Consumerism

Guidance: A Plea for Abandonment
J.R. Seeley

"This piece by Jack Seeley spells out with great clarity the downside of trying to raise your kids to know what the score is, i.e. the prevalent "Socializing Mode" as set out by DeMause and practised by just about everybody -- to the detriment of their kids. More than that he analyses the nature of relationships with kids, spouse, friends or patients that avoid the hazards of traditional "teaching."

Of the many meanings its practitioners give to "Guidance," I am interested in the one that intends it to be a source of general aid or counsel for the child in the decision making process. I wish to argue that that function cannot be discharged under modern conditions by any process that carries with it the etymological overtones of the word guidance. I wish to say why I so believe, and I want to offer an alternative conception.

The plea for abandonment of the very notion of guidance is based upon moral considerations upon a judgment as to the centrality of human dignity -- as well as upon the appraisal of the situation of guide and the person guided.

It goes without saying that if I am to speak of morals at all I must postulate human choice. In a deterministic philosophy both choice and morality must be absent or illusory. I should like to go further. If choice is not a first good -- and it may not only not be a first good or supreme value, but experientially a bad or evil -- it is an indispensable condition for all other (moral) goods.

There is significance in neither ethics nor aesthetics without choice -- indeed the proper bound of these is the realm of human choice, actual or potential (i.e., choosable). Whatever, therefore, needlessly limits choice, limits good. That this contention must be taken within the context of the entire human condition is also obvious. A limitation of choice (e.g., the choice to avoid armed service) in the defense of a good (i.e., generally choice-maximizing) society may be a positive good.

Given this view of the central or pivotal character of choice, I am led to regard those communication or educational processes as "best" that, in the long run, maximize choice for the parties concerned. These are what may be called the liberative processes or arts. Essentially they entail coming into power over that which constricts choice or, in the long run, would tend to do so. The child who learns to speak comes into possession of the power to stimulate himself, to cause himself shame or pride, a power, until then, which lay only in the lands of others. The child who comes to some understanding of how he has been and is being "educated" or "led" or "guided" or "developed" is in part in possession of some further possibility of autonomy or choice. The child who is barred from the greatest measure of understanding with which he can cope is to that degree crippled or retarded.

I have stated what I believe to be right, but, right or wrong, I think it can be asserted that the deceit of the child in these matters is now much more difficult than it once was.

I submit that the teacher's role has changed from that of an unconscious transmitter of generally accepted values to one where he is expected to "shape the child's character." I argue, therefore, that since there is no general value model, and since the child's situation or problem cannot be foreseen in any detail, teachers are thrown back on quite other techniques and obligations. I shall contend that your differential access to psychological knowledge and your peculiar position both enable you and obligate you to engage in a vastly different enterprise. And lastly, I shall attempt to sketch what I believe to be the general nature of that enterprise.

Time was when the lot of the schoolteacher was simpler and happier, though he struggled manfully against it to his present unhappy destiny and onerous load. Time was -- and not so long ago at that -- when, working, essentially as a servant under direction, his task was to "pass on" as much of a clearly defined and widely agreed culture as the relatively feeble resistance of his pupils would permit. Like all but a very few in his day, his information came to him hallmarked, his morality certified, and, whether or not he had also internalized the going beliefs, he had effectively to serve them or cease to be a teacher.

Today's teacher is not so situated. No longer is there an attested and acceptable morality. No longer is there a world of blacks and whites, with nice firm borders around fields of knowledge or moral problems similar to those the teachers of the day caused the children to put around their "art" productions ("A good, firm outline is the first thing"). No longer for any but the wholly bemused or intensely unintelligent or the willfully blind are there clear and certain answers to any important question: the nature of man, the "best" social or political or economic arrangements, the destiny of the individual or the society or the species. No longer for the honest man are the certitudes certain or the philosophic or ethical boundaries secure. The rules that in an easier and perhaps happier day seemed to carry their justification for all eternity written upon their faces now carry with equal plainness their provisionality, their local and temporal limits, their ad hoc character, stamped upon them. Is it a plain principle of common sense, for instance, that no man shall be tried under legislation made to apply retroactively? Then what of Nurnberg? Is it a plain principle of international diplomacy and the peace and concord that rests upon it that interference by one State in the internal affairs of another is intolerable? Then what of Soviet propaganda? of the "Voice of America"? of permitting the atrocities of the Hitler years in Germany -- or those of the Stalinist years in the Soviet Union?

The truth is that there are no longer any plain answers, or, where there seem to be, they are not enduring. If there are eternal verities -- other than propositions in logic or mere tautologies -- they clearly lie at so high a level of abstraction as to be virtually useless guides to conduct. We are all, in the image of a great American, "against sin"; it is only that we no longer know with any precision what is or is not "sin."

How indeed should it be otherwise? The world in which we grew up is so altered, so changed and made over by events that any resemblance between it and the world of our students is virtually nil. Why should we think, when events move more rapidly, crises are more cataclysmic, revolutions cut deeper, that we by some special dispensation are enabled to know much about the world in which the young are growing up. We have not gone with them, we have ceased from following after them, their people are not our people nor their gods our gods. What we have is the bond of our common humanity, little more.

We all know -- do we not? -- that we have precious little advice to give, that we are sure of few things, that those are of doubtful relevance. Where are we going? What it is for? What sense does it make? What things shall a man hold fast to? What things are good?

For what do we know? Only, I submit, that virtually every known answer to every important question is trivial or specious or both. This is valid knowledge, and a catalogue of all the exploded theories that have once been held to order the realms of fact or value -- together with an account of the dogmatism and certitude with which they were held to be true -- would be a useful though not edifying legacy to pass on to the young.

Indeed, it is possible that we are, in general, more bewildered than the young because we are better educated. They too will be bewildered in their time: a little less, perhaps, if we help them; considerably more, if we pass on to them at this late date as credible so many of the things we had to spend the best parts of our lives unlearning. They are now less bewildered because they rest temporarily on the false certainties that sheltered, rural, or otherwise parochial parents have been able to salvage for them. They are sure not because they have overcome the world, but because they have not yet encountered it.

Many of us attempt to cover the yawning chasms of our deepest uncertainties with high-sounding phrases of dubious meaning: "the good life," "maturity," "responsibility," "good citizenship," "the greatest good of the greatest number," "the welfare of the whole," and so on. If these terms are used as pointers, faint, feeble attempts to give form to our vague and troubled aspirations, well and good. If we pretend, as often we seem to, that they have a content that we know and that they define a program we pursue, we do but deceive ourselves.

Let us ask now from this vantage point what intelligible sense and what not undignified meaning we can give to the process we have been calling the guidance of the young. Let us examine first the situation of the counsellor, then that of the counselee.

First let us recall that we have two priceless and painful professional privileges: the privilege of differential access to psychological theory, and therefore to knowledge of ourselves and others; and the privilege of a quite distinctive position and role in the information-dispensing hierarchy.

To those who have eaten the fruit of the tree of psychological knowledge the world can never be the same again. Even if the new knowledge is encapsulated so that it is "in the mind" without deeply affecting the life directly, the presence of the capsule as an irritant foreign body is a potent reminder that all is not as it once was. Gone is any simple view of man's nature; gone are the pretty fairy-tale-book colours of hallowed sentiment and memory; gone are the nice, clean forms and fair proportions that were once thought to describe alike man's dream and man's reality. Gone are the simple issues, gone are the ready rules, gone the sharp bounds and neat distinctions.

Access to the new psychology carries with it by implication the necessity of a new kind of knowledge as far reaching as it is narrowly focused, as penetrating as it is painful, as disenchanting and destructive of an old dream world as it is promising and potentially productive of a new. It carries with it not only a new knowledge, but a new focus on experience, and a call, inescapably tied to the new knowledge, for a new focus for loyalty. It is true that the Greeks said "know thyself"; it is true that Elizabethans could already repeat Polonius' "Above all this, to thine own self be true..."; but it is only in our own day that reasonably reliable methods of knowing the self have become available, and it is only in our own day that a profession dedicated relatively undividedly to such self-discovery has come to birth, if not yet to maturity.

This localization of loyalty in the self in the context of other selves, the new focus on feeling in the context of intelligence, these shift the meaning of morality, the character of relationship, the status of rules and the whole "grammar of motives." This is a Protestantism with a vengeance beside which the Protestantism of the Reformation pales. That protest against a priest-mediated morality drove man back upon his own "conscience" as a control in crisis, aided still however by a dubious legacy of rules for ordinary occasions. It was only when man discovered that, far from escaping the priest, he had merely succeeded in internalizing him, via his mother, in his "conscience," and that that highly prized function was no less irrational, demanding, arbitrary, and destructive than the old external enemy -- it was only when he realized this, that a new Protestantism became a possibility and a necessity! For the new protest made it possible for man to take responsibility for his own conscience. What had been a guide, a support, something on which to unload responsibility became a charge, a drain, something to be faced as a problem, taken responsibility for, made over, re-formed and reformed and so integrated and made human. This is the Revolution of our times -- or at least half of it -- and this is the Reformation that, witless or witting, willing or unwilling, we are now in.

We are thus privileged (and penalized) I submit, in the face of confusion on one side and rigor on the other, in having access to new methods and new moralities: methods that render us more intelligible or less opaque to ourselves; moralities that depend on such self-access, since self-loyalty is focal. This is the privilege of psychologists. But there is a second privilege inherent in their peculiar position in the information-dispensing hierarchy.

Next to the preacher and the publisher, perhaps no man has been under clearer mandate to be dishonest than the teacher. The young have for some reason been thought to be particularly aptly cast for the role of consuming the falsehoods that the old can no longer stomach. And the teacher, having differential contact with them, has been watched with special care to make sure he carried a pure variety of the current line. The higher the official in the hierarchy, in general the more is he under the necessity of deceit.

Guidance people are twice exempt from this institutionalized necessity for self-betrayal. Few of them are so highly placed that people think of them generally as policy makers, people who make a difference. (This is their present fortune, as it is the fortune of all professions before they "arrive" or of all who are at any time held lightly or in contempt.)

But by a further special dispensation, in virtue of their "mystery" or craft, they are exempt from some of the standard requirements to fabrication which weigh so heavily upon their colleagues. No one knows much about them or greatly cares so long as they fulfil their formal function: the task of adapting the young to the manner of life to which society would like them to become accustomed. This is such a desperate necessity -- all other institutions having patently failed, the home and the church most notably -- that the parents and school trustees are almost willing to give those so charged a free hand. Counselors have, hence, the "privilege of the confessional," and for much the same reasons: the hope is that they will somehow save the individual without really upsetting any of the arrangements that make perennial salvage necessary. In contradistinction to the classroom teacher with his covert preacher's permit or mandate, counselors have a substantial exemption from the necessity of bearing false witness.

Peculiarly, then, guidance people have differential and advantageous access to truth, and differential and advantageous license to make use of their own experience, and, indeed, to permit others the use of it. These are rare gifts in our day or any other.

Let me now turn to the situation of the students.

The young are in our day under threat of a triple tyranny: the tyranny of impulse, the tyranny of power, the tyranny of number. The first is age-old. The second weighs with peculiar force, since submission to it -- to the voice of the powerful adult -- no longer yields even those secondary gains with which it was once invested. The third is new -- new, at least, in its pervasiveness and force and the depths to which it penetrates.

As we all know and have long taught -- though we may not have fully learned -- the child can only escape the tyranny of impulse as he is caught up and given form and function in the social activities in which he participates. He becomes a person, a self, an organized being as and to the degree that, by direct or vicarious methods, he takes part in the common, collective, or shared enterprise. He is liberated from impulse as he is "socialized."

But this is only a primitive first step. Indeed it is difficult to understand why in a country in which "socialism" is such an evidently bad word, "socialization" should be such an evidently good one, unless we are really more tender of property than person. For the price paid for release from the bondage of impulse has been until recently, for the vast majority, very high. The price was either continued dependency on some powerful parental figure -- or, in the jargon, "surrogate" -- or the internalization of that figure in all its infantile oversimplification within the personality. It was this situation that caused the "pangs of conscience" to have their peculiar poignancy. Whatever threatened this primitive control system threatened the return of the otherwise undomesticated and understandably feared impulses: forbidden because feared, and hence feared because forbidden. Men so situated are notably controlled, and in some sense self-controlled, but only in the sense that the self has been in part cuckolded: part of the self is not ego but alter.

In our day when powerful parental figures are hard come by, and where "Life with Father" seems a comedy rather than a report, the principle of organization -- for the child must organize or, psychologically, die -- is around a vague and shadowy "they" rather than a sharp and overpresent "he" or "she". It is not merely that parents have largely abdicated because life has undermined their position from without while we have weakened it from within -- it is that two groups, both no doubt from the best motives, have rushed into the vacuum thus created, and have sought to give the child a place to lay his head -- or, rather, his heart, for this is a matter of loyalty.

The first group includes the now vast array of quasi parents: the teachers, guides, counselors, advisers, scoutmasters, psychologists, children's hour specialists, social workers, group organizers, recreation directors, playground operators, librarians, storytellers, nursery-school workers. These new welcome operators of a gigantic child-raising industry do to a considerable degree fill the void, conferring on the child the dubious opportunity of organizing himself around their mistakes instead of his own parents. This may be a gain because the mistakes are likely to be more common than idiosyncratic, and thus more bearable.

In any case, this beachhead could not be held and consolidated without the aid of a second group: the child's own peers. After all, none of us in these new professions can be more than a collective parent to the children we deal with, in spite of all our attention to "individual differences." We are group parents and in the exertion of our quasi-parental function we call the group as a psychological reality into existence and consolidate its power over the individual. In fact, our ghosts now return to haunt parents who now pay us to exorcise them: they probably worry more about the child's lack of "integration into the group" than ever they did in the days when that might have been a problem. The child is now "helped" in that "integration" virtually from nursery-school days on by parent and quasi parent alike.

Children so naturally alive -- both cruelly and cooperatively and sometimes both at once -- to one another's necessities are quick to help one another out and to establish official or unofficial, conscious or unconscious group norms. The child knows the parents want him to "get along"; he knows the kind teacher wants to help him get along and that, unlike the parent, she knows how; he knows the kids themselves want him to get along. How should one resist so much kindness? It is exceedingly difficult for a child so circumstanced -- and the most privileged middle-class child is quite generally so circumstanced -- to come to any clear picture of either himself or his world. He is not faced by an enemy or comforted by a friend; he fights or embraces a wraith. "People think...," "they say...," "it is generally agreed...," "the consensus was...,". All the points that ought to be jumping-off points for inquiry or foci for resistance are terminal points for discussion and resolving points for action. Popularity was never so hard sought, and perhaps never so dearly bought.

The outcome of this new "mode of production" tends to be of a character type that Fromm first described as the "market personality" and that Riesman was later to pin down more fully and clearly for America in what he well calls the "other-directed" character. This character, with its sensitive radar-scope trained to instant reaction to any social "blip" he contrasts with the "inner-directed" character of recent days with his gyroscope-like conscience and with the "tradition-directed" character of still earlier days and simpler times.

I think with Riesman that there is, even in a generally other-directed society, a possibility of what he calls "autonomy," a chance of avoiding the death of "adjustment" (which has been until recently part of our stock-in-trade). In such a society, moreover, autonomy might well be a good so precious as to make other values puny beside it -- and so difficult of achievement, unless we now institutionalize the means thereto, that it might come to border upon bare contingency -- a limiting case rather than a type-event. How can a place for the nurture of autonomy be provided? What space can be cleared within which the care and feeding of the idiosyncratic self may be carried on, within which a "decent degree of insubordination" can be restored, within which cultural and group patterns may have less overwhelming weight and depatterning effect?

This will call, I believe, for the exercise of every known liberative are and perhaps the invention of new. What was formerly a luxury for the few -- liberation from the accidents of time and space, from the parochialism of this culture and that family, this work-shift and that club--will become a necessity for the many. There will be a demand, more pitiable if unspoken, for the services of those who can help in this quest.

For the only flight possible for those who are not to flee freedom is a flight, via self-discovery, into the daylight of a selfconscious and responsible relation of oneself to oneself, and hence to others. As a mass task this is new necessity.

What do we know of the liberative arts?*

We know surely that every liberative art rests on a limited number of complex simplicities: simplicities of relation, focus, value, process, and product.

The relation is one that joins the parties to it in, perhaps, the greatest intimacy combined with the greatest distance that is within the compass of human experience. The would-be liberator must be like the epitome of the friend and the epitome of the stranger, and the better in each role as he fulfils adequately the other. So also must the would-be liberatee.

The focus is always on making the unconscious conscious. This too is a two-way street, a process of mutual education. What each counselee discovers of himself to his counselor is part of his contribution; what he discovers to his counselor of his counselor is the other half.

The paramount and only necessary joining value on both sides is the pursuit of truth, ardent, relentless, unflinching-more accurately, self-rekindling when ardor flags, self-restarting when relentlessness weakens, self-recovering when flinching demands its brief day or hour.

The process is a continuous examination of the world as it is mirrored and distorted in the self, and of the self as it is projected in and distorted in the world -- including the world of the liberative relationship -- and again this involves both sides, or it is truncated and meaningless.

The product is, at a minimum, two people who know more about each other, each about the world, and each about himself. That is all. Perhaps, it is enough.

These simplicities, though characteristic of the "psychotherapeutic" enterprise, do not find themselves limited thereto. A good friendship, marriage, or education requires them if it is to have enduring value.

So much for the fundamental conception.

I think then that under present circumstances the proper purpose of the psychologically enlightened is to call a halt to the epidemic process of adjustment; to interrupt it as well and as radically as they may, both in themselves and in others who will permit and accept this use. As a sociologist, I am not unaware of the necessities of "maintaining the structure," "preserving the continuities," "keeping the culture intact." But because I recognize the necessity of toilets, it does not follow that everyone must wish to be a plumber. I think there need be no fear in an era of TV, radio, and powerful mass media that the loss of some supporting voice to the banalities will effectively weaken the chorus. Counselors have, I think, a special role: the role of maintaining in themselves, and in those whom they are permitted to affect, a tension to the limit of capacity against these subtle, pervasive, adaptive, and adjustive influences. One must adapt to live; but every adaptation is a little death, and while no physician may refuse death as a reality, neither may he welcome it -- except when it has effectively arrived -- as an ally.

The tension so created and sustained has as its function the continuous prevention of closure, the uninterrupted interruption of habit and custom formation, the unceasing war against the comforts of unconsciousness. It is an operation against the psychological and social grain; its stock-in-trade is the creation of sufficient unease to affect the ease from which all psychological disease is born.

If the guiding conception is not to be "guidance" but discovery -- of a world and especially of the collaborating selves who are its focus; and if the purpose is the interruption of adjustment for the sake of consciousness, it is tempting to say that the whole pyramid of traditional "guidance" preoccupations should be up-ended: that jobs and intelligence ratings and interest and capacity assessments and the smoothing-over of "disciplinary" situations are trivial in that order. Perhaps "practical" people, and today's prematurely practical children, force such beginning points anyway. (Whatever "practical" may mean in theory, in practice it means flight into that which does not matter -- even from the viewpoint of the claimant -- as against that which does. When we use "practical" as a term of praise we should react emotionally as we do toward a crutch or a beautifully healed scar: it is admirable -- but sad.) Perhaps such beginning-points are even praiseworthy: there is evidence, I think, that in many matters psychological there is an economy of waste. (Group therapy, for instance, goes farther, faster in groups that spend enough time on "irrelevancies.") But waste that does not move on to something else is just waste.

If the resulting "conversations" are to have utility, from the viewpoint set forth here, they must serve to raise questions rather than answer them, must facilitate the joint and mutual exploration of the quadratic relations of "counselor," "counselee," and each of their worlds, and must do this with reference to matters that matter.

I insist upon the question-raising function because, in psychology as in the life of society, it is under and around either (or both) the questions closed (tabu) or the questions never asked that the darkness lies and the dangers multiply.

I insist upon jointness and mutuality for reasons I have already made clear, both moral and technical: I deem the deceit involved in alternative practices wrong, and I find the results abortive in the sense that the process comes to a stultified close at what should be the inception of its most rewarding portion. I insist upon the discussion of matters that matter here because they will, generally, be discussed nowhere else: every other institution of the society may not unfairly be viewed as having as its major object the provision of an agenda in the pursuit of which the important may be avoided. The school also has its agenda -- and a very heavy one -- to prevent the child from coming to grips with reality, but it may have more moral space in such interstices as counselors occupy than have other, and now more confessedly bankrupt, bodies. It is in the hope that this is so and that counselors can exploit their interstitial advantage that these remarks were set forth.

But this brings us to method. The method that can have any tenable hope of moving toward such high ends must be a method of exploration, essentially of discussion. But at this point of semantic shudder seizes me. It is symbolic of the world in which we live that such a term must be explicitly defined, since almost as many atrocities are committed in its name as are now committed in the name of "democracy" -- and not all on one side of any ideological or political fence!

I find I have to say that it is not discussion (in the sense I want) if the outcome is predetermined, or even substantially biased. (The warning may be thought unnecessary but at the present time just such a pseudo discussion series is being used and advocated in the classrooms of several states under the rubric of Human Relations Classes.) It is not discussion if the range is restricted by overt -- or, worse, covert -- understandings of where it cannot go. It is not discussion if it demands restriction of the forms of expression -- polite language, no emotionality, pseudo "reasonableness." It is not discussion if there is a hidden agenda; or rather, more reasonably, since we all have hidden agenda, it is not discussion; unless progressively the hidden agenda of each of us is, of design, and as far as it can be, revealed and reintegrated. It is, of course, not discussion if other manipulative or covert-coercive devices are substituted for these. I say all these things because the notion seems wide-spread that discussion is a new and more efficient method for achieving the objectives of one party to it. In my lexicon that is fraud -- and, if it claims exemption because it operates to the "real advantage" of the victim -- it is fraud with arrogance and self-deception added.

It is also not discussion, of course, if it "takes the desires and necessities of the other party into account." Unless he is very sick or defective this is an ignoble nobility; it is also an assault, since by its pseudo generosity it makes of the victim less than he need or could be. That also is not mutuality.

It is only discussion when and if and to the limit of capacity of all participants it centers around what is genuinely doubtable -- and to those who have eyes to see, what is not? -- and moves, by whatever ways are mutually acceptable and productive, to its own properly undeterminable (and perhaps indeterminate) conclusion. It is not even, in Mr. Stuart Chase's phrase, a "road to agreement" unless agreement includes the agreement to disagree. Consensus and agreement, like peace, are currently overvalued goods, and to make agreement an object of discussion is again to trivialize it by imposing a sometimes relevant minor means as a distorting final end. Any lesser object for discussion than "mere clarification" vitiates discussion, just as any object for play but "mere pleasure" vitiates play.

I have argued on moral and technical grounds for the abandonment of what I took as the essential meaning of "guidance." I have pleaded instead for a joint exploration by young and old of each other and their worlds. This, it seems to me, substitutes for the relatively trivial problem of "passing on the culture" the one of making that culture over in transmission so that the generations may benefit from the exchange. This, as far as I can see, is a process without definable limit or diminishing return.

* Those communication or educational processes that, in the long run, maximize choice for the parties concerned. These are what may be called the liberative processes or arts.

John Seeley is perhaps best known for his book The Americanization of the Unconscious, published by International Science Press, New York, 1967, and distributed by J.B. Lippincott Co. LCCCN 66-29488. The book is a collection of many of his papers, including this one, given first as the keynote address at a guidance teachers convention.