In the comments section of my last post, Brian makes a distinction between what he calls shallow and reassuring narratives and deeper more questioning ones. He mentions the work of the German sociologist Theodore Adorno who was highly critical of the Culture Industry (a term Adorno coined with Max Horkheimer in 1944) and its control and dumbing down of mass culture. Brian’s comments, particularly the notion of “reassuring narrative”, touches on some thoughts I’ve been mulling over recently about the nature of fantasy and escapism and whether these are as harmful or unhealthy as is often claimed. Brian’s mention of Adorno reminded me of an essay entitled “Cult of Distraction” by an friend and teacher of Adorno’s: Sigfried Kracauer who in 1926 wrote:
“The bourgeois middle classes… maintain the illusory claim that they are
still the guardians of culture and education. Their arrogance, which creates
sham oases for itself, keeps the masses down and denigrates their amusement…
They claim the status of high art while actually rehearsing anachronistic forms
which evade the pressing needs of our time.”
It might be said that
these “pressing needs of our time” (then or now) are a wider social
phenomena which have little to do with the often far more strongly felt
pressing needs of individuals which much culture provokes, feeds, reassures,
engages and sometimes even creates (as Adorno and others have noted). Many
Marxist thinkers perceived such individualistic ‘needs’ as a distraction (or,
in Adorno’s case, a “deception”) and instead urged for an art that would expose
the ‘real’ social relations in operation in any given situation and how these
function as the actual but otherwise unrecognised cause of discontent at the
level of the individual.
But Marxists are not
alone in this disavowal of distraction, escapism and fantasy. Freud too
believed that fantasy was a form of wish fulfilment. Similarly Piaget
interpreted childhood fantasy as a maladaptive pattern that is gradually
superseded by more rational logical behaviours. Montessori too advocated ‘real’
play in preference to fantasy play - though, interestingly, her grandson tells
of how she read fantasy stories to him at a younger age than she suggested for
other children.
The bourgeois denigration
of the masses amusement that Kracauer speaks of is as widespread today as it
ever was. But in developmental psychology, at least, researchers like Paul L.
Harris are beginning to show how childhood fantasy is a fundamental site of
rationalisations about cause and effect and even of moral reasoning. In fact it
is children who cannot play at make-believe who suffer the most serious
developmental difficulties.
But at the adult level
the attitude persists that all forms of fantasy and escapism are a frivolous,
shallow, meaningless waste of time and are deleterious to insightful thinking
(as Adorno claimed) and that the only culture worthy of our attention should be
a challenging, thought provoking, critical and self aware one.
Presumably even the
deepest thinkers need to take a break from the taxing practice of
gazing into the fathomless pool of revelation occasionally. Sometimes a little
reassurance is the perfect salve, especially in lives that are otherwise solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish, and short. And who is to say that such distractions
do not provide other goods than amusement alone – just as fantasy is of benefit
to the development of children? And, as a further point of contrast: how
numerous I wonder are those unfortunate individuals that, due to their highly
educated academic insight, are now unable to fully immerse themselves in the
pleasures of fiction or illusion? – though fiction, it seems, is particularly
prone to this malady (see here
for example).
“Happiness is the
perpetual possession of being well deceived.”
-Jonathan Swift
Or, as Adorno, laying it
on thick, put it:
“The phrase, the world wants to be deceived, has become truer than had
ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, falling for the
swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire
a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes
shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to
them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting
it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they
no longer clung to satisfactions which are none at all.”
Adorno’s essay “Culture
Industry Reconsidered”, from which the above is taken, is not wrong by any
means, but in his determination to get at the truth, he generalizes,
oversimplifies and overstates the case. In fact he does exactly what Nassim
Taleb warns of in my last post.
It’s probably evident by
now that I’m not at all convinced that fantasy is such a harmful thing as is so
often claimed (though it’s probably really just a question of degree) and I’m
also not so sure that it is deleterious to insightful thinking either. As
Adorno acknowledges:
“It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being, produced
an airtight case proving the regressive effects of particular products of the
culture industry.”
Nor has it yet. And this is probably because insight is a two way
process between a curious object and an inquiring mind, and curious objects can
be found wherever one looks deeply, not just where depth has already been
excavated through the insight (or deviousness) of others, whether they be
heavyweight thinkers or even self-serving functionaries of the Culture
Industry.
