The Madhouse of Change

After the Second World War, I spent two years (1947--1948) writing a small book on the nature of mass movements, which Harper later published under the title The True Believer. These were two years of utmost concentration and absorption. Yet even as I was writing the book, there was something tugging at my mind, making me wonder whether my attempt to make sense of the Stalin-Hitler decades would have relevance to what was taking place in the post-War world, particularly to the strange goings on in Asia and Africa. On both continents, several countries won independence from foreign rule and began to modernize themselves in a hurry. The struggle for independence was relatively brief, but the attempt at modernization became a hectic affair, which turned every country into a madhouse. Now, modernization is not an occult process. It requires the building of roads, factories, dams, schools, and so on. Why should the accomplishment of such practical tasks require the staging of a madhouse?

I spent 18 years groping for an answer. Almost everything I have written during the past 18 years has dealt with some aspect of this problem. Every time I stumbled upon something that looked like an explanation, I wrote an essay. I acted on the assumption that in this sort of problem, all hunches and guesses were legitimate. It occurred to me, for instance, that modernization is basically a process of imitation--backward countries imitate advanced countries--and I wondered whether there might not be something bruising and antagonizing in the necessity to imitate a superior model. For the backward, imitation is an act of submission, and it is reasonable to expect that the sense of inferiority inherent in imitation should breed resentment. So I wrote an essay on "Imitation and Fanaticism," in which I suggested that the backward have to rid themselves of their feeling of inferiority, must demonstrate their prowess, before they will open their minds and hearts to all that the world can teach them. Most often in history, it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered, rather than the other way around. There is, therefore, a kernel of practicalness in the attempt of a Nasser or a Sukarno to turn their people into warriors. It is a fact that nations with a warrior tradition, such as the Japanese or the inheritors of Genghis Khan in Outer Mongolia, find modernization less difficult than nations of subjected peasants, such as Russia and China. The essay also suggested that imitation is least impeded when we are made to feel that our act of imitation is actually an act of becoming the opposite of that which we imitate. Communism can be an effective agency for the transmission of Western achievements to backward countries, because it convinces the backward that by modernizing themselves they are actually becoming the opposite of the capitalist model they imitate. Finally, I pointed out that we are most at ease when we imitate a defeated or dead model, and that the impulse of the imitators is to defeat or even destroy the model they imitate.

I also noticed that the present modernization of backward countries is directed not by businessmen or traditional politicians but by intellectuals, and I blamed the madhouse on them. I wrote several essays in which I tried to prove that unlike prosaic men of action, the intellectual cannot operate at room temperature; that he pants for a world of magic and miracles, and turns everyday tasks into holy causes and Promethean undertakings. I suggested that should intellectuals come to power in an advanced country, it, too, would turn overnight into a madhouse.

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The explanation that appealed to me most and to which I hung on longest was an unlikely one for an American. I became convinced that change itself is the cause of the madhouse; that change as such is explosive. It took me long to reach this conclusion. In this country, change is familiar and acceptable. We seem to change homes, jobs, habits, friends, even husbands and wives, without much difficulty. Actually, through most of history, change has been a rare phenomenon. Think of it: The technology perfected in prehistoric times served as a basis of everyday life down to the end of the 18th Century. Even in this country, people lived in 1800 A.D. the wáy men lived in 3000 B.C. George Washington would have felt at home in King Cheops' Egypt. The end of the 18th Century marks a sharp dividing line between an immemorial static world and a world of ceaseless change. It is obvious, therefore, that change is far from being as natural and matter of fact as we imagine it to be. Moreover, an observant person will notice that even in this country, change is never free of irritation and elements of fear. We adjust ourselves quickly to a new job or a new environment, but the moments of anxiety are there. And if we had to change our whole way of life as people have to do in the developing countries, we, too, would become upset and unbalanced.

The obvious fact is that we cannot prepare and fit ourselves for the wholly new. Skill and experience count for little and may even be a handicap. It takes time before we adjust ourselves to a wholly new situation and fit in. In other words, drastic change turns a whole population into misfits, and misfits live and breathe in an atmosphere of passion. We used to think that revolution is the cause of change. Actually, it is the other way around; revolution is a by-product of change. Change comes first, and it is the difficulties and irritations inherent in change that set the stage for revolution. To say that revolution is the cause of change is like saying that juvenile delinquency is the cause of the change from boyhood to manhood.

To understand what is going on in the developing countries, we must know what it is that misfits need above all. They need self-confidence, which means plenty of opportunities for successful action, for asserting themselves and proving their worth. Where there are such opportunities, change is likely to proceed without convulsions and explosions. We have seen it happen in this country. From the middle of the last century to the First World War, some 30,000,000 Europeans came to this country. They were, for the most part, peasants torn from the warm communal life of small towns and villages and dumped almost overnight on a strange, cold continent. If ever there was a drastic change, this was it. The immigrants went through an upsetting, irritating and painful experience. They were misfits in every sense of the word, ideal material for a revolution. Yet we had no upheaval. The immigrants adjusted themselves quickly to the new environment. Why? Because they had an almost virgin continent at their disposal and unbounded opportunities for individual advancement and self-assertion.

In most of the developing countries, there are only the meagerest opportunities for the individual to do something on his own. Most of these countries are unimaginably poor, with debilitated populations living on the edge of subsistence. Some countries, like Indonesia, are rich in natural resources, but their governments do not countenance individual enterprise and self-assertion. The intellectuals who are in charge derive their sense of usefulness from telling other people what to do, and see it as an infringement of their birthright when common people start to do things on their own. You cannot see a Sukarno or even a Suharto government telling the people of Indonesia to come and get it, the way America told the immigrants from Europe. Now, what do misfits do when they cannot win a sense of confidence and worth by individual effort? They reach out for substitutes. The substitute for self-confidence is faith, and the substitute for self-esteem is pride. Faith and pride in what? In a leader, a holy cause, a nation, a race. And it is easily seen that once you operate with faith and pride, you are going to have the bedlam atmosphere of a madhouse.

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It is remarkable that all the years I was playing with these explanations I failed to see something that was staring me in the face. I failed to see that staging a madhouse in the course of rapid modernization was not peculiar to backward countries in Asia and Africa. It was only recently that it dawned upon me that Europe, too, has been living in an apocalyptic madhouse staged by Germany and Russia as they set out to modernize themselves at breakneck speed. The nationalist, racialist and revolutionary movements, and the great wars, which have convulsed the Occident during the past hundred years, were the by-product of a drastic change in the life of the European masses, when millions of peasants were transformed into urban, industrial workers. Seen against this apocalyptic background, my explanation of the explosiveness of change as due to the creation of a state of unfitness seemed pale and inadequate. I began to feel that change does more than create misfits, that it affects deeper layers of the psyche. Considering how rare change has been through most of history, it is legitimate to assume that change goes against human nature, that there is in man a built-in resistance to change. It is not only that we are afraid of the new. Deep within us there is the conviction that we cannot merely adjust to change, that we cannot remain our old selves and master (continued on page 246)madhouse(continued from page 168) the new; that only by getting out of our skins, by becoming new men, can we become part of the new. In other words, change creates an estrangement from the self and generates a need for a new identity and a sense of rebirth. And it depends on the way this need is satisfied whether change runs smoothly or is attended with convulsions and explosions.

Let us go back to the 30,000,000 immigrants who were dumped on our shores and see what really happened to them. I said that the reason they had adjusted themselves so quickly to the new environment was that they found abundant opportunities for individual advancement. Is this all there was to it? Actually, a whole lot more happened to them. The moment the immigrants landed on our shores, America grabbed hold of them, stripped them of their traditions and habits, gave them a new diet and a new mode of dress, taught them a new language and often gave them a new name. Here was a classical example of processing people into new men. Abundant opportunities for action by themselves could not have transformed the transplanted peasants so quickly and smoothly.

Immigration, then, is a potent agency of human transformation. It is, moreover, an agency the masses will resort to on their own accord whenever there is a drastic change in their way of life. It is significant that the rapid industrialization of Europe was attended not only by mass movements but also by mass migrations to the New World. Marx cursed the discovery of gold in California for cheating him of his foretold and prayed-for glorious revolution. He said it was the injection of gold from California that saved tottering Europe. Actually, it was the discharge of 30,000,000 immigrants to America that postponed Europe's apocalyptic denouement.

It should be obvious, of course, that immigration can effect a human transformation only when it is to a foreign country. Internal migration cannot do it. Even now, when you want to transform a Sicilian or Spanish peasant into an industrial worker, you can do it more effectively by transferring him to Germany or France than to Milan or Barcelona. The Sicilian peasant who goes to Milan is not automatically processed into a new man, and he is likely to satisfy his need for a sense of rebirth by joining the Communist Party or some other mass movement. Immigration to a foreign country is a do-it-yourself way for the masses to attain a sense of rebirth. When they achieve this sense by joining a mass movement, they avail themselves of a device staged for them by intellectuals. It is easy to forget that mass movements are the creation not of the masses but of the intellectuals. Now, what is likely to happen to a Sicilian peasant who becomes an industrial worker in Milan did happen to millions of European peasants who flocked to the cities of their native countries in the second half of the 19th Century: They attained a sense of rebirth and a new identity by joining the nationalist and revolutionary movements staged for them by poets, writers, historians and scholars, and their adjustment to a new life became a convulsive and explosive affair that eventually shook the Occident to its foundations.

Mass movements play a twofold role in the process of change. Firstly, they stage the drama of rebirth. By joining a mass movement, we become members of a chosen people--saints, warriors or pioneers showing the way to the rest of mankind. Secondly, by fusing people into a compact corporate body, a mass movement creates a homogeneous malleable mass that can be molded at will. We who have lived through the Stalin-Hitler decades know that one of the chief achievements of a mass movement is the creation of a population that will go through breath-taking somersaults at a word of command and can be made to love what it hates and hate what it loves.

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There is one drastic change that no society can avoid; namely, the change from boyhood to manhood. It is a difficult and painful change, and we all know its explosive by-product of juvenile delinquency. How do ossified, changeless societies weather this change? I was particularly interested in primitive, tribal societies that have remained unchanged for millennia. When I first started to look into this matter, I had no idea what I would find. I happened to come upon a translation of Arnold van Gennep's The Rites of Passage, and as I turned the pages, I had the surprise of my life. There it was in black and white: The rites primitive societies stage to ease the boy's passage to manhood are the rites of death and rebirth. In the Congo, boys at the age of 15 are declared dead, taken into the forest and given palm wine until they pass out. The priest-magician watches over them. When they come to, he feeds them special food and teaches them a new language. During the rites of reintegration, the boys have to pretend that they do not know how to walk and that, like newborn children, they have to learn the gestures of everyday life. In several Australian tribes, the boy is taken violently from his mother, who weeps for him. He is taken into the desert, where he is subjected to physical and mental weakening to simulate death. He is then resurrected to live like a man.

In modern societies that have no rites of passage, the juvenile gropes his way to manhood on his own. He becomes an ideal recruit for mass movements. Indeed, the rapport between juvenile and mass movement is so striking--the two are so tailor-made for each other--that anyone of whatever age who joins a mass movement begins to display juvenile traits. This intimate linkage between juvenile and mass movement, and the fact that change readies people for mass movements, gave me a new view of the nature of change. Change, I realized, causes juvenilization; it turns a whole population into juveniles. It is as if the strain of change cracks the upper layers of the mind and lays bare the less mature layers. Another way of putting it is that people who undergo drastic change recapitulate to some degree the passage from childhood to manhood, and mass movements are in a sense the juvenile delinquency of societies going through the ordeal of change.

The juvenile, then, is the archetypal man in transition. There is a family likeness between juveniles and people who migrate from one country to another, or are converted from one faith to another, or pass from one way of life to another--as when peasants are turned into industrial workers, serfs into freemen, civilians into soldiers and people in backward countries are subjected to rapid modernization. Even the old, when they undergo the abrupt change of retirement, may turn, so to speak, into senile juveniles. There is such a thing as senile delinquency. Retired farmers and shopkeepers have made of Southern California a breeding ground of juvenile cults, utopias and movements. The Birch movement, with its unmistakable character of juvenile delinquency, was initiated by a retired candymaker and is sustained by retired business executives, generals and admirals. One need not strain the imagination to visualize the juvenile madhouse we would have if rapid automation should cause the retirement of millions of vigorous workers still hungry for action.

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It should be of interest to see what light these theories throw on one of the most pressing changes that confront this country at present; namely, the Negro's passage from inferiority to equality.

One sees immediately the almost insurmountable handicaps that beset the Negro on every hand. Take the matter of rebirth. The fact that in this country the Negro is a Negro first and only secondly an individual puts the attainment of a sense of rebirth beyond his reach. No matter what the Negro individual achieves or becomes, he remains a Negro first. How can he ever feel that he is a new man reborn to a new life? Think of the absurdities Elijah Muhammad and Father Divine had to concoct in order to give the Negro some taste of rebirth. A decade of fervent agitation, demonstrations, riots, court decisions and new laws has not altered the fact that the while environment divests the Negro of his individuality.

Or take immigration. Millions of Negroes have migrated from the South to other parts of the country, but this mass migration has not helped the Negro to change himself. It is an internal migration that, as we have seen, cannot work. a human transformation, and cannot endow people with a new identity. The Negro ghettos outside the South are a world of "nowhereness" and "nobodiness" where the groping for identity assumes the aspect of a nightmarish masquerade. It is of interest that Negroes who come to New York from the West Indies. Panama or Africa do have the exodus experience, and their performance is not utterly different from that of European immigrants.

Can mass movements do ought for the Negro? The answer is no. America is hard on mass movements. What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a corporation or a racket. The Puritan and Mormon movements became training grounds for successful businessmen, and even the Communist movement is becoming a vehicle for the transformation of true believers into successful real-estate dealers. The Black Muslim movement is on the way to becoming a holding company of stores, farms and banks. The civil rights movement has been an instrument in the hands of the Negro middle class in its effort to integrate itself with the white middle class and force its way into the more privileged segments of American life. Used thus, the Negro revolution is not a movement but a racket. The Negro middle class has neither faith in nor concern for the Negro masses.

The fact is that the civil rights movement has not only failed to become a genuine mass movement but has also failed as a racket. Not only has it not achieved anything like a transformation of the average Negro but it has failed to give the Negro middle class the new life that seemed within its reach. The Negro middle class has fabulous opportunities for individual advancement, yet such opportunities cannot give the Negro a sense of fitness and an unequivocal sense of worth. Middle-class Negroes arc finding out that what they need most is something that they as individuals cannot give themselves; something, moreover, that neither courts nor legislatures nor governments but only the Negro community as a whole can give them. Only when the Negro community as a whole performs something that will win it the admiration of the world will the Negro individual be able to be himself and savor the unbought grace of life. The Negro must have justified pride in the achievements of his people before he can have genuine self-respect. Another way of putting it is that at present the only way the Negro in America can attain a sense of rebirth is by giving birth to an effective Negro community. This cannot happen unless the Negro middle class reintegrates itself with the Negro masses and canalizes its energies, skills and money into the building of vigorous organs for mutual help, self-improvement and communal achievement. Demonstrations, riots, slogans, grandstanding and alibis cannot create one atom of pride.

The building of a Negro community will probably require a new type of leader--a leader who will know how to dovetail the Negro's difficulties into opportunities for growth. The renovation of the Negro slums has been crying out for the mass training of unemployed Negroes as carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers, plumbers, electricians, painters, etc., and their organization into a black union that later, when the slums have been rebuilt, could challenge the discriminating white unions to open up or be wiped out. There is no reason why the Negroes in America should not become world pioneers not only in the renovation of slums bin in the overcoming of backwardness. It is to the 20,000,000 Negroes in America that the backward countries should turn for guidance.

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I have said that everywhere in America at present, the Negro is a Negro first and only secondly a human being. This is not wholly true. There is one place, the U.S. Armed Forces, where the Negro is a human being first. By joining the Armed Forces, the Negro acquires a new identity and is reborn to a new life. His excellent performance in Vietnam is generating a pride that radiates across the Pacific and reaches into many Negro households. New Left activists who ring doorbells in Harlem and urge Negro housewives to make common cause with the Viet Cong are unceremoniously thrown out. It is not inconceivable that the new leaders who will eventually lead 20,000,000 Negroes to a promised land will be Negro veterans of the Vietnam war. The new type of leader will be without charisma, swagger or clownishness. When the task is done, the followers of such a leader will feel that they have done everything themselves and that they can do great things without great leaders.