Alienation and the Carnivalization of Society

Jerome Braun, Lauren Langman

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415888783
• eBook ISBN: 9781136618338
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Relations interpersonnelles en psychologie

This book examines alienation from both a sociological and psychoanalytic perspective, revisiting classic treatments of the topic (Marx, Simmel, Weber) and exploring its relevance to understanding post-modern consumer society. It examines the escapist potentials for good and for ill in modern society - those fostered by commercial interests, and those maintained by individuals and groups as their form of resisting alienation.

Part I

Alienation in Modern Mass Society

Its Consequences in Producing Post-Modernity That Is Increasingly Similar to Pre-Modernity

1 The Rise of the Nazis as an Example of Sadistic Carnival

Jerome Braun

Reading Richard J. Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich (Evans 2003) helped me put into perspective the oddness of the rise to power of the National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany, a party which never got the majority of the popular vote for Parliament in a free election. Their success seemed to fit in well with the peculiar rigidities of the German class system, which in milder form shows similar characteristics to other class-ridden, which is another way of saying rather bureaucratic, societies of Continental Europe.

One way to look at how social integration occurs in various societies is to see how the mechanisms for integration evolve from certain primary social institutions and how they carry over to other areas of life; thus how they evolve and change over time. Using Max Weber’s study of the Protestant Ethic (see Weber 2001) as a major inspiration, we can say that Britain and even more so America are societies that achieve major elements of social integration individualistically, or to be more exact society is integrated on the job bureaucratically but the wealth earned on the job is used to offer opportunities for individual autonomy off the job. Originally spending money was not even the most important source of individual autonomy, but the self-righteousness fostered by rather moralistic Protestant sects (many were Calvinist in orientation) encouraged many of their members to be critical of the moral worthiness of societal leaders, and to even be choosy about the moral worthiness of their own peers and thus those they chose to associate with. The extreme case of this, but also a rather common cultural model, was the distrust of the trustworthiness and morals of those who were not part of one’s own religious movement, something which hampered blind loyalty as a source for social cohesiveness and as a source for bureaucratic control by the state. The result was in some communities the growth of Protestant sects that weakened national solidarity and ended up increasing class or even ethnic solidarity, and in other communities it went one step farther and weakened class and ethnic solidarity and encouraged a rebuilding of communal solidarity based on individual autonomy, and sometimes individual moralism.

Thus the complexity of class relations in America and even more so in Britain reflects the addition of moralistic and religious concerns to the more simple class identifications which are in that sense based on more simple ethnic and bureaucratic loyalties in much of Continental Europe. Admittedly the process of increasing anonymity in society and increasing individualism has continued to this day so that religious loyalties have weakened compared to their strength in the past, facilitated by the broad range of choices in lifestyles now encouraged through an expansion of economic markets that increases the importance of recreation and entertainment, and now the lifestyle communities that have become anchored through them. The result nowadays is a growth less of moralistic individualism than of narcissistic individualism.

The increase in individual as opposed to group narcissism has weakened religious loyalties in Britain and in America but less so in America (partly because communal feelings even of a secular sort are so weak in America that religion in many areas of the country forms the basis to a large extent for having communal feelings at all). However, in Continental Europe because there were traditionally fewer religious choices than in Britain and in America and they were so tied to enforcement by the government and general feelings of nationalism, as secular nationalism or at least secular culture has increasingly served the purposes of government so that they don’t need to enforce religion as a way to give legitimacy to their own rule, people no longer feel strong social pressure to be religious, especially since the individualistic sources of religiosity (strong in America) are still relatively weak in Continental Europe.

The societies of Continental Europe originally tended to learn from the experience of the Catholic areas that border the Mediterranean that have historically been to a large extent integrated based on the bureaucratic structures of the Catholic Church and of secular elites that also gain their legitimacy and power through their bureaucratic structures, sometimes in competition with Catholic religious elites, but more often in alliance with them. Admittedly, elites in these Catholic areas have bureaucratic traditions that date back to preindustrial times and thus are often more easygoing and pleasure-loving than elites in most other areas of Europe. This is also facilitated by the fact that these are societies of old inherited wealth where elites were often members of a leisure class, who enjoyed rather hedonistic lifestyles, and were willing to allow the common people to also enjoy hedonistic pleasures, though elites, religious and secular, reserved the right to crack down when they felt the common people were going too far and threatened social order.

In much of northern Europe the legitimacy of elite rule, both religious and secular (though secular authority after the Reformation had the most influence), depended on elites who fostered social order (even more so than in Britain, where evangelical Protestantism made people self-righteous, rather than pietistic, and rebellious against unworthy elites). These were societies where there was little hope that self-righteous Protestants from among the common people could enforce social morality upon society at large, including elites, in this world as opposed to the next; and the next best thing, encouraging economic growth which would serve as a test of character and would foster individual autonomy, hopefully for moralistic purposes, also seemed much less likely in those areas of northern Europe than in Britain, the Netherlands, and Switzerland, where both evangelical Protestantism and economic growth worked hand in hand.

Instead, those other areas of the North were places that feared anarchy above all, partly because they had no hope that individual decision making would foster anything other than anarchy; certainly they had little hope that individual decision making as expressed in markets could structure society. These also were areas where the climate and the richness of the physical environment was just not conducive to the hedonistic lifestyles encouraged in the Mediterranean areas; there was also much less old wealth in the North and less opportunity for elites to be satisfied by their own hedonistic lifestyles. The elites in the North were expected to rule and not just enjoy themselves with occasional forays among the common people to maintain social order. These were societies where it was considered that maintaining social order was a full-time job.

To fill out this discussion, I should add that in Islamic areas secular life is rather hedonistic, and sociable, in somewhat the same way as it is in the Mediterranean areas of Europe, but when things go too far, the enforcement mechanism for social morality is less bureaucratic elites of either the secular or the religious sort and more the primordial authority figures of family and local community (see Rosen 2002). In this sense, local authority is trusted more than distant authority (even though distant authority is sometimes recognized as being necessary, for example, to mediate disputes), and hedonism takes second place as a value to primordial loyalties (family values being of great importance), all of which makes the authority structures of Islam similar to the authority structures of Anglo-American Protestantism.

Admittedly the primordial loyalties of the American frontier never became tribal, and the truly independent status of these American frontier communities who handled their own problems rather independently of the central government lasted only decades and not hundreds of years as in the tribal areas of Islamic communities. By now even primordial communal and family loyalties in America and also in Britain are rather weak by Islamic standards, and when the economic markets and the lifestyles they facilitate do not suffice to create individual happiness, and must be propped up by an increasing need for government to step in and create social order, it is something that is done rather begrudgingly in Anglo-American culture areas, and with much more faith as being part of the normal scheme of things in Continental Europe.

This brings us back to the rise of the Nazis. Their grab for power came with the enabling legislation passed by the Reichstag (Parliament) after the Dutch nitwit Marinus van der Lubbe set a fire on February 27, 1933, in the Reichstag building that caused major damage and which became a rallying cry for Nazis and others that the Communists were trying to overthrow the government. Hitler, who was already Reich Chancellor by this time, and the members of his cabinet, all members of conservative parties, brought to President Paul von Hindenburg a decree for his approval to override certain articles of the Weimar Constitution dealing with personal liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, rights to privacy, rights against confiscation or restrictions on property, as well as the right to take over the states of the Reich if warranted by the need to preserve public order.

This was, by American and British standards, badly written because overbroad law soon led to a reign of terror as not only Communists but many members of leftist parties, including those who were members of the Reichstag, were treated as if they were no different from the Communists. Of course the Nazi officials were essentially lying, and could get away with this because the checks and balances of government, the result of either sympathy from or intimidation of the executive and judicial branches of government, led to misuse of this enabling law.

Then there were the members of the conservative but non-Nazi parties. They could not be accused of having Communist sympathies. They were dealt with by out-and-out intimidation from the brownshirts, the Nazi party’s paramilitary organization. Thus harassing and arresting leftists because of a terribly written, overbroad enabling law to deal with a supposed Communist, but to a large extent imaginary, plot to overthrow the government, and dealing with conservative but non-Nazi Germans through simple physical intimidation or by purging them from their jobs, was the pincer movement that enabled the Nazis to force loyalty from all elements of the German population despite the fact they were never a majority political party to begin with. Finally, on March 24, 1933, the Reichstag passed enabling legislation that met the required two-thirds constitutional requirement of the members present with the votes of the (Catholic) Center Party that allowed Hitler to rule by decree without further supportive legislation from the Reichstag.

The Center Party had succumbed to promises that the independence of the state governments, many of which were strongholds of Catholic political power, and of the judiciary would not be interfered with. Also, the Vatican pressured them to appease the Nazis since their concern was for a concordat, somewhat similar to what they had with the Italian government, that would protect the Church, but that at the same time meant the Church would have very little moral influence in political matters, nor would individual Catholics just wanting to follow their consciences, for the result was not a liberal state where individuals would be free to follow their consciences but an even more authoritarian, and certainly less moral, institution than the Catholic Church would try to rule over people’s consciences.

Of course the Nazis did not keep their word. As Richard Evans describes what soon happened to the Center Party: “Its newspapers were being banned or taken away from it. Its local and regional organizations were being closed down one by one. Its ministers in every state had been removed from office. Its civil servants, despite constant reassurances from Hermann Göring, were under continual threat of dismissal” (Evans 2003, 364).

Therefore the question arises, Why did the other sources of authority in Germany from the judiciary to the civil service to heads of churches to the leaders of the military give in to this? Why were there no functioning checks and balances in German society to prevent this? One way to look at this is that Germany, and to a lesser extent much of Europe, in the 1930s did not have an American-style middle class who were considered moral leaders because they tended to avoid the moral weaknesses of the rich, who were too often arrogant, and of the poor, who were often obsequious toward power when they weren’t outright escapist. Instead the middle class of much of Europe, and especially of such a bureaucratic society as Germany, were merely middling in power and wealth and authority and had very little moral authority. They in fact basically stood for nothing, unlike the traditionally moralistic American middle class, and traditionally deferred to the rich, or if under revolutionary circumstances the poor got the upper hand, the leaders of the poor.

As a matter of fact, a good number of the leaders of German society felt they had to use right-wing fanatics to fight left-wing fanatics because a middle position for German politics was very weak, even though it is the normal position for American politics because it most benefits the middle class; and that which benefits the middle class is usually thought in America to be most conducive for the common good, because it is a compromise position that will end up benefiting most everyone. However, even in Germany the rise in influence of extreme left-wing and right-wing parties was unusual, because of the failures of the more moderate parties to deal with the difficulties of the Weimar period, and especially the disastrous economy.

But even so, the very fact that a large proportion of the population would even consider extreme left-wing and right-wing solutions reflected a society for whom social order through social engineering, even if necessary at the expense of civil liberties, was the ultimate goal of government, as if anarchy, not self-organized communities either through market forces or communal self-organization or both, was the natural state of society without governmental intervention. Also, the very fact that elites felt they could not bring about social order through their own prestige and their own ability to rouse the population, but had to work through demagogic middlemen, showed the bureaucratization of society and how the leadership of society was not earned through close interaction between the leaders and the led, nor in reality by the leaders earning the loyalty of the led.

Instead, German society had evolved into a bureaucratized society pure and simple, where leaders had developed a great deal of arrogance because they did not socialize with the mass of population, and they did not reason with the mass of population, but they had gotten used to ordering people around based on their bureaucratic powers; and when this failed, rebuilding a sense of moral authority (that hallmark of American-style Protestant revivalism) was the farthest thing from their minds. For generations, the German state had increased its power over the population it ruled through bureaucratic manipulation, and through brute power, often military power. Large elements of the German elite during the troubles of the Great Depression were now willing to return to the same old bag of tricks.

The question still remains not only why were so many of the elites so amoral and power hungry, but why did so many of the common people, especially those who in American society might have been part of the moralistic middle class, were in Germany part of a much more amoral bureaucratic class, or even part of a downwardly mobile lumpenproletariat (which Hitler for much of his life certainly was), and that in general no major groups in German society became known for their high morals at this period in history. As Herman Finer wrote in a book published in 1946 about the voters who gave the Nazis their greatest electrical success in the election of March 1933: “The German voters were principally culpable of political ignorance, lack of civic prescience, insensitivity to anti-democratic forces, and democratic responsibilities, and individually selfish regard for their own immediate short-run convenience” (Finer 1946, 49).

Certainly you can’t say that the American cultural obsession with individual autonomy as the product of economic independence through proper use of market opportunities results in low crime rates or even lack of such social problems as mental illness or suicides. All the problems which Emile Durkheim mentioned in his study on Suicide (Douglas 1973; Durkheim 1997) common to individualistic cultures exist in America. What is different about much of Europe is that there is little hope that individuals can maintain their dignity trying to produce a moral influence on society through an accumulation of a number of individual decisions in market fashion, as if the freedom to choose one’s loyalties will produce a marketplace for morality, where the best people and the best community of such people will draw more adherents and will win social influence. Instead, it is common in Europe for one’s personal identity to not result from one’s achieved personal relationships but from one’s ascribed personal, or in bureaucratic settings or in society at large not so personal, relationships. Then the feelings of drowning one’s identity in the whole, the feelings of nationalism in fact, become a substitute for the lack of other social accomplishments.

In a nutshell, because the frontier conditions of American life have historically provided economic and even social options lacking in more constraining (because of lack of options) societies, individual autonomy was encouraged to a degree greater than was commonly found in most modern societies, and this encouraged the religious belief that religious ideals of a virtuous community could be created in a somewhat market fashion for the same reason new communities in general in a frontier society could be created in market fashion. However, in societies that held the common perceptions that such options were lacking, such as the societies of Continental Europe, social cohesiveness was considered to be not the result of a myriad of individual decisions, and to not offer opportunities for starting over to produce virtuous communities, but instead social cohesiveness often had a different function, to produce psychological feelings of exuberance in a rather amoral sense.

That is why feelings of “nationalism” have traditionally been a core component of individual conformity to social pressures in Europe in a way that is rather weak in American society, and joining new religions as a source of creating new communal feelings (in practice this mostly means joining new Protestant sects) has been a common social option in America but not in Europe to any great degree. The fact that the attempt of each Protestant sect to become a kind of new Catholicism as the Christianity of choice for society at large in America has ultimately failed, and the hypocrisy of having social-class-based Christian cultures, and with it the weakening of national unity, has become the reality of American Protestantism, and is a common criticism by Europeans of American Protestantism.

In fact, American religion in general, in order to appeal to individuals in market fashion, has strong pressures on it to either encourage individual narcissism or sometimes in backlash fashion to serve as an alternative to it (this is commonly the minority position nowadays, though gaining in strength because of overall social disorder). The religions of Continental Europe have traditionally gained their strength through social conformity as the result of the state trying to gain legitimacy by claiming to be the protector and interpreter of religion, and so governing the boundaries of religion and usually in the process creating a state religion. Confusing religion with nationalism has been the traditional accusation of hypocrisy that American Protestants have leveled against European religion.

One of the leading indicators that America is still a rather puritanical society is the common cultural belief, derived from evangelical Protestantism to a large extent, that the further one gets away from the immediate family and the immediate community, the less intimate social relationships will be, and can be. That intellectuals can create intimate relationships out of thin air, by using propaganda to make people feel toward the state an intimate feeling of loyalty that only the family and the immediate community were once considered to be worthy of, that intellectuals work toward creating feelings of nationalism, is considered in Europe an attempt to deal with a social problem, essentially the social problem of anomie, and in America is traditionally considered a sign that such intellectuals are dishonest and manipulative, if not out and out delusional.

Yet admittedly the self-control that is the sign of the puritanical character, the need to wait for opportunities for “true” social fulfillment that may never come, in modern America is in many ways a historical vestige; and fulfilling individual narcissism through the escapisms of the entertainment industries is now commonly considered a viable substitute. This is something the typical Euro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface
• Part I Alienation in Modern Mass Society Its Consequences in Producing Post-Modernity That Is Increasingly Similar to Pre-Modernity
• Part II The Carnivalization of Society
• Part III Conclusion
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index