Doublethink | The Clare Spark Blog

Compare Orwell’s pessimism to his admirer John Dos Passos’s sunnier views, who wrote of Orwell in his later years, and once voiced this more optimistic assessment of humanity’s future:

[Responding to German students as to what is admirable about USA:] “I told them they should admire the United States not for what we were but for what we might become. Selfgoverning democracy was not an established creed, but a program for growth. I reminded them that industrial society was a new thing in the world and that although we Americans had gone further than any people in spreading out its material benefits we were just beginning, amid crimes, illusions, mistakes and false starts, to get to work on how to spread out what people needed much more: the sense of belonging, the faith in human dignity, the confidence of each man in the greatness of his own soul without which life is a meaningless servitude….Faith in self-government, when all is said and done, is faith in the eventual goodness of man.” (p.508, Virginia Spencer Carr’s bio of John Dos Passos, whose USA trilogy, written in his younger years, was one of the most radical and brilliant of all the left-wing literature. After his quarrel with Hemingway during the Spanish Civil War, he gradually turned away from the Left, but his optimism and defense of the dissenting individual are the legacy of the Enlightenment.)

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October 27, 2012

Melville, Orwell, Doublethink

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 9:41 pm
Tags: blasphemy, cognitive dissonance, double bind, Doublethink, Father Mapple, flogging through the fleet, George Orwell, Herman Melville, Homage to Catalonia, Hunting Captain Ahab, John Dos Passos, Mary Glendinning, Moby-Dick, nationalism v. internationalism, Pierre or the Ambiguities, Roy Porter, sadomasochism, United Nations, virtuous expediency, voter suppression, White-Jacket, Winston Smith, writing as exorcism

This is my second major Orwell blog: see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/15/orwell-power-and-the-totalitarian-state/ for the first one.

During my recent forays into the changing interpretations of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949), I was surprised to learn that Orwell had read passages from Herman Melville’s White-Jacket (1850) while broadcasting on the BBC during the early years of WW2. Specifically, he excerpted a gory description of a naval doctor performing an unnecessary and fatal amputation on a wounded U.S. sailor. Elsewhere in White-Jacket, HM had sharply and vividly written about “flogging through the fleet,” a practice that he abhorred, possibly because he had been caned as a child by his own father. Indeed, Roy Porter sent me an ad from a British newspaper offering White-Jacket as sadomasochistic porn. (On the dynamics of sadomasochism see https://clarespark.com/2009/09/21/managerial-psychiatry-jung-murray-and-sadomasochism-2/.)

Though at least one Orwell biographer (Jeffrey Meyers) has emphasized GO’s masochism, I have not found a source yet that relates where the conception of Doublethink originated. Did Orwell know about “cognitive dissonance” from experience, or reading, or had he read Melville’s Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852), where Melville not only describes his mother’s frequent mixed messages, but invents “Plinlimmon’s Pamphlet” that praises “virtuous expediency” as the best morality attainable on this deceptive earth. My book on the Melville Revival (Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival) is nearly entirely devoted to this theme of the double bind/cognitive dissonance/virtuous expediency, all of which signify what Orwell chose to call Doublethink.

Here are the double binds that I suggest were made apparent in Melville’s novels, and then may have driven his academic revivers in the 20^th century into all manner of psychogenic symptoms and illnesses. (It is my contention that Melville readers who wished to advance in academe had to suppress the evidence before them in order to please the reigning ideology in the universities that employed them, so many derided Melville/Ahab as crazy, while defending Plinlimmon’s sensible philosophy, that they attributed to their “moderate” Melville/Ishmael .) But first take Doublethink in Pierre.

There is no conflict between “truth” and Order. Mary Glendinning, Pierre’s mother in the novel, wants her son “just emerging from his teens” to grow into a manly individual, but not such an individual that he disobeys her choice in choosing his future wife, who will also be perfectly obedient to her wishes.
Pierre is expected to revere his dear perfect (Christian) father, but he must not be so good a Christian as to rescue from near-beggary his “natural” half-sister Isabel.
Pierre reads the double bind, jilts his mother-chosen fiancée, runs off with Isabel, and mother dies of insanity. This book will not end well. (See Pierre’s scolding mother in this hard to find set of illustrations by Maurice Sendak, for a truncated edition of Pierre. https://yankeedoodlesoc.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/pierre3.jpg.)

In the much quoted Father Mapple’s sermon in Moby-Dick, the abolitionist preacher speaks of snatching the truth even if it lies hidden under the skirts of judges and Senators. It is unclear here whether “truth” signifies the truth of Christ, or of the truth as defined by lawyers (or today, scientists). But it is a fact that during Captain Ahab’s speech on “the quarter-deck”, he declares that “Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.” Since Ahab is widely described as a blasphemer, I suspect that it is empirical truth that the relatively powerless see, and which is denied by their superiors, that Melville meant to call out. Which links him now to Orwell’s famous “dystopia.”

For Winston Smith works in “the Ministry of Truth” where he rewrites history to suit the propaganda requirements of Big Brother and the Inner Party. Recall Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), where he denounces journalists for taking the Soviet line that all anarchists and Trotskyists were in league with Franco’s fascists. John Dos Passos, in Century’s Ebb, remembered Orwell as an individualist striking out at those man-made institutions that forced him to lie for the sake of Order. Compare Dos’s elevation of Orwell as truth-seeker to the trendier line that Orwell, like Melville, was a premature anti-imperialist, and for that alone we honor his life and work.

[Added 11-10-12 Dos quote: )“If one thinks of the artist as…an autonomous individual who owes nothing to society, then the golden age of the artist was the age of capitalism. He had then escaped the patron and had not yet been captured by the bureaucrat…. Yet it remains true that capitalism, which in many ways was kind to the artist and to the intellectual generally, is doomed and is not worth saving anyway. So you arrive at these two antithetical facts: (1) Society cannot be arranged for the benefit of artists; (2) without artists civilisation perishes. I have not yet seen this dilemma solved (there must be a solution), and it is not often that it is honestly discussed.” (George Orwell, in TRIBUNE, 1944). Quoted by Arthur M. Eckstein, “George Orwell’s Second Thoughts on Capitalism,” The Revised Orwell, ed. Jonathan Rose (Michigan State UP, 1992), p.204.

Another double bind that is especially relevant today: There is no conflict between national identity and international identity. Hence, the United Nations is our best bet to avoid wars of the catastrophic magnitude of the world wars of the 20^th century, or to halt “voter suppression” on November 6, 2012. Such are the psychic requirements of political correctness, the term itself an example of Doublethink, for facts (correctness) are non-partisan. Melville’s takedown of “virtuous expediency” is more to the point.

For a related blog see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/14/reality-and-the-left/. For “political correctness” as decorum, an idea passed out by liberal elites, see https://clarespark.com/2010/07/18/white-elite-enabling-of-black-power/, especially the suggestion by Christopher Edley, whose career has been remarkable.

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October 14, 2012

“Reality” and the “Left”

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 6:16 pm
Tags: Adorno Prize, communism, Democratic Party talking points, Doublethink, false consciousness, Judith Butler, McCarthyism, multiculturalism, New Deal social psychology, Orwell, postmodernism, Socialism

Judith Butler trading card

(For a related blog see https://clarespark.com/2012/09/07/charisma-and-symbolic-politics/: my response to the rhetoric and tactics of the Democratic National Convention, 2012.)

There was a time when there was a radical left in this country, with many warring internal factions from the late 19^th century onward. But social democrats (moderate conservatives in their own view) selectively co-opted the real left, saving that pro-labor distinction for themselves as the sole moral defenders of the working class, nailing McCarthyism (and the “paranoid” Right) for misguided assaults upon liberals. But whether old Communist or New Dealer, this messy, confusing, and overlapping set of movements rejected “reality” in favor of the “real” existence of

1. “False consciousness” (the Red argument that the working class had been bought off through consumerism, hence had relinquished demands for structural reform). For Marxist-Leninists , we don’t have socialism in America because capitalists transmitted their greed to the workers through institutions managed by “the Jews” or other wily “Hebraic” puritans. In a previous century, Southern apologists for slavery (e.g. George Fitzhugh) helped ploughed this field, comparing Northern “wage slavery” with the more benign paternalism they ascribed to Southern slaveholders. Or, false consciousness may signify excessive deference to “experts” and lack of faith in their own ability to manage their lives. In this instance, [Jew-controlled] mass culture is blamed, while those who laud the heroism and solidarity of workers in current television, may be writing against this type of “false consciousness,” one identified by George Orwell. (Orwell described it as “the pathetic reverence that illiterate people have for their supposed superiors”.)

2. “Identity politics” (the Social Democrat/progressive policy) that class ties were pre-empted by ethnic or racial ties. All my blogs on German Romanticism and the progressives are about this issue. (See https://clarespark.com/2011/03/28/index-to-multiculturalism-blogs/.)

For social democrats masked as “the Left”, we would and should have [ethical] “socialism” in America (or its simulacrum) under certain conditions: The rich should pay their “fair share” and reparations should be made to those victimized by “white male supremacy” through such programs as affirmative action and a “people’s history”: the unveiling of America’s previously unbounded assault upon Nature (including the Third World), non-whites, women, and the labor movement. The State answers the question “what is truth?” and gathers unto its bureaucracies (assisted by social psychologists) all claims to objectivity as to the “real” American history.

Yes, there are Marxist-Leninists with full professorships at numerous universities, as there are university and popular presses that publish them. But such a sprinkling of dissent serves one purpose: the fiction that free speech, no holds barred, is protected in America. Whereas some on the Old Left praised the industrial bourgeoisie as a progressive class, the New Left, along with the rest of the counter-culture, “uncovers” the “real” American past as an unadulterated outrage, with the assistance of Communist/Pop Front allies.

So who sees “things as they are”? There remain two groups vying for your eyeballs: Those hard leftists not beset by false consciousness and who see themselves as future bosses in a reconstructed communist/socialist polity (led of course by the politically conscious working class), or

the critical theorists and postmodernists, who nail science and empiricism as a “swindle,” with the Enlightenment as protofascist, reserving a “multiplicity” of truth telling for their socially-constructed selves. Many (on their left) have criticized this stance as self-contradictory, as a house built upon sand. Not to worry; Orwell’s Doublethink is alive and well amongst those academics who win all the prizes these days.

Judith Butler, Flexner Professor

[Illustrated: anti-Zionist and feminist Judith Butler, winner of the Adorno Prize this year. For my own take on Orwell criticism see https://clarespark.com/2012/10/15/orwell-power-and-the-totalitarian-state/, where I sharply depart from socialist interpreters of Orwell’s legacy.]

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October 11, 2012

The “Other”

Filed under: Uncategorized — clarelspark @ 7:29 pm
Tags: antisemitism, Doublethink, Frankfurt School critical theory, genuine liberalism, German Idealism, Gordon Allport, Harvard Defense Council, Henry A. Murray, Melanie Klein, New Deal social psychology, Orwell's 1984, prejudice, projective identification, Sartre, scapegoating, T.W. Adorno, the Other, The Prelude, thought crimes, Wordsworth

Graham Nash photoassemblage

This blog is about the almost universal use of the term “the Other” to designate unwarranted “prejudice” in the perpetrator of [ThoughtCrimes]. Presumably, the bigot views his antagonist as not quite human in the same way he is, i.e. he is Other. The notion of “the Other” comes from two sources, as far as I can tell: 1. German Idealism that sees subjectivity as the human condition (drawing on Plato and Kant); and 2. The psychoanalytic method of Melanie Klein, namely her theory of projective identification. It was taken up by Frankfurt School critical theorists in the early 1940s as far as I can tell, followers of Kantian subjectivism.

What projective identification asserts as truth is as follows: there are no real irreconcilable conflicts of interest in the world. Rather, the prejudiced person projects his own unacceptable (inner, evil) thoughts upon an enemy, who then appears as a monster deserving of annihilation, and at the very least must be controlled. Clearly, a strong dose of multiculturalism will cure the hateful individual, and with such salutary instruction, wars will cease and irrational parties will meekly submit to arbitration by a rational mediator skilled at finding “common ground.”

In all my work, I have fought this strategy, not because I like fighting (as in shooting wars), but because I don’t submit to the notion of a “neutral” liberal state that practices the coercive harmonizing of conflicting interest groups and ideologies. My therapist at UCLA warned? me that a dream revealed that I was fearful of submitting to my doctoral committee, and he was relieved when I finally got my degree (then he confessed that he disapproved of my prior “defiance”. Wonder ye why I liked Orwell’s 1984?).

This is a portion of how I presented the conception of projective identification in my book on the Melville Revival:

[From chapter 2, Hunting Captain Ahab:] The socially responsible alchemists were joined by the Frankfurt School German-Jewish refugees in the early 1940s. Like other Progressive productions in social psychology, the massive and numerous studies of the “authoritarian personality” by Adorno, Horkheimer et al, have transmuted objective conflicts of interest and rational responses to economic crises into symptoms of personal irresponsibility. The refugee philosophers, Marxist-Freudians to a man [plus Hannah Arendt], explained that the character structure of the middle-class with its falsely feeling “mass culture”/mob society and yen for agitators produced mass death in the twentieth century.[i]

T. W. Adorno

The overall project of their critical theory was to discredit excessively liberal values while subtly accrediting the discourse and world-view of organic conservativism–re-baptised by T.W. Adorno as genuine liberalism, like Wordworth’s “genuine liberty”(The Prelude, XIV, 132 [ii]), antidote to the protofascist “authoritarian personality.”[iii]

[From Wordsworth’s The Prelude:]

I speak in recollection of a time

When the bodily eye, every stage of life

The most despotic of our senses, gained

Such strength in me as often held my mind

In absolute dominion. Gladly here,

Entering upon abstruser argument,

Could I endeavour to unfold the means

Which Nature studiously employs to thwart

This tyranny, summons all the senses each

To counteract the other, and themselves,

And makes them all, and the objects with which all

Are conversant, subservient in their turn

To the great ends of Liberty and Power. (The Prelude, XIV, 127-139)

…………………..

…I remember well

That in life’s every-day appearances

I seemed about this time to gain clear sight

Of a new world–a world, too, that was fit

To be transmitted, and to other eyes

Made visible; as ruled by those fixed laws

Whence spiritual dignity originates,

Which do both give it being and maintain

A balance, an ennobling interchange

Of action from without and from within;

The excellence, pure function, and best power

Both of the objects seen, and eye that sees. (The Prelude, XIV, 367-378)

According to the Kleinian psychoanalytic theory of “projective identification” the self projects forbidden aggression into an external object which must be controlled. In the case of the upwardly mobile middle class, their (contemptible) will to power is supposedly projected upon the Jews. Stubborn adherence to non-dualisms was identified with scapegoating, obviously a bad thing for mental health. Social psychologist Gordon Allport denounced group prejudice in his frequently reprinted Freedom Pamphlet of 1948, The ABC’s of Scapegoating. [iv] Allport advised Americans to adjust to pluralism by looking inside to check their “moral cancer” (7). Whites should stop scapegoating blacks, Christians should stop scapegoating Jews, “labor” should stop scapegoating “the spokesmen for ‘business’ ” (like Allport?), and conservatives should stop confusing liberals with communists by scapegoating FDR (26). Allport’s pamphlet is illuminated by comparison with the worksheets he earlier devised with Dr. Henry A. Murray for the Harvard seminar Psychological Problems in Morale (1941), meant to be disseminated to “private organizations” throughout the nation. As part of the Harvard Defense Council, the seminar was to be “an important component in a general program of coordinated research.”[v] The materials for the course consisted of one short red-bound typescript, and numerous stapled worksheets, each methodically dealing with some aspect of propaganda, including a summary of Hitler’s personality and psychodynamics that would inform counter-propaganda. Hitler’s duplicity, irrationality and contempt for the masses was constantly compared with American rationality, which oddly enough, was derived from the protofascist and irrationalist social theorist, Vilfredo Pareto.[vi]

In worksheet #4, “Determinants of Good and Bad Morale,” the [moderate conservative] authors outlined “aggressive needs in group coherence.” First, there must be “outlets for grievances”: “Provision for the free expression of opinion improves morale.” Second, “scapegoat outlets” were another aid to good morale:

“The direction of aggression against a subversive minority group may reduce tensions, and will be least disruptive if the scapegoat group is one which is in conflict with the total group in respect of major immediate aims. Aggression had better be directed against the external enemy, but if this is frustrated, or the group becomes apathetic, the subversive minority group may improve morale by either (1) reducing frustrated tensions of aggression or (2) reawakening aggression, or (3) displacing aggression away from intra-group aggression, or (4) displacing aggression away from the leaders of the group, if and when reversed [sic] are suffered (p.8).” Did you catch the double message, indeed a case of Doublethink?

I am suggesting that the ahistoric, irrationalist concept of “scapegoating” or “negative identity” cannot explain “prejudice”; rather, the pluralists are admitting there is no basis for unity in class societies whose politics are organized around national or ethnic “peaceful competition.” If the only unity is found in differing groups worshipping one “ideal self” (or artwork, which will, in practice, be designated by the elite), then the bad individualist like Melville will be attacked. Thou shalt not question the good parent’s (i.e., the welfare state’s) benevolence or the possibility of “group adjustment” by reconfiguring the social structure along materialist, i.e., “Jacobin” lines. As Sartre noted in his wartime essay Anti-Semite and Jew, German unity was forged solely in the common project to remove the social irritant that prevented natural harmony. This “prejudice” against the Jewish intellect and its sulking reverence, so corrosive to “natural” family bonds, was specific to a pluralist society whose objective divisions could not be overcome without some measure of institutional transformation. The rooted cosmopolitanism of the moderate men, by definition masking class and gender conflicts with the bizarre notion of competing, yet peacefully co-existing, mutually adapting ethnic groups, is thus deceptive and discredits all science: its “pluralism” and “tolerance” attack the moral individual seeking common ground by straying outside the boundaries set by elites.

Adorno portrait in urban setting

[i] 91. See T.W. Adorno, Leo Lowenthal, Paul W. Massing, “Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda,” Anti-Semitism, A Social Disease, ed. Ernst Simmel (New York.: International Universities Press, 1946): 125-138; Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder (New York: Harper, 1950) and the other publications in the series “Studies in Prejudice” edited by Max Horkheimer and Samuel H. Flowerman, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee.See below for the links of their identity politics (usually attributed to Erik Erikson) to the Harvard/Chicagopragmatists: Parsons and Lasswell. Cf. Hugh Seton-Watson, “The Age of Fascism and its Legacy,” International Fascism, ed. George L. Mosse (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1979), 365. They argue: Hitler was only slightly indebted to the capitalists (who did not extensively fund him, or put him in power), and he soon brought them to heel. The irrationalist interpretation of Nazism as an outpouring of bad middle-class taste was followed by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, defending modernism in its reconstruction of the Nazi Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937.

[ii] 92. Melville owned (and took with him on his 1860 Meteor voyage) The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth Together With A Description of the Country of the Lakes in the North of England, Now First Published with His Works, ed. Henry Reed (Phila., 1839). Some of his (surviving) annotations were discussed in Thomas F. Heffernan, “Melville and Wordsworth,” American Literature (Nov. 1977): 338-351. There is no mention of “The Prelude.” Hershel Parker states that Duyckinck brought the Appleton proof sheets of the poem to the Berkshires in 1850, and even reviewed it, but that neither he nor Melville read the poem at that time; see Parker, “Melville & The Berkshires,” American Literature: The New England Heritage , eds. James Nagel and Richard Astro (New York: Garland Publishing, 1981), 68. Parker suggests that Melville’s sympathies for the suffering poor were inspired by Wordsworth’s cottagers and his own professional or personal traumas of the early 1850s (78-79), while Heffernan noted the importance of “The Excursion” to Clarel (351), a work displaying “the similarity of moral and religious concerns.”

[iii] 93. See T.W. Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950), 71, 781-783.The “Genuine Liberal” type is anti-totalitarian and free of narcissism; in Adorno’s appropriation of Freud, the genuine liberal possesses “that balance between superego, ego, and id which Freud deemed ideal” (71). Adorno’s example of the type is a politically naive, but frank and independent twenty-one year old woman, not given to ultra-femininity/ feminine wiles; she is the daughter of a hiring manager at a railroad; in the family sexual division of labor, her loving mother represents emotions, her father, facts. She is religious (“Perhaps we will all be saved”) and reads Plato for Utopian inspiration. When asked how she felt about Negroes and Jews, she was “guided by the idea of the individual,” but she wouldn’t want to marry a Negro with dark skin or a man with a big nose. However, as a nurse’s aid, she did not object to caring for Negro patients. Adorno quotes her “joke” [what would Freud have said?]: “Maybe if the Jews get in power they would liquidate the majority! That’s not smart. Because we would fight back.” Admirably free of bigotry, she is also free of “repression with regard to her feelings toward her father: ‘I want to marry someone just like my father’ ” (783).

Distinguishing themselves from “manipulative” fascists, the authors, in their concluding sentence, prescribe an antithetical appeal to the emotions: “…we need not suppose that appeal to emotion belongs to those who strive in the direction of fascism, while democratic propaganda must limit itself to reason and restraint. If fear and destructiveness are the major emotional sources of fascism, eros belongs mainly to democracy” (976). Henry A. Murray’s Thematic Apperception Test was used by Adorno’s colleagues creating “the F-scale” (the potential for fascist behavior); Murray’s and Lasswell’s books are recommended in the bibliography

[iv] 94. Gordon Allport, ABC’s of Scapegoating (New York: Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith, 1983, ninth rev.ed., first publ. 1948).

[v] 95. Gardner Murphy, Civilian Morale, 427.

[vi] 96. Murray-Allport worksheet #16, “Psychology of Influence (Education Persuasion) Applied to Morale Building in America,” 13.

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