Egocentrism

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Brookline, MA, United States
I'll post rants here, and musings; articles and thoughts about articles. I'll keep it quite complex and yet astoundingly simple: whatever it is I am interested in at any given moment.

Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Fromm's next step?

I'm just shopping for courses at Hebrew U. right now, and tonight I sat in on a course taught by Jonathan Cohen, one of the great scholars of Jewish educational philosophy (and he kind of looks like one of the Star Trek aliens from DS9 though I can't find the link - and a little less like this one).

Here's the line of thinking that might be worth sharing. According to Cohen, Erich Fromm (most famous for The Art of Loving, though I'm quite sure this thinking is not found there), believed in a progressive approach to the development of human civilization based on three stages in an individual's human development, from a baby reliant on its mother emotionally, to a child who makes a deal [covenant] with his father cognitively, to an autonomous young-adult/teen who rejects his relationship with his parents. This is interesting in and off itself, and has implications for thinking about the development of maternal goddesses (who may have just given of themselves and of the earth) and paternal gods (who could get angry) and helps to explain the throwing off of God by civilization since the Scientific Revolution (or Enlightenment, take your pick). But Fromm, again according to Cohen, did not take this one step further - evidently, philosophers (like Fromm, Marx, and more), not being prophets, stop at explaining the history of the world in their own era.

Here's my חידוש:

If we hold by Fromm (loosely, at least), then it would make sense that the fourth stage is not a return to reliance on other individuals (i.e., moving back into your parents' house post-college) but instead the acceptance of your own responsibility for more than yourself - what we might call parenthood. Under such a read, imagine the 3rd era of development (which, under my theory, is quickly moving into our rear-view mirror) as encompassing the last five hundred years or so, when humanity ran roughshod over each other, the planet, and everything that came in our way. Civilization, then, has acted as the irresponsible teenager, obsessed with his own autonomy but negligent of the responsibilities that should be associated with it. Then, the next stage of human history should involve us getting our act together, moving from the orgiastic instincts of the past to a shepherding of each other and the rest of the world (including endangered animals and the environment, chiefly). Is such a move in the offing? Perhaps. But I think, from a Frommian perspective, this is a compelling read towards the type of social entrepreneurship and return to caring about environmental issues we've seen in the past little slice of history.

Here's hoping we're ready to be parents.

2 comments:

NarshBed said...

Can we go one step further in development? It is not just that we need to be ready to be parents, it's that those parents, need to be able to form a community.

We hear a lot about the global community and the internet era shrinking it to a global village and it becomes sort of trite.

But 3 of the main issues at stake in this election (the financial crisis, terrorism, environment) are undeniably global issues.

I think this is the first point in our history where we have begun to feel that not only do we need to act responsibly we need everyone to act both responsibly and together.

egocentric said...

Big Daddy Narsh,

At this optimistic moment for us all, I agree with you. But I think it might be a little too massive a jump for us to move from adolescent teen to true community builder.

I might suggest that the logical outgrowth of Fromm's idea includes at least three more steps post-parent (if not more):
1. Parents of multiple children - taking on varied responsibilities as we deal with geometrically more difficult circumstances;
2. Community builders (intraethnic) - working together with people with whom we share common values and goals;
3. Community builders (interethnic) - working together with everyone.

What I just listed as step three is, I think, the utopian vision of Gene Roddenberry in the Star Trek universe.

Alternatively, perhaps we should take the approach differently: before being parents and taking care of something else (the earth), we need to learn to be partners in a marital-esque relationship. Maybe that includes the struggles of the nations of the world to stand up together during what one of my professors called "the Soviet Century" (1917-1991), including the League of Nations and the post-WWII institutions. The age of terrorism (1991 ff.) and the challenges of the environment force us to bond together and protect our own.