Regressive Modernism, Fear, and Fromm’s Escape from Freedom

The Western world faces a great danger from the regressive movement that a top international human rights official recently spoke strongly against. Said Raad al-Hussein is a diplomat from the Hashemite Jordanian royal house and, since last year, the United Nations (UN) High Commissioner for Human Rights. Surely, he has not expressed himself as undiplomatically in his entire professional life as he did in his speech at the security conference of Den Haag in early September 2016. He spoke of the Dutch politician Geert Wilders, saying that,

all of those like him…the populists, demagogues and political fantasists…. All seek in varying degrees to recover a past, halcyon and so pure in form,

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where sunlit fields are settled by peoples united by ethnicity or religion…living peacefully in isolation, pilots of their fate, free of crime, foreign influence and war. A past that most certainly, in reality, did not exist anywhere, ever (See the full speech at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/06/un-human-rights-high-commisioner-zeid-raad-al-husseinsHim-speech-reject-populist-bigots-in-full).

In order to leave no doubt, Al-Hussein provided the names of those he meant: Donald Trump, the Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, the Czech president Milos Zeman, the Austrian politician Norbert Hofer, the Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, French politician Madame Le Pen, the Brexit leader Nigel Farage, and also the terror militia Da’esh, or ISIS. In his excitement, he must have forgotten Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski. He, Al-Hussein, the diplomat continued, lived through the Balkan wars as a member of the UN peacekeeping force, in which he saw “wars so cruel, so devastating, which flowed from this same factory of deceit, bigotry and ethnic nationalism.”

It was surely not only anger, but also powerlessness and perplexity that drove the UN Human Rights Commissioner to this unusually undiplomatic statement. What is happening in this world? Why do so many people everywhere react so completely irrationally and follow such leaders? Why are so many ordinary individuals willing to throw the values of the enlightenment and humanity overboard? What can one do to understand and oppose this trend?

The social psychologist Erich Fromm in 1941 published his breakthrough Escape from Freedom, as a refugee from Nazi Germany. It appeared in German in Switzerland during 1945 with the title Fear of Freedom (note that this and all other German titles and terms have been translated into English). Presumably the American title, Escape from Freedom, better captures the content of the book today. At the end of the 1920s, Fromm had investigated the mentality and opinions of industrial and white-collar workers in Germany through interviews, and in exile—after the National Socialists came to power—formulated his concept of the authoritarian social character: authoritarianism, destructiveness, retreat, and adjustment. These were the main elements of Germany’s societal development that paved Hitler’s way to power (Erich Fromm and

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Wolfgang Bonß, Workers and White Color Workers on the Eve of the Third Reich: A Social Psychological Study, 1980).

Today we know about the devastating psychological effects of the Great Depression during the 1930s, that were all the more serious in Germany because of the currency inflation just a few years earlier. At least as important were the basic changes that began much earlier with the industrialization and the literal “transformation of the world” in the 19^th century (See Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World, 2014, an English edition). The steam engine, and later much more powerfully the harnessing of electricity, brought about transformations in economics and society that forced changes on many people, brought about totally different models for living and, because of their rapidity, asked too much in the way of adaptation of too many people. Industrial modernity and the unleashing of the markets induced fear, even if it was cushioned then by government social policy. These changes led to resistance because they threatened traditional values and the organization of society. Consequently, long before Hitler became prominent, there was a “young conservative” movement whose members believed in a “conservative revolution.” The movement wanted to overcome the contradictions and conflicts of modern society and the supposedly inept parliamentary democracies through an authoritarian system and folk nationalistic concepts.

History does not repeat itself, but if one compares today’s situation with that of the past, one finds all the elements that lead to fear of freedom.

The economic consequences and psychological effects of the subprime crisis of 2008 have not been overcome. The bursting of the housing bubble in the United States and in Spain threw millions of people into misery and brought the worldwide banking system to the brink of ruin. The resulting Euro and governmental debt crises are still with us. Central banks’ reduction of interest rates to almost zero and even below has curtailed people’s ability to save money, contradicting generations of values and norms of life in Western societies. It destroys planning for the future precisely when private savings are necessary for the later years in life. All this disturbs people profoundly and feeds fear.

In the meantime, there are two important currents: digitalization and globalization; they are equivalent in their dynamics to the First (steam engine) and Second (electricity) Industrial Revolu-

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tions. We know, or at least suspect, that they will overturn the industrial world as we know it. There is literally no economic activity that will not be affected by them. Even some highly qualified and well-paid jobs will disappear and the consequences will reach all the way into the upper middle class. This too creates fear. Those who have something to lose are afraid. Only fury remains for those who have already fallen off the proverbial cliff and lost everything. Trump and Farage fish in a cloudy lake of anxiety and raw emotion.

Next, there is hypercommunication. Because every human being can at any time and within seconds communicate with the entire world, the mass of information that everyone must sort out every day and determine what is important, relevant, and true or false is a singularly crippling demand. As a self-defense, proven knowledge is replaced by faith and ideology. Information is only accepted if it supports what the individual wants to believe. Social media thus primarily acts as agents of self-assurance. Information that could undermine this self-assurance will not even be acknowledged.

Hypermobility, in the harmless “democratic” version, means that travel to almost every point on earth is affordable for almost everybody. In the “fear inducing” version, it means human beings of the poor South can more easily reach the rich states of the North (that is, Western Europe and North America). What hypermobility and hypercommunication mean in combination has been shown in the past year during the so-called refugee crisis (in Europe); it would not have been so dramatic without these two factors.

Much of the fear of these latest refugees can be linked to their Islamic religion and identity. International terrorism has become the provenance of Islam. The images of 9/11 are still in all of our heads, just as we cannot ignore, in spite of our best efforts to repress it, the media-induced blood trail that Islamic terrorism has left in the last 15 years. Al Qaeda, ISIS, and company have provoked a populist reaction around the world. So now, archaic, violent Islam is wrongly seen as the “real” Islam. This approach is treasonous to the hundreds of millions of peaceful Muslims for whom religion is just as much a private affair as it is for most Christians in the world. But populists need an enemy image and, because of political correctness, as Jews are not permitted to be so again, they choose Muslims and other ethnic and religious groups.

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If the enemy is not Islamic terrorism, then it is the fear of too much foreign cultural infiltration. This, too, should not be underestimated, even in societies in which people are increasingly less aware of their own historical, religious, and cultural roots. For example, in the Czech Parliament a delegate recently suggested the creation of a non-partisan working group that would work against the mixing of Czech and other cultures. He might as well have called for a sieve in which to gather water. This is the current situation.

With this point, we reach the most important concepts that Fromm described as the authoritarian social character.

Under authoritarianism, the attractiveness of supposedly strong men like Trump, Putin, and Orbán, is that they reaffirm people’s belief that liberal, constitutional democracies either do not reflect their national character (Orban and Putin) or are an expression of a rotten political establishment (Trump). Then there is destructiveness and aggression. Trump confronts uninhibited and destructive capitalism with an extreme aggressiveness; oddly enough, he is the very person who profited from this capitalism. Even more oddly, his aggressiveness does not direct itself against structures, but against marginal groups. This, too, is a common thread for extreme nationalists. It may be the Roma (gypsies) or the refugees who need to be fought against, or like in Britain, European Union (EU) foreigners who are using EU laws and Britain’s generosity.

Finally, there is retreat; here we are with Brexit and those societies that would like to follow its approach. The temptation is to pull back into a national, national-socialistic, or even folkish world, a supposedly unspoiled world, but one that never existed. After they stoke fear, populists hype these false images. Europe and the US have always had cultures meet each other in conflict and cooperation, not always peacefully and often with energy-filled frictions, but mostly productively.

In 2011, the German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey used the concept of “regressive modernism” for the first time (Sheets for German and International Policy, 2011). This year he used the concept again in an analysis of the economic and social situation in Germany; he is referring in particular to the developments in West Germany before and after the collapse of communism and the East German government (The Descent Society. On Rebellion in the Re-

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gressive Modern Age, 2016). For me, this is a useful concept in order to understand the worldwide movement of populist currents. In psychology, regression means a defense mechanism, that is, a “reappearance of earlier evolutionarily behavioral forms after severe failures and frustrations” (Brockhaus-Lexikon, Edition 20, Vol. 18, 183).

In essence, this is what I discussed so far: Brexit and the populist tendencies in the US and Europe are primarily an expression of a psychological disturbance that follows frustration and fear. The question now is: How can one confront this phenomenon? Most likely with the instruments of social therapists and psychologists; that is, to take these fears seriously, talk about them, and try to accommodate them productively.

Easily said! Politicians are definitely not psychologists, but they ought to be responsible for reducing fear through an approach that controls unleashed finance capitalism, reconstructs social modernism, and acknowledges that a solid societal framework must be guaranteed for an autonomous life that is relatively free of fear. They must prevent the free-fall into the societal abyss and give a new and realistic chance to those who have been pushed out of a comfortable lifestyle. The free market is not going to do this.

All this takes time. In France, Greece, Spain, and Italy this needed time is running out. In countries like Germany, the window of opportunity is greater than in Britain, where this window is closed for the time being. The United States stands (before the election in November) at the brink. It will take trust in politicians who have the strength to conceptually think beyond today and who are willing to act. It requires trust in the democratic system that is hopefully able to deliver appropriate decisions at the required tempo.

In the end we have no choice. We do, however, have the solace of Albert Camus’ observation that we must see Sisyphus as a happy human being.

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