Fromm and Maccoby on Cultural Stimuli

In our discussion thus far we have paid little attention to the problem of the happiness of the peasant. In fact, we have stressed the economic advantage of the productive orientation, but said little of the subjective factor of satisfaction and contentment. In order to understand this problem better, we must have in mind the important fact, mentioned in Chapter 5, that the village is a cultural and spiritual desert. The values which existed for the precapitalistic peasant, and which Tawney has described so succinctly, have virtually disappeared because they are in blatant contradiction to the spirit of a society in the process of industrialization. The friendly, purposeless conversation, the fiesta, the sitting around, and the sweetness of doing nothing, which in a society with precapitalist values and traditions were subjectively very satisfying, are rapidly losing their place within the Mexican village of the 20th Century. This is so because such values and traditions cannot grow unless they are rooted in the spirit of the total culture; furthermore, the economically successful peasants, who are of the productive-hoarding type, and who dominate the village, have cut off the expenditures for fiestas and all other forms of "uneconomical" recreations. Thus the receptive peasant is left with nothing except the cheap entertainment of radio, television, movies, and comic strips. The easy access to liquor (actively promoted by the industry producing alcoholic beverages) is all that is left to make use of his free time. The picture of the "good life" portrayed by television and radio increases even more the sense of worthlessness of the purposeless life, and increases the receptive peasant's sense of defeat and hopelessness.

... It is our experience that villages in which a richer cultural tradition is still alive (such as Tepoztlán or Tzintzuntzan) have probably a somewhat larger percentage of productive-receptive characters, and it is a legitimate speculation to assume that cultures like medieval society, in which man and living are the overriding goals, while not creating the characterological basis for hard and relentless effort, and not a great deal of individualism, offer the possibility for the development of the productive-receptive orientation. Both in the case of the village today, and in the case of a village in an unbroken, humanly rich culture, productiveness develops when the economic and the cultural reality permits and stimulates the kind of activity which is the essence of productiveness.

To return to the peasant of our village, while many are characterologically motivated for hard work, they have little enjoyment. Life is seen as a struggle to keep afloat. By orienting themselves more and more to the market, to profits and material gain, the productive-hoarding peasants are increasingly influenced by the new class of entrepreneurs to give up traditional fiestas as a waste of money, to work harder to buy more consumer goods, and to provide schooling for their children so that they can leave the village. While the cane growers cling to a way of life that leaves them increasingly vulnerable to exploitation, the productive-hoarding peasants do as much as possible to pull themselves into the modern society. A combination of factors including the values of the industrial society, pressures from the new entrepreneurs, rising prices, and new consumer demands all favor an orientation toward cash crops, capital investment, and status in terms of income. But the given limitations of their economic success are such that the vast majority of the productive-hoarding peasants can never earn enough to consider themselves successful in terms of the city economy, or even in terms of the new village entrepreneurs. All they have is hard work, little reward, and the constant risk of being run over by forces they can neither predict nor control. They must look at themselves in the eyes of the industrial world as underdeveloped. (134-135)

Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby
Social Character
in a Mexican Village (1970)

Here, then, is a lovely functional role for The Arts (as part of Culture) that does not require the actual artistic production to be functional. Culture makes life worth living, and thus it is lived better with Culture at its side. What else? Culture here in the end is still subservient; the notion that it aids productivity can never be formulated in a way that does not also simultaneously contradict the emphasis on Just Because. In fact here EF and MM actually propose this remedy only for one particular personality type, which raises a second set of questions: what about the other types? Must we assume that diversity in this sphere is inevitable and hence that having proper outlets available for all types is a matter of justice? Or do we go so far as to identify benefits and drawbacks of each type and then set about devising policy that we hope trickles down all the way to the process of character formation? Oy.

For me there is an even more chilling/fraught issue here. It seems quite agreeable that life is better all around when we have pleasuable cultural outlets available to us. But as the contemporary Creative Class as theorized by Florida has demonstrated, a supremely well-developed intellectual and entrepreneurial class does not actually need an accompanying culture which matches the sophistication of their day jobs; rather, a variety of "peasant"-level diversions is plenty adequate (preferred, actually), the differences in form being merely superficial ones in the larger sense and dictated rather predictably by time and place. (Quoth Florida, if memory serves: "some would say much of this is superficial, and much of it is." No shit!) Of course some of us were bound to lose our ways and apply our productive characters, intellects, and bourgeois comforts towards art itself, without having a day job. Hence the "decadent" post-industrial phase, portending a final collapse. It would be awfully satisfying to be able to respond to this charge with sociological evidence that productive characters crave cultural engagement which matches the sophistication of the rest of their lives. However we define "sophistication," though, it's hard to see anyone alive today who is NOT simply a full-time artist themselves truly breaking out of the realm of "cheap entertainments," for the simple reason that they don't NEED (psychologically) to. If they did, they would! The Creative Class has enough money to afford to do so! Hence the authors lapse just a bit in permitting THEIR contempt for "the cheap entertainment of radio, television, movies, and comic strips" to shine forth. Really the problem is not cheapness but rather inauthenticity. These cultural artifacts are, simply, artifacts of a different culture; they are not "rooted in the spirit of the total culture." Perhaps that can be said of certain subsets of the Creative Class as well, and perhaps they'll be the ones to eventually drift towards High Art in their leisure time while their friends mock them mercilessly.

At the start of the study we asked ourselves whether the villagers would respond to more cultural stimuli if they were offered to them. To answer the question, we brought experimental stimuli to the village; they included the choir of the National University of Mexico, folk dancers, and folk singers. A reading group was formed...where each week those who were interested might come and listen to fairy tales, and to novels especially about Mexico and about peasants in other parts of the world. A group of 20 women and 2 men regularly attended the readings. They particularly enjoyed a novel about the peasants of the region during the Mexican Revolution of 1910 as well as Grimm's Fairy Tales and the stories by Tolstoy about Russian peasants. It was notable that they identified themselves with the attitudes, fears, and strivings of the European peasant. Furthermore, for the first three years of the study, motion pictures were also regularly shown by the study. At first the aim was to have comments and discussions about the films... many villagers felt reluctant to attend a performance when they did not pay for it. However, when they were encouraged to comment on the films, their comments were sensitive and perceptive.

Each villager was rated in terms of his or her participation in the cultural activities introduced by the study. Thirty percent of the villagers participated at one time or another, while 70 percent never participated... For the men there was a significant correlation between productiveness and cultural participation. ...

Why is it that the unproductive and receptive villagers do not respond to new cultural stimulation? First of all, the nature of the unproductive person is that he does not respond to stimuli, that he is passive. Furthermore, some of the particular stimuli might even have made him feel worse, in that they have reminded him of the values that represent the dominant ethic of material gain and progress and which would make him appear irresponsible and lazy. Even some of the folk stories tend to emphasize the values and moralizing of hoarding free peasants in Europe. ... If the passive-receptive villagers are to respond to cultural stimuli, it would seem that these would have to be of a different type in the context of new economic conditions that promise a better future for these people. (141-142)

A noble effort in the broadest sense, I think, but also seemingly oblivious to a couple of key points. (As always, points that the Cultural specialist would not have overlooked, whatever our other blind spots might be.) First, the authenticity problem mentioned before has not been solved here, or not REsolved at least. The presentation of both indigenous and imported peasant-themed literature certainly counts for something, and the resonances with other people from other parts of the world could be powerful. Even so, there is only so far this kind of progress can go without completing the circle as it were, i.e. nurturing and eliciting creative agency in the local polity. From my vantage point within today's outreach paradigm, the apparent limitation of this study's cultural outreach purview to the presentation of existing artifacts stands out. Certainly this is the necessary starting point; one does not go straight to cultural creation in such a scenario, but I think that the effect EF and MM clearly are seeking necessitates that agency be an eventual goal. This is NOT to say that "peasant" art can meet all needs, or that "local" production necessarily has some special metaphysical quality, or that every peasant should/must become some kind of artist. It is merely to point out that such outside studies cannot remain responsible for a village's cultural life indefinitely. At some point they must teach the man to fish, as the saying goes.

I'm not oblivious to the many and varied potential reasons why this was not attempted, but I am always surprised when it is not even addressed. The authors remark a few times that many of these peasants are in fact time-rich, which obliterates the first/best argument of various Communist oppositions to "bourgeois art" being offered up to their people; but then the conclusion that most such peasants here are time-rich because unproductive/receptive, cane planters, etc. indicates that those with the time won't benefit (can't, really) from "cultural stimuli" of any kind. The "good" ones, then, just like in American high schools, are by virtue of their breadth of interests and "good" qualities actually somewhat more strapped for time, and this intentionally and probably happily. Hence something of an impasse which is not easily massaged.

In any case, though I'm usually the ultimate skeptic of art-as-proxy for various types of general personal development in the post-industrial world, in the world here described by EF and MM, where a sizeable minority manage to achieve unmistakable inner genuineness and warmth against all odds only to have it somewhat locked inside of them by dysfunctional cultural/behavioristic norms, the potential for art therapy seems greater.

[from a notebook, 2016 or 2017]

Fromm and Maccoby on the Total Character Structure

The nonproductive forms of social relatedness in a predominantly productive person—loyalty, authority, fairness, assertiveness—turn into submission, domination, withdrawal, destructiveness in a predominantly nonproductive person. Any of the nonproductive orientations has, therefore, a positive and a negative aspect, according to the degree of productiveness in the total character structure. (78)

Erich Fromm and Michael Maccoby
Social Character
in a Mexican Village (1970)

p. 79 has a long list of "positive aspects" along with their "negative aspects," the idea being as above that the productive/nonproductive binary is the linchpin distinction which colors most other secondary traits.

These sorts of theoretical edifices are always a bit unsightly, but the general insight that the beneficence or malevolence of a given trait is actually a function of many or all of the accompanying traits is a brilliant one. In Minneapolis of course, the nonproductive version of openness is apathy. (CalArts too.)

[from a notebook, 2016 or 2017]

Facts and Fancy

(from my Goodreads review of Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930-1960 by Nicholas Sammond)

The overall posture and style of this study are so self-consciously disinterested and relativistic as to read like a caricature of postmodern academic writing. This pastiche has lost not merely its sense of humor but its sense of purpose too. The fear of letting a stray value judgment slip out seems to have stultified the author's analytical capabilities. And yet values per se are largely what the study is about. The superficial irony of this is plain enough, but I think it is more than ironic. It is at least mildly disingenuous. In some respects it is cowardly.

The disinterested empirical scholar is discouraged from bringing their own values into the mix because disinterested empiricism cannot, by its own inner logic, operate that way. This book stumbles its way into a subdiscipline where disinterested empiricism is thought to be especially de rigeur but where it is actually quite inadequate. Sammond repeatedly invokes something like "the dominant presence of members of the white, Protestant, progressive middle class in the study of childhood." (7) He repeatedly names and specifies these agents of institutionalized moralization, repeatedly inviting us to consider them by profession, race, and class. Their work, he tells us, was profoundly shaped by classbound values. The fact of classboundedness and the identity of the classes in question are unequivocally named and reiterated. But Sammond seldom names the values themselves, and when he does name them I found it difficult to conjure much righteous indignation.

I do not wish to suggest that there actually is a universal morality. That is not what I believe. I don't think you have to believe it, though, to trip up on the idea that "truthfulness" and "unselfishness" are "middle-class virtues" (85) which cannot be reasonably expected of other classes. To me that sounds a lot like, say, reading being a White thing. Sammond himself probably believes no such things, but he is not allowed to say so, because this is scholarship and mere opinions aren't worth anything. The hubris of progressive sociologists, on the other hand, is an objective fact which can be presented as such, for if there is no universal morality then all progressivism is just a stillborn moral fallacy. Even "truthfulness" cannot mooch a provisional exemption. Truthfulness!

Naturally, the chickens of relativism roost in the hencoop of hypocrisy. What are the moral implications of accommodating the actions of a dishonest or selfish poor person? Does this help them or hurt them? Is it justified merely by the fact that they are poor and you are rich? By the right to cultural self-determination? Liberty? Consequentialism? Echoing overzealous committees everywhere, Sammond could claim that these properly philosophical questions are beyond the scope of his social-scientific study. I agree that they threaten to explode any such study into an unwieldy interdisciplinary patchwork; but I would strongly disagree that they are, literally, outside his scope. His own methods have made these questions essential to his scope and he makes no effort to acknowledge or address this. Instead, the really important takeaway is that most of the reformers were white, Protestant, progressive, and middle-class, whereas not all of their objects were these same things. As it turns out, this is not quite worth writing a book about.

Reformers of any slant in any area of human endeavor are vulnerable to the charge that they have put forth their own values as universal ones. Without this fundamental arrogation there can be no collective social action of any kind. The mere fact of arrogation is endemic, background radiation to the perceptible heat and light of social and political life. The arrogation of reformers is not an urgent sociological issue. What is urgent, I think, and what could have been pursued more doggedly here, is a compelling chronicle of the dynamic interaction between values and institutions. Strictly speaking, the thesis that "discursive circuits constructed around and through media-effect arguments sell products and build careers" (360) does describe a dynamic process, but it begs a lot of questions too. My sense is that Sammond forbid himself as a matter of methodology from opining, judging or blaming, and that by proscribing these things he railroaded himself into a static account rather than a dynamic one. (When your first order of business is to name the race and religion of the principals, it's hard to say much of anything more without offending.)

I also am not convinced, either by this account or by others, that the interaction between the Disney Studio and the reformers Sammond identifies was truly dynamic until quite late in the period he covers. In amongst all of the imbrication and commodification, I noticed that the dates, types and sources of the documents he reproduces throughout the book support my skepticism. Concerned parents created the market and Disney, eventually, seized on it. But Disney already had an enormous market, and progressives had a lot of ideas which were oblique to Disney and to media generally. Following academic convention, Sammond takes a laser-focus on the tiny area of overlap. It turns out there is not nearly as much for him to write about as the length of the book would imply.

If you don't already know something about the reformers Sammond chronicles, you still won't have much of an idea of what their values actually were after reading his book. He detects that the progressives have unduly assumed at least one non-working, stay-at-home parent, a luxury which many working class and immigrant families didn't enjoy; and he points out that child labor has persisted in agriculture (and disproportionately among children of color) long after progressives had more or less succeeded in abolishing it for white children. These are sobering reminders for white, middle-class readers; they are nonetheless quite underwhelming in the role Sammond has carved out for them here, where the towering monoliths of American Sociology, Enterprise, and Entertainment have collided in a giant orgy of...what exactly?

"Truthfulness" and "unselfishness" arise in the discussion of Disney's Pinocchio. It is the natural film for Sammond to discuss, since its overbearing didactic moralism stands out even in the Disney oeuvre. Yet transparent texts can be difficult to handle, and Sammond breaks everything he touches. With so much threadbare symbolism sitting right on the surface (Stromboli is literally a puppetmaster), Sammond cannot possibly work his way back to "middle-class values" without committing an act of interpretation. He has previously been too vague about values, whereas this film is explicit about them. Sontag warned us about this: "to interpret is to impoverish." Disinterested empiricism has taken him as far as it can, and now it is his turn to recapitulate in reverse the error of media effects crusaders by projecting upon the text the social location of those most eager to consume it. Consumer eagerness now engulfs the text from without, metastasizing into its organs of content and meaning. Suddenly it is not Edward Filene or Walt Disney but Sammond himself who has elevated consumption to a moral value! Buy a film and you become its content! And its content you! It's cheaper than the naming rights to a distant star or atoll! Hence a fleeting indulgence in armchair criticism is the precise moment when things go off the rails for good, whereby "truthfulness" becomes "middle-class," whereby poor people's untruthfulness is locked away in the black box of cultural self-determination, whereby Pinocchio cannot reflect the values of a solitary poor person unless all of the other poor people are also lining up to view it. Not just a filmic text is impoverished this way but also the "virtue" of everyone who is not "middle-class." That is quite an accomplishment.

I'm not a critic or a sociologist, but I feel like there has to be a better way to go about this. Fromm defined ideologies as "socially patterned rationalizations." Say we take those three concepts, pair them into three dyads, and then study each dyadic nexus; each one generates a limited but salient field of material which is relevant to our topic, and also a sprawling field of extradisciplinary connections. Given the organic limits of human cognition and the profusion of published research, each of the outward-facing fields is functionally unbounded; but they are perfectly finite in number (there are three of them), and this makes it possible at least to momentarily stare into each abyss and admire what makes it unique from the others and from the original topic. Then we return to the inside, reassemble the triad, and look for the triadic nexus. A geometric analogy to planes, dimensions and wormholes suggests itself. This is just silly stuff I think about, but it seems to me that this book has done none of this nor anything remotely resembling it. It is not even a one-dimensional sociology, because it has not even the first prerequisite for the dimensionalization of sociological thought, namely a sentient authorial being. The strict repression of authorial slant in this area of scholarship is quite ironic given one of Sammond's key takeaways from the inconclusiveness of Media Effects research: even children do not simply swallow whole everything they are told or exposed to. I think we can assume this of readers of scholarly publications as well. A profusion of value-oriented scholarship could actually be the best way to achieve the "parallactic" ideal that some postmodernists have put forth, whereby observation from a variety of angles permits a clearer view than any single one of them can alone. The first step towards that ideal is not to give up on fixed moral positions but rather to stake them out. A moral position can be the second point which defines a line of inquiry. This poses methodological challenges, to be sure, but there is a payoff for surmounting those challenges, a payoff with which studies like Sammond's cannot compete. Fromm and Maccoby made a blind stab in this direction which is simultaneously comical and profound: they constructed numerical scales of psychoanalytically-defined traits by which to measure the Mexican villagers they studied, they took the measurements (basically they made them up), and they performed some conventional statistical analysis of these figures to look for Results. To a self-loathing postmodernist this looks like pure arbitrary slant, the methodological equivalent of intentionally exceeding the speed limit at first sight of a cop. My contention is that if hundreds or thousands of diverse minds were to construct their own numerical scales and take their own "measurements," the aggregated results would be as meaningful as the minds are diverse. (This diversity would need to be more than skin-deep.) Against this backdrop, Sammond's approach looks like another fruitless search for perfect objectivity, distance, disinterest. If the slant is always there anyway, we might as well turn it to our advantage.

At great semantic and rhetorical pains, Sammond does eventually work his way around to some interesting big-picture theses about commodities and the social construction of childhood. For reformers and parents alike, the erroneous belief in strong media effects

"smoothes over some unpleasant contradictions in the construction of personhood and identity in democratic capitalist society. Quite simply: the child as susceptible to commodities stands in for the child as commodity-in-the-making...[whereby] persons must be simultaneously and impossibly unique individuals and known quantities." (360)

Ay, that's the stuff! But by this time the sins of omission are piled high, reflected in the endnotes by a veritable profusion of beyond-the-scope apologias which I literally lost count of. I'm reasonably sure I have never seen so many in one place, actually, and I think that is a singularly meaningful reflection on the nexus of topic and method here.