Hoffer on "The Spirit of Our Age"

Eric Hoffer is arguing that the defining spirit of Western societies since the Industrial Revolution has been an emphasis on administering things rather than people.  The rule of society has been handed to the middle class, which is an implicit promise of self governance.  The middle class has been extraordinarily productive when left to its own devices.  At the same time, though, with the explosion of education you get a new social problem:

"Finally, the education explosion is enormously increasing the number of people who want to live meaningful, relevant, and important lives but lack the ability to attain relevance and significance by individual achievements."

"To cope with these difficulties the middle class must learn how to contain anarchy, how to regulate and manipulate everyday life, and, above all, how to concoct a faith, a philosophy, and a style of life to suit the needs of a noncreative horde hungering for meaningful, weighty lives.  In short, in order to win, the middle class must lose itself.  It must shape itself in the image of the elitists who hope and work for its destruction."

Perhaps we made a mistake when we decided that higher education should tie itself to the project of the middle class.  Note that Hoffer is not a wealthy elitist but a self-educated writer who earned his living by manual labor.  When these words come from such a man they cannot be dismissed as the words of an elitist seeking to protect his privileges.

Hoffer on reformers

An aphorism from the section titled "The Ordeal of Change":

Though the reformer is seen as a champion of change, he actually looks down on anything that can be changed.  Only that which is corrupt and inferior must be subjected to the treatment of change.  The reformer prides himself on the possession of an eternal unchangeable truth.  It is his hostility toward things as they are which goads him to change them; he is, as it were, inflicting on them an indignity.  Hence his passion for change is not infrequently a destructive passion.

Indeed, snake oil salesmen always look down upon their marks customers.  And education reformers always send their kids to hyper-traditional schools.

Oh, there you go bringing class into it again!

In the essay "The Intellectual and the Masses", Hoffer notes that for most of history the educated classes felt more solidarity with the powerful than the masses.  He attributes the modern intellectual sympathy for the masses to a feeling of precariousness among the intellectuals:  Historically, when the low-born were elevated in social station they generally turned their back on their class of birth in order to prove their worth.  If you feel that you can make your place among the high-born and enjoy the benefits you will try to prove yourself worthy.  If you feel that it isn't an option then maybe you'll advocate for the class that you're at risk of falling back among.

Also, as we have expanded the number of educated people (or at least the number of credentialed people) the value of an educational credential drops, so the intellectuals will have less reason to feel as though they enjoy privileges worth defending.  This is consistent with the modern economic situation.

On the other hand, I think that in America some of the precariousness felt by intellectuals is about more than just a feeling tied to their immediate security and prospects.  In the 19th century, a time of expansion and optimism noted by de Tocqueville, it was also observed that America was hardly a society that valued intellectuals.  Even in times of a secure economic and political order, an intellectual can feel as if he or she is of low status, especially in a democratic culture like America.

Finally, I like Hoffer's observation on how hard it is to strike an ideal balance, presuming one wants such a thing.  On the one hand, intellectuals with great freedom (usually via the patronage of the powerful) tend to have brilliant starts, but then the society can stagnate.  Intellectuals who feel a bit precarious will advocate for the advancement of the masses (which is a good thing), but an excess of egalitarian and democratic feeling in society does not necessarily lead to a flowering of the fruits of intellect either.  You need a certain amount of tension to keep people pushing but not so much pressure and challenge that creativity is put aside in favor of satisfying immediate needs.

The scribbling classes

I just finished a chapter titled "Scribe, Writer, and Rebel", in which Hoffer observes that writing pre-dated literature by centuries in most societies.  The first writings that archaeologists have found were generally commercial or administrative in nature--ledgers of accounts and taxes and harvests and whatnot.  Essays and literature came later.  His argument is that the literate classes were happy to serve as functionaries of government and business, without seeking creative outlets (at least in written form) until later.  He also notes that early outpourings of literature seem to coincide with times of political upheaval.  Not being familiar with the historical record on this, I am going to take him at his word for the sake or argument, and explore the sociological point that he makes.

Near the end of the chapter, he argues that producing a mass of scribes (or people with the modern equivalent in formal academic training) without prospects for employment suited to their credentials (which are distinct from their talent) is bad for social stability.  I think I agree with that.  He also argues that since historically the educated classes were involved in keeping ledgers and records, the expansion of planning bureaucracies is a natural consequence of a surplus of educated people.  I think that is a very tempting explanation for the explosion of administrivia in many aspects of modern life, particularly in state-subsidized sectors like medicine and education.  I particularly like this line:

Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency.  Yet where social stability is an overriding need, the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.

There's so much I could say about bureaucratic fluff jobs at a university, and the need to absorb people...

I had no idea that Eric Hoffer spent time watching education reformers

Between the Devil and the Dragon, page 70:

Total innovation is the refuge of the untalented and the innately clumsy.  It offers them a situation where their ineptness is acceptable and natural.  For we are all apprentices when we tackle the wholly new, and we expect the new to show the apprentice's hand--to be clumsy and ill-shapen. 

Yet, however untalented and clumsy, the innovators have a vital role to play.  For it is the fate of every great achievement to be pounced upon by pedants and imitators who drain it of life and turn it into an orthodoxy which stifles all stirrings of originality.  The avant-garde counteracts this deadening influence, and fulfills the vital role of keeping the gates open for the real talents who will eventually sweep away the inanities of the experimenters and build the new with a sure hand.

Yes, that is the dilemma of innovation:  There are real innovations and there are frauds and cheap imitations and minor tweaks that get over-sold.  There are truly creative types and real talents and then there are the dilettantes.  The problem is that the dilettantes can easily become the enforcers of orthodoxy if they are welcomed into the temple, but they can just as easily keep some space open on the fringes.  It's a tough balance.

Hoffer's point about orthodoxy also reminds me of how Hofstadter closed his chapter on Dewey:  "And so the quest for a method of institutionalizing the proper anti-institutional methods goes on."

Hoffer on growth

My decision to read Between the Devil and the Dragon was inspired by a visceral reaction to a Hoffer quote about the learned.  One theme of the book, especially the collection of aphorisms in the first section, is that humans are creatures whose nature is to change their nature, and to learn and grow and adapt and innovate.  I like this quote from page 16:

Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles.  The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.

One thing I've noticed is that many in higher ed are determined to find and participate in some sort of revolutionary transformation.  As I've said before, American higher education is haunted by a spirit of restlessness.  It may not have all of the uncompromising idealism and fanaticism of revolutionaries (which is a good thing, because revolutionaries eventually set up guillotines), but it certainly exhibits a rhetorical longing for some of the same things as revolutionaries.  Consequently, people often keep shifting from one fad to another, without necessarily pushing any farther forward.  This seems consistent with Hoffer's observation that revolutionaries do not actually grow.

More on technocrats

Between the Devil and the Dragon, page 24:

To make of human affairs a coherent, precise, predictable whole, one must ignore or suppress man as he really is and treat human nature as a mere aspect of nature.  The theoreticians do it by limiting the shaping forces of man's destiny to nonhuman factors: providence, the cosmic spirit, geography, climate, economic or physiochemical factors.  The practical men of power try to eliminate the human variable by inculcating iron discipline or blind faith, by dissolving the unpredictable individual in a compact group, by subjecting the individual's judgment and will to a ceaseless barrage of propaganda, and by sheer coercion.  It is by eliminating man from their equation that the makers of history can predict the future and the writers of history can give a pattern to the past.

This reminds me of what I wrote about assessment several months ago:

OK, so we're up against a trifling force like human nature, but when has that ever stopped a technocrat?

I'm glad I picked up this book.

Hoffer gives us an insight on the technocrat

The first twenty pages of Between the Devil and the Dragon are a collection of very short pieces, most of them just a few sentences or a couple paragraphs.  I usually skip such things, but out of curiosity I read, and I'm glad I did.  On pages 12-13, Hoffer has an intriguing insight into the technocratic mind:

Both the scientist and the savage postulate the oneness of man and nature.  The difference between them is that the savage tries to influence nature by means which have proved their efficacy in influencing human nature, while the scientist wants to deal with human nature the way he deals with matter and other forums of life.  The scientist reads the equation human nature = nature from left to right, while the savage reads it from right to left.  Yet it is worth noting that Darwin, too, read the equation from right to left when he read cutthroat capitalist competition into the economy of nature. 

The remarkable thing is that the fanatic deals with men the way the scientist deals with matter.  There is a startling similarity between Bacon's prescription for mastering nature--"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed"--and Loyola's formula for manipulating men--"Follow the other man's course to your own goal."

I never thought of it this way before, but the analogy to shaman religious belief is fascinating in light of the interplay between religious and technocratic language in educational matters, especially when people are trying to play off the fruits of social science research, as I have touched on before.  On the other hand, a few pages earlier Hoffer discusses how the Abrahamic faiths separate man from nature, unlike many other faith traditions of the ancient world, and cast man as being made in the image of God.  Of course, the ordering of human affairs will thus inspire religious passion in one who sees man as being in God's image as much as it will in one who sees man as being part of the same supernatural world as the animals and plants around them.

(Somebody might object that a lot of technocrats are atheists, at least in modern academia, and thus do not see man in the terms of either religious tradition, but cultural leaves a heavy imprint on us.  We are often most like the things that we reject, because we rejected those things after feeling the burn of their brand.)

Anyway, this is something to ponder more fully.

Next book: _Between the Devil and the Dragon_ by Eric Hoffer

The next book that I'm going to read and blog is Between the Devil and the Dragon by Eric Hoffer.  Hoffer was an interesting man:  Self-educated, he wrote numerous books and essays on social and political topics, the most famous being The True Believer (a book on fanatics and mass movements, which I read nearly 10 years ago).  However, while he was a well-respected writer and social critic, he mostly worked in manual labor, living on skid row and then as a wandering laborer for many years before getting a job as a longshoreman in San Francisco (which he did for 27 years).  The True Believer is a book that I very much enjoyed, being nominally about fanatics and movements but in truth being a wide-ranging exploration of human nature and societies.  The current book is a collection of essays and other works, and The True Believer is in this compendium.  I probably won't re-read it, but I probably will read the rest of it.

My reasons for pick this up are two-fold.  First, obviously, Hoffer was an insightful person with a broad and deep knowledge of history and penetrating observations about people.  My second reason is petty, and perhaps one that Hoffer would not approve of.  I came across the following quote from a collection of aphorisms that Hoffer had published:

In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

This presumes a false dichotomy, while exemplifying a classic style of progressive American anti-intellectualism.  The quote was offered up in a comment thread that had turned to the fashionable psychological concepts and the nature of success.  Its popularity seems to arise from an embrace of a false dichotomy that Hoffer would probably not endorse:  If one spends enough time as a learner, one will eventually become quite learned.  One can be learned and keep on learning, a point that Hoffer would probably grant.  The learned ones who are in the most trouble are the ones who have become comfortable and lazy.

Anyway, I was most bothered that an anti-intellectual dichotomy would come from a writer that I so deeply respect, so I googled the quote, found the source, and then raced to the library to find the context.  Alas, the context is a book of short aphorisms, which is to say that there was no context because the aphorisms were offered independently rather under some thematic organization.  So I looked around the shelf for other books by Hoffer, and found that Between the Devil and the Dragon also has quite a bit to say about intellectuals and the spirit of the modern era.  I'm hoping that I'll find in Hoffer's writings the nuance that was lacking in this invocation of Hoffer for an anti-intellectual point.

Now, of course, Hoffer himself was not a traditional intellectual.  We can debate whether or not the word "intellectual" should be applied to him at all (he apparently eschewed it), but there's no denying that he was a great learner, he had learned a lot, and he offered up quite insightful and informed writings.  What label you wish to apply above and beyond those basic facts is basically a semantic issue.  He was certainly not credentialed in the way of those who typically get called "intellectuals" but he certainly could match many an intellectual for depth and breadth of knowledge, mastery of language, and subtlety of thought.  So, while it would be a mistake to cite a wise longshoreman if I'm looking to defend credentialed intellectuals (or at least credentialed and self-styled "intellectuals") I think it is quite proper to look to Hoffer if I want to speak up for the value of deep thought over superficial fads.

Let's find out if he agrees with me.