. One’s whole life must be devoted to this aim” (111-12). The indispensability of humility, objectivity, and reason to love can’t be overstated, and it’s important to appreciate, especially when he launches into one of his extended mystical flights of fancy, how much of Fromm’s writing about the nature of love is actually about the scientific approach.
Fromm stresses the indivisibility of the four basic elements of love: “To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were not motivated by concern” (27). (Reciprocally, real care and responsible concern for another being aren’t possible without knowledge of their specific qualities and needs; this is a key part of Rachels’ argument for “moral individualism” in Created from Animals.) He also emphasizes that the epistemic practices of love have to be comprehensively applied:
Humility and objectivity are indivisible, just as love is. I cannot be truly objective about my family if I cannot be objective about the stranger, and vice versa. If I want to learn the art of loving, I must strive for objectivity in every situation, and become sensitive to the situations in which I am not objective. (111-12)
To have acquired the capacity for objectivity and reason is half the road to achieving the art of loving, but it must be acquired with regard to everybody with whom one comes in contact. If someone would want to reserve his objectivity, and think he can dispense with it in his relationships to the rest of the world, he will soon discover that he fails both here and there. (111-12)
No areas of belief are exempt, and I’ve written about the many problems with attempts to cordon off religion from these requirements. By the same token, no relationships are exempt. If the stress is on cultivating habits of love and a loving orientation, practicing nonloving relationships with regard to some is going to interfere with the development of these capacities.
Of course, the cultivation of humility, objectivity, and reason isn’t limited to the formal institutions or spaces of science, nor does it mean approaching our life and relationships as a laboratory. This would be contrary to Fromm’s vision. It’s a shame that objectivity is so often seen as a detachment from others and the hardhearted treatment of them as objects. That arrogant idea is the opposite of what Fromm’s saying: the objectivity at the heart of love isn’t about being detached from others, but about trying our best in practice to detach our perception of them from our own biases and perceived interests.
Fromm didn’t follow his arguments through to their logical conclusion or fully pursue their implications, was inconsistent concerning the scope of application of the practices of love, and often fell back into conventional patterns of thought that saw loving in exclusively human terms, and these problems need to be addressed. But his arguments about love in general lead ineluctably to the conclusion – as he recognizes elsewhere when he talks about biophilic vs. necrophilic orientations - that loving practices based on these four basic elements have to be given the widest possible scope, and not reserved for one species any more than for one group or nation.
In order to realize this expanded vision, we need to think about biophilia in concrete terms and to address the aspects of Fromm’s and others’ thinking that work against the expansion. I’ll be doing that in future posts.
Love and the need for social change
“Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it.” - TAoL, 121-2
As I mentioned previously, Fromm didn’t see this or his other works as self-help manuals, and consciously worked to fight that potential misconception. The cultivation of a loving approach is, he recognized, “inseparably connected with the social realm” (119). He was quite plain about the fact that he saw our culture (he had a frustrating tendency to conflate “secular” culture with capitalism) as hostile to love:
[T]he capacity to love in an individual being in any given culture depends on the influence this culture has on the character of the average person. If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love - brotherly love, motherly love, and erotic love - is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love. (77)
This being the case, “People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society” (122). This marginalization comes with familiar difficulties and choices: how can people live by the principles of love and also make their way in the world as it is? People who appreciate the culture’s basic hostility to love can try to separate themselves as far as possible from “secular concerns,” as was the choice of “the Christian monks, and by persons like Tolstoi, Albert Schweitzer, and Simone Weil” (120-1). Or they can become cynical, arguing that “to speak of love today means only to participate in the general fraud” (120-1). But Fromm believed that loving could be practiced at the margins and in the interstices of society that allow for it – the culture is hostile to love, but that doesn’t mean there are no refuges for it.
He argued that “important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon” (122). This requires large-scale collective action, but Fromm was optimistic about the possibilities for change because he regarded love as “the ultimate and real need in every human being.” “That this need has been obscured,” he argued, “does not mean that it does not exist” (123). In his view, any society that failed to provide the conditions for the fulfillment of this deep, powerful need for love was doomed to fail in the long run, and movements that do appreciate this fundamental need and what its fulfillment makes possible would have a great chance at success. Therefore, “To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man” (123).
1As I’ll discuss in a future post, this breaks down completely when he writes of erotic love. He insists that this is not a love of equals so much as a meeting of opposite poles, and even criticizes those visions of equality that reject this concept of essentialized, complementary polarities. This leads him to some of his most sexist statements as well as to some stupid conclusions about homosexuality, and is entirely inconsistent with his emphasis on loving another meaning loving in them all others, including yourself, and the shared sense of identity this brings. This sort of thinking was toned down, though not eliminated, in his later works.
2In To Have or To Be? Fromm specifically criticizes the abstracting of “love” itself.
