Becker, Ernest. Beyond Alienation: A Philosophy of Education for the Crisis of Democracy. New York: George Braziller Publishing, 1967.

If I do not know how my neighbors will act when I step out daily into the world, my very existence is threatened literally with each man I meet, or with each group of lads at the s street corner, or with each passage near an outlying neighborhood. We can appreciate the anguish more today than ever, since our individualistic, commercial-industrial society has literally become a struggle of man against man. (13)

Education, in sum, if it is to be truly the New View worthy of man, must set itself – in some way, somehow – in opposition to the very social world out of which it springs! (37)

Culture is the cultivation of excellence, then, excellence that man once had, and that he has now lost. It is as serious as life itself, because without it man is crippled in the struggle to live a truly human existence – an “authentic” existence, as Ortega would have it. (54)

Imagine a society that functions without any notion of synthesis of knowledge, that at most puts such ambition far, far into the future, considering it largely a dream; imagine that in its place the society puts the single principle of consumer self-interest that will somehow coordinate all its fragmented activities; imagine further that the society is decidedly opposed to thoroughgoing social reconstruction, that it shrinks with loathing from any but the most partial and makeshift social changes; and then you will understand why this society has not only emptied its people of reason, vision and ideals, but is emptying the country of its natural resources and beauty, and threatening – like a huge, lumpy, and many-colored gas-filled balloon – to blow up the entire world if it will not stand still and stop rubbing the balloon’s overbloated edges. (71)

And this brings us to the final and most important thing we have learned in ranging over the problem of synthesis. If mankind would instruct itself, it must instruct itself wisely; and to instruct wisely is to teach morality, the right and the wrong. The synthesis of knowledge has one outstanding task, namely, to provide a reasoned basis for moral action. (78)

Bring man back into the Newtonian universe, said Diderot; make him the center; push Newton into the background; humanity is first, science is second; make science the slave, not man. What about infinity? Not interesting, said Diderot. What about mathematics, the queen? A blight, answered Diderot – who was not mean mathematician himself; mathematics is arrogant, it falsifies – it does not give perceptible quality. But what about mathematical physics, the great achievement of the age? “Speak more softly,” urged the Encyclopedia, “if the coal carriers hear you, you’ll make them laugh.” Existence is the thing – Man – the mass of men – Humanity; human music, not the music of the spheres, that’s what interests man, the man of flesh and blood. Quality is the thing – what men see and feel – not the abstractions that they spin out of their heads. (96)

Everything that lives, lives by drawing together strands of experience as a basis for its action; to live is to act, to move forward into the world of experience. Meaning, then – for any animal – is the drawing together of aspects of experience for action and well-being. (126)

We might sum up the whole history of sociology in what at first seems merely a flippant statement, but is really very apt: The history of sociology is a series of attempts to overthrow fictional views of society in order to arrive at a truly fictional view of society. One after another, the mythologies of various thinkers had to be punctured in order finally to understand man as he was, as a performer of the social fiction, an actor on the stage of society, living and breathing the script for social action that is written in each time and place. (127)

If we want a real theory of the social system, it must show things as they really are, and not the way we wish them to be. Man is not a selfish, isolated atom who needs a strong hand to control him; neither is he a natural buyer-and-seller who must handle money in order to be happy; man is a natural member of a community who dances to the tune of the ideology he learns in the society in which he lives. (129)

Once we allowed the full place in social theory for the fictional nature of social meanings, we were presented with the most terrible realization of all: that man’s playforms may even outwit human adaptation itself. The fiction can become greater than physical reality; the struggle for survival becomes a struggle with the ideas one has inherited, and not with Nature itself. (141)

That is the heart of the matter: to change our social fiction means to change all our major accustomed habits; and for the higher primates to change habits means to arouse the anxiety of the unfamiliar. The higher primates for the most part are willing to die in the familiar, rather than survive in the unfamiliar. Man would rather sacrifice survival than change the ideas he has learned from his group. (142)

The problem of all play, of all creation of meaning, is to make it convincing; and conviction is given most forcefully by flesh-and-blood, by life and death; and on the level of civilization this is usually achieved by sheer number. (143)

By the time we get to modern bureaucracy, as we said, this spirit wins out completely: numbers, instead of excellence; quantity, instead of quality. War today has become wholly a matter of computer calculation by numbers. The symbolism is wholly quantitative. And it is here that we best understand the first major way in which the relatively innocuous contests of primitive society become transmuted into the cataclysmic evils of civilized life. The inspiration is still the play-form, the basic urge is still the contest, but the method has assumed a life of its own: the symbol is torn out of any organic relationship with the other forms of culture. (143-144)

Among the primitives…one sacrifice would be enough to signal victory, one tortured prisoner would appease the gods, one life would sanctify a season, purify a whole tribe. Conviction, in a word, came easily and “cheaply” because all activities were in organic relationship; each meaning ramified in all areas. War and god, ritual and myth, song and art, imagination and reason – all formed one complex whole. The bureaucratic method, on the other hand, has a separate life of its own, and must justify itself on its terms and these terms are abstraction and number. So we understand that when we combine the awe-inspiring finality of flesh-and-blood with the abstraction of rational calculation, the toll of evil must be high; the bureaucratic god is the bureaucracy itself, and this god, unlike that of the primitive, is unappeasable. (144)

Evil is banal, because evil is merely the toll of the game of society, and not of any basic iniquity in man. (145)

With the analyses of Kenneth Burke and [Hugh] Duncan, social theory was brought to its highest point of sophistication. Man was clearly understood as an actor on the scene, at the center of the stage of a social drama, a symbolic drama in which life and death were at stake, but which was symbolic through and through. (145)

If we were immodest, we could say that man’s reason had finally given him the possibility of full possession of himself, to do with as he may. But it would be truer to say that evolution had brought Life to the point of its greatest potential liberation. (147-148)

Marx’s great critique of the social fiction of capitalism was launched under the war cry of the “fetishism of commodities.” It was a brilliant and telling criticism of the new game of commercial-industrial society. It meant that man was now narrowing his meanings down to the smallest area of satisfaction, to the area of consumer goods. Everyone thrust his hands into the great grab bag of the new consumer society, drew out a handful of gadgets and trinkets, and hurried home to fondle and admire them. It was indeed a fetishism of the most vicious kind, a fetishism in which man’s striving for freedom, dignity, unlimited scope, the largest possible panorama of meanings – all this was sacrificed to a singly buy-and-sell fetishism. It was absurd and humanly debasing, but it went ahead full steam, until in the twentieth century man’s sharpest mental skill was the quick recall of brand names, the unflinching decision between rival products. (156)

“Bad” aesthetics, then, would be that which the individual undertakes under the old authority, under the coercion of the old rules for behavior that he learned as a child. This would be the coercion of fear of making new and independent choices, unexpected ones, choices more appropriate to new situations; hence, choices that would take the individual out of his old world, and continually renew the possibility of developing the life force. “Good” aesthetics, then, are the choices that are not bound rigidly by the early learning, the ones that are not limited by automatic perceptions, the ones that are a reflex of childhood conditioning. “Good” aesthetics, then, are the choices that are not bound rigidly by the early learning, the ones that are not limited by automatic perceptions, the ones that are not a reflex of childhood conditioning. “Good” aesthetics are those which the individual undertakes, under the aegis of his own responsible powers, out of his narrow, familiar world. The thing that makes one aesthetic pattern broader and richer would be simply that it releases more of the life force in the aesthetic integration. (179)

We could understand sadism, masochism, and fetishism as “bad” aesthetics, as clumsy, automatic, and limited ways of relating to others; patterns of behavior used by individuals who are basically weak and shallow. We could then understand that the capacity to love, and the kind of love one could give, varied with one’s powers. It could be liberating and creative, or constricting and negating. It depends largely on whether the lover is strong and free, or weak and bound by automatic habit: Is he building himself firmly into his habitual world by choosing an object that serves old needs and fears? Or is he reaching out courageously for a new world by choosing an object that leads him on to new perceptions and behaviors? (180)

The members of a society draw together not only with potlatch, not only with rituals of giving and destroying goods, but with the most effective ritual of all, the one that promotes the maximum of group solidarity and satisfaction: I mean, of course, the ritual of the sacrificial scapegoat. (189)

As we said earlier, Hannah Arendt showed with great clarity and compellingness, how Eichmann was merely trying to earn his feeling of human worth like any other individual in a faceless bureaucracy, and that is by functioning smoothly and efficiently with orders he receives. What did Arendt conclude? The only possible thing: that although this man was not “evil” in the sense that he harbored “inhuman” needs – still, he was definitely not a desirable person. Anyone who has to earn automatically his feeling of worth and basic dignity by unquestioningly disposing of other people’s lives simply has to be banished from the pale of humankind. (193)

We judge it, then, as Arendt judged Eichmann: We can say of social fictions that they are to be condemned, when in their promotion of social solidarity and brotherhood, they take a toll of human life and dignity. (193)

The tragedy is simply this: that new meanings can only come from the creative depths of the life force within each individual; but the individual is the last one who believes in his right to develop unique meanings. He takes everything he needs uncritically from the society at large. As a result, man’s meanings, instead of being free and open, are in fact “instinctivized” – hardened into the mold of a standard social pattern. Thus, the one animal who is the potentially open vehicle for the life force actually closes up that vehicle by his fear of standing on his own original meanings. This is the tragic paradox of man, freedom, democracy, and social theory – and, in the present stage of evolution, of life itself. (198)

There is one way that the liberation of man might be facilitated, and that is by a general education which introduced self-critical reflection as a part of the school curriculum, as soon as feasible. This solution is something that stems logically at the present time. Besides, as I have written elsewhere, it is to be preferred over psychoanalysis on many counts, not the least of which is that psychoanalysis is itself largely a distorting, tyrannical dogma over the minds of its initiates. (200, footnote)

Sin is man’s fate, and the release from sin is the only way to freedom. But what is sin? “Sin” is “unsupported meanings,” separation from a grounding in higher authority, aloneness of the individual with his own meanings. (204)

In this way, from all fields, we could understand all the dimensions of human striving as a search for rich and secure meanings; and we could see that evil was not due to “inborn” hates and aggressions, but that it resulted from the natural use of one’s fellow men to satisfy one’s urge for meaning. And one thing we could see above all: that if weakness was greater, evil was greater; and weakness for man means shallow and narrow meanings, and lack of critical awareness of who one is, and what he is striving for. (229)

In other words, our anthropodicy confirmed the search of the Enlightenment: By developing his critical reason, man can free himself from a large measure of the evil that exists in his social world. Most of all, Rousseau was vindicated in his belief that evil stems from weakness and not from strength. It results from the fear of free choice, from the inability to assume responsibility for unique action and meanings. On the individual level this means that the weak man is the empty man, the manipulated one, and the manipulator of others – the masochist and the sadist. On the social level it means mass man, the frightened scapegoater, the warmonger. On both levels it means clumsy, shallow, uncritical, rigid aesthetics, destructive ways of satisfying one’s strivings, ways that take a toll in the lives of one’s fellow men. (230)

Commercial society created the herd opinion, frustrated self-criticism and self-mastery, by making man a puppet in search of consumer satisfactions. (230-231)

How better to expand the base of “scholarship” and “expertise” than by making life itself the problem frame of knowledge, by giving to each the task of throwing light on his own liberation, of weighing and choosing from accumulated wisdom for the purposes of his soul? (233-234)

Only the hubris of science could take Thoreau’s Walden, and dare to appropriate a word with such noble connotations, for such a vile vision. (243-244)

In other words, we can have an independent university, an autonomous body of science that links the process of education constructively to the community. This means that the State no longer needs to guard man against the authority of science within it; it means that the university can be independent of the state, without being socially destructive; it means that the ideal of experimental democracy can begin to be realized. It means nothing less than the world-historical resolution of the problem of education versus the State: a natural resolution, not an artificial one; a peaceful resolution, not a revolutionary one; a humanistic resolution, not a coercive one. There is no longer any need for the State to fear the autonomy of the university – unless it fears the fullest development of its own citizens. (247-248)

What we needed was a new unity, a unity that would bring the whole back into a divine cosmos. On my life, we have it now or we will never have it. (248)

It is the great Rousseau’s truth; the one that caused him to fall swooning to the ground; the one over which he cried with hot tears of torment, joy, and discovery, soaking the whole front of his coat; the truth that he sobbingly flung out as a challenge to modern man; the truth that has been haunting us for two hundred years, and that is now ours to take up and use as a measure for all education – “Man is good.” (254)

Man is good; but society renders him evil. (254)

In this way, courses on human development will be courses in the brainwashing that takes place in each society; they will give the person the knowledge and the impetus he needs to take his own life into his own hands – if this is what he wants. (260)

A new generation taught in the arts of self-criticism and self-discovery would unfold, while the university would truly be a seat of knowledge. It would seek to unfold the universal man, the man free from the automatic constraints of his own culture and times. The university would thus be the handmaiden of life itself, entrusted with the care of the most sublime mystery, encrusted with breaking the cultural mold that constricts evolution. (261)

Fetishization is a word that shows us how man narrows down his meanings when his society does not educate for, nor make possible, broader ranges of self-rewarding experiences. (270)

We can understand other types of social stupidity with a richness that has not before been possible: Scapegoating, for example, is, as we saw, a clumsy and easy way to achieve the unity of one’s own group, to reaffirm one’s own values and meanings, to exercise firm control over one’s social world by offering up the sacrifice of the evil stranger. We can also understand why it takes an even heavier toll in the modern world perhaps than it ever did; today man has been fully emptied of the quality of his individuality; he has becomes finally a fully quantified thing, to be tallied like any commodity. At a time when we thought we were becoming “civilized” and outgrowing “irrational” conduct, we can understand that man never outgrows his need for intense and unified meanings; if anything, then, he is bound to become more vicious, under the shallow conditions of modern life. Potlatch for potlatch, we are more dangerous than the Assyrians and the Romans. (271)

The weight of sin, then, is the weight of meanings that are not related to a broad and self-transcending framework; they are meanings that do not justify the individual in the light of the eternal significance of the universe. With sin, man is cut off, he stands alone with meaning, separate from the ground of things, uprooted in his own finitude. (275)