Erich Fromm: Society, Technology and Progress

Fromm on Society, know-how and progress

Fromm desires to argue that our societies, as they’re now, essentially create sad people. This is a vital level, for a lot of causes:

First, if this was true, one couldn’t simply blame the unhappiness of individuals in industrialised societies on unintentional occasions, like a pandemic, a struggle, unemployment or a illness. All these, in fact, are likely to make issues worse – however, based on Fromm, it’s the very cloth of our system that’s certain to create sad people. We can’t hope to get a contented industrial society by, say, elevating the taxes or decreasing them, by selling social housing or supporting free enterprise, by regulating towards air pollution or in favour of huge oil. None of those, as needed as a few of them could be, will be capable to change the foundation of the ailment of our societies: that capitalism, because it practised within the Western industrialised world, is simply not suitable with human happiness and flourishing.

Second, if this was true, it will imply that we don’t have to individually really feel responsible for being depressed, sad, tormented by nervousness and emotions of inadequacy. We could be doing nothing improper and nonetheless be victims: victims of a system that we can’t management and that takes away our probabilities at a full, satisfying human life, a system that cheats us out of our lives with out giving us something of actual worth again.

And third, if this was true, it will imply that the one correct option to cope with human unhappiness can be a revolutionary one. No visits to the psychiatrist would assist, no prolonged holidays, no pay elevate. If the society is what’s making us sick, then this society should go. In a approach, that is the purest type of the legacy of Marx in Fromm: the rebirth of man should occur by way of a restructuring of the society during which we stay.

The promise of limitless technological progress

In explaining how capitalist societies make individuals sad, Fromm goes again to the start of industrialisation and to the peak of its promise within the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries. Inside 100 years, the time span from grandfather to grandson, we went from basically agrarian, rural societies to full protection of each dwelling with electrical energy; to lighting up cities and streets; to inventing dwelling know-how like radios, TV units, kitchen machines, washing machines, dishwashers and computer systems; we went from using horses to flying to the moon on the highest of gigantic rockets; from having 6 p.c of deaths in childbirth within the mid-Nineteenth century to shut to zero within the mid-Twentieth; from writing a letter in England that may take weeks to achieve a recipient in India to selecting up one’s telephone and being related to any level on the planet inside seconds.

In a world like that, it’s comprehensible that our personal mother and father and grandparents, who have been on the finish of that chain within the mid-Twentieth century, would have thought that the wonders of know-how would by no means finish. One can nonetheless see that optimism in books and flicks from 50s America, a contented place of huge automobiles, low-cost gas, fully-automated kitchens and pleased individuals: the land of limitless ice-cream.

“We have been on our option to changing into gods, supreme beings who might create a second world, utilizing the pure world solely as constructing blocks for our new creation,” writes Fromm (To Have or To Be, p.1).

However as industrial progress changed people and animals with mechanical and nuclear power and the human thoughts with laptop energy, we started to ask whether or not the nice promise of the economic age has truly labored out. Did it?

No, says Fromm. The economic age and its deal with know-how has did not fulfil its promise (p.2/3). One drawback is that we started to grasp that unrestricted satisfaction of all needs doesn’t result in happiness. We can have extra alternative to speak about this later this 12 months, after we come to Epicurus and his views on find out how to obtain happiness. The principle level is that materials items, though they could present us with pleasures, don’t necessarily satisfy our need for a meaningful and productive life.

The misplaced which means of labor

And one thing else occurred: within the technique of industrialisation, we misplaced our independence as creators at work. Within the medieval workshop, the grasp and their apprentices managed each step of the method of the creation of an artefact – from the choice of the bushes from which to make a bit of furnishings, to the ornament of the ultimate piece with carvings and paint. The method was one during which the creators had one thing actual to indicate for his or her talent and their artwork, one thing that they might contact, see, and be happy with and recognised for by others of their society.

The economic age and its deal with know-how has did not fulfil its promise. 

Trade and mass manufacturing has achieved away with all that. Who can nonetheless right this moment say that they’re chargeable for a complete product from begin to end? I see every of my college students for 3 hours every week, all through half a 12 months – and by no means once more. I train the identical course repeatedly to at all times new faces, after which they go away and I by no means see them once more. What grew to become of them? Did they turn out to be nice scientists, good household ladies and men, gifted artists, deep thinkers? I don’t know. I did my three hours every week and that was that. And nearly each job in our world is like that. The manufacturing facility employee doesn’t make something alone. They’re performing one small operation repeatedly on ever new copies of the identical factor which can be rolling by on an meeting line. The financial institution clerk is a tiny cog within the equipment of a financial institution, not himself chargeable for something of what the financial institution does – most of it he doesn’t even find out about besides from the information. The worker at a grocery store, the driving force of a bus, the nurse in a hospital: they’re all simply performing a small, repeated motion, kind of complicated and demanding, however they by no means see the entire image, they by no means see the success and the complete impression of their work, and so they by no means get to assert the satisfaction and the popularity for no matter change on this planet their lives have introduced.

In fact, in return we get low-cost garments, radios and iPhones for all, antibiotics and vaccinations, and a comparatively safe provide of meals (no less than within the industrialised West). However we get these on the value of promoting out the which means of our lives.

As a substitute of being impartial masters of our lives, we grew to become “cogs within the bureaucratic machine,” writes Fromm. Our ideas, emotions, and tastes are manipulated by authorities and trade. After which, we should always not overlook that financial progress is basically restricted to the wealthy nations. The hole between wealthy and poor nations is ever widening, and ecological disasters, droughts and famines at all times hit the nations which can be already affected by mismanagement and wars.

As a substitute of being impartial masters of our lives, we grew to become “cogs within the bureaucratic machine,” writes Fromm. 

Fromm hadn’t skilled the entire spectrum of right this moment’s apocalyptic riders, however we might add a complete checklist of recent threats to our survival: rampant surveillance, international heating, extinction of species, international air pollution, AI taking our jobs, microplastics, dictatorships and the disastrous results of social media on our societies.

Why has the promise of limitless progress failed?

So why didn’t the dream work out? Why didn’t the world go on because it seemed prefer it would possibly within the 50s? Why didn’t we find yourself in an utopia of pink kitchen home equipment and pleased residents on manicured lawns and as a substitute discover ourselves more and more in worlds that resemble these of Mad Max?

In line with Erich Fromm, the industrial-capitalist utopia was based mostly on two main premises, Fromm says, and each are terribly improper:

• First, that the intention of life is happiness within the sense of most pleasure.

• And, second, that egotism, selfishness, and greed in capitalism will ultimately result in concord and peace.

However hedonism, the unrestricted enjoyment of pleasures, does not result in happiness. Regardless of us having unparalleled materials comforts, “we’re a society of notoriously sad individuals: lonely, anxious, depressed, harmful, dependent — people who find themselves glad when we have now killed the time we try so exhausting to avoid wasting” (To Have or To Be, p.4).

And he goes on:

Ours is the best social experiment ever made to unravel the query whether or not pleasure (…) generally is a passable reply to the issue of human existence. For the primary time in historical past the satisfaction of the pleasure drive shouldn’t be solely the privilege of a minority however is feasible for greater than half the inhabitants. The experiment has already answered the query within the adverse (p.4)

The second premise can be not true: that egotism and greed will deliver concord and peace.

The reason being that egotism describes not solely a selected form of behaviour however an individual’s character. (And on this, Fromm is clearly following Aristotle!) An individual who focuses on maximising their enjoyment from pleasures turns into somebody who will get pleasure from not sharing, being grasping, preventing to get greater than others, and ultimately from exploiting employees and prospects. Fromm:

I can by no means be happy, as a result of there isn’t a finish to my needs; I have to be envious of those that have extra and afraid of those that have much less. However I’ve to repress all these emotions as a way to signify myself (to others in addition to to myself) because the smiling, rational, honest, type human being everyone pretends to be.

Fromm believes that capitalism and industrialisation are basically at odds with a society that fulfils the fundamental human wants. 

In the long run, the idea of limitless pleasure in a work-based society is predicated on a contradiction: On the one hand, we have now to just accept an obsessional work ethic that asks us to work for ten or twelve hours a day, six days every week (see the explanations for Touching Fish, discussed earlier on this blog. On the opposite, we maintain up a super of full laziness throughout the remainder of the day and through holidays.

That’s clearly a contradiction. No human society earlier than ours had had such a loopy relationship to work. If one goes, even right this moment, to a distant Greek or Italian village, one will discover that folks don’t normally distinguish sharply between work and leisure: complete households serve meals in a tavern, solely to sit down round, chat and play with the children whereas the friends are consuming. The grocery store proprietor will man his store daily, all day, however a lot of that point shall be spent speaking on the telephone to pals, studying the newspaper, or consuming espresso with passers-by. And the identical is true of most different lives in these locations.

However these contradictions, this loopy association of full-power work all of a sudden changed by equally frantic doing-nothing is barely attainable due to the society we’re in and the applied sciences that decide and management our lives:

“The infinite meeting line belt and the bureaucratic routine on the one hand, and tv, the car, and intercourse on the opposite, make the contradictory mixture attainable. … Moreover, each contradictory attitudes correspond to an financial necessity: twentieth-century capitalism is predicated on maximal consumption of the products and providers produced in addition to on routinized teamwork.”

Fromm’s concepts in our lives

So Fromm believes that capitalism and industrialisation are basically at odds with a society that fulfils the fundamental human wants, particularly the immaterial, the psychological wants of human beings: the necessity for recognition, for significant work, for a life that’s satisfying and worthwhile fairly than only a replaceable quantity in an incomprehensibly complicated system that’s out of the management of any single individual. On this, he comes near a number of the softer Luddites we are going to speak about later, for instance Stephanie Mills.

This week then, let’s have a look at how our lives are affected by applied sciences, and significantly by bureaucratic processes and applied sciences that are likely to take management and satisfaction away from us and degrade us into being appendages of a machine or an establishment, as a substitute of giving us room to develop as professionals who do a worthwhile, inventive work.

I don’t anticipate that anybody in our societies is fully freed from this type of new slavery, of being cheated out of their freedom and satisfaction by some huge machine that they’re only a small a part of. However, though we’re all affected, there could be alternatives for every considered one of us to try to escape that annihilation of our inventive selves.

As a trainer, I can attempt to domesticate private contacts to my college students exterior of my three hours of instructing. I could make pals with them and watch them develop and discover which means of their lives. As a bus driver, I can maybe attempt to make pals with the individuals I drive daily: a heat greeting, a query, a comment concerning the climate could also be sufficient to make somebody confide in us and create a bond.

As mother and father, we should always not solely guarantee that our children tick the bins of their homework, however take half an hour within the night to speak to them about our view of the world, our opinions, our fears, our hates, our hopes. And the place none of that is attainable, if we’re actually caught at a manufacturing facility meeting like with out the prospect of ever getting extra significant work, then maybe there’s a option to discover a few of that exterior of that manufacturing facility or workplace. Maybe we will volunteer within the afternoon for an hour to maintain aged individuals firm for a espresso. Or we will serve meals to the hungry in our group. Or we will paint, be inventive. I not too long ago found that I might paint on my telephone. I downloaded a free artwork app and went on to color for hours on a weekend, stunning myself with how a lot enjoyable that was. I didn’t turn out to be Picasso or Rembrandt – however I definitely grew to become a happier individual for these few hours, which I may need in any other case simply have spent in entrance of a TV display or watching cats on Youtube.

The promise of limitless progress hasn’t paid off, Fromm says. However this additionally implies that we don’t owe it something any extra. The deal is off, and we’re free to search out satisfaction and which means in each approach that we will.

And nobody has the fitting to cease us.

Return to The Ultimate Guide to the Philosophy of Erich Fromm.

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