No More Learning

"
Her words did not go unchallenged. Professor B became visibly upset, and firmly disagreed:
What we do is entirely different. The point is that at a revolutionary university they demand a specific product, and insist that everyone emerge as this. Here at Arly we do not care about such things. We do not care what the girls believe when they graduate. Our main concern is that they learn something from their college experience.
Professor B compassionately defended an institution to which she was deeply committed, and in her emphasis on the "expected product," she made an important point. But the threat to her self- esteem, implicit in Professor A's comparison, led her to overstate her defense; for when the others questioned her more closely she admitted that as a serious educator she could not avoid caring about what her students believed and about what kind of young women they were encouraged to become during their college years. She was taking an equally simplistic intellectual position: namely, that good education has absolutely no connection with "brainwash- ing" (or with ideological totalism).
A young professor of English, also troubled, but more wary of facile conclusions, restated the issue as a dilemma:
Much of what we teach depends upon some kind of group agreement on standards of quality and truth of concepts. At the same time, one of our main troubles is getting people to speak up and offer criticisms of others' ideas based upon their own genuine opinions. . . . But just by simply saying that Shakespeare was the greatest poet in the English language--an assumption on which any English teacher would find widespread common agreement--and by then expecting the student to hold this opinion, aren't we really indulging in the same kind of process as thought reform?
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After considerable additional discussion, during which I men- tioned some of the features of ideological totalism, Professor C made a thoughtful attempt at resolution:
Perhaps we can avoid this by holding our beliefs with a certain amount of tension . . . with an attitude that "I believe in this, but recognize that there can be other beliefs in opposition to it. " In this way we can subject any belief which we hold to the tension or pressure of its own limitations and of other alternative beliefs.
By neither denying the continuities with thought reform nor overstating them in nihilistic despair, but instead by facing them as an unavoidable paradox, Professor C opened the way to a more fundamental approach. He grasped the necessity for both commit- ment and flexibility in education, and especially the necessity for its inclusion of what Michael Polanyi has called "personal knowl- edge"--knowledge neither strictly objective nor strictly subjec- tive which demands active participation and responsibility on the part of the knower. 5
Later, as I thought about these three positions, I realized that Professors A and B had gone astray largely because they were un- able to understand the relationship between education and re-ed- ucation. In the broadest sense, these amount to the same thing. For in the student's act of attaining knowledge, his previous pat- terns of identity as well as belief must be altered, however slightly. Every new idea or technique requires a complex rearrangement of what existed before. And this rearrangement is necessary from the moment of birth, since the infant begins not as a tabula rasa but as an organism with innate behavioral tendencies (whether we call these tendencies drives, instincts, or needs). Re-education is inevi- tably influenced by the attitudes and beliefs (personal and institu- tional) conveyed by the mentors who guide it, and thus has some- thing in common with thought reform. Professor A perceived some of this and was overwhelmed by her perception. Professor B had to deny both the relationship between education and re-education and the extent of the mentor's involvement in the educational process. Professor C was searching for a formulation which would account for the relationship between education and re-education, for the mentor's influence upon it, and also for his being himself
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bound by certain group standards; but he transcended these simi- larities by distinguishing between good educational practice and ideological totalism. His concept of tension in the educational proc- ess was thus an affirmative addition to the negative criteria of ideological totalism described in the previous chapter.
Any educational experience is a three-way interplay among stu- dent, mentor, and the ideas being taught--ideally it is an interplay of stimulating tension. Such tension includes the mentor's forceful presentation of ideas within the context of the cultural traditions in which they arose; his demand that each student permit himself to be challenged by these ideas; and his allowance for each stu- dent's individual relationship to the ideas. When this tension does not exist, education is apt either to move in the direction of totalism or else simply fail. If, for instance, the idea or the subject matter becomes so predominant that mentor and student come to see themselves as mere vehicles for it, education encounters the totalistic dangers of doctrine over person and of the implied claim of a sacred science. Either the student will be completely uninvolved, or else he will be coerced by seemingly mysterious ahuman forces. The same totalist trends are present when mentor and idea come to- gether in an incontestable, omnipotent combination which makes no provision for the student; also present in these circumstances are milieu control, mystical manipulation, and--depending upon the forms of discipleship which the mentor's individual and institu- tional character dictate--the possibility of the demand for absolute purity, the cult of confession, and the dispensing of existence.
This situation might exist, for instance, in a graduate school department of, let us say, economics, sociology, or literature, domi- nated by a forceful, authoritarian department head who is a single- minded devotee of one particular doctrinal approach to his subject and who considers alternative views "erroneous," and "unscientific. " His students' assigned reading matter would be limited to this "cor- rect" approach, except possibly for a few readings among "incor- rect" writers included for the sake of gathering ammunition with which to ridicule them; students would be unable to question the ultimate truth of the prescribed doctrine and approach; they would feel guilty, frightened, and ashamed if they began to suspect that a rival approach might be a better one; and each would be under great pressure to reshape his identity in such a way that it could
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encompass the correct doctrine--especially those who might be seeking the good will of the department head in relation to their future careers. This is, of course, the educational situation which most closely approximates totalism, although the ultimate avail- ability of alternative life choices outside the correct doctrine does distinguish it from thought reform.
Finally, at the opposite extreme is the teaching situation in which ideas are considered to have little importance and are presented (and are expected to be received) with minimal involvement on everyone's part. In these circumstances, a disinterested withdrawal on the part of both mentor and student occurs, or else a com- pensatory overfocus on the student-mentor relationship, so that both become bogged down in a psychological morass which neither understands.
In each of these imbalances within the three-way relationship, the student's intellectual growth and his quest for realization are both hampered.
Three-way tension does not in any way imply absolute equality of mentor and student; on the contrary, it demands that the former accept the responsibility of his intellectually superior position, and that the latter surrender himself to the extent that he becomes receptive rather than refractory to what is being taught. Moreover, temporary discipleships and educational environments of near-to- talism (such as sometimes exist in Jesuit-run schools) offer distinct intellectual advantages if the student goes on from these to the world outside. Even relatively coercive institutional demands for a particular identity product--transmitted by faculty and advanced students through a number of well-defined hazing rituals--can pro- vide emotional benefits: strong identifications, the opportunity to test one's capacity for rebellion against respected authorities, and an experience of personal trial and initiation which, although pain- ful at the time, is nostalgically recalled forever after. Relatively coercive environments can come close enough to totalism to do their damage, especially at lower age levels (for instance, the British public schools described by George Orwell). 6 But in pluralistic societies, even the most extreme of these institutions see themselves as part of the individual's continuing educational process. They may try to influence him as much as possible during his stay; but it is assumed that he will go on to new ideas and different identities
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in the future. They become most harmful when they approach the totalist extreme of claiming to offer the student a single path of absolute perfection whose limits he is never to exceed.
The alternative to totalism in education then is a liberalism based upon the three-way tension described above, a liberalism that in Lionel Trilling's words can recapture its "essential imagination of variousness and possibility/' without losing the "awareness of complexity and difficulty/' It is, as Trilling goes on to say, "a large tendency rather than a concise body of doctrine. "7 In this "tendency" there is a rejection of omnipotence on the part of the mentor even when the student seeks to thrust it upon him; and a balance between a vigorous presentation of available knowledge and the encouragement of those elements of the student's imagina- tion which may someday transcend that knowledge in new dis- covery.
Psychological Re-education
Psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are forms of psychological re- education; but they focus less upon man's knowledge of the world about him than upon his understanding of his own self. Their concern with the most fundamental and the most hidden of human emotions adds a special depth to their re-educating efforts, and a special intensity to their influence. Their avoidance of totalism is therefore a matter of particular importance. 8
The ethos of psychoanalysis and of its derived psychotherapies is in direct opposition to that of totalism. Indeed, its painstaking and sympathetic investigations of single human minds place it within the direct tradition of those Western intellectual currents which historically have done most to counter totalism: humanism, individualism, and free scientific inquiry. Because of its continuing concern for individual differences and for flexible personal develop- ment, it is not surprising that psychoanalytic work has never been permitted under totalitarianism (or political totalism). And psycho- analytically-derived insights, as I have attempted to suggest through- out this book, provide one of the best ways to counter totalism through shedding light on its manner of functioning.
But in its organizational aspects, psychoanalysis--like every other revolutionary movement, whether scientific, political, or religious
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--has had difficulty maintaining its initial liberating spirit; it has had its full share of bitter ideological controversy and schism. More- over, certain social and historical features of the psychoanalytic movement--its early struggle with the unusually strong hostilities stimulated by its "shocking" doctrines, the novelty and isolated intensity of its therapeutic relationship, the brilliant virtuosity and "grandiose one-sidedness"9 of its originator, and the subsequent intellectual and emotional appeal of its doctrine among practi- tioners and patients to the point of sometimes substituting for religious or political beliefs--have given rise to special problems in relationship to its scientific pursuits. These problems, and espe- cially the effect they have on the psychoanalytic training situa- tion, have been commented on by many psychoanalysts*10 I can add little to what has already been written except to place some of these issues in the perspective of this study of totalism.
Psychoanalytic training is a form of personal re-education, in preparation for re-educating others. During his years of apprentice- ship the trainee develops three important identities. He becomes first a patient. Through his own free associations in the "faceless" encounter with his analyst, he comes to grips with previously buried emotions in a waythat "can play havoc with . . . his adjustments to the individuals close to him, who cannot for the life of them see why a person has to get sick in order to learn how to cure others. " 1J- This training analysis is his means of gaining insight into and mastery over those psychological tendencies which might other- wise interfere with his own therapeutic work. He is also a student. He attends seminars on psychoanalytic theory and technique, sees these principles demonstrated in his own analysis, and learns how to utilize them in the analyses he later conducts under the supervision of senior analysts. And he is a candidate. He seeks to qualify for membership in the local institute, and in the national and international psychoanalytic organizations--for eventual "con- firmation" as a psychoanalyst. Erikson has referred to this train- ing as "a new kind of asceticism," one that "demands a total and central personal involvement . . . which takes greater chances with the individual's relationship to himself . . . than any other pro- fessional training except monkhood. " 12
From the standpoint of the criteria for ideological totalism, we may raise the following additional questions: Does this combina-
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tion of personal therapy, professional instruction, and organiza- tional influence--all mediated by a single training institute--create a tendency toward milieu control? Does it cause the institute itself to become surrounded with a near-mystical aura? Do these circum- stances--especially the candidate's learning a scientific doctrine in connection with its therapeutic application to his own psychological distress--create an implicit demand for ideological purity? And do they raise the possibility that his analyst and his institute, by bring- ing about his "cure," will become (even if inadvertently) the ar- biters of his neurotic and existential guilt? Could the confession process of therapy in this way take on an extratherapeutic function of binding the candidate to the psychoanalytic movement, thereby making him hesitant to criticize its teaching? Is there sometimes a tendency, in the descriptive and reductive overemployment of a particular school's or institute's favorite technical terms, to load the language or to suggest a sacred science? Is there thus a danger of establishing (perhaps unconsciously on everyone's part) a pat- tern of intellectual conformity as a prerequisite for a successful training experience--or in other words, establishing a primacy of doctrine over person? And when questions of ideological difference influence decisions about who is to be recognized as a legitimate psychoanalyst, is there a tendency toward the dispensing of exist- ence?
It is perhaps unnecessary to stress that the psychoanalytic train- ing procedure never approaches the totalist actualities of thought reform, and for this reason I raise questions about "tendencies" and "dangers. "13 Nor can the problems involved in preparing men and women for psychoanalytic work in a manner that offers maximum protection for future patients be ignored. Indeed, it may be that the psychoanalyst often requires something stronger than a working hypothesis--something closer to a dogma--as a combined protective shield and sorting mechanism for the extraordinary rush of emotions released by the psychoanalytic process. But psycho- analysis is able to look critically at itself, to experiment, correct, and change. As early as 1937, Franz Alexander, then President of the American Psychoanalytic Association, warned against these dangers and urged that psychoanalysisdivest itself of its own "move- ment"; 14 others subsequently have suggested diminishing the insti- tutes' power,15 and dividing the therapeutic and didactic aspects
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of the student's training so that they are no longer controlled by the same institute. 16 Studies of the training procedure are being conducted; and the general trend is toward a more "open" environ- ment, toward a better balance in the educational tension among doctrine, mentor, and student. Thus the sweeping accusation that "psychoanalysis is brainwashing" is as false as the statement that "education is brainwashing/' Insofar as tendencies toward totalism exist, however, they are bound to interfere with intellectual prog- ress, and with the emergence of those creative spirits which any discipline requires if it is to continue to contribute to the stream of human thought
I shall mention briefly just a few more of the many implications of this study of thought reform for the theory and practice of psy- chiatric re-education. The first pertains to the concept of "resist- ance," which is basic to most psychotherapy. Since thought reform has its own notion of "resistance/7 the caricatured exaggerations of ideological totalism can be helpful in examining some of the presuppositions of more moderate and more genuinely therapeutic work. Chinese reformers are apt to consider any inner opposition or outer hesitation--in fact anything at all that stands in the way of thought reform--as "resistance. " The psychotherapist sim- ilarly regards almost any attitude or behavior standing in the way of cure--but especially the reluctance to bring unconscious ideas into consciousness--to be expressions of resistance to therapy. These resistances are the real experience of any therapist; but after a study of thought reform one cannot help but be a bit chastened in the use of the concept. That is, as a psychotherapist I would consider it important to ask myself whether what appears to be resistance is truly a reflection of inner opposition to cure, or whether it might be inner opposition to my concept of the necessary direction of cure. And I would also wonder whether such resistance might not be a reflection of poor communication between the patient and myself, or of the absence between us of shared values17 and assump- tions about the therapy, both of which might be profitably in- vestigated along with any psychological barriers within the patient.
The psychoanalytic concept of "transference"--a concept which is constantly being studied and reformulated--may also be re- examined in the light of questions of totalism. The therapist's
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recognition of the existence of transference--that is, of the patient's tendency to re-experience, in relationship to the therapist, earlier attitudes and fantasies developed originally toward parental authori- ties--is on the whole an extremely important check against to- talism. For it provides a theoretical framework within which any tendencies in the patient to grant omnipotence to the therapist can be questioned by both, as well as a means of inquiring thera- peutically into the sources of such tendencies, and a rationale for resolving these emotions--however difficult a task this resolution may be. In thought reform an opposite policy prevails. Transfer- ence occurs there too, not so much in relationship to one "therapist" as to the entire ideological movement; but instead of attempting to understand and ultimately resolve this transference, the reformers seek to enlarge and perpetuate it in the participant's permanent surrender of self to the authoritarian organization.
Like many other useful concepts, however, the notion of trans- ference, if it is overemphasized, can produce the very results against which it ordinarily guards. Thus, if the therapeutic relationship is viewed as exclusively one of transference--with the actual person of the therapist and the adult self of the patient ignored--the danger arises that the patient will come to see himself almost entirely within his infant-child identity, and that his bestowal of omnipo- tence upon the therapist will be inadvertently encouraged. Psycho- analysts have recognized this problem and have emphasized the necessary dialectic in every therapeutic relationship between actual encounter and transference, as well as the inevitability of the therapist's own emotional involvement (or countertransference reactions). 18 Especially relevant is Janet Mackenzie Rioch's con- cern 19 that the psychotherapist do all possible to offset rather than perpetuate the patient's frequent "willingness to surrender," and that he take cognizance of the "symbolically submissive position" inherent in the psychoanalytic treatment situation. Her warning to the analyst to avoid the role of the "chronic hypnotist" amounts to a warning against totalism--since hypnosis is in effect a situation of interpersonal totalism in which the subject's perceptual world is reduced to the highly-focused influence of the omnipotent hyp- notist. 20
Another important issue which thought reform raises for psy- chiatric therapy is the use of the concept of "reality. " The totalist
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environment (in a Chinese prison, for instance) can literally stand reality on its head: demand that all within its sway commit them- selves to altered versions of external events, and then insist that these falsehoods constitute "objective reality. " Psychiatrists are familiar with distortions like these, but arising in the minds of in- dividuals rather than resulting from group manipulations; and as psychiatrists we consider them signs of mental illness, thereby imply- ing that we expect psychologically healthy people to be able to adhere to a reality of external events. We also recognize the great variation in interpretations of reality, especially in relationship to the "psychological realities" of individual patients. And we extend the concept of reality to suggest something on the order of the way things are, as opposed to the way that the patient imagines them to be. In fact, we regard the therapeutic relationship as a means of enhancing the patient's reality-testing, of helping him to recognize his own distortions.
All of these usages have validity; but the therapist's notion of reality is nonetheless highly colored by his own ideological convic- tions about such matters as psychological health and illness, social conformity and rebelliousness, commitment and detachment, and especially about what constitutes wise or mature attitudes and be- havior. Moreover, it is precisely these issues--and their relationship to problems of personal identity--which trouble patients in psycho- therapy in America today, rather than the more clear-cut symptom neuroses described during the earlier days of psychoanalysis. This means consequently that unless the therapist can sort out his own reality prejudices, he may inadvertently transmit his personal ideologies within the treatment situation and require a successful implant upon the patient as a criterion for cure. Since ideological convictions about all of these matters are never absent, and indeed are necessary for any constructive change in therapy, they are better openly discussed as a part of the therapeutic process, and discussed in a manner that allows for their subjectivity and tenta- tiveness. To do this requires the view that reality is both definite
(in relationship to external events), and highly relative (in relation- ship to any observer's interpretation of such events).
Concerning milieu therapy, I have already mentioned thought reform's demonstration of the tremendous influence which a partic- ular milieu--and the psychological themes contained therein--can
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bring to bear upon the individual person. This has great importance for psychiatric practice in a variety of ways, but I shall limit myself here to mentioning the harmful effects of environments that are "extremist" in regard to the magnitude of stimuli which they offer. At one pole is the deprived milieu--the milieu of "sensory depriva- tion"21--in which stimuli are so sparse as to be insufficient for the maintenance within the individual person of a reasonable degree of interest in and responsiveness toward his surroundings. Such an environment has been created under experimental condi- tions, and it produces patterns of boredom, restlessness, stimulus- hunger, extensive day-dreaming, loss of organized thinking, hyno- gogic states, and a variety of hallucinatory experiences. The rough equivalent of a deprived milieu within a psychiatric environment is the old-fashioned back ward in which patients sat about (and un- fortunately still sit about) aimlessly, with little or no challenge or activity-evoking stimuli from their external surroundings. The op- posite pole is the milieu of ideological totalism, in which the in- dividual is bombarded with stimuli to the point of suffocation. The counterpart of this kind of environment within a psychiatric hos- pital would be (again speaking very roughly) the "total push" ap- proaches adopted during the recent past by many institutions as a reaction against the stagnancy of the back wards atmosphere. While this was a definite improvement, it sometimes led to ac- tivity for activity's sake; a revealing comment on this was made to me by a schizophrenic patient after a few weeks' exposure to total push: "Gee, Doc, I wish I had a minute to sit down and think. "
There is a certain similarity in these two types of extreme en- vironments: both are overcontrolled milieux, and both interfere with the variety and balance of environmental stimuli required for optimal psychological function. Both are thus ultimately "de- prived," although we cannot say (as has sometimes been suggested) that the milieu of sensory deprivation is an experimental model for thought reform.
Psychiatric hospitals have learned to avoid both extremes, and to develop programs and activities which offer a better balance between individual and milieu, so that the patient is neither overwhelmed by external stimuli nor so cut off from them that he is thrown back entirely upon his already malfunctioning internal life. Recent workers have stressed both socialization and individual creativity,
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the increase of "open" (unlocked) wards, and the therapeutic com- munity. They have advocated patient participation in the planning of hospital programs, a balance between ordered and spontaneous activities, and finally, an avoidance of the identity of permanent patienthood through emphasizing the patient's connections with and educational preparation for--rather than his medical isolation from--the outside world. 22
Finally, thought reform also has sobering implications for psy- chiatric theory. Despite contrivances and crudities, Chinese Com- munist theory about the "class character of man" was made opera- tive and--at least to a certain extent--could be shown to "work. " Theories have an irrepressible tendency to confirm themselves, especially when one deals with human beings; in Alfred North Whitehead's phrase, "the idea is a prophecy which procures its own fulfillment. " This does not mean that we need despair and give up theorizing entirely (I certainly have shown no such tend- ency in this book); but it does suggest that psychiatrists can learn from physical scientists to look on theory not as a permanent and unalterable structure but rather as a useful and relatively valid means of ordering the data of experience within the framework of existing knowledge. Everyone of course recognizes this about theory--except when it comes to his theoretical beliefs.
Similarly, thought reform should make us somewhat cautious about those claims to "unification" of the behavioral sciences which imply an ultimate monopoly of one approach or an ultimate ideal of incontrovertible truth. A plunge into this kind of theoretical closure would be but another example of an intolerance for con- fusion driving us into the seductive embrace of totalism. I do not suggest that we can afford to rest content or cease being critical of faulty and ill-conceived theory and research; nor is there any doubt about our need for greater unity in our knowledge of man. But thought reform illustrates (and scientific experience strongly af- firms) the importance of remaining open to knowledge from all sources, even (or especially) the most unlikely. I am convinced that we need new approaches to psychiatric theorizing based upon humanized notions of style, pattern7 and configuration in the inter- play of internal and external psychological forces, rather than upon the more simplistic cause-and-effect mechanical images of nine- teenth-century physics now so widely employed. Such new ap-
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preaches seem to be necessary if we are to learn more about the nature of man's emotional involvement in his changing physical environment, the ways in which he is himself undergoing change, and the relationship of this change to psychological health and disease, and to the realization of human potentialities. They will require outlooks which are the very antithesis of totalism: a subtle and flexible historical perspective beyond that of the individual life- history, a certain degree of boldness in the application of dis- ciplined imagination, and a willingness to risk being wrong--or to expose (in Riesman's term) the "nerve of failure. "
Religion, Political Religion, and Science
I have already suggested that thought reform bears many re- semblances to practices of organized religion, and to various kinds of religious re-education. Indeed, most of the psychological themes of ideological totalism can be found somewhere in the Judeo- Christian tradition, however indirect any such theological in- fluences may have been in the development of thought reform itself. These totalist tendencies have usually been related either to the theocratic search for heresy or to patterns of revitalizing enthusiasm--or (as in thought reform) to both.
In the first of these, the theocratic search for heresy, the in- evitable assumption is that the administrators--whether themselves secular or clerical--rule their community and carry out their ideo- logical purifications only as agents of a perfect and omniscient deity. The classical examples are the Inquisition of the middle ages and the treason and anti-Papist trials of sixteenth-century England. Both of these movements were characterized by orgies of false confessions, apparently produced by psychological manipulations of reality, identity, and guilt similar to those of thought reform. Thus the Inquisition created its own witches, much as thought reform created its spies and reactionaries--this despite the fact that Inquisitors were specifically cautioned in one of their "technical manuals" (Malleus Maleficarum or Witches' Hammer) 23 against the undesirable possibility of producing false confessions. And prominent persons in Tudor England, impressed by "the brilliant aura of divinity, the inscrutable light of infallibility which emanated from the royal person" denounced themselves for crimes they had
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never committed. 24 Chinese Confucianism (whether or not one considers it a religion) on the whole avoided such tendencies, al- though it too at times became sensitive to heresy and moved in the direction of totalism; for the most part it created something closer to what Whitehead has termed a "genial orthodoxy," and allowed a considerable amount of personal leeway within the limits of its unchallengeable assumptions (in this respect not unlike some phases of medieval Catholicism).
The second variety of religious totalism, that associated with revitalizing enthusiasm, has been widespread enough: it can be found in the more extreme practices of early Lutheranism and Calvinism,25 in the Chiliastic sects of the middle ages26 and in many post-Reformation fundamentalist and revivalist cults. All of these movements, according to Ronald Knox, reflect the "over- mastering influence" of St. Augustine--even if "exaggerated now from this angle, now from that. " 27 Usually laying great stress upon the dramatic personal conversion experience, while varying in their relative emphasis upon confession and re-education, they have sought to purify man in accordance with a particular vision of Biblical truth or prophecy; as in thought reform, this vision has sometimes been so urgent that men have been physically and psychologically brutalized in its name.
Beyond these theological excesses, thought reform has a more fundamental relationship to religion in general, a relationship noted by almost every priest and minister who has come into contact with it. One Jesuit priest who was studying Chinese indoctrination methods in Hong Kong emphasized to me the following parallels with Christianity: the concept of love (of country, "the people," labor, science, and public property); the concept of hope in the future (through the accomplishments of socialism); faith (in Communist ideology); a deity (the Communist movement); a spirit of martyrdom, of sacrifice and suffering, an aspiration to sainthood; stress upon humility and selflessness; and the stress upon converting theoretical principles into a way of life. (Many secular writers--Bertrand Russell, for instance--have made similar com- parisons. ) Others among my subjects compared thought reform to their own Jesuit training, although they were usually quick to dis- tinguish the two on the basis of ultimate moral purpose. A Protes- tant missionary was struck by its similarity with the Moral Re-
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armament movement in which he had at one time been active-- especially in regard to such things as group manipulation of guilt and planned spontaneity. 28 One or two priests spoke of Com- munism as "nothing but a Christian heresy"--a statement which perhaps says both too much and too little; and few among my subjects, whatever their clerical or secular status, failed to comment upon the "religious" nature of thought reform's emotional in- tensities, moral energies, and exhortative demands.
Keeping in mind thought reform's close relationship to religion, how can we distinguish totalist practice within religious institutions from more balanced forms of spirituality? Rhadakrishnan, the dis- tinguished Indian philosopher and statesman, points to organizing tendencies within religion as the specific danger:
When religion becomes organized, man ceases to be free. It is not God that is worshipped but the group or the authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority and not violation of integrity. 29
I believe we must consider also the prevailing themes within a particular religious milieu. Thus religious totalism can be recognized by the criteria outlined in Chapter 22, and especially by the fol- lowing trends: exaggerated control and manipulation of the in- dividual, the blanketing of the milieu with guilt and shame, the emphasis upon man's hopeless depravity and worthlessness, and upon his need to submit abjectly to a vengeful deity--all within the framework of an exclusive and closed system of ultimate truth.
Contrasting with religious totalism are those religious situations which stress man's worth and his possibilities as well as his limita- tion; his capacity to change as well as the difficulties inherent in bringing about such change; and faith and commitment without the need for either self-negation or condemnation of nonbelievers. These attitudes leave room for emotional and intellectual growth as opposed to static doctrinal repetitions, and a broadened sensi- tivity to the world rather than a retreat into religious embeddedness. Since each of the world's major religions has at one time or an- other demonstrated both of these contrasting tendencies, any particular religious environment must be judged according to its own characteristics. 30
Man is unlikely to give up his need for the sense of awe and devo-
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tion inherent in the religious experience; but there are indications from many parts of the world that organized religion is playing a diminishing role in mediating human change. Religious institu- tions, while highly influential, tend to assume a relatively conserva- tive stance, and political movements, as well as scientific and technological innovations, have become the great regulators of change. During the past century, emotions formerly directed toward organized religion have been expressed in relationship to politics and science. This rechanneling of emotion is not without its dangers; as Camus said, "Politics is not religion, or, if it is, then it is nothing but the Inquisition. " 31 Such political inquisitions occur --as in thought reform--when ideological totalists set up their own theocratic search for heresy.
One example of this variety of totalism in recent American history would be McCarthyism, a bizarre blend of political religion and extreme opportunism.
True, this movement never developed the scope or the organization of a full-scale thought reform pro- gram, either during the lifetime of its leader or after his death; yet it had many uncomfortable resemblances, including most of the characteristics of ideological totalism. In particular: the "big ac- cusation" accompanied by "small facts" (like that described by Father Vechten); the quick development of a relationship of guilt between the accused and his environment, along with ruthless exploitation of ostracism and shame; a cult of confession and re- pentance; a stress upon self-betrayal and a bond of betrayal be- tween accusers and accused; the creation of a mythological doctrine (the State Department was being overrun by Communist "subver- sives" who were in turn responsible for "losing China"); and the demand that victims take on a new identity in accordance with this myth. The ostensible purpose of McCarthyism was of course that of fighting Communism; in the end, it not only did great service
to Communism throughout the world, but also became a poor imitation of its declared enemy. Indeed, the focus of so much of McCarthyism's ideological mythology upon China seems more than coincidental. It suggests that the American emotional involvement in that country, based on years of missionary activity and wartime alliance, was so great, and the events of the Communist revolution so far-reaching and unpalatable, that the American public was receptive to a rewriting of history no less distorted than that of
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thought reform's own myth. And among those most actively en- gaged in the McCarthyist movement were many former Com- munists turned anti-Communist--all of which again seems to confirm (at varying levels of politics and individual emotion) the principle that totalism breeds totalism.
But McCarthyism was not simply a reaction to Communism; it had close connections with specific religious and secular currents in American life. Edward Shils has convincingly demonstrated its relationship to religious fundamentalism and to the demagogic strain of political populism. 32 This relationship suggests that the political inquisition and its related totalist phenomena find fertile soil in a wide variety of social and historical conditions and in virtually any culture. It also reveals the source of one of McCarthy- ism's fatal weaknesses--its antiscientific bias.
As Shils points out, the McCarthyist harassment of scientists within and without the government was not only a reflection of its general mania concerning "security," but also of the fundamen- talist's long-standing distrust of the scientist, and of the dema- gogue's resentment of the intellectual The thought reform move- ment also shows great distrust of the intellectual, but in contrast worships science and scientists. In these extreme attitudes we see a modern shift of the god-devil axis from religion to science.
The god side of the axis (by no means confined to the Com- munist world) is expressed vividly by Michael Polanyi:
. . . just as the three centuries following on the calling of the Apostles sufficed to establish Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Em- pire, so the three centuries after the founding of the Royal Society suf- ficed for science to establish itself as the supreme intellectual authority of the post-Christian age. "It is contrary to religion! "--the objection ruled supreme in the iyth century. "It is unscientific! " is its equivalent in the 2oth. 33
Accompanying this deification is the expectation that science will supply a complete and absolutely accurate mechanistic theory of a closed and totally predictable universe. Modern physics has long disowned this ideal, but it persists in the human sciences--bio- logical, psychological, and social--and is particularly damaging there. Thought reform is its ultimate expression--a mechanized
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image of man within a closed society, and a claim to scientific method in the remaking of man in this image. There is the as- sumption that science--that is, the "social science" of Marxism-- can liberate men from the encumbrances of all past institutions, family ties, social loyalties, professional affiliations, and religious and philosophical commitments: first by exposing these as "un- scientific/* then by demonstrating that they are no longer necessary in a truly "scientific" environment. It is true that this faith in science can produce much that is humane and beneficial: a dis- tinguished British physician, for instance, after his return from a visit to China termed the Chinese Communist Party "probably the best instrument ever devised for cleaning up a slum, for instructing its inhabitants in hygiene and for getting everybody immunized. " 34 But men also require institutions and conventions of varying de- grees of rationality; and thought reform, rather than eliminating such institutions, has established new ones even more encompassing than the old, and a good deal more blinding in relationship to knowledge and truth.
While this god-pole of science seems now to predominate almost everywhere, it is possible that there lurks beneath it more of the devil-pole than might be suspected. For there are also suggestions
(evident in many kinds of literature, including science fiction) of great hostility toward science, hostility beyond the fundamentalist prejudices of McCarthyism. Men resent the power of science to change familiar landscapes and to reshape the world in ways that make them feel less at home in it. Above all, they fear the destruc- tive power of science, its capacity to create weapons which could destroy mankind. Science becomes, if not a disguised devil, at least a vengeful god to be feared beyond all others, and people begin to believe that if only we could be rid of science and scientists the world would be left in peace. God-pole and devil-pole, equally misleading and dangerous in their extremism, may even exist concurrently within the same mind. 35
There are more constructive approaches to science, and there are alternatives to the kinds of totalist imbalance we have described among science, politics, and religion. An extensive discussion of these would be beyond both the scope of this book and my personal capabilities; but I would like to indicate a few of the possibilities
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which have been suggested by scientists themselves.
Albert Einstein, for instance, stressed the need for an equilibrium
between science and nonscientific tradition:
. . . thd scientific method can teach us nothing else beyond how facts are related to, and conditioned by, each other . . . the aspiration toward such objective knowledge belongs to the highest of which man is capa- ble. . . . Y et it is equally clear that knowledge of what is does not open the door directly to what should be. . , . To make clear these funda- mental ends and valuations, and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to perform in the social life of man. And if one asks whence derives the authority of such fundamental ends, since they can- not be stated and justified merely by reason, one can only answer, they exist in a healthy society as powerful traditions, which act upon the conduct and the aspirations and judgments of individuals. 86
Einstein does not claim for science the omnipotence which totalists bestow upon it, nor the authority to dictate or replace the full complex of ideals that men live by.
Indeed, the greatest of scientists have frequently spoken of their own need for faith--or trust--in the order of the universe, of their awe and humility before it, of the inevitable incompleteness of
their understanding of it. Thus, Robert Oppenheimer writes about his profession:
In it we learn, so frequently that we could almost become accustomed to it, how vast is the novelty of the world, and how much even the physi- cal world transcends in delicacy and in balance the limits of man's prior imaginings. We learn that views may be useful and inspiriting although they are not complete. We come to have a great caution in all assertions of totality, of finality or absoluteness. 37
It seems clear that scientific practice should lead one to reject, rather than embrace, totalism of any variety. J. Bronowski carries this view further in his discussion of "the scientific spirit" as a mode of thinking, with its emphasis upon "the creative mind/' the "leap of imagination/' and the "habit of truth"; and its require- ment that "the society of scientists . . . be a democracy [which] can keep alive and grow only by a constant tension between dissent and respect, between independence from the views of others and tolerance for them. " 3S
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Science can advance greatly even in a totalitarian society, but it always requires a special enclave in which there exist speculative freedom and the "habit of truth. " (Genuine science can serve as an escape from philistine sacred science and becomes in such a society one of the few professions in which unhindered creative work is possible. Indeed the attractions of this relatively free and highly-respected enclave within an over-controlled society are in- evitably felt by that society's most talented young men and women, and may have much to do with the impressive scientific progress which has taken place in Russia. )
The ideas of Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Bronowski suggest the possibility of a society in which politics and science coexist neither in total isolation nor in suffocating embrace; in which political bodies help to guide scientifically-based change with sensi- tive concern for the simultaneous altering, elimination, and preser- vation of various traditional institutions; in which science itself is free to explore all aspects of the human and nonhuman realms, while actively resisting anyone's claim to a mechanized absolute: and above all, of a society supporting a variety of clerical and secular approaches to knowledge and to faith, no one of which is permitted to impose upon the others the threats and restrictions of self-acclaimed final truth.
We need not dwell upon the difficulties of achieving such a vision, and during the last half-century the world has, if anything, moved further from it. Nor is the task made simpler by the dramatic transformations which science is helping to promote everywhere, the significance of which is baffling to nonscientists and by no means fully clear to scientists themselves. Yet this vision can provide not only an alternative to totalism but also an approach toward restoring a more favorable balance in the creative-destructive po- tential always inherent within this three-way interplay. If religion, politics, and science can reach such an equilibrium, they will be- come less the objects of extremist emotions and more the rightful agents of three vital tendencies of individual mental life: spirituality, judiciousness, and the mastery of the unknown.
? CHAPTER 24 'OPEN" PERSONAL CHANGE
Nontotalist approaches to re-education can encour-
age an experience of individual change very different from that promoted by thought reform--one characterized by "openness to the world" rather than by personal closure. Not much has been written about the psychology of this open form of per- sonal change, and I will attempt only to suggest some of its features in relationship to the general problem of human change at this historical moment. I do so well aware of the difficulties involved both in formulating such change and in actually achieving it; yet it would seem to me less than responsible to conclude this study in any other way.
Any statement about human change depends upon one's assump- tions concerning the extent to which adult and near-adult people can change. Chinese reformers seem to assume an extreme malle- ability of human character. They go far beyond conventional Marxist-Leninist approaches in their conviction that even those who have been exposed to the most pernicious influences of the "exploiting classes" can "change their class" and personally "turn over. " They look upon human beings, at least implicitly, aswrongly- molded clay, needing only new molds and proper remolding from ideological potters--a remolding process which they themselves are willing to pursue with the hottest of fires and the most suf- focating of kilns. Theirs is the totalist vision of change, what J. L.
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Talmon has called "the sustained and violent effort to make all things new/'1
Psychiatric experience can support no such view. As psychiatrists, we are in fact constantly impressed with the enduring quality of emotional patterns developed during infancy and childhood, and with the difficulties involved in changing these. We are also struck by the importance of certain universals of emotional life--am- bivalent admixtures of love, hate, shame, guilt, striving, and de- pendency. These exist partly outside of conscious awareness, and none can be completely eliminated even by the dramatic type of change which thought reform proposes. It may be, however, that in psychiatry we err in the opposite direction, that we underesti- mate the possibilities for adult change. Thus some psychiatric writing seems to express the ultra-conservative notion that there is nothing new under the sun, that man is so "determined" by his instincts and by the events of his childhood that all suggestion of later change is illusory.
Recent work in the human sciences, however, suggests a middle ground,2 and it is this approach I wish to pursue here. For I be- lieve that change during adult life is real and perpetual; significant change may be extremely difficult to consolidate, but the capacity to change significantly during adult life has become in this his- torical epoch increasingly necessary for emotional survival. Thus, in the individual subjects of this study, important changes occurred during late adolescence and adulthood, although impressivelycon- sistent behavioral patterns remained throughout their lives. And more universally, we find imaginative expression of this capacity to change in the great mythological theme of "death and rebirth," a theme given coercive expression in thought reform.
I wish to describe in rough outline a pattern of personal change, another symbolic form of death and rebirth, parallel to but sig- nificantly different from that imposed by totalist practice. Such a change can occur through more or less formal association with education, religion, therapy, or politics; it can also take place through less structured encounter with new people, new ideas, or new landscapes. We may conveniently envision it within a three- step sequence: confrontation, reordering, and renewal.
By confrontation I mean the combination of inner impulse and external challenge which creates within a person the simultaneous
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recognition of the need and the possibility for change. I stress the element of inner impulse because I believe that there is in man a fundamental urge toward change--a force which propels him in the direction of what is new and unknown--ever battling with his opposing tendency to cling exclusively to what is emotionally familiar. In this sense man is never simply "changed" by external forces, but rather finds his individual impulses toward change acti- vated and manipulated by these forces. Without such inner as- sistance from each individual person, the agencies of change could have little success, and little justification for their existence. Ex- ternal challenge is thus always related to internal urges to know and to master.
This open confrontation causes a questioning of identity rather than thought reform's assault upon identity. It calls forth the most specifically human of faculties--introspection and symboliza- tion--rather than stunting these faculties by use of totalist coercion and dogma. The person so challenged is thrown back upon the re- sources derived from his own past without being thrust into thought reform's regressive stance. He experiences anxiety at the prospect of emerging from the security of existing identities and beliefs, pos- sibly even the severe anxiety of potential nothingness, but not the sense of being annihilated by all-powerful manipulators of anxiety. He feels the guilt and shame of unfulfillment--the "shock of recognition" of neglected personal capacities--but without the virulent self-hatred demanded by the accusatory totalist milieu. He may experience a deep sense of inner and outer disharmony, of un- comfortable personal alienation, but not the antagonistic estrange- ment of thought reform. The rebel who undergoes "a feeling of revulsion at the infringement of his rights,"3 the prospective re- ligious convert who becomes aware of his "divided self,"4 the seeker of psychotherapy who comes to recognize the debilitating nature of his neurosis, the artist who feels himself drawn into a new creative realm, and the ordinary man who at some point questions the pattern of his existence--all of these are examples of confrontation.
To act upon this confrontation is to advance to the next phase, that of reordering; and this means embarking upon the work of re-education and change. As in thought reform, reordering is likely to include a personal "emptying" process--some form of confession
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and exploration of existential guilt--in the service of exposing and altering past emotional patterns. But the personal exposure is dignified by privacy and balance; insights and interpretations are neither coercively publicized nor artificially guided along the nega- tive thought reform channels of self-betrayal and logical dishonor- ing. The involved individual cannot avoid the impact of his nega- tive identity, but he is not forced to view himself as nothing but this most debasing of self-images. In dealing with the harsh realities of his own limitations and of the world outside himself, he is by no means guaranteed a happy ending: he may indeed experience the terror and dread of a true sense of tragedy, but not the humiliating com- mand performance of thought reform's manipulated pseudo-tragedy.
Symbolic emptying is accompanied by a corresponding absorp- tion of new or refashioned ideas and emotions; this absorption can be accomplished by relatively free learning rather than by the nar- row impositions of a sacred science. This learning requires a measure of personal isolation, and even a temporary refractoriness to alternative influences, but not the hermetic self-sealing of totalism. There is the opportunity to test the personal validity of new ideas, to experiment with new forms of human relationships and creative expression, rather than the demand that all of these be subjugated to prefabricated totalist ideology and language. Through emptying and absorption, the individual (as in thought reform) constantly reinterprets his own past. He cannot reinterpret without ideological bias, without a certain amount of emotional polarization and an overcritical attitude toward his past conditioned by his urge to change; but he can find ways to moderate his judg- ments (through both introspection and outside influences), rather than having them further distorted by the always immoderate, guilt saturated totalist milieu.
The third and final stage consists of a sense of open renewal, contrasting with thought reform's closed form of rebirth. Renewal depends upon the new alignment--the new sense of fit--between personal emotions and personally-held ideas about the world; in other words, on a new interplay between identity and ideology in which both have been changed. Through renewal, the individual can free himself from exaggerated dependencies and experience an "emergence from embeddedness"5 rather than a plunge into a new form of totalist embeddedness. He can accomplish this only by
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viewing his relationships to old authorities as steps along his per- sonal path toward greater independence, not by making the illusory totalist effort to annihilate their inner remnants or deny their existence.
He is free to experience a new or reinforced commitment to an ideal or a cause, but a commitment made autonomously and in the face of alternatives, rather than as a compulsory loyalty as- sociated with a bond of betrayal. Instead of totalism's highly- simplified and distorted pure image approach to knowledge, he may acquire an enlarged receptivity to intellectual and emotional complexities around him. Nor can this renewal be consolidated by the symbolic submission of a "final confession" or a "final thought summary"; rather, there must be an awareness (whether gradual or sudden) of genuine self-knowledge and a readiness to accept its consequences. These include: a personal responsibility for expres- sions of love and hate, rather than a submission to their legislation by push-button enthusiasm or by ideological command; and a recognition of social identifications beyond the self--free of ideo- logical exclusiveness, and including yet transcending family, pro- fession, culture, and nation.
A person so renewed, instead of being coercively reshaped ac- cording to an imposed ideological myth, will be able to call forth the "submerged metaphor" ? of his own mythologically nourished imagination to further his efforts at self-expression. He will feel himself to be connected with his past, however critical he may be of it, and will not try, in the totalist manner, to cut himself off from it completely. This new harmony, however, cannot afford him total relief from personal conflict and confusion. A certain amount of conflict and confusion are in fact inherent in the enlarged life space which he attains, in contrast to their attempted elimination by totalist constriction. Such renewal, whether achieved through per- sonal search or by guided secular or clerical change, places one in more viable relationship to the universal human experience, or to "the principle of continuous life. " 7
In contrasting this open style of change with the closed thought reform mode, I am admittedly speaking in ideal terms. No such change can proceed entirely unhindered, as closed-system emotional patterns always exist within any person--patterns of regression,
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mistrust, and of incapacitating dependency--which undermine open change at every turn. The three steps I have described are, of course, schematic, since each is likely to be incomplete and all three can occursimultaneously.
Yet open change does occur and has been described. We can see it in the lives of great men: in, for instance, Camus' emer- gence from the "burning and disordered" years of his experiments with totalism (both Communism and nihilism) to become perhaps the most articulate moralist and exponent of autonomous com- mitment in our century. 8 We see it also in what William James described as the "willingness to be" of religious converts and the "states of knowledge" and "states of insight" of Eastern and Western mystics;9 and in what Michael Balint calls the "new be- ginning of love" of successfully treated psychoanalytic patients. 10 We have also observed change of this kind among the subjects of this study, in their casting off the closed influences of thought re- form and undergoinga personal experience of renewal (for example, Father Vechten, Father Luca, George Chen, and Mr. Hu). I would make the further claim that in the completion of every genuinely creative act, and in fact at some time during virtually every adult life, changes of this open variety take place.
Whether a change is open, closed, or something of each, it in- volves the entire person. For this reason I have stressed throughout this study the relationship of personal identity to specific attitudes and values as well as to larger ideologies; and I have used the con- cept of identity as a large configuration rather than a localized subdivision in the mental topography. Similarly, I have spoken little of "persuasion" and much of pressures toward identity change. For I feel that belief and identity are so intimately related that any change in one must affect the other. This means that anyone's approach to ideologies, within his own culture or without, will invariably be strongly influenced by existing group identifications
(or more broadly, by the need to belong), as well as by the ever- present inner struggle for a self-respecting personal definition. Also of great importance is the question of guilt, and especially ex- istential guilt. That which will permit a man to come to terms with his own feeling of limitation and at the same time afford him a sense of group affiliation and personal continuity is that which he will come to believe.
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This psychological interplay is always related to broader historical influences. Problems of identity and belief are likely to become more widespread and intense when individual change is associated with rapid culture change--and during our epoch rapid culture change has become the rule rather than the exception. Thus the changing identity sequence we described for China in Chapter 19 has important meaning for other countries still emerging from traditional individual and social patterns--countries in Asia, the Middle East, parts of Europe, Africa, and South America. Nations in all of these areas have, in widely diverse ways, shared an ethos of filialism and an identity of the filial son. Now mostly in some kind of transitional stage, they show strong evidence of rebellion against filialism and of adopting the identity of the modem student. Highly vocal "youth cultures" are appearing where they had never existed before--young people in great conflict with their parents and with family-oriented customs, demanding self-expres- sion in place of youthful deference, seeking active patterns (or even activism) rather than passive ones, experiencing bitter anger and painful guilt in connection with their rebellion, undergoing considerable confusion in identity, and feeling desperate ideo- logical hunger. This seems to be the individual pattern of culture change within any recently traditional society. And contesting ideologies--nationalism, liberal democracy (or democratic social- ism), and Communism--are also still battling as they did in China.
Certainly a major task of the human sciences is to relate knowl- edge of specific cultures to existing universal alternatives in the direction of change--and to gain more understanding of the actual process of change in both cultures and individual people. 11 As John Dewey wrote in 1949, "Social 'science' waits upon a grasp of the fact that the only possible stable coordinations are equilibria of movements in respect to one another. . . . Now that practically all things are 'in process/ failure to study the direction in which they are moving constitutes the present . . . disorganization. " 12
In pursuing this problem, we will do well to pay special attention to youth groups, to men and women from sixteen to thirty years old. It is they who most enthusiastically espouse the change- stimulating ideas and ideologies. And there is good reason to believe that in these youth groups we can regularly see, as we saw in China, a culture's experimentations with its own possible future
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courses. I do not wish to imply that these youth group phenomena alone initiate culture change, for there is no denying the im- portance of technological and industrial development, of altered patterns in child-rearing and education, and of new ideologies and social institutions. But I do suggest that youth groups represent a human vanguard in the sense that they are the first and most intense indicators of the kinds of psychological experience and identity shift which will occur subsequently in adult populations throughout a particular society,
Thus, I believe that the developmental phase of late adolescence and early adulthood has special significance for all subsequent per- sonal change. This is the period in which adult identity takes shape, and it is the time of strong enthusiasms, of a marked tend- ency toward emotional polarization, of great ideological receptivity, and of maximum experiential intensity. I suspect that during any adult change it is necessary to revive in some fashion--or else perpetuate--the predominant patterns of this phase of life, perhaps even more than those of the earlier phases of childhood to which psychiatry presently directs so much attention. This is not to minimize the importance of character formation during early life, but rather to suggest that the altering of adult identity depends upon a specific recapturing of much of the emotional tone which prevailed at the time that this adult identity took shape. This view is consistent with William James' association of religious conver- sion with "the ordinary storm and stress and moulting-time of adolescence," and his conviction that "conversion is in its essence a normal adolescent phenomenon, incidental to the passage from the child's small universe to the wider intellectual and spiritual
life of maturity/'13 The "moulting-time" of youth, then, establishes within each man a model for later adult change; and the sudden emergence of youth cultures can similarly provide a social model
(or several alternative models) for later historical change.
All of this has much bearing on the problem of ideological totalism. For the more intense the identity strains and patterns of alienation among the modern students of any country emerging from filialism, the greater the possibility of this group's adopting extremist approaches to the resolution of such strains. In China
these took the form of Communist ideology, and the "therapy" of thought reform. Other countries may respond similarly to the
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attractions of totalism, as a means of achieving rapid economic and technological growth and of simultaneously dealing with identity tasks similar to those described for China: the destruction of traditional filialism, the undermining of Western liberalism, the mopping up of transitional chaos, and the resurrection of filial emotions in the service of a closed mass movement. These countries, insofar as their specific cultural traditions allow, could conceivably also adopt some thought reform-like process for the purpose of carrying out a similar program. In studying patterns of historical change, we should divest ourselves of the psychological illusion that a strong filial tradition is a bulwark against modern ideological totalism (or most specifically, Communism). The opposite seems to be true. It is precisely the desperate urge to sweep away decay- ing yet still powerful filial emotions and institutions that can call forth political totalism.
Nor are post-industrial cultures--including our own "affluent society"--immune from identity strains of equal severity, or from possible attractions to various forms of totalism. In our country, these attractions could stem from a sense of purposelessness, con- fusion, and lack of commitment; of dissatisfaction with the ritualism and roteness created by overorganization of our professional and social spheres (big society and mass society); of mounting evidences of corrupt and irresponsible practice in public life and within com- munication media; and of our relative ineffectually in the face of the gains of ideological rivals (including some envy of their ap- parent totalist efficiency). Again some of the patterns of youth culture may be revealing; and in American youth we encounter-- amidst much quiet conformity--rebellion which concerns itself less with political preoccupations and more with patterns of social nihilism, iconoclastic criticism of existing cultural forms, and an urge for direct and absolute "experience. " Indeed, the Zen Buddhist plunge of the American beatnik has in it some of the same element of total rejection of one's past, in exchange for another's past, as the Chinese intellectual's initial plunge into Western sociopolitical forms.
This is not to say that totalism is by any means the sole (or even most probable) eventuality, either for ourselves or for the transi- tional cultures of which we have spoken. It rather suggests the faltering state of liberal alternatives to totalism, the paucity of
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nontotalist social visions for the future, and the urgent necessity for such visions. It may be that the most fervent of liberal antitotalists --those most confident of their moral stand--are among those intellectuals who have known the most extreme forms of totalism-- among Chinese, Poles, and Hungarians who have spoken out against their regimes. The actions of these groups have an additional significance, for they demonstrate that the open nontotalist mode of existence has been sufficiently experienced to have become part of the broad human consciousness, and is therefore likely to con- tinue to endure everywhere as a viable alternative to totalism. The youth rebellions opposing totalism in Eastern Europe, Russia, and China seem to combine urges toward privacy, personal freedom, and self-expression (frequently manifested by interest in non- Communist literature, art, and jazz music, or by "bourgeois ro- mance*') with patterns of nihilism not too different from those found in the United States and among youths throughout the world.
Surely the craving and the search are universal: man seeks new modes of existence--blending the scientific, the political, the artistic, and the spiritual--which will provide liberal alternatives to totalism along with the sense of feeling meaningfully related to a world whose most constant feature is change. No one can predict from what quarter such a vision, or elements of it, may emerge.