Yahoo's failure and the emotional web

Yahoo has just announced that it is positioning itself for a potential sale of its assets. The term “potential” is important. It is likely that several companies have expressed an interest in buying some or all of its assets; the press has identified Verizon, the wireless provider, as one possible purchaser. But there is as yet no actual offer. One reason Yahoo made this announcement is that many of its investors and shareholders believe that its CEO, Marissa Mayer, having failed to grow its revenue since her arrival from Google in 2012, has no sure plan for restoring it as a valued Internet company. In the final third quarter of 2012 — Mayer’s first three months as chief executive of Yahoo— the company made about $1.2 billion in revenue, most of it from advertising. Three years later, in the same quarter, its revenue was still $1.2 billion.  While Yahoo attracts millions of visitors to its site each month, it garners only 6.5% of U.S. online search revenue, while Google gets 77.7%. As one journalist writes, “Yahoo, which still has a billion people using its apps and websites, is an afterthought in many ad budgets.” By early February 2016, Yahoo’s share price was at a new 52-week low, about 50% off its November 2014 highs.

One reason Yahoo’s search revenues have declined is because Facebook’s growth flooded the display advertising market with inventory. “Demand from marketers could not keep up with all the new supply—ad budgets were not increasing at the pace of Facebook’s growth—and the average price the industry, including Yahoo, was able to charge declined steeply.” In addition, Google’s superior search algorithms and its method of auctioning off ad-positions on a web page, meant that it could charge significantly more for its advertising space. A 2012 study comparing the cost of a “click” on Google versus Yahoo shows, for example, that a click-through for “shopping and classified” search terms was 72 cents on Google versus 44 cents on Yahoo. Similarly, a click-through for computer and Internet search terms averaged $1.08 on Google, versus 40 cents on Yahoo. This is one reason why Google’s revenue has grown so rapidly. Yahoo once excelled in attracting advertisers with display or banner ads. But while in 2000 such ads accounted for 78% of online advertising revenue, by 2008 they accounted for only 33%, just as search-based ads accounted for 45%.

One reason Yahoo lost the search wars to Google, (and now Yahoo relies on Microsoft’s Bing search-engine), is because, since its inception, its executives saw Yahoo as a front-end company. They thought of it as a consumer-friendly user interface for the web, while imagining that search engines were at the back end; much like the way in which Intel provides chips for laptop computers. Yahoo, they thought, could buy the services of search engine specialists while focusing on creating front-end products, such as email applications and financial news sites. In this sense, like a television network with programs, Yahoo was a media company with products. This led to a lack of focus, with a suite of products ranging across entertainment, finance, news, celebrities and games. Yahoo was in effect a “mini Internet,” which made sense in 1999 when a user, “could open Netscape Navigator and use the Internet all day and never leave Yahoo and never want to.”

Reporting on a meeting of Yahoo employees, one author describes how a facilitator asked group members the first word that occurred to them when they thought of a particular company’s name. “He said, ‘PayPal.’ People wrote down ‘payments.’ He said, ‘Google.’ People wroteTop of FormBottom of Form down ‘search.’ He said, ‘eBay’ and they wrote down ‘auctions.’ After a few more companies, he said ‘Yahoo.’ He collected thirty pieces of paper on Yahoo. Everyone had a different word. What was Yahoo trying to do? No one inside the company knew.”

Many analysts have complained that Marissa Mayer, who was a successful executive at Google, has not answered this question. Instead, in trying to turn Yahoo around she has “opted for tiny bolt-ons” of new products to the Yahoo site, without clarifying its singular raison d'être. For example, she developed a suite of 15 online magazines devoted to topics like food, autos, real estate, travel and technology that she is just now shutting down. In her first year she acquired 20 startups, some quite small. In March of 2013 she acquired Summly, a news-reading app for $30 million, and in August of 2015 she acquired Polyvore, a visual search engine for fashion for $200 million. Her biggest acquisition at $1.1 billion was for Tumblr, a micro-blogging site. But at the time of its acquisition Tumblr had 100 million users, but only $10 to $15 million of revenue.

In a trenchant critique, a columnist for the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo, argues that Mayer failed because she could not “bet the farm,” that is, make a big bet decision on the future of the company. As he writes, “Three years ago, when Ms. Mayer first took over, she sparked excitement about the future of a company that had, by then, put everyone to sleep. Finally, Yahoo was getting an executive who seemed to understand the web, who was infectiously excited about the possibilities of new technologies, and who had a pretty good track record of ushering in new things.” Yet, as he notes, “Over all, Yahoo remains much the same business it was three years ago. She appears to be building a better Yahoo — with debatable results.”

Manjoo speculates, that had Marissa been ready to make a big bet, one that would bring new focus to Yahoo’s identity, and give it a plausible trajectory, she might for example, have “ditched the web portal and plunged into television” by purchasing Netflix. “The timing was perfect: In 2012, a visionary might have guessed that cable bundles would soon be on the wane, that people would increasingly favor on-demand entertainment, and that there was an appetite for new business models in an aging part of the media. At the time, the stock market doubted Netflix’s streaming future, and the company’s shares were less than a tenth of their current price — in the ballpark of what Yahoo would have been able to afford.” He goes on to note that, “In the time Mayer was at the helm,” Pinterest, a site festooned with web images that users identify and “pin,” has established a “new kind of online commerce,” Facebook invested in the messaging app, “what’s app,” and Vine created a popular site for six-second user-generated videos.

Manjoo’s argument, while not definitive is nonetheless suggestive. Mayer, according to this line of thinking, was not in touch with the currents of popular taste that have shaped what people wanted from their online experience. Indeed, Mayer’s frame of reference, as she has repeatedly emphasized in many talks, has been on the infrastructure of the web; that is, the way in which mobile, video, native advertising and social networks, are changing how content is carried. She has focused on the medium not the message; perhaps a perspective she finds more comfortable as a software coder and a web engineer.

Manjoo’s critique raises the question of when CEOs will make big bets. One hypothesis is that CEOs are more likely to do so when facing crises. For example, when Lou Gerstner became the CEO of IBM in 1993, IBM faced the prospect of selling assets to improve its cash flow. Many in the company believed that in fact IBM should break up so that its constituent divisions--mainframe, storage devices, operating systems and databases-- could compete more effectively in their own submarkets. This concept was consistent with an industry narrative that an integrated computer-system provider like IBM was becoming obsolete.

Gerstner, in a gutsy move, argued against the narrative, insisting that big corporate customers needed an integrator who could pull all of these pieces together. He posited that IBM’s Mainframe, the 390, was the machine to integrate and harmonize all the products in its customers’ IT ecosystems. He then cut the price of the 390 drastically, actually accentuating the cash crisis, which in turn required that he fire thousands of employees.  But his big bet paid off. The price of a unit of mainframe processing fell 96% while mainframe shipments increased twelve times between 1994 and 2001.

Gerstner not only responded to a crisis by cutting prices. He in fact exacerbated it. This put enormous pressure on the company to sell many more mainframes. As a result, the company’s executives had the “freedom of no choice.” This link between crisis and big bets is why startups are the source of so many innovations, and why of course so many fail. By definition, they are big bets and are in state of permanent crisis, racing for results as their funding diminishes. 

But despite Yahoo’s protracted difficulties --revenue had been stagnant since 2011 -- Mayer paradoxically faced the opposite of a crisis. She took up the CEO role under the protective umbrella of the company’s big ownership stake in Alibaba, China’ biggest Internet supermarket, its own Amazon and then some.  Before Alibaba went public in 2014, the only way investors could go long on it was to invest in Yahoo. Anticipating an eventual Alibaba IPO, investors bid up Yahoo’s stock price so that it rose from a starting point of $15 just before Mayer assumed office, to $39 dollars, two weeks before the IPO itself.  After going public, Alibaba was valued at some $25 billion. Yahoo sold 140 million of its shares in the company, earning a windfall profit of $9.4 billion, while retaining 383 million shares, which at $87 a share, were worth $33 billion two weeks after the IPO. To keep this in perspective, Yahoo’s operating earnings in 2014, before subtracting interest and taxes, and excluding unusual expenses, was $220 million. The Alibaba “umbrella” was extraordinary. It enabled Mayer to take act judiciously, and proceed cautiously when acquiring a series of ventures and startups. As sensible as this may have seemed, this strategy never compelled Mayer or her team to address the underlying issue of identity and purpose.

I think Mayer was hobbled in another way. She tended to focus on processes rather than ideas. Abraham Zaleznik, the psychoanalytically informed organization theorist who taught at the Harvard Business School, argued that executives with a managerial rather than a leadership orientation, emphasized business processes --how to use and improve them --while neglecting the underlying ideas that animate these processes and make them meaningful. 

For example, Mayer describes with considerable pride in a video interview how in her first year she implemented a program for eliminating bureaucratic “jams” that people believed were obstructing work.  An employee would describe a jam and “people would go online and use a moderator tool to vote the jam up or down,” as an issue worth addressing.  As a result, the company eliminated the parking gate in the parking lot, the need to use an employee badge to get into the gym, and improved the product shipping process. As she notes, “We changed a thousand things in the first year of using the system. It really empowered us.”

Executives who focus on process are often attracted to the idea that a good leader is what management theorists call a “servant-leader.” In this way of thinking, a leader’s primary task is to eliminate the organizational obstacles that prevent employees from making the best of use of their talents. There is, in this conception, the idea that organization actually interferes with productivity, it is really just bureaucracy, and without a formal organization people would spontaneously coordinate their work to great effect.

Similarly, as she reports, when she first joined the company, employees would ask her, “When are you going to have your big strategy rollout-- your meeting for a grand vision for Yahoo.” She replied, “I am not going to have a big dog and pony show. I am going to the cafeteria and listen because you people have been here for a lot longer. You know what has worked or not.  Maybe we will have a strategy meeting sometime this fall and I will need your help in shaping our strategy.” She adds, “That was a more comfortable way for people to accept me and I view that my role is to listen and get things out of the way.”

I think one aspect of the servant-leader idea that attracted Mayer, was its fit with her concept of a company as a culture. “Culture,” she says in a video interview, “Is something that is hard to change.” Likening culture to the DNA of a company, she says that you can’t inject new genes into DNA, but rather you can facilitate the expression of its good genes. The question was, “how do you turn these genes on, how do you ‘hyper-express’ them.” Stepping into the role of CEO, she said that it was important, “that we not try to change Yahoo into something else. It is a great company. We have great assets. How do we make it the best version of itself?”

This stance is sympathetic and reflects a welcomed humility. But her phrase “that was a more comfortable way for people to accept me,” may also mask a certain discomfort with aggression, and a wish to be part of the group rather than its leader. Mayer put great store in her hanging out in the cafeteria when she first joined the company She notes that when people would talk to her in the cafeteria they would ask her at some point, “is it time to go?” and she would reply, “ No, No, please don’t go, please give me a chance.” As she herself has noted, she is very shy.

This penchant for process is revealing in another way. Like many leaders in the technology industry, Mayer focused on cultivating, supporting and evaluating talent. For example, early in her tenure, she gave the employees free meals and smartphones, “To increase the employees’ energy and output and change the culture of the company.” Of course, companies in Silicon Valley have no choice but to create good working conditions for talented engineers, coders, product designers and marketers. Processes for ensuring these conditions, are necessary though not sufficient for success.

However, what is peculiar in this regard is that Mayer put great store in an employee evaluation system, called the “Quarterly Performance Review (QPR) through which managers force-ranked their employees on a scale of 1 to 5. It proved unpopular and divisive. As one author writes, “Even on top-performing teams, someone always had to get a poor score. Poor and sometimes even average scores made it nearly impossible to transfer jobs, earn full bonuses, or get promotions. The system made employees feels like they were working against each other, not with each other.”

Observers were puzzled that Mayer, who put such great store in employee morale and elevated the role of teamwork, would introduce such a divisive system. One hypothesis is that she embraced this system, despite opposition, because it distanced her securely from the work of re-assessing Yahoo’s basic business idea, what Peter Drucker once called a executive’s “theory of the business.” This work provoked too much anxiety.

Look at it this way. A leader focused on ideas would select people whose talents were joined closely to the products and services the company wished to develop. For example, had Mayer decided that Yahoo had little future as an internet portal -- Facebook and Google had “won” the race, --but could compete in the media/entertainment business, she would have laid-off thousands of employees and hired people whose experiences, interests and talents were focused on the internet as an entertainment vehicle. Absent such an idea, and understandably pressed by her investors to control expenses—after all revenue was not growing- she relied on a mechanical process that severed the link between the company’s purpose and its employees’ talents.

In psychodynamic terms, we could hypothesize that Mayer and her top team faced two chronic sources of anxiety. First, the prospect that Google and Facebook had in fact won the portal/platform war, a conclusion warranted by the results of Mayer’s tenure to date. Second, that to shape a new corporate identity they had to make a big bet. The QPR system helped them stave off their anxiety from both of these sources, while paradoxically displacing it onto the supervisors and employees who then had to struggle with the QPR’s divisive and emotionally difficult consequences. Anxiety is like the “hot potato” thrown from one group of people to another.

To be sure, I would be exaggerating if I said that Mayer was only interested in process. After all, she was a computer engineer by training, she could write computer code, and while at Google, she helped develop the clean look of its search page and its Gmail app. She learned to use data and experiments to determine what features of a web page were attractive, and how to design web pages to simplify users’ navigation between them. When she first arrived at Yahoo she set up her office computer so that she could write code with it. Instead of meeting with employees quarterly to discuss financial results, she led a monthly product review meeting.

But I think her focus on products such as email, an online magazine, or the photo-sharing site Flickr, focused her attention at the wrong level of analysis. It is like the distinction between a course and a curriculum. Any course can be evaluated on its own terms as a vehicle for pedagogy and learning, but ultimately the course gains meaning only in relationship to the curriculum of which it is a part. Planning a curriculum is a more far-reaching activity than planning a course. In Elliot Jaques’ terms, it provokes consideration of a longer “time horizon, ” the sine-qua-non of executive level functioning.  This suggests that she had to evaluate Yahoo’s products in relationship to a larger conception of the web as an evolving sociocultural system.

Let me suggest here that Mayer may have been limited by her training and socialization as an engineer.  She graduated from Stanford University with a specialization in artificial intelligence and “for her undergraduate thesis, she built travel-recommendation software that advised users in natural-sounding human language.” Upon joining Google in its earlier years, she learned the discipline of using data to improve websites. As she recounts in a video, while trying to improve the user interface of an application, a mentor told her, “What we do not need now is more opinions, we need data.”

One question is, does this data orientation exact a price?  Consider the following. A lead designer at Google, Doug Bowman, quit the company because he was exasperated by the misplaced use of data. In a farewell blog post, he wrote, “A team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4, or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions. There are more exciting design problems in this world to tackle.” In other words, the quantitative approach to design narrows the scope of problems that trigger design thinking. It is like the famous “law of the instrument,” expressed in Abraham Maslow’s felicitous comment, “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

In addition, Mayer proposed two formative ideas for thinking about Yahoo’s purpose.  First, she identified the typical user’s four “daily habits;” ‘news reading,’ ‘checking weather,’ ‘checking email,’ and ‘photo-sharing,’ and argued that Yahoo should create the best applications for each. Second, she said that a web portal such as Yahoo should focus on four channels of communication -- Mobile, Video, Native Advertising and Social network, or the “MaVeNS.”

Let me suggest these conceptions together-- habits and channels-- characterize Yahoo as an information utility, a kind of infrastructure for supporting internet use that in the main operates in the background as an enabler, rather than as an agent with a purpose. Her thinking lacks an imaginative conception of the web as a repository of experiences, fantasies, anxieties and emotional connections.

Let me describe two experiences I have had that may illuminate this point of view. I learned how to become and then direct an Avatar of myself on a virtual reality website called, “Second Life.” In one session with several colleagues, we all “took to the air” and flew over the landscape of our virtual world. I felt a certain joy in this process, a sense of freedom, as well as a connection to my peers, even as I understood that it was completely contrived.

Now I have also had, like many other people, repeated dreams of flying -- they are very common—in which I try to convince my friends that if they simply let the wind flow beneath their chests they would be lifted up; that it is really that simple!  Freud, in his inimitable way, argued that such flying dreams were bodily representations of the erect penis or clitoris. If we resist this kind of focus on the body – a hallmark of psychoanalytic thinking and its basis in what 19^th century philosophers called “scientific materialism,”  – we can still certainly say, as Freud is suggesting, that flying in dreams expresses a certain potency and reach beyond the constraints and boundaries of the physical world.  So the virtual reality website, Second Life “made my dreams come true,” but of course only virtually true. One central feature of the emotional web then is just this permeable boundary between reality and fantasy. Of course, products of art --novels, painting, films – move along this boundary as well. After all, we really cry at a movie’s happy ending. But the emotional web has accentuated this boundary’s permeability and intensified our experiences of crossing it.

I also recently saw the film “Stutterer,” which is an Oscar nominee for the best live-action short of 2016.  The hero has a severe stutter, so much so that when strangers on the street address him, for example they ask him for directions, he feigns deafness. It is simply too painful for him to try to speak. Yet the movie voices his inner thoughts at those moments, making clear to the viewer that this young man is articulate and intelligent. We learn at the movie’s beginning that he is engaged in a lively chatting relationship with a woman on the web. He sees her picture next to her chat messages. At long last she asks that they meet at the time of her planned visit to London. Of course he is terrified.  But after several days of delay, he musters the courage to arrange to meet her at a restaurant of her choosing. I won’t give away the punch line, except to say that something about her abilities/disabilities complements his. They are a “match made in heaven.” This film is a fantasy about how the freedom that virtual reality provides, by releasing us from our bodies, which is after all the ultimate boundary, brings us love in the real world.*

One hypothesis is that insofar as Mayer inhabited the engineering worldview, she was doomed to thinking of the web as infrastructure and Yahoo as a portal.  This is a one- dimensional conception, and with it Mayer was competing/boxing with “one hand tied behind her back.” Of course Google was built upon this worldview as well, but it turns out that there is room for only one Google. She needs a new narrative of the web in which design is linked to the permeable boundary between fantasy and reality. The question is; could this point of view lead her to some creative business ideas?

*For readers attuned to the cultural revolution of the sixties, we can recognize in these vignettes expressions of what observers at the time called “a new sensibility.” As one author writes, describing that period,  “Performers of the Living Theater, tried to draw the audience into the play or take the performance into the audience. Such forms of involvement at first included actors, still in role, mingling with the audience during intermission; within the decade, cast members would encourage audience members to frolic with them in sexual acts.” The arts, as Mcluhan argued, are our culture’s “early warning system.” In this sense we can say that the artistic impulses of the sixties, their excess, their obliteration of the difference between low and high culture, their attack on boundaries, anticipated the emotional web.

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The Psychodynamics of Star Wars

“A long time ago in a galaxy far away…” So begins the opening “crawl” of

Star war movies. These movies invite us to consider them as evocations of an ancient legend that explain the origins and foundation of the world we have inherited and as we know it today. In this blog post I would like to take this conceit seriously, namely to examine Star Wars as a modern myth or origin story that sheds light on our current experiences. The risk in doing this is to take what is after all an entertainment vehicle and commercial undertaking far too seriously. On the other side, the franchise’s persistence over thirty years in films and books, its world wide popularity, and its trafficking in the fundamental themes of good and evil should give us pause enough to consider it seriously, as we might the legends of the Greek gods, the Norse heroes of the Wagner Ring Cycle, or even the portraits of the patriarchs in the Bible.

C.J. Jung suggested that myths could be seen as social dreams through which our shared arc of life, from birth to death, is expressed through universal archetypes, for example, mother, father, child, devil, trickster, wise old man or hero. If we accept this idea, we could say that Star Wars might be such a myth in which such universal archetypes, for example, Yoda as the wise man, Darth Vader as the devil, the droid as the trickster, and Luke Skywalker as the hero, are joined to our collective preoccupations as we experience them today. The newest film’s casting, The Force Awakens, underlines this feature.  Actors who were young some thirty years ago, Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford and Mark Hamill, reprise their roles, but as older and aging characters. As aging actors they too will recede in importance, as younger actors take up central roles in succeeding films of the Star Wars franchise. Older filmgoers, watching this latest movie, can come into touch with their own aging. Let’s for the sake of argument assume that this mythical and archetypical frame of reference is relevant, and see what insights this point of departure affords us.

The Disordered family and cosmos

A striking feature of the most recent Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens, is that the cosmos is disturbed because family relationships are disordered.  Failed family relationships are evident throughout the movie. For example, the new female heroine, Rey, whom the film suggests will succeed Luke Skywalker as the next great Jedi warrior, has been orphaned early in life, separated from her parents as the result of some traumatic and perhaps political event. When we encounter her early in the movie she methodologically records every day she has been separated from her parents by markings on a wall, as if she were in prison. In addition, Kylo Ren, the grandson of Darth Vader and the son of Hans Solos and Princess Leia (now a general in the Republic), is estranged from his parents. In addition, Solo and the Princess are estranged from each other, most likely because they have lost their son, Kylo Ren, to the dark side. Also, Luke Skywalker has vanished from the face of the galaxy and is thus estranged from his sister Princess Leia and all of those who have depended on him as the Jedi representative of his generation.  Finally, as the Fore Awakens informs us, Luke Skywalker once trained Kylo Ren to become a Jedi, thus acting as both his guru and as father figure. When Ren went over the dark side, precipitating Skywalker’s withdrawal, the two became estranged permanently.

Now in the life of a small child, a disturbed family life is indeed a cosmic disturbance. In this sense Star Wars evokes a child’s feeling that parental conflict can literally unravel his or her world. But the bridge from the cosmos to the family has adult meaning as well, insofar as we believe that the foundation stone for civilization is the orderly family. In psychoanalysis the figure of the father, or more broadly, the paternal function, personifies this linkage. The father introduces his children to the demand that they control their impulses in order to take up their roles first in school and then in society. We know that children who grow up without fathers, are more likely to drop out of school, abuse drug and alcohol, have more problems with aggression, are twice as likely to commit suicide, and for boys, are more likely to commit crimes. In short, children in such families are more likely to feel overwhelmed. As they mature, their powerlessness may lead to feelings of despair, one reason why they are more likely to commit suicide or crimes.

There is a pivotal emotional moment in the film, when Kylo Ren kills his father, Hans Solo on the Starkiller base. Solo spots Ren from behind walking across a narrow footbridge on the base and calls to him by his original name “Ben” (named after Ben Kenobi). They see each other for the first time after years of estrangement. Solo shows emotional strength in reaching out to Ren. Yet on the other side, he is foolishly risking his life in trying to make contact with his son. After all, at that moment they are antagonists. Kylo is looking for Rey and her droid, while Solo is protecting them. Should Kylo find the droid he could locate Luke Skywalker’s hiding place in the galaxy and destroy him, eliminating the latter’s potential role as a tutor to the next generation of Jedi warriors.

Responding to his father’s pleas that he rejoin his family and the light side, Kylo says, “I'm being torn apart. I want to be free of this pain.” One question is what is the source of his pain and why has it led him to such a point of despair that he is being torn apart. One conception is that Ren suffers from the burden imposed by weak fathers and father figures. The weak father is an attenuated version of the absent father. Hans Solo was once a vagabond, a trader who lived at the margin of society making money by dealing with shady characters, borrowing money and not repaying his debts. He attained moral stature by joining the rebels’ fight against the Empire, (Star Wars IV, A new Hope). But in the Force Awakens, (Star Wars VII), he has apparently reverted to his original dubious profession as a merchant and trader on the galaxy’s fringes, partly because Kylo, originally named Ben, has turned to the dark side. When Rey the heroine first meets Hans Solo and asks him if he is in fact the famous Hans Solo, he replies, “I used to be.” On the bridge, when Hans asks Kylo to remove his mask and reveal the face of his son, Kylo replies, “Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him.”

One psychoanalytic conception is that a weak father burdens the psychological development of his son. In this conception, every son needs a “strong enough” father to help him gain control over his own impulses. The son identifies with and internalizes his father’s competence and independence. He trades his wish to gratify his impulses for his father’s love and respect. His father and later other figures of authority, whom he both loves and fears, become the precipitates of what Freud called the son’s “superego.” But when the father is weak, the son must become his own internalized policeman. Unmodified by love and respect, his superego becomes unduly harsh charging him to excess with being inadequate, ineffectual and guilty, for this is the only way he can control his impulses. When this experience becomes intolerable, it leads to despair. Under these conditions the son may seek relief by turning over his harsh superego to an overly strong father figure, such as Snoke the leader of the Dark side, who relieves him of his guilt, and assures him of his potency.

One conception is, that at that moment on the bridge, Kylo is caught between two experiences of his father, as loving or weak, as the forgiving father or the fool. This is too painful a tension for him bear. This is why he tells his father that he wants to be “free of this pain.” Then, though first hesitating, he kills his father thus underlining his transition to the dark side. The psychoanalytically tuned viewer may link this scene on the footbridge to the scene in Oedipus Rex in which Oedipus, meeting his father on a narrow road, kills him in a dispute over whose carriage has the right of way.

The dark side and the devil

This link between despair and murder also has religious and mythological roots. Goethe’s story of the Faust legend is the exemplar story here. Faust, despairing of ever reaching a complete understanding of the universe, considers killing himself. He is saved by a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, who promises to do his bidding in this world if Faust will in turn serve the devil in Hell. When Faust agrees, the devil soon after helps him seduce Gretchen, a woman he finds attractive. Gretchen in turn poisons her own mother so that she and Faust can meet in private. As this drama suggests, the devil permits what is normally forbidden for example, killing for sexual pleasure, an impulse we may at some point entertain in our fantasy but that we would never express in reality.

Examined from a mytho-theological perspective, the Faust story suggests that despair challenges faith, raising the prospect that God, like failed fathers, is weak in this world. If this is true, it suggests that an anti-god or anti-Christ is strong, and in the theology of the western world this is none other than the devil. The devil offers us a road out of despair by promising us potency, if we make good on our crisis of faith and abandon God. If God in turn represents the moral function of the superego, the set of, the “thou shall nots” and “thou shalls” of the Ten Commandments, then as David Bakan argues, the devil suspends the superego, permitting what the superego forbids. This is the religious meaning of the dark side. Snoke as the leader of the dark side is the devil. He frees up his followers, to act out fantasies they would ordinarily keep out of awareness and certainly keep in check for example murdering innocents at will. He relieves them of guilt. This is why his followers feel grateful to him and seek his approval. Broadly speaking, this is the basis for what historians call the “totalitarian seduction.” It is a deal with the devil. This is why Hux, the military leader of the dark side’s storm troopers, sounds like Hitler when he addresses them in a mass rally as they prepare to destroy the resistance’s base. Hitler personifies the devil in modern times.

The emotionally vulnerable man

In some currents of popular culture, when a man or father is moved by his emotions, it is a sign of weakness, an indication that he cannot control his impulses. The Force Awakens initially traffics in this conception. Luke Skywalker upon facing the devastating loss of Kylo Ren and the murder of his Jedi students, is depressed and withdrawn. When we see him --only at the very end of the movie-- we encounter a man all alone and seemingly in despair. Solo, as we have seen, is victimized by his love for his son. Indeed, one of the movie’s conceits is that Kylo Ren is an “incomplete devil,” who becomes inappropriately enraged upon meeting obstacles.

But then the film goes on to offer a more nuanced perspective on the emotionally vulnerable man. The question posed is, can a man’s emotional vulnerability trigger his growth in stature?  In the first Star Wars movie (IV, A New Hope,) the male paragon is the virtuous warrior, the Jedi, a man disciplined enough to risk his life to preserve the Republican and democratic way of life and to do so with equanimity and deliberation.  Obi Wan or Ben Kenobi is the exemplar. In the first Star Wars film, A New Hope he confronts Darth Vader in order to give Skywalker a chance to escape and fulfill his mission of ultimately destroying the Death Star.  Obi Wan understands that Vader, both younger and stronger can kill him. In the middle of their light-sabre battle, knowing he has helped Skywalker escape, he simply accedes to his defeat, saying to Vader, "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

At one level he is predicting his reappearance as a spirit or ghost. Indeed in The Force Awakens, Rey, upon discovering Luke Skywalker’s light sabre in a dungeon-like setting, hears Kenobi’s voice. But in naturalistic terms we can interpret his statement to mean that he will become an ideal, much as Moses or Jesus are, and will inspire other warriors to take up the battle of the dark side with the same courage, equanimity and poise that he has done. The other warrior/pilots of the republic, as befit ordinary heroes, demonstrate a similar grace under fire.

Kenobi has achieved what Freud called sublimation. He has learned to regulate his emotional or instinctual life, which can overpower the rational faculties, by linking them to the work of achieving higher ideals and thereby forgoing immediate gratification in the service of a wider love, what Freud called “Eros.” His control is so complete that he can sacrifice his life for the welfare of a next generation. In a sense, the mantra, “May the force be with you,” may be translated as, “May you appropriate those instincts or drives which animate you, for a greater good.” In this sense Kenobi becomes for the next generation, what Freud called an “ego ideal.” While the superego is the seat of injunctions and the source of guilt, the ego ideal is the seat of aspirations and a source of the capacity to love at a level that goes beyond immediate gratification. 

The newly introduced main character Finn, presents a different picture. Unlike the fighter pilots of the resistance, he initially lacks grace and courage. When we first encounter him as a storm trooper he is overwhelmed by the sight of blood as his fellow troopers kill villagers on the planet Jakku. Fearing that he will get caught for failing to fire his weapon, he deserts his troop, then pretends that he is a Jedi so that Rey will help him in his flight, and finally abandons her -- despite her pleas that he join the resistance- when he can arrange for a flight off the planet. In other words, he is at first a coward and a liar. Finn ultimately grows into a warrior when, upon learning that Kylo Ren has captured Rey, he comes into touch with his love for her, and masters the weapons he must use in an attempt to rescue her. In a sense, Finn is at a lower level of  “warrior development” than a Jedi, because his courage derives from his passion for a person, a woman, rather than from his commitment to an ideal.

A culture of narcissism?

The difference between Obi Wan Kenobi and the men of The Force Awakens highlights the psychoanalytic distinction between the ego and the self. The former describes an executive function of the mind that is aware of its own divisions and ambivalences. It is the way a person observes and controls his own emotional responses to internal as well as external stimuli; for example, by distancing himself from feelings of self-imposed guilt, or taking an ironic stance toward his own passions. Eli Zaretsky, in his wonderful book Political Freud, calls this type of person an exemplar of psychoanalysis’ “maturity ethic”. But in a post-modern age, Zaretsky suggests, we privilege our emotions and put greater value on responding in the moment to them, whether they are noble or not.  

One popular and scholarly conversation suggests that this shift from ego to self highlights a new culture of narcissism where we use our feelings to make peremptory demands on others for recognition and affirmation. For example, students in college classes who demand that they not be exposed to literature that creates discomfort.  Conservative critics worry that such a culture of narcissism with its focus on self-esteem, means that people lack courage and the will to take risks. To them it represents a decline in the masculine elements of the culture as well as a cultural attack on “white males,” and on what they represent and have achieved. This may be why today, Donald Trump, in all his primitivism, is nonetheless appealing.  

The movie presents a different possibility. It suggests that as men take on more “feminine” characteristics, women can take on more masculine ones. The paternal and maternal functions are preserved in our culture but are expressed differently and in new ways by both men and women. This parallelism evokes experiences in every day family life. Fathers are increasingly involved in infant and baby care- changing diapers, feeding, bathing and story telling -- just as mothers are more engaged in the world of work, making good on their ambitions. The hopeful aspect of this vision is that as men mature into their adult character, they will feel less taxed psychologically by the demand that they repress their feminine side, for example by being passive, and for women, the demand that they repress their masculine side, for example by being active. People would feel more psychological freedom and less guilt in taking up their adult roles more fully.  

Rey, the movie’s central character, exemplifies this new role for women.  She represents the next generation of Jedi, the Force flows through her naturally, and as an orphan has learned to defend herself against predators who occupy the frontier settings on her home planet of Jakku. She has mechanical skills, is a self-taught aircraft pilot, and is inspired by the history of the resistance. But she is not a one-dimensional superwoman. She longs for her parents and is drawn to Hans Solo as a potential father figure, a yearning that Kylo Ren, who battles her in a penultimate scene, senses. In the movie’s final moment she finds Luke Skywalker in his mountain hideaway and in a gesture of love returns to him his light saber that, once he had abandoned it, had been stored for some thirty years in a dudgeon/castle on the planet Takodana.

The psychoanalytically tuned viewer may see this as a moment in which a woman returns a phallic object to a man - his weapon -- as the first step in helping to revive his potency. But this is too narrow a “reading” of this moment. I suggest that it is instead a moment of tender reconciliation between the sexes and the generations. It suggests that the daughter cannot be wholly herself without her father and that a man cannot be wholly himself without a woman. In this sense, the very last scene answers the opening chords of the first scenes by offering the prospect that the family unit can be restored so that civilization may once against thrive. It is in this way a romantic ending but not necessarily an unrealistic one.

The Force Awakens leaves me with the question about the meaning of the “warrior” archetype in a post-modern culture. Emerging from the devastation of the twentieth century, a century of two world wars, nationalisms and ideologies, we may be wary of ideals and feel more secure in strengthening our attachments to specific people whom we love and wish to protect. But Star Wars suggests that the dark side is ever present, that the totalitarian seduction, with its political implications, is always just around the corner. This is the warning that Freud offers us in his magisterial, Civilization and its Discontents. Do we take this seriously? If we do, are we prepared?

Isis and the socioemotional roots of terrorism.

Humiliation

The terrorist murders in Paris and San Bernardino, California draw our attention once again to the psychological and emotional underpinnings of terrorism. There are two points of departure in considering this issue. One is to query the psychology of the individual terrorist. We ask what motivates him or her to kill strangers and innocents in the service of a political or religious cause. There are undoubtedly many motives at play for example, a terrorist is frustrated by his social circumstances, he believes that that murdering is righteous, he is attracted to terror because it is exciting and dangerous, or because it affords him money, power and access to women. The second point of departure is to explore the socio-emotional dimensions of terrorism, that is the feelings associated with groups and their collective experience and history. Here we would ask what social experiences predispose people of a particular culture to see terrorism as a legitimate a form of expression. My colleagues call this the “socio-analytic” dimension, distinguishing it from a psychoanalytic one. 

In this spirit, one common trope is that the people in the Arab world feel humiliated by their lack of power. In, The geopolitics of emotion: How cultures of fear, humiliation and hope are changing the world. Dominique Moisi writes that, “The dominance of humiliation in the Arab-Islamic world has many causes, but the first and most important is a sense of historical decline.” This reference to “humiliation” and its relationship to “decline” can help provide a psychological account of why individuals may feel little compunction in killing innocent people. The psychoanalyst Carlos E. Sluzki suggests that people are ashamed when they agree with the judgment of those who shame them. By contrast, when humiliated, people feel unjustly attacked by those who humiliate them. This attack is persecutory so that a would be terrorist is already, in his own mind, a victim. The terrorist lacks compunction because his own victimhood is morally outrageous.

Now as I write this, I can feel my reader tugging at my sleeve. Doesn’t such an explanation psychologize what is often quite purposeful and rational behavior? As the saying goes; “one person's 'terrorist' is another's freedom fighter.” Moreover, explanations such as Moisi's run the risk of what the Literary scholar Edward Said, called “Orientalism,” the presumption, first advanced in the age of imperialism, that people and their cultures in the East were uncivilized and irrational.  Orientalism, according to Said, presented the East, particularly the Islamic East, as an “other,” unconnected to the history and development of the West and thus not part of a shared human history. This is reflected in Rudyard Kipling’s famous poetic line,  “Oh east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet.” In this sense, asserting that the Arab world feels humiliated could itself be degrading and humiliating. It estranges those of us in the modern West from the Arab East, as if we could not possibly share their experiences.

I think it is best therefore to draw on Arab sources for insight. I am drawn here to Samir Kassir’s brilliant book, Being Arab. He was a Palestinian Lebanese intellectual and journalist, assassinated by Syrian intelligence in 2005. The book is an exposition of the experience, meaning and roots of what he calls “the Arab malaise.” He writes movingly of what he calls the “gaze.” “The Arab malaise is inextricably bound up with the gaze of the Western Other – a gaze that prevents everything, even escape. Suspicious and condescending by turns, the Other’s gaze constantly confronts you with your apparently insurmountable condition, ridicules your powerlessness, foredooms all your hopes, and stops you in your tracks time and again at one or other of the world’s border-crossings. You have to have been the bearer of a passport of a pariah state to know how categorical such a gaze can be. You have to have measured your anxieties against the Other’s certainties – his or her certainties about you – to understand the paralysis it can inflict.”

I think Kassir is describing the experience of feeling inferior in the presence of the “western other.” Now it is certainly part of our shared humanity to imagine how any of one of us would respond to such an experience. If I then put myself in the situation he conjures up, I can imagine feeling despair, and from that emotional place responding with either resignation or rage. But rage is a feeling closely connected to humiliation. It activates humiliation, or to put it another way, humiliation is the tinder for fire’s rage. The terrorist lights the fire. I propose therefore, that Dominique Moisi’s proposition, that humiliation is a dominant emotion in the Arab-Islamic world, is at least consistent with Kassir’s social psychology.

Stalled Modernization

But Kassir’s argument is more complex. Moisi’s conception that humiliation is triggered by the Arab world’s sense of its decline is incomplete. It leads too readily to the idea that people in the Arab world are attached to their ancient history and almost mythical memories, for example of Islam’s golden age. From the eighth to thirteenth century, Muslim rule extended as far west as Spain, the caliphate governed a pluralistic empire, and Islamic scholars made great advances in philosophy, medicine and mathematics. In this conception, the Arabs are hopeless romantics fixated on the past. Indeed, the idea that the East is romantic is another one of Orientalism’s trope.

Kassir, by contrast argues that the decline of the Arab world is an entirely modern story. I want to explore this particular idea further. Kassir notes that the Arab world experienced its own period of enlightenment and modernization in the 19^th century, triggered first by Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman governor of Egypt, and later by the Ottoman elite in Istanbul. “The old empire changed totally in three decades- dress included-so much that it became (even if just for two years) a constitutional state. All the advantages of technological civilization- railway, electrification, steam navigation – were adopted east of the Mediterranean pretty much at the same time as they were in the north. Daily life was transformed in Istanbul and the large Arab provinces alike, and a parallel cultural revolution put the Ottoman elites in sync with Europe.”

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, this particular period of modernization, called the “nahda” in Arabic, came to an end within the Arab world proper, though not in Turkey. Yet after World War II, the tempo of modernization picked up yet again, particularly in Egypt, under the leadership of Gamal Abdel Nasser. He removed the king, suppressed the Muslim brotherhood, built the Helwan steel works and the Aswan dam, nationalized the Suez Canal, and instituted land reform. By 1960, as Kassir notes, “the veil had become sufficiently rare to make its appearance noteworthy.”

Moreover, Nasser was one of the most important leaders world-wide in the third world’s struggle against colonialism. This gave him great standing in the Arab world, and was one reason why, in 1958, Syria united with Egypt to form the short lived “United Arab Republic.” However one evaluates the politics of the struggle against colonialism, there is little doubt that it was part and parcel of a modernizing movement within third world countries. The struggle was not over whether to modernize, but rather over who would control the process. This is why such countries as Egypt, Cuba, Mexico, Iraq, and Malaysia, nationalized banks, railroads and oil fields, all often owned by foreign companies. This is also one reason why third world leaders such as Nasser found socialism, as a model of modernization, attractive. As an economic doctrine it provided a rationale for the public sector owning what Lenin once called the “commanding heights” of the economy.

But Egypt, the bellwether of the Arab world, experienced political and economic obstacles to development, never fully embracing a planned or a market based economy. From 1961 to 1973, as Egypt took on the shape of a socialist society, the state dominated the economy, the share of the private sector in GDP was low, and the government pursued import substitution policies. As Farrukh and Dobronogov write, “Egypt invested heavily in public infrastructure and social services (such as health and education) but could not sustain high economic growth. Business efficiency and labor productivity stagnated, as the country’s development plans aimed at physical output targets, (a method of socialist planning-LH) and its industrial exports were oriented mostly towards communist countries with low quality requirements.”

After 1973 the economy grew faster due to increasing revenue from oil sales, more remittances from abroad, and an “open door policy”, which allowed a greater role for the private sector. But the resulting market development was unbalanced as well. While commercial activities grew, the trade deficit rose to 1/5^th of GDP, inflation increased, industrial employment fell, the state bureaucracy grew and the number of poor families grew significantly.

There were food riots in 1977, and the Muslim brotherhood, once suppressed by Nasser, responded by providing social services to the poor. This set up a conflict between the Brotherhood and the regime. When Anwar Sadat made peace with Israel in 1979, the Brotherhood, empowered by their political base among the poor, “resorted to open confrontation with the regime.” As Nadia Ramsis Farah, the political economist notes, “The regime tried to placate the Muslim brothers by passing a constitutional amendment in May 1980 which…made Sharia the principal source of legislation.” At the same time, Sadat, “Made widespread arrests of Islamist activists,” after which a Brotherhood offshoot assassinated Sadat. Mubarak assumed power, and the conflict between the Brotherhood and the regime intensified. Between 1992 and 1997 radical Islamist groups assassinated prominent people and tourists, and took control of an area of one million people in Cairo (Imbaba) by enforcing sharia law, collecting taxes and terrifying residents. “All this happened under the auspices of a government that claimed to be protecting its population.”

These political and power struggles stymied Egypt's modernization. While in 1960 Egypt and South Korea were at comparable levels of development, by 2010, per capita income in the latter was five times the former. Indeed, one trigger for the rebellion in Tahrir square in Cairo, the epicenter of the Arab Spring, was the feeling, shared by millions of Egyptians, that their society was stagnant.

Fascism

There are three ways to code this very brief story; 1) It is a tale of a people resisting modernization, 2) A tale of a people responding to a failed or flawed modernization process (Kassir’s argument), or 3) The intersection of the two. I favor the third, that is, a stalled modernization process legitimates the fundamentalist resistance to modernity. The modernizing elites are not "delivering the goods," reducing their political legitimacy.

I find this third option plausible because we know that the Great Depression triggered anti-modern currents in the very heart of Europe only eighty-five years ago. The Nazi celebration of the “folk,” the evocation of the symbols of “blood and soil,” their contempt for democracy, and their proclamations of superiority, have many social-psychological features in common with Islamic fundamentalism. For example, reporting on his experience as a young political Islamist, Ed Husain notes that he saw, “Everyone along religious lines and all non-Muslims as inferior.”

But fascism is a very modern phenomenon. Indeed Hannah Arendt, the great theorist of totalitarianism, argued that the loneliness induced by mass society, and people’s experience of their resultant superfluity, prepared them for totalitarian domination. In Arendt’s conception, under certain conditions crises of modernity can trigger contempt for human life. In this sense modernity is more fragile, more vulnerable, than our enlightenment tradition once presumed. Indeed, the very concept of “post-modernity” contains within it a critique of the enlightenment tradition and a skepticism about the claim that rationality is a reliable guidepost for human affairs. This critique provides a fertile ground for the rise of different versions of fundamentalism and primitivism in many settings around the world, not just Arab ones. In this sense, to once again underline Kassir’s argument, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism is a very modern phenomenon. It is as much a part of the West’s as it is of the Arabs’ history and experience.

This account of stalled modernization helps account for the role that the image of Israel plays in the Arabs' narrative of their past and future. Consider the impact of Israel’s victory over the combined Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Said Aburish writes in his 2004 book, Nasser: The Last Arab, “The six day war.. was so unexpected in its totality, stunning in its proportion, and soul destroying in its impact that it will be remembered as the greatest defeat of the Arabs in the twentieth century….The Arabs are still undergoing a slow process of political, psychological and sociological recovery…Even comparison to the “lost generation of post-World War I is apt. The Arab generation which was lost as a result of the 1967 war didn’t die in the trenches or rebel against an already disintegrating Ottoman empire.. They had become a lost generation because they lost their honor and because they were as much to blame as their leaders and the governments their leaders ran. The setback was enormous and all-inclusive…It was the Arab people and the most popular Arab leader in at least five hundred years, Nasser, who lost the 1967 war.”

The objective observer can be forgiven for wondering how the tiny sliver of Israel, with six million Jews can undermine a generation of leaders in an Arab world of 367 million people. One simple answer is that Israel is more than itself. Instead, it has become the Arab world’s symbol of its own underdevelopment. They see in Israel the upside down reflection of their own image. This is why people in parts of the Arab world believe that only Israel’s defeat can restore their honor and set the stage for Arab renewal. Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, of course understood this and could make peace with Israel only after he restored Arab honor by crossing over the Suez in the Yom Kippur war. This is also why the Palestinians, like Israel, are a symbol. They surely have suffered mightily, but in parts of the Arab world their material suffering is less motivating than their victimhood. This is why for example they have been treated so shabbily in parts of the Arab world, for example in Lebanon.

Sadik Al-Azm shows in his passionately rendered book, Self-criticism after the defeat, that the Arab world had difficulty drawing pragmatic lessons from Israel’s victory in the six-day war. This makes sense if Israel is a symbol in the Arab world’s confrontation with its own seemingly intractable stagnation. The underlying question is overcoming stagnation, not Israel. As he writes, “Our use of the term “nakbah” [disaster] to indicate the June (six-day) War and its aftermath contains much of the logic of exoneration and the evasion of responsibility and accountability, since whomever is struck by a disaster is not considered responsible for it, or its occurrence, and even if we were to consider him so, in some sense, his responsibility remains minimal in comparison with the terror and enormity of the disaster. This is why we ascribe disasters to fate, destiny, and nature, that is, to factors outside our control and for which we cannot be held accountable.” He suggests for example, that Arab leaders overestimated the U.S. role in shaping Israel’s victory, and underestimated the Arab soldier’s lack of technical education and sophistication.

Overcoming humiliation and cultural renewal

Al-Azm raises a very fundamental question. How can a nation transcend defeat so that its citizens have a vision of a future that stimulates their personal and collective ambitions and hopes? Moreover, when defeat is chronic, as represented by stagnation, what are the levers of political and cultural renewal? The history of nations coping with defeat is not encouraging. Germany, in the aftermath of World War One, succumbed to the idea that it had been “stabbed in the back” by communists and Jews. This set the stage for Hitler’s rise. Post World-War Two West-Germany found a future in a peaceful Europe united with France, Japan, in a resolute pacifism combined with a disciplined focus on building its export industries. But both of these countries were defeated totally, while their victors occupied them for many years.

I suggest that we consider religious culture as resource for renewal. In launching the Iraq War the Bush administration in the U.S. posited that individuals throughout the Arab world had democratic aspirations. This must be true, witness the Arab Spring. But aspirations are like topsoil readily washed away unless protected by the sturdy roots of plants and underbrush. Saddam Hussein’s terrifying domination of the Iraqi population undermined any institutional and cultural supports that could sustain democratic practices after he was overthrown. 

I am drawn here instead to the Sufi tradition in Islam with its links to Islamic mysticism as an alternative to the resurgence and revival of Salafism and Wahhabism, both extreme versions of Islam. These Islamic traditions rely on the literal interpretation of the Quran. Israel’s victory in 1967 strengthened these extreme currents in Islam, reinforcing the region’s turning away from, rather than toward, modernism.

Literalism imposes great burdens on the social and psychological development of a culture. Of course, one danger of literalism is familiar. There are passages in the Quran, which if taken literally, condone the killing of non-Muslims, for example;

[005:033]  “The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter,” or

[004:089] “They but wish that ye should reject Faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing (as they): But take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of God (From what is forbidden). But if they turn renegades, seize them and slay them wherever ye find them; and (in any case) take no friends or helpers from their ranks.

But literalism also has an insidious and more sustained consequence. Joseph E.B. Lumbard, a convert to Islam and an Islamic scholar argues that puritanical reformists, “favor an opaque literalism which denies the efficacy of our speculative, intuitive, and imaginal faculties.” In other words, literalism blocks thinking and suppresses a person’s subjective response to his or her own experience in confronting a text. This is why as he argues, “the rise of violence, punctuated by the events of September 11, 2001, are the latest symptoms of an underlying illness, a cancer which has been eating at the collective moral and intellectual body of the international Islamic community.” 

Literalism contrasts with esotericism, a tradition associated with mystical currents in all religions. It presumes that a text has hidden as well as surface meanings. My readers may be familiar with the Jewish Kabbalah as a text dedicated to uncovering the hidden meaning of texts as by implication the world of spirit. The Muslim text, Spiritual Gems, preserved and transmitted by Sufis, is similar in character. 

One strand of modernization theory, often neglected by scholars who confuse modernism with secularism, connects mysticism to modernization. David McClelland the scholar of “the achievement motive” in modernizing settings, called this “positive mysticism.” Strikingly, one mediating force between mysticism and modernization turns out to be science. As David Bakan points out, science just like mysticism, presupposes that there is a difference between the manifest appearance of the physical world and its hidden structure. Today in physics the hidden structure is mathematical, and some physicists propose, that it is entirely so. The mathematicians among the ancient Greeks, Pythagoras and his students, were also mystics. 

To interpret a text or a physical appearance, the reader or scientist has to bring his or her “intuitive or imaginal faculties” to bear. In this sense rationality as a model of how thinking takes place, does not fully describe the actual scientific method, since scientific discovery, like text interpretation, is a creative process, engaging the imagination and intuition. Isaac Newton, the great physicist and mathematician of the enlightenment was also an occultist and alchemist and wrote a chapter in his The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended, on the mathematics of Solomon’s Temple.

The act of interpreting a text also mediates between mysticism and modernity.  As the history of the protestant reformation suggests, once people have direct access to sacred texts, for example, the Bible, and are free to bring their own interpretative powers to their understanding of it, they learn to exercise their individual initiative as readers and thinkers. The idea that a text has esoteric meanings opens the door to the thinking subject. This openness was one source of the rise of individualism in early modern Europe, an essential building block of a modernist culture. This suggests that mystical currents in any religious tradition are one vehicle for sustaining a dialogue with modernism without necessarily succumbing to all of the West’s versions of it.

What I am suggesting is that the Sufi tradition, which has strong roots in Morocco, in Sunni and Shia communities throughout the Arab world, in the West, and in Iran, might provide a cultural counterpoint to Salafism. In a study of Sufism in Indonesia, Julia D. Howell writes, “Sufism once associated with the strongly rural sector of Indonesian society, clearly has not died out.. .in the period of Indonesia’s most rapid economic development under the New Order government, Sufism has inspired new enthusiasm even in the sectors of Indonesian society most intensely engaged in modernization and globalization: the urban middle and upper class.”

In addition, in contrast to Salafism, Sufism is a more pluralistic tradition, depends on the decentralized relationships between individual teachers and their students-- the Sufi order-- and highlights the role of the subject in gaining access to both God and knowledge of the divine. This suggests to me that as an indigenous religious tradition, it establishes a basis for engaging with modernism without subordinating Islamic culture entirely to Western traditions. Indonesia is a Muslim society that has in fact made a transition to democratic forms of government. No one can predict how this engagement would unfold, but it is an avenue worth exploring and advancing.

Shame

The potential role of Sufism returns us helpfully to the issue we broached in this post’s beginning; the link between humiliation and shame.  Recall that the psychoanalyst, Carlos Sluzki, argued that in experiencing humiliation a person rejects the appraisal of those who judge his performance or character to be wanting. But in experiencing shame a person internalizes this appraisal, and the standards they represent, by holding himself accountable for his failed performance. Humiliation externalizes, shame internalizes. This suggests that shame in turn sets the stage for learning and development. If this is a useful model of psychological growth, it suggests that people, stung by humiliating experiences, can develop themselves by transforming humiliation into shame.

But to do this, a person must also have some internalized ideal, a belief, to harness shame to learning. Shame is the vehicle for the journey to the ideal. Without such an ideal, a person will simply feel despair. This process of using shame is one conception of what Freud call the “Oedipal” struggle. In Freud’s conception, a young boy at some point is ashamed of his finitude when compared to his powerful father. Freud’s metaphor of the “castration complex”—the boy's penis is small -- describes just this experience. But the boy develops as a person when he transforms his shame into a wish to become like his father. The father becomes the boy’s ego-ideal. But of course it his father.

Perhaps this model of development can be applied more broadly, or in a socio-analytic way. As Lumbard writes, “When, however, one intellectual tradition is abandoned outright, there is no basis for the evaluation of another intellectual tradition and none of the fertile ground that is necessary for effective assimilation. Recovering the Islamic intellectual tradition is thus an essential, if not the essential, step to ameliorating the malaise which Muslims and non-­Muslims alike have long bemoaned and decried. When this has occurred, Muslim peoples will be better prepared to engage Western civilization without surrendering to it altogether or opposing it outwardly while capitulating inwardly.”

I take this to mean that the Arab world, can develop socio-culturally if its people and leaders can build on a tradition they already own and whose ideals provide them with a productive way to engage with modernism. In this way they can tolerate their shame long enough to unleash their creativity.