Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm

    The name of this book really drew me in, and I stuck with it because of my interest in learning about the rise of authoritarianism in the early twentieth century. Authors like Fromm, Arendt, and Hoffer are so engaging because their perspectives on the Second World War and authoritarianism are not only well-written, but highly relevant to democratic decline today. Fromm is especially concerned with the problem that is caused by “freedom from” without “freedom to.” Specifically, capitalism and liberalism freed individuals from feudal roles without tying them to anything positive or giving people a way to achieve self-actualization. As a result, individuals found themselves lost and unmoored in the world, and sought out authoritarian movements to anchor them to something. Fromm writes that “modern man, freed from the bonds of pre-individualistic society, which simultaneously gave him security and limited him, has not gained freedom in the positive sense of the realization of his individual self; that is, the expression of his intellectual, emotional, and sensuous potentialities. Freedom, though it has brought him independence and rationality, has made him isolated and, thereby, anxious and powerless.” Fromm is important because while he acknowledges that psychology cannot alone explain the flight to Fascism, he explains in detail the psychology behind why individuals subjugate themselves to a fascist state.

     I think Fromm’s description and analysis of modern society are accurate and remain highly applicable today, but I am still skeptical of his historical analysis of the Middle Ages and the Protestant Reformation. I think the book suffers from a perspective that begins with the end of the Middle Ages. The book sort of acts like history only exists in Europe, and like history began with the closing of the commons. So much of what Fromm writes is describing why -Europeans- succumbed to authoritarianism, but doesn’t explain much about different groups of people all over the world who have done the same. His conclusions are universal- “We also recognize that the crisis of democracy is not a particularly Italian or German problem, but one confronting every modern state.” But he doesn’t really talk about historical examples or peoples outside Europe. Maybe it would have helped him to write the book fifty years later, seeing authoritarian movements take hold in Asia and Latin America.

     For Fromm, human beings are unique among animals in that humans require a far greater degree of learning than instinct. We have few instincts and are essentially helpless and doomed if left alone in the wilderness as children. We are -free- from instincts and have the free will to decide what to do from birth. In that sense, Fromm writes of “freedom from” that “human existence and freedom are from the beginning inseparable.” “Freedom from” is the lack of external restraints, while “freedom to” is the positive ability to self actualize, by not being impoverished or socially repressed. Fromm argues that since the Renaissance, the West has made massive advancements in “freedom from” while “freedom to” has lagged behind. I wonder what he would say about non-Westerners dealing with the same issue today. But that gap between “freedom from” and “freedom to” is what “has led, in Europe, to a panicky flight from freedom into new ties or at least into complete indifference.” 

     With the rise of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, and the fall of feudalism, religiosity, and the old order, “the individual was left alone; everything depended on his own effort, not on the security of his traditional status.” Today, we often think of this change as purely good, and it was almost definitely a net good. But for many, that loss of traditional status was a bigger loss than their material gains, and for some, social mobility meant mobility downwards, not upwards. Social castes are irrational and wrong, but there are many who benefit from a caste system that leaves them higher in the social hierarchy than they would be otherwise. So like white supremacists today who would rather be poor and benefit from racism, antisemites in Germany would do the same.

     Fromm starts to lose me when he gets deep into Calvin and Luther. He asserts that Calvin’s idea of predestination emerges again in Naziism through the basic idea of inequality of men. But I was unconvinced since lots of people have thought men are unequal, and nothing about Calvinism or Lutheranism could explain why Italy was the first country to adopt Fascism. Fromm is extremely hostile to both Calvin and Luther, writing that they “belonged to the ranks of the greatest haters among the leading figures of history.” But even if you accept that Calvin and Luther were the worst guys ever, it is hard to imagine that they somehow uniquely prepared Germans to become servants to the Fuhrer.

     Critical to Fromm’s analysis is that the same cause, the advent of the modern world, can have two effects. One is to make men more independent, self-reliant, and critical, and the other is to make men more isolated, alone, and afraid. Capitalism severs the individual from the world, allowing him to choose to use his freedom to relate with it spontaneously (which I did not understand), or to give up his freedom to eliminate the gap between the individual and the world.

     Ultimately is it “the insignificance and powerlessness of the individual” that creates the most fertile ground for Fascism. Further aggravating is the fact that facts have lost their power and salience in the modern world since we are bombarded, already by the 1940s, with radio, film, and newspapers that desensitize us to the events of the world. Left with this mass of information that is beyond any person’s comprehension, people become ready to accept any leader who can promise excitement or meaning. The remedy, as I understand it to be, is basically in creating a welfare state, according to Fromm. By meeting the basic needs of the individual and educating him, he is empowered to do that “spontaneous” interaction with the world that helps him achieve the life satisfaction to avoid being seduced by authoritarianism.

Miscellaneous:

• Great passage: “But Hobbes’s picture became outmoded. The more the middle class succeeded in breaking down the power of the former political or religious rulers, the more men succeeded in mastering nature, and the more millions of individuals became economically independent, the more did one come to believe in a rational world and in man as an essentially rational being. The dark and diabolical forces of man’s nature were relegated to the Middle Ages and to still earlier periods of history, and they were explained by lack of knowledge or by the cunning schemes of deceitful kings and priests. One looked back upon these periods as one might at a volcano which for a long time has ceased to be a menace. One felt secure and confident that the achievements of modern democracy had wiped out all sinister forces; the world looked bright and safe like the well-lit streets of a modern city. Wars were supposed to be the last relics of older times and one needed just one more war to end war; economic crises were supposed to be accidents, even though these accidents continued to happen with a certain regularity. When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak. Nietzsche had disturbed the complacent optimism of the nineteenth century; so had Marx in a different way. Another warning had come somewhat later from Freud. To be sure, he and most of his disciples had only a very naive notion of what goes on in society, and most of his applications of psychology to social problems were misleading constructions; yet, by devoting his interest to the phenomena of individual emotional and mental disturbances, he led us to the top of the volcano and made us look into the boiling crater.
• Fromm identifies the Renaissance as a movement by a small group of wealthy elites, while the Reformation was a movement of the urban middle class. So when the Reformation occurred among people who didn’t have the wealth or power that Renaissance patrons and lords had, they were overwhelmed with a sense of individual nothingness and helplessness. They stood alone facing the world, feeling “insecurity, powerlessness, doubt, aloneness, and anxiety.” 
• What are the significant psychological atmosphere changes going on today? How are they the same or different from those that occurred with the development of capitalism? Is it about a pervasive visibility? Seeing and being seen? We didn’t know what privacy was until we lost it.
• Interesting idea about how death is a bigger idea in more individualistic societies since the death of an individual is just part of the life of the whole in collectivist societies.

In the Shadow of Quetzalcoatl: Zelda Nuttall and the Search for Mexico’s Ancient Civilizations by Merilee Grindle

     So I didn’t love this book but it was an interesting look at turn of the century Mexico and a pretty interesting woman. Zelda Nuttall was a single mother and a Mexican American archaeologist who lived in Mexico but also travelled and lived throughout the United States and Europe. She published about the Aztecs mainly, and helped to make many discoveries.

     Unfortunately, not a ton is documented about her, so a lot of the book is filler about the setting of her life and the people she knew instead of about her. And the book takes a weird tone at times about the way she would assert herself to get credit for her discoveries. It felt a little infantilizing to me and made her seem egotistical instead of just matter-of-factly getting credit for her work. I think it is done to imply a point about her struggles as a woman, but that doesn’t get said explicitly. She is ultimately a really interesting person, but the book is probably a little too long.

Mexico's Crucial Century, 1810 - 1910: An Introduction by Colin M. MacLachlan and William H. Beezley

    So, I wanted to read about Mexico from the Mexican War of Independence until the Mexican Revolution. It turns out that such a book exists, and now I have read it. Mexico's revolution in 1911 is obviously a huge deal in Mexican history and is probably the defining moment in Mexican history, especially if you consider it as one whole historical event along with the Cristero War. But I was interested in how Mexico got to that point, and how Mexico fell behind the US in the time before then. Mexico fought several wars in the 19th century, against the Spanish, against the French, against the United States, and several times against each other. The "crucial century" in the book's title is all about state formation and a gradual stop-and-start strengthening of federal government control that wasn't consolidated until Porfirio Diaz came to power from 1876 to 1911. 

    There are many points at which Mexico ended up politically delayed compared to the British colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America. First of all, Mexico didn't want to be independent of Spain. Mexico was forced into independence by the French conquest of Spain. Interestingly, when Spain was liberated from French occupation, Fernando VII returned to the throne unwilling to accept a modified form of constitutional monarchy like many thought. If he had adopted some reforms of liberalism, he might have held onto Mexico, but his actions further motivated the Mexican insurrection. Second, Mexico didn't have a Washington. Everything I read always reinforces how special George Washington was. Having a single figure who embodied the country with unanimous support and who knew when to step down was absolutely critical in early nation-building. The closest Mexico had to that was Father Hidalgo, but he was executed in March of 1811. After that, Mexico continued through a decade of sporadic fighting before securing independence. It is also critical that the United States had a head start, and as neighbors and competitors, used that head start to muscle Mexico out of the way. By the time Mexico gained its independence, the United States had already been independent for decades, had purchased Louisiana from the same French Empire that conquered Spain (which caused Mexican independence) and was encroaching on Mexico's border at a uniquely vulnerable time in Mexican history. Then Mexico just still didn't get very good leaders. Santa Anna is one of these big leaders, but it took a long time for him to become a centralist, and spent a lot of time fighting against central government, and Mexico failed to gain enough central strength to oppose rebels in the north who would form the Republic of Texas. I mean, at this point in time, Mexico was dealing with provinces refusing to send troops to fight in its wars and breaking off. So while we study the Texas portion in America, we don't follow as closely the fact that Jalisco and Zacatecas also seceded at that time.

    One of the critical points of conflict in Mexico's "crucial century" was the role of the Catholic Church, which was the primary line along which conservatives and liberals were divided. When Father Hidalgo issued the grito de Dolores, initiating the war for independence from Spain, he asked the people of Mexico to fight those who would aid in French control over the Spanish colony after Napoleon conquered Spain. It was the threat of liberalism and atheism that specifically prompted the development of a Mexican state, which had been more or less content under Catholic Spanish rule until then. In the final stage of the War of Independence, Agustin de Iturbide promulgated the Plan of Iguala, which made three specific guarantees: independence, religion, and equality. He specifically promised to protect the Catholic Church in the new Mexican state.

    Besides the conservative-liberal divide and/or the secular-religious divide, there was a debate between federalism and centrism. There were liberal centrists and federalists and there were conservative centrists and federalists. The long battle would culminate in an ultimate centralization by the end of the century, but it took a long time to get there. It took far longer and much bloodier conflict in Mexico than in the United States to reach an agreeable plan for an acceptable federal government. The authors say that the federalist-centralist divide was not very philosophical, mainly just depending on where a given liberal or conservative lived in the country, AKA Mexico City or not.

    Mexico didn't really get a clean democracy until 2000. From 1810 to 1876, it was a very weak central state with some elections, but just as many coups and civil wars. From 1876 to 1911, it was a dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz, with some elections. Then until the 1920s, it was in a chaotic revolution, which culminated in the rule of the PRI, a political party that established a one-party state until 2000. That's a very delayed political development. Spain was sending armies to retake Mexico as late as 1829. France intervened in 1838-39. When Santa Anna finally tried to centralize the regime, revolts in favor of federalism swept the entire regime, including seven in Jalisco, five in Puebla, and a temporary independence for Yucatan. Then the Mexican-American War from 1846-48. Liberals and conservatives fought civil wars in the 1850s. Then France invaded again from 1861-67. This was not a stable country or a country that could stabilize! These wars had huge negative impacts on the Mexican economy, reducing output from mines and farms, causing roads to be abandoned, and population loss. Mexico was economically weaker for much of 19th century independence than it was as an 18th century Spanish colony. Around the time that Texas broke away and the United States conquered Mexico's northern half, it took six months for a wagon from Mexico City to reach Santa Fe, New Mexico, and even longer to reach California.

    I'm just gonna wrap this up a little early because I honestly sort of lost where I was in the post and I am just too busy right now but I think I covered the big themes. The last thing I'll mention is the huge French connection going on in 19th century Mexico. French invasions and investments were a really big part of 19th century Mexico and that feels so foreign and bizarre today. Mexico was basically colonized economically by France even though the actual attempts at political takeover never happened. I'll also say that the authors assert that the Porfiriato may have politically stabilized Mexico and grow its economy, but the regime failed to distribute those gains fairly among the people, and resulted in land concentration and a reduction in real wages. The authors point out that Mexico diverged from the successful model of development in Britain and the United States that built strong domestic markets to provide consumption bases for production. Mexico suffered from being too poor to afford its own goods, and relied on external trade at a time when tariffs were rampant abroad.

Miscellaneous Facts:

• Guatemala amicably separated from Mexico when Iturbide abdicated the throne of his "Empire of Mexico."
• Iturbide had initially been a royalist officer.
• At the Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston found out that the Mexican army bedded down for the night without setting a watch. So he took his numerically outnumbered force and led an attack that defeated them and caught Santa Anna.
• The Paseo de la Reforms was originally modeled off the Champs Elysees and created by the French Emperor Maximillian, who named it the Calzada de la Emperatriz. Benito Juarez named it Paseo de la Reforma.
• During the American Civil War, the Union occupied Brownsville, Texas, and the result was the creation of a boomtown called Bagdad on the south side of the Rio Grande that disappeared again after the war.
• The Yucatan Peninsula became independent in the mid-19th century and also had the Caste War, which caused a significant population decline.

Le petit prince d'Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

     Ce livre est très beau et intéressant. Dans le livre, l’auteur se rencontre un garçon que est venu d’autre planète. Le livre est philosophique, et il a des thèmes de perdre, voyager, et découvrir la but de la vie. Bien sûr, les « grandes personnes » comprennent moins que les garçons. Aussi, le petit prince, je crois, ressemble à Jésus, et les arbres baobabs ressemblant à les Nazis ou autres forces du mal.

     Le petit prince vient d’autre planète, où il a une petite fleur, une rose. Il a pleur pour sa rose, que seul à quatre épines pour se défendre contre le monde. Dans terre, il devient triste quand il voit beaucoup roses, parce que la rose sienne n’est pas unique. Cependant, il apprendre que sa rose est unique parce que c’est sa rose. 

     La vie d’auteur est très intéressant aussi. Il était pilote et aventurier que est mort pendant la seconde guerre mondial. Je lis en ligne à propos de lui pendant que je lisais le livre. Je voudrais pratiquer plus de français.

Polyglot: How I Learn Languages by Kató Lomb, translated by Ádám Szegi and Kornelia DeKorne

    What a fantastic book! Instructional books can be so boring but Polyglot is this amazing memoir/instructional combination that is informative and entertaining. She is so interesting since she only started her language learning journey when she was in her thirties, after training to be a chemist. Lomb gives the reader the story of her life through lessons in adult language learning. This book is not for a new language learner so much as it is for ALLs, or Adult Language Learners, who are striving to learn multiple languages. So more for someone learning their third, fourth, or fifth, not their second language. I picked it up because I saw passages from the book on the internet and was interested in some functional tips, and I couldn't put it down because Lomb's voice just makes the book really readable and fun. She writes relateably and she writes beautifully, from "Could it be possible to build with such diamond bricks the thought bridge that spans the space between minds?" to funny stories about inviting a French tourist to the Budapest tourism office where she worked...but accidentally describing it as a brothel (or when she brags about going to the movies 17 times on a three-week trip to Moscow, becoming such a regular that they held a movie five minutes for her because she was running late). She also calls the central Hungarian plain a "mirage-haunted flatland," which I've never heard before.

    Lomb is insistent that she does not have any special aptitude for language learning (despite being fluent in 16 languages) and that anyone can do what she can do. She even writes out a formula:

Invested Time × Motivation/Inhibition⁠ = Result

But I am skeptical that anyone can do it. She describes pure elation at perusing dictionaries, and staying up late to tune her radio to foreign airwaves and taping broadcasts she likes. Basically, she may not have had an aptitude, but her motivation was beyond what almost anyone would do. She is unique, though. She discusses signing up for advanced Polish classes without knowing a word of Polish: when the instructor is astonished that she is at a totally basic level, Lomb replies, "those who know nothing must advance vigorously." She is just an indefatigable character.

    The beauty of foreign language study, she writes, is that it is one of very few things worth doing poorly. Dabbling in medicine, science, or law won't get you into an OR, a laboratory, or a courtroom. But having just a little bit of a foreign language provides huge marginal benefits over lacking any familiarity. Knowing enough to get directions somewhere is a massive improvement over being lost abroad.

    Lomb advises starting a new language by just picking up a dictionary and exploring it. As an ALL advances in learning, she advises them to use the dictionary, but not to abuse it by immediately jumping to it. Instead, ALLs should try to use context clues, and if they must use the dictionary, should write down not just the meaning of an individual word, but the meaning of the context in which it was used. After that initial dictionary perusal, she recommends picking up a textbook and starting to teach oneself (she definitely didn't have access to the internet for language learning in 1970). She then recommends picking up books and just starting to read. If she doesn't know a word, she tries to just learn from context and keep going unless she becomes completely lost without the word, and then she opens up a dictionary. The point of reading is to enjoy the language, not to stop to look up each word, which ruins the experience. To practice listening, she listens to news bulletins in foreign languages.

    Lomb gives the reader some rules she calls the Ten Requests. Paraphrased here, they are:

1. Spend a little time working on the language each day, especially in the morning 
2. When your enthusiasm is low, don't stop studying, switch to another form (e.g. listening instead of reading).
3. Never learn isolated units of speech, learn in context.
4. Write phrases in the margins of your text and build prefabricated phrases to use as crutches in conversation.
5. Translate random billboards, ads, and numbers you see in daily life.
6. Don't memorize anything that hasn't been reviewed for accuracy.
7. Always memorize idiomatic expressions in the first person (e.g. I'm pulling your leg).
8. Foreign language is a castle that must be besieged from all directions: newspapers, radio, movies, technical or scientific papers, textbooks, and conversation.
9. Don't let fear of embarrassment stop you from making mistakes, and don't let pride get in the way of being corrected.
10. Have faith that you are a linguistic genius, and that it's the pesky language's fault, or the dictionary's fault, but that you are smart enough to do it.

Then she also gives a list of things one should not do when learning a foreign language:

1. Do not postpone learning.
2. Do not expect your fellow language-learners to be good partners for conversation.
3. Do not believe that taking a class is all you need to do. You need to work outside class.
4. Do not obsess over words you don't know, build comprehension on what you do know.
5. Do not forget to write down your thoughts in your own words by using familiar expressions.
6. Do not be deterred from speaking by fear of making simple mistakes.
7. Do not forget filler expressions like "My French is kind of shaky" to use in conversation.
8. Do not memorize anything outside its context.
9. Do not leave newly learned structures or expressions hanging in the air--use them and practice them as soon as possible.
10. Do not be shy of learning poems or songs by heart.

    Lots of her language advice is also life advice. She writes how she "heard from a swimming coach that how soon children learn to swim depends on how much they trust themselves and the surrounding world. I [Lomb] am convinced that this (self) confidence is the precondition of success in all intellectual activity." All in all, I loved this book and would recommend to anyone learning a third language.

Pedro Páramo por Juan Rulfo

    Pedro Páramo es un cuento de fantasmas. Cuando Juan Preciado viaja al pueblo de su madre fallecida para enfrentarse con su padre, se informa que su padre ya está muerto hace muchos años. Lo que encuentra el protagonista es un pueblo lleno de fantasmas de su padre y de todos la gente del pueblo, y los fantasmas cuentan o actúan los acontecimientos importantes en la vida del pueblo y del padre de Juan Preciado, Pedro Páramo.

    Algo interesante de la novela es su influencia en Cien años de soledad, que salió mas de una década después. El libro relata el declive del pueblo de Comala, que termina desierto, y también tiene temas de incesto, una falta de desarrollo económico, y memoria como Cien años de soledad. Comala hasta suena parecido a Macondo. 

Russia in Review

    I decided to start this year with a focus on Russia, and I read five books about Russia: War and Peace, Collapse, Stalin, Doctor Zhivago, and The Future is History. Two were fiction, works of acclaimed Russian literature, and the other three were non-fiction, including one biography. Four of the authors were Russian, and the other one, Stephen Kotkin, is an American of Belarussian-Jewish descent. I also watched Come and See, a Belarussian movie from the 1980s about a boy's experiences in World War Two in Nazi-occupied Belarus. The books covered, in the order listed above (which is also the order I read them in), the 1800s-1810s, the 1980s-1990s, the late 1920s to 1941, the 1900s-1940s, and 1984-2015. So this was largely a focus on Russia in the pre-WWII Stalin era and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

    The biggest theme in my readings was war. So I came away with a feeling of Russia as a civilization facing hordes of enemies within and without, constantly in a struggle to survive. It is hard for me to say whether this is some deeper truth about Russia or just says more about my interests. I think it would be hard to find a time when Russia was not in some deep conflict. The entire existence of the Soviet Union it was either in conflict with itself or with America or Germany. And then the one book I read set in a pre-Soviet time was set in Tsarist Russia's wars against Napoleon. It would be interesting to read about Russia in more peaceful times.

    With all this war and conflict, Russia felt very bleak. And that, to me, is a truth about Russia's last century or so. The Soviet Union dealt a huge injury to Russian civilization from which it has not recovered. The initial Revolution and Civil War obviously killed millions, but the collectivization of farming and the subsequent purge under Stalin were even worse. Communism took away Russia's best minds and put the whole society under tyranny for generations. It was amazing how different War and Peace really felt as a book compared to all the others that were set during Communist rule. Soviet Russia was really right up there with Nazi Germany but was allowed to linger on for decades after the Nazis were toppled. The resulting structure left in the 1980s was totally hollow because everyone, even the leaders, understood that the Stalinist tyranny was totally beyond the pale.

    While I didn't really love Doctor Zhivago, something striking was how Russia produced so much good literature, especially before Communism. Between Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Nabokov, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn, it's just an unbelievable run of legendary authors. I would love to read more of them. And it is really apparent how the best of them were either before Stalin (Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), ended up disillusioned with Stalin (Gorky), had their work suppressed by Stalin (Pasternak), or went into exile because of Stalin (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn). And since then, my impression is that great literature has basically been extinguished in Russia. Russia has seriously declined from being a cultural powerhouse before Communism to being what Masha Gessen called a place without a future in The Future Is History after Communism.

    It is really clear to me now how Moscow is the center of a Russian world that extends to the Baltics, Poland, the Carpathian Mountains, Transcaucasia, and Siberia. The Russian people are at the center and all the other peoples around them are really just dealing with it. It reminds me of how Mexico and the Caribbean sort of exist in the hinterland of the United States and are forced to deal with whatever America does. Russia also is similar in the way it intervenes in those countries, usually without any foreign countries saying anything about it, which shows why Russia is so offended by NATO expansion and Western support for Ukraine. Russians really view places like Crimea as something even more integral than the United States views Latin America, since Ukraine and Belarus were not just formerly part of the Soviet Union, but also Slavic peoples, known as "Little Russia" and "White Russia," respectively. All in all, this sort of unit on Russia left me much more interested in Russian history, Russian people, and especially Russian literature.