Man as a Commodity
Mosse, George
Man as a Commodity The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age, by Bruno Bettelheim. Free Press. 309 pp. $5. Reviewed by George Mosse The ideals of human progress and of hope for a better life...
...Bettelheim is a psychologist, and while he applies psychological criteria to his observations, they lead him towards some fundamental criticisms of the Freudian approach in which he was trained...
...Those who survived best were men and women who faced their situation and attempted to adjust to it while secretly keeping some attitudes of their former world intact...
...the family remained together instead of scattering, which might have saved their lives...
...That man can be good thus becomes beside the point...
...The operations of the S.S...
...Social organization now has a demonstrable power over man...
...The play ends with Anne pro claiming her belief in the goodness of all men...
...As if this were not enough, Bettelheim demonstrates that this childlike dependence involves taking on the very value system of the rulers, complete with brutality and racism...
...Those who shut their eyes to concentration camp reality were most easily made the victims of it...
...Man was deprived of his autonomy...
...The Informed Heart should be required reading for all those who are interested in reexamining liberal dogma in the face of the challenges Bruno Bettelheim raises...
...Yet the changes in personality under the extreme situation of concentration camp existence came about through a rigid control of the environment, consciously manipulated by the S.S...
...Thus Bettleheim explains the ultimate degradation of modern man: how thousands could be ruled by a few guards, how men and women could go to their death without protesting...
...To Bettelheim this seems to be of the essence: that the modern state now has in its hands the means of actually changing personality...
...This is not an enumeration of that catalogue of horrors with which we are all too familiar, but a serious attempt to derive meaning from these horrors for our time...
...The lesson which men concerned with human progress and human freedom might draw from this book is somewhat different from Bettelheim's own point of view...
...Indeed, his conclusions spring from a repudiation of much of what he had hitherto accepted as part of psychological thought...
...Moreover, psychology seeks to adjust man to society, but in a concentration camp there is no conventional society to adjust to, and the reality of evil cannot be sublimated...
...His hope is based on the better understanding by man of these dangers as well as upon his observation that men in the concentration camp situation did embrace death rather than live as a commodity...
...Modern man is haunted by the vision of his own degradation...
...Reviewed by George Mosse The ideals of human progress and of hope for a better life through social reorganization have been severely tested in our own age...
...To Bettelheim, the dangers of such a society are a part of the industrial, social, and technological revolution in which we live...
...were geared to this end, chiefly by inducing in the inmates a childlike dependence upon their guards, and destroying their adult frame of reference...
...Excellent though his actual analysis may be, his larger conclusions do not quite convince...
...The society he analyzes existed at a point when a certain ideology was triumphant...
...everything was controlled by an external and uncontrollable power...
...Belief in the goodness of man is an escape from the reality of the totalitarian environment, which can transform the central autonomy of human personality into a robot-like dependence upon a brutal ruler...
...There is no evidence that history repeats itself in an identical manner, even though the identical problems may still want solution...
...The father taught his children academic subjects instead of how to escape in case of danger...
...Men hoping to improve society must not be sidetracked into searching for the recesses of man's soul but instead must realize that human freedom and social organization are inseparable...
...According to modern psychology, the inner man, not society, creates the personality...
...It is admitted by Bettelheim that even Soviet labor camps do not display the same extreme types of personality change...
...Here was a family that shut its eyes to the National Socialist reality and its implications...
...It can even change that human nature which previous generations believed was entirely or partially impervious to the social process...
...they are, therefore, ever present...
...Bettelheim's critique of The Diary of Anne Frank is to the point...
...Moreover, it is always dangerous to generalize from "extreme" human situations, though this has, significantly, become the fashion in our time...
...The totalitarian concentration camp society changed the human personality of its victims...
...The book's core concerns the "extreme" situation of man imprisoned in the National Socialist concentration camps...
...Modern psychology seems to him mistaken in two particulars...
...To Bettelheim this shirks the very problems which the book raised...
...Men and women, living in an artificial society over which they had no control, became "living corpses...
Vol. 25 • April 1961 • No. 4
