The Psychic and Behavioral Nature of Orientation and Devotion
Religion, Character and Society
by Erich Fromm – To Have or To Be (followed by my conclusion TJL)
This chapter deals with the thesis that social change interacts with a change in the social character; that “religious” impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart; if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one.
The starting point for these reflections is the statement that the character structure of the average individual and the socio-economic structure of the society of which he or she is a part are interdependent. I call the blending of the individual psychical sphere and the socio-economic structure social character. The socio-economic structure of a society molds the social character of its members so that they wish to do what they have to do. Simultaneously, the social character influences the socio-economic structure of society, acting either as cement to give further stability to the social structure or, under special circumstances, as dynamite that tends to break up the social structure.
Social Character vis-a-vis Social Structure
The relation between social character and social structure is never static, since both elements in this relationship are never-ending processes. A change in either factor means a change in both. Many political revolutionaries believe that one must first change the political and economic structure radically, and that then, as a second and almost necessary step, the human mind will also change: that the new society, once established, will quasiautomatically produce the new human being. They do not see that the new elite, being motivated by the same character as the old one, will tend to recreate the conditions of the old society in the new socio-political institutions the revolution has created; that the victory of the revolution will be its defeat as a revolution – although not as a historical phase that paved the way for the socio-economic development that was hobbled in its full development. The French and Russian revolutions are textbook examples. It is noteworthy that Lenin, who had not believed that quality of character was important for a person’s revolutionary function, changed his view drastically in the last year of his life when he sharply saw Stalin’s defects of character and demanded, in his last will, that because of these defects Stalin should not become his successor.
On the other side are those who claim that first the nature of human beings must change – consciousness, their values, their character – and that only then can a truly human society be built. The history of the human race proves them wrong. Purely psychical change has always remained in the private sphere and been restricted to small oases, or has been completely ineffective when the preaching of spiritual values was combined with the practice of the opposite values.
Social Character and “Religious” Needs
The social character has a further and significant function beyond that of serving the needs of society for a certain type of character and satisfying the individual’s character-conditioned needs. Social character must fulfill any human being’s inherent religious needs. To clarify, “religion” as I use it here does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion. Indeed, in this broad sense of the word no culture of the past or present, and it seems no culture in the future, can be considered as not having religion.
This definition of” religion” does not tell us anything about its specific content. People may worship animals, trees, idols of gold or stone, an invisible god, a saintly person, or a diabolic leader; they may worship their ancestors, their nation, their class or party, money or success. Their religion may be conducive to the development of destructiveness or of love, of domination or of solidarity; it may further their power of reason or paralyze it. They may be aware of their system as being a religious one, different from those of the secular realm, or they may think that they have no religion, and interpret their devotion to certain allegedly secular aims, such as power, money, or success, as nothing but their concern for the practical and the expedient. The question is not one of religion or not? But of which kind of religion? – whether it is one that furthers human development, the unfolding of specifically human powers, or one that paralyzes human growth.
The Psychic and Behavioral Essence of Religion
A specific religion, provided it is effective in motivating conduct, is not a sum total of doctrines and beliefs; it is rooted in a specific character structure of the individual and, inasmuch as it is the religion of a group, in the social character. Thus, our religious attitude may be considered an aspect of our character structure, for we are what we are devoted to, and what we are devoted to is what motivates our conduct. Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their “official” beliefs for their real, though secret religion. If, for instance, a man worships power while professing a religion of love, the religion of power is his secret religion, while his so-called official religion, for example Christianity, is only an ideology.
The religious need is rooted in the basic conditions of existence of the human species. Ours is a species by itself, just as is the species chimpanzee or horse or swallow. Each species can be and is defined by its specific physiological and anatomical characteristics. There is general agreement on the human species in biological terms. I have proposed that the human species, that is, human nature – can also be defined psychically.
In the biological evolution of the animal kingdom the human species emerges when two trends in the animal evolution meet. One trend is the ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instincts (“instincts” is used here not in the dated sense of instinct as excluding learning but in the sense of organic drives). Even taking into account the many controversial views about the nature of instincts, it is generally accepted that the higher an animal has risen in the stages of evolution, the less is its behavior determined by phylogenetically programmed instincts.
The process of ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instincts can be plotted as a continuum, at the zero end of which we will find the lowest forms of animal evolution with the highest degree of instinctive determination; this decreases along with animal evolution and reaches a certain level with the mammals; it decreases further in the development going up to the primates, and even here we find a great gulf between monkeys and apes. In the species Homo, instinctive determination has reached its minimum.
The other trend to be found in animal evolution is the growth of the brain, particularly of the neocortex. Here, too, we can plot the evolution as a continuum: at one end, the lowest animals, with the most primitive nervous structure and a relatively small number of neurons; at the other, Homo sapiens, with a larger and more complex brain structure, especially a neocortex three times the size of that of our primate ancestors, and a truly fantastic number of interneuronal connections.
Considering these data, the human species can be defined as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum. This combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain development had never occurred before in animal evolution and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new phenomenon.
Lacking the capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination – new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates – the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive.
Without a map of our natural and social world – a picture of the world and of one’s place in it that is structured and has inner cohesion – human beings would be confused and unable to act purposefully and consistently, for there would be no way of orienting oneself, of finding a fixed point that permits one to organize all the impressions that impinge upon each individual. Our world makes sense to us, and we feel certain about our ideas, through the consensus with those around us. Even if the map is wrong, it fulfills its psychological function. But the map has never been entirely wrong – nor has it ever been entirely right. It has always been enough of an approximation to the explanation of phenomena to serve the purpose of living. Only to the degree that the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its irrationality can the map correspond to reality.
The impressive fact is that no culture has been found in which such a frame of orientation does not exist. Neither has any individual. Often individuals may disclaim having any such overall picture and believe that they respond to the various phenomena and incidents of life from case to case, as their judgment guides them. But it can be easily demonstrated that they simply take their own philosophy for granted because to them it is only common sense, and they are unaware that all their concepts rest upon a commonly accepted frame of reference. When such persons are confronted with a fundamentally different total view of life, they judge it as “crazy” or “irrational” or “childish,” while they consider themselves as being only “logical.” The deep need for a frame of reference is particularly evident in children. At a certain age, children will often make up their own frame of orientation in an ingenious way, using the small amount of information available to them.
But a map is not enough as a guide for action; we also need a goal that tells us where to go. Animals have no such problems. Their instincts provide them with a map as well as with goals. But lacking instinctive determination and having a brain that permits us to think of many directions in which we can go, we need an object of total devotion, a focal point for all our strivings and the basis for all our effective, not only our proclaimed, values. We need such an object of devotion in order to integrate our energies in one direction, to transcend our isolated existence, with all its doubts and insecurities, and to answer our need for a meaning to life.
Socio-economic structure, character structure, and religious structure are inseparable from each other. If the religious system does not correspond to the prevalent social character, if it conflicts with the social practice of life, it is only an ideology. We have to look behind it for the real religious structure, even though we may not be conscious of it as such – unless the human energies inherent in the religious structure of character act as dynamite and tend to undermine the given socio-economic conditions. However, as there are always individual exceptions to the dominant social character, there are also individual exceptions to the dominant religious character. They are often the leaders of religious revolutions and the founders of new religions.
The “religious” orientation, as the experiential core of all “high” religions, has been mostly perverted in the development of these religions. The way individuals consciously conceive of their personal orientation does not matter; they may be “religious” without considering themselves to be so – or they may be nonreligious, although considering themselves Christian. We have no word to denote the experiential content of religion, aside from its conceptual and institutional aspect. Hence, I use quotation marks to denote “religious” in the experiential, subjective orientation, regardless of the conceptual structure in which the person’s “religiosity” is expressed.
Is the Western World Christian?
According to the history books and the opinion of most people, Europe’s conversion to Christianity took place first within the Roman Empire under Constantine, followed by the conversion of the heathen in Northern Europe by Boniface, the Apostle of the Germans, and others in the eighth century.
But was Europe ever truly Christianized?
In spite of the affirmative answer generally given to this question, a closer analysis shows that Europe’s conversion to Christianity was largely a sham; that at most one could speak of a limited conversion to Christianity from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries and that for the centuries before and after this period the conversion was, for the most part, one to an ideology and a more or less serious submission to the church; it did not mean a change of heart, that is, of the character structure, except for numerous genuinely Christian movements.
In these four hundred years Europe had begun to be Christianized. The church tried to enforce the application of Christian principles on the handling of property, prices, and support of the poor. Many partly heretic leaders and sects arose, largely under the influence of mysticism that demanded the return to the principles of Christ, including the condemnation of property. Mysticism, culminating in Master Eckhart, played a decisive role in this antiauthoritarian humanistic movement and, not accidentally, women became prominent as mystical teachers and as students. Ideas of a world religion or of a simple undogmatic Christianity were voiced by many Christian thinkers; even the idea of the God of the Bible became questionable. The theological and non-theological humanists of the Renaissance, in their philosophy and in their Utopias, continued the line of the thirteenth century, and indeed, between the Late Middle Ages (the “Medieval Renaissance”) and the Renaissance proper no sharp dividing line exists.
To show the spirit of the High and the Late Renaissance, let’s look at a summary picture of medieval Christian ideals:
“In society, the great medieval thinkers held that all men are equal in the sight of God and that even the humblest has an infinite worth. In economics, they taught that work is a source of dignity not of degradation, that no man should be used for an end independent of his welfare, and that justice should determine wages and prices. In politics, they taught that the function of the state is moral, that law and its administration should be imbued with Christian ideas of justice, and that the relations of ruler and ruled should always be founded on reciprocal obligation. The state, property, and the family are all trusts from God to those who control them, and they must be used to further divine purposes. Finally, the medieval ideal included the strong belief that all nations and peoples are part of one great community.”
Indeed, had European history continued in the spirit of the thirteenth century, had it developed the spirit of scientific knowledge and individualism slowly and in an evolutionary way, we might now have been in a fortunate position. But reason began to deteriorate into manipulative intelligence and individualism into selfishness. The short period of Christianization ended and Europe returned to its original paganism.
However the concepts may differ, one belief defines any branch of Christianity: the belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior who gave his life out of love for his fellow creatures. He was the hero of love, a hero without power, who did not use force, who did not want to rule, who did not want to have anything. He was a hero of being, of giving, of sharing. These qualities deeply appealed to the Roman poor as well as to those of the rich who regretted their selfishness. Jesus appealed to the hearts of the people, even though from an intellectual standpoint he was at best considered to be naive. This belief in the hero of love won hundreds of thousands of adherents, many of whom changed their practice of life, or became martyrs themselves.
The Christian Hero Was the Martyr
In the Jewish tradition, the highest achievement was to give one’s life for God or for one’s fellow beings. The martyr is the exact opposite of the pagan hero personified in the Greek and Germanic heroes. The heroes’ aim was to conquer, to be victorious, to destroy, to rob; their fulfillment of life was pride, power, fame, and superior skill in killing. St. Augustine compared Roman history with that of a band of robbers.
For the pagan hero a man’s worth lay in his prowess in attaining and holding onto power, and he gladly died on the battlefield in the moment of victory. Homer’s Iliad is the poetically magnificent description of glorified conquerors and robbers. The martyr’s characteristics are being, giving, sharing; the hero’s, having, exploiting, forcing.
It should be added that the formation of the pagan hero is connected with the patriarchal victory over mother-centered society. Men’s dominance of women is the first act of conquest and the first exploitative use of force; in all patriarchal societies after the men’s victory, these principles have become the basis of men’s character.
Which of the two irreconcilably opposed models for our own development still prevails in Europe? If we look into ourselves, into the behavior of almost all people, into our political leaders, it is undeniable that our model of what is good and valuable is the pagan hero. European-North American history, in spite of the conversion to the church, is a history of conquest, pride, greed; our highest values are: to be stronger than others, to be victorious, to conquer others and exploit them. These values coincide with our ideal of “manliness”: only the one who can fight and conquer is a man; anyone who is not strong in the use of force is weak, “unmanly.”
It is not necessary to prove that the history of Europe is a history of conquest, exploitation, force, subjugation. Hardly any period is not characterized by these factors, no race or class exempted, often including genocide, as with the American Indians, and even such religious enterprises as the Crusades are no exception. Was this behavior only outwardly economically or politically motivated, and were the slave traders, the rulers of India, the killers of Indians, the British who forced the Chinese to open their land to the import of opium, the instigators of two World Wars and those who prepare the next war, were all these Christians in their hearts? Or were perhaps only the leaders rapacious pagans while the great mass of the population remained Christians? If this were so, we might feel more cheerful. Unfortunately, it is not so. To be sure, the leaders were often more rapacious than their followers because they had more to gain, but they could not have realized their plans were it not that the wish to conquer and to be victorious was and still is part of the social character.
One has only to recall the wild, crazy enthusiasm with which people participated in the various wars of the past two centuries the readiness of millions to risk national suicide in order to protect the image of “the strongest power,” or of “honor,” or of profits. And for another example, consider the frenzied nationalism of people watching the contemporary Olympic Games, which allegedly serve the cause of peace. Indeed, the popularity of the Olympic Games is in itself a symbolic expression of Western paganism. They celebrate the pagan hero: the winner, the strongest, the most self-assertive, while overlooking the dirty mixture of business and publicity that characterizes the contemporary imitation of the Greek Olympic Games. In a Christian culture the Passion Play would take the place of Olympic Games; yet the one famous Passion Play we have is the tourist sensation in Oberammergau.
If all this is correct, why do not Europeans and Americans frankly abandon Christianity as not fitting our times? There are several reasons: for example, religious ideology is needed in order to keep people from losing discipline and thus threatening social coherence. But there is a still more important reason: people who are firm believers in Christ as the great lover, the self-sacrificing God, can turn this belief, in an alienated way, into the experience that it is Jesus who loves for them.
Jesus thus becomes an idol; the belief in him becomes the substitute for one’s own act of loving. In a simple, unconscious formula: Christ does all the loving for us; we can go on in the pattern of the Greek hero, yet we are saved because the alienated ‘faith’ in Christ is a substitute for the imitation of Christ. That Christian belief is also a cheap cover for one’s own rapacious attitude goes without saying. Finally, I believe that human beings are so deeply endowed with a need to love that acting as wolves causes us necessarily to have a guilty conscience. Our professed belief in love anesthetizes us to some degree against the pain of the unconscious feeling of guilt for being entirely without love.
“Industrial Religion”
The religious and philosophical development after the end of the Middle Ages is too complex to be treated within the present volume. It can be characterized by the struggle between two principles: the Christian, spiritual tradition in theological or philosophical forms and the pagan tradition of idolatry and inhumanity that assumed many forms in the development of what might be called the “religion of industrialism and the cybernetic era.”
Following the tradition of the Late Middle Ages, the humanism of the Renaissance was the first great flowering of the ‘religious’ spirit after the end of the Middle Ages. The ideas of human dignity, of the unity of the human race, of universal political and religious unity found in it an unencumbered expression. The seventeenth and eighteenth century Enlightenment expressed another great flowering of humanism.
The Enlightenment philosophy expressed the ‘religious attitude’ that we find in the theologians of the thirteenth century: “If we examine the foundation of this faith, we find that at every turn the Philosophers betrayed their debt to medieval thought without being aware of it.” The French Revolution, to which Enlightenment philosophy had given birth, was more than a political revolution. As Tocqueville noted, it was a “political revolution which functioned in the manner and which took on in some sense the aspect of a religious revolution. Like Islamism and the Protestant revolt it overflowed the frontiers of countries and nations and was extended by preaching and propaganda.”
Radical humanism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is described later on, in my discussion of the humanist protest against the paganism of the industrial age. But to provide a base for that discussion we must now look at the new paganism that has developed side by side with humanism, threatening at the present moment of history to destroy us.
The change that prepared the first basis for the development of the “industrial religion” was the elimination, by Luther, of the motherly element in the church. Although it may appear an unnecessary detour, I must dwell on this problem for a while, because it is important to our understanding of the development of the new religion and the new social character.
Societies have been organized according to one or the other of two principles: patriarchal or matriarchal. The matriarchal is centered in the figure of the loving mother. The motherly principle is that of unconditional love; the mother loves her children not because they please her, but because they are her children. For this reason the mother’s love cannot be acquired by good behavior, nor can it be lost by sinning. Motherly love is mercy and compassion.
Fatherly love, on the contrary, is conditional; it depends on the achievements and good behavior of the child; father loves that child most who is most like him, the one whom he wishes to inherit his property. Father’s love can be lost, but it can also be regained by repentance and renewed submission. Father’s love is justice.
The two principles, the feminine motherly and the masculine fatherly, correspond not only to the presence of a masculine and feminine side in any human being but specifically to the need for mercy and justice in every man and woman. The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their mutual antagonism and, instead, color each other.
While such a synthesis cannot be fully reached in a patriarchal society, it existed to some extent in the Roman Church. The Virgin, the church as the all-loving mother, the pope and the priest as motherly figures represented motherly, unconditional, all-forgiving love, side by side with the fatherly elements of a strict, patriarchal bureaucracy with the pope at the top ruling by power.
Corresponding to these motherly elements in the religious system was the relationship toward nature in the process of production: the work of the peasant as well as of the artisan was not a hostile exploitative attack against nature. It was cooperation with nature: not raping but transforming nature according to its own laws.
Luther established a purely patriarchal form of Christianity in Northern Europe that was based on the urban middle class and the secular princes. The essence of this new social character is submission under patriarchal authority, with work as the only way to obtain love and approval.
Behind the Christian facade arose a new secret religion, “industrial religion,” that is rooted in the character structure of modem society, but is not recognized as “religion.” The industrial religion is incompatible with genuine Christianity. It reduces people to servants of the economy and of the machinery that their own hands build.
The industrial religion had its basis in a new social character. Its center was fear of and submission to powerful male authorities, cultivation of the sense of guilt for disobedience, dissolution of the bonds of human solidarity by the supremacy of self-interest and mutual antagonism. The “sacred” in industrial religion was work, property, profit, power, even though it furthered individualism and freedom within the limits of its general principles. By transforming Christianity into a strictly patriarchal religion it was still possible to express the industrial religion in Christian terminology.
My Conclusion:
Of all the many ideas and concepts in this insightful piece of writing I am most impressed with the Psychic and Behavioral Essence of Religion. I was so impressed with the end of Part One that I added that heading. This is Fromm at his best getting right to the essence of a complex thing.
Like many other ‘hiding in plain sight’ concepts, in general, people think of religion as sacred locations, spiritual leaders of various faiths, and adherence to dogma. Yes, in one sense of the word, that is religion, but notice how external these things are. Even dogma is imposed from outside and adherence implies a not altogether willing submission motivated by a self-interested power. Fromm’s definition is internal and has an operational character.
Fromm contrasts internal with the external, the real and the put-on, and behavior with an ideology.
“Often, however, individuals are not even aware of the real objects of their personal devotion and mistake their “official” beliefs for their real, though secret religion. If, for instance, a man worships power while professing a religion of love, the religion of power is his secret religion, while his so-called official religion, for example Christianity, is only an ideology.”
Fromm uses an elegant chain of logic to show that the sort of religion he’s talking about is natural to all human being in all times because it originates not in external preachers but within ourselves as human beings.
He begins the logic by asserting that, “the human species, that is, human nature – can also be defined psychically.” He then proceeds to explain that in two very important ways we are very different from other species, even primates.
“Considering these data, the human species can be defined as the primate who emerged at the point of evolution where instinctive determination had reached a minimum and the development of the brain a maximum. This combination of minimal instinctive determination and maximal brain development had never occurred before in animal evolution and constitutes, biologically speaking, a completely new phenomenon.”
It was this new phenomenon that made internally religious behavior necessary.
“Lacking the capacity to act by the command of instincts while possessing the capacity for self-awareness, reason, and imagination – new qualities that go beyond the capacity for instrumental thinking of even the cleverest primates – the human species needed a frame of orientation and an object of devotion in order to survive.”
So, we can easily ignore the sacred places, spiritual leaders and dogmas of a denomination we were born into, but the human need for a frame of orientation and an object of devotion are not something that anyone ignores. They are part of being human.
Because we exist in one place at a time we naturally orient ourselves on a sort of internal map, and our map always says, “you are here now,” in reference to our present location. Any time the map is obscured we feel lost, and the discomfort of being lost drives us to find our place once more. We contemplate our coming movements based on what our map says is around us.
This moment by moment orientation is the basis for the sort of religious orientation Fromm is talking about. He doesn’t say this directly but I feel that as we grow from children into adults a general orientation come to be within our personality. Referring back to the beginning of this conclusion, a person whose secret religion is power, admires power and believes he must have it and his orientation develops as he grows into manhood.
Objects of devotion, likewise develop over time from experience. Our power oriented boy naturally admires powerful men. He longs to be one, and spends considerable time emulating them. He may even call them, ‘his idols.’ Considered from an operational perspective devotion and orientation develop together, each of them playing a role building the boys character structure, and shaping the personality of the man he becomes.
Our boy and the man he becomes will choose likeminded friends and disassociate from anyone that contradicts his orientation. Anyone who speaks ill of his ‘idols’ will be despised as a blasphemer, and it is here, in the emotions, that the religious character of ‘industrial religion’ shows itself. Devotion is devotion, so when it’s directed towards a ostensibly secular figure it’s exactly the same emotion as that directed towards a religious figure.
In conclusion, Fromm has made clear that as human beings we need an orientation, which he also calls a map, and that map will never be an exact picture of reality.
“Only to the degree that the practice of life is freed from its contradictions and its irrationality can the map correspond to reality.”
So, we may be freed from superstitions that turned the folks of past societies into fools, but that doesn’t make our beliefs perfect. We are just not wrong about the same thing as them.
Limitation Philosophy is a worldview based in correcting the delusions our limited personalities create in us. Its orientation is founded on the truth of the Limitation Paradigm, and the logic that follows from the paradigms two maxims. From it we know that we are limited, and orient our lives based on that reality. Like many other theological realities Limitation Philosophy makes plain, the worship of the boundless being and limitless personality of the Deity gets turned around completely. I see no object of devotion in a inscrutable Deity, in whom all things have their being, so I adore truth instead, and orient my being towards an ever greater discovery of beliefs that correspond to reality.
Until the moment I wrote that last paragraph I had never thought to ask whether I worship the Deity of my theological beliefs. I just never gave the concept of worship any honest thought. I realize now that I’m just dedicated to the truth about God.
As a boy my fathers adopted religion and its shattering effect on my life as a person incapable of atheism left me with lifelong questions. Now in my sixties I believe I have found the answers. The struggle with mental illness, alcoholism and drug addiction made reality a safe harbor I seek with diligence. Having escaped the horrors of unreality I find beliefs that correspond with reality comforting.
I wish I could share them more. I wonder why there is very little interest in what I’ve found, but I’m glad that, if nothing else, I have found answers that are deeply satisfying to myself. Truth brings me peace, and I enjoy it.
Thank God for Eric Fromm, I find his insights fascinating and helpful.
Thomas Laperriere
Some Thoughts the Day After
Having spent a good portion of the day before processing Religion, Character and Society I read the contents of the Introduction of To Have Or To Be by Erich Fromm.
Link To INTRODUCTION THOTB Printable PDF
I was struck mostly by the hopeful tone. Fromm hopes for a new man self transformed from the inside by adopting the healthy ‘being’ attitude over the self-destructive ‘having’ attitude. He has honest hope that the threat of annihilation in a nuclear war can be averted, and a sane society emerge from the changed character of its members.
What struck me most was simply this. I realized that we live in a world without hope. Not without hopes, we all still have those, but as a society we have given up on reversing climate change, and all the social ills that beset us in this 21st century. The resignation with which I add, perhaps the last century is telling. I don’t think there are solutions either.