Erich Fromm Stars in George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent: A Digressive Book Reviewby
Benjamin Marks
A while back I read George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent. It is a shocking book and I do not recommend it. In fact, it is hardly worth the respect of reading, let alone reviewing. Essentially the entire book can be summarised as follows: there is no world government, therefore we need world government, and that world government should be a democracy. (For a devastating critique of democracy, with world democracy being a reductio ad absurdum, see this article by Tom Palmer’s hero, Hans-Hermann Hoppe). The only positive I got out of the book is a reference on one of the last few pages to Erich Fromm, of whom I had previously never heard. Below is the reference to Fromm in the context of the entire paragraph. All those with agency are confronted by a choice. We can use that agency to secure for ourselves a safe and comfortable existence. We can use our life, that one unrepeatable product of four billion years of serendipity and evolution, to earn a little more, to save a little more, to win the approval of our bosses and the envy of our neighbours. We can place upon our walls those tombstones which the living erect to themselves: the framed certificates of their acceptance into what Erich Fromm has called the ‘necrophiliac’ world of wealth and power. We can, quite rationally, subordinate our desire for liberty to our desire for security. Or we can use our agency to change the world, and, in changing it, to change ourselves. We will die and be forgotten with no less certainty than those who sought to fend off death by enhancing their material presence on the earth, but we will live before we die through the extremes of feeling which comfort would deny us.1 Hmmm. Yes. Some good points. What’s this about necrophilia? Sounds convincing. (Note sarcastic overtones.) Better see who this Erich Fromm chap is. Turning to the excruciatingly annoying 159th endnote – here it is the endnotes, why not use footnotes? and the number of them, that I find annoying –, Monbiot references Erich Fromm’s 1973 work, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Wow. "Necrophiliac," a book titled "The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness," sounds interesting. So I throw away the Monbiot crap and get myself some Erich Fromm to read. It turns out to be a pretty disappointing book, as with all the other Erich Fromm that I have now read, but there are some very brief bursts of brilliance. To the anarcho-capitalist, Austro-libertarian, paleo-conservative like myself, Erich Fromm is helpful – from my reading – in three key areas. (1) As Joseph Stromberg footnoted in his introduction to MES/PM, Fromm is a "possible useful source of inspiration" for a "rational-ethical" connection, according to a Murray Rothbard letter.2 (2) Erich Fromm’s discussions on "the pathology of normalcy" and "consensual validation," we can extrapolate to be a critique of false patriotism, neoconservatism, and shallow utilitarianism. And (3) Ludwig von Mises’s notion of statolatry – worship of the state – and Erich Fromm’s work on sadomasochism are complementary. Objectivistic Humanistic Ethics Murray Rothbard’s The Ethics of Liberty may have drawn inspiration from Fromm’s works, especially Man for Himself. I presume that conceptually Fromm was helpful, provoking the development of a more clear and logical objectivistic ethics, rather than the muddled writing of Fromm being of direct – say, quotable – help. If ethics constitutes the body of norms for achieving excellence in performing the art of living, its most general principles must follow from the nature of life in general and of human existence in particular. In most general terms, the nature of life is to preserve and affirm its own existence. All organisms have an inherent tendency to preserve their existence: it is from this fact that psychologists have postulated an "instinct" of self-preservation. The first "duty" of an organism is to be alive. To sum up, good in humanistic ethics is the affirmation of life, the unfolding of man’s powers. Virtue is responsibility toward his own existence. Evil constitutes the crippling of man’s powers; vice is irresponsibility toward himself.3
Erich Fromm, it often seems, was on the right track but then does not take his ideas far enough, or begins talking about what Freud or Marx had to say about it. There is at least the germ of a good idea in quite a bit of his writing. The Pathology of Normalcy and Consensual Validation False patriotism is the belief that whatever government says goes. Neoconservatism is the belief that the status quo should be maintained. Shallow utilitarianism is whatever the majority says goes, and since the majority are either false patriots or neocons, that’s what shallow utilitarians believe in. This is often called groupthink. Erich Fromm called it "the pathology of normalcy" and claimed it was brought about through "consensual validation." What is so deceptive about the state of mind of the members of a society is the "consensual validation" of their concepts. It is naively assumed that the fact that the majority of people share certain ideas and feelings proves the validity of these ideas and feelings. Nothing is further from the truth. Consensual validation as such has no bearing whatsoever on reason … 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 [and] the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths…4 Hardly news to libertarians, but at least something we can agree with Fromm about. Sadomasochism as Statolatry War is perhaps the clearest expression of statolatry. Gary North, in a recent LRC article, called war a display of the "ethics of the cannibal." The cannibal has adopted an ethical position that places his own children at risk, and the children of every man who lives among the cannibals. "Tit for tat" rules in the world of cannibalism. What I do this week, my enemy may do next week. If I may lawfully eat his children, he may lawfully eat mine. Of course, cannibals might tell an anthropologist they may do it for nutrition’s sake. But it is more than this. It is a religious practice. It is a religion of child sacrifice, what the Israelites were told not to do: pass their children through a sacrificial fire (Deuteronomy 18:10). Similarly, Erich Fromm, in my favourite excerpt of his, put it like this: The fact that, in the case of child sacrifice, the father kills the child directly, while in the case of war, both sides have an arrangement to kill each other’s children makes little difference. In the case of war, those who are responsible for it know what is going to happen, yet the power of the idols is greater than the power of love for their children.5 Mises favourably quoted Hegel’s coining of the phrase "the futility of victory." Mirroring Mises, Fromm put it like this: "Power over" is the perversion of "power to." The ability of man to make productive use of his powers is his potency; the inability is his impotence… Where potency is lacking, man’s relatedness to the world is perverted into a desire to dominate, to exert power over others as though they were things. Domination is coupled with death, potency with life. Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralysed.6 Fromm’s distinction between "power over" and "power to"7 is parallel to the Rothbardian comparison between the "market principle": "power of man over nature" and the "hegemonic principle": "power of man over man."8 Mises’s writing on statolatry is reinforced in the following passages of Erich Fromm’s on sadism: Sadism has essentially no practical aim; it is not "trivial" but "devotional." It is transformation of impotence into the existence of omnipotence; it is the religion of psychical cripples. [P]ower through which one [or, as in a democracy, many] group[s] exploits and keeps down another tends to generate sadism in the controlling group… Hence sadism will disappear … only when exploitative control of any … group has been done away with. Exploitation and manipulation produce boredom and triviality; they cripple man, and all factors that turn him into a psychic cripple turn him also into a sadist or a destroyer.9 Lastly, a quick flashback to the Monbiot excerpt above; Fromm was misquoted. He never considered "wealth and power" to be products of a "‘necrophiliac’ world." Even if Monbiot uses "power" in the sense of power over others and "wealth" to denote extreme possessiveness and hoarding it still has nothing to do with Fromm’s necrophilia. Which, by the way, he meant as "the passionate attraction to all that is dead, decayed, putrid, sickly; it is the passion to transform that which is alive into something unalive; to destroy for the sake of destruction; the exclusive interest in all that is purely mechanical. It is the passion to tear apart living structures."10 So, even though, in regards to necrophilia I think both Monbiot and Fromm’s comments are silly, it is clear that Monbiot misrepresents what Fromm was trying to say. As an aside: don’t econometrician’s fit nicely inside Fromm’s definition of necrophilia? Well, there you have it. Erich Fromm via George Monbiot who misquoted him anyway.
September 28, 2004 Benjamin Marks [send him mail] lives under the custodian ownership of his parents in Sydney, Australia. He is the generous recipient of occasional research and welfare grants from them. |