7. Society as Crucible

7 Society as Crucible HENRY S. KARIEL "1 have much to learn, doctor." "Not nearly as much as you suppose. It depends on your attitude to what 1 tell you. What often makes things arduous in my profession is the patient's insistence on arguing about everything... ." Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (1955) Is it not possible, I have felt forced to ask myself when haunted by the possibility of being found out, that I am not so much the victim of misunderstanding as of understanding? What troubles me is the possibility that 1 am being slowly and system atically understood-understood as an economic, social, psycho logical, and ultimately physiological specimen. My fear, of course, is an old one: the loss of identity. Nevertheless, there are both historical forces and intellectual assumptions that give this old fear new grounding. The historical forces are technological; the intellectual assumptions are epistemological.

What is puzzling initially is that a loss of personal identity should accompany growth in understanding. Surely it is no neces sary price for scientific knowledge. Why should not increased knowledge of ..man and society lead to an enhanced appreciation of personal uniqueness, to the liberation of individuals from the false miracles, mysteries, and authorities that captivate them? And is a case against increased knowledge not simply one for obscurantism? 135 136 Psychiatry and Responsibility I In the social sciences, more particular Iy in the field of social psychology, we seem to find it imperative today to give credit to but one type of research result: the hypothetical statement that has withstood efforts to invalidate it by attempts to vary relevant data under controlled conditions. We cannot find it proper, within the social sciences, to accept the testimony of those who profess to have insight into the nature of man by passively, sympa thetically reflecting on his condition. We cannot because we know-ever since Kant first distinctly articulated our position that it makes no sense to speak of man's nature. What man's nature "really" is, what constitutes the norm for man's character, we can never genuinely know. Or, more precisely, we can never formulate unequivocal terms by which to communicate such understanding of man's nature as we presume to have.

The conclusions we have drawn from this argument have been various. Originally, it was the artist who could feel emancipated by the doctrine that we may trust only those laws, formulas, or myths that we have ourselves created. He had been confined, prior to Kant, to efforts that might illuminate the natural order of things. When he presented what he beheld, his representation was bound to be orderly-for the universe his works mirrored in concentrated form, like Hamlet's play for the king, was itself assumed to be orderly. But with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, it could become apparent that whatever order was inherent in the universe, it would remain forever esoteric. Yet this inspired no pessimism. While man could no longer say anything meaningful about the mysterious supernatural world, he could still remain alert to its promptings. And in the natural world, in what now was truly his natural world, he could feel free to make the laws, formulas, or myths that satisfied his needs. His needs no longer had to be harmonized and restricted in reference to the objective laws of a cosmos external to man. As generations of romantics beginning with Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade made plain, his passions moved to the foreground. Thus, the artist found Society as Crucible 137 himself free to express his feelings both in the way he shaped his life and in the way he gave form to his work.

He was generally prevented, however, from enlarging the sphere of his operations. Individual prejudices, social pressures, political traditions-all these blocked the way, confining him to the can.. vas,. the salon) the concert hall, or the theater. But where these checks were weak for historical reasons, the artist's will, as the case of Wagner illustrates, could easily be translated into action.! It became possible for the aesthetics of romanticism to crowd out the ethics that had sustained a tradition of constitutional politics. Language could be transformed, as George Orwell was to report in anguish, from a truth-revealing medium to an action-inducing implement used by those in power to keep society in motion. The dramatist could break down the walls of the theater, can .. verting passive audiences into active performers, removing, as Francis Fergusson has pointed out in his Idea of a Theater (1949), the distinction between art and life. If life could become art, the territory of the state could become the arena in which the inspired statesman could act as the supreme artist. Like Captain Ahab, he could take society into his hands, expose it to his charisma, and proceed to impose his order on an otherwise meaningless, hostile universe.

Thus emerged the artist heroically engaged in rebellious action, subject exclusively to aesthetic criteria posing but one final question: Is his work capable of moving us? The theory of kno1tvledge sanctioning this development was to have a similar consequence in other fields-especially in the impact it made on psychology (and ultimately the social sciences generally).2 Accept ing this theory as a postulate, we were able to conclude, not that a psychology is inlpossible, but that a body of psychological know ledge (or social knowledge) can consist only of propositions derived from the observation of individuals under varying condi tions. To build such a body of knowledge, we seemed initially to have a choice in approach. We could either take advantage of the natural laboratories that human history indulgently offers us, or we could artificially construct the laboratories within which 138 Psychiatryand Responsibility to put our hypotheses to the test. In either case, we had to demand that man, our subject, be acted upon and that we have a measure of control over the forces that act on him.

It is this need for maintaining control that was' to make us ever more dissatisfied with the natural laboratories provided by human history. Thus, our epistemology contributes significantly to our efforts to gain progressively more controtof history. It impels us, as we seek to purify our psychological knowledge, to leave less and less to chance. We consequently find ourselves prompted to enlarge the range of our scientific enterprises. Seeking to gain ever greater understanding of individuals, we know we must act on them in an ever expanding laboratory. There is nothing in tl}e logic or the assumptions of our science that can check a steadily accelerating spread of our efforts to gain empirical knowledge. What checks there are come from a tradition of intellectual speculation that we can make appear increasingly unworthy of enlightened men. We can bring this tradition itself under control by unmasking the beliefs of its adherents as rationalizations, ideologies, or myths, plausible to the extent that they enable us to get on in the world, to master and tame it, to make it express our needs. It thus becomes possible for us to remove the final threat to our treatment of society as a crucible, to our unin hibited acting upon men in order to understand them better.

And to act on them, we readily concede, is to restrict them in their action. II We have not had reason so far to feel that such restrictions creatively legislated by social science might be pernicious. We have come to recognize that freedom, whether social or individual, is no solid block. We may take some of it away only to find the remainder expanding. Thus, in the extreme case, we may deny the members of a whole age group the freedom of their youth by forcing them to fight a battle waged to enhance the freedom of all. We merely have to justify our action on the ground that the selected individuals in fact have the stamina essential to make Society as Crucible 139 them perform effectively. They must, on empirical grounds, deserve to be enlisted. To enable us to reach decisions such as this, we have quite properly made it attractive for psychologists, psychiatrists, sociol ogists, and anthropologists to help us. We have encouraged them in their determination to define appropriate restrictions of freedom and to put their definitions to the test. Those being restricted, manipulated, or indoctrinated have-we widely be lieved-really merited such treatment. And just as we can em ploy the techniques of science to select the deserving, so we can employ them to select the undeserving-those who are, on evidence hard to contest, our misfits, delinquents, under achievers, and noncooperators. A study of them constitutes a curriculum in pathology. In one way or another, they are all sick. They are our potential parole violators, authoritarian per sonalities, and uneducable students. They are the men whom tests stamp unfit for wartime intelligence service, for piloting aircraft, or for balancing bank accounts. Who of sound mind would not want to impose restrictions on them? Science, after all, merely implements the law. It executes, if not formally en acted statutes, then at least those dictates of right reason com manding our spontaneous respect.

By reflecting on the various fields in which we are calling on a behaviorist technology to institute a harmonious social order, we should gain some understanding of the refinements, the ramifica tions, and especially the dynamism of its operations. This should make us aware of how it contributes-gently, casually, almost benignly-to the socialization of political man. Therapy is provoked and legitimated, of course, by the existence of a critical situation, whether it be war, depression, or disease. When a breakdown has occurred, all sorts of efforts to re-establish law and order become justifiable. Thus, a textbook in criminology seems merely to say the obvious when it pro claims: "Crime and delinquency are sufficiently damaging to human beings to justify as much concentrated scientific endeavor as we employ when we fight any devastating disease." S The effort to reintegrate parts that are out of joint may, in the first instance, 140 Psychiatry and Responsibility be purely theoretical, an attempt, whatever its ideologically con servative genesis, to enhance our knowledge by establishing statistical correlations. Only later does it advance from theory to action.

The course taken by the study of crime, that is, the study of . radically disruptive social behavior, illustrates this progression admirably. Cesare Lombroso, in his classic L'uomo delinquente (1876), was the first to offer what he considered evidence showing that there were physical criminal types and that individuals who shared a set of relevant traits-generally apelike ones-were pre disposed to a life of crime. If these conclusions were to be dis credited, as they "rere, this could be done only by Lombroso's own statistical method. In 1928, for example, Max Gustav Schlapp associated glandular dysfunctions with criminality, or at least with the body chemistry of those witless criminals who were caught. 4 In the following year, Johannes Lange published his case for predestined criminality based on a study of identical twins. 5 Body types enabled William H. Sheldon to create an index of delinquency composed of numerically scaled degrees of inter relation. 6 Similarly, Sheldon and Eleanor T. Glueck were able to correlate physique and delinquency, introducing qualifications that led to ever greater precision. 7 A great number of still unco ordinated studies seeking to relate criminality and environmental economic conditions have follo,ved. 8 As these theoretical endeavors began to meet prevailing prac tical needs, laboratories could become available. Thus, David Dressler has reported 9 how at New York's Wallkill State Prison personnel at all levels are trained to note and record such items [of convict behavior] in a central file kept in the Service Unit. The parole board has found this most useful. The institution is a laboratory for observing inmates under all sorts of conditions, studying their reactions and interactions, their personalities and motivations.

Undeniably, such work contributes to the progressive refine .. ment of prediction tables as tools for identifying convicts fit to re-enter the world of the law-abiding. What is of significance for Society as Crucible 141 the moment, however, is the logic that dictates an ever greater intensity of observation "under all sorts of conditions" as the necessary price for an enlarged range of understanding. Still, the price is not high; it raises no embarrassing ethical issues. Though candidates for parole may become most sensitive to the expecta tions that the criminologist builds into indices of behavior, they are by no means being manipulated. They are presumably acting naturally while being observed. The criminologist keeps his distance and does not tell them to what social values to adjust. If convicts are on their own, it is because their disease is not considered as severe as that of psychotics. Here the psychiatric achievements of Harry Stack Sullivan are instructive. When Sullivan learned to see schizophrenia, not as something localized in the patient, but as a manifestation of a larger disorder arising out of unhealthy social relationships, he thought he had become capable of reintroducing his patients into the healthy society. He therefore conceived of the mental hospital as a "school of person ality growth" 10 in which patients could be guided to reorient themselves in reference to group norms carefully formulated by psychiatrists and upheld by hospital attendants. The aim of psychiatry thus became that of helping the individual to bring his feelings into the realm of consensually validated information about the self. The true self, the composite of one's genuine desires, was to become that which is socially valued. ll Because experience showed that psychiatrists were most successful when they enabled the patient to know himself as his group knew him, the role of psychiatry had to be broadened. While psychiatry did not have to act directly on the individual patient (he was scarcely an individual anyway), it now had to create the "inter personal field" that would induce the patient to adjust. The degree of his adjustment to the norms of this field-a field to be gradually established by psychiatry-was an index to his mental health. 12 "As your skill increases," Sullivan lectured a group of aspiring psychiatrists, "you will be able to validate inferences, your provisional hypotheses about the events, by influencing the interpersonal field." 13 The approach by which Sullivan sought to lead his patients 142 Psychiatry and Responsibility back to health was to open "really revolutionary vistas of guided personality change" for those who were eager to come to grips with broade;r social issues.l4 Thus, Kurt Lewin's generous im pulses, in particular his faith in fraternalistic democracy, led him to set up and manipulate groups, for he too perceived how individual perception and behavior are socially conditioned. 15 He experimentally demonstrated-on a scale larger than Sullivan's but immeasurably smaller than more adventurous social re formers might hope for-that "ideology cannot be changed with out changing the actual distribution of power within a group." 16 He saw that when the experimenter is empowered to introduce the kind of relationships that his hypothesis specifies, individuals can be made to behave. Within the group that gives behavior its psychological significance, so Lewin could report during the Second World War,17 the seemingly unpleasant experience can be made palatable: "Under ordinary circumstances an individual will strongly resist an order ... to eat three dozen unsalted soda crackers. As 'subjects' in an experiment, on the other hand, in dividuals were found ready to 'take it' without either hesitation or resistance." Given a functional social system, its components can be counted on to feel constrained to play their assigned roles.

I t should go without saying that social psychologists share a profound distaste for the kind of social system within which a whipper, as in Kafka's Trial} whips because it is his function to whip. Yet they know their preferences to be irrelevant. They are scientifically concerned, after all, not with human purposes, but with how men actually behave under varying conditions. Under standing man's behavior, they hope to be in a position, in the words of Abram Kardiner, to "furnish a critique of social forms in order to enable us to predict their stability." 18 They seek to confirm the correlations that will amplify our capacity to direct the energy of individuals toward productive ends. Knowing what constitutes social failure, they provide the formulas for adjusting to "success." 19 As they correlate a personality profile, ethnic background, economic status, social class, and sexual behavior with future "well-being:' with "success" in college, marriage, Society as Crucible 143 and life, with "adjustment" to well accredited ideals, the guid ance and reform of individuals can confidently proceed on a politics-transcending, scientific basis.

Harold D. Lasswell anticipated, as early as the 1930's, the demotion of politics as a method for allocating individual in terests. 20 He recom.m.ended a m.ethod that would bring the irra tional basis of social conflict out into the open. He expected public administrators and social scientists to be trained to practice what he candidly called "preventive politics." This would sup press the politician's pathological drive for power at the source by curing the social diseases that nourish it. And it would move the rest of us efficiently toward the ends that we, once straightened out, wish for in any case. Following the shock of the Second World War-and some of Lasswell's clues-Bruce Lannes Smith felt moved to collect information on a group he. identified as the world's major propagandists. His data enabled him to show; among other things, that their fathers were very active politically or professionally, or else that they had been exposed to symbols of authority. From this, Smith concluded that the destructive impulses of a propagandist like Goebbels will be frustrated when a specifiable environment is constructed-presumably one without active fathers or authority symbols. What difficulties there were to taking such steps existed because "we still move dimly in the Dawn Age of social integration." 21 In 1948, James G. Miller sought to help us move into the bright noonday of social integration by proposing that we im prove our knowledge of the psychology of man-power utilization.

He wrote: Since many of the specialties required for a future war would be in engineering, scientific, and professional areas, preparation of qualified personnel for the event of war might well become a national educa tional program to exploit our country's human resources .... It might well be in order to keep the nation prepared [by] making higher education available to every person capable of receiving it, so that we may continue to have a thoroughly prepared nation that will conse quently be much more powerful. ...

144 Psychiatry and Responsibility If we can make an analysis of the profile of psychological and physical requirements for certain types of jobs and ways of life and a similar analysis of the profile of personality and physique of each of our citizens, we will have a scientific basis on which to match our popUla tion with the jobs which need to be done. 22 This approach to the mass of men, Miller hoped, would also be used to select their leaders-though, admittedly, "it will be some time before we shall be able to apply such selection to congress men and presidents." Miller's remarks were to be sharpened by the unabated sense of social crisis and urgency in the late 1950's. Today, challenged by the "crisis" of American education and certain that some thing is wrong with American "character," educational adminis trators are steadily improving their skill in designing artificial competitive situations to reveal the student's capacity to conform to the prevailing definition of academic success. The test for which the prospective college student can be coached (because the test is merely a game) is being improved on by trials that, far from being games, are authentic intimations of the life to come. In these trials, only the fully educated, and not the par tially coached, can be expected to excel. They will be unable to hide their flaws and thus, when they attain passing scores, must be far better risks than the hopeful organization men whom William H. Whyte, Jr., has invited to cheat on employment tests.

And as we are confronted by the economic and social need to produce college graduates, we become duty-bound to act on the ever more accurate prediction that certain identifiable high school students are likely to be proficient in college. What goes for school, in particular the school attached to the economy, goes for one's entire occupational and professional life. The methods for the screening of ass personnel during wartime can be employed for the selection of eighteen-year-old "trainee executives" in peacetime. 23 The models for the well-functioning infantry platoon contain "lessons for management." 24 Having analyzed what is wanted, the researcher is· ready, as Alex Inkeles has pointed out, to specify "the distinctive personality characSociety as CrucibIe 145 teristics that should influence recruitment. . . ." As an out standing example of this type of research, Inkeles has cited G. E.

Swanson's study of the differences between the job of the editorial and the sports writer: Basing himself on the theory earlier developed by Lasswell and Rosten, Swanson predicted that as against the sports writers, the editorialists would be markedly more phallic-aspiring, anal-expulsive and oral passive in character .... This study is but one of a series which suggest that we have begun to break ground in a great unexploited field of study of the relation of character types to different aspects of social structure and the functioning of social systems.25 When acted on, such studies cannot help but reduce society's failures. To be sure, they extend the range of the manipulatable; but they also guarantee that individuals play functional roles. They embody no values and can, in principle, be used to achieve any objective whatever. 26 As a probing and sensitive psychology systematically eliminates life's bumps and detours, only unbelievers with a perverse pas sion for catastrophe will resist. After all, a behavioristic thera peutics, so the argument goes, merely makes certain that in our social system no round pegs will move toward square holes, that those who have skill will really slide into positions demanding skill. The science of psychology merely correlates past perform ance with future behavior, using the fullest available history of an individual as index. It makes his future behavior a function of his past, his environment, his reflexes. At the same time, it may, because it is relentlessly watchful, observe and record that he happens to misbehave-spitefully, resentfully, or accidentally doing the unexpected, failing to follow his natural inclinations.

In that case, he might be left alone as harmless, depending, of course, on how critical the crisis we face. But it must, in any case, refine its operating procedures, so that at least his successors win be the duly integrated, well-behaving components of the function ing, hierarchically organized social system.27 146 Psychiatry and Responsibility III Before such a loss of identity within a well-running social system is universalized, before we are all haunted by the pos sibility of being found out, we should remind ourselves that power, including the power to move men, is not unjustly granted because it can, hypothetically, be carried to a logical extreme. The question is not what is possible, but what, under contemporary conditions, i~ likely. Furthermore, power is surely a neutral thing. Whether or not it is abused-it seems too obvious to need stating -depends on the ends sought. We should remember that Chief Justice Marshall's dictum that the power to tax is the power to destroy was properly put in its place by Justice Holmes' taunt that the power to tax is not the power to destroy "as long as this Court sits." We can draw the line.

Yet-and the voice which asks is hard to still-precisely, who are "we"? And, whoever "we" turns out to be, what gives those who draw the line their moral authority? The basis for legitimacy has traditionally been the soundness of our political institutions. Power, at least in liberal-democratic theory, is legitimate when the decisions that call for its exercise are arrived at politically, that is, when the institutions that compel policy-makers to take continuous account of the groups affected by their decisions are in good working order. What is in doubt today is the viability of these traditional institutions. Be cause we have not geared them to the demands of modern in dustrial society, the crucial decisions determining the rhythm and the direction of our work and our leisure tend to be resolved "scientifically" rather than politically. We can see the reasons for the decline of politics and the ascension of' "science" in (1) the character of modern industrialism and bureaucracy (which we seem to consider as irrevocably "given"

without specifying who has made the gift), (2) the nature of modern warfare, and (3) the entry of new groups into politics. These forces have resulted in the decline of legislative assem blies, while lending authority to an instrumental, predictive Society as Crucible 147 science. We today "administer" the political and economic markets in which, during an earlier age, the more privileged orders had made their choices. We permit our choices to be framed by some holy abstraction: the Facts, the Logic of the Situation, the Needs o~ the Economy, or the Dynamism of Industrialism. We leave decisions, must leave decisions, up to qualified adminis trators, experts, and planners-,-those with the knowledge to anticipate· the consequences of behavior. They, our true policy scientists, are invited to make adjustments and produce recon ciliations. This does not mean, however, that no one makes decisions within the depoliticalized realm. Resources continue to be dis tributed; a surplus continues to be allocated; rewards continue to be bestowed. In so far, then, as we do not dispense with dis criminatory action, inequalities remain. But these may be based on a new "rational" basis: the highly variegated skill-demands of the industrial order. An ideal bureaucracy, Max Weber speculated some time ago, insists that older ways of discrimination be re placed; recruitment and promotion, he saw, are based, not on class, but on ability teo perform. Inequalities derived from out acceptance of the "false" distinctions of class, race, color, and sex give way to new inequalities based on aptitude and skill that is, natural inequalities. And these are best specified, of course, by a unified natural science of sociology, psychology, and physiology.

Such a science becomes essential, as Hannah Arendt has bril liantly suggested,28t~ gain knowledge of an adjusted, well behaved society. Th~ proper approach to understanding a society in which purposive action is reduced to non purposive behavior is precisely a naturalistic behaviorism. Hence, in so far as our society is in fact depoliticalized, we should expect sociologists, as opposed to political scientists, to provide us with the most telling accounts. 29 In so doing, they are not, it would appear, making history; they are merely making it explicable. They are facing up to what Edward Shils has seen as the end of ideology.30 They are signaling the invasion of an industrial bureaucracy and a technological discipline into all significant spheres of human 148 Psychiatry and Responsibiltty life. Giving us the straight facts, they are depicting a prevailing limitation of political alternatives.

As democrats, liberals, and humanists, however, they face a dilemma, for it is not possible to stand aloof from a depoliticalized society, fully report on its inner compulsions, and yet not con tribute to its perpetuation. The sociologist who remains con sistently hypothetical and relativistic is constrained to accept as legitimate what happens to exist.~l The most objective of analyses, especially these,become immediately useful to society, obliterat ing the distinction between social action and social study.32 w. Lloyd Warner's insight into the life of Yankee City becomes instantaneously valuable to the merchandiser of industrial prod ucts; the scientific study of The Ineffective Soldier can be frankly subtitled "Lessons for Management and the Nation." The conclusions of analysis feed the very economic and social arrange ments that tnake a naturalistic approach relevant in the first place. All accounts turn into affirmation as even moral dissenters are welcomed because they enable the system to take due account of its "\",eaknessesand thereby to gain in vitality.

The decisions to engage publicly in the naturalistic treatment of society could be traditionally validated only in reference to standards arrived at by a philosophical dialogue or by political techniques. These, and these alone, gave authority, for they assured the tentativeness of all policy. They tolerated no con clusive settlements in the public sphere, frustrating every effort to impose some final rationality on society. They were deemed to precede, and hence con trol, romantic passions in all fields of human activity, including the field of empirical science. Today, however, we are not succeeding in subjecting all public action-whether it be that of the industrialist, the scientist, or the public administrator-to political controls. Our problem, as should be evident, is to involve all policy-makers in the political process. But what institution is available for doing so? How can we curb those determined to act on their understanding of the nature of social justice or communal health? The two pre-eminent institutions Tocqueville celebrated because they might be a bulwark first to the rise of the apathetic masses and then to CaesarSociety as Crucible 149 ism have been thoroughly transformed by technology: federalism is obsolescent in all but name, and our pluralistic system of com petitive voluntary associations has been overshadowed. Govern ment by nationwide, large-scale associations is beginning.to eclipse decentralized, voluntaristic government-and there are few signs that we are meeting the challenge by making our public govern ment unified, strong, and accountable in response. The result is that we permit the public realm to be administered by those who serve a depoliticalized technological order, obeying the supposed functional imperatives of industrial. development.

Commenting on recent methodological trends, Ronald Lippitt has wondered "how hopeful we can be about getting access, for manipulation and measurement, to many of the complex variables of group functioning and individual relationships to the group." 3~ He sympathetically concluded that: We find many groups of all types who are dissatisfied with their present way of functioning. If we are able to offer them a "change-service" in the direction of better functioning, they are ready to share in the re search enterprise to the extent of making controlled experimental designs in the field possible·and of cooperating in all manner of meas urements. At the present moment we have an overabundance of or ganizations, institutions, and groups asking to serve as subjects for field experiments. If Lippitt is correct, social psychologists are experiencing no difficulty in expanding their field of operations. When they detect that the worker is alienated from human purposes, when they diagnose widespread anomy (finding the symptoms in the sluggish performance of the work force), they are called on to design the myths that make the worker cooperate in the task of survival and that protect him against the temptations of liberty.

They thus produce unity, cohesion, and centralization-but not within a tradition of civility and of politics. As the institutions that might keep them in check wither away, and as technology is making us ever more affluent, they govern by default. Thus, utopian thinking, once the property of resentful political groups, 150 Psychiatry and Responsibility is assigned to psychologists and sociologists. It is they who con struct our models for the healthy society.34 And to the extent that their models, in the tradition of the classic utopia, discrimi .. nate against change and conflict, they further reinforce the decline of politics. We have scarcely any cause to anticipate a sustained interest in subjecting social diagnosticians and therapists to control-least of all when they are self-effacing professional scientists. We are unlikely to be concerned not merely because of the sheer com plications introduced by an expert-run technology but also because of the undeniable fact that technology does make life less tedious and more pleasant.

Nor are we likely to be concerned about the impact of the new behaviorism when we assume that "society" has defined what constitutes social health, when we believe that the ends of life toward which we are being moved have been consensually given, and are, as such, simply understood. This notion alone explains the innocent simplicity with which psychologists can allow them selves to speak of the universal desire for self-fulfillment and to applaud all growth toward an undefined freedom. We all agree, B. F. Skinner has intoned,35 that "health is better than illness, wisdom better than ignorance, love better than hate, and pro ductive energy better than neurotic sloth." Supported by the con viction that political groups do not (or no longer should) struggle to make their conflicting definitions of health, wisdom, love, and productivity prevail, behavioral scientists can feel free to insist that their science allows us to plan intelligently for un contested ends. Relying on a unanimous acceptance of social goals, characterizing resistance as perverse, they can cheer one another on to ever renewed efforts. What is more, their conviction about the absence of actual political conflict can slowly be given a factual foundation. For when a behaviorist technology operates with self-confidence because it assumes agreement on ends, it can so concentrate on the perfection of the means as to eliminate the possibility that men will trouble themselves to redefine ends.

Thus, it helps to create the very absence of conflict that it assumes to exist.

Society as Crucible 151 The ascendancy of an unchecked behaviorism is further facili tated by the assumption that no matter how much its practitioners learn to analyze, examine, and "understand," all will turn out for the best. History, at least American history, is kindly. What science institutes by its therapeutic and prophylactic treatment of society will surely be in the long-run interest of society itself. Modern social psychology, at least where it is vigorously experi mental, will ineluctably vindicate the values of liberal democracy. Its every advance reaffirms our values. Why then should Americans resist it? No court that sits, no political tribunal mediating be tween competing claims for justice, can escape being swallowed by the higher rationalism. We shall be found out and, having been understood, absorbed. We shall be classified by our natural capacities, laboring and resting in a hierarchial society within which we have been guided to proper places. What is more, we can acquiesce: our hunger is satisfied. For good or ill, we are appeased within the public arena by autonomous experts who have gained understanding, if not of the nature, then of the behavior of man.

Their credentials for action, furnished by Kant, were initially carried, we may now remember, only by the artist confined to the fringes of civil society. If the artist now moves to the center, it is (1) because we are hard put to assert the primacy of the political, and (2) because we have pushed aside, within scientific discourse, once meaningful distinctions. The former calls for vigorous and responsible public action. The latter calls for re thinking the nature of the quest to enhance understanding. IV A seemingly imperturbable technology, an uncriticized public consensus, a lagging political apparatus, a faith in the beneficence of the application of scientific techniques-these seem to make for a deference to a self-vindicating and self-validating science of social psychology. Science itself appears to be locked into this system of forces so that its every advance nourishes the very order that threatens human freedom. Ignoring, for the moment, 152 Psychiatryand Responsibility the ominous thrust of history, which, at least in my view, calls for public action to restore politics to its high estate,36 what is it we might do to extricate science? How can we keep every scientific gain in understanding from making its unwitting contribution to the loss of personal identity?

We shall have to differentiate again between the quest for speculative knowledge for its own sake and the quest for practical knowledge for the sake of action. Having reintroduced this clas sical distinction, we can properly proceed to inhibit a practical science of means. When a behaviorist social psychology conceives of itself as a problem-solving discipline, it cannot be permitted to operate autonomously. When it presumes to resolve conflict and establish harmony, when it presumes to act on the phenomena under investigation, it must be held in check by goals that have been politically formulated. The danger is that without such a check, a naturalistic science of psychology will actually succeed in its ,value-neutral aspirations. It will systematically destroy the realm within which men, unfulfilled, apprehend their goods and engage in politics to mediate between them. It will do so because the material on which it operates is pliable. While the nature known to the physicist or the chemist will not bend when the technician puts hypotheses to the test, our ideas of what is val uable are far from firm. They can be made to shrivel and vanish altogether.

There may, indeed, be times when we must manipulate the beliefs of men. But this can be justifiable only in the gravest of emergencies, only after a political diagnosis of a state of emer gency has been made. Since all empirical scientists, including social scientists, have a vested interest in crisis situations, arti ficially creating them for testing purposes when they do not naturally exist, their pronouncements about our current "condi tion" should always invite the closest scrutiny. We should make doubly sure that their prescriptions rest on scrupulously accurate observation when they presume to inform us, as Abram Kardiner has,37 that the reform of society is imperative because of an alarming increase in male homosexuality, schizophrenia, juvenile delinquency, and the egocentric techniques of marriage partners.

Society as Crucible 153 While the speedy elimination of racial conflict, labor-manage ment violence, or schizophrenia is certainly desirable, produc tivity, peace, and even health all remain debatable goods. In a liberal society, consensus on them will always be limited by the variety of our visions and loyalties. Only the institution of politics and a science doing justice to both unique and patterned phenomena can preserve this variety. They preserve the capacity of an opposition to oppose, to argue, and thus to keep the future open. They protect us from being reduced and humiliated, from being identified and understood once and for all. For us, in our present stage of development when we are still· denied final knowledge· of our condition, they are our greatest public good. NOTES 1. One might, parenthetically, gain understanding of the new function of the audience by reflecting on both Mario's debased role in Thomas Mann's "Mario and the Magician" (1930) and on the role more recently sketched out for problem children therapeutically exposed to the puppet theater. (See A. G. Woltmann, "Puppetry as a Means of Psycho therapy," Encyclopedia of Child Guidance [New York: Philosophical Library, 1943]).

2. See especially the chapter entitled "Psychology and Epistemology" in Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951). 3. David Dressler, Practice and Theory of Probation and Parole (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), p. 205. 4. The New Criminology: A Consideration of the Chemical Causation of Abnormal Behavior (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928). 5. Verbrechen als Schicksal (Leipzig: Georg Thieme, 1929). 6. Varieties of Delinquent Youth (New York: Harper & Bros., 1949). 7. Physique and Delinquency (New York: Harper & Bros., 1956). See also their Criminal Careers in Retrospect (New York: Commonwealth Fund, 1942). 8. See especially George B. VoId, Theoretical Criminology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958). 9. Op. cit., p. 110. 10. Harry Stack Sullivan, IISocio-PsychiatricResearch," American Journal of Psychiatry, X (May, 1931), 977-91, 984.

11. See, in this connection, Nelson N. Foote, Hldentification as the Basis for a Theory of Motivation," American Sociological Review, XVI (February, 1951), 14-21, and "Discussion" by Reinhard Bendix, p. 22.

154 Psychiatry and Responsibility 12. The Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan, ed. Patrick Mullahy (New York: Hermitage House, 1952), p. 203. 13. Sullivan, "The Study of Psychiatry," Psychiatry, X (November, 1947), 355-71, 358. 14. Leonard S. Cottrell and Nelson N. Foote, "Sullivan's Contributions to Social Psychology," The Contributions of Harry Stack Sullivan, p. 193. 15. See Gordon W. Allport's introduction to Lewin's Resolving Social Con flicts (New York: Harper & Bros., 1948), p. vii. See also Ernst Cassirer, "The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, V (September, 1944), 1-35. 16. Kurt Lewin et al., liThe Practicality of Democracy," Human Nature and Enduring Peace, ed. Gardner Murphy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1945), p. 312. 17. "Time Perspective and Morale," Civilian Morale, ed. Goodwin Watson (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), pp. 48-70, 52-53.

18. The Psychological Frontiers of Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1945), p. 2; see also The Individual and His Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), p. xiii. According to Ralph Linton, a science of anthropology will properly seek "to ascertain the processes and continuities involved in the phenomena with which it deals with a view to the prediction of events and ultimately their control." ("The Scope and Aim of Anthropology," The Science of Man in the World Crisis, ed. Linton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1945], pp. 3 18, 17.) 19. See Paul Horst et al., The Predicting of Human Adjustment: A Survey of Logical Problems and Research Techniques, with Illustrative Applica tion to Problems of Vocational Selection, School Success, Marriage, and Crime (New York: Social Science Research Council, 1941). For a useful but extravagant summary of verified manipulative knowledge in social psychology, see Carl R. Rogers, "Implications of Recent Advances in Prediction and Control of Behavior," Outside Readings in Psychology, eds. Eugene L. Hartley and Ruth E. Hartley (New York: Crowell Co., 1957), pp. 3-10.

20. See Psychopathology and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930), especially pp. 202-203. 21. Bruce Lannes Smith, "The Political Communication Specialist of our Times," Propaganda, Communication, and Public Opinion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), pp. 31-73, 73. 22. "Psychological Approaches to the Prevention of War," Current Trends in Social Psychology, Wayne Dennis et ale (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948), pp. 274-88, 291-93. 23. OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men (New York: Rinehart, 1948); Ronald Taft, "Use of the 'Group Situation Observation' Method in the Selection of Trainee Executives," Readings in Experimental Industrial Psychology, ed. Milton L. Blum (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1952), pp. 32-37. 24. Eli Ginzberg et al., The Ineffective Soldier: Lessons for Management and the Nation, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).

Society as Crucible 155 25. Alex lnkeles, "Psychoanalysis and Sociology," Psychoanalysis, Scientific Method, and Philosophy, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York University Press, 1959), pp. 117-29, 121; for Swanson's study, see "Agita tion through the Press," Public Opinion Quarterly, XX (Summer, 1956), 441-56. 26. Else Frenkel-Brunswik has called attention to the research of E. R. Jaensch, a Nazi psychologist, who described the very personality type that the authors of The A uthoritarian Personality (1950) had character ized as prejudiced and intolerant of ambiguity-but he regarded it as praiseworthy. ("Further Explorations by a Contributor," Studies in the Scope and Method of tiThe Authoritarian Personality," eds. Richard Christie and Marie jahoda [Glencoe: Free Press, 1954], pp. 226-75, 252.) 27. F. A. Hayek has recently asked us to consider what would happen if only what is agreed to be the best available knowledge were to be used in action. "If all attempts that seemed wasteful in the light of generally accepted knowledge were prohibited and only such questions asked, or such experiments tried, as seemed significant in the light of ruling opinion, mankind might well reach a point where its knowledge en abled it to predict the consequences of all conventional actions and to avoid all disappointment or failure. Man would then seem to have subjected his surroundings to his reason, for he would attempt only those things which were totally predictable in their results." Because behavior would then be made to conform to the existing state of knowledge, "there would no occasion for new knowledge to appear."

(The Constitution of Liberty [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960], pp. 37-38.) 28. The I-Iuman Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp.43-44. 29. See especially the works of Bendix, Selznick, Riesman, Shils, Mills, Bell, and Lipset. 30. He was reporting on a 1955 conference on "The Future of Freedom" in Encounter, V (November, 1955), 52-8. 31. In Seymour Martin Lipset's definition, the language is soft but the point is clear: "Legitimacy involves the capacity of the system to en gender and maintain the belief that the existing political institutions are the most appropriate ones for society." (Political l\lan [New York: Doubleday & Co., 1960], p. 76.) 32. The present-day operations of the press offer a vivid parallel: In order to sustain mass circulation, Life magazine, for example, stages and directs SOlne of the very news events on which it makes its objective reports. The fullest report, of course, can be made when journalists gain complete control of a news situation, for then they have indeed total knowledge of all its elements.

33. "A Program of Experimentation on Group Functioning and Group Productivity," Current Trends in Social Psychology, Wayne Dennis et ale (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1948), pp. 14-49, 47. 34. For a searching critique, see Rene J. Dubos, "Medical Utopias," Daedalus, LXXXVIII (SumIner, 1959), 410-24.

156 Psychiatry and Responsibility 35. "Freedom and the Control of Men," A merican Scholar, XXV (Winter, 1956), 47-65, 5L 36. I seek to deal with problems of public action in The Decline of Ameri can Pluralism (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1961). 37. "Social and Cultural Implications of Psychoanalysis," Psychoanalysis and Scientific Method, ed. Sidney Hook (New York: New York Uni versity Press, 1959), pp. 81-103.