Thought it might be better to post this as an independent post rather than on the culture war thread.
“It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas or feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing on reason or mental health. Just as there is a "folie a deux" there is a folie a millions. The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”
I’ve been putting off writing this review, paradoxically because this was a very important book. Erich Fromm, here and in the other two works of his I have read, really captures the problems I have with my life and society, and earnestly attempts to generate solutions, although he himself pessimistically admits that these are unlikely to be implemented.
The central premise of this book, as perhaps hinted at by the title, The Sane Society, is an attempt to illustrate what a society based on real human needs would look like in value. In the process, Fromm defines both what he thinks the fundamental human needs are, the ways in which our society (that of the 1970s in his case) is ill-suited to these needs, and ways that we can get there from here.
Fromm starts the book with a short chapter that makes that radical (in the eyes of some) that our society is actually insane, using suicide and homicide rates in a bunch of western countries over the past hundred years to make the case that something has gone wrong spiritually. You can quibble about the statistics, talk about the arc of history bending towards justice, or point out that materially we have never been better off. All three points may be true, but it’s hard to deny, at least from the point of view of my lying eyes that something has gone wrong spiritually.
The Spiritual Malaise of Modern Capitalism
I think the first time I realized this was when I was a freshman in college. For most of my life up until that point, I had been motivated by whatever the “next step”: doing well in school, so I could take harder classes, and eventually get into the best college (MIT), or in running, so I could run in bigger, faster races, and improve my standing on the team. Although things appeared to be following the same trajectory in the first months of college, progress no longer seemed like it would continue. How could life have any meaning if my material, and hierarchical progress would not continue? When I asked my parents for advice, my mom told me that it was still important to keep working hard, so I could earn money and consume things, but also not feel guilty for not contributing to society. At the time, this answer was completely unsatisfying to me: how could consumption, which is be it’s very definition short-lived, provide long-term meaning? How could “working hard” on something that I didn’t care about, bring me joy or intellectual fulfilment?
I read The Sane Society nearly seven years after that freshman fall and conversation with my mom, and I think the book provides a cogent thesis for both her advice, and my reaction.
Fundamental human needs according to Fromm consist of not only the basic material needs as posited by Marx (food, water, shelter), but also a non-alienated existence with the freedom to influence one’s own environment, self-regard (not treating the self as an object), and the ability to enjoy the fruits of his labor. According to Fromm, both the Soviet and capitalist systems have managed to produce to cover the basic material needs of its citizens, but fail to provide a cure for alienation. Part of this is the feature both systems share in common: industrialism has made modern man alienated from the fruits of his labor. It is much more difficult to be satisfied as an assembly line worker, or even as part of the modern scientific apparatus than it was to be an artisan would made tables from start to finish, or a farmer who grew his crops from seed. Matthew Crawford talks about this topic more in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the diagnosis of both him and Fromm is something that I agree with.
Automation and Alienation
This is why I’m opposed to things like further automation and AI. Labor does not need to become even more alienated. Although I suppose the internet and specialization has already done a lot of the damage, I fear AI may do the same thing for knowledge work that the assembly line has done for craftmanship. No longer will you midwife an idea or a theory from conception to execution, but merely obtain fragments of your thought nearly fully formed from a computer algorithm that has done most of your thinking for you.
Critics may argue that this automation of jobs allows for greater leisure time. Not only has the historically not been the case (see the early industrial revolution), but leisure is an essentially unproductive and consumptive activity that does not lead to spiritual growth or the exercise of man’s will. Leisure activities like training for sport, language learning, or craftsmanship would count as work in Fromm’s system. Although I don’t take as strong of a stance on Fromm against leisure, I can again say from personal experience that there’s only so much relaxation and leisure that I find to be enjoyable before I want to work on something meaningful again.
A Robot Society
The other shared feature of Capitalism and Soviet Communism that Fromm highlights is their conformity. The reason for this in the Soviet system is rather obvious (top-down dictatorship), but in capitalism stems from commodification of the human individual. Both in the labor and “personality” (dating) market, Fromm argues, one must conform to societal standards or risk being labeled as a defective “product” and end up being out of a job or a husband/wife.
I found this argument to be one of the most convincing critiques of capitalism that I had read/heard of. The material critiques of Marx and other 19th century socialists (i.e. that capital was exploitative and would be unable to meet people’s material needs), were proved wrong in the 20th century when the system was incentivized to produce people rich enough to become consumers. However, just paying people more doesn’t change the fact that you are paying them for their labor, meaning they are making themselves into a commodity, a thing, which cannot have anything but bad knock-on effects on the psyche.
So what do we do about all of this? How can I move past both my ideas of progress, and my mom’s consumptive mindset? Fromm basically thinks we can’t, unless we radically overall society. I’m not so sure. Two other books that I will be reviewing soon: the Illusion of Self by James Garfield and Philosophy as a Way of Life by Pierre Hadot provide alternate answers, which I will explore in later posts. But what I will say for now that I do think personal change is possible.
How I will be changing my life as a result of this book:
The Sane Society underlined something that I already knew: the collective norms of our American, western society are neither necessary, sufficient, or even good for human thriving. I’m not sure what the exact right norms are yet, but embracing the Kantian, Stoic, and Christian ethic of loving thy neighbor as thyself, and embodying meaning in work seem like good places to start.
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Notes -
It's not the case that capitalism is "just paying people more". There's no real mechanism to accomplish that. One cannot simply come up with a deus ex machina to keep everything else the same, but just increase how much you pay people.
Instead, what "paying people more" means is that people increase in productivity, usually via specialization and trade. The trade part is then integral to the means by which people get "paid more". The only real way we know of to increase productivity is specialization and improvement of ideas.
One then must consider the separate question of alienation. In a world of specialization and increasing of ideas, there are many opportunities, some of which are highly specialized, and some of which are the production of ideas. There are now strictly more types of things one can choose to do. I find that alienation seems to be a subjective attitude toward the things that one does. One person may feel alienated from the work of a research scientist; another may feel alienated from the work of a farmer. A thousand years ago, if you were someone who had the subjective experience of feeling alienated from the work of being a farmer, tough luck. Now, you have options. If someone has the subjective experience of feeling alienated from any work other than being a subsistence farmer, living off the land and only their own toil and sweat, they can choose to do so. Most people don't. They feel some stronger alienation that is repelling them from that choice. I don't see why we should force them to experience that greater alienation.
The more general spiritual malaise many feel probably does arise from the abandonment of religion and even half-hearted metaphysics/metaethics. That's pretty orthogonal to questions about wealth, productivity, and what people do for work.
The thing is I don't think people felt alienated from their work in the past. Sure people were bored or unsatisfied, but alienation seems to be a distinctly modern phenomena that comes with specialization. The tough thing which I think Fromm is highlighting is that specialization is also really good for productivity.
How so? Does it still satisfy the following:
Oh I see I misunderstood what you were saying there originally. That is a good point. I would say that the reason that people don't choose that path probably only has a little to do with alienation. Despite the discomfort with alienation, I think the modern people do enjoy distinct material advantages (that they would not have as a subsistence farmer) that make them not want to give up that lifestyle, at least voluntarily. There are however a lot of examples in the 19th century, mainly in Chile and Argentina, of kidnappings of white settlers by native Americans where the kidnapee preferred to stay with the subsistence tribe rather than return to industrial abundance.
My view on why specialization causes alienation is because specialization tends to disconnect you from the product of your labor. A craftsman is going to feel much less alienated than an assembly line worker, even though the later is far more productive, because he gets to see the finished product and feel responsible for it. The same I think is true in knowledge work. A research scientist 50 years ago could do experiments and publish largely independently. But now, at least in my field, papers routinely have over twenty authors: the work no longer really feels like it's yours.
There's gotta be some spiritual way around this phenomena though. One counter example I can bring to mind from the Middle Ages are the stonemasons who worked on cathedrals. They didn't get to see the finished product of their labor, as cathedrals routinely took hundreds of years to build. Nor did they really get to feel responsible for the work that they were doing: there were hundreds if not thousands of people working on these buildings. Yet from what I've read, most of them did not feel very alienated from the work that they were doing. For the glory of God was a very powerful motivator.
I don't think I caught any reasoning for this sentence, and yeah, I don't follow. I'm pretty sure I do feel alienation from the work of a subsistence farmer.
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