Society Against Itself, by Howard Schwartz

In Society against Itself: Political Correctness and Organizational Self-Destruction, Howard Schwartz offers a lucid and profound root analysis of what Christopher Lasch famously called “the culture of narcissism” as rooted in rage against the paternal. Drawing upon Freud and Lacan, Schwartz views the increasingly infantile, Dionysian nature of our society as rooted in an inversion of the normative Oedipal path. According to this model, the healthy person (especially the male) eventually distances himself from the nurturing, encompassing mother by identifying with the “paternal” which stands for objective, rational society which is indifferent to the needs of the self. By identifying with the father and all associated values (rationality, obedience, authority, sacrifice, effort, efficiency), the mature adult is able to work and deal with reality and eventually move towards an always-partial restoration of the primal maternal unity in a new marriage and family. The anti-Oedipal narrative, by contrast, sees the paternal as hostile and competitive in that it deprives the victimized of the pleasurable love of the affirming, indulgent mother. By this radical inversion, the paternal is no longer life-giving and protective, but destructive and oppressive. The inflated, self-centered Ego therefore despises any assertion of law, tradition, standards, or authority as evil impositions of the father (patriarch) as greedy competitor for the mother’s love.
An organizational theorist, Schwartz offers vivid, concrete case studies of organizations self-destructing by the embrace of politically correct values like diversity. Particularly striking is the case of journalist Jayson Blair of the NY Times. Eventually fired for gross inaccuracies, plagiarism and fabrications, his entire career with the Times was a blatant contradiction of the “paternal” values that publication has traditionally embodied: objectivity, accuracy, and painstaking research. As an African-American, he was indulged in his irresponsibility for the sake of diversity. Particularly fascinating is the contrast between the prior publisher (the epitome of formality, integrity and objectivity) and his son and successor, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. The later came of age in the Cultural Revolution of the 60s and has committed the Times to the maternal values of The Age: abortion and gay rights, diversity, and an egalitarian disgust for authority and tradition. It becomes obvious that this anti-Oedipal logic, brought to its logical conclusion, can only destroy the paper as a journal of repute. This logic is inherently destructive of any organization.
His argument is entirely convincing, illuminating and provocative. It is enhanced by graphic examples and a lucid writing style. What is less than satisfying, however, is his understanding of the paternal. For him it is the objective and non-indulgent order, industriousness and efficiency, exchange values and market dynamics, organization and bureaucracy. It represents the public order of our contemporary world in that it is impersonal and mechanical. Schwartz seems to have internalized the contemporary split between the private as comforting and the public as impersonal. And so the reader asks: Is this really what it means to be a father?
Hardly! Surely the paternal can equal the maternal in the tenderness and intensity of its love. What sets it off from the intimacy of the maternal is a quality of reverence and awe that is filial, pious, and religious by nature. If the mother is always psychically attached to the self, the father is ever different, strange, fearsome, powerful and admirable. The tenderness and intensity of his love is surprising, therefore, since it is not already “a given” and “taken for granted” and antecedent to every other emotion and thought. Rather, it is a dramatic intervention, entirely gratuitous and startling. What is marvelous about the father’s love is not just that he represents a distant, strange and hostile world; nor even that he has mastered that world and made it safe; but that he stoops to the fragile, precious child and brings all his prowess and status into the tenderness of his embrace. If maternal love always and already precedes and even evokes the personality of the little one, paternal love enters at a later stage, dramatically and astonishingly, to encounter a Thou that has already emerged even as it continues to emerge.
Faced with the choice between the maternal as affirming, nurturing and indulgent and the paternal as objective, demanding and impersonal it is small wonder that our society opts for the former. Schwarz’s presentation is itself a symptom of the problem he unveils: an impoverished understanding of masculinity and paternity. Respect and love for the paternal (Roman pietas) can only develop in a religious context in which there is awe before a Transcendent God. Pietas was for the Romans a far more powerful reality than our anemic, sentimentalized understanding of piety. It represented filial loyalty, gratitude and devotion to family, authority, tradition, and ancestors. Our word “religion” itself derives from the Latin religio which refers to these ties of affection and loyalty. Today’s widespread preference for “spirituality” over “religion” shows the infantile, narcissistic orientation of the Self in its disgust for bonds of obedience, loyalty and sacrifice. That is to say: it demands the indulgence of a corrupted mother and despises the demands of the father.
Small wonder than that our Catholic father, the Pope, elicits such hatred in the Western world: he stands alone as the epitome of paternity. It would be impossible to imagine better father figures than our John Paul and Benedict: gentle, reverent, protective, lucid, assertive, reserved, controlled, steady, d humble and yet magnanimous. And how are they viewed by our dominant anti-Oedipal culture? They are seen as: misogynist, judgmental, moralistic, controlling and yet indulgent of pedophiles.
Schwartz’s understanding of religion itself exemplifies the triumph of the feminine over the masculine. He understands religion as the pathway through the paternal back to the embrace of the maternal. The final goal is restoration of primal, blissful union with the mother so that the paternal is a transitional discipline, a means to a greater end. This goal finally eludes satisfaction and can only be partially and tentatively realized in marriage and family so there is a final despair that lays over his viewpoint.
Schwartz would find an entirely refreshing and exuberantly hopeful alternative vision in Benedict’s first book on Jesus of Nazareth. Perhaps the pivotal insight of that work is that Jesus is first and always Son of the Father. From this it follows that we are, all of us, created to be, eternally, sons and daughters of the Father, in the Son. Life on earth, in this view, is always a journey from the originating womb of the mother into the arms of our heavenly Father, who is infinite, absolute Joy and Love and Life. This journey is not into the impersonal, but towards the Absolutely Personal.
Even prior to the creation of space and time, God is always Father…and Son…in the Spirit. Paternity, along with filiality, is the very essence of God: Absolute Perfection, Being, Goodness, Truth and Beauty. All earthly fatherhood, then, is intended to image or reflect the absolute Paternity of God. Motherhood, by sharpest contrast, has its own integrity and definition as a creaturely reality and does not represent anyone or anything. In the created order, than, femininity and maternity are the very highest values. Mary reigns as Queen of heaven and earth, of the angels and the saints. Joseph, as stepfather, is a representative; as are Peter and the twelve. Masculinity is always representative of something greater than itself; while femininity has its own fullness and integrity. Masculinity to be true to itself, then, must be humble, as well as generous, strong, protective and chaste. No wonder than that there is such disgust for masculinity and patriarchy: since Adam himself, we men have been proud, selfish, weak, and impure.
Schwarz’s chapter on hysteria has relevance here on the nature of femininity. Pushing political incorrectness to the limits, he retrieves the idea of hysteria as a strategy of the feminine to dominate, rather than be dominated by the masculine in its effort to define and signify. If desire is normatively the drive of the male to reconnect with the maternal, than the female is free of desire because she identifies with her mother and so experiences a certain fullness or plenum. Bereft of desire, she is undefined and therefore looks to the masculine logos for definition and meaning. So different is the feminine from the masculine, however, that the male inevitably fails to comprehend his woman within the categories of logos or reason. The feminine response to this failure is hysteria.
So we have here a circle of futility: the male longs for reunion with the mother, something he can never achieve; the female needs to be understood, interpreted, or signified by the male, something of which he is incapable. Quite a dismal picture!
Our Blessed John Paul, of happy memory, would have much to offer our saddened organizational theorist on the nature of femininity. I suspect he would agree that woman exudes fullness, integrity, abundance and an overflowing generosity expressive of her very femininity as maternity. He would also agree that the male tends to undervalue and misunderstand the feminine in its sublimity, tenderness, and loveliness. Gazing at our Blessed Mother herself, however, the Pontiff sees joy and glory, overflowing life and mercy. Surely her spouse, Joseph, fell short of comprehending Mary in her glory; but he contemplated her with chaste and reverent awe even as he served her and her Son, as he remained eve r docile and obedient to the promptings of the heavenly messengers.
May we all contemplate Jesus, Mary and Joseph in the many sublime, mysterious dimensions of paternity and maternity, filial piety, and spousal virginity…and thereby restore and strengthen the (religio) bonds of loyalty and affection, authority and obedience, that unite us with each other in God!