Childhood and Society

Human body, human mind and society are interrelated each other. However, the scientific anatomy often fails to see those three in entity, perceiving human minds to be narrow and static. Psychoanalysts are different. Thanks to their analysis methodology, psychoanalysts overcome this pitfall and are able to see the mutual influence of soma, mind and society. They study individual human crises by becoming therapeutically involved in them, and can see that somatic tension, individual anxiety, and group panic have the same rout. Erik Erikson, a psychoanalyst authored “Childhood and Society”, a brilliant work to elucidate the relationship among body, mind and society through his clinical psychological analysis of childhood.

Childhood and development of ego

Human beings have a long childhood; the more civilized the community, the longer childhood people experience. Long childhood makes a technical and mental virtuoso out of man, but it also leaves a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in him or her. Why?

The reasons are related to the stages of human psychological development. According to Erikson, human beings experience 8 stages in their psychological development. For more detail, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erikson%27s_stages_of_psychosocial_development

Each developmental stage requires children to acquire each psychological ability (virtue) for their further maturity, and there always are the challenges and potential conflicts. For instance, the first developmental stage requires that a child acquire basic trust in his or her first developmental stage, but there always is the risk of embracing mistrust. The conflicts between the confrontational values (in this case trust and mistrust) create anxiety, and one’s ego manages it through providing defensive measures with him/herself, the measures that are sometimes expressed in peculiar ways.

Erikson’s basic concept of ego is coming from Freud. Feud argued that human beings have the pressure of excessive wishes (the “id”) and the oppressive force of conscience (the “superego”). According to Freud, the id is the oldest province of human mind; it is everything which would make us “mere creatures”, such as responses of the amoeba, impulses of apes, and so on. On the other hand, the superego is a governor which limits the expression of the id by opposing to it the demands of conscience. Sometimes the superego oppresses ego too much and it is analogous to those of the blindly impulsive id: the cruelty of religious inquisition is one example. The ego dwells between id and superego, balancing them through defensive measures and thus restricting the development of anxiety.

Erikson argues that the events that children experience are designed to overcome these challenges that children face in their psychological developmental process. He argues that the society lighten the inescapable conflicts of childhood with a promise of some security, identity, and integrity. Let me mention two mechanisms for example - cultures and identity.

Cultures and identity

Erikson studied primitive cultures of Native American Tribes: Yurok and Sioux and found that the tribes use behavioral configurations to protects them from individual anxiety which might lead to panic. For instance, the Plains hunters feel anxiety over emasculation and immobilization, the Pacific fishermen feel it over being left without provisions.

“The discovery of primitive child-training systems makes it clear that primitive societies are neither infantile stages of mankind nor arrested deviations from the proud progressive norms which we represent: they are a complete form of mature human living, often of a homogeneity and simple integrity which we at times might well envy. “ (page 112)

“To accomplish this (managing anxiety), a primitive culture seems to use childhood in a number of ways: it gives specific meanings to early bodily and interpersonal experience in order to create the right combination of organ modes and the proper emphasis on social modalities; it carefully and systematically channelizes throughout the intricate pattern of its daily life the energies thus provoked and deflected; and it gives consistent supernatural meaning to the infantile anxieties which it has exploited by such provocation.” (page 185)

Take another example. Religion organizes the conflict between trust and evil, collectively cultivating trust in the form of faith and exploiting the sense of evil in the form of sin.

“Such an organization may have its era in history when it reinforces this particular ego value with a ceremonial power capable of infusing civilizations and of replenishing the communality of its followers in one form of human integrity. “ (page 277)

According to Erikson, identity based on cultures plays the central role as an anchor to keep the inner equilibrium in human minds.

“We concluded that only a gradually accruing sense of identity, based on the experience of social health and cultural solidarity at the end of each major childhood crisis, promises that periodical balance in human life which – in integration of the ego stages – makes for a sense of humanity. But wherever this sense is lost, wherever integrity yields to despair and disgust, wherever generativity yields to stagnation, intimacy to isolation, and identity to confusion, an array of associated infantile fears are apt to become mobilized: for only an identity safely anchored in the “patrimony” of a cultural identity can produce a workable pyshosocial equilibrium.” (page 412)

Erikson argues that young people now experiences difficulties in acquiring cultural identity, as the world experiences the rapid changes. At his time, the world experienced the World Wars, world-wide communication, mechanization, urbanization and so on, and the changes in milieu made it difficult for young people to have a solid cultural identity.

Remarks

Although the comment may not be relevant to the very contents of the book, this book made me to think of the hint to see the entity. Human minds, bodies and society are connected, and just seeing them separately may lead to the wrong conclusion. One way to avoid this failure is to see a creature living in the entity. Karl Marx said that a product in capitalism society is reflecting all aspects of the society, and the same can be said for the analysis of minds and society.

The book also inspired me to think about the meaning of social mechanisms. Any odd system, such as old traditions, has the historical rationale of its existence. Just to laugh at the “Japanese” style corporate cultures is too easy. What is difficult but truly valuable is to find out the raison d’etre of these cultures and bring out implications and lessons for the future.

Reference

Erik H. Erikson, “Childhood and Society”, W W Norton & Co Inc (Reissue edition), 1993/08

The Consequences of Modernity

People tend to call the current era “post-modernity”, “new society”, etc., but Anthony Giddens argues in his book “The Consequences of Modernity” that we are not experiencing the era beyond modernity; rather we are now at the very consequences of modernity where key characteristics of modernity became radicalized and universalized than ever before.

The key observational characteristics of modernity are “disembedding mechanisms (or abstract systems, composed of symbolic tokens and expert systems)”, which are backed by trust based on “faceless commitments”. This trust in strangers is generated by the situation of modernity which experienced the unprecedented social changes, such as (1) human beings transcended the power of natures, and (2) emerging reflexive science cast doubt on divinity of Gods and myths, (3) change in institutions.

Disembedding mechanisms overcoming time and space

The term “disembedding” means the “lifting out” of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space. (page 21)

Giddens argues that there are two types of disembedding mechanisms. The first is the creation of symbolic tokens. The symbolic tokens are media of interchange which can be “passed around” without regard to the specific characteristics of individuals or group. (page 22) An example of tokens is money, says Giddens, because money in its developed form is defined in terms of credit and debt, where these concern a plurality of widely scattered interchanges. It is a means of bracketing time and so of lifting transactions out of particular milieux of exchanges, and thus it is a means of time-space distanciation.

(page24).

The second type of disembedding mechanism is the establishment of expert system. The expert systems remove social relations from the immediacies of context, by providing “guarantees” of expectations across distanciated time-space. For instance, we perceive a lawyer as a legal professional regardless of their seniority or the relationship we have made with him or her. (page 28)

Background changes in modernity

A. Radicalized Reflexivity

Giddens argues that reflexive appropriation of knowledge is the characteristics of modernity. Here, reflexivity means the custom that one examines, reflects and reforms oneself (or simply self reflection). The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character (page 38).

Needless to say, reflexivity is not the unique idea of modernity. Giddens says that only in the era of modernity is the revision of convention (i.e. reflexivity) radicalized to apply to all aspects of human life, including technological intervention into the material world. He cites examples of modern social science, such as economics, as the one having reflexive characteristic in its research style.

The knowledge applied to social activity has four factors. First, some individuals and groups can more easily have access to the knowledge. Second, social values and empirical knowledge are inter-connected. Third, knowledge about social lives transcends the intentions of those who apply it to transformative ends. Fourth, knowledge reflexively applied to the conditions of system reproduction intrinsically alters the circumstances to which it originally referred. (page 44)

B. Changes of Institutions in modernity

Giddens says that modernity is composed of four institutional dimensions: industrialism, capitalism surveillance, and military power. He argues that those four, especially industrialism and capitalism, are compatible and are under the concept of modernity. Modernity is inherently of global nature, and as globalization makes progress, the four dimensions transform into international division of labor, world capitalist economy, nation-state system, and world military power.

Trust in modernity

In modern social life, many people interact with and thus trust others who are strangers to them. (page 80) Giddens says that all disembedding mechanisms, both symbolic tokens and expert systems, depend upon trust. Thus, he thinks trust is the fundamental factor of the institutions of modernity. Trust is a form of “faith”, in which the confidence vested in probable outcomes expresses a commitment to something rather than just a cognitive understanding. Giddens also argues that the trust involved in modern institutions are based upon vague and partial understandings of their “knowledge base” (page 27)

Trust in itself had existed long before the modernity, but the striking feature of modern trust is that people express faceless commitments, instead of facework commitments. Here, facework commitments refer to trust relations which are sustained by or expressed in social connections established in circumstances of co-presence. Faceless commitments, instead, are the faith in symbolic tokens or expert systems (Giddens terms it “abstract systems”). Giddens says as follows:

“It will be a basic part of my argument that the nature of modern institutions is deeply bound up with the mechanisms of trust in abstract systems, especially trust in expert systems.” (page 83)

Trust usually is demanded where there is ignorance, i.e. we trust things that we don’t know well, e.g. scientists’ remarks. According to psychology, a sense of the reliability of persons and things is basic to feelings of ontological (existential) security. In other words, trust is something to do with survival of human beings.

However, the above understandings do not help us to understand why in modernity the meanings of trust experienced transformation. To answer to the question why modernity sees faceless commitments, Giddens examines the environment of trust and risk in pre-modern and modern cultures. Modern era marked the great progress in science and the power of human beings. The community no longer is limited to the location thanks to the advancement in mobility. The biggest pre-modern threats were based on nature, environments or locality, whereas they became to be generated by human beings themselves and globalized. The reflexive science diminished the influence of religions, left human beings in a threat of personal meaninglessness. (the table below is from page 102)

This environmental change caused abstract systems to provide a great deal of security in day-to-day life which was absent in pre-modern orders. As we believed in God and neighbors in pre-modern era, we now need new Gods and believe in expert systems and symbolic tokens.

Remarks

To me it was an interesting idea that trust based on faceless commitment is not the product of 21st century but of modern era. Reading through the discussions that Giddens made on trust building in modernity, we will be able to foresee how the discussions on faceless trust would evolve.

It is not the 21st century that human beings exceeded the limitation of time and space. Internet is not the fundamental reason of transcending time and space; it is the trust that enables human beings to go beyond the limitations of time and space.

Reference

Anthony Giddens, “The Consequences of Modernity”, Polity, 1991/9/2

The Tacit Dimension

“I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell”, said Michel Polanyi in his book “The Tacit Dimension”, whose work paved the way for the study of tacit knowledge, the concept that is later applied to business analysis by Ikujiro Nonaka.

As an example to explain the concept of tacit knowledge, Polanyi uses the way we identify one’s face. We cannot explain why, but can confidently identify our friend’s face from a million of others. The form of nose, width of mouth, color of eyes and the others constitute a face of individuals, but the aggregation of individual factors is somehow different from the entity. The same can be said when we talk about personal preference: although we list key conditions for friends, we tend to make friends who do not satisfy the conditions. Something is missing in listing particular factors only.

Polanyi introduces the concept of tacit knowledge, which is the integrated knowledge that captures wholeness of the things.  Polanyi seems to be inspired the idea of Gestalt psychology, which emphasizes the importance of wholeness in human recognition system. He emphasized the importance of wholeness in human intelligence and said as below:

“The highest forms of integration loom largest now. These are manifested in the tacit power of scientific and artistic genius. The art of the expert diagnostician may be listed next, as a somewhat impoverished from of discovery, and we may put in the same class the performance of skills, whether artistic, athletic, or technical.” (page 6)

Basic structure of tacit knowledge

Let us briefly look at how Polanyi describes the basic structure of tacit knowledge. He argued that tacit knowledge has four aspects: functional, phenomenal, semantic, and ontological

Let’s say that there happened an event A and then an event B. For instance, a child sees dark cloud and then rain. Once a child form tacit knowledge on raining, he or she can combine the two kinds of knowing (functional aspect of tacit knowledge), can tell that rain will come by seeing dark cloud (phenomenal aspect), is able to find meaning in dark cloud, i.e. meaningless feelings turns into meaningful one (semantic aspect), and, finally, the child will be able to understand the comprehensive entity of how weather changes (ontological aspect).

Entity and particulars

Polanyi claims that we acquire tacit knowing by “indwelling” things. For instance, when a boy learns how to ride bicycle, he needs to integrate various body actions. He needs to be fully used to each action, so that he can internalize the action and don’t need to be conscious of it. You cannot ride a bicycle if you care every bodily movement. Polanyi called this internalization of each action indwelling. He also used the word “interiorization” as the same meaning of indwelling. Once we succeed in indwelling things, we will be able to see each what we indwelled as the entity. This is the process of tacit knowledge formation. By knowing and indwelling particulars, we reach to principle to explain particulars as an entity.

Thus, just breaking down the entity into particulars will lead to lose the understanding of wholeness, and that is the common pitfall of investigations. Polanyi said:

“We can see now how an unbridled lucidity can destroy our understanding of complex matters. Scrutinize closely the particulars of a comprehensive entity and their meaning is effaced, our conception of the entity is destroyed. Such cases are well known. Repeat a word several times, attending carefully to the motion of your tongue and lips, and to the sound you make, and soon the word will sound hollow and eventually lose its meaning. By concentrating attention on his fingers, a pianist can temporarily paralyze his movement. We can make our selves lose sight of a pattern or physiognomy by examining its several parts under sufficient magnification.

  Admittedly, the destruction can be made good by interiorizing the particulars once more. The word uttered again in its proper context, the pianist’s fingers used again with his mind on his music, the features of a physiognomy and the details of a pattern glanced at once more from a distance: they all come to life and recover their meaning and their comprehensive relationship.”  (page 18)

If tacit knowledge is the essence of all knowledge, ideal of exact science, i.e. the science full of lucidity and dividing the concept into very tiny elements, is fundamentally misleading and a source of fallacies. Polanyi said that the process of formalizing all knowledge to the exclusion of any tacit knowing is self-defeating.

Importance of ambiguity

If tacit knowledge does exist and play a determinate role in knowledge formation, then knowledge wholly based on only visible and identifiable grounds collapse. Although modern science has weighed importance on objectivity and testable experiences, Polanyi claims that metaphysical belief, which is sometime ambiguous and very logically weak, should play the central role in the progress of science.  He says:

“Metaphysical beliefs are not explicitly professed today by scientists, let alone by the general public. Modern science arose claiming to be grounded in experience and not on a metaphysics derived from first principles. My assertion that science can have discipline and originality only if it believes that the facts and values of science bear on a still unrevealed reality, stands in opposition to the current philosophic conception of scientific knowledge.”  (page 70)

                                                              

Remarks

I found the similarity in problems detecting way of Polanyi and Chomsky (see the previous post). Polanyi said as follows:

“To see a problem that will lead to a great discovery is not just to see something hidden, but to see something of which the rest of humanity cannot have even an inkling. “ (page 22)

Polanyi also taught us a hint to come up with the great discoveries. Indwelling or interiorizing is the key. Perhaps this weekly reading would lead to the interiorization.

The concept of tacit knowledge always encourages me when I face difficulty in explaining my personal belief. I totally agree with the concept that Polanyi brought about and wish to cherish my personal belief and principle.

Reference:

Michael Polanyi, “The Tacit Dimension”, University of Chicago Press,  Reissue edition, 2009/05