In my freshman year at Johns Hopkins I read an essay that Talcott Parsons published in 1947, “Certain Primary Sources of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western World”. It’s been on my mind ever since and I’ve blogged about it I don’t know how many times, e.g. TO WAR! Part 1: War and America's National Psyche. Parsons argued that Western child-rearing practices generate a great deal of insecurity and anxiety at the core of personality structure. This creates an adult who has a great deal of trouble dealing with aggression and is prone to scapegoating. Inevitably, there are lots of aggressive impulses which cannot be followed out. They must be repressed. Ethnic scapegoating is one way to relieve the pressure of this repressed aggression. That, Parsons argued, is why the Western world is flush with nationalistic and ethnic antipathy. I suspect, in fact, that this dynamic is inherent in nationalism as a psycho-cultural phenomenon.
A full decade before Parsons, John Dollard published Caste and Class in a Southern Town, which “redirected the study of southern race relations in general and lynching in particular” by asking a simple question: Why do people need racism? The question implies that mistaken beliefs about others are symptoms of racism, not its cause. Racism has some useful function in the individual or collective lives of racists. What function could that be? Dollard’s answer was, in effect, to keep the peace.
In a post from 2013, Blacks, Blues, and Soul Sickness: Lynching and Racism in the USofA, I quote him making an argument the anticipates Parsons’ 1947 argument. Dollard observes that social life is often frustrating, generating aggressive impulses which cannot be always be satisfied. In Dollard’s view this leads to
a generalized or “free-floating” aggression . . . [that] can be thought of as a tendency to kick, hit, scorn or derogate someone or something if one could only find out what. A second necessity is that of a permissive social pattern. This must exist in order to lift the in-group taboos on hostility. The permissive pattern isolates a group within the society which may be disliked. Usually it is a defenseless group. . . The third essential in race prejudice is that the object must be uniformly identifiable. [pp. 445-446]
In other words, white racists are using blacks as scapegoats for the accumulated frustrations they experience in daily life. Aggressive impulses are being displaced from their real objects, which are appropriate targets, to substitute objects, toward whom one can act aggressively.
Then just yesterday I quoted Stephen Greenblatt on how the English nourished antisemitism from 1290 through to the mid-17th century, a period when there were no Jews at all in England. This anxiety, anger, resentment, and hatred thus had to originate entirely within the socio-cultural dynamics of English society. It had nothing at all to do with interaction with real Jews.
There’s an obvious pattern here. I could multiply examples. You’ll find some of them in the articles I’ve linked.
But the psychodynamic imagery of projection, which was at the heart of Parson’s rather convoluted psychoanalytic account is not helpful. It seems to imply that one sees or senses something within oneself, right here, picks it up and then tosses it, that is, projects it, to someone else, over there. The process is not that deliberate and self-conscious. It just happens.
It’s more like a failure to differentiate in the first place, a failure nurtured by various cultural practices, including rituals and stories. For it is through those kinds of practices that the negative affect becomes attributed to other people and other groups. Ultimately, we’ve got to go back to infancy, which is after all, where Freud started, where the infant is unable to differentiate between ego and alter. How do cultural mechanisms shape those interactions?
It's turtles all the way down, that is, interpersonal interaction. That’s what I struggled to conceptualize in the special case of music in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, “Part I: Collective Dynamics,” pp. 23-90. And I started where one must start, with the brain. What is going on in the brains of people while they’re interacting?
That question was just barely an empirical one when I wrote the book, but it had become (almost) empirical. I was able to cite some early work by Uri Hasson. That early work has blossomed into an extensive area of research crossing many disciplinary lines. You can find some of that word by searching my blog on the name “Hasson,” and the tags, “coupling” and “synchrony”.
More later.
"Then just yesterday I quoted Stephen Greenblatt on how the English nourished antisemitism from 1290 through to the mid-17th century, a period when there were no Jews at all in England."
ReplyDeleteI assumed from the previous post you were questioning Stephen Greenblatt's claim and rejecting it.
My previous comment must have been incomprehensible.
No problem.
ReplyDeleteHis claim is not strictly true. The religious intolerance of the period ensured no practising Jews (in public at least) but that same spirit of religious intolerance lead to an expulsion of the Jewish population in Spain and Portugal, leading to small numbers of the Jewish community settling in England particularly London at the end of the mediaeval period.
ReplyDeleteConversion to Christianity was the alternative to non-practice, I think Queen Elizabeth's Doctor was an example. Interest in Hebrew also allowed openings in scholarship for a small number of converts to work in the university system.
Greenblatt's claim is not uncommon, its a marginal group with a marginal history that is easy to ignore.
If memory serves me correct the damnable Doctor Lopez the Queens physician is speculatively suggested as a model for Shylock on the odd occasion. A dramatic claim, makes for an action packed narrative.
Greenblatt devotes several pages to Lopez, ending in his public execution. He was Portuguese, had been a Jew, but had converted to Christianity and insisted he was Christian to the very end. And he does discuss the possibility that there may have been some Marranos in London.
DeleteMarrano/ Anglo Jewish population in London has been researched since the early 20th century by Jewish historians starting with Lucien Wolfs 'Jews in Elizabethan England' and 'A Jewish community in Tudor England.'
DeleteResearch as I noted is more often than not ignored.
p.s. I should note the small number of papers I have read are all by British historians on Jewish history, who since the early 20th century seem to refer to the Marrano populations (distinct groups depending on country of origin) as Jewish communities. U.S scholarship and Jewish historical studies from an American perspective may be very different here.
ReplyDeleteAppear to be significant differences on what constitutes Jewish history and identity and the extent to wither it is of common consensus (the no Jews in England claim which is old and pre-dates the discovery of the Marrano population) or that later historical research and discovery of the Marrano population is ignored and the subject of misconception (the common claim made by researchers here).