Artists, Agitators, Introspectors

Christopher Lasch
The Revolt of the Elites (1995)

Socialism, as [Oscar] Wilde understood it, was simply another name...for the elimination of drudgery by machines. Wilde had no patience with those who proclaimed the dignity of labor. ... The collectivization of production would liberate the poor from want, but it would also liberate the rich from the burden of managing and defending their property. ... No less than manual labor, the administration of property distracted people from the real business of life.
(p. 231)



Socialism, in Wilde's conception, would not come about through the action of the masses. The masses were too stupefied by drudgery to be capable of emancipating themselves. ... Agitators were the political equivalent of artists: disturbers of the peace, enemies of conformity, rebels against custom. They shared with artists a hatred of authority, a contempt for tradition, and a refusal to court popular favor. Agitators and artists were the supreme embodiment of individualism, wishing only to please themselves.
(p. 232)

This kind of message [Christ as "artist"]...appealed to intellectuals in search of a substitute for religious faiths by then widely regarded as offensive to the modern mind. ... It confirmed artists and intellectuals in their sense of superiority to the common herd. It sanctioned their revolt against convention... By equating social justice with artistic freedom, the religion of art made socialism palatable to intellectuals who might otherwise have been repelled by its materialism. In the heyday of the socialist movement its attraction for intellectuals cannot be adequately explained without considering the way it overlapped with the bohemian critique of the bourgeoisie.
(p. 233)



In the 1960s revolutionary students adopted slogans much closer in spirit to Wilde than to Marx: "All power to the imagination"; "It is forbidden to forbid." The continuing appeal of such ideas, thirty years later, should be obvious to anyone who casts an eye over the academic scene and the media. The postmodern mood, so-called, is defined on the one hand by a disillusionment with grand historical theories or "metanarratives," including Marxism, and by an ideal of personal freedom, on the other hand, that derives in large part from the aesthetic revolt against middle-class culture. The postmodern sensibility rejects much of modernism as well, but it is rooted in the modernist ideal of individuals emancipated from convention, constructing identities for themselves as they choose, leading their own lives (as Oscar Wilde would have said) as if life itself were a work of art.
(p. 234)

Riesman on Public Performance

In "progressive schools",

Above all, the walls change their look. The walls of the modern grade school are decorated with the paintings of the children or their montages from the class in social studies. Thus the competitive and contemporary problems of the children look down on them from walls which, like the teacher herself, are no longer impersonal. This looks progressive, looks like a salute to creativeness and individuality; but again we meet paradox. While the school de-emphasizes grades and report cards, the displays seem almost to ask the children: "Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is fairest of us all?" ...

[now in a footnote]

Still more paradoxically, it often happens that those schools that insist most strongly that the child be original and creative by this very demand make it more difficult for him to be so. He dare not imitate an established master nor, in some cases, even imitate his own earlier work. Though the introduction of the arts into the school opens up the whole art world to many children, who would have no time or stimulation outside, other children are forced to socialize performances that would earlier have gone unnoticed by peers and adults.

David Riesman
The Lonely Crowd
("Abridged edition with a 1969 preface")
(orig. 1950)
p. 62

The last point is crucial and, in spite of the many ways this warhorse work has not aged well, this point still is not adequately reckoned with. In fact I would conjecture that it is less adequately reckoned with now than in 1950 when all of this still looked (to some old-fashioned observers) like the radical change that it is.

Wexler (Brain and Culture, 2008) reports that "average national scores on a variety of different intelligence tests have risen steadily and substantially ever since the tests were first developed." (70) "The causes of this...are not well understood" (72), but the expansion of education and the burgeoning complexity of daily and occupational life seem likely to play a role, while increased practice at taking the tests can safely be ruled out.

Wexler's is a valuable scientific entree to the first half of Milo's observation,

each succeeding generation has "improved" technical wiring...

while Riesman's speculation is one angle in on the denouement,

This is much more inevitable than it is admirable; a natural progression of technique, but, of course, not necessarily resonance.

I do not wish to suggest that either the art or the children themselves should be taken out of school entirely. Clearly, however, the success of "improved technical wiring" is useless (dangerous, actually) without addressing the concurrent failure to develop the second- or third- order faculties of "judgment" (Sennett on pentatonics), "continence" (Mumford on everything), "resonance" (Milo above), etc. I'm just a dabbler, but I have spent a fair amount of time in public schools working with students, both individually and in small breakout groups, often during the school day, and I actually don't think I have ever seen the scenario Riesman describes play itself out in any concrete event that comes easily to mind. Quite to the contrary, I have found it very difficult (no doubt as a consequence of the inscrutability of large brass instruments, especially when the kids are barely large enough to hold onto them) to inspire any kind of personal investment at all in the endeavor. Tweens and adolescents often strongly resist "socializing" their performances, but not at all for the same reasons a self-regarding professional might. This quite precludes the teaching of "judgment" or "continence" in artmaking, of teaching the importance of the "kill ratio" to many great artists' great reputations, of its importance to art as an ecosystem. You can try just telling the 8th grade trombone section that the musical world is an "ecosystem." Don't hold your breath! But the message is paramount because clearly, later, something changes for many students, both those who continue with formal arts study and those who strike out on their own, leading to something like the "oversharing" phenomenon. ("Incontinence" is more expressive but doesn't quite work for this part.)

In short, I know not how to teach these virtues, only how to exemplify them. The culture wars have forced people on the Left to fall hard into line on the side of teaching and the teachers without giving enough thought to this distinction. Of course "role model" is a phrase that administrators love and which kids hear constantly at school (or at least I did). Like their better-paid counterparts in pro sports, new band teachers taking over in challenging circumstances often speak of "building a culture" as the most decisive challenge. They're right of course, but we shouldn't have to design it in a laboratory when there's a whole "culture" out there on the outside for students to reckon with. The context in which someone becomes a role model is very important. The culture-at-large may also be lacking in any number of ways, but its subjects are playing for keeps. That is where I cannot avoid agreeing with JT Gatto, though it goes against everything I was raised to believe, that we now need less school and not more. Not no school, and not just school, which is the false dichotomy bequeathed to us by the culture wars. Personally I'd vote for just barely enough school and as much as possible of everything else. If this is so offensive to the teachers, then just make the second half of the school day completely unstructured and keep the whole bloated bureaucracy situation as it is, let people keep their full-salary pensions, etc. Let's just admit that it's postindustrial day care and lean into the positive potentials of that. Give the teachers a chance to exemplify rather than just teach; it'll be as good for them as it will for their charges. After a couple of classes and a healthy lunch, let all the cool kids go hang out with the cool teacher as much as they want, then let them realize that no one is totally cool or totally uncool, and then let them realize how totally uncool it is to be part of the crowd that hasn't figured this out. Lean into their other-direction! My experience is that kids far more so than adults will pretty quickly have an "aha" moment in a scenario like this. And if not, is the worst case anywhere near as bad as what we currently have?

I realize that none of this is going to happen anytime soon, but thanks for humoring my idealism, again.

---

I vividly recall a moment in 1st grade which takes Riesman's observation a step further into Progressive modernity. Sitting in Sue Allen's first grade classroom, in what was, for the time being, a Montessori magnet in Minneapolis' very rough near-Northside, I became fascinated not with the art on the walls but with a giant wall chart documenting everyone's progress in completing assignments. Some students had hardly turned in anything while others had done so much extra credit that they had lapped the field (i.e. when their row was completely filled from left to right, the teacher restarted at the left side with a new/different series of markings or stickers in the boxes). If the point was to shame-motivate the laggards, it didn't work at all. But if the point was to awaken any latent armchair sociologists, then it worked on me, because one day I found myself wondering why some kids hardly did any work while others did all the work. And why did a few do an incomprehensible amount of extra work above and beyond the limit of extra credit to influence their actual grade? I certainly have thought more about this memory after the fact than I did at age six, so the standard caveats apply. But I'm sure that I did ask myself a question in that moment, and of course it's a question that has confounded many brilliant adults too, and hence remains unanswered. 

Later on, the district sabotaged the magnet program and I mostly observed fights instead of wall charts. I effectively had no "education" from third through fifth grade save for Mom teaching me long division in a pinch, though I had plenty of the "complex" non-academic stimulation that Wexler says can build up your wiring. What's really amazing to me now is that I even had friends. One of them fought a bully on my behalf. Yet somehow I grew up to be a misanthrope and to write this blog. This also raises some interesting developmental questions.

Freud — The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (ii) — Superstition and Suspicion

[244]I would distinguish myself from a superstitious man, therefore, as follows: I do not believe that an event not caused in any way by my own mental life can tell me any hidden facts about the future structure of reality, but I do believe that an unintentional expression of my own mental processes can reveal some hidden factor which itself belongs to my mental life alone. I may believe in outer (real) chance, but not in fortuitous inner (psychic) actions. A superstitious man will see it the other way around: he knows nothing of the motivation of his fortuitous actions and slips, he believes fortuitous psychic factors exist, and he is inclined to ascribe a significance to outside fortuitous events that will make itself felt in reality, and to see chance as a means of expression for something hidden that is outside him. There are two differences between me and the superstitious man: first, he projects a motivation on to something outside him, while I look for it within myself; and second, he interprets chance as some incident that has happened, while I derive it from an idea. However, what seems to him concealed corresponds to the unconscious in me, and we share an urge not to see chance as solely accidental but to place some kind of interpretation on it.

I assume that this conscious ignorance and unconscious understanding of the motivation of psychic fortuitous events is one of the roots of superstition. Because a superstitious person is ignorant of the motivation of his own fortuitous actions, and because that motivation is clamouring to be recognized, he has to accommodate it in the world outside himself by displacement. If there is a connection of this kind it will scarcely be confined to this one case. In fact I believe that a large part of any mythological view of the world, extending a long way even into the most modern forms of religion, is nothing but psychology projected into the outside world. The vague recognition (it might be called endopsychic perception) of [245]psychic factors and circumstances in the unconscious is reflected--it is difficult to put it any other way, so here I must call on the analogy with paranoia--is reflected in the construction of a supernatural reality, which science will transform back into the psychology of the unconscious. The myths of Paradise and the Fall, of God, good and evil, immortality, and so on, could be understood in this way, turning metaphysics into metapsychology. There is less of a gulf between paranoiac and superstitious displacement than may at first glance appear. When human beings first began thinking, as we know, they felt compelled to resolve the outer world, anthropomorphically, into a diversity of personalities in their own image; the chance events that they interpreted in superstitious terms were therefore the actions and expressions of persons. They were just like those paranoiacs who draw conclusions from the trivial signs they observe in other people, and like all those healthy people who, correctly, judge character by the fortuitous and unintentional actions of their fellow men. Superstition seems misplaced only in our modern, scientific but by no means complete view of the world; as the world appeared to pre-scientific ages and peoples, superstition was legitimate and logical.

Relatively speaking, therefore, the Roman who abandoned some important enterprise if he saw birds flying in the wrong formation was right; he was acting logically in line with his assumptions. But if he abstained from the enterprise because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door (un Romain retournerait [a Roman would turn back], as they say), he was definitely superior to us unbelievers, and a better psychologist than we are, despite our current efforts. His stumbling showed him that some doubt existed, something in him was working against his enterprise, and its power could impair his own ability to carry out his intention just as he was on the point of performing it. One can be sure of success only if all mental forces are united in making for the desired aim. ...

[246]Anyone who has had the opportunity of studying the hidden emotions of the human mind by psychoanalytic methods can also contribute some new ideas about the quality of the unconscious motives expressed in superstition. It is particularly easy to see how superstition arises from suppressed hostile and cruel feelings in neurotics, who are often very intelligent but afflicted with compulsive ideas and obsessions. Superstition is to a high degree an expectation of bad luck, and anyone who frequently ill-wishes other people, but has repressed such ideas because he has been brought up to wish them well instead, will be particularly likely to expect bad luck to descend upon him from outside as a punishment for his unconscious ill-will.

The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, trans. Anthea Bell, pp. 244-246

The crucial distinction here is inner- as opposed to outer-directed psychology. Freud here quietly levels a devastating critique of those who project their otherwise healthy skepticism exclusively onto the outside world and not at all back upon themselves. In today's colloquial terms this amounts to worrying about things you can't control, a sure recipe for frustration if not for madness itself, as well as for the peculiar condition, raised earlier in the work, of social actors who know (or seem to) others better than they know themselves.

I don't know that I myself can make any exceptional claims to self-knowledge, but as an introvert mired in lifelong estrangement from the tyranny of extroversion which seems to run the world I was foist into at birth, I certainly am apt to posit a privileged position here for my comrades in inner-directedness, and I can certainly conjure my fair share of anecdotes in which excess gregariousness is accompanied by obvious deficits of self-scrutiny. And since introversion and gregariousness are, of course, not mutually exclusive, I would head the list with my own more gregarious moments, which seem not merely to suggest but in fact require a temporary relaxation of filters. As pertains specifically to public social interaction I indeed identify unapologetically with that ever-trendy neologism, the "ambivert," and as I have slowly learned to negotiate the social world and become more familiar (if not truly more comfortable) with its demands, the compulsive talker has made ever more frequent appearances and the wallflower ever fewer. This has indeed been profitable for both my self-knowledge and my relationship to this external social world; but it has also confirmed for me beyond a reasonable doubt that I am almost sure to regret the things that pop out of my inner extrovert's mouth, and often times profoundly so. I definitely like myself less as the filter has become leakier with age, and I'm afraid that is probably a meaningful observation.