From W.A.S.T.E. on FB. With my response. Have at it. Should be interesting.

[Mark Kohut]

Kai,

I hope it is not only that you agreed with my quick take on the piece that
I find this
mini-essay wonderful----thanks for taking the time to inform all of us so
deeply, and with
'further 'reading"!?.....and then, I say....

it is also BRILLIANT in that Pynchon link to Frenesi.....simply great, I
say.

The Group Read grows in insight and ramifications of GR.

mark



On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 6:15 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de
> wrote:

>
> In terms of science, even taken the soft standards of social science, the
> F scale was a failure. It claimed to measure deeper dynamics of the mind
> (in the sense of psychoanalysis), but only managed to identify clusters of
> social and political attitudes on the surface. And so the issues of
> conservatism and authoritarianism got mixed up. As a consequence, the
> authoritarianism of the left could not be detected by the F scale.
>
> How little it actually had to to with serious science you realize when
> confronted with the fact that the answers of test subjects on many issues
> were evaluated completely different - the Cold War had kicked in, and this
> required political adjustments - when the F scale was used again by the
> Frankfurt Institute during the 1950s to, well, measure the 'democratic
> maturity' of West Germans.  For Adorno and Horkheimer this was no problem,
> because they considered their theories to stand on their own feet and, in
> general, used data "only to derive from it concrete questions for
> investigations" (Adorno). That's the continental style - compare also
> Luhmann -, and as such, since there has been and always will be a certain
> gap between elaborated social theory on the one and empirical social
> research on the other side, perhaps not problematic. But it's funny to see
> how the F scale is used till today as some kind of fetish to make plausible
> two things which simply are not true: That the Frankfurt School contributed
> significantly to empirical social research, and that the societal dynamics
> of anti-democratic processes can, at least in principle, be stopped by
> social psychology.
>
> In the case of the Frankfurt Institute, the unshakable believe in the
> general importance of Freud's approach damaged the validity of its social
> research seriously. While there might be exceptions - the
> ethnopsychoanalysis of people like Devereux or Morgenthaler -, the use of
> psychoanalysis for the social sciences seems to me, by now, rather limited.
> Actually you do not improve one problematic science - sociology - by adding
> another one in case of which the status as a science is even more
> questionable. (That Freud, in terms of style, was among the greatest
> authors of German science prose is nevertheless true.)
>
> And I agree with you, Mark, that - the dog-comparison is striking! - the
> spirit of the whole project is not too far away from Pointsman's Pavlovian
> social technology. Hey, hey, we're doing Big Science ...
>
> If you want to read more on that, you can either have a look at Lorenz
> Jäger's "Adorno: A Political Biography" (Yale University Press, 2004) or at
> "Roots of Radicalism. Jews, Christians, And The New Left" (Oxford
> University Press, 1982) by Stanley Rothman and S. Robert Lichter. While
> Jäger - among the half of dozen biographies that appeared on occasion of
> Adorno's 100. birthday, Jäger's was the only non-hagiographic one -
> delivers an honest account of Adorno's merits and failures and analyses his
> life in the context of German Jewish history, Rothman and Lichter, who
> explored the authoritarianism of the New Left, as it unfolded during the
> students' movement - not only in the US - in the 1960s and early 1970s,
> with questionnaires  and thematic apperception tests (TATs), discuss the
> "The Authoritarian Personality" in context of their own research project.
> To finish this mail, let me give you a longer quote from their instructive
> study (yes, you could put it on any 'secondary literature' list for
> "Vineland"!):
>
> "The F scale was developed to measure attitudes that typically expressed
> an underlying authoritarian character structure. Yet there is a crucial gap
> between Fromm and Adorno's psychodynamic theories and the traits measured
> by the test. Quite simply, the F scale cannot test the relationship between
> psychodynamics and sociopolitical attitudes because the scale measures only
> the attitudes. It's simply assumed that these attitudes express deeper
> personality trends. (...) Clearly, Sanford and his co-workers simply
> inferred the alleged emotional substratum of such 'authoritarian' attitudes
> from psychoanalytic theory./ Whatever the intended latent content of F
> scale items, their manifest content consists primarily in beliefs about
> human nature and one's proper relationship to other people. That is, the F
> scale measures certain aspects of social ideology which may or may not
> reflect deeper personality dispositions. The most that can be inferred from
> the correlation of 'F' with other attitude scales is a unified social
> outlook, rather than the unity of personality and ideology found by Adorno
> and his colleagues./ All this resulted in considerable confusion as to
> precisely what it is that the F scale measures. In trying to capture the
> psychodynamic complexity and latent emotional basis of fascist proclivities
> with a single paper-and-pencil test, the authors produced the opposite of
> what they intended. The F scale can create the impression that
> authoritarianism is nothing more than a set of beliefs, a cast of mind
> combining political conservatism with intolerance toward social deviance.
> (...) Use of the F scale has not only led to superficial readings of the
> concept of authoritarianism but also narrowed the the concept to include
> only the ideological 'right'. The resemblance of conservative and
> 'authoritarian' attitudes is so strong that some writers simply treat the
> two as parallel concepts. But if authoritarianism is nothing more than an
> extreme conservative ideology, why should it be considered an integral
> aspect of personality functioning? Edward Shills thus condemned the F scale
> as 'political attitudes masquerading as personality dispositions ...
> designed to disclose not authoritarian personality as such but rather the
> 'Right' --- the nativist-fundamentalist Authoritarian'./ The test was
> intentionally 'loaded' toward the political right because its creators, who
> were trying to identify potential fascists, saw fascism as a right-wing
> phenomenon. But if the potential for fascism lies not in conservative
> attitudes themselves but in the underlying personality trends they express,
> there should be some way of determining whether these trends might also be
> expressed in other attitudes." (pp. 157-159)
>
> Attitudes like Frenesi's ...
>
>
> On 04.06.2016 13:20, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>
> http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/how-world-war-ii-scientists-invented-a-data-driven-approach-to-fighting-fascism/
>
> Mark Kohut <https://www.facebook.com/mark.kohut.1?fref=ufi> "human
> character can be measured the same way the temper of a dog can be
> measured"...'scientific rationality"-----just another variation on the
> disease so viciously, rightly, righteously, deeply satirized by Pynchon in
> Gravity's Rainbow--and one of his most profound depth charges against
> America's, the West's, culture of slouching toward death.
>
>
>
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