Psychohistory (fictional)

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) 

Psychohistory is a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe which combines history, sociology, and mathematical statistics to make general predictions about the future behavior of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. It was first introduced in the four short stories (1942–1944) which would later be collected as the 1951 novel Foundation.

In-universe

Axioms

Psychohistory depends on the idea that, while one cannot foresee the actions of a particular individual, the laws of statistics as applied to large groups of people could predict the general flow of future events. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: An observer has great difficulty in predicting the motion of a single molecule in a gas, but with the kinetic theory can predict the mass action of the gas to a high level of accuracy. Asimov applied this concept to the population of his fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered one quintillion. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two axioms:

• that the population whose behavior was modeled should be sufficiently large
• that the population should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses because if it is aware, the group changes its behaviour.

Ebling Mis added these axioms:

• that there would be no fundamental change in the society
• that human reactions to stimuli would remain constant.

Golan Trevize in Foundation and Earth added this axiom:

• that humans are the only sentient intelligence in the galaxy.

The Prime Radiant

Asimov presents the Prime Radiant, a device designed by Hari Seldon and built by Yugo Amaryl, as storing the psychohistorical equations showing the future development of humanity.

The Prime Radiant projects the equations onto walls in some unexplained manner, but it does not cast shadows, thus allowing workers easy interaction. Control operates through the power of the mind, allowing the user to zoom in to details of the equations, and to change them. One can make annotations, but by convention all amendments remain anonymous.

A student destined for Speakerhood has to present an amendment to the plan. Five different boards then check the mathematics rigorously. Students have to defend their proposals against concerted and merciless attacks. After two years the change gets reviewed again. If after the second examination it still passes muster, the contribution becomes part of the Seldon Plan.

The Radiant, as well as being interactive, employs a type of colour-coding to equations within itself for ready comprehension by Psychohistorians.

• Seldon Black are the original Seldon Plan equations developed by Seldon and Amaryl during the first four decades of Seldon's work at the University of Streeling, and define Seldon Crises, the Plan's duration, and the eventuation of the Second Galactic Empire.
• Speaker Red are additions to the plan by Speakers (Senior Mentalic Psychohistorians of the Second Foundation) since the time of Seldon.
• Deviation Blue are observed deviations away from Psychohistorical projections with a deviation in excess of 1.5 standard deviation of predicted outcomes (1.5 σ). The Era of Deviations, at the rise of the Mule, produced deviations in the Seldon Plan in excess of .5 through 10 sigmas, and the resolution of this period required a full century of labour by members of the Second Foundation, often with dangerous interventions and uncertain likelihood of success, to return the Galaxy to the Plan.

Other colours have been imagined by fans, and mentioned by Asimov, such as:

• Notation Green - additions of pertinent scientific papers appended to findings (Forward the Foundation)
• Projection Purple - Useful for determining limits on future Speaker Red equations, using projections of events with regard to a very sketchy but still monumental Seldon Black scheme. A tool of the first three generations of Psychohistorians after Seldon, and by the 5th Century of the Plan a teaching tool at most. (Forward the Foundation)

Development

In his later career, Asimov described some historical (pre-Seldon) origins of psychohistory. In The Robots of Dawn (1983), which takes place thousands of years before Foundation (1951), he describes roboticist Han Fastolfe's attempts to create the science based on careful observation of others, particularly of his daughter Vasilia. Prelude to Foundation (1988) suggests that one of Fastolfe's robots, R. Daneel Olivaw, manipulated Seldon into practical application of this science.

Limitations

The fact that Seldon established a Second Foundation of mental-science adepts to oversee his Seldon Plan might suggest that even Seldon himself had doubts about the ultimate ability of a purely mathematical approach to predicting historical processes, and that he recognized that the development of psychic skills, such as those used by the Mule, had the ability to invalidate the assumptions underlying his models, though he did not (and could not) predict the appearance of the Mule himself. The Seldon methodology might therefore only work at a certain level of species-development, and would over time become less useful.

Psychohistory has one basic, underlying limitation which Asimov postulated for the first time on the last page of the final book in the Foundation series: psychohistory only functions in a galaxy populated only by humans. In Asimov's Foundation series, humans form the only sentient race that developed in the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Seldon developed psychohistory to predict the actions of large groups of humans. Even robots technically fall under the umbrella of psychohistory, because humans built them, and they thus represent more or less a human "action", or at least, possess a thought-framework similar enough to that of their human creators that psychohistory can predict their actions. However, psychohistory cannot predict the actions of a sentient alien race; their psychology may differ so much from that of humans that normal psychohistory cannot understand or predict their actions.

The end of the series offered two possibilities:

1. sentient races actually very rarely develop, such that only humans evolved in the Milky Way Galaxy, and in most other galaxies, it appears probable (given this assumption) that only one sentient race would develop. However, statistically two or more alien races might evolve in the same galaxy, leading them into inevitable conflict. The fighting in this other galaxy would only end when one race emerged the victor, and after the prolonged conflict with other races, would have developed an aggressive and expansionist mindset. In contrast, humans had never encountered another sentient species in the Milky Way Galaxy, so they never felt greatly compelled to expand to other galaxies, but instead to fight other humans over control of the Milky Way. Eventually, such an aggressive alien race would expand from galaxy to galaxy, and try to invade the Milky Way Galaxy.
2. through genetic engineering, subsets of humanity could alter themselves so significantly from baseline humans that they could for all intents and purposes be considered "aliens". Specifically exemplifying this theory we find Asimov's Solarians: humans evolved from an old Spacer world who had genetically modified themselves into hermaphrodites with telekinetic mental powers.

Seldon Plan

Seldon used psychohistory to predict that the Galactic Empire would fall: this was a generations-long process which had already begun, and was too far gone to stop. This would result in a subsequent 30,000 years of barbarism, before the various petty kingdoms of the galaxy eventually aggregated again into a Second Empire. It was possible, however, to use psychohistory to influence future events in such a way that this "Great Interregnum" was shortened from 30,000 years to a mere 1,000. To implement his plan, Seldon creates the Foundations – two groups of scientists and engineers settled at opposite ends of the galaxy – to preserve the spirit of science and civilization, and thus become the cornerstones of the new galactic empire. The First Foundation was located at Terminus, an isolated planet at the fringe of the galaxy, and was tasked with preserving and advancing scientific knowledge. As the outer provinces of the Galactic Empire fragmented politically and declined technologically, the First Foundation would maintain this advantage over them. Secretly, the Second Foundation was focused on psychohistory itself, updating Seldon's predictions as the generations passed and subtly influencing events to ensure that the Plan would succeed.

The Seldon Plan for the First Foundation focused on ten major crises that it would face over then next thousand years. Hari Seldon made a series of holographic recordings about each crisis, set to be revealed one at a time to the Foundation at the predicted time each one occurred. The general outline of the Seldon Plan can be inferred from the Crises:

1. Balance of Power - the political fragmentation of the galaxy would begin at its outermost fringes, as the Periphery provinces split off into petty interstellar kingdoms, fifty years after the settlement of Terminus. When this came to pass, the region around Terminus itself broke up into the "Four Kingdoms", the most powerful of which was Anacreon. Each of the Four Kingdoms wanted to conquer Terminus to seize its advanced technology. The solution to this crisis was to play off each of the Four Kingdoms against each other, arranging treaties so that a direct invasion by any one of the kingdoms would be met with an immediate counter attack by the other three, ensuring the invading kingdom was defeated before they could make use the Foundation's technology defeat the other kingdoms.
2. Religion - thirty years later, one of the surrounding barbarian kingdoms would aggregate enough power that even the threat of all its neighbors united against it could no longer deter it. When this came to pass, it was Anacreon. During the intervening time period, the neighboring kingdoms had pressured the Foundation to send them technological aide rather than face conquest - in turn, making them dependent on the Foundation, which actively encouraged the population of these kingdoms to revere their technology with religious awe. Thus when Anacreon attempted a direct attack on the Foundation, its own people revolted against it.
3. Trade Alone - By about 150 years into the Plan (70 years after the second crisis), the religious infiltration of the Foundation into surrounding kingdoms would begin to wear off - due to a combination of time, recovering technological base in other parts of the galaxy, or simply that other barbarian kingdoms wised up to the prior strategy and refused to let Foundation missionaries into their borders. Seldon's own recording stated that a major reason religious/spiritual sway would eventually lose influence was due to a growing sense of regionalism/nationalism among the barbarian kingdoms, in which the prior rule of the Galactic Empire was beyond living memory (in contrast, Anacreon's population was willing to revolt against its leaders only eighty years after independence). By this point, however, the Foundation would become enough of an economic power (now ruling the territory of the Four Kingdoms and expanding beyond them), that it could wield this as a non-violent weapon. Through trade alone, barbarian kingdoms would become dependent on Foundation technology, and then could be blockaded into submission without firing a shot. This passed as predicted, using an economic blockade to defeat the Republic of Korell.
4. Foundation and Empire - Two centuries into the Plan, the Foundation's growing trade hegemony in the Periphery would grow large enough that it would attract the direct attention of the Galactic Empire - mighty even in decay. While by that point the Empire only retained control over the inner third of the galaxy, these interior provinces had always been their core powerbase, controlling three-quarters of the galaxy's wealth and population (to the point that many in the Empire still didn't even notice it was in a decline). This happened as predicted: the last great general of the Empire, Bel Riose, serving its last great emperor, Cleon II, launched a campaign to conquer the Foundation. This time there was no masterstroke that the Foundation needed to win other than sheer tenacity, as the Empire was doomed to fail: a weak general was no threat to them, while a strong general under a weak emperor would rather conquer the centers of imperial power than the Foundation at its fringe. The only scenario that would result in an attack was a strong general under a strong emperor, but inherently, that emperor would see the general's growing conquests as a threat and eventually remove him - Cleon II ultimately had Bel Riose arrested on false charges of treason, after which the Empire experienced numerous civil wars and its rate of decline drastically increased. The strong general and emperor could never be the same person, because if the emperor went to conquer the fringes in person, usurpers would rise up in the central provinces.
5. Independent Traders - Three centuries into the Plan, the Foundation's sphere of influence would expand enough that Terminus was no longer the only center of economic power. The "Merchant Princes" on its border worlds, selling technology to barbarian kingdoms, would become powerful in their own right. Meanwhile, the central power of the Mayors of Terminus would grow increasingly corrupt, as wealth became concentrated. The independent traders would revolt against the central authority of the Mayor of Terminus, and although they would ultimately lose, the civil war would nonetheless result in key social and political reforms that would undo the corruption that instigated the crisis. In many ways the Foundation would experience the same problems (corruption and over-centralisation) that led to the decline of the Empire, although it would become stronger for doing so. The conditions for this Crisis to occur happened as predicted - the Mayor became a hereditary office, inherited by the incompetent descendant of once-competent predecessors, and the consortium of Independent Traders began talks where they mentioned rebellion. The crisis did not pass as predicted, the first of Seldon's Crises to not occur (with incredible accuracy) when predicted. Indeed, a hologram of Seldon appeared and discussed the Crisis, and how it would've been solved, before a large audience that was occupied by a different crisis.
   • Seldon's Plan was totally upset by the unpredicted appearance of the Mule, a mutant with the telepathic powers to control people's minds - 'mentalic' powers. The Mule conquered the Foundation, and the Independent Trader worlds, and swept aside the last remnants of the Galactic Empire. The Mule, however, was eventually defeated by the Second Foundation, which was also focused on developing mentalic powers in order to guide Seldon's Plan with a firm hand, ensuring that either important events occur as predicted, or that the consequences of those events are managed such that the original event might as well have passed as predicted. With the Mule defeated, The Second Foundation then essentially "fakes its own death", convincing the resurgent First Foundation that the Second Foundation had existed but was now destroyed, to fulfill the tenet of psychohistory that the target population must not be aware they are being influenced, lest it alter their behaviors. Knowing that they were being influenced would be an additional (unmanaged) influence.
6. This Seldon Crisis was not described.
7. This Seldon Crisis was not described.
8. Relocating the Capital - after 500 years, the people of Foundation would be in a position to consider moving their capital from Terminus, safe at the edge of the Galaxy, to a point much closer to the centre. While this debate did occur, this Crisis was not, as the others had been, a focal point for the narrative, and is given is less detail. The debate is ostensibly about moving the capital for economic purposes but, five centuries after the creation of the Foundation, halfway through the 1,000 year long "Great Interregnum", the Foundation, now known as the Foundation Federation, is now in a position of great power. Therefore there is an underlying debate about obeying Seldon's Plan (which predicted the capital would remain on Terminus, with 87.2% probability, and the Second Galactic Empire was still 500 years away) or following a different path - they directly controlled one third of the galaxy, spread out from Terminus at the edge. They had faced no other major galactic rivals since the defeat of the First Galactic Empire (under Riose), with the greatest threat in that time being internal enemies that could form if it expanded too recklessly. The Foundation's control over so much territory led to a push to move the capital closer to the center. Ultimately this was rejected and the capital remained on Terminus, as Seldon predicted. Moving the capital closer to the center of their own territories, and thus the galaxy as a whole, would only embolden the Foundation to consider beginning campaigns into the territory of the powerful Interior provinces that once formed the core of the Galactic Empire, which would carry significant risk. To ensure a stable absorption, the Foundation could only accumulate these territories gradually over the next five centuries.
9. This Seldon Crisis was not described. Following events occurring in Foundation's Edge, there is a high likelihood neither the ninth or tenth Seldon Crisis occurred. Alternatively, given that Seldon was aware of Olivaw's plan for Galaxia, it is possible that the final two crises were actually dealing with it, or, with the inherent limits of psychohistory (i.e. war with extra-galactic aliens or transhumans).
10. This Seldon Crisis was not described.

1,000 years after the creation of the Foundation, having survived 10 Seldon Crises, Seldon's Plan predicted that it would control and unify the entire galaxy, forming a Second Galactic Empire. According to the Second Foundation in Foundation's Edge, who had maintained Seldon's original plan with revisions and corrective actions where necessary, the specific goal for this Second Empire was to make it a "Federated Empire" - with more power shared with the provinces so that the central government wouldn't become corrupt and decline as Trantor once had.

Asimov on psychohistory

On September 25, 1987, Asimov gave an interview to Terry Gross on her National Public Radio program, Fresh Air. In it, Gross asked him about psychohistory:

Gross: "What did you have in mind when you coined the term and the concept?"

Asimov: "Well, I wanted to write a short story about the fall of the Galactic Empire. I had just finished reading the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [for] the second time, and I thought I might as well adapt it on a much larger scale to the Galactic Empire and get a story out of it. And my editor John Campbell was much taken with the idea, and said he didn't want it wasted on a short story. He wanted an open-ended series so it lasts forever, perhaps. And so I started doing that. In order to keep the story going from story to story, I was essentially writing future history, and I had to make it sufficiently different from modern history to give it that science fictional touch. And so I assumed that the time would come when there would be a science in which things could be predicted on a probabilistic or statistical basis."

Gross: "Do you think that would be good if there really was such a science?"

Asimov: "Well, I can't help but think it would be good, except that in my stories, I always have opposing views. In other words, people argue all possible... all possible... ways of looking at psychohistory and deciding whether it is good or bad. So you can't really tell. I happen to feel sort of on the optimistic side. I think if we can somehow get across some of the problems that face us now, humanity has a glorious future, and that if we could use the tenets of psychohistory to guide ourselves we might avoid a great many troubles. But on the other hand, it might create troubles. It's impossible to tell in advance."

In Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection (which was published after his death) he writes about the origins of psychohistory:

"Psychohistory" is one of the three words (that I know of) that I get early-use credit for in The Oxford English Dictionary. The other two, for the record, are "positronic" and "robotics".

... In the case of "psychohistory", however, I suspected that the word was not in common use, and might even never have been used before. (Actually, the O.E.D. cites one example of its use as early as 1934.) I first used it in my story, "Foundation", which appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fictiion.

... So I suggested we add the fact that a mathematical treatment existed whereby the future could be predicted in a statistical fashion, and I called it "psychohistory". Actually, it was a poor word and did not represent what I truly meant. I should have called it "psychosociology" (a word which the O.E.D. lists as having first been used in 1928). However, I was so intent on history, thanks to Gibbon, that I could think of nothing but psychohistory.

I modeled my concept of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases... The molecules making up gases moved in an absolutely random fashion in any direction in three dimensions and in a wide range of speeds. Nevertheless, one could fairly describe what those motions would be on the average and work out the gas laws from those average motions with an enormous degree of precision.

In other words, although one couldn't possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could accurately predict what umptillions of them would do.

So I applied that notion to human beings. Each individual human being might have "free will", but a huge mob of them should behave with some sort of predictability, and the analysis of "mob behavior" was my psychohistory.

There were two conditions that I had to set up in order to make it work, and they were not chosen carelessly. I picked them in order to make psychohistory more like kinetic theory. First, I had to deal with a large number of human beings, as kinetic theory worked with a large number of molecules. Neither would work for small numbers. It is for that reason that I had the Galactic Empire consist of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four billion. That meant a total human population of one hundred quadrillion.

... Second, I had to retain the "randomness" factor. I couldn't expect human beings to behave as randomly as molecules, but they might approach such behavior if they had no idea as to what was expected of them.

... Much later in the game, I thought of a third condition that I didn't think of earlier simply because I had taken it so completely for granted. The kinetic theory assumes that gases are made up of nothing but molecules, and psychohistory will only work if the hosts of intelligence are made up of nothing but human beings. In other words, the presence of aliens with non-human intelligence might well bollix the works. This situation may actually develop in future books of the Foundation series, but so far I have stayed clear of non-human intelligences in my Galactic Empire ...

Outside fiction

At the 67th science-fiction world convention in Montreal, Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in Economics, mentioned Hari Seldon, a central character in Foundation who was a psychohistorian, as his inspiration to study Economics since it is the closest thing to Psychohistory.

The 3 February 2017 issue of Science has a special section "Prediction and Its Limits". This section has articles on many mathematical techniques of predicting human behavior, and explicitly compares them to Asimov's psychohistory.

Literary influences

Some literary critics have described Asimov's psychohistory as a reformulation of Karl Marx's theory of history (historical materialism), though Asimov denied any direct influence. Arguably, Asimov's psychohistory departs significantly from Marx's general theory of history based on modes of production (as distinct from Marx's model of the capitalist economy, where "natural laws" work themselves out with "iron necessity") in that psychohistory is predictive (if only in the sense of involving precisely stated probabilities), and in that psychohistory is extrapolated from individual psychology and even from physics. Psychohistory also has echoes of modernization theory and of work in the social sciences that by the 1960s would lead to attempts at large-scale social prediction and control such as Project Camelot.

Similar concepts

• Psychohistory, the real (non-fictional) study of the psychological motivation of groups in historical and current events
• Game theory, application of probability models to analyze human (and other) interactions driven by strategic rationality (defined broadly), with the potential for predicting events
• Operations research
• Operational calculus - the real sub-field, area of mathematics
• Cognitive science - the interdisciplinary study of the mind
• Performance operational analysis
• Macroeconomics, the real economics sub-field that considers aggregate behavior
• Lyapunov time, the time for a system to become unpredictable after observation
• Economic history, the real economics sub-field trying to discover long-run trends in human behaviour (the equations of the Prime Radiant)
• Praxeology, the study of human action
• Cognitive Science
• Robopsychology, the fictional study of the personalities of intelligent machines
• Quantitative psychology, the real psychology sub-field that applies statistical mathematics to psychology
• Mathematical sociology, the real sociology sub-field that applies statistical mathematics and other quantitative approaches such as social network analysis to micro- and macro-social phenomena
• Cliodynamics, the real area of research focused on mathematical modeling of historical dynamics
• Societics, the fictional study of "the interaction of individuals in a culture, the interaction of the group generated by these individuals, the equations derived therefrom, and the application of these equations to control one or more factors of this same culture"
• Survival analysis, a branch of statistics which deals with death in biological organisms and failure in mechanical systems. This topic is called reliability theory or reliability analysis in engineering, and duration analysis or duration modeling in economics or event history analysis in sociology.

Psychohistory

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

Psychohistory is an amalgam of psychology, history, and related social sciences and the humanities. It examines the "why" of history, especially the difference between stated intention and actual behavior. Psychobiography, childhood, group dynamics, mechanisms of psychic defense, dreams, and creativity are primary areas of research. It works to combine the insights of psychology, especially psychoanalysis, with the research methodology of the social sciences and humanities to understand the emotional origin of the behavior of individuals, groups and nations, past and present. Work in the field has been done in the areas of childhood, creativity, dreams, family dynamics, overcoming adversity, personality, political and presidential psychobiography. There are major psychohistorical studies of studies of anthropology, art, ethnology, history, politics and political science, and much else.

Description

Rembrandt's painting of the sacrifice of Isaac (Gen.22). Psychohistory holds that ritual child sacrifice once occurred in most cultures.

Psychohistory derives many of its concepts from areas that are perceived to be ignored by conventional historians and anthropologists as shaping factors of human history, in particular, the effects of parenting practice and child abuse. According to conventional historians "the science of culture is independent of the laws of biology and psychology". and "[t]he determining cause of a social fact should be sought among social facts preceding and not among the states of individual consciousness".

Psychohistorians, on the other hand, suggest that social behavior such as crime and war may be a self-destructive re-enactment of earlier abuse and neglect; that unconscious flashbacks to early fears and destructive parenting could dominate individual and social behavior.

Psychohistory relies heavily on historical biography. Notable examples of psychobiographies are those of Lewis Namier, who wrote about the British House of Commons, and Fawn Brodie, who wrote about Thomas Jefferson.

Areas of study

There are three inter-related areas of psychohistorical study.

1. The history of childhood – which looks at such questions as:

• How have children been raised throughout history
• How has the family been constituted
• How and why have practices changed over time
• The changing place and value of children in society over time
• How and why our views of child abuse and neglect have changed

2. Psychobiography – which seeks to understand individual historical people and their motivations in history.

3. Group psychohistory – which seeks to understand the motivations of large groups, including nations, in history and current affairs. In doing so, psychohistory advances the use of group-fantasy analysis of political speeches, political cartoons and media headlines since the loaded terms, metaphors and repetitive words therein offer clues to unconscious thinking and behaviors.

Emergence as a discipline

Sigmund Freud's well known work, Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), included an analysis of history based on his theory of psychoanalysis. Yet, Freud's text is in no way a psycho-historical work since the focus of the study is to examine and explain the level of individual psyche which may arise from the influence of the structures of civilization. It is in fact the opposite of psycho-history in that it claims that the unconscious and the individual psyche are both structural effects of different social forces, i.e., civilization. In 1913, Sigmund Freud published Totem and Taboo, which attempts to draw a parallel between the psychical experience of neurotics and primitive peoples through contemporaneous sociology, anthropology, and psychoanalytic theory.

Wilhelm Reich combined his psychoanalytic and political theories in his book The Mass Psychology of Fascism in 1933.

The psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote about the psychological motivation behind political ideology, starting with The Fear of Freedom in 1941.

Another member of the Frankfurt school, Theodor Adorno, published The Authoritarian Personality, in 1950, which was an influential sociological book which could be taken as something of a proto-psychohistorical book.

Its first academic use appeared in Erik Erikson's book Young Man Luther (1958), where the author called for a discipline of "psycho-history" to examine the impact of human character on history.

Lloyd deMause developed a formal psychohistorical approach from 1974 onwards, and continues to be an influential theorist in this field.

Independence as a discipline

Psychohistorians have argued that psychohistory is a separate field of scholarly inquiry with its own particular methods, objectives and theories, which set it apart from conventional historical analysis and anthropology. Some historians, social scientists and anthropologists have, however, argued that their disciplines already describe psychological motivation and that psychohistory is not, therefore, a separate subject. Others regard it as an undisciplined field of study, due to its emphasis given to speculation on the psychological motivations of people in history. Doubt has also been cast on the viability of the application of post-mortem psychoanalysis by Freud's followers.

Psychohistorians maintain that the difference is one of emphasis and that, in conventional study, narrative and description are central, while psychological motivation is hardly touched upon. Psychohistorians accuse most anthropologists and ethnologists of being apologists for incest, infanticide, cannibalism and child sacrifice. They maintain that what constitutes child abuse is a matter of objective fact, and that some of the practices which mainstream anthropologists apologize for (e.g., sacrificial rituals) may result in psychosis, dissociation and magical thinking.

Psychogenic mode

Lloyd deMause has described a system of psychogenic modes (see below) which describe the range of styles of parenting he has observed historically and across cultures.

Psychohistorians have written much about changes in the human psyche through history; changes that they believe were produced by parents, and especially the mothers' increasing capacity to empathize with their children. Due to these changes in the course of history, different psychoclasses (or psychogenic modes) emerged. A psychoclass is a type of mentality that results from, and is associated with, a particular childrearing style, and in its turn influences the method of childrearing of the next generations. According to psychohistory theory, regardless of the changes in the environment, it is only when changes in childhood occur and new psychoclasses evolve that societies begin to progress.

The major psychogenic modes described by deMause are:

Mode	Childrearing characteristics	Historical manifestations
Infanticidal	Early infanticidal childrearing: Ritual sacrifice. High infanticide rates, incest, body mutilation, child rape and tortures.	Child sacrifice and infanticide among tribal societies, Mesoamerica and the Incas; in Assyrian and Canaanite religions. Phoenicians, Carthaginians and other early states also sacrificed infants to their gods. On the other hand, the relatively more enlightened Greeks and Romans exposed some of their babies ("late" infanticidal childrearing).
	Late infanticidal childrearing: While the young child is not overly rejected by the mother, many newborn babies, especially girls, are exposed to death.
Abandoning	Early Christians considered a child as having a soul at birth, although possessed by evil tendencies. Routine infanticide was replaced by joining in the group fantasy of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father to be killed for the sins of others. Routine pederasty of boys continued in monasteries and elsewhere, and the rape of girls was commonplace.	Infanticide replaced by abandonment. Those children who survived the experience did not internalize a completely murderous superego. Longer swaddling, fosterage, outside wetnursing, oblation of children to monasteries and nunneries, and apprenticeship.
Ambivalent	The 12th century saw the first child instruction manuals and rudimentary child protection laws, although most mothers still emotionally rejected their children. Children were often treated as erotic objects by adults.	The later Middle Ages ended abandonment of children to monasteries. Early beating, shorter swaddling, mourning for deceased children, a precursor to empathy.
Intrusive	During the 16th century, particularly in England, parents shifted from trying to stop children's growth to trying to control them and make them obedient. Parents were prepared to give them attention as long as they controlled their minds, their insides, their anger and the lives they led.	The intrusive parent began to unswaddle the infant. Early toilet training, repression of child's sexuality. Hell threats turned into the Puritan child so familiar from early modern childrearing literature. On the other hand, the end of swaddling and wet-nursing made possible the explosive modern takeoff in scientific advance.
Socializing	Beginning in the 18th century, mothers began to enjoy child care, and fathers began to participate in younger children's development. The aim remained instilling parental goals rather than encouraging individuation. Manipulation and spanking were used to make children obedient. Hellfire and the harsher physical disciplinary actions using objects to beat the child disappeared. The Socializing Mode remains the most popular model of parenting in North America and Western Europe to the present day.	Use of guilt, "mental discipline", humiliation, time-out, rise of compulsory schooling, delegation of parental unconscious wishes. As parental injections continued to diminish, the rearing of the child became less a process of conquering its will than of training it. The socializing psychoclass built the modern world.
Helping	Beginning in the mid-20th century, some parents adopted the role of helping children reach their own goals in life, rather than "socialize" them into fulfilling parental wishes. Less manipulation, more unconditional love. Children raised in this way are far more empathic towards others in society than earlier generations.	Children's rights movement, natural childbirth, the abandonment of circumcision, attachment parenting, Taking Children Seriously, unconditional parenting, Parent Effectiveness Training, deschooling and free schooling.

Psychohistorians maintain that the five modes of abusive childrearing (excluding the "helping mode") are related to psychiatric disorders from psychoses to neuroses.

The chart below shows the dates at which these modes are believed to have evolved in the most advanced nations, based on contemporary accounts from historical records. A black-and-white version of the chart appears in Foundations of Psychohistory.

The Y-Axis on the above chart serves as an indicator of the new stage and not a measurement of the stage's size or relation to the x-axis.

The timeline doesn't apply to hunter-gatherer societies. It doesn't apply either to the Greek and Roman world, where there was a wide variation in childrearing practices. It is notable that the arrival of the Ambivalent mode of child-rearing preceded the start of the Renaissance (mid 14th century) by only one or two generations, and the arrival of the Socializing mode coincided with the Age of Enlightenment, which began in the late 18th century.

Earlier forms of childrearing coexist with later modes, even in the most advanced countries. An example of this are reports of selective abortion (and sometimes exposure of baby girls) especially in China, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, India, Pakistan, New Guinea, and many other developing countries in Asia and North Africa, regions in which millions of women are "missing". The conflict of new and old psychoclasses is also highlighted in psychohistorians' thought. This is reflected in political contrasts – for instance, in the clash between Blue State and Red State voters in the contemporary United States – and in civil wars.

Another key psychohistorical concept is that of group fantasy, which deMause regards as a mediating force between a psychoclass's collective childhood experiences (and the psychic conflicts emerging therefrom), and the psychoclass's behavior in politics, religion and other aspects of social life.

A psychoclass for postmodern times

According to the psychogenic theory, since Neanderthal man most tribes and families practiced infanticide, child mutilation, incest and beating of their children throughout prehistory and history. Presently the Western socializing mode of childrearing is considered much less abusive in the field, though this mode is not yet entirely free of abuse. In the opening paragraph of his seminal essay "The Evolution of Childhood" (first article in The History of Childhood), DeMause states:

The history of childhood is a nightmare from which we have only recently begun to awaken. The further back in history one goes, the lower the level of childcare, and the more likely children are to be killed, abandoned, beaten, terrorized and sexually abused.

There is notwithstanding an optimistic trait in the field. In a world of "helping mode" parents, deMause believes, violence of any other sort will disappear as well, along with magical thinking, mental disorders, wars and other inhumanities of man against man. Although, the criticism has been made that this itself is a form of magical thinking.

Criticisms

There are no departments dedicated to "psychohistory" in any institution of higher learning, although some history departments have run courses in it. Psychohistory remains a controversial field of study, facing criticism in the academic community, with critics referring to it as a pseudoscience. Psychohistory uses a plurality of methodologies, and it is difficult to determine which is appropriate to use in each circumstance.

In 1973, historian Hugh A. Trevor-Roper dismissed the field of psychohistory entirely in response to the publication of Walter Langer’s The Mind of Adolf Hitler. He contended that psychohistory’s methodology rested “on a defective philosophy” and was “vitiated by a defective method.” “Instead of proceeding from demonstrable steps, from fact to interpretation, from evidence to conclusion,” he contended “psycho-historians move in the opposite direction. They deduce their facts from their theories; and this means, in effect, that facts are at the mercy of theory, selected and valued according to their consistence with theory, even invented to support theory."

DeMause has received criticism on several levels. His formulations have been criticized for being insufficiently supported by credible research. He has also received criticism for being a strong proponent of the "black legend" view of childhood history (i.e. that the history of childhood was above all a history of progress, with children being far more often badly mistreated in the past). Similarly, his work has been called a history of child abuse, not childhood. The grim perspective of childhood history is known from other sources, e.g. Edward Shorter's The Making of the Modern Family and Lawrence Stone's The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800. However, deMause received criticism for his repeated, detailed descriptions on childhood atrocities:

The reader is doubtless already familiar with examples of these psychohistorical "abuses." There is a significant difference, however, between the well-meaning and serious, if perhaps simplistic and reductionistic, attempt to understand the psychological in history and the psychohistorical expose that can at times verge on historical pornography. For examples of the more frivolous and distasteful sort of psychohistory, see Journal of Psychohistory. For more serious and scholarly attempts to understand the psychological dimension of the past, see The Psychohistory Review.

Recent psychohistory has also been criticized for being overly-entangled with DeMause, whose theories are not representative of the entire field.

Organizations

Boston University offers a Psychohistory course at the undergraduate level and has published course details.

The Association for Psychohistory was founded by Lloyd deMause. It has 19 branches around the globe and has for over 30 years published the Journal of Psychohistory. The International Psychohistorical Association was also founded by deMause and others in 1977 as a professional organization for the field of psychohistory. It publishes Psychohistory News and has a psychohistorical mail order lending library. The association hosts an annual convention.

The Psychohistory Forum, publishes the quarterly journal Clio’s Psyche. It was founded in 1983 by historian and psychoanalyst Paul H. Elovitz. This organization of academics, therapists, and laypeople holds regular scholarly meetings in New York City and at international conventions. It also sponsors an cliospsyche online discussion group.

In Germany, scientists taking an interest in psychohistory have met annually since 1987. In 1992, the Gesellschaft für Psychohistorie und politische Psychologie e.V (“Society for Psychohistory and Political Psychology”) was founded. This society issues the Jahrbuch für Psychohistorische Forschung (“Annual of Psychohistorical Research”)

Notable psychohistorians

• Lloyd deMause, founder of The Institute for Psychohistory.
• Peter Gay, Sterling Professor at Yale University, author.
• Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist specializing in psychological motivations for war and terrorism.
• Vamik Volkan, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, University of Virginia professor emeritus, peacemaker, and Nobel Prize nominee

Erich Fromm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm 

Erich Fromm
Fromm in 1974
Born	Erich Seligmann Fromm March 23, 1900 Frankfurt am Main, German Empire
Died	March 18, 1980 (aged 79) Muralto, Ticino, Switzerland
Alma mater	Heidelberg University
Era	20th century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Continental philosophy Frankfurt School psychoanalysis Marxist humanism humanistic Judaism
Main interests	Humanism, social theory, Marxism
Notable ideas	Being and Having as modes of existence, security versus freedom, social character, Character orientation

Erich Seligmann Fromm (/frɒm/; German: [fʁɔm]; March 23, 1900 – March 18, 1980) was a German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German Jew who fled the Nazi regime and settled in the US. He was one of the founders of The William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and Psychology in New York City and was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Life

Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Orthodox Jewish parents, Rosa (Krause) and Naphtali Fromm. He started his academic studies in 1918 at the University of Frankfurt am Main with two semesters of jurisprudence. During the summer semester of 1919, Fromm studied at the University of Heidelberg, where he began studying sociology under Alfred Weber (brother of the better known sociologist Max Weber), psychiatrist-philosopher Karl Jaspers, and Heinrich Rickert. Fromm received his PhD in sociology from Heidelberg in 1922. During the mid-1920s, he trained to become a psychoanalyst through Frieda Reichmann's psychoanalytic sanatorium in Heidelberg. They married in 1926, but separated shortly after and divorced in 1942. He began his own clinical practice in 1927. In 1930 he joined the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research and completed his psychoanalytical training.

After the Nazi takeover of power in Germany, Fromm moved first to Geneva and then, in 1934, to Columbia University in New York. Together with Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, Fromm belongs to a Neo-Freudian school of psychoanalytical thought. Horney and Fromm each had a marked influence on the other's thought, with Horney illuminating some aspects of psychoanalysis for Fromm and the latter elucidating sociology for Horney. Their relationship ended in the late 1930s. After leaving Columbia, Fromm helped form the New York branch of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1943, and in 1946 co-founded the William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology. He was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1941 to 1949, and taught courses at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1941 to 1959.

When Fromm moved to Mexico City in 1949, he became a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and established a psychoanalytic section at the medical school there. Meanwhile, he taught as a professor of psychology at Michigan State University from 1957 to 1961 and as an adjunct professor of psychology at the graduate division of Arts and Sciences at New York University after 1962. He taught at UNAM until his retirement, in 1965, and at the Mexican Society of Psychoanalysis (SMP) until 1974. In 1974 he moved from Mexico City to Muralto, Switzerland, and died at his home in 1980, five days before his eightieth birthday. All the while, Fromm maintained his own clinical practice and published a series of books.

Fromm was reportedly an atheist but described his position as "nontheistic mysticism".

Psychological theory

Beginning with his first seminal work of 1941, Escape from Freedom (known in Britain as Fear of Freedom), Fromm's writings were notable as much for their social and political commentary as for their philosophical and psychological underpinnings. Indeed, Escape from Freedom is viewed as one of the founding works of political psychology. His second important work, Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, first published in 1947, continued and enriched the ideas of Escape from Freedom. Taken together, these books outlined Fromm's theory of human character, which was a natural outgrowth of Fromm's theory of human nature. Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956, which recapitulated and complemented the theoretical principles of human nature found in Escape from Freedom and Man for Himself—principles which were revisited in many of Fromm's other major works.

Central to Fromm's world view was his interpretation of the Talmud and Hasidism. He began studying Talmud as a young man under Rabbi J. Horowitz and later under Rabbi Salman Baruch Rabinkow, a Chabad Hasid. While working towards his doctorate in sociology at the University of Heidelberg, Fromm studied the Tanya by the founder of Chabad, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. Fromm also studied under Nehemia Nobel and Ludwig Krause while studying in Frankfurt. Fromm's grandfather and two great grandfathers on his father's side were rabbis, and a great uncle on his mother's side was a noted Talmudic scholar. However, Fromm turned away from orthodox Judaism in 1926, towards secular interpretations of scriptural ideals.

The cornerstone of Fromm's humanistic philosophy is his interpretation of the biblical story of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. Drawing on his knowledge of the Talmud, Fromm pointed out that being able to distinguish between good and evil is generally considered to be a virtue, but that biblical scholars generally consider Adam and Eve to have sinned by disobeying God and eating from the Tree of Knowledge. However, departing from traditional religious orthodoxy on this, Fromm extolled the virtues of humans taking independent action and using reason to establish moral values rather than adhering to authoritarian moral values.

Beyond a simple condemnation of authoritarian value systems, Fromm used the story of Adam and Eve as an allegorical explanation for human biological evolution and existential angst, asserting that when Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they became aware of themselves as being separate from nature while still being part of it. This is why they felt "naked" and "ashamed": they had evolved into human beings, conscious of themselves, their own mortality, and their powerlessness before the forces of nature and society, and no longer united with the universe as they were in their instinctive, pre-human existence as animals. According to Fromm, the awareness of a disunited human existence is a source of guilt and shame, and the solution to this existential dichotomy is found in the development of one's uniquely human powers of love and reason. However, Fromm distinguished his concept of love from unreflective popular notions as well as Freudian paradoxical love (see the criticism by Marcuse below).

Fromm considered love an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, and he distinguished this creative capacity from what he considered to be various forms of narcissistic neuroses and sado-masochistic tendencies that are commonly held out as proof of "true love". Indeed, Fromm viewed the experience of "falling in love" as evidence of one's failure to understand the true nature of love, which he believed always had the common elements of care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Drawing from his knowledge of the Torah, Fromm pointed to the story of Jonah, who did not wish to save the residents of Nineveh from the consequences of their sin, as demonstrative of his belief that the qualities of care and responsibility are generally absent from most human relationships. Fromm also asserted that few people in modern society had respect for the autonomy of their fellow human beings, much less the objective knowledge of what other people truly wanted and needed.

Fromm believed that freedom was an aspect of human nature that we either embrace or escape. He observed that embracing our freedom of will was healthy, whereas escaping freedom through the use of escape mechanisms was the root of psychological conflicts. Fromm outlined three of the most common escape mechanisms:

• Automaton conformity: changing one's ideal self to conform to a perception of society's preferred type of personality, losing one's true self in the process; Automaton conformity displaces the burden of choice from self to society;
• Authoritarianism: giving control of oneself to another. By submitting one's freedom to someone else, this act removes the freedom of choice almost entirely.
• Destructiveness: any process which attempts to eliminate others or the world as a whole, all to escape freedom. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it".

The word biophilia was frequently used by Fromm as a description of a productive psychological orientation and "state of being". For example, in an addendum to his book The Heart of Man: Its Genius For Good and Evil, Fromm wrote as part of his humanist credo:

"I believe that the man choosing progress can find a new unity through the development of all his human forces, which are produced in three orientations. These can be presented separately or together: biophilia, love for humanity and nature, and independence and freedom."

Erich Fromm postulated eight basic needs:

Need	Description
Transcendence	Being thrown into the world without their consent, humans have to transcend their nature by destroying or creating people or things. Humans can destroy through malignant aggression, or killing for reasons other than survival, but they can also create and care about their creations.
Rootedness	Rootedness is the need to establish roots and to feel at home again in the world. Productively, rootedness enables us to grow beyond the security of our mother and establish ties with the outside world. With the nonproductive strategy, we become fixated and afraid to move beyond the security and safety of our mother or a mother substitute.
Sense of Identity	The drive for a sense of identity is expressed nonproductively as conformity to a group and productively as individuality.
Frame of orientation	Understanding the world and our place in it.
Excitation and Stimulation	Actively striving for a goal rather than simply responding.
Unity	A sense of oneness between one person and the "natural and human world outside."
Effectiveness	The need to feel accomplished.

Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of the "primary ties" of belonging (i.e. nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":

There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual.... However, if the economic, social and political conditions... do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom.

— Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36–7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256–7.)

Five basic orientations

In his book Man for Himself Fromm spoke of "orientation of character". He differentiates his theory of character from that of Freud by focusing on two ways an individual relates to the world. Freud analyzed character in terms of libido organization, whereas Fromm says that in the process of living, we relate to the world by: 1) acquiring and assimilating things—"Assimilation", and 2) reacting to people—"Socialization". Fromm asserted that these two ways of relating to the world were not instinctive, but an individual's response to the peculiar circumstances of his or her life; he also believed that people are never exclusively one type of orientation. These two ways of relating to life's circumstances lead to basic character-orientations.

Fromm lists four types of nonproductive character orientation, which he called receptive, exploitative, hoarding, and marketing, and one positive character orientation, which he called productive. Receptive and exploitative orientations are basically how an individual may relate to other people and are socialization attributes of character. A hoarding orientation is an acquiring and assimilating materials/valuables character trait. The marketing orientation arises in response to the human situation in the modern era. The current needs of the market determine value. It is a relativistic ethic. In contrast, the productive orientation is an objective ethic. Despite the existential struggles of humanity, each human has the potential for love, reason and productive work in life. Fromm writes, "It is the paradox of human existence that man must simultaneously seek for closeness and for independence; for oneness with others and at the same time for the preservation of his uniqueness and particularity. ...the answer to this paradox – and to the moral problems of man – is productiveness."

Fromm's influence on other notable psychologists

Fromm's four non-productive orientations were subject to validation through a psychometric test, The Person Relatedness Test by Elias H. Porter, PhD in collaboration with Carl Rogers, PhD at the University of Chicago's Counseling Center between 1953 and 1955. Fromm's four non-productive orientations also served as basis for the LIFO test, first published in 1967 by Stuart Atkins, Alan Katcher, PhD, and Elias Porter, PhD and the Strength Deployment Inventory, first published in 1971 by Elias H. Porter, PhD. Fromm also influenced his student Sally L. Smith who went on to become the founder of the Lab School of Washington and the Baltimore Lab School.

Critique of Freud

Fromm examined the life and work of Sigmund Freud at length. Fromm identified a discrepancy between early and later Freudian theory: namely that, prior to World War I, Freud had described human drives as a tension between desire and repression, but after the end of the war, began framing human drives as a struggle between biologically universal Life and Death (Eros and Thanatos) instincts. Fromm charged Freud and his followers with never acknowledging the contradictions between the two theories.

Fromm also criticized Freud's dualistic thinking. According to Fromm, Freudian descriptions of human consciousness as struggles between two poles were narrow and limiting. Fromm also condemned Freud as a misogynist unable to think outside the patriarchal milieu of early 20th century Vienna. However, in spite of these criticisms, Fromm nonetheless expressed a great respect for Freud and his accomplishments. Fromm contended that Freud was one of the "architects of the modern age", alongside Albert Einstein and Karl Marx, but emphasized that he considered Marx both far more historically important than Freud and a finer thinker.

Political ideas and activities

Fromm's best known work, Escape from Freedom, focuses on the human urge to seek a source of authority and control upon reaching a freedom that was thought to be an individual's true desire. Fromm's critique of the modern political order and capitalist system led him to seek insights from medieval feudalism. In Escape from Freedom, he found value in the lack of individual freedom, rigid structure, and obligations required on the members of medieval society:

What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom…But altogether a person was not free in the modern sense, neither was he alone and isolated. In having a distinct, unchangeable, and unquestionable place in the social world from the moment of birth, man was rooted in a structuralized whole, and thus life had a meaning which left no place, and no need for doubt…There was comparatively little competition. One was born into a certain economic position which guaranteed a livelihood determined by tradition, just as it carried economic obligations to those higher in the social hierarchy.

Play media

Noam Chomsky discusses Erich Fromm's theory of alienation.

The culmination of Fromm's social and political philosophy was his book The Sane Society, published in 1955, which argued in favor of a humanistic and democratic socialism. Building primarily upon the early works of Karl Marx, Fromm sought to re-emphasise the ideal of freedom, missing from most Soviet Marxism and more frequently found in the writings of libertarian socialists and liberal theoreticians. Fromm's brand of socialism rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, which he saw as dehumanizing, and which resulted in the virtually universal modern phenomenon of alienation. He became one of the founders of socialist humanism, promoting the early writings of Marx and his humanist messages to the US and Western European public.

In the early 1960s, Fromm published two books dealing with Marxist thought (Marx's Concept of Man and Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud). In 1965, working to stimulate the Western and Eastern cooperation between Marxist humanists, Fromm published a series of articles entitled Socialist Humanism: An International Symposium. In 1966, the American Humanist Association named him Humanist of the Year.

For a period, Fromm was also active in U.S. politics. He joined the Socialist Party of America in the mid-1950s, and did his best to help them provide an alternative viewpoint to McCarthyist trends in some US political thought. This alternative viewpoint was best expressed in his 1961 paper May Man Prevail? An Inquiry into the Facts and Fictions of Foreign Policy. However, as a co-founder of SANE, Fromm's strongest political activism was in the international peace movement, fighting against the nuclear arms race and U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. After supporting Senator Eugene McCarthy's losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Fromm more or less retreated from the American political scene, although he did write a paper in 1974 entitled Remarks on the Policy of Détente for a hearing held by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. Fromm was awarded Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979.

Criticism

In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse is critical of Fromm: In the beginning, he was a radical theorist, but later he turned to conformity. Marcuse also noted that Fromm, as well as his close colleagues Sullivan and Karen Horney, removed Freud's libido theory and other radical concepts, which thus reduced psychoanalysis to a set of idealist ethics, which only embrace the status quo. Fromm's response, in both The Sane Society and in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, argues that Freud indeed deserves substantial credit for recognizing the central importance of the unconscious, but also that he tended to rectify his own concepts that depicted the self as the passive outcome of instinct and social control, with minimal volition or variability. Fromm argues that later scholars such as Marcuse accepted these concepts as dogma, whereas social psychology requires a more dynamic theoretical and empirical approach. In reference to Fromm's leftist political activism as a public intellectual, Noam Chomsky said "I liked Fromm's attitudes but thought his work was pretty superficial".

On Anti-Nuclear Bullshit

Ted Nordhaus

Founder and Executive Director

ted@thebreakthrough.org

Feb 10, 2021

In his widely read essay, “On Bullshit,” the philosopher Harry Frankfurt famously distinguished between liars and bullshitters. Liars, counterintuitively, Frankfurt argued, actually care about the truth, and hence attempt to conceal or distort it. Bullshit, by contrast, serves a social function, not an epistemic one.

I was reminded of Frankfurt’s distinction recently, with the publication of a new paper by Harrison Fell, Alex Gilbert, Jesse Jenkins, and Matteo Mildenberger reanalyzing data from a study published last fall in Nature Energy by Benjamin Sovacool and colleagues at the University of Sussex Energy Group.

Sovacool and his coauthors claimed to demonstrate that deployment of nuclear energy around the world did not reduce carbon emissions. The reanalysis by Fell, et. al. is devastating, showing Sovacool’s data actually shows the opposite. From the abstract: “employing the same data sources and time periods, we find that nuclear power and renewable energy are both associated with lower per capita CO2 emissions with effects of similar magnitude and statistical significance.”

Of course, you don’t really need a complicated regression analysis to figure this out. France and Sweden boast the lowest per capita emissions among major advanced developed economies globally and get 80% and 50% of their electricity, respectively, from nuclear energy. When nations build nuclear plants, emissions reliably fall and when they shut them down, as we’ve witnessed over the last decade in Japan and California, they reliably rise.

But for decades, Sovacool and other prominent anti-nuclear academics have published a slew of dubious studies in peer-reviewed publications purporting to find that closing nuclear plants reduces emissions, that nuclear energy is fossil fuel intensive, uniquely dangerous, and inherently expensive, and that renewable energy alone can meet 100% of the world’s energy needs.

This is the sort of thing that many people would call bullshit. But in Frankfurt’s parlance, ideological academics like Sovacool are actually liars. By that, I am not suggesting that Sovacool and others are literally lying. Nor does any of it rise to the level of academic fraud.

But the history of anti-nuclear scholarship pretty strongly suggests that peer-review is no defense in the face of tenured academics with strong ideological commitments. Motivated cognition is a powerful thing and faced with an inconvenient truth, that nuclear energy, which environmentalists have long viewed as worse than fossil fuels, is actually one of the better options we have for cutting carbon emissions and addressing climate change, researchers like Sovacool are entirely capable of conjuring scholarly falsehoods via the magic of models, regression analyses, and highly selective data.

Bullshit, by contrast, is a different animal. It involves going along to get along, repeating claims that are prima facie ridiculous because everyone else appears to believe them too. If Sovacool and other anti-nuclear academics are liars in Frankfurt’s parlance, the peer reviewers and editors who went along with publishing the whole absurd exercise are bullshitters.

Sure, peer-review is time-consuming and uncompensated. But that can’t remotely explain how Sovacool was able to take a study that he was forced to retract just three years ago, slap a fresh coat of paint on it, and republish it in a more prestigious journal. Or why Mark Jacobson’s now-debunked 100% renewable study was not only published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science but received an award as one of the best studies of the year, before its obvious flaws were exposed. Or, for that matter, why decades of coverage of nuclear energy in the mainstream media has so reliably diverged from the overwhelming evidence about nuclear’s remarkable record of safe operations and low emissions.

The actual technological pathways to deeply decarbonizing the entire global economy are few and far between. Nuclear is without question one of them.

Climate and energy bullshit proliferates not based on the strength of empirical claims upon which it is based but because it fits a social narrative that has been around for a very long time and that was mapped over, almost whole cloth, from earlier environmental claims about population, toxic chemicals, and limits to growth.

At bottom, almost all contemporary framings of the climate issue insist that addressing the problem will require a fundamental break from the past. Our actions, our choices, our determination to fundamentally remake the world, right now, shall determine whether we thrive or burn up in a runaway fossil-fueled cataclysm.

And so, in the popular climate discourse, we imagine more marching and protesting and clever climate communications might radically remake the political economy of carbon and energy on a planet with seven billion people, soon to be nine, that is still overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. We argue that political will is all that stands in the way of an international treaty, a global carbon price, or a Green New Deal and that once the political breakthrough materializes, those measures will magically produce some unnamed and unobjectionable technology to do everything that wind and solar energy can’t.

Nuclear energy’s original sin was that it was plug and play with industrial modernity, promising limitless energy to support economic prosperity and a growing population. Even as most today acknowledge that any serious effort to address climate change will need to accommodate both, the popular climate discourse speaks of carbon budgets and temperature targets as if they were real things while barely mentioning nuclear, a real technology with documented success decarbonizing modern economies, because it doesn’t fit the narrative.

When nations build nuclear plants, emissions reliably fall and when they shut them down, as we’ve witnessed over the last decade in Japan and California, they reliably rise.

Instead, we talk of technologies that have never actually existed: gigantic machines that remove carbon directly from the atmosphere or hydrogen-powered aircraft or pumping sulfur particles into the stratosphere. The environmental movement and philanthropy have even been far more open to bolting costly carbon capture technology onto coal and gas plants than reconsidering nuclear energy, probably because the former is a pollution-control technology that would increase the cost of fossil energy and, not incidentally, is probably only feasible in the event that the world either regulates or taxes carbon dioxide.

Nuclear energy is no panacea either. And perhaps we will figure out how to entirely eliminate emissions with carbon capture or clean hydrogen or something else. But the actual technological pathways to deeply decarbonizing the entire global economy are few and far between. Nuclear is without question one of them. It can do things, like providing heat for industrial processes that renewables simply cannot easily, and is still the only low-carbon technology with a demonstrated track record of significantly decarbonizing a modern, industrialized economy.

As impressive as the falling costs of wind and solar energy have been, we aren’t going to power the entire global economy with variable sources of renewable energy alone. We have no experience or proven capability to operate an electrical grid entirely with wind and solar energy, much less the other 80% of the global energy economy that doesn’t run on electricity.

Most serious observers, in the news media, academia, government, and even environmental NGOs actually know this and most credible global decarbonization scenarios and energy systems models find a significant need for nuclear to deeply decarbonize modern economies. But you wouldn’t know that from our zombie climate discourse.

Successful climate action in the actual world won’t look anything like the heroic fantasias that so easily captivate the chattering classes. More likely, insofar as we succeed, we will do so via a series of partial, stumbling, and half-baked measures. Doing so will require things like nuclear energy, natural gas, carbon capture, and big agriculture that don’t, in the popular imagination, sit weightless on the land. It will require big government, big corporations and big infrastructure. It will accommodate itself to industrial modernity, consumption, and consumerism and will require a revolution in neither sentiment nor technology but rather the slow accumulation of knowledge, technological prowess, institutions, and practices.

In the end, everyone knows what Sovacool, Jacobson, and other anti-nuclear academics are up to. They are simply highly credentialed ideologues. It’s the bullshit that I worry more about, because, in its incoherence, overheated conspiracies, breezy utopias, and empty radicalism, it is far harder to interrogate