Cover art for the book Social Amnesia by Russell Jacoby

Russell Jacoby’s Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology from Adler to Lang (1975) has a black and white copy of Sleepers by George Tooker as the book’s cover illustration. The original artwork is in color and has a sea of blond-haired, blue-eyed figures under a blanket. Every individual depicted in the work has a frightening sameness and seemingly unfocused eyes.

Social Amnesia treats contemporary psychology as a nearly uniform area of study that has not moved much since the work of Freud and seeks to interpret society in the most conformist manner. During the Vietnam War era in Rhode Island, a psychiatrist became known for his work with war resisters in substantiating their cases against both the draft and the military. I was one of the people who had direct knowledge of Dr. Alfred Fireman’s heroic work. Dr. Fireman was anything but conformist in his approach to psychiatry and war and he kept his high moral perspective alive when he moved to Florida and began writing evaluations of some people sentenced to death.

Dr. Fireman came under attack from many, when, during the war, he stated, and I paraphrase here, that in the case of the Vietnam War and US society, it was the society and not the individual protesting that war where maladjustment existed.

Readers may imagine the reaction Dr. Fireman’s observations received. The general thread of reaction was that society is never to blame and it was the individual who needed to be considered regarding maladjustment. Dr. Fireman’s critics were perhaps expressing an early iteration of American Exceptionalism. If the US does it, in this case the Vietnam War, then it must be right and just. Maladjustment to war might go far in contemporary society if a critical mass could act to counter the “masters of war.”

This is the late protester and theorist Abbie Hoffman: “You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.”

Jacoby’s The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in an Age of Apathy (1999) is his critique of the loss of “utopian ideals that once sustained dissent and movements of social change.” In the face of mass protest against the Iraq War (2003), the Occupy Wall Street Movement (2011), and the current resistance to Israel’s unending and expanding wars in the Middle East, readers might conclude that contemporary movements, although having strong utopian ideals, face organized repression in varying forms in the US and elsewhere. These movements often seem to achieve little observable results. The Iraq War decimated that nation and continues with a US presence today. The Occupy Wall Street movement brought police repression of peaceful protest. Many of those who have protested Israel’s vicious and illegal wars in the Middle East have been sanctioned in various ways including punishment for speech and protest both on and off US campuses. Physical assaults against protesters have been relentless.

During the decade of the 1980s, two groups formed in Rhode Island. One was a part of the national Nuclear Freeze Movement and the other was the Committee for Central America. While the membership of the groups was partly similar, there were severe criticisms of the Central America group, formed to support the leftist government in Nicaragua with various kinds of support. I was a member of both groups and the activism in this relatively small part of southern Rhode Island was remarkable. The Central American group sent workers to Nicaragua and medicines. One member of the Freeze group, a professor at the nearby university, publicly condemned the Central American support group as having communist members. That experience was similar to many left organizations where a group formed to meet specific issues and then either bickered endlessly, or failed to last much longer than that group’s mission or objectives. The left constantly has to reinvent itself much like the phoenix of mythology rising from the ashes of human mayhem again and again.

The 1960s and early 1970s were halcyon days for utopian ideals. The Port Huron Statement broke the New Left’s ties to the sectarian Old Left. Many in the Old Left, held onto sectarian views that condoned, to an extent, the gulags of the former Soviet Union under Stalin. It was not enough that the Old Left had suffered under government repression beginning with the Red Scare and extending up until McCarthyism. One major premise of the Port Huron Statement is participatory democracy in which like minded activists coalesce to change society. Political, military, and business interests are trying to drive that function of democracy into the ground.

A part of the New Left got caught up with an insane idea that they were the vanguard of a revolution in the US, when the reality on the ground was that most workers in the US wanted decent wages and the ability to live in comfort. The Weather Underground got it wrong when it moved to extend its targets to innocent people and by the time of the notorious Brinks Robbery, it had become completely unhinged in a bizarre and deadly spate of violence. By then, however, the New Left was dead anyway because many of its antiwar adherents were happy to become careerists not all that different from their working class counterparts who wanted to live in peace. All of these political, social, and economic forces led to the end of what Jacoby calls any idea of utopia. Now, going out in protest against war can be dangerous in the US, as the ruling class is willing to break heads to maintain its elite position. The environment crumbles and much of what is brought to bear against the existential threat of climate destruction is tinkering around the edges. Hardly any protest is heard about the threat of nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

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