Re: that NY Times article

On Mon, 1 May 2006, Katharine Thayer wrote:

> This article is a logical mess, and doesn't explain anything. A more useful
> thing to read IMO for understanding what happened in Nazi Germany and what's
> going on today might be Erich Fromm, "Escape from Freedom," which actually
> makes sense.

I suspect, from her tone, that Katharine didn't want to see these
explanations. I found them present,clear,and compelling... (And if I
remember correctly, Fromm was strongly influenced by Freud.)

Although actually what this shows is I think a basic rule of human
nature....

The eye sees what it came to see.

> This NYT article is supposedly about fundamentalism, but doesn't even bother
> to define the term. It implies in the second paragraph that the Nazi

Actually, it doesn't claim to be *about* fundamentalism, it addresses the
APPEAL of any fundamentalism (of which there are infinite varieties), what
fundamentalism puts together or relieves in the conflicted psyche.

> movement was one of many "forms of tyrannical fundamentalism" then goes on
> explain Freud's theory about why people might follow a tyrannical leader (a
> theory that seems pure BS to me, but that's not my point here). Now we have

That's the reader's privilege, but fortunately for the field, there are
many who find these approaches extremely fertile... And that Freud
conceptualized emotional dynamics that hadn't been done before or since.
Not everything he said will be eternally as he said it. But brilliant
men and women spend a lifetime fine tuning just one of his observations
and theories... There's an ongoing literature. And AFAIK, although many
will reject it all as "BS," so far anything susceptible to "science"
remains, none of it has been disproved.

The most familiar case along these lines is the fellow who did the sleep
studies, claiming that dreams had no meaning -- were just random firings
of the brain -- because they occurred during REM sleep where higher
thought processes were believed to be -- asleep. Then another guy came
along & showed that the higher thought centers DO light up during dreams.
The original guy (Hammer? Hammond?) had to accept the evidence but was
seriously bummed. His comment, quoted in the NY Times (& I have the
rference somewhere) was that he hated to think there was anything in his
mind (ie.,. an "unconscious") that he didn't know about. EXACTLY. (That's
why God invented the unconscious.)

> to ask ourselves, what does blindly following a leader have to do with
> fundamentalism? Is he saying that the "fundamentalist urge" is the urge to
> blindly follow a tyrannical leader?

I read this article once a couple of days ago, so I surmise now. But it's
basically explaining the APPEAL of fundamentalism, what it satisfies in
the human psyche... not that the person goes out looking for
fundamentalism, but the fundamentalism seduces him or her.

And the "tyrannical leader" because something else is being satisfied
seems benign, and possibly worshipped...(I mean think of Mao, et al.)
Until, maybe, it's too late.

As I say, I'm extrapolating now from a once over reading...I'm not going
to go through this any more. But at each step Katharine has put a spin, or
made an unsupported assumption or driven the idea to a reductionism that
destroys the point. (And IMO, civilisation depends on the ability to make
distinctions.)

I do think it's possible that if she read it again without the
hostility, even if she can't accept it, it might become, um, less "BS,"
or at least clearer.

J.
Received on 05/02/06-01:37:08 AM Z