TAP–THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY

Negative Entropy – Bateson - Freud

ANNOTATION:
Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society; Isis, Vol. 100, No. 2 (June 2009), pp. 219-262. Note: This annotation includes my own reflection on the issues raised in relation to the Fabulous Loop de Loop

The Authoritarian Personality, Creativity and Independence

Context: In the years following WWII the social sciences in the United States received considerable institutional support by philanthropic foundations, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, NGOs, governmental institutions, and organisations covertly funded by the CIA (including the MK-Ultra program). The Joshua Macy Foundation, for instance, was a major conduit for CIA funded research programmes. The vast majority of those involved in these programmes had no knowledge of the covert funding. Cybernetics, and the Macy conferences were an important element in a cultural matrix that championed interdisciplinary dialogue. This was at a time when social cohesion was understood to be under threat from communism abroad and the anti-liberal forces of McCarthyism at home. In this context, the values of 'creativity' and 'independence of thought' (attributes which were lacking in the American conception of the Soviet soul) were championed. These traits –which translated as self-evident virtues – were modelled within the academy and within elite institutions such as the OSS (which would become the CIA) to create an ideal of the American citizen who displayed few of the traits of The Authoritarian Personality (TAP, as Theodor Adorno would identify it).

The annotation that follows reviews the emergence of this Post-war liberal consensus in order to provide context for Gregory Bateson’s own significant contribution to it and to better understand the place of cybernetics as a diagnostic and regulative tool within liberal culture as it came into being after WWII.

TAP – Against the The Authoritarian Personality.

Since the 1930s in the United States there was a move toward generalism in education as response to a perceived specialisation within science and culture in general as divisive to overall cohesion. Along with this anxiety came the diagnostic instruments for defining and instrumantalising the subject of unity. Strangely, the ideal post war liberal subject came to resemble the individuals who devised the tools to evaluate the ideal liberal subject: creative, open-minded, tolerant and able to cope with ambiguity. (Note: these are the qualities exhibited by the mentally healthy in Bateson’s Communication and the Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951).

Theodor Adorno et al’s The Authoritarian Personality (TAP 1950)24 is an important template for social scientific, psychological and anthropological research projects conducted in the united states during the Cold War. TAP runs for twenty-six chapters over one thousand pages and aims to provide a character profile of the authoritarian personality and develop means to identify the authoritarian ‘syndrome’ through various diagnostic tools.

For instance, degrees of prejudice were identified via such devices as the F Scale (Fascist scale) and E Scale (ethnocentrism Scale). TAP monitored authoritarian tendencies between the poles of ‘authoritarian’ and ‘democratic’ through a series of questionnaires. It is significant, however that an earlier model of TAP worked within a tripartite range from ‘authoritarian’ to ‘revolutionary’ with ‘neutral’ in the middle. 26 This model was abandoned in favour of the twin poles of ‘authoritarian’ (fascist and communist) and ‘democratic’. The post-war liberal subject, defined against the dual threat of McCarthyism on the right and the perceived threat of Soviet Communism on the left, would display the psychologically healthy trait of being able to understand ambiguity, was ‘open minded’, ‘rational’ , ‘creative’ , and ‘non-conformist’
The authoritarian personality, by contrast, is not creative, shows little personal initiative (deferring to authority), is not able to tolerate ambiguity and is prone to irrationality.
These categories serve to establish several functions,

a) they provide an equivalence between fascism and communism
b) they make political inclination an issue of mental hygiene and
c) they create the means of establishing these things to be scientific and a-political, whilst they remain social concerns.
d)The authoritarian condition was understood as a crutch for the ‘absence of self’.

Tests and research programmes similar to TAP were conducted in academies over the United States from the 1950s to the 1970s to the degree, Cohan-Cole suggests, that societies problems became “isomorphic with the problems of the academy” 29. For instance, the fragmentation of knowledge – which had been characteristic of academic life in the first half of the twentieth century – was assumed to be a symptom of a broader societal problem. Indeed retaining unity within such a diverse nation was a perennial source of political anxiety. So it was that the solutions provided within the academy – to encourage interdisciplinary dialogue and creativity, to develop a shared ‘thematic language’ which promoted cohesion – were regarded as solutions for society as a whole. The academy, and the interdisciplinary conferences, of which the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics were the most ambitious, provided models of creativity and cohesion to be reproduced on a larger scale within the coming ‘post-ideological society’ (Clive Bell). Likewise social psychiatric experiments, which were routinely conducted within academies, were regarded as the homunculus of larger systems within society. In the manner of a benign, cultural feedback loop “creativity, interdisciplinary, and cultural cohesion, […] helped produce one another.”

Berkley’s Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR) was instituted in 1949 and funded by the Carnegie and Rockerfaller Foundations. It brought together members of the TAP project with alumni of the personal assessment project of the OSS (soon to become the CIA). Together they attempted to develop standards for evaluating creativity and personal effectiveness.
This was done through the study of individuals who had a proven record of creativity. These were taken from a pool of OSS officers and others deemed to be exemplarily creative, colligate and interdisciplinary.
This, unsurprisingly, affirmed the cultural production of the elite – commonsensical ideas of what is non-conformist and creative were fed back through the system to produce results concluding that the personality of an OSS agent, for instance, might correspond to the most creative, free thinking and democratically minded individual in society at large.

As Jamie Cohan-Cole writes: “A reliable way of distinguishing the Highs (in authoritarianism) from the Lows (in authoritarianism) was to ask them to name people they admired. Those low in authoritarianism responded with such names as “Whitman, Pushkin, Beethoven, Voltaire, Bertrand Russell, Comte, Maimonides, Confucius, Sir William Osler, Freud, [and] Pestallozzi.” On the other hand, the Highs responded with “Marshall, MacArthur, Lindbergh, the Pope, Henry Ford, Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, Kate Smith, [and] Bing Crosby.” The authors of TAP read these two groups of names as an indication that democratically minded people valued “intellectual, aesthetic, and scientific achievement, social contribution, and democratic social change,” while authoritarians valued “power and control, conservative Americana, etc.” On the other hand, critics of TAP noted another difference: the individuals admired by democratically minded Americans were “largely unknown to non-intellectuals.”

TAP tests tended to confirm expectations: the south was more conservative than the north, the better educated were less authoritarian. The subject would shed authoritarian tropes even in the time it takes to turn from a freshman to a graduate student. In this era, refined culture (aka class) and democratic (aka liberal) temperament, were bound together in a circuit of mutual affirmation.

Opposition to this affirmative circuit was regarded as pathological, as an EPC report made plain in: “The whole spirit of free American education will be subverted unless teachers are free to think for themselves. It is because members of the Communist Party are required to surrender this right . . . that they should be excluded from employment as teachers.”

The remarkable thing about this statement is that it is both anti-communist and anti-McCarthyite. The communist is not a potential corruptor of youth (as McCarthy might fear) but someone who lacks the ability to think for himself. This understands communism as an intellectual pathology threatening the mental hygiene of the host institution. The logic of liberal reasoning excludes the political by reframing it as a pathology, subordinate to scientific understanding rather than a matter of judgment or political preference. Here political difference was understood not as an ideological or political issue but as a social, scientific issue. It is in this context that anthropologists such as Margeret Mead were employed to consider ‘mental hygiene’ as an issue of social importance as opposed to an issue of political orientation. It was in this context also that creativity becomes a psychological virtue because it works against totalitarianism on both sides of the liberal political spectrum, along with those other agents of liberalism, autonomy and creative freedom. This provides the context for Bateson’s own (a)political ecology which developed through his own association with the OSS, his work on the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics, which sought an epistemological unity through his steps to an ecology of mind; which in recognising pattern in a series of relations, invites a dynamic cohesion. Throughout we see an affirmation of the liberal subject as creative, non-conformist and intellectually non-aligned. It was a liberalism that could accommodate opposition to war or debates on global ecology, which could criticise unregulated capital and even technological determinism and never threaten a deeper, more fundamental notion of freedom which is the goal and limit of liberalism.