Becker, Ernest. The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man. New York: George Braziller Publishing, 1968.

Neither science nor philosophy now aspires to give us wisdom. And wisdom, for man, must be a comprehensive picture of evil. (117)

Man must confront the underlying alienation that exists in every age, and alienation exists whenever the individual does not have a commanding view, a unitary critical perspective, by which to take in hand and react to the determinants of his social existence. (141)

…the demonic comes into being for man whenever he is manipulated by large impersonal forces beyond his control; forces that he is actively and uncritically contributing to. Thus, when modern man sets in motion vast social institutions but does not take critical control of them, the institutions assume their own momentum; the people who man the institutions become like ants mechanically doing their duty, and no one dares to question the routine to which the institutions conform. The result is that there is no way of breaking through the uncritical fictions that control society and that are embodied in vast and powerful, faceless organizations. Responsibility is nowhere; grinding power everywhere. (142)

This is the deomic nature of social evil in our time. It is a fitting culmination of the failure to heed the Enlightenment lesson: if man fails to introduce critical reason into the realm of human affairs, he must be prepared to suffer evils which he could have prevented. (142)

It is this that gives art work its esthetic quality: it represents the firm fusion of playful fiction and disturbingly neutral nature, a union whereby man takes possession of the world and makes it his own by infusing it with his meanings. Thus, esthetic is always characterized by integral unity, lively movement, extreme diversity, and yet overall naturalness and simplicity. All these attest to one superordinate fact that gives conviction at its maximum: they declare that fabricated meanings and natural, nonhuman, neutral objects belong inseparably together; and that consequently man’s tentative symbolic striving is right for all time. Thus, we see that art is the distinctively human mode because man is the only animal who must fabricate his own conviction, and the esthetic object is the most convincing possible object. (175)

Small wonder, then, that the esthetic object gives the highest joy. When man weaves together human symbolic design and earthly material, he achieves something unprecedented: by embodying the cultural fiction he gives himself immortality, as only it can be had in a world of death and decay. (175)

Again, the difference between good art and bard art: the one opens out the world to new experience and carries one beyond the deterministic constrictions of his past. The other merely relieves built-in anxieties, calms and assures one that the accustomed world view, the usual perceptions, are right, that the world is an expected place into which one’s accustomed energies are sure to fit. Bad art, in sum, gives one conviction merely by building one more firmly into the world. Bad art, then, performs for man what nature has already performed for the lower animals. Bad art imprisons, whereas man should instead seek to open out his world, to bring freedom and spontaneity into the universe. But for this, as we said, man needs strength. (187)

It is not enough for man to transact with symbols alone, and if he transacts with flesh alone he is not man. The esthetic merger of ritual puts man into the world on his terms: he changes from a passive plaything of fate to someone who creates a world of meaning. Thus we see how ritual, even though it builds man into the world, also liberates him: when he actively creates his own meanings he rises above both the animal condition and the passive condition of an everyday role participant in culture. (214)

Mass man, in one important sense in which this term has significance for a historical psychology, is man who must contrive to celebrate life all alone. (231)

History has taught us that in periods of rapid social change man resorts to the worst forms of agonism – hollow self-display, material acquisitions, envious competition, war and hate. (233)

Progressive education itself as Dewey understood it, proposed to overcome neurosis. And the progressive educator’s understanding of neurosis is the same as the vaunted “clinical” one; he could rephrase it in terms of two basic and related deficits: (1) The paralysis of the ability to learn by natural trial and error; and (2) The distrust of one’s powers of independent judgment, throughout life. (286)

Hence, as Dewey saw, true democracy is the only atmosphere in which man can grow because it is against nonreflective action at all times. It is geared to meeting with the full force of cognition continually new, problematic situations. (286)

Today I think we can fairly say that the greater the period of delay between early training and the assumption of responsible adult action, the greater the unconscious which tyrannizes the individual. Since the unconscious is really another of talking about limited action and cognition that is socially induced and learned, then we can say that the severity of one’s neurosis will vary with the strength and length of the moratorium that society puts on the child’s use of his responsible executive powers. (287)

Aggression is an inept attempt at self-affirmation by someone who has been prevented from learning to cope with life in responsible ways. (303)

Recurrent evils like sadism, militant hate, competitive greed, narrow pride, calculating self-interest that takes a nonchalant view of others’ lives, mental illness in its extreme forms – all stem from constrictions on behavior and from shallowness of meaning; and these could be laid in the lap of society, specifically, in the nature and type of education to which it submits its young; and to the kinds of choices and cognition which its institutions encourage and permit (325-326)

Thus, the Oedipus complex (or better: oedipal phase of behavior) is really a law in the strict scientific sense; it is The Law of Character Development in the symbolic animal. (328)

The whole early training period of the child can be understood in one simple way: it is the period in which he learns to maintain his self-esteem in more-or-less constant fashion by adapting his reactions to the dictates and the possibilities of his human environment. (328)

In other words – and this is crucial – the single principle which unites a full-field theory of alienation would have to be itself a measure of social criticism. (337)

In other words, a theory is a persuasive, propagandistic symbolic device that wins loyalties in the field. (361)

It seems clear that to opt for a theory of alienation in the science of man is to opt for a kind of world, and that the way one sees theories depends partly on the way he sees people (365)

Earlier in this century, it was James Mark Baldwin who taught us what the True, the Good, and the Beautiful must mean for a vision of life working within Kantian limitations and centered on man. He saw that Truth and Beauty could not be abstracted concepts in a post-Darwinian world. And he was one of the first to show that human abstraction must exist in behavior; it is organismic primarily, conceptual only secondarily. This means that the Good, for an animal who strives within nature, must be the inwardly satisfying; the True must be the outwardly proven – that which shows the acting subject that his thoughts do indeed make accurate connection with the material reality; the Beautiful, then, must be the union of the Good and the True (Baldwin, 1915, p. 287) because only thereby is the organism’s Being heightened. In other words, the Good is relative to organismic needs; the True is relative to organismic perceptions; the Beautiful is relative to its particular modes of making satisfying contact with the world. The Real, then, is all of this taken together: the world as seen from within behavior – the only Real that an organism can know. (376-377)

This was Baldwin’s once well-known theory of Pancalism, which had a place in Hasting’s famous Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, but which dropped our of history because there was no social vision to use it. With Pancalism, Baldwin tried to declare that the science of man was an esthetics that could take over the problem of religion and provide the organism with an awe-inspiring universe partly of its own making. Thus Baldwin offered a truly secular definition of Beauty and Ugliness, a definition which is still basic to a man-centered science: he saw that the Beautiful is the free, the Ugly is that which is contingent, determinate, caused (1915, p. 287). When the organism uses its own distinctive energies in effecting its esthetic mergers with the external world, the Beautiful comes about. The Beautiful, then, always derives from the free potential, from the proper matching of means to effect self-chosen ends. Dewey saw that the work of art is beautiful because it contains in itself the perfect matching of means and ends. Furthermore, the work of art is, par excellence, a product which is caused for its own sake, and is thus beautiful by Baldwin’s definition. Baldwin saw that the Ugly was something whose existence is the causal result of something else, thus, a slack pile, a rubbish heap: partial, determinate, contingent on something else, finished. We are beginning to find automobiles ugly because their effects are contingent: they choke our cities, wreak slaughter on the highways, fill our lungs with gases. And yet they were not made for this: they were made for money gain and the pleasures of personal manipulations and convenience. We find houses ugly when they are built for utility living only – when they are contingent upon something else. In a world of organisms and objects, in sum, the Beautiful is defined by the free interplay of subjective energies in a determinate world of matter. (377)

This kind of behavioral definition of the Beautiful and the Good also gives us support for the ethical imperative that we have needed for a science of man, namely, that we have only to maximize self-powers and freedom, allow man to be other than determinate, contingent, caused. Thus modern man is also ugly in his alienation, because he is unfree, because he is not the seat of his own responsible executive powers. For a science which would aim at an ethical ideal of freedom, each individual who lives in automatic and uncritical response to the forces that shaped him is ugly. He has a life style that is contingent and caused by the unthinking social facilitation of the business of life. For the acting organism, the Good and the Beautiful must always be a function of the exercise of self-powers. For the acting human organism, the Good and the Beautiful must always be a function of the exercise of his distinctive self-powers, namely, responsible choice based on the fullest possible exercise of critical powers. Thus all actions which are reflexively forced will seem ugly, except perhaps to those who find open and free choice a threat to their existence. They have to make a different kind of closure with the world, in order to feel satisfaction. Hence, the Good, for them, will be the automatic and the coerced. These people will also be insensitive to the unusual esthetic object, because its meaning will be private, integral to itself, and indeterminate. But these kinds of people are precisely the ones that an ideal-typical science seeks to educate and free. (377-378)

We have, then, a way of judging degrees of Good and Beautiful. And it is a behavioral standard which is ethically superior in some ways to religious versions of the Good and the Beautiful. That is to say, it is not partially fantasy and otherworldly and only partially this-worldly. We can judge the Good in virtue of whether it allows free human energies to unfold in this world, whether it liberates man from automaticity, whether it decreases the coercion of man against man. It is a Good that is based on and measured by developing human potential. It supports an ontology of spontaneity and love like the one Stendhal put forth. (378)

In terms of esthetic theory, this would mean that the concrete world is ordered into meaningful wholes, while the peculiarities of its parts are retained. This is the great counterfictional triumph of the esthetic object: it represents the weaving of unifying human purpose into a pluralistic but neutral world. The world is enriched by the unifying esthetic object, but the object itself is never completely possessed or determined. It retains all of its natural diversity and richness, and ultimate freedom. The esthetic object is thus the highest object because it adds concreteness and freedom to the world, at the very same time. It thus overcomes both disunity and determinism. (379)

We would consider that anything that works against human perception is evil since it narrows man down to a determinate, quasi-instinctual level, and at the same time closes off the world in its potential richness. In other words, we would aim for a standard of ethics that would itself enhance natural revelation as a struggle against natural evil. (381)

In a sense, Dewey was one of the last great Enlightenment men, one who gave fitting voice to the centuries of human yearning and stumbling over man’s dispossession of himself and the world. He saw God as the idealizing possibility in life, that calls upon the best natural energies, and by means of which self and world are given heightened significance. The quintessentially religious comes into play as man envisages the ideal as a call to his highest efforts: the vision of the possible, to be realized by the best intelligence of the whole community of man. This alone justifies human effort in nature and in history: it unites divine possibility at least somewhat with human purpose. (383)