Representativeness Heuristics and Fallacies

Christopher Lasch
The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type
(1965)

[xvi] I am much less interested, in short, in praising or condemning the new radicalism than in understanding where it came from. Even the effort to understand where it came from, unfortunately, will strike some readers as an insidious attempt to discredit the ideas of radicals and reformers by "psychologizing" them away. For some people, it is enough to say the reformers were moved by the spectacle of human injustice; to say anything more is to deny the fact of injustice. I am unable to understand this argument, nor do I know quite how to meet it (since I cannot understand it), except to say that the reformers themselves did not share this reluctance of their admirers to examine their own motives. They wrote about their motives with all the enthusiasm, and all the honesty, with which they wrote about social injustice, and I have relied very heavily on what they wrote.

If only the artists could be lucky enough to have their utterances taken seriously rather than psychologized away.

Of course it would be possible to ignore what they wrote about themselves, and to write instead
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about the evils of capitalism.

It would also be possible, later, to dismiss what they wrote about themselves and to tortuously/torturously explicate the psychological grounds for this dismissal. Of the artists, that is.

But that is not the book I have chosen to write. I have written instead about some of the critics of capitalism, in the hope that their history would tell something, if not specifically about capitalism, about the peculiarly fragmented character of modern society, and beyond that, about what it means to pursue the life of reason in a world in which the irrational has come to appear not the exception but the rule.

Not only the scope and design of this study but its method needs a word of explanation. I have chosen to approach the new radicalism chiefly by means of a series of biographical essays, although I know that for a social historian to proceed in this way is almost to invite misunderstanding. The connection between biography and history is never altogether clear, and it is especially obscure in the case of social history. The political historian can justify the study of notable men by reference to their influence on events, the literary historian by reference to the intrinsic value of their works. For the social historian such considerations are ruled out from the start.

Well, the social does, in a sense, trump everything else, formal literature and politics included; hence these other historians are not so free as the author here supposes, or not unless they are laser-focused on the parochial, internal dealings of their fields.

His subject is the social structure, the people he writes about are often anonymous, and if he ventures on biography at all, it must be—so it would seem—with the excuse that his subjects are "representative men." By taking this position, however, he lays himself open to the objection that a representative man is a contradiction in terms; for is not a human being, by reason of all that makes him human, something unique?

Well, yes! Another rejoinder duly noted.

Obliquely, the larger point is this: representative conclusions are answers only to very particular questions. The more broadly representative the pretensions, the less interesting and more tenuous such theses tend to become.

And, the point of this point is not simply to dine out on the intractable complexity of contemporary societies or the ultimate uniqueness of individuals. It is, rather, that the kind and quantity of information that a person can make profitable use of is not nearly so variable or complex a question as is psychology or sociology writ large. As complex as people are, we have not changed nearly as much as has "society," most especially in its now-infamous tendency to generate more information than anyone can use.

The subjects of this book were chosen in deliberate violation of the notion that a social historian ought to write about people "typical of their times." One of them was a hunchbacked dwarf, another an extremely neurotic woman with an irregular emotional history, another a counselor to Presidents. All of them were extremely articulate people—a fact which further sets
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them off from the run of humankind. But it is this very fact, though it further distinguishes them, which makes up their value to the study of the history of American society. They articulated experiences which, whether or not they were representative experiences in the sense of being widely shared by others, were nevertheless representative in another sense: they could only have happened at a particular place at a particular time. Some experiences are archetypal: men undergo them simply because they are human, the experiences are inherent in the human condition. But others are closely rooted in a social context, and by listening carefully to what people say about them, one can sometimes learn more about a given society than by more formal sociological analysis.

Compare to W. Stephenson's contention that, even within the realm of formal sociological analysis, he could learn mo-betta from in-depth study of a few subjects rather than relying on the brute force of sample size.

(On which point, from Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism...

[34] Psychoanalysis best clarifies the connection between society and the individual, culture and personality, precisely when it confines itself to careful examination of individuals. It tells us most about society when it is least determined to do so. Freud's extrapolation of psychoanalytic principles into anthropology, history, and biography can be safely ignored by the student of society, but his clinical investigations constitute a storehouse of indispensable ideas, once it is understood that the unconscious mind represents the modification of nature by culture, the imposition of civilization on instinct.

...

[35, footnote] "On...its home ground," Adorno added, psychoanalysis carries specific conviction; the further it removes itself from that sphere, the more its theses are threatened alternately with shallowness or wild over-systematiztion. If someone makes a slip of the tongue and a sexually loaded word comes out, if someone suffers from agoraphobia or if a girl walks in her sleep, psychoanalysis not merely has its best chances of therapeutic success but also its proper province, the relatively autonomous, monadological individual as arena of the unconscious conflict between instinctual drive and prohobition. The further it departs from this area, the more tyrannically it has to proceed and the more it has to drag what belongs to the dimension of outer reality into the shades of psychic immanence. Its delusion in doing so is not dissimilar from that 'omnipotence of thought' which it itself criticized as infantile."

)

Incidentally, the elder Freudian Lasch can fairly be said to have dispensed, at one time or another, with all of the caveats raised by his younger self here, to where the weaknesses of The Minimal Self are pointed up rather starkly by the passages above despite bearing the same author's name. If nothing else, this itself points up a further limit of the "psychologizing" turn, of the proffering of psychology as the missing link in the epistemological chain between biography and history: people are complicated and, one might dare say, protean.