I prefer dialogue to debate.
I don’t have all the answers and I am willing to learn from people whose
perspectives differ from my own. But
even a simple conversation has become difficult unless you stick to a benign
subject like the weather. Dialogue involves
a little give and take, and that has become as rare as a telephone booth. Practitioners of political correctness don’t
want to hear what I have to say, unless it is to collect evidence of my thought
crimes.
Nevertheless, I remain curious about what makes PC people
tick. How is it that they cling so
tightly to one narrative, and remain impervious to a whole host of relevant
facts? I remember a conversation with
one perennial activist. Anytime I would
bring up a demonstrable, irrefutable fact his response was a gruff “Well,
that’s not true.” When I cut the
conversation short, I guess he chalked it up as a “WIN.”
Several years ago, it dawned on me that political
correctness was a prelude to tyranny. It
hurts to see how those who are preening in their own virtue have turned America
into a country where it is best to keep your mouth shut and sacrifice the
larger liberties so that you can hang on to a few small ones.
It really is stifling.
The mask, the smothering gag that hides your expressions, is a perfect metaphor
for these times. I have come to the
point where I see the futility of talking to PC people: it goes OK, but only if
I hide who I am and what I think, and that is not a satisfying way to relate.
Still, I have persisted in trying to understand them. There once was a time when you could argue
with someone holding different beliefs and you could both be on the playing field
of rational discourse. The stubborn
blindness of political correctness, however, infiltrates a person way beyond
the level of conscious rationality, a very deep subconscious level. That
much, I had begun to recognize.
And then, EUREKA! I
found someone who had pondered these things many years ago and actually came up
with some plausible explanations. My
utter frustration has been replaced by a degree of understanding and even compassion for why PC
people are so relentlessly PC.
When I first perused the 1997 paper by Howard S. Schwartz I
had to make sure it was not a satirical piece.
The Freudian jargon gave me pause, especially since I have misgivings
about the many evils that have been committed in the name of PSYCHOLOGY.
But after reading and re-reading the paper, to get up to
speed with the technical vocabulary, I was floored by the insights in “PSYCHODYNAMICS
OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS.” I re-post the
entire paper below, after my own summary of the main points explored by
Schwartz (along with a few observations and impressions.)
According to Schwartz’s psychodynamics of political
correctness, “paternal influences are repudiated and a biparental model of
authority is replaced by one revolving around a primordial conception of the
mother. Paternal influences are those which represent the engagement with
external reality, and regression to the primordial mother is therefore a
rejection of external reality.”
Right away, we can see how this mirrors the breakdown of
nuclear families in America, the absence of fathers, and the purging of “toxic”
masculinity.
Schwartz refers back to a 1991 article on PC by Richard
Bernstein that identified a subtle shift from the post-Marxist Left’s
conception of struggle between economic classes, to a framework of oppositions
based on differences in gender, race, and sexual orientation.
The author makes an extremely salient point: “the disturbing
thing about political correctness ("PC") has not been the content of
its ideology, but the principle of argumentation that it has employed…”. To illustrate, he shares a story (read it below) that has
become all too familiar.
Schwartz takes us through the elements of psychoanalytics
that undergird his theory. First, the
infant has not yet formed a boundary between itself and its mother. Freud identified the infant’s experience of
being the center of a loving world as “primary narcissism.”
Eventually, though, the harsh realities of the world shatter
this state, and the developing infant struggles with isolation and
helplessness. In response, the little
one fantasizes an omnipotent mother who could bring about a return of blissful
narcissism. This return to narcissistic
fusion is described as the “ego ideal,” representing “a world without
obstacles. In such a world, we would be able to do exactly what we want and
have it turn out to our benefit, since the world would be structured to fulfill
our desires. According to this vision, we would be perfectly at home in the
world, without anxiety or shame, sure of ourselves, certain of the validity of
our behavior, without doubt or marginality.”
This certainly sounds like the world envisioned by the
politically correct!
“Unfortunately” the world is not our mother. Our wants are not at the center of the
world. The world does not exist to meet
our demands, but makes demands that we must meet. During normal development, we
would internalize these demands with the formation of the superego. While the
ego ideal is structured around an idealized mother, the superego is structured
around an idealized father.
The function of the father in the family “has been to create
a distance between the family and external reality so that the ego ideal,
represented by the mother, could operate within the family, giving the children
a deep feeling that they were important and loved. The role of the father with
regard to the children, was to inculcate the superego by representing
indifferent external reality within the family so that, by introjecting him,
the children could learn to cope with that reality….The father acts as the
agent of the external world. Through his prohibitions, he represents its
indifference and its demands.”
So, what we see in the traditional family is the wholeness
achieved from a balance of roles.
“Society can be seen to involve an intimate interaction of the ego ideal
and the superego.”
According to Schwartz, “a biparental model of
child rearing…incorporates both paternal and maternal elements, recognizing the
difference and the value of each. It leads to an image of authority that is
both realistic and loving.”
But, Schwartz argues (and we have all observed) that since
the 1960s the role of the father (superego) has been repudiated, replaced by
“the domination of pre-oedipal narcissism, whose central feature is fusion with
the primordial mother.”
This is certainly offering some clues about why
communication with PC people is so very frustrating. Two recent movements coincide with the
regression to the primordial mother.
1) Postmodernism rejects the objective reality of the external
world. To the extent that the external
world is acknowledged by the postmodernist, it represents it “is associated
with patriarchy, which uses it in the service of male oppression, keeping down
and marginalizing the spontaneous, the organic, the feminine.”
2) The more radical forms of feminism see a shift in “embodiment of
authority from the biparental model to one based on the more primitive
primordial mother” repudiating what the father represents. The danger of this
shift is not so much that it repudiates the father, but that it puts into
political form the repudiation of what the father represents – external reality
itself. This is what we see happening in PC.”
Schwartz explores how these developments have become
manifest in the university setting.
First is a picture of how it once was, when the university represented a
biparental model. “The function of the
superego in the university is primarily the inculcation of standards. The
university presumes that there is an external world which can be known in
better or worse ways…. With regard to teaching, the university functions
ideally as a father, who prepares students to achieve something in the world
based upon the modeling of good work, work in accordance with the highest
standards, and the differential reward of good versus bad work. If the process
is successful, the student internalizes this polarity between good work and bad
work as part of the superego, and goes out into the world where he or she does
good work based upon this internalization.”
To witness the antithesis of good work, the diminishment of
the superego, go to a student art exhibition at the nearest university. You will encounter “conceptual” art produced
with a paucity of technical dexterity, devoid of anything approaching objective
standards of beauty.
Schwartz looks at the other side of the coin: “The ego ideal
is also present, perhaps most importantly, in the nurturance of the individual
student, bringing that student to be able to accept his or her own spontaneity,
which is the well-spring of creativity. It should never be forgotten, in this
connection, that the muse is a female figure.”
This rise of the ego ideal/primordial mother is also easy to
find on today’s college campus.
Recently, while walking across one campus, I encountered someone who
pointed out the new amenities devoted to making students “more comfortable” (as
if that is a desirable thing). My
immediate response was that in my college days a demand for spa-like comforts
would have been scoffed as ridiculous.
“If you’re looking for comfort, freshman, you have come to the wrong
place.”
Though Schwartz applies his model of PC to the university,
it applies equally well on many levels: the individual, the family,
institutions of society (the church?), and society as a whole:
“Put the idea of a self-subsistent, objective external world
into question, however, and one undermines the meaning of the father. Take away
the idea of an objective world and you deny the legitimacy of external demand
and the superego that represents it. Demands come to be seen as oppression.
Deny the superego and all that is left is narcissism; the only question becomes
whose narcissism. The idea of achievement, and the distinction between good and
bad work, then, come to seem arbitrary categorizations whose meaning is to be
found in the expression of the father's narcissism. No means remains to explain
why the children should not be able to live in permanent enjoyment of their
closeness with the primordial mother. Her power would guarantee their
happiness, if only his could be gotten rid of. The attempt to expel the father,
and the external world he represents, is the meaning of the PC university.”
I believe this is a sufficient introduction. Without further ado, enjoy the eye-opening wisdom
of Howard S. Schwartz.
---
http://www.sba.oakland.edu/faculty/schwartz/PCJABS.htm
PSYCHODYNAMICS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
by
Howard S. Schwartz
Professor of Organizational Behavior
Department of Management and Marketing
School of Business Administration
Oakland University
Rochester, Michigan 48309-4401
INTERNET: SCHWARTZ@OAKLAND.EDU
Journal of Applied Behavioral
Science, 33 (2), 1997:
133-149. I have had the benefit of some extremely valuable criticism in the
development of this paper. Without being able to thank everyone, I would
especially like to express my appreciation to Robert Maxwell Young, Howell
Baum, Ann Penner Winston, Larry Hirschhorn, Yiannis Gabriel, Mary Van Sell, and
the reviewers of the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science.
PSYCHODYNAMICS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
ABSTRACT
Political correctness represents
a regression in university functioning in which paternal influences are
repudiated and a biparental model of authority is replaced by one revolving
around a primordial conception of the mother. Paternal influences are those
which represent the engagement with external reality, and regression to the
primordial mother is therefore a rejection of external reality. Aspects of
university functioning that are explained by this model include the inversion
of valuation, the assault against the white males, the subordination of
rationality in decision making, the balkanization of the university, the drive
to the extreme, and the anomaly of female power.
PSYCHODYNAMICS OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS
Introduction
The term "Political
Correctness" made its way into public consciousness through an article by
Richard Bernstein in the New York Times (1991). It referred to
a strain of post-Marxist leftist thought in which the struggle between economic
classes had been replaced, as a primary ontological framework, with a more
differentiated set of oppositions based on such differences as gender, race,
and sexual orientation. Thus, as Bernstein put it:
Central to pc-ness, which has its
roots in 1960's radicalism, is the view that Western society has for centuries
been dominated by what is often called 'the white male power structure' or
'Patriarchal hegemony.' A related belief is that everybody but white
heterosexual males has suffered some form of repression and been denied a
cultural voice ... (Section 4:1)
But, to many of those concerned
with this phenomenon, the disturbing thing about political correctness
("PC") has not been the content of its ideology, but the principle of
argumentation that it has employed:
… more than an earnest expression
of belief, "politically correct" has become a sarcastic jibe used by
those, conservatives and classical liberals alike, to describe what they see as
a growing intolerance, a closing of debate, a pressure to conform to a radical
program or risk being accused of a commonly reiterated trio of thought crimes:
sexism, racism and homophobia. (4:4)
In response to these charges,
those who felt themselves criticized for PC have responded in a number of ways.
Often they have both denied that any coercion to be PC existed and accused the
critics of the same thought crimes the accusation of which was said to
constitute PC in the first place (Fried, 1991). Generally the response has been
to attack the motives of PC's critics. For instance, those critics have been
accused of being agents of right-wing think tanks (e.g. Wiener, 1992), or
otherwise right-wingers who had nobody to direct their venom against now that
the cold war has ended (see, for example, Gitlin, 1992, although his own
perspective is much broader, nuanced and in no way an example of PC itself.)
These arguments have no apparent
application to me. I have never received any money from a right-wing think tank
and my objection to PC long antedates the end of the cold war. Actually, my
first experience with it was in 1971. But it may be useful, by way of
introducing PC, to report on my first experience with it during the relatively
recent past.
This was in 1987, after I had
returned from a sabbatical where I had been working on a book on narcissistic
process in organizations. The campus minister was interested in my work and
asked me to make a presentation at an institute that he was starting. The
presentation, which ultimately grew into Chapter seven of my book Narcissistic
Process and Corporate Decay (1990), required a presentation of
Freud’s concept of the Oedipus complex.
As I was going through this part
of the argument, a woman in the audience, who happened to be the chair of the
psychology department at the time, had what can only be called a fit. Without
addressing herself to anything I was saying in particular, and without any
apparent attempt to control her rage, she said that Freud was a sexist and a
misogynist, and went on to condemn the entire psychoanalytic enterprise, which
she said was "shot through" with sexism and racism. As she talked, it
became clear to me that she had little idea of what she was talking about. She
said, for example, that the Oedipus complex did not apply to women, which was
why Freud invented the idea of the Electra complex. She was evidently unaware
of the fact that it was Jung, not Freud, who used the term "Electra
complex."
Despite this woman's evident lack
of grounding in what she was talking about, her voice seemed to express a
feeling of absolute authority. I recall that at the time this struck me as very
peculiar. But what struck me as even more peculiar was that as she engaged in
this frenzied performance, the other members of the audience were not looking
at her as if she were acting strangely, but were looking at me as if I had done
something contemptible and despicable. I remember thinking at the time that
what was going on in that room was not the way things ought to be done in the
university.
I cannot say that I felt wounded
by this interaction. I was more bemused than anything else. But I did have the
feeling that if events like this were becoming characteristic of the
university, this indicated that there was something terribly wrong in an
institution that was very important to me, and I felt a degree of outrage over
that. I also felt that I should make such processes into a focus of
investigation.
The results of this investigation
are what I present in this paper. In a previous paper (Schwartz, 1993), I
described a number of instances of PC and attempted to explain them within a
theoretical framework. The present paper represents a more sophisticated
development of that framework.
My argument will be that the
processes involved in PC represent a regressive shift in organizational
functioning from what I will call the "biparental" model, which
involves both maternal and paternal elements, to a primitive maternal model
from which paternal elements have been purged. I will begin by elaborating the
psychological basis on which this analysis will rest.
Narcissism, The Ego Ideal, and
the Superego
According to the standard account
in psychoanalytic theory (e.g. Mahler, Pine, and Bergman, 1975), in the
beginning of psychological life, the infant has not yet formed a boundary
between itself and its mother. The total devotion to the infant of the mother,
who is the world to the infant, results in the infant experiencing itself as
the center of a loving world. Freud referred to this experience as
"primary narcissism." As time goes by, the infant is painfully
alerted to the fact that the world does not lovingly revolve around it, and
comes to feel isolated and helpless as a result. To escape from its
helplessness, the child fantasizes an omnipotent mother who loves it entirely
and with whom it may fuse to return to the original narcissistic state.[1]
The phantasy of oneself as having
returned to the state of narcissistic fusion is referred to by Freud (1914,
1921) as the ego ideal. For Freud, the development of the theory of
the ego ideal, as a psychological configuration distinct from the superego, was
a short foray. Elaborating this theory more fully in its own right was the work
of others, notably of Chasseguet-Smirgel (1985, 1986). For her, the ego ideal
represents a world without obstacles. In such a world, we would be able to do
exactly what we want and have it turn out to our benefit, since the world would
be structured to fulfill our desires. According to this vision, we would be
perfectly at home in the world, without anxiety or shame, sure of ourselves,
certain of the validity of our behavior, without doubt or marginality. On the
individual level the ego ideal underlies our loved images of ourselves. On the
collective level, the idea of a society manifesting the ego ideal lies behind
our image of utopia.
The problem is that, short of
psychosis (Chasseguet-Smirgel, 1985), our experience never fully corresponds to
the ego ideal. We never get to be the center of a loving world. The problem is
that the world is not our mother. It has an independent existence outside of
ourselves. Far from being structured by love for our selves, the world
manifests a cold, powerful indifference. It does not simply give, but makes
demands on us which we must fulfill if it is going to sustain us.
For Freud (1923), in the course
of normal development we internalize these demands during the oedipal stage to
form the superego. As the ego ideal is structured around an
idealized mother, the superego is structured around an idealized father. [2]
The differentiation between
maternal and paternal roles naturally grows out of, and expresses itself in,
somewhat different patterns of development for boys and girls. The point I will
make in this paper is that maturation requires the development of capacities
for both roles, but it is certainly correct that the two sexes have different
inclinations in this regard. Chasseguet-Smirgel’s analysis (1986), which I
follow here and whose implications I have developed more fully elsewhere
(Schwartz, 1995), maintains that all children feel helpless in the face of the
omnipotent mother, who they nevertheless deeply love. Girls can resolve their
helplessness by identifying with her and her power. Boys do not have that
option and must find a way to secure an independent identity which will be, at
the same time, valued by women. This has been the root of the paternal role.
The father's function, as it has
emerged in this connection, has been to engage the indifferent external world
and to make that world amenable to the life of the family. His role has been to
create a distance between the family and external reality so that the ego
ideal, represented by the mother, could operate within the family, giving the
children a deep feeling that they were important and loved. The role of the
father with regard to the children, was to inculcate the superego by
representing indifferent external reality within the family so that, by
introjecting him, the children could learn to cope with that reality. [3]
Thus, the father acts as the
agent of the external world. Through his prohibitions, he represents its
indifference and its demands. Over time, the children take the father’s
prohibitions into themselves. They build the structure of the world's
constraint into their own character, fashioning it around the core of what they
come to call "reality." This is how children learn the rules of
exchange that operate within their culture: what they must do to get along, in
a reciprocal way, with others who are indifferent to them. Making sense of
these rules, they turn external demands into obligations, and thus come to
understand what they previously could not understand: why they must do what
they do not want to do.
Through the superego people,
especially males, are enabled to give up the love of the primordial mother on
the promise of being able to earn the ego ideal later through worldly activity.
One can easily see the value of the superego by reflecting on the culturally
useful activity that it generates. At the same time it is also possible to
observe that the superego preserves society from the distortion of reality and
the sense of infinite entitlement that narcissism would otherwise generate.
None of this takes away from the
value of the ego ideal and the maternal role. Only the ego ideal can give
inspiration to what would otherwise be a dry and joyless pattern of
obligations. Thus, the superego structures our understanding of how we are
separate from the world around us, and therefore how we must engage it on its
own terms. The ego ideal provides a meaning for this engagement by giving us an
image of overcoming our separation and becoming one with the world.. Society
can be seen to involve an intimate interaction of the ego ideal and the
superego.
The traditional family, as Freud
understood it, manifests what I shall call a biparental model
of child rearing along these lines. It incorporates both paternal and maternal
elements, recognizing the difference and the value of each. It leads to an
image of authority that is both realistic and loving.
PC and Regression
In order to understand PC one
needs to recognize that in recent decades, specifically since the late sixties,
the role of the father, the superego, has come to be repudiated. Taking its
place has been the domination of pre-oedipal narcissism, whose central feature
is fusion with the primordial mother.
This development has a number of
aspects, but two are of particular importance. First is the philosophical
current typically referred to as postmodernism or poststructuralism, associated
with the various writings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan,
Francois Lyotard, and others. What one finds in these works is the general
position that there is no objective external world. Knowledge is only language
and language refers only to other language. The idea that there is an external
world is associated with patriarchy, which uses it in the service of male
oppression, keeping down and marginalizing the spontaneous, the organic, the
feminine.
At the same time, the maternal
orientation itself has made a bid for dominance through a number of varieties
of feminism. Setting up an opposition between, on one hand, the supposedly
rule-bound, hierarchical, aggressive orientation of men and, on the other, the
supposedly spontaneous, caring, non-hierarchical, receptive orientation of women,
a broad spectrum of writers has sought to portray what they see as the
distinctive psychology of women, which I shall refer to simply as the feminine,
as an alternative organizing principle to what they see as male domination
(e.g. Gilligan, 1982; MacKinnon, 1989; Calas and Smircich, 1991; Irigaray,
1985).
To the extent that feminist
writers propose the feminine as a complement to the masculine, as a side of the
personality that, in our society, and especially outside the family, has needed
additional expression, their work seems to me to represent an interesting,
valuable, and essentially correct point of view (e.g. Benjamin, 1988). Seen
within the postmodern context, however, the simultaneous assault on the male
and apotheosis of the female mean something else. They do not represent a
revision of the idea of optimal development by adding maternal to paternal
elements. Rather, we can see a shift in the embodiment of authority from the
biparental model to one based on the more primitive primordial mother. The
danger of this shift is not so much that it repudiates the father, but that it
puts into political form the repudiation of what the father represents –
external reality itself. This is what we see happening in PC.
From the Biparental to the
Primitive Maternal in the University
To understand the meaning of a
revolt against the paternal within the university, we need to understand how
the superego, the institutionalized paternal, traditionally operates in that
institutional context. This is an easy matter. In the biparental model, the
meaning of the university is the generation of achievement. We may think of
this as the beneficial transformation of reality, whether physically or through
an increased understanding of that reality.
The function of the superego in
the university is primarily the inculcation of standards. The university
presumes that there is an external world which can be known in better or worse
ways. The meaning of standards is the establishment of the best ways of knowing
the world, based on the whole history of human engagement with that world. The
function of research, of course, is to get to know the world better, and
thereby to raise the standards of knowing. With regard to teaching, the
university functions ideally as a father, who prepares students to achieve
something in the world based upon the modeling of good work, work in accordance
with the highest standards, and the differential reward of good versus bad
work. If the process is successful, the student internalizes this polarity between
good work and bad work as part of the superego, and goes out into the world
where he or she does good work based upon this internalization.
With regard to decision making in
the biparental university, the superego manifests itself as intended rationality.
The superego, by acknowledging the existence of an objective external world
that can punish us if we get things wrong, places a premium on getting things
right. The whole panoply of procedures for making decisions in the university
exists for the purpose of taking possibilities for action and subjecting them
to rational, logical criticism, of eliminating parochial and narcissistic bias
and getting as close as possible to a course of action that will have the
desired concrete result. Surely this is not to say that the university, any
more than anyone or anything else, always gets things right. Certainly this
does not mean that university professors are less narcissistic than anyone else
– a view that only those unfamiliar with the university could uphold. It is
simply to say that rational criticism is an accepted and legitimated mode of
university discourse, that the distortions that narcissistic bias creates are
recognized as distortions, and that the structures created to limit their
effects are seen as legitimate.
None of this is to deny that the
ego ideal is present in the university in equal measure to the superego. The
ego ideal is necessary to transform demands into ideals, without which the
university would lose the spirit of its existence, and without which, indeed,
it would be impossible to give meaning to the idea of the beneficial. The ego
ideal is also present, perhaps most importantly, in the nurturance of the
individual student, bringing that student to be able to accept his or her own
spontaneity, which is the well-spring of creativity. It should never be
forgotten, in this connection, that the muse is a female figure. But within the
biparental university, the pursuit of ideals is channeled by the representation
of external demand into good work and concrete achievement.
Put the idea of a
self-subsistent, objective external world into question, however, and one
undermines the meaning of the father. Take away the idea of an objective world
and you deny the legitimacy of external demand and the superego that represents
it. Demands come to be seen as oppression. Deny the superego and all that is
left is narcissism; the only question becomes whose narcissism. The idea of
achievement, and the distinction between good and bad work, then, come to seem
arbitrary categorizations whose meaning is to be found in the expression of the
father's narcissism. No means remains to explain why the children should not be
able to live in permanent enjoyment of their closeness with the primordial mother.
Her power would guarantee their happiness, if only his could be gotten rid of.
The attempt to expel the father, and the external world he represents, is the
meaning of the PC university.
Structure and Process in the
PC University
In order to understand both the
appeal and the danger of organization based on the primitive mother, it is
necessary to underscore the fact that the primordial mother is a phantasy. She
is not a real mother. She is the image of mother cast in the mold of the
infant's desire. The primordial mother is the phantasy of a person who would
complete the circle of a loving world centered upon the child. In other words,
she is the complement of the child's narcissism. When individuals identify with
her, when they re-form themselves in her image, they give up their own adult
character and remake themselves on the basis of the most primitive levels of
their psyches.
The appeal of this regression is
clear enough. We all desire to fuse with the primordial mother and again be the
center of a loving world. But, as a principle of organization for the
university, the rule of the primordial mother is not as perfect as we might
imagine.
First, notice that the loving
world of which the person would be the center would have only one person in it,
plus that person's reflection: it would contain no independent others. This is
not recognized as a problem by the narcissistic child, who sees no need for
independent others. But as a principle of organization in a real world which
contains real others, it has a contradiction at its core.
Narcissism, which the connection
with the primordial mother enshrines and guarantees, makes it impossible to
live peaceably in a world in which there are real others. I demand that you
take me as the center of your world, and you demand that I take you as the
center of my world. There is no way in which we can make sense out of the
otherness of the other. It has to be met with total emotional rejection and
hatred. It does not belong in the "good" world which has me as its
center, and so therefore must be "bad." The gulf between us is
absolute. How can organization be possible at all?
In a word, the love of the
primordial mother, which it seems to us would make the world complete, appears
to be a perfect principle of organization. In reality, however, it would
shatter the world. It is a principle of perfect disorganization, of
chaos. [4]
The problem here is that love is
specific. The kind of unconditional love that defines the primordial mother for
us means that she (or he) takes our point of view without subjecting it to
judgment or to categorization. Love means being accepted because we are exactly
who we are. But our own inclusion on the grounds of such specificity defines
for us a moral universe which excludes everyone who is not who we are, which is
to say everyone else.
At one level, this problem is
resolved by the psychology of the group. If the person can substitute a group
identity for an individual one, social organization becomes possible at the
level of the group. An idea of oneself as a member of a group can serve as
one’s ego ideal. This opens the possibility that others can adopt the same ego
ideal. Those who do so may identify with each other based on that fundamental
similarity. In this way, relations previously characterized by envy and
antagonism are transformed into group feeling (Freud, 1921).
But this means that the problem
of narcissistic disorganization will reappear between groups. Instead of
believing that the world should revolve around us as individuals, we come to
believe that it should revolve around us by virtue of our group identity. It is
those outside the group, those who do not take the group as their own ego
ideal, who are now experienced as threats and as not belonging in the world.
Thus, for mutually antagonistic individuals, we have simply substituted
mutually antagonistic groups. This is the first element of the structure of the
PC university.
The second problem of
organization based on the primordial mother is the need to provide an affective
connection through which the group can make claims on her. In the family, or
for that matter in Japanese organizations where the maternal principle is
powerful (Doi, 1973), a strong interest on the part of the mother is sought
through an appeal based on continual association. But in the university, where
people come and go, this is not a viable option.
In the university dominated by
the processes of PC, which I shall refer to as the PC university, [5] this
problem is dealt with through an abstraction. The abstraction is the idea of
the child who needs love the most, the one who has been least loved in the
past, the victim. It is this abstraction, this specific claim to having been
damaged in a certain way and at a certain time, therefore, that provides the basis
of the group's identity. This provides the reason why individuals who deviate
from the group with regard to the ideology of its victimization are treated as
if they do not belong to the group. (See, for example, Carter, 1991). It is a
mistake, therefore, to think of these groups as defined by demographic
characteristics. At their root, they are defined by an ideology about demographic
characteristics. My point here is that the idea of these group conflicts, to
use a familiar phrase, is a social construction. Understanding such conflicts
rests less on understanding the claims of the specific groups against each
other than on understanding the fundamentally intrapsychic dynamics of the
social construction of the idea of such conflict itself.
This differentiation into groups
based on level of victimization determines the logic according to which social
structure develops within the PC university. It also gives rise to the basic
social process within the PC university, which is to differentially love the victim
and, by the same token, to withdraw love from and to hate those who have
previously been loved, who come to be seen as having stolen that love from
those who now are in need of it.
Thus, PC transforms the
university into a battleground between the forces of goodness, as personified
by the victims and their righteous allies, and the forces of evil, personified
by the oppressors: those who previously had status, and the whole panoply of
social institutions through which they gained that status and have maintained
it.
Dynamics of PC
The Inversion of Valuation and
the Transformation of the University
The premise of the superego is
that love needs to be earned through good work. To be sure, the superego cannot
provide us with love, but only with respect. Love attaches to who we are, not
what we do; it cannot be earned (Sennett and Cobb, 1972). But the superego can
provide the criteria on which people agree that persons should be
loved, based on the fulfillment of its requirements. This provides the basis
for the social dramatization of love that we call status or prestige, and this
is what those of low status feel deprived of.
When the idea of an objective
external world is lost, the idea of achievement, of earning love on the basis
of good work, no longer has meaning. Individuals who have had status in the
past, and who legitimated that status by claims of achievement, come to be seen
instead as having acquired their status illegitimately. The idea of gaining
status through achievement comes to be seen as a smoke-screen for theft. Those
who have had status are thus redefined as having stolen love from those of low
status. They are seen as oppressors who deserve to be hated and attacked, and
to have their power destroyed. On the other hand, those of low status, under
the primordial maternal principle, are those who need love the most. Thus, the
social dramatization of love comes to be focused on them.
In the absence of the superego,
this dual process of excoriating the oppressors and expressing love for the
victims becomes the whole meaning of the university. For example, the entire
nature of what constitutes knowledge changes in the PC university. Knowledge
becomes whatever ideas express hatred of the oppressors and love of the
victims.
Along with this change go changes
in the ideas of the transmission of this knowledge, in the form of teaching,
and the creation of new knowledge, in the form of research and scholarship. For
example, teaching is no longer the study of intellectual and artistic
achievements, characteristic of the superego, but becomes a politicized process
in which the forces of goodness are trained and mobilized and the forces of
evil are subverted. Everything that is done is legitimated by reference to its
function in this battle. The narcissistic premise here is that anything else
serves the purpose of oppression. As the well-known slogan of the 1960s put it,
"If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem."
In all of this, we find a
disparagement of the idea of great works which is closely related to the
depreciation of achievement I have already discussed. The very idea of great
works comes to be seen as a technique of oppression (Searle, 1992).
The Assault Against White
Males
This line of reasoning helps to
provide an understanding of one of the most striking cultural developments of
our time: the assault against white males. As Richard Shweder, writing in The
New York Times has observed, "‘white male,’ dead or alive, is now
used as an accusation.... a slur." Following with the usual thinking
behind the charge, he says
The left relishes the usage. It
thinks that white males have held center stage too long, that it's time for
their victims. (1991: Section 4:15)
Clearly enough, the assault upon
white males is an attack upon what is seen as the dominant group. To me, that
is relatively unimportant. For the reasons Hegel (1964) referred to as the
dialectic of lordship and bondage, the replacement of old elites by new ones is
an old and familiar historical pattern. The effects of this pattern have, no
doubt, often been salutary.
More important is that the
assault on white males is an attack against the superego itself. That this
assault on white males is an assault on the superego is shown by the fact that
the ground upon which the prestige of the white males rests is rarely
mentioned. This is an important omission. For surely, if white males have had
prestige in the past, this has not been entirely undeserved. Science,
technology, social, economic, and political institutions, indeed, the university
itself, all reflect the contributions of Western men far out of proportion to
their numbers. Casting white males on the bad side of a clean distinction
between good and evil at the very least fails to recognize, let alone express
appreciation for, these contributions.
This stance only makes sense if
one supposes, in accordance with narcissistic psychology, that good things
simply happen, as if by magic, because they are supposed to, without anyone
having had to make them happen. The psychology of the superego is a psychology
of doing, while pre-oedipal narcissistic psychology is a psychology
of being. It is only within this primitive psychology that the fact
that many good things happen only because somebody worked to make them happen
can simply disappear.
The Subordination of
Rationality in Decision Making
This last point points to another
interesting and important dynamic. I think of that dynamic as the subordination
of truth to goodness. The premise of the superego is the indifference of the world.
Truth is seen as neutral and is given independent standing. On the other hand,
narcissistic psychology rests all consideration on a prior differentiation
between good people and bad people, whose ideas contain this goodness or
badness within them. The idea of an independent truth is replaced by a notion
of relative "truths" which are not presumed to have even the
possibility of validity outside of the community that uses them (e.g. Fish,
1992). Strained through the moralism I have described, this approach comes to
mean that the expression of the feelings of a good person must be granted
validity without any independent measure of the agreement of those feelings
with facts being necessary. By contrast, it is enough to classify a speaker as
a member of a bad group in order to discredit what that person says, with no
need for any consideration of the content of what is said. Within the context
of PC, that is to say, the criterion of logic is replaced by the argumentum
ad hominem.
This, by the way, provides an
answer to those who maintain that what is going on in the PC university is the
same thing that has always gone on. The university, these individuals maintain,
has always been a contentious place. In response one may acknowledge that the
university has always been a contentious place, but its contention has been
concerned with with what is true and who is right. In current PC times, the
question has become who is good.
At any rate, one can imagine the
effect that this development would have on decision making. Decision making in
the PC university loses even the intention of being rational. Argument about
possible courses of action no longer involves consideration of the actual
effects policies will have. The process instead turns to the avowal of one's own
goodness and the imputation of badness to one's opponents (Schwartz, 1993).
The Balkanization of the
University
Structure under the superego is a
behavioral structure: the division of labor. The purpose of this behavioral
structure is to organize the pursuit of achievement and the competition to set
its standard. Under the unalloyed operation of the ego ideal, structure rather
becomes a moral structure: good group versus bad group.
From this vantage point, we can
understand why, instead of competing for achievement, students come to engage
in a competition for sympathy and even pity. By showing that they have been
victimized, oppressed, abused, devalued in the past, the students assert their
claims to compensatory appreciation and resentfully depreciate the claims of
others. From this standpoint, we can understand the development which
balkanizes student bodies into hyphenated groups proclaiming their competing
histories of oppression and grievance.
This emotionally charged
conflict, when it takes place in our intendedly multicultural universities,
undoubtedly is a source of constant surprise, perplexity, and sadness to the
well-meaning individuals who have given rise to it. Certainly they meant
nothing of the sort. For them "... the point is to join differences in
such a way that the integrity of none is destroyed." They had in mind a
mosaic, or a quilt in which "differences are sutured together at their
edges to form a whole." (Choi and Murphy, 1992) But by establishing
narcissism as the norm for university life, PC advocates made it inevitable
that the actual university would be the locus of bitterness, envy and ill-will.
Resentment and hostility are not just temporary feelings which will be outgrown
in the PC university; they are built into its very structure. The fact that
each of these groups recognize and are constituted by the difference of the
others does not mean, as Choi and Murphy appear to believe, that they
appreciate those differences. All it means, within narcissistic psychology, is
that they define themselves against the others.
It is the superego, from whose
indifferent vantage point each voice is only one among many, that makes it
possible for groups to get along with each other. Of course, the superego can
be changed. The fact that it can be changed in accordance with differing and
developing reality is implied by the term "rational" in the concept
of legal-rational authority (Weber, 1947). But the superego is not just
one voice among many. It needs to be located at the top of a hierarchy, not
only if it is going to function at all, but also if other voices
are going to function without engaging each other in a duel to the death.
Arguably legal-rational authority is the greatest achievement of Western
civilization. The idea that, with its rules, its reliance on reason, its demand
for superordinate status, legal-rational authority is seen by the PC as the
very source of oppression (e.g. MacKinnon, 1989), is properly a cause for
concern.
The Drive to the Extreme
The psychology of the superego
contains a built in conservatism. This psychology rests on an internalization
of external order and places a premium on the maintenance of established
structure. In politics, the superego presses toward a solution that can be
applied universally and then toward the acceptance and maintenance of that
system. Narcissistic psychology, because it presses for the attainment of
something that cannot be attained, has a built in radical bias. The psychology
of the superego is realized through creation of an organization. The ego ideal
attempts to realize itself through creation of a movement. History, it seems to
me, embraces both of these dynamics, and recommends a proper balance between
them. When the realism of the superego is repudiated, however, the sole
operation of the ego ideal creates a politics that manifests what I think of as
a drive to the extreme. There are a number of dimensions to this.
First is what we may see as the
insatiability of demand. In the absence of a superego which can adjudicate
between reasonable and unreasonable claims, the measure of victimization must
be the subjective feeling of being victimized. To be sure, the feeling of being
victimized may come from real victimization, but the exploration of narcissism
shows that this feeling also can come from interpreting the indifference of the
world as a personal threat. This, of course, is the mechanism of paranoia. This
means that, as real victimization is eliminated, the university's process
stands in danger of coming under the control of the community's most easily
offended, most paranoid elements.
The insatiability of demand has
another dimension to it. As Maslow (1970) observed, most of us want a positive
conception of our self. We want to see ourselves, and wants others to see us,
as persons who have done something worthwhile: to have a sense of our self as
strong and active. In a word, we want respect and self-respect. But this is not
something we can attain on the basis of having been victimized in the past.
At its best, recognition of
oneself as having been victimized reflects a sense of the self as comparatively
weak and passive. To be sure, the circumstances of victimization may have been
such that any self would have been overcome. But be that as it may, there is no
way of resolving this dilemma. Failure, no matter how inevitable, is still
failure. And the pity of others can never help us to get beyond the sense of
ourselves as pitiful. At its worst, the claim of victimization may fall on deaf
ears, and be met with increasing resentment, hostility, and a feeling that one
is getting more than one deserves.
In the absence of a superego that
could offer a program for the attainment of respect, the perception that others
pity or resent them is likely only to raise the level of the victim group's
feeling of being unloved. Sadly, the logic of narcissism leads victim groups to
redouble the efforts which caused them this pain in the first place.
Another reason why PC tends to
move the university toward the extreme has to do with the logic of moral
debate. As I have said above, under the superego, debate centers around the
issue of what is true and what course of action is right. Under the rule of the
primordial mother, debate becomes a matter of who is good. The aim of the
debate is to show that one's opponent is bad (in this case racist, sexist,
homophobic or the like) and that one is good. For some groups, being good just
means being a member of the group, as defined by its ideology of victimization.
For others, and specifically for white males, being good means proving that one
is good despite one's group identification. The result of this is that, for
white males who make up the university power structure, goodness is always in
question and must be demonstrated continually, through a kind of moral
one-upmanship that operates by an incremental ratcheting up of the stakes.
On top of this, one must see the
intrapsychic dimension that operates here. The PC individual, especially the
white male, must not only operate according to the rules of a game of moral
goodness. He also must prove to himself that he is good. But goodness in this
case means the absolute love of the oppressed. There is no room here for
ambivalence or measure. Yet love is within the domain of the ego ideal. It is
irreducibly narcissistic. Even the love of the mother for her child is based on
her identification with the child.
The love of the oppressed demands
something that is psychologically impossible, the permanent abandonment of
one's own separate identity in exchange for enthusiastic subordination to the
narcissism of another. Individuals who accepts this demand must experience
their own spontaneous responses as a continual indictment and condemnation of
themselves. The point is that in a moral universe defined either by being or by
loving the oppressed, one's own ego ideal and superego are defined as
oppression. This is intolerable to the self, which must be permanently vigilant
against this perception of badness, political incorrectness, at the core of its
own being.
Notice again how this process
differs from what one would find under the superego. The superego attaches
goodness and badness to behavior, and permits behavioral acts of reparation as
ways of compensating for previous badness. Narcissism attaches goodness and
badness to the self, and does not permit reparative actions as a way of
reestablishing one's goodness. Narcissism demands an absolute, perfect
goodness, and our own recognition that we fall short of that ideal drives the
continual recreation of a perfect fictional identity and the abandonment of who
one is.
One way of dealing with this
dilemma is by finding political incorrectness in others before they can find it
in oneself. In effect, this is projecting one's own badness onto others and
attacking it there. This phenomenon is a manifestation of the dynamic which
psychoanalysis refers to as "projective identification." (Klein,
1975). Such projection offers one the aspect of perfect goodness as a righteous
warrior in the struggle against absolute evil, a role which offers narcissistic
benefits, especially in the form of self-righteousness, in excess of anything
the real world can provide. This, no doubt, helps to explain some of the vigor
and verve with which the campaign for PC is pursued. The other way to
experience one's own political incorrectness is with shame, which delegitimates
the self and takes one and one's own good sense out of the way of the PC tide.
There is an irony to this that is
worthy of mention. If PC is to be justified, it must be justified as a way of
combating racism. But Young (1993) has observed that racism is itself a form of
projective identification. Seeing PC as a form of projective identification
leads us to wonder how effective it possibly can be in this combat. This notion
suggests the alternative possibility of complementary dynamics of projective
identification, each reinforcing and justifying the other.
The Anomaly of Female Power
One further point which needs to
be made about the psychodynamics of the PC university relates to the ambiguous
position of women. Within the psychology I have outlined here, women are seen
as defenseless victims of male oppression on one hand, and as exemplars of the
omnipotent primordial mother on the other. Thus, we find, on the one hand, that
the image of the woman as passive, helpless victim is ubiquitous in our
society, with whole classes of institutions having been created to protect
these victims. On the other hand, and indeed partly through the manipulation of
this image, women have manifested enormous power in the transformation of
almost every aspect of society. This paradox is particularly interesting in
connection with the theory developed here because it is difficult to think of
any other way to explain it. [6]
Conclusion
Having maintained that PC
represents psychological regression, it is important to reiterate that
regression is not necessarily bad. On the contrary, as psychoanalytic thinkers
such as Kris (1952) have observed, regression is a necessary element of
creativity. Again, it might be argued, times of continuous change such as those
we live in call for the enhancement of creativity in all areas of life. This
may be, putting the best light on it, the deeper social function of
postmodernism and the rise of the maternal. But Kris’ point was that, in order
to contribute to creativity, regression has to be in the service of the ego.
What we see being played out in PC, however, and in the war of the primitive
maternal against the paternal generally, is not regression in the service of the
ego. It is regression against the ego. That is its danger.
How the idea developed, in our
time, that the maternal and the paternal are fundamentally in opposition to
each other is an interesting question, but one that I cannot engage here (See
Schwartz, 1995, 1996). It will suffice to say that this idea of fundamental
opposition is in serious error. Far from being in opposition, the maternal and
the paternal require each other if they are to be themselves. The paternal
without the maternal manifests itself as form without content; the structure
the isolated paternal creates is not the structure of anything. But the
maternal without the paternal leads to helpless immersion in unrealizable,
sterile fantasy, and makes it impossible to rationally engage the world. In the
end, the result for those mothered in this way can only be grief. On the level
of personality, the hypertrophy of the paternal is represented by the
obsessive-compulsive; but the type representing the unadorned maternal arrays
itself against external reality itself. It moves toward the psychotic (Frosh,
1991). Putting the matter this way may help us avoid the temptation of trying
to choose between them.
To be fully adult means having
internalized both the maternal and the paternal. It means being both father and
mother to oneself. The university serves the purpose of maturation when it
provides students with maternal and paternal influences which they can bring
into themselves. But when the university structures itself as a battle between
these two essential principles, standing for the destruction of one by the
other, it takes a stand against maturation, and tends to make the difficult
process of maturation all the more difficult.
NOTES
[1] Klein (1975) refers to this
primordial, all-loving, omnipotent mother as the "good breast."
[2] Idealization, in my view,
always relates to the ego ideal, which is based on the idealized mother.
Idealization of the father refers to the belief that the father has himself
attained fusion with the idealized mother.
[3] It is critical to note that
this happens to girls as well as boys, even if not entirely in the same
measure. Thus, consider this from the columnist Anna Quindlen:
My relationship with my father
was more man to man. He required of a fully developed human being that she have
exhaustively studied both Max Shulman and Machiavelli, Django Reinhardt and
Louis Armstrong... His motto was "winners need not explain." He
treated B's as if they were F's.... If you couldn't keep up, you got left.
I kept up....
My father exercised only the
tyranny of his expectations, but it was tyranny enough. And then, not so many
years ago, I realized that, like a heart transplant after the rejection phase,
his expectations for me had become my own. And I stopped valuing myself by how
my father valued me. I know from literature and life that is perhaps the
greatest passage that human beings ever make. (1993: E17)
[4] Hobbes (1939) put it
this way:
Again, men have no pleasure, but
on the contrary a great deal of grief, in keeping company, where there is no
power able to overawe them all. For every man looketh that his companion
should value him at the same rate he sets upon himself; and upon all signs of
contempt, or undervaluing, naturally endeavors, as far as he dares (which
amongst them that have no common power to keep them in quiet, is far enough to
make them destroy each other), to extort a greater value from his contemners by
damage, and from others by the example. (emphasis added, 160)
Which contributes strongly to
this:
In such condition there is no
place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no
culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be
imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and
removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the
earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst
of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death..
[5] Universities clearly differ in
their degree of PC. Moreover, it inevitably generates resistance to itself. It
is therefore unlikely that any university can be said to be entirely PC.
Nonetheless, it is possible to think about the PC university as an ideal case,
which is what I am doing here.
[6] I cannot resist mentioning an
example of this contrast that arose at the University of Michigan in 1992. This
case involved a sophomore student in an introductory Political Science course.
The student, in a paper criticizing telephone polling, invoked a hypothetical
"Dave Stud," who, while "knowledgeable" about a certain
area of taxation, refused to answer a pollster's question because he was busy
"entertaining three beautiful ladies in his penthouse."
This male student’s female
teaching assistant responded this way in the margin of the paper:
This is ludicrous &
inappropriate & OFFENSIVE. This is completely inappropriate for a serious
political science paper. It completely violates the standard of non-sexist
writing. Professor Rosenstone has encouraged me to interpret this comment as an
example of sexual harassment and to take the appropriate formal steps. I have
chosen not to do so in this instance. However, any future comments, in a paper,
in a class or in any dealings w/me will be interpreted as sexual harassment and
formal steps will be taken. Professor Rosenstone is aware of these comments --
& is prepared to intervene. You are forewarned! (The Michigan Review, 1993)
The disparity here between the
frail, vulnerable woman, grievously damaged by the merest mention of male
sexuality; and the powerful woman, capable of mobilizing the full weight of the
University of Michigan against a hapless sophomore, is breathtaking.
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