All social institutions, all cultures, all religions and philosophies, all progress, asserts Fromm, are motivated by man’s need to escape the terrifying sense of helplessness and aloneness to which his reason condemns him.
The necessity to find ever-new solutions for the contradictions in his existence, to find ever-higher forms of unity with nature, his fellowmen and himself, is the source of all psychic forces which motivate man. . . .u
In Man for Himself, Fromm states that only through “reason, productiveness and love” can man solve the problem of his “separateness” and achieve a “new union” with the world around him. Fromm’s claim to be an advocate of reason is disingenuous, to say the least. He speaks of reason and love as being “only two different forms of comprehending the world.”12 As if this were not an unequivocal proof of his mysticism, he goes on to speak, in The Art of Loving, of the “paradoxical logic” of Eastern religions, which, he tells us approvingly, is not encumbered by the Aristotelian law of contradiction and which teaches that “man can perceive reality only in contradictions.”13 (Hegel and Marx, he asserts—correctly—belong to his “paradoxical” epistemologi-cal line.) His discussion of what he means by “productiveness” is scarcely more gratifying.
In The Art of Loving, written some years after Man for Himself, he declares that reason and productive work, though certainly important, provide only partial and, by themselves, very unsatisfactory solutions: the “unity” they achieve is “not interpersonal,” and the “desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in man.”14 Fromm pulls an unexplained switch at this point. What began as a problem between man and nature is now to be solved (in some unspecified manner) by human “togetherness.” One is not surprised; in reading Fromm, this is the sort of pronouncement for which one is waiting—there is a sense of inevitability about it. Love and love alone, he tells us with wonderful originality, can allay man’s terror—”Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.””
Only through “relating” oneself positively to others, only through feeling “care and responsibility” for them—while preserving one’s personal integrity, he adds somewhat mysteriously—can man establish new ties, a new union, that will release him from alienated aloneness.
The cat is now ready to be let fully out of the bag. The preceding is Fromm’s view of alienation as a metaphysical problem; its full meaning and implication become clear when one turns to his social-political analysis of alienation. In the context of the latter, one can see clearly what sort of “ties,” what sort of “union” arid what sort of “love” Fromm has in mind.
Every society, as a system of human relationships, may be evaluated by how well it satisfies man’s basic psychological needs, says Fromm—i.e., he explains, by die possibilities for love, relatedness, and the experience of personal identity which it offers man.
Capitalism, Fromm declares, has been disastrous in this regard: far from solving the problem of man’s alienation, it worsens it immeasurably in many respects. In liberating man from medieval, regulation and authority, in breaking the chains of ecclesiastical, economic and social tyranny, in destroying the “stability” of the feudal order, capitalism and individualism thrust upon man an unprecedented freedom that was “bound to create a deep feeling of insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.”16
Scratch a collectivist and you will usually find a medievalist. Fromm is not an exception. Like so many socialists, he is a glamorizer of the Middle Ages. He perfunctorily acknowledges the faults of that historical period—but in contrasting it with the capitalism that succeeded it, he is enchanted by what he regards as its virtues.
What characterizes medieval in contrast to modern society is its lack of individual freedom. . . . But although 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. A person was identical with his role in society; he was a peasant, an artisan, a knight, and not an individual who happened to have this or that occupation. The social order was conceived as a natural order, and being a definite part of it gave man a feeling of security and of belonging. 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. But within the limits of his social sphere the individual actually had much freedom to express his self in his work and in his emotional life. Although there was no individualism in the modern sense of the unrestricted choice between many possible ways of life (a freedom of choice which is largely abstract), there was a great deal of concrete individualism in real life.”
It is not uncommon to encounter this sort of perspective on the Middle Ages, among writers on alienation. But what makes the above passage especially shocking and offensive, in the case of Fromm, is that he repeatedly professes to be a lover of freedom and a valuer of human life.
The complete lack of control over any aspect of one’s existence, the ruthless suppression of intellectual freedom, the paralyzing restrictions on any form of individual initiative and independence—these are cardinal characteristics . of the Middle Ages. But all of this is swept aside by Fromm—along with the famines, the plagues, the exhausting labor from sunrise to sunset, the suffocating routine, the superstitious terror, the attacks of mass hysteria afflicting entire towns, the nightmare brutality of men’s dealings with one another, the use of legalized torture as a normal way of life—all of this is swept aside, so entranced is Fromm by the vision of a world in which men did not have to invent and compete, they had only to submit and obey.
Nowhere does he tell us what specifically the medieval man’s “concrete individualism” consisted of. One is morbidly curious to know what he would say.
With the collapse of medievalism and the emergence of a free-market society, Fromm declares, man was compelled to assume total responsibility for his own survival: he had to produce and to trade—he had to think and to judge—he had no authority to guide him, and nothing but his own ability to keep him in existence. No longer could he, by virtue of the class into which he was born, inherit his sense of personal identity: henceforward, he had to achieve it. This posed a devastating psychological problem for man, intensifying his basic feeling of isolation and separateness.
“It is true,” Fromm remarks, “that the capitalistic mode of production is conducive to political freedom, while any centrally planned social order is in danger of leading to political regimentation and eventually to dictatorship.”18 Capitalism, he further concedes, has proven itself superlatively capable of producing goods and of raising men’s material standard of living to undreamed-of heights. But a “sane society” must have more to offer man than political freedom and material well-being. Capitalism, Fromm insists, is destructive of man’s spirit. He offers several reasons for this charge, which are very revealing.
(1) Like Marx, Fromm decries the humiliating predicament of the worker who has to sell his services. Capitalism condemns the worker to experience himself, not as a man, but as a commodity, as a thing to be traded. Furthermore, since he is only a tiny part of a vast production process, since, for example, he does not build an entire automobile himself (and then drive home in it), but builds only a small part of it (the total being subsequently sold to some unknown, distant party), the worker feels alienated from the product of his own labor and, therefore, feels alienated from his own labor as such—unlike the artisan of the Middle Ages, whose labor could express the “full richness” of his personality.
It is an elementary fact of economics that specialization and exchange, under a division of labor, make a level of productivity possible which otherwise would not be remotely attainable. In pre-capitalist centuries, when a man’s economic well-being was limited by the goods he himself could produce with his own primitive tools, an unconscionable amount of labor was required to make or acquire the simplest necessities—and the general standard of living was appallingly low: human existence was a continual, exhausting struggle against imminent starvation. About half of the children born, perished before the age of ten. But with the development of the wages system under capitalism, the introduction of machinery and the opportunity for a man to sell his labor, life (to say nothing of an ever-increasing standard of material well-being) was made possible for millions who could have had no chance at survival in pre-capitalist economies. However, for Fromm and those who share his viewpoint, these considerations are, doubtless, too “materialistic.” To offer men a chance to enjoy an unprecedented material well-being, is, evidently, to sentence them to alienation; whereas to hold them down to the stagnant level of a medieval serf or guildsman, is to offer them spiritual fulfillment.