Comments on Sagan

I bring an historian’s mindset to the issues Eli Sagan raises, which means that my first reaction to the notion of general evolutionary development is a negative one since as a concept, as Eli Sagan knows, it has fallen into disfavor for much of the last sixty years—perhaps even since the devastation of 1914-18 dealt the notion of perpetual progress a devastating blow.

But from what my freshman Western Civilization II students say in their answers to the question, “What Is Modern?” you would never know this is the consensus among historians. Mostly, my students elaborate on how good things are by noting how much “progress” we have made, delineating all the technological innovations we enjoy—the cell phones and mini-computer playthings they are continuously fondling—until they are brought up short when I mention Hiroshima and the Holocaust, which their denial systems never let them see.

I fully recognize my negative knee-jerk reaction to the notion of evolutionary development is a biased remnant of my graduate school days. We all learned that there were at least two theories which should never be mentioned in class: “The Whig Interpretation of History,” the notion that there’s been an inevitable advancement of humankind through constitutional government, personal freedom, and scientific advancement; and the related but separate social evolutionary theory associated with the Idea of Progress. Neither would get you through graduate school.

An opposite two-part dogma was drummed into our heads instead: that each historical event is utterly unique; and that there are no overall patterns in human development. I do not think it is much different today in graduate history departments or among historians generally.

As a result of these decades-old prejudices I come to Eli Sagan’s paper with the ingrained distrust of things evolutionary learned as a

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1960’s graduate student. This allows me to understand the prejudice of my fellow historians when they first encountered deMause’s “Evolution of Childhood” essay over thirty years ago, or encounter it for the first time today. Their criticisms then and now have little to do with the deMause essay’s intrinsic scholarly merits which many Establishment historians dismiss out of hand as an example of the Whig Interpretation of History, an unfair burden deMause’s essay has had to carry ever since it was first published.

I hope in my comments below not to make the same mistake with Eli’s deeply felt, cogently argued, and provocative paper.

Despite what I was told in graduate school, I am not at all averse to the project he has in mind for us. Indeed, in the early 1980’s I used the notion of progressive psychic integration as a focal point for a paper on early German nationalism where I argued that the ability of Europeans to finally achieve a more integrated sense of self allowed them, beginning around 1800, to transform their long-standing parochial and tribal identities into larger national identities. Implicitly, this ability showed a pattern of an earlier and greater integration in Europe moving from west to east which, again implicitly, corresponded to deMause’s findings on the history of childcare—better care in western Europe and America, worse as one moved eastward—and hence improving stages of psychic integration in the west where nationalism first emerged.

As I began to read farther in Eli’s paper my immediate association was to Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, made famous for its development of the notion of paradigm shifts. As a psychoanalytic anthropologist, he brings in the general notion that greater psychic energy needs to be expended to cause such paradigm shifts in whatever area we are talking about. It is, I think, an extraordinarily helpful way to think about things and should be considered in general as an important perspective in intellectual, social, and cultural history.

I would have liked to hear some reference somewhere along the line to Julian Jaynes’s notion of the bi-cameral mind, which I am hopeful Eli will explain to me someday.

I thought next about Hegel’s place in this discussion. Hegel seems to have gone missing. I expected the Dialectical Logic, with its notion of the progressive unfolding of God’s mind through history, to show up somewhere down the road, but I suppose that Hegel was implic-

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itly covered by Marx and Engels.

Eli’s invocation of Talcott Parsons (all these years associated in my mind almost exclusively with the Weber thesis on the Protestant origins of capitalism), has made me want to revisit Parsons in a new way. Eli makes a good case for his significance, and for Robert Bellah, unfortunately known to me up till now only through an occasional letter to The New York Review of Books. I’ve got some serious homework to do.

Eli’s introduction of the Renaissance-Reformation nexus seems to me apt and important. It is a traditional problem. Did the Renaissance create the Reformation? Was the Reformation a reaction against the Renaissance? Was it both? What, exactly, is the psychic advantage of Protestantism? Was it not regressive, a typical purity crusade against the secular modernity of the Renaissance? To think it is less punishing and more loving than Catholicism—and I am not sure Eli is saying this—is to ignore the harsh demands of Calvinism and the punishing thrust of the Puritans.

His phrase “iron-bound logic” made me a bit uneasy until it was concretized by the excellent example of how stages cannot be jumped—that is, that leaps from post-puberty to adulthood (skipping adolescence) just cannot be made. It makes perfect sense, but then I wonder about the applicability of the metaphor itself. Does it in any way imply the organic fallacy applied to society—America was born in 1776, went through its infancy, grew up in the nineteenth century, became a young adult in the early twentieth century, etc., etc.—or, alternately, the statement sometimes heard in Congress that Cuba is a cancer, and so on, which I am uneasy about given the well-known outcomes of organic fantasies in Nazi Germany and other totalitarian states. I wonder additionally about the fact that, until about 1900, adolescence conceptually did not exist. Yes, people went through it anyway, but did they really? And exactly how did they? And what does our society’s extension of the adolescent moratorium well into young adulthood tell us about irresponsible permissiveness masquerading as helping mode parenting? Some small bones to pick, but I suggest the argument goes on.

I am happy to say I am in full accord with Sagan’s work At the Dawn of Tyranny. I have been using the concept of movement from primitive pre-literate society to civilization via the intermediate stage of complex culture as part of my Western Civilization I classes ever since

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Eli’s work first convinced me 25 years ago. It dovetails nicely with the omnipresent Neolithic Revolution identified in all the college texts.

His clarifications that there is no imperative for these cultures to evolve, that some are frozen for millennia in the same patterns, and that numerous regressions are possible are all vital points that disarm the caricature advanced by critics that evolutionary theory assumes inevitable ever-upward trends, and are crucial points that need to be made over and over.

As to the great question of moral progress, I return in my simpleminded way to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. As I teach my psychohistory classes, the engine that drives the observable progressive renunciation of impulse may very well be deMause’s great notion of improved parenting eventually producing a sea-change in behavior with the periodic emergence of a new psycho-class, one with more empathy, more understanding, and greater impulse control as a result of incremental improvements in more empathic parenting. My students respond positively to the obvious illustration that there is an enormous difference between the way co-eds dress in American colleges and universities and the way women dress under the Taliban, a gap that despite the too frequent existence of date rape and sexual harassment in our world, shows how far modernity has moved toward controlling sexual impulses in western civilization.

On the other hand (and maybe I am too close to the subject), I have spent 30 years studying the causes and consequences of the Second World War and trying to make sense of the origins of Nazi evil. That old dilemma—If there is so much progress why is the 20^th century the bloodiest century in history?—keeps nagging at me and does not seem so easily answered by the all-to-easy introduction of the theme of regression from the threats of modernity, pleasure seeking, and improved psychic integration.

Historians, even those sympathetic to psychological approaches, object to Lloyd deMause’s rejection of external structural influence, the dogmatic insistence that it is not “out there” until it is first “in here.” It makes sense in a certain way that people turn to Christianity or begin reading Dr. Spock’s childrearing manual when their psyches are ready for them, but it is enormously destructive to the historical credibility of deMause’s evolutionary model, and references to it, to say that is all there is

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to it. To insist that institutions play no conditioning or socializing roles in history is, to me, simply off the mark and takes history out of the equation.

The same is true with trauma, which I look for but find missing in Sagan’s presentation. The question is how does the cannibal “get over” the trauma of cannibalism to move to the anal headhunting stage? (It is Eli’s “Engine of Change.”) How does it work, exactly? To be convinced, historians will have to be shown all the details. Psychic evolution can be seen, but how can the engine of improved parenting be proven since the anthropological literature by and large was not asking the necessary psychological questions when those participant observers were out there among the Ik mountain people of Uganda.

Does a historical trauma—say World War II—constitute only a temporary setback? Does it linger on? It is hard to imagine that the traumatic consequences of the Holocaust and Hiroshima are only temporary. I wonder about their future as indelible traumas inter-generationally transmitted.

Unless I misunderstand the argument, I wonder about the assertion that human sacrifice disappears. Did it not go on in symbolic ways at various times in history, even recent history, when individuals and groups and psycho-classes, even countries, were thrown to the wolves?

I think Eli makes a good point about triumphant capitalism discrediting Marxism and thereby discrediting evolutionary theory by association. However, I wonder why the “triumphalist” fantasy at the end of the Cold War—that is, Reagan won it, capitalism has proven itself the best system, and so forth—did not counteract the dogmatic rejection of evolutionary theory in the long run by reinvigorating the evolutionary model. For a time I thought it did, as we bought the group fantasy in the 1990’s of a benevolent capitalism spreading from the U.S. across the globe inevitably bringing with it integrity, moral righteousness, and corporate transparency, until it all disappeared along with the Peace Dividend. It is not so much that Bush and the Vulcans missed the boat, it is that they unleashed an immoral, unfettered super-capitalism, harnessed to an American Empire which has proven to be about as ugly as any in history. Yes, regressions occur and need to be explained. But it is hard for me intellectually and emotionally for me to hold on to an evolutionary theory given our immediate circumstances in 2008, even though one can

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marvel at the progress which seems to be demonstrated with the election of America’s first African-American president.

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