7 minute read
Flawed theory
Joseph Shaw finds no evidence to support the idea that traditionally minded Catholics are rigid in their thinking
Pope Francis appealed to the concept of ‘rigidity’ when asked by Fr Antonio Spadaro, why some people like the Traditional Mass:
The accusation of ‘rigidity’ against conservative and traditionally-minded Catholics, and particularly seminarians, is a familiar one, and it is important to try to understand where it comes from and what it really means, in order to determine whether it is justified, and how to respond to it. The story begins with Sigmund Freud, who liked to explain negative psychological phenomena by reference to sexual repression. It seemed natural to a later psychologist, Wilhelm Reich, to use it to explain Fascism ( The Mass Psychology of Fascism , 1933). Reich wrote:
Reich applied his theory not only to Nazism, but to Communism, labelling it ‘Red Fascism’, and was ejected from the Communist Party for his pains.
Reich’s challenge to Nazism was answered by another psychologist, Erich Jaensch, in 1935. Jaensch gave Reich’s characterisation of Nazis a positive spin, saying that they were clean-living, tough-minded, and antiSemitic, and opposed to decadent artistic, ideological, and sexual trends.
After the war Theodor Adorno and his co-authors picked up the threads of this debate in The Authoritarian Personality (1950). Adorno and his collaborators adopted Jaensch’s two personality types; like Reich, however, they appealed to sexual repression as the origin of the type Jaensch liked, but which they criticised: the ‘Authoritarian’ type.
Adorno’s theory was very influential. Twenty years after Adorno’s book, the British psychologist Peter Kelvin described the authoritarian personality as follows:
These ideas were not limited to textbooks. The 1979 Pink Floyd album, The Wall, opposes the ‘bleeding hearts and artists’, and the repressed, fearful, dull-witted, and aggressive types who hate Jews, black people, and homosexuals. This is popular culture straight out of Adorno.
It is reasonably clear therefore what Pope Francis and others in the Church have in mind when they talk about ‘rigidity’. It is a reference to the authoritarian personality, linked in textbook fashion to insecurity.
It would appear from this that on Pope Francis’ analysis Traditionalism is a harmless outlet for a group of people with deep-seated anxiety issues. Importantly, this analysis does not suggest that Traditionalism is any kind of threat, since its pool of potential supporters is very limited. On the other hand, members of this unfortunate minority are clearly unsuited to pastoral ministry, and it is no surprise to find Pope Francis less relaxed about traditionalist seminarians, and the bishops who wish to ordain them, than he is about celebrations of the Traditional Mass.
The important question is: is this true? Are those attached to the Traditional Mass frightened, immature, and unimaginative? More fundamentally, do the characteristics attributed by Adorno to the ‘authoritarian personality’ really go together?
Adorno’s research methodology has been much criticised; leaving that aside, I would pick out two large-scale problems with his theory.
The first is the assertion by the Nazi psychologist Jaensch, which has passed without challenge into the thinking of Adorno and his popularisers, that the Nazis were products of the traditional, hierarchical family, and represented traditional, middle-class morality, especially in the area of sexuality. Jaensch’s motive was to make the Nazis reassuringly respectable; Adorno’s project seems to be to denigrate this kind of respectability through its association with the Nazis.
The reality, however, as many people noticed at the time and since, was that the Nazi party was filled with saddos and misfits, of all kinds of family backgrounds, often of dubious sexuality and even racial origin, who condemned bourgeois moral principles, herded priests into death camps, and dabbled in the occult. They undermined the authority of the traditional family in favour of the state, by for example conscripting children into the Hitler Youth, and had little time for conventional sexual morality.
The second issue is to do with the Freudian explanation of the Nazi phenomenon. This is that sexual repression leads to anxiety, narrow-mindedness, and a strong aversion to taking risks. The difficulty is that the adoption of fascism in Germany was experienced not as an act of conformity to conventional rules, but as the violent overthrow of the political establishment, in favour of a programme of suicidally risky expansionism. Nor was the war-machine which emerged from the Nazi experiment characterised by sclerotic risk-aversion and a failure of imagination. Indeed, it was not the Germans, but their opponents, who were incapable of adjusting their military principles to new information and circumstances, particularly in the opening stages of the war.
In short, the different components of the stereotypical ‘authoritarian personality’– traditional sexual morality, risk aversion, rigidity of thinking, etcetera – don’t hang together, even in the favourite example of those who developed this theory.
There is, of course, such a thing as risk aversion. Leaving aside the rest of Adorno’s theory, can we connect this with traditional morality?
Two lines of empirical enquiry shed some light on this question. The first is the investigation of healthy risk-taking, seen for example in entrepreneurism. One of the things which has emerged from this is that children with secure two-parent families have greater appetite for such risk in later life, than others less fortunate. 2
Traditional two-parent families are strongly correlated with positive life outcomes for children in many ways, so this finding is hardly surprising. But it is these families, if any, which must include that bogey-man of Freudianism, the supposedly cloying and unimaginative traditional family, and its moral formation of children. The reality is that children brought up without this structure, with supposedly liberated parents moving between multiple partners, are more prone to have problems with their school work and to display chronic anxiety.
The second line of suggestive research relates to pornography. On the basis that sexual repression is the key to all sorts of problems, generations of Freud-influenced penal reformers have demanded that imprisoned sex offenders be provided with a supply of porn.
What does the evidence say? One survey of the literature, whose author set out to test the effectiveness of rehabilitation plans for offenders which included the provision of pornography, admitted:
As with the Freudian claim about sexual morality and pathological risk-aversion, the claim that porn can facilitate a sexual outlet like a safety-valve for people of disturbed sexualities, is not just off the mark, but the reverse of the truth.
‘ Me – square?’
From Cracks in the Curia, 1972
To put it charitably, Pope Francis’ form of expression is linked to a psychological theory which, while mainstream forty years ago, is today outdated.
The next question is: how can we best respond to the accusation of ‘rigidity’?
When it is impractical to raise the more fundamental criticisms of Adorno which I have set out above, one can use the supposed connections between different character traits to undermine the idea that a person or group of people are really ‘rigid’. Remember, the theory says that ‘rigid’ people are not only sexually repressed but risk-averse, wishing above all to impress their superiors and keep the rules, lacking in artistic imagination, are anti-Semites and racists, and so on.
If one points out, therefore, that the Traditional Mass has always been strongly supported by poets and musicians, the Adorno-influenced critic will find this very surprising. He will be further confused if he notices that the Traditional Mass is supported by people of all races, including Jewish converts to the Faith. Above all, it should be impressed on Adorno’s modern Catholic disciples that the vast majority of supporters of the Traditional Mass have come to it in defiance of those in authority over them, and certainly not as a way of currying favour with anyone. Indeed, for young people today, the Traditional Mass can be the ultimate rebellion.
A longer version of this paper was delivered as part of the Iota Unum series in April 2019.
1 Peter Kelvin, The Bases of Social Behaviour, 1970. Quoted by Norman Dixon The Psychology of Military Incompetence (1976). Ellipses are Dixon’s.
2 “Smart and Illicit: Who Becomes an Entrepreneur and Do They Earn More?” by Ross Levine and Yona Rubinstein (National Bureau of Economic Research, 2016)
3 “Use of Pornography with Sex Offenders in Treatment: A Controversial Conundrum” Scott Allen Johnson (International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and Human Resilience, 2015)
