The Democratic Surround

Book on the rise of liberal thought in America.

Quotes

• Before the industrial era, he argued, “primitive man” had used all of his faculties constantly.21 Now he had to specialize. As a result, he could no longer see reality whole, nor could he see, feel, and think simultaneously. The preliminary course at the Bauhaus aimed to restore those abilities; so too did The New Vision.
• For Moholy, as for a range of American critics in the 1920s and 1930s, the mass media were enemies of visual and mental health. In a 1934 letter to his Hungarian friend and sometime editor Frantisek Kalivoda, Moholy explained that “a widely organized and rapid news service today bombards the public with every kind of news. . . . Without interest in evolution it overwhelms its public with sensations.
• That fusion, Moholy believed, could transform the organization of society. “Through technique man can be freed, if he finally realizes the purpose: a balanced life through free use of his liberated energies,”
• For that reason, Mead and other members of the Committee for National Morale envisioned the museum as the proper setting for a new kind of propaganda: one that would nurture both the individual democratic personality and the collective sense of national purpose.
• For Bateson, the key to building both a democratic personality and a democratic culture was the transformation of apperception. This was not the same thing as abandoning political control to grass-roots groups. Nor was it the same as attempting to dictate social change from above. Rather, it was a species of scientific management designed to simultaneously liberate and coordinate the actions of democratic selves. Leaders needed to act like educators, Bateson suggested, and they needed to teach people how to “learn to learn.” And that in turn meant reshaping communication.
• For Mead and Bateson, though, even the generation of morale-boosting activity from the grass roots wasn’t enough. Social scientists had learned that personality structure and social structure were inextricable. In wartime, the success of America’s armies would depend on the strength of its psychosocial fabric. The challenge was thus not simply to convince Americans that they should believe in an egalitarian, individualistic, and yet unified society. Rather, it was to help Americans build one.
• Bateson and Mead nevertheless strongly supported government promotion of American morale. Like Fromm, they sought to balance the need to produce spontaneous, creative individuals with the political imperative of taking concerted national action against fascism
• According to Marshall, mass media could not help but turn many minds in a single direction. “When millions of people, through the press, the radio, or the motion pictures, are all told the same, or approximately the same thing, at the same time,” he argued, “something relatively new in the history of communication happens. . . .” Individual audience members experienced “some response, en masse.”73 The challenge was to prevent the Germans from using that fact against Americans, and to empower Americans to use it against their enemies. For these purposes, an essentially ballistic model of communication, in which messages travelled from sender to receiver and had effects when they arrived, seemed ideal.
• In her widely read book And Keep Your Powder Dry . . . , Mead argued that the Nazis had brought forth a new and total kind of warfare. As German Panzers rolled across Europe, they attacked civilians and soldiers alike. So too did the fascist propaganda apparatus. Under these conditions, the cultural personality of the American people took on a new importance. “The strengths and weaknesses of the American character,” she wrote, are “the psychological equipment with which we can win the war.”67
• The ultimate test of a democracy, Fromm suggested, would be its ability to promote individual psychological growth. Modernity had freed people from medieval superstitions and feudal social structures. But it had also made them so anxious about their new solitude that entire nations had sought refuge in fascism. True freedom, Fromm explained, resided not in submission to a higher order, but in “the full realization of the individual’s potentialities.”6
• Escape from Freedom. In the modern world, he explained, individuals found themselves freed from the strictures of church and village that had constrained the individual in the pre-industrial era. This freedom, however, bewildered many and caused them to seek shelter under the powerful wing of authoritarian leaders. In that sense, sheer liberty represented a negative form of freedom. “Positive freedom,” wrote Fromm, “consists in the spontaneous activity of the total, integrated personality.”62 Spontaneous action gave voice to that unity in a way that simultaneously acknowledged the uniqueness of the individual self and allowed it to contribute to the good of the entire society. “Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness without sacrificing the integrity of his self; for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world—with man, nature, and himself.”
• Abraham Maslow - The democratic person . . . tends (in the pure case) to respect other human beings in a very basic fashion as different from each other, rather than better or worse [italics original]. He is more willing to allow for their own tastes, goals, and personal autonomy so long as no one else is hurt thereby. Furthermore, he tends to like them rather than dislike them and to assume that probably they are, if given the chance, essentially good rather than bad individuals.”
• On Margaret Mead - But in light of her biography, and of the racism and homophobia that permeated mainstream American society at the time, her book was also a provocation: If an ostensibly primitive society of Samoans could offer the kinds of romantic flexibility, interpersonal warmth, and collective benevolence that she described, why couldn’t a modern America? If Samoans could be psychologically free, why couldn’t Americans?
• Like Wilhelm Reich and other Marxist psychoanalysts, Fromm believed that the economic conditions of everyday life shaped the psychological structure of the individual.
• Democratic morale, on the other hand, worked to integrate the personality. Emotion and reason, intellect and will, evaluation and action—all would be one.
• essay entitled “The Nature of Democratic Morale.” “In a democracy,” he wrote, “every personality can be a citadel of resistance to tyranny. In the co-ordination of the intelligences and wills of one hundred million ‘whole’ men and women lies the formula for an invincible American morale [italics original].”16 For Allport, the defining problem of fascist morale was that it depended on a fracturing of the psyche. Totalitarian propaganda worked to divide the emotions from the reason.
• Adorno, Thompson, and their fellow journalists and scholars varied in their accounts of how the transformation would occur, but by 1938, virtually all agreed: Mass communication could turn the individual personality and, with it, the structure of society as a whole in a totalitarian direction.
• According to Adorno and Simpson, music facilitated “adjustment” to mainstream society in two ways, each “corresponding to two major socio-psychological types of mass behavior toward music in general and popular music in particular, the ‘rhythmically obedient’ type and the ‘emotional’ type.”48 By the first group, Adorno meant young radio listeners and especially those who danced the jitterbug. For Adorno, dance was a mode of accommodation. To dance to popular music was to rehearse one’s alienation and at the same time, by attaching oneself emotionally to the pleasure system of the existing society, to increase that alienation. In the frantic footwork of the jitterbugs, Adorno seemed to hear the mechanical drumbeat of goose-stepping soldiers. The “rhythmically obedient” types, he wrote, were the “most susceptible to a process of masochistic adjustment to authoritarian collectivism.”
• And if they start to come to adult awareness, the entertainment industry will quickly put them back in the nursery: “Together with sport and film, mass music and the new listening help to make escape from the whole infantile milieu impossible,” declared Adorno
• During the three years that Adorno worked on the Princeton project, he applied his critique of the psychological power of media with a ferocious rhetorical bite.40 He steadily attacked both popular music and the radio as if they were themselves the Nazi forces that had driven him from Europe. “The liquidation of the individual is the real signature of the new musical situation,” he exclaimed in a 1938 essay for the reconstituted Institute for Social Research’s Zeitschrift, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening.”41 Written in the same year that saw the anti-Jewish pogrom of Kristallnacht and the German annexation of Austria, Adorno’s essay echoed with despair: It can be asked whom music for entertainment still entertains. Rather, it seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility. Everywhere it takes over, unnoticed, the deadly sad role that fell to it in the time and the specific situation of the silent films. It is perceived purely as background. If nobody can any longer speak, then certainly nobody can any longer listen
• In the 1930s, few critics expressed this view more articulately than Theodor Adorno. Like many of his colleagues at Frankfurt’s Institute for Social Research, Adorno had fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.
• By a crowd, Le Bon meant not a simple gathering of people, but what he called “a psychological crowd.”29 Such a gathering had a “mental unity” and was characterized by two distinct features. First, the individuals in such groups had suffered “the disappearance of conscious personality”;
• In the chaotic decades of the Third Republic that followed, Le Bon came to see crowds as an increasingly common social phenomenon and as emblems of a new mass society. He also saw them as a threat—to collective social order and to individual reason. In his 1895 volume The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Le Bon linked their rise to the coming of modernity itself.
• To be able to understand the world and change it, Chase argued, Americans needed to break down language itself, to dissolve its terms from their material-world referents, and so distinguish the pictures in their heads from reality. And nothing made the importance of that work clearer than the omnipresence of mass communication, propaganda, and the threat of a second world war. In 1941, linguist and future Senator S. I. Hayakawa’s volume Language in Action brought Chase’s argument and Korzybski’s theories into the public eye. Like Chase, Hayakawa argued that “we live in an environment shaped and partially created by hitherto unparalleled semantic influences: commercialized newspapers, commercialized radio programs, ‘public relations counsels,’ and the propaganda technique of nationalistic madmen.”22 To survive this onslaught, citizens needed scientific techniques for interpreting and resisting semantic assaults.
• his popular 1938 volume The Tyranny of Words, economist Stuart Chase summed up the historical importance of semantic analysis thus: “First a war that killed thirty million human beings. Then a speculative boom which, after producing more bad language to sell more fantastic propositions than in the entire previous history of finance, exploded like the airship Hindenburg. Finally, when a little headway has been made against economic disaster, the peoples of Europe, more civilized than any other living group, prepare solemnly and deliberately to blow one another to molecules. . . . Confusions persist because we have no true picture of the world outside, and so cannot talk to one another about how to stop them.”
• The term “general semantics” was coined by Polish philosopher and mathematician Alfred Korzybski in the early 1920s. Korzybski had published a series of articles and books in which he argued that human beings’ ability to pass knowledge down through time via language was what made them unique as a species. In 1933 he published an exceptionally influential extension of his early theories, entitled Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics. At its core, the book argued that much human unhappiness in both the psychological and social realms could be traced to our inability to separate the pictures in our heads and the communicative processes that put them there from material reality itself. To solve this problem, Korzybski offered a course in close scientific reasoning and linguistic analysis. To alleviate the power that symbols and their makers have over us, he argued, human beings needed to parse the terms in which language presented the world to them. Having done so, they could begin to recognize the world as it was and thus to experience some degree of mental health.
• The Institute for Propaganda Analysis emerged in 1937 out of a class in “Education and Public Opinion” taught by Dr. Clyde Miller at Columbia’s Teacher’s College.
• What has disappeared is the deeply democratic vision that animated the turn toward mediated environments in the first place, and that sustained it across the 1950s and into the 1960s. This book aims to recover that vision
• For that reason, members and friends of the committee advocated a turn away from single-source mass media and toward multi-image, multi–sound-source media environments—systems that I will call surrounds. They couldn’t build these systems themselves. With a few exceptions, they were writers, not media makers. But they knew people who could build surrounds: the refugee artists of the Bauhaus. Since the early 1930s, Bauhaus stalwarts such as architect Walter Gropius and multimedia artists László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer had fled Nazi Germany and settled in New York, Chicago, and other centers of American intellectual life. They brought with them highly developed theories of multiscreen display and immersive theater. They also brought the notion that media art should help integrate the senses, and so produce what they called a “New Man,” a person whose psyche remained whole even under the potentially fracturing assault of everyday life in industrial society.
• "Were the world we dream of attained, members of that new world would be so different from ourselves that they would no longer value it in the same terms in which we now desire it. . . . We would no longer be at home in such a world. . . . We who have dreamed it could not live in it. MARGARET MEAD, 1942"
• Across the 1930s, committee members such as anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson and psychologist Gordon Allport had worked to show how culture shaped the development of the psyche, particularly through the process of interpersonal communication. In the early years of the war, they turned those understandings into prescriptions for bolstering American morale. First, they defined the “democratic personality” as a highly individuated, rational, and empathetic mindset, committed to racial and religious diversity, and so able to collaborate with others while retaining its individuality.