in America, where the code civil formed part of the background for the American Supreme Court decision to outlaw in 1954 racial discrimination in schools.
By the time The Uses of Disorder was published in 1970, the accumulated injustices done to Americans of colour had turned major American cities into violent battlegrounds. The Kerner Commission, a national quasi-governmental body, was created to analyse these riots. The mayor of New York, John Lindsay, was a member of this commission, and in 1967 I belonged to his legion of assistants. The commission concluded that ‘white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it’. This might seem, perversely, to explain the title, The Uses of Disorder: violent disorder serves as a wake-up call.
Burning streets did not resurrect, however, the scenes of barricaded streets that Benjamin Constant witnessed at the end of his life, during the 1830 revolution in Paris. Here he encountered barricades raised to protect insurrectionary districts from military attack and police round-ups. A barricade was at the time constructed by throwing furniture into the street and then piling it up at corners to create an impasse. In 1830, the spaces behind barricades were vigilantly guarded by the citizens in revolt; until the military overwhelmed them, the streets were, for a few weeks, disciplined spaces. In contrast, during the violent urban disorders of the 1960s, storefronts inside poor communities were set aflame by looters who had infiltrated the rioters. The leaders of street protests could not control these violent parasites from the very beginning. As the Kerner Commission found, these looters were few in number; still, the revolutionary ‘uses of disorder’ appeared corrupted by theft.
Racial upheaval was not the only kind of disorder touching America at the time. While rarely being violent, more personalised disorder afflicted the civil society of the privileged: those who were white, middle class, heterosexual, and, if young, free from military service abroad. The discontent inside this ‘secure’ zone traced back to a malaise articulated by Benjamin Constant.
Constant was a novelist as well as a jurist; such pursuits were practised separately, imagined as the activity of different islands labelled Imagination and Philosophy. His novel Adolphe portrays a man who gives up a great romance, chronicling his falling out of love rather than the initial stoking of his ardour. Adolphe becomes bored by the storms and stresses of desire; in middle age, passion arouses him less than the allures of a career. The novelist writes this story to show how ‘small’ a human being Adolphe becomes.
The philosopher of civil society thus decries how the circumscribed life comes to fear adventure, shunning difficulties, avoiding storms and stress. This contrasts with the contemporary account of ambition drawn by Stendhal in the novel The Red and the Black. Stendhal’s protagonist, Julien Sorel, burns with ambition, driven by desire to conquer Paris and to penetrate the very heart of power, becoming a domestic Napoleon. Adolphe does not burn with passion, nor did he conform to the more German model of aspiration, a desiring of youth succeeded by resignation and regret in middle age. Adolphe is content, indeed relieved, to lead an orderly, clearly laid-out life.
Constant the philosopher did not analyse the mechanism by which such ‘smallness’ could afflict the collective civic body. That explanation appeared later, as social science. The fear explored by Adolphe’s story appeared nearly a century later in Max Weber’s writings on bureaucracy. People live inside an ‘iron cage’, Weber famously argued, when working within bureaucracies, particularly if their overriding ambition is to climb the bureaucratic ladder. The figure of Adolphe was now by Weber set in a broader context, one in which efforts to rationalise society, as the code civil, inevitably created the bureaucracies which demeaned people: ‘Rational calculation … reduces every worker to a cog in this bureaucratic machine and, seeing himself in this light, he will merely ask how to transform himself … to a bigger cog’.
Weber was not a dry observer of this process: ‘The passion for bureaucratization … drives us to despair’. He was certainly not alone in identifying this malaise. Novels like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities dissected, in relentless though often comic detail, how bureaucracy makes for small life. Perhaps the most despairing image of the iron cage was elaborated by Weber’s contemporary, Rainer Maria Rilke, in his poem about a panther confined to a zoo. The poem began, ‘his vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else’.
Iron-cage despair afflicted those of my generation who had grown up inside the security zone. Sociologist C. Wright Mills detailed with some sympathy the construction of his parents’ particular cage: Daddy and Mummy were haunted by the Great Depression and World War II but kept those nightmares to themselves; the nightmares could be repressed thanks to America’s new prosperity and global hegemony. But by the beginning of the sixties, the children of the zone simply paced, panther-like; by the end of the decade, they sought more actively to destroy it. The young had regained the passion for experience writ large which Constant – and after him, Musil and Weber – had though shrunken. Which is where The Uses of Disorder entered the picture.
I did not come from the zone. My childhood was spent in an urban public housing project, and my single parent was a covert member of the Communist Party. I was gay, and I had lived in Chicago and New York on my own or with lovers since I was fifteen. A series of accidents led me into Harvard University as a young adult. There, at first, the sorrows evoked by those who grew up secure seemed to me self-indulgent. In time, I appreciated that their suffering was real. I was also as self-involved as any suburban Hamlet. I made big mistakes in judging the strangers with whom I mixed daily and nightly. I had survived, but I had not gained much self-knowledge.
At Harvard, I sought to find self-knowledge by writing. Something in me wanted to write, however, about places lived in rather than strict autobiography; in relating self and city, ‘city’ seemed to me the independent variable. It might be said that I was not ready to face myself. But at Harvard a mentor, psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, thought this was the right way to face: looking outward rather than inward.
The young Erikson was a Danish artist who got nowhere with art and so turned to psychoanalysis as a second-choice profession, initially training under Freud and working with children in Vienna. He fled war-gutted Europe for a post at the Austen Riggs psychiatric clinic in Massachusetts, where he became more interested in adolescents and young adults. There Erikson did the work for which he became famous, on the ‘identity crisis’ which occurs as human beings transition from adolescence to adulthood. In his view, this is such a rough passage because of the tension between seeking and shutting out new experiences. On one hand, the young thirst for the new; on the other, they fear being exposed raw. If this tension is not worked through, the young will cling to a rigid sense of self that inhibits them from accounting for difference and divergence in others.
I accepted this view in The Uses of Disorder but in time came to see it could be restructured without the Freudian plumbing of id shits, superego flushings and the like. Cognitive psychologist Lionel Festinger did so by researching the continual interplay in the brain between inductive curiosity, which opens up new perspectives, and deductive reasoning, which seeks to resolve mental disorder. In another vein, psychologist Carol Gilligan rejected the idea that an adolescent identity crisis – ‘Who am I?’ – is the defining moment when gender differences between self and others are sorted. Gender, she showed, is renegotiated again and again, across the human lifespan.
These un-Freudians rephrased what Freudian jargon calls ‘ego strength’. Whether confronted with a math puzzle, the jarring demands of a lover, or learning a new job, people need to develop an ability to deal with ambiguity, difficulty and the unknown to explore the unexpected turn rather than defend against it. And here lay Erikson’s own strength as a thinker: he was a moralist more than he was a psychoanalyst.
His moral view could be encapsulated in the phrase Less Self, More Other. That’s what happens on the positive side during an identity crisis, and indeed throughout
