Quick Hit: MHS in the Boston Magazine

Boston Magazine has published a short article on some of the bizarre items held at archives around Boston, including several from the Massachusetts Historical Society (such as the ring containing strands of John Quincy Adams' hair, pictured on the right). You can check out all the images and descriptions on their website.

more vintage video fun: "a date with your family"

Brought to you from mst3k, another educational short (about 10 minutes) demonstrating the proper attitude towards, and behavior at, nightly dinner with one's family.



My favorite sequence:

Narrator: "First of all, Daughter has changed from school clothes to something more festive.

I know I certainly put on my Sunday best before Hanna and I sit down to supper. Also, it's creepy that all the characters are referred to by their generic member-of-the-family label, not actual names.

"Dressing a little makes her feel -- and consequently look -- more charming."

because it's all about performance, girls! remember that!

"Mother too changes from her daytime clothes. The women of this family seem to feel that they owe it to the men of the family to look relaxed, rested, and attractive at dinner time."

In the words of Mike & Co: "So they're unsuspecting when they kill them!"

aside from the fact it's about women performing for men, I love the way the emphasis is on appearance: it's important to "look" relaxed, rested, and attractive . . . never mind that Mother and Daughter are the ones preparing and serving the entire meal!

The whole film, in fact, emphasized the performance of an ideal 1950s family, with the suppression of unpleasant news and discord in favor of harmony and surface-level conversation. The narrator's script keeps emphasizing this point, as if he's just begging for us to wonder what evils are lurking in the shadows, unspoken.

. . . "Everyone wants to flee this seething cauldron of angst!"

brown bear comes to stay

Yesterday, Hanna and I rented a zipcar and drove up to Freeport, Maine, to the L.L. Bean flagship store to purchase winter boots, long underwear, and a few other items to keep us toasty warm this winter. While we were there, Hanna found this little brown bear, made from recycled plastic bottles, who informed her he was tired of hanging around the store and wanted to come home with us. And so she bought him for me.


Here he is, sitting on the bed with Evangeline (the bunny rabbit) and Sebastian (the elder bear). They are getting him acquainted with the ways of our household. He has not yet been forthcoming on the matter of his name; if any of you feel inspired, feel free to chime in via comments!

On the Syllabus: Man For Himself

This week for my independent study, I finally sat down and finished Erich Fromm's 1947 treatise on humanistic ethics: Man For Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. Erich Fromm, a prolific writer on psychology, philosophy, politics, and ethics, clearly can't be adequately represented by a small excerpt from one published work . . . but I thought I would, nevertheless, give you a flavor of his thinking by sharing a passage from Man for Himself in which he responds to one of the criticisms of his humanistic philosophy which foregrounds the capacity ("potentiality") of human beings: that is, "what about the problem of evil?"

"The opponents of humanistic ethics," he writes, "claim that man's [1] nature is such as to make him inclined to be hostile to his fellow man, to be envious and jealous, and to be lazy, unless he is curbed by fear. Many representatives of humanistic ethics [have] met this challenge by insisting that man is inherently good and that destructiveness is not an integral part of his nature" (213). As Fromm points out, this leaves us with the problem of what destructiveness and where it comes from, if we reject it as an inherent part of human nature (since, self-evidently, human beings demonstrate a capacity for violence).

Our first step in approaching the problem of destructiveness is to differentiate between two kinds of hate: rational, "reactive" and irrational "character-conditioned" hate [2]. Reactive, rational hate is a person's reaction to a threat to his own or another person's freedom, life, or ideas. Its premise is a respect for life . Rational hate has an important biological function: it is the affective equivalent of action serving the protection of life; it comes into existence as a reaction to vital threats, and it ceases to exist when the threat has been removed; it is not the opposite but the concomitant of the striving for life [which Fromm believes is the most fundamental human drive].

Character-conditioned hate is different in quality. It is a character trait, a continuous readiness to hate, lingering within the person who is hostile rather than reacting to a stimulus from without . . . [a phenomenon] of such magnitude that the dualistic theory of love and hate as the two fundamental forces [of human life] seems to fit the facts. (216-17, emphasis in the original).

Fromm asks then (somewhat rhetorically) whether, given the evidence, he is forced to concede that theories maintaining destructiveness is a fundamental part of human nature (he uses Freud's work as an example) are, indeed, correct. No, he responds to himself, he is not. He posits that both capacities (creativity and destruction) are present in human beings as potentialities which need certain conditions to manifest; furthermore, he argues that the capacity for productive, life-promoting creativity, is a primary capacity, whereas the capacity for destruction is secondary, realized only when the conditions for the primary are not met:

Both the primary and the secondary potentialities are part of the nature of an organism . . . the "secondary" potentiality comes into manifest existence only in the case of abnormal, pathogenic conditions. . . . man is not necessarily evil but becomes evil only if the proper conditions of his growth and development are lacking. The evil has no independent existence of its own, it is the absence of good, the result of the failure to realize life (219-20).

While I am skeptical about the division between rational/irrational used here, and find Fromm's reliance on psychoanalytic language frustrating at times, his basic concept of human beings has a lot of (ahem) potential for re-imagining our most basic assumptions concerning human nature.

In the wake of the Second World War, many people -- across diverse fields of inquiry -- were wrestling with the question of what "human nature" was -- and could be -- with a sense of great urgency. Fromm offers us one such example; I'll look forward to sharing more with you in the weeks to come.

~~~footnotes~~~

[1] after my post on Goodman last week, it is worth noting that Fromm specifically, in the introduction to Man for Himself, defines his use of the word "man" as a universal pronoun for "human being."

[2] Fromm uses "character" in a very specific sense, elaborated on elsewhere in the book and in his other work, and here is indicating a basic orientation toward life versus a reaction to a specific incident.

video wednesday: the home economics story

Hanna introduced me to this timely 1951 promotional video from Iowa State College just as I was reading Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd last week. It is an incredible snapshot of the way college attendance was presented to young women in the postwar period; watch to be bitter end for the senior year requirement to play house in preparation for "real life" for the full creepy effect. Almost as good as the marriage preparedness video I posted back in March.



Running time: 25:02 minutes.

UPDATE: Hanna chastised me for not including the mystery science theater version of this short, which is available via YouTube, so here are the links (it comes in two parts): part one and part two. Better late than never?

from the neighborhood: graffiti fail?

I finally snapped a picture of this piece of graffiti in our neighborhood that makes me laugh every time I walk passed it.


I'm assuming the punctuation was meant to be an exclamation point emphasizing this (supposed) sexual activity of Lisa's; instead it came out as more of a query, giving the phrase a tentative aura: maybe this girl we know likes anal sex? we aren't sure? Well done y'all!

On the Syllabus: Growing Up Absurd

So I might not have a lot of time to post this year, but one thing it occured to me to do is post selections from some of my thesis-related reading for those of you who are interested in what I'm doing on the intellectual/history front. Since I'm enrolled in an independent study this semester, I have the luxury of designing my own schedule of reading in preparation for my oral history fieldwork. The reading I'll be doing this semester is in part theoretical/methodological (how I'll be doing my oral history collecting and thesis writing, and why I chose to do it that way) in part a review of the existing historical literature on the period and topics I am studying, and in part primary sources that help provide contemporary context for the beginnings of the Oregon Extension program.

One of the books I've been reading this week, Paul Goodman's Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in an Organized Society. The prolific Goodman wrote one of the earliest post-war critiques of 1950s American conformity, first published in 1957, which later became a "must read" for countercultural activists during the 1960s and 70s. The basic argument of Growing Up Absurd is that the post-war society is depriving youth (specifically boys, see below) of meaningful work opportunities -- leaving them with the option of unfullfilling factory of office jobs that do not contribute (in Goodman's view) to the betterment of society. While his argument has faults, he is also making key observations about the fault-lines in American society during the era of post-war conformity. The priceless bits, however, are the sections in which he defends his focus on "young men and boys" as a stand-in for "youth." When I began reading, I figured he was using masculine pronouns as a stand-in for humanity in general (it's the 1950s after all). Not so according to this parenthetical found at the end of his introduction:

(I say the "young men and boys" rather than "young people" because the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, "make something" of herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act. With thie background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married. The quest for the glamour job is given at least a little substance by its relation to a "better" marriage. Correspondingly, our "youth troubles" are boys' troubles -- female delinquency is sexual: "incorrigibility" and unmarried pregnancy. Yet as every woman knows, these problems [I am writing about] are intensely interesting to women, for if the boys do not grow to be men, where shall the women find men? If the husband is running the rat race of the organized system, there is not much father for the children.) [13]

I would love to write an entire essay at some point unpacking the layers of cultural "common sense" packed into this one single paragraph of Goodman's polemic. He continues this way of raising the question of women in a tangential, completely un-analyzed way. In the section where he discusses the Beats, he critiques their cultural dissent at length and then eventually gets around to the question of "What is in it for the women who accompany the Beats?" (185)

There are several possible sexual bonds . . . Her relation to him is maternal: she devotes herself to helping him find himself and become a man, presumably so that he can then marry her. . . Another possible relation is Muse or Model: her Beat is her poet and artist and makes her feel important. This is a satisfaction of her feminine narcissism or penis envy.

So mother or virgin/whore: those are our options girls. But wait! There's more (185-187).

One sometimes sees a pathetic scene in a bar. Some decent square young workingmen are there, lonely, looking for girls or even for a friendly word. They feel they are "nobodies"; they are not Beats, they are not artists. They have nothing to "contribute" to the conversation. The girls, meantime, give their attention only to the Beats, who are sounding off so interestingly. But these Beats will not make any life for the girls, whereas the others might make husbands and fathers.

Amazing what a long history the Nice Guy (tm) vesus Bad Boy (tm) mythology has, isn't it? One might, of course, ask if there are any female Beats -- in spirit if not in historic fact (there were very few women who were part of the core movement). Goodman does actually mention such women, at the tail end of his analysis:

Finally, of course, there are the young women who are themselves Beats, disaffected from status standards. Perhaps they have left an unlucky marriage, have had an illegitimate child, have fallen in love with a Negro, and found little support or charity "in" society. They then choose a life among those more tolerant, and find meaning in it by posing for them or typing their manuscripts.

So even the women "Beats," who fit his earlier definition of "incorrigibility," end up being not so much artist-activists themselves, but rather a sub-species of the Muse and Model he defines earlier. As women artists and activists pointed out at the time -- most loudly and concertedly during the 1960s and 1970s -- this was in fact far from the truth of their own lived experience.

That's it for this week's "on the syllabus" dispatch . . . look for more next weekend!