Ken Fuchsman
Mar 7
Re: [cliospsyche] Re: Another view of the Academy Awards
In 1957 Lawrence Olivier and Marilyn Monroe starred in The Prince and the Showgirl. Times have changed and now we have The Billionaire and the Porn Star. Should Netflix or HBO make a film of this story? If so, who should portray the President and who the adult film actress?
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Judith Logue
Mar 7
Another view of the Academy Awards
Alec Baldwin and Jennifer Lawrence or a slightly older but not old actress ... Scarlett Johannsen - or many other possibilities.
IMO: But this is going to be an uninteresting story soon.
Few are going to care about T’s predatory sex life - more than a few days at a time , except Melanomia - and any attempt to leave T will result in worse punishment and consequences for her and her family than staying put and as separate as she now is.
Judy
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Ken Fuchsman
Apr 10
These times
For any American and for all psychohistorians, these are extraordinary times. Before the Trump presidency, it was not common for a psychodynamic and psychiatric diagnostic category to become part of the political discourse of the mass media. It is rare in our history that a book by psychiatrists on a political subject would make the best seller list as did Bandy Lee's The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Echoes of Watergate are present all the time. After Nixon's resigning office, psychobiographical accounts of Richard Nixon frequently appeared at just when psychohistory was emerging as an organized force.
Follow the money was a central theme of the Watergate investigation. While yesterday's headlines centered on the FBI searching Trump's attorney Michael Cohen, of significance also is that the Trump foundation received $150,000 from a Ukranian while Trump was a candidate. Michael Cohen arranged the payment.
We are living through times that see themes of noir fiction and films being news headlines. Who know where this plot will end? Will protagonist Trump be held accountable or will he get off scot free? Our melodramatic national noir soap opera is in full bloom. The fate of America being a republic of laws or one where sleazy corruption continues to dominate is in the balance.
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Harvey Kaplan
Apr 10
Re: [cliospsyche] These times
Good but frightening point
Harv
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bdagostino2687
Apr 11
RE: [cliospsyche] These times
The rule of law may well be in the balance, Ken, at least in the short run, but Trump is proving way too incompetent to lead the Republican party into a brave new world of fascism. He is a world class entertainer, which is how he managed to get elected president, but now that he actually has to run the government and the party he spends most of his “working” day watching TV and tweeting, which is not how you run organizations in the real world, especially if you are not willing to delegate the governing function to others. He is living in a fantasy world co-created by his enablers in Fox News and the Republican Party. History is full of examples of individuals and organizations that went off the rails because of sheer incompetence, admittedly not before doing a lot of damage and ruining the lives of millions of people.
Senator Richard Blumenthal, not someone prone to hyperbole, called the FBI raid on Trump’s attorney’s offices “a nuclear strike with multiple warheads.” Given how sloppy Trump is and how he has played fast and loose with the law all his life, the FBI (not Mueller) probably now has in its possession a treasure trove of incriminating information on Trump. If the Democrats retake the House in November, he will almost certainly be impeached and in the wake of a midterm election trouncing and all the other damage Trump has been doing to the Republican Party, there is even a chance that he would be convicted by a bi-partisan two thirds of the Senate. Alan Dershowitz met with him last night and I wouldn’t be surprised if he advised Trump to resign now, get pardoned by Pence, and save what is left of his life and the Republican Party.
Having said all this, we are indeed in uncharted waters, and I can’t claim to have a crystal ball. If the Democrats screw up the midterm elections (ironically, the Republicans are using the specter of impeachment to energize their own base), things will become even more unpredictable.
Brian
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Subject: [cliospsyche] These times
Authoritarianism
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 21
Encouraging new willingness to associate early childhood experiences with broad later political impact.
Things to consider:
1) When we use the term "authoritarianism" and with our frequently bringing up the practice of spanking, specifically, or physical punishment in general, are we doing enough to make sure that what our studies won't mostly serve is further fodder for our own perhaps shaky emotional equilibrium which is perhaps steadied when we de facto ascribe bullying men as the primary source of our problems? The feminist Jessa Crispin, speaking to her audience of well-educated progressives, has argued that we ourselves split off portions of our own selves, selves we're not comfortable with, into others -- we use our own "shit containers" -- and predatory white men serve as our receptacles. If this is true, then are authors taking into sufficient consideration that WE LIKE hearing about bullying men right now, that we've learned to PRIMARILY associate bullying with stern fathers, with men, even as parents and mothers might also be mentioned, so we may not so much be taking psychohistory into bolder realms with these studies as we are cementing a static situation where we can carry on our daily lives mostly guilt-free by expanding the full range of the authoritarian (read: patriarchal?) problem?
2) Professor Milburn discusses delegate groups, groups made to carry the "sins" individuals most disown themselves of because their parents deemed them evil. This ends up leading to racism, or war against ostensibly dependent/vulnerable groups, groups that most aptly convey a need for care and support. Yet in exploring what typifies the ostensible bad child in "Raised to Rage" (49-50), Milburn should, one would have thought, have had us think almost entirely of the actually genuinely advantaged, "high horse" people, people who convey that they they haven't really been shut down in life, people who talk back to their parents, are living comfortably and well. Yet how many articles are there where "bad others" who don't so much convey soddenness, weakness, vulnerability, but rather high-esteem, places like, say, Sweden? Are we keeping the topic wholly off ourselves, so we feel almost more clinically empowered? Observers of, not participants within, the dynamics of a problem?
3) There are discussions of black childrearing, of the high percentage of black parents that still spank their kids. How many articles are there that explore the possible political implications of this? If Trump represents a regressing public's desire to revenge against all the "bad boys and girls," then should we expect that Trump, or someone like him, will eventually end up appealing very strongly to black Americans, and how they can eventually be expected to turn against "high horse" people -- i.e., well-raised progressives -- who ACTUALLY have been doing most to assist them, exempting only what they needed to assist them in their current group fantasy needs? If we end up being hated by those within minorities who physically punished their kids because we seem to them spoiled -- we seem, in our presuming manner, what their own mothers would have killed them for -- will we be able to take it in stride? Does any component of our sanity actually depend on understanding ourselves as saviours who are appreciated by those they've saved? Should progressives be counting up the number of people out there who were raised out of authoritarian backgrounds, an accurate accounting, beyond the constituents of Hillbilly Nation, factoring in the amount of growth panic people are experiencing owing, to calculate whether the only kind of populism that will succeed one that is conservative in nature, whether or not we're almost guaranteed to lose, that Hillary was guaranteed to lose, no matter what we do, it's just time for that particular kind of historical stage?
4) Would anyone share my concern that Brittney Cooper might regress in her admirable call for change and think again that people who run about as if they own the place, people who didn't learn to be cowed, are what every caring mother should hate most?
4) Is there any indication that we're due to go beyond imagining how childrearing can affect politics to imagining how childrearing can determine social structures? DeMause had them all as delegate groups, with the church containing...., and the army containing...., etc. Has anyone broached this territory again? If not, is what we're doing a bit, well, bourgeois, in that it would seem to allow us to think of the entirety of much of our own existence as just as civilized and solid and everyday marginally pleasing or slightly banal as it appears (Person one: "the art gallery has a group function of..." Person two: "hold on there. Adults who were beaten as kids needing to imagine others who are the selves they must reject, I get, but what on earth are you talking about?... the justice system as historical group delegate? Insane. It's simply part of the fabric of civil society, nothing more. Read the Economist and you'll see."), leaving insanity to the trolls, however much, in their amassing multitudes, they're way past just spilling out from underneath the bridge?
5) Does "authoritarian parenting" work against remembering other concerns, like enmeshment, for example. Not harshness, scare-tactics, bullying, but being used as an incestuous vehicle, an extension of a parental body? In the apparent rise of discussions of authoritarian childrearing, the resurrection and reapplication of Adorno, are we cementing certain specific understandings of what constitutes the averse in early childhood, that ostracizes, makes invisible, other ones that ought to be just as prominently in view?
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Denis O'Keefe
Apr 21
Patrick,
Why don't you come to the conference and find some answers to your questions?
Denis
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 21
Denis,
Thanks for the invite. I'll come.
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Ben
Apr 22
On 22 April 2018 at 01:17, Patrick McEvoy-Halston wrote:
1) When we use the term "authoritarianism" and with our frequently bringing up the practice of spanking, specifically, or physical punishment in general, are we doing enough to make sure that what our studies won't mostly serve is further fodder for our own perhaps shaky emotional equilibrium which is perhaps steadied when we de facto ascribe bullying men as the primary source of our problems? The feminist Jessa Crispin, speaking to her audience of well-educated progressives, has argued that we ourselves split off portions of our own selves, selves we're not comfortable with, into others -- we use our own "shit containers" -- and predatory white men serve as our receptacles. If this is true, then are authors taking into sufficient consideration that WE LIKE hearing about bullying men right now, that we've learned to PRIMARILY associate bullying with stern fathers, with men, even as parents and mothers might also be mentioned, so we may not so much be taking psychohistory into bolder realms with these studies as we are cementing a static situation where we can carry on our daily lives mostly guilt-free by expanding the full range of the authoritarian (read: patriarchal?) problem?
Isn't being predatory a bad thing? How can we be projecting our own shit containers onto predatory white men unless predatory white men and their enablers are looking to dodge accountability for being predatory? Isn't blaming the victim, playing the victim, refusing to reflect on one's own role in situations, purposefully confusing being criticised and being attacked and other similar behaviours associated with the phenomenon of moral disengagement part of a victim complex that facilitates this kind of scapegoating and blame-shifting? Where predatory white men are concerned, aren't we defending projecting in the name of not projecting?
Men who are bullies is a problem! There's nothing 'de facto' (presumably you mean summarily or arbitrarily) about it. To argue otherwise is to allege that facts are arbitrary, apparently because you don't happen to like them. Isn't patriarchy a problem? I think it is!!
Not liking the fact of patriarchy and wanting people to feel guilty for acknowledging it seems to me to reflect a patent desire to scapegoat, which in turn arguably reflects many of the ahistorical, deeply politicised and not very empirical at all foundations of much of what seems to pass for psychohistory in this group. Be great to see arguments such as the above subjected to peer review>
Cheers,
Ben
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bdagostino2687
Apr 22
Well said, Ben. Stated in another way, many psychohistorians tend to reduce large scale historical structures (e.g. the global capitalist economy, the state, the war system) to the psychology of individuals and groups. Whether those who hold such ideas realize it or not, this functions ideologically to legitimize large scale structures that are predatory in an objective sense. If we say that political elites make wars and corporate elites dismantle the livelihoods of workers because “the people” want this, we are not only blaming the victim, we are providing an ideological justification for predatory institutions.
In the long run, it is true that these institutions depend on the deference and obedience of ordinary people, and in that sense people are complicit in their own oppression. But on the timescale of a single generation, “the people” are constrained by the institutions we inherit and can only effectively resist and fashion alternatives if we acknowledge and understand these constraints. As Marx said, humans make history, but not exactly as we please.
Brian
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From: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Ben
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Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Authoritarianism
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Ben
Apr 22
Well said yourself, Brian. The problem I have with the Demausian approach as reflected in much of the commentary in this group is his utter lack of understanding of social relations, people as social actors and the dynamics of groups. Placing all of the emphasis on personal subjectivity as it relates to interpersonal relations ignores all the social forces that drive us, in so doing letting them off the hook. Where is the existence of class divisions between haves and have nots and the matrix of social relations that go into defending privilege from democracy and social justice? Where are the actions of the rich and powerful with their hands over the levels of social policy and the purse strings?
Psychohistory could be a phenomenal area of research if it could surmount this empirical deficit which places it outside of the realm of academic discipline and into the arena of racist and reactionary political ideology.
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Trevor Pederson
Apr 22
Don’t pat yourself on the back too hard Ben
I think Marxian thought should be foundational to psychohistory, but it’s absurd to posture as if the “academic disciplines” have treated Marxian thought so seriously (sociology), are rigorously empirical (gender studies) and are above ideology.
W. Reich began with the premise that Nazi Germany represented a failure for communism that needed to be studied psychologically. Later we all found out the horrors of this kind of socialism. A science should be capable of advancements and self-critique, but how many of the few academic Marxists out there have gotten into the psychology necessary to deliver this re-evaluation?
You have a point Ben but you do it a disservice to invoke the authority of the academy.
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 22
Ben,
Predatory is a bad thing. Jessa Crispin argued that progressives tend to use awful men (yep, terrible childrearing equals terrible people) as their poison containers because they're ideal to never reflect back onto them. They're already awful, so that bits of awful that is in us won't be seen when we've intermingled it with them because it too easily passes as something belonging properly in the subjects. I also continue to maintain that the most useful thing progressives can be doing right now is not to diagnose the consequences of terrible childrearing, but of the childrearing that they themselves received. We're going through a very dangerous period and we need to know if we've got blindspots, that is, things we MUST see a certain way, for altering them any different would unsettle our equilibrium. If our requirements for the white working class is one of these, how they must be perceived, then is one of the reasons we're focusing on Russia so much because it allows us to keep in our minds the image we were learning we needed to have of them to suit proper use of them as poison containers? We focus more on Russia, on Trump's various particulars, and thus pretend to not notice that in the meantime, bit by bit, the white working class is being slowly removed as an allowable vehicle for anyone's abuse, that bit by bit, we're losing the poison containers we were depending on ongoing usage of... and thus perhaps our own eventual upcoming psychic doom, upon "our return"?
No, I did not argue that patriarchy is not a problem. I belong in the same wondrous category of people that you do that hold it as awful. I'm not letting powerful people of the hook. DeMausian psychohistory argues that new psychoclasses don't let the powerful get away with nearly as much because they have fewer requirements for them to serve as parental gods and for their ownselves to behave masochistically. It's behind all efforts to bring political systems closer to the egalitarian, humane ones they very much all could be. I think there's a lot of what you're looking for already in psychohistory... examination of the sordid abuse of the powerful: for me, that's already plenty there in Clio. We don't let ourselves off the hook because we're forcing ourselves to think on how we might be projecting early childhood dramas out onto the political stage. This can be embarrassing Tell us things we don't want to know about ourselves. I find it brave.
I think it really does that extra thing, that extra thing we should only be encouraging if we want to make sure we act politically for the right reasons, to confirm that what actually isn't primary is our need to find enemies. The Bernie Bros (not, that is, all of Sanders' supporters, of whom many were of DeMause's helping psychoclass) were accused of projecting their own mothers onto Hillary Clinton, and so the war against her was mostly about revenge against an early childhood antagonist, mom. Without psychohistory, to even consider this would be impossible, and it would only appear as it would within populist imaginings -- war against neoliberalism.
I hope psychohistory continues to draw in people with imagination, and rather fewer of those who want to clamp it down into something reasonable to reasonable people who come to mighty conclusions that are pretty much already accepted and standard, that is, the restricted and boring. (If we get lots of the former, then, yes, empirical studies equals awesomeness! Without them, I won't bother to look at their research because the most surprising things, the most truly unsettling things... well, the day would never come that they would see it anointed permanently as truth owing to having been proven by scientific fact.) To draw them in, psychohistory needs to be... colourful, open and surprising. A french salon. Conservatives are trying to expel "the French invasion" from the universities, Frederick Crews is trying to get rid of psychoanalysis, all in the name of empiricism.
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bdagostino2687
Apr 22
Is there really any controversy on this list that we need to take a dialectical approach to organized academia? Without careful research and the peer review process, psychohistory is just speculation, however evocative and colorful it might be. That said, if psychohistory becomes yet another academic priesthood engaged in the usual bureaucratic power games, it will be at best irrelevant to real people in the real world and at worst a self-serving body of lore that prevents people from understanding the world. Can’t we walk and chew gum at the same time? When are we going to stop setting up and defending sterile and untenable dichotomies?
Brian
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From: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com On Behalf Of Patrick McEvoy-Halston
Sent: Sunday, April 22, 2018 9:15 AM
To: Clio’s Psyche
Subject: Re: [cliospsyche] Authoritarianism
Ben,
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Ben
Apr 22
The authority of the academy isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and sometimes frankly it sucks fat donkey balls, but even at that, it still provides a better process for establishing some vague concept of reality than the big clanging tin can known as the internet.
Speaking of the tin can, if I'm not mistaken that's the one that associates discussion of facts that the vested interests associated with the status quo prefer remain under wraps with campaigns of ideological subversion -- ironic considering the subversion of democratic forms in fact by corporate oligarchy, such that democratic rights are now associated with corporate supremacism, and attempts at asserting democratic rights are considered attacks on the rights of business. Just ask the IMF, that's exactly what the Trans Pacific Partnership is all about.
Given that that's the case, this culture war garbage about the universities as hotbeds of deviance tends to look like the covert subversion of democratic norms it attributes to teh Redz.
Agree completely about Reich, and that's because I'm not a marxist. Maybe you shouldn't assume to know everything. You were saying something about not patting yourself on the back too hard?
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Trevor Pederson
Apr 22
I didn't accuse you of being a Marxist, but I'd be glad to hear you explain your position. Reich criticized the USSR and socialism but he still had his concept of work-democracy that was based on Marxian principles.
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Ken Fuchsman
Apr 22
Within academic disciplines there are recognized sub-disciplines such as political psychology, psychological anthropology, social psychology, economic psychology, philosophical psychology, but not psychohistory.
Within history departments, there are sub-fields of economic history, political history, sociology and history, but not psychohistory.
Even prominent historians who focus on the connections between psychology and history shy away from identifying themselves as psychohistorians. To some critics of psychohistory the field does not sufficiently rely on sound scholarship and is often accused of being reductionist and/or ideology supported with selected use of evidence and improbable inferences from evidence to conclusion.
Those who favor psychohistory do not necessarily need a home in academia, but need to focus on better use of evidence and conclusions, and to examine what if any differences there are between those who practice integrating psychology and history without identifying as psychohistorians and those who call themselves psychohistorians.
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 22
But on the timescale of a single generation, “the people” are constrained by the institutions we inherit and can only effectively resist and fashion alternatives if we acknowledge and understand these constraints. As Marx said, humans make history, but not exactly as we please.
This is theory to me, Brian. It strikes me as more plausible to believe that if somehow childrearing could be dramatically altered within a generation, that that generation would have little need to acknowledge and understand constraints for they'd be too busy seeing good results in their using all materials at hand, even the ostensibly firmly constraining ones, to repurpose for themselves an entirely new society. This includes language. A racist, sexist, classist language, in my judgment, won't do much to produce racist, sexist, classist people, if somehow they were all raised with significantly superior childrearing, with significantly more love. As they as a generation gained power, they'd modify the language, of course, but this would only be making passage into true civility that much easier for the next generation, not clearing away at some horrible constraint that is almost impossible to bypass and that will, will-nilly, determine you.
Do you think some might like your way of understanding change because it seems even-handed, slightly dour, reasonable, because it fits how many of us require thinking of our world and because it passes as not theory, but only as adult/wise? Do you think that some are attracted to the idea that institutions not be made to seem immaterial, flighty, ephemeral -- phantoms sourced out of early childhood exigencies -- because even as by necessity we must still grapple with the results, nevertheless the weight goes back into us? Do you think arguing for my way of seeing things seems too optimistic, too full of expectations, and that part of the way we, the civilized, justify our ongoing professional gains is by eschewing thinking that seems to want to bite the sun, to have it all -- by making ourselves those of morbid acceptance of necessity, that is, John Lecarré-types? Contemporary maturity as a compromised state born ultimately out of deflecting a sense that one might have accrued punishment for having lived life a bit too large, is that what maturity is? A kind of retarded, immature, shrunken, degraded, holding-pattern view of things, that in holding, might well help one pass detection, because it seems to grind back anything particular and reaching into a stretched back, flattened face?
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bdagostino2687
Apr 22
I find all this right on point, Ken. I think that the integration of psychology with history and public affairs IS psychohistory. That said, two of the main peer-reviewed psychohistory journals define the field more narrowly—The Journal of Psychohistory was (at least in its origins) deMausian, and Clio’s Psyche has been more traditionally psychoanalytic. If the field is to prosper, we need to open our intellectual horizons to the full range of ways that scholars can understand how history and public affairs shape and are shaped by the psychology of individuals and groups. The only arbiters of truth and validity are the universally accepted methods of academic research, including literary, historiographic, statistical, and other specific methods. If someone doesn’t believe in or value these methods, then they can still be engaged in worthwhile creative work, but it is not psychohistory as I define it. That is as inclusive as I know how to be without employing the term psychohistory to mean anything and everything. This is my third and last post for the day.
Brian
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 22
Here btw is part of Jessa Crispin's discussion of shit containers. Again, to me it's interesting because though we all know that racists project unwanted aspects of themselves into other people, there really isn't much exploration of how we -- the genuinely healthier people -- are not so healthy that we've escaped the need for the same.
And here is a recent article from Outline which describes how very literally we're shipping our New York shit onto Alabama. I hope some people find this interesting.
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Hans Bakker
Apr 23
I have been following the discussion. I am currently on the Sweezy Book Prize Committee for the Marxist (and Marxian) section of the American Sociological Association. It may be true to some extent that U.S. sociology has not always welcomed the insights of Karl Marx but since the 1960s there have been many academic sociologists who have taken Neo-Marxian and Marxian inspired Neo-Weberian views seriously. The Frankfurt School still has an impact in some networks both inside and outside academic sociology. I myself have made a contribution to comparative historical sociology using insights from Marx, Weber, Simmel and Galbraith.
Cheers, Hans J. I. Bakker
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
Apr 27
This is Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad, from their "Raised to Rage: politics of anger and the roots of authoritarianism":
"Slavery did not by itself create parental cruelty to children in black families. This treatment was also a characteristic of West African families (Gutman 1976). [...] This is surely one of the cruelest consequences of slavery -- transforming black parents into punishers of their own children -- a pattern that contemporary racism induces some parents to continue." 151 -52.
This book was written in 2016, when I don't think anyone would have blinked in reading these statements... with the argument being that slavery forced black families -- for tactical purposes -- to physically punish their kids: uncowed kids were surely more likely to be singled out and punished by white owners. That is, we would mostly elide sentence number one and just continue on and take in the rest of the paragraph. Today, I'm thinking our ownership of the cultural sphere, of what is considerate legitimate and civilized news, is shaky enough that I'm not so sure. I'm thinking that, more likely, some belonging even in somewhat respectable circles, someone like Andrew Sullivan, or the emergent barbarian who's being accepted as the opposite, Jordan Peterson, might with their "legitimacy" begin to pry open a further look into sentence number one and ask of the text, how much the characteristic cruelty of West African families was so much worsened when it was replaced / supplemented by the characteristic cruelty of slavery that you could fairly describe what happened to them as a transformation into -- only now -- something malformed?
Just reading the paragraph, it seems like something malformed was there from the beginning, in the "characteristic of West African families" part. Just reading the paragraph, it would seem that children who grew up under punitive authoritarian parenting in West Africa were taken away by white slavers who were also the product of brutal authoritarian childrearing, and put into a system that really needs effort put into distinguishing how exactly it was fundamentally different from the rancid in the former place. And the implication would be that once you took away the full effects of slavery, if somehow possible, you'd still have underneath that which owed to West Africa, but with little ability to actually take that on because presenting it in any way which doesn't allow the reader to elide recognition of it, complicates a narrative we succour on: many black americans beat their kids because they had to do it previously in order for their children to survive slavery.
It would in fact lead us to wonder what it was about the slavery system that CHANGED a group of people who previously beat their kids in West Africa for the reason, presumably, everyone beats their kids -- which is not for tactical purposes, but for the reasons behind it recognized everywhere else in Milburn's book... to be the aggressor, to not be weak, projection -- into ones who did so smartly, sagely, KINDLY, correctly, even if it meant almost inevitable lingering-on side effects that wouldn't automatically quiet to a stop when they no longer enabled adept survival skills, and in fact really were now just cruel, warping, underserving.
We're going at our research with kid gloves, it would seem to be me. There IS a narrative we must sustain. There IS a poison container we must sustain: all venom into one target and one target only. One's research is to enable that, because it produces studies that enable us to imagine ourselves probably the most perfect people alive on earth, as absolutely civilized, as all evil becomes condensed into a group we cannot permit to see recovered in any way -- the white majority, the non-professional ones, outside our urban centres -- and all victims of their evilness, presented in a fashion which shows just how much of the miraculous we attribute to them: if they beat their kids, we find that, unlike everyone else, they do so for reasons that must be fairly considered, for there is sure to be wisdom in it (...if they'd done otherwise, their children wouldn't have survived); they're in fact superheroes. And by recovered, I don't mean redeemed -- because their childrearing is terrible; they are as Hillary presents them -- but understood in the same way we would allow for studies of West Africa if we were drawn to really focus on the authoritarian cultures that exist there.
I mentioned before in this thread that those who argue about the terrible effects of authoritarian culture should now be expecting that every family out there, of whatever racial, cultural background, that still physically punishes their kids, will probably end up voting for Trump or someone like him, because he represents the authoritarian voice. We need to stretch our imagination so that we stop hugging this narrative that without Russia, Hillary would have gotten the white house, and start expecting that if our culture reads to many, more and more, as one that is narcissistic and overly permissive -- as everything their childhoods told them was bad and evil and weakness-inspiring; as everything they need to distinguish themselves from else loose their parents' favour and respect -- we'll see further evidence that what America is becoming is a land united to collectively strangle us, i.e., the antithesis of Hillary. Psychoanalyze for envelopment fears, at my pleasure. I'd like to know if I have them.
Michael Milburn and Sheree Conrad are speaking at the conference. I actually mostly appreciated the book I read of theirs. I raise first my powerful concern.
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Missing pages in the Spring 2017 back issue
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
May 3
Just to bring to everyone's attention that the Spring 2017 issue wasn't scanned properly. At the "back issues" link, the text terminates at around pg. 312. The interview with Ken Fuchsman is cut off completely.
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Ken Fuchsman
May 3
Patrick,
I have notified the editor and associate editor of this omission
Ken
On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Patrick McEvoy-Halston wrote:
Just to bring to everyone's attention that the Spring 2017 issue wasn't scanned properly. At the "back issues" link, the text terminates at around pg. 312. The interview with Ken Fuchsman is cut off completely.
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Bob Lentz
May 3
Patrick and Ken:
Thanks for bringing this glitch on the Website to our attention. It is being work on and hopefully will be corrected soon.
Bob
On Thursday, May 3, 2018 at 6:47:19 AM UTC-6, Ken Fuchsman wrote:
Patrick,
I have notified the editor and associate editor of this omission
Ken
On Thu, May 3, 2018 at 8:13 AM, Patrick McEvoy-Halston wrote:
Just to bring to everyone's attention that the Spring 2017 issue wasn't scanned properly. At the "back issues" link, the text terminates at around pg. 312. The interview with Ken Fuchsman is cut off completely.
--
<><><>
To post to this group send to: cliospsyche@googlegroups.com
Clio's Psyche is sponsored by The Psychohistory Forum. For questions visit: cliospsyche.org
Digest is available on request and sends no more than 1 email a day.
Home: http://groups.google.com/group/cliospsyche
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
May 3
Great stuff. It's wonderful to have the back issues there, and I'm glad I'm a subscriber to the new arriving ones.
Bob Lentz
May 3
Great to hear, Patrick. The link to Spring 2017 seems to work now.
On Thursday, May 3, 2018 at 7:08:48 AM UTC-6, Patrick McEvoy-Halston wrote:
Great stuff. It's wonderful to have the back issues there, and I'm glad I'm a subscriber to the new arriving ones.
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Failed approaches to psychohistory
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me (Patrick McEvoy-Halston change)
May 18
It might be that we are finally about to present versions of psychohistory that are presentable to academia. Studies of authoritarianism, psychoanalytic biographical explorations of presidents... all surely fit to be newly embraced within academia, and likely enthusiastically. I wonder as I see this, though, if what we are are like Gollum who finally gets his prized special ring on his finger, just before it will be irrelevant to him, as "the game" has suddenly changed.
You can't go into a bookstore these days without feeling like you're within the film world of Casablanca, where there remains much that is civilized, and yet you see circulating throughout increasing elements that make you wonder if even here you're due for a take-over. Seemingly half the people around you, are buying or carting around Jordan Peterson's books, Canada's most powerful "intellectual," and perhaps most powerful figure, and so the "alt-right," very much even here.
What does this have to do with psychohistory, and psychohistory's failed approaches? This article suggests the link. Explore Jordan Peterson, the people reading him, and you quickly get to the youtube alt-right star, Stefan Molnyeux. Who is Molnyeux? He's the one who read aloud the entirety of Lloyd deMause's Emotional Life of Nations, as well as The Origins of War in Child Abuse, and who keeps telling people of the necessity of reading DeMause's works. You add Molnyeux to Steven Pinker, to an increasingly "alt-right" world that will use their works to make academia seem more interested in social engineering (and professional class promotion) than in truth, and the discredited deMause may hardly be off the map, but perhaps due to be as much in sudden view as Brexit.
I look forward to reading Elovitz's new book, but the finish should explore how the alt-right is already using Pinker and a weaponized deMause in an effort which will war against whatever "completion" of the psychohistorical endeavour we are hoping to accomplish in the co-opting, receptive, rebel-free, gregarious and becalmed world of academia. With Pinker, with Peterson, with Molnyeux, very suddenly, a deMause, used as a "raping tool" (they could care less about what he offers the world, only how he can be used to punish it), could be what people come to know as even an academic psychohistory.
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