Roots of the paranoid republic

 

When Kurt Lewin came to America in 1929, he was already a famous figure in Berlin. Lewin had started out in social philosophy, the kind of thing practiced and theorized by Georg Simmel, but he had taken a turn into social psychology, and held a chair in Gestalt psychology at the Berlin university in the twenties. Having been trained in philosophy, he was fascinated by the underlying theory of the psychological experiment, criticizing the idea that the application of statistics and modelling the psychology laboratory on physics or the natural sciences was the best route for social psychology’s object: the mechanisms of human interaction.

These are the dry vocational aspects of Lewin’s life in 1929. However, you can’t explain Lewin’s influence simply by referring to his papers. Rather, there was something about the man himself, apparently. This is the story told in James Korn’s history of the use of deceit in social psychological experiments:

“A German-Jewish immigrant … radically changed the direction of American social psychology. Kurt Lewin already had a following in the United States as a result of an article

published by J. E Brown (1929) and an invited lecture at Yale University in 1929. The Yale lecture foreshadowed the nature of his impact because, although most of the audience could not understand what he said (he lectured in German), his obvious enthusiasm held the attention of his listeners.”

 

In my experience, Yale lectures are usually not to write home about: they are often detail distressed – too much or too little – and the speaker makes no attempt to put life into what he or she is saying. A professor at Yale told me a long, amusing anecdote about Lacan’s lecture there – which, much to the surprise of his hosts, was not only incomprehensible – it was Lacan, after all, and used the model of elephant sexuality to explain something – but was also in French. In the professor’s recounting, he had to restrain a colleague who was threatening to go on stage and clock Lacan in mid metaphor.

 

Perhaps Yale talks bring out the bizarre. In Lewin’s talk, he demonstrated his theories by showing a short film he made of his wife’s eighteen month old niece attempting to sit on a rock. The film was an expose of the way even an infant sequences a task without having a specific experience to guide her.

 

To give an entire talk, in 1929, in German was, let us say, a bold move: that it added to Lewin’s glamor rather than diminished it is pretty impressive.

 

Korn’s book is about the rise and relative fall of using deception – often employing confederates, as in a con game – to create a social psychology experiment; Korn claims that the origins of this kind of thing, or at least the impulse that led to experiments that are known to all, such as the Milgrim experiment, came originally from Lewin’s work and influence on his students – students who also included businessmen. In fact, Lewin was fascinated with organization, including business organizations, and it is no weirdness that his American biographer, Alfred J. Marrow, was an industrialist.

 

Lewin’s film clip – and his early advocacy of filming subjects – is not only about his underlying theory of what social psychology should be doing – discovering sequences, not behavioural pairs on the Pavlovian – Behaviouralist model – but also about his subjectivity as a product of the Weimar era. Marrow’s biography doesn’t mention it, but it is not hard to imagine that Lewin was a fan of Fritz Lang’s films. In particular M., the film of Lang and his scriptwriting wife, Thea von Harbou, that is in many ways exactly like a social psychology experiment, with secret observers, such as fake blind beggars, watching the streets for the child murderer and marking him so that others could find him. It is odd to think of how Lewin transposed the modernity of Weimar Berlin to mid America – exactly mid, as he spent his best years in America in Iowa, at the University of Iowa’s Child Welfare center.

 

However, his deception experiments were not played on children – but on the usual prey, college students. At Harvard he conducted an experiment on the “fear response” in groups that was a model of the deception experiment – it was structured around a supposed experiment that was really a lure for the real experiment. For instance, students or other volunteers would be told they have to solve problems. Then the psychology student would say that they had completed the experiment, and would they please stay in the room and write down their analysis of their experience. He would walk out the door and lock it. Then smoke would be directed through a grill in the door, and people in the ceiling above the room would watch to see how the group was affected by finding smoke, that is, evidence of fire, and a locked door.

 

Fun.

 

Or as Korn puts it: “In this study we see many of the deceptive elements that would be repeated later in social psychological research: a bogus task, misinformation from the experimenter, and hidden observers.”

 

It interests me that the controversy about these small scale deceptions has been about the ethical problem of how they might harm the participants, but not about the larger problem of infecting the public discourse with the scientific practice of deception, and the power-relationships this entails. What does this do to the “scientist”? What does it do to the larger public that becomes aware of it? How does this ease with deceptive elements work when they are annexed, say, by national intelligence agencies?  Although most of the controversy about the ”post-truth” era is an invitation to fake deepthink, there was, during the Cold War years and up until now, a comfort with deception on the part of the intelligentsia and the powerful that fundamentally undermined the trust needed to maintain a democracy. And I think these routinized deceits have never been given the historical prominence or consideration they deserve. The construction and use of  paranoid machinery is one of the discoveries of the twentieth century that is having a massive effect on the twenty-first century.

 

The citizen-paranoid seeks a society-paranoid – which is the very image of authoritarianism.

 

Yet, this picture of Lewin is not complete. He was, in truth, a New Dealer liberal, an advocate for less authoritarian ways of teaching – in a series of famous experiments, his group at Iowa showed how more democratic classrooms were actually less liable to arguments, tantrums and bickering. The authoritarian method of the Lewin liberal is interwoven with the liberal goal of a society of tolerance. We toil in this net.