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 To HAVE or to BE
Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm's thesis in this remarkable book is that two modes of existence are struggling for the spirit of humankind:
THE HAVING MODE,
which concentrates on material possession, acquisitiveness, power, and aggression and is the basis of such universal evils as greed, envy, and violence; and:
THE BEING MODE,
which is based on love, in the pleasure of sharing, and in meaningful and productive rather than wasteful activity.
Dr. Fromm sees the HAVING mode bringing the world to the brink of psychological and ecological disaster, and he outlines a brilliant program for socioeconomic change that could really turn the world away from its catastrophic course.
What Is the "HAVING" Mode?
Our judgements are extremely biased because we live in a society that rests on private property, profit, and power as the pillars of its existence. To acquire, to own, and to make a profit are the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual in the industrial society.* What the sources of property are does not matter, nor does possession impose any obligations on the property owners. The principle is: "Where and how my property was acquired or what I do with it is nobody's business but my own; as long as I do not violate the law, my right is unrestricted and absolute."
This kind of property may be called private property (from Latin privare, "to deprive of"), because the person or persons who own it are its sole masters, with full power to deprive others of its use or enjoyment. While private ownership is supposed to be a natural and universal category, it is in fact an exception rather than the rule if we consider the whole of human history (including prehistory), and particularly the cultures outside Europe in which economy was not life's main concern. Aside from private property, there are: self-created property, which is exclusively the result of one's own work; restricted property, which is restricted by the obligation to help one's fellow being; functional, or personal, property, which consists either of tools for work or of objects for enjoyment; common property, which a group shares in the spirit of a common bond, such as the Israeli kibbutzim.
The norms by which society functions also mold the character of its members (social character). In an industrial society these are: the wish to acquire property, to keep it, and to increase it, i.e., to make a profit, and those who own property are admired and envied as superior human beings. But the vast majority of people own no property in a real sense of capital and capital goods, and the puzzling question arises: How can such people fulfill or even cope with their passion for acquiring and keeping property, or how can they feel like owners of property when they haven't any property to speak of?
Of course, the obvious answer is that even people who are property poor own something -- and they cherish their little possessions as much as the owners of capital cherish their property. And like the big property owners, the poor are obsessed by the wish to preserve what they do have and to increase it, even though by an infinitesimal amount (for instance by saving a penny here, two cents there).
Perhaps the greatest enjoyment is not so much in owning material things but in owning living beings. In a patriarchal society even the most miserable men in the poorest of classes can be an owner of property -- in his relationship to his wife, his children, his animals, over whom he can feel he is absolute master. At least for the man in a patriarchal society, having many children is the only way to own persons without needing to work to attain ownership, and without capital investment. Considering that the whole burden of childbearing is the woman's, it can hardly be denied that the production of children in a patriarchal society is a matter of crude exploitation of women. In turn, however, the mothers have their own form of ownership, that of the children when they are small. The circle is endless and vicious: the husband exploits the wife, she exploits the small children, and the adolescent males soon join the elder men in exploiting the women, and so on.
The male hegemony in a patriarchal order has lasted roughly six or seven millennia and still prevails in the poorest countries or among the poorest classes of society. It is, however, slowly diminishing in the more affluent countries or societies -- emancipation of women, children, and adolescents seems to take place when and to the degree that a society's standard of living rises. With the slow collapse of the old fashioned patriarchal type of ownership of persons, wherein will the average and the poorer citizens of the fully developed industrial societies now find fulfillment of their passion for acquiring, keeping, and increasing property? The answer lies in extending the area of ownership to include friends and lovers, health, travel, art objects, God, one's own ego. A brilliant picture of the bourgeois obsession with property is given by Max Stirner.** Persons are transformed into things; their relations to each other assume the character of ownership. "Individualism", which in its positive sense means liberation from social chains, means in the negative sense, "self ownership", the right -- and the duty -- to invest one's energy in the success of one's own person.
Our ego is the most important object of our property feeling, for it comprises many things: our body, our name, our social status, our possessions (including our knowledge), the image we have of ourselves and the image we want others to have of us. Our ego is a mixture of real qualities that we build around a core of reality. But the essential point is not so much what the ego's content is, but that the ego is felt as a thing we each possess, and that this "thing" is the basis of our sense of identity.
This discussion of property must take into account that an important form of property attachment that flourished in the nineteenth century has been diminishing in the decades since the end of the First World War and is little evident today. In the older period, everything one owned was cherished, taken care of, and used to the very limits of its utility. Buying was "keep-it" buying and a motto for the nineteenth century might well have been : "Old is beautiful!" Today, consumption is emphasized, not preservation, and buying has become "throw away" buying. Whether the object one buys is a car, a dress, a gadget, after using it for some time, one gets tired of it and is eager to dispose of the "old" and buy the latest model. Acquisition -- transitory having and using -- throwing away (or if possible, profitable exchange for a better model) -- new acquisition, constitutes the vicious circle of consumer-buying...
Excerpted from the book To Have or to Be by Erich Fromm, published by Harper and Row. Copyright © 1976 by Erich Fromm. Reprinted with permission courtesy Harper and Row Publishers Inc.
* R.H Tawney's 1920 work The Aquisitive Society is still unsurpassed in its understanding of modern capitalism and options for social and human change. The contributions of Max Weber, Brentano, Schapiro, Pascal, Sombart, and Kraus contain fundamental insights for understanding industrial society's influence on human beings.
** Sterner, Max, 1973. The Ego and His Own: The Case of the Individual Against Authority. Edited by James J. Martin. Translated by Steven T. Byington. New York: Dover. |
