Divided America: Adorno's View of Prejudice
We are divided even in how we view reality and how we view each other. Adorno helps us to understand this.
On July 31, I posted Part 2 of this series on Divided America, which focused on the Adorno et alia massive study, “The Authoritarian Personality,” published in 1950. In this post, Part 3 of the series, I wanted to go into more detail on the chapters by Theodor Adorno.
Theodor Adorno authored four of the chapters in The Authoritarian Personality. In this post, I will focus on Chapter 16, “Prejudice in the Interview Material.” I want to begin with a quote from a woman who scored high on the F-Scale of the survey, developed by the team of researchers, with Adorno’s help, and administered to over 2,000 Americans. The “F” in the F-Scale stands for “fascism,” and it was designed to identify people who had a tendency to support totalitarianism. The woman said:
I don’t blame the Nazis at all for what they did to the Jews. That sounds terrible, I know, but if the Jews acted the way they do here, I don’t blame them. I’ve never had any bad personal experiences with Jews, it’s just the way they act. Don’t help your fellow man, that’s their creed.
Adorno said that this person’s “underscoring of her own irrationality” concerning the Jew’s innate “badness” is particularly noteworthy. She is not only being irrational; she is also aware that she is being irrational. She says that she has had no bad personal experiences with Jews, but she is also convinced that they are inherently bad (they don’t help out others, meaning non-Jews), and she is okay with Jews being eradicated in death camps.
What would be a more rational approach? The woman could have said, “I don’t really know any Jews, and I haven’t had any bad experiences with them, so I don’t wish them any harm.” Let me take the rational approach one step further: Even if she did have some encounters with Jews and had a few bad experiences, she could have said, “Maybe, these experiences were not typical. Every time I meet someone, even people of different religions and races, I try to treat them as individuals. I try to judge them on their own actions.”
Throughout this chapter, Adorno stresses that “anti-Semitic prejudice has little to do with the qualities of those against whom it is directed.” Prejudice is more related to “the subject’s own psychological wants and needs.” In other words, prejudice is about projection.
This doesn’t mean, Adorno points out, that the group selected as “scapegoats” is entirely random. The “scapegoat” or “outgroup,” the object of the projection, typically has four qualities.
First, this group must “be tangible enough, and yet not too tangible, lest it be exploded by its own realism.” The group is usually not abstract, like “liberals.” I will come back to the way that MAGAs focus on liberals later in this post. By “tangible,” Adorno means a group that lives among us (Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, etc.) but is secluded in some way so that the experience of interacting with the group will not disturb the stereotype of the group. In the United States, prejudice has persisted more consistently in rural white areas, where there is little contact with the out-group. Some of the most extreme MAGAs have been moving to ex-urbs, new cities that are fabricated outside of major cities.
Second, the group “must have a sufficient historical backing and appear as an indisputable element of tradition.” A group like “fans of Ted Lasso” is a recent phenomenon of popular culture; it does not have “historical backing.” Jews and Blacks do. Even groups like “Hispanics” or “immigrants” are a little too abstract. Trump induces fear about the border with Mexico, and he portrays them (Mexicans, not Hispanics or Latins) as criminals and rapists.
Third, the group “must be defined in rigid and well-known stereotypes.” Jewish stereotypes have been developing at least since the fourth century BCE, the time of the First Council of Nicaea in 325 ADE. About that time, Christians stopped identifying themselves as both Christians and Jews. Black stereotypes have been developing since 1619 when the first slaves were brought to Jamestown. Prejudice develops slowly over centuries. It is embedded into our culture.
Finally, the group “must possess features” that “harmonize with the destructive tendencies of the prejudiced subject.” In other words, prejudiced persons need to be convinced that they can clearly identify members of the scapegoated group. Jews, Blacks, and Mexicans can be identified on sight. Or, so the prejudiced person believes. This is one of the reasons why many states had laws against interracial marriage. These laws were designed to keep the white race pure and minorities clearly identifiable by what were considered “racial” traits.
As I discussed in an earlier post, political correctness has made it more difficult for the authoritarian personality to project anger and fears onto an outgroup. During the presidential campaign of 1979, after the Civil Rights movement, after even terms like “Negro,” once considered respectful, became offensive, Reagan used “Liberal” as an “outgroup” to fear and despise. The problem with this approach is that a “Liberal” is not easy to identity. As attitudes toward this “outgroup” developed, key individuals began to represent the entire group. This explains, in part, why such intense hatred developed for Hillary Clinton or Joseph Biden.
Once an out-group is identified, the prejudiced person can project fears and anger onto them, even their own self-loathing. Adorno discusses Turk, one of their subjects who “indulged in violent anti-Semitic diatribes” and later, in the interview, revealed that he was Jewish.
The traits ascribed to the out-group always embody contradictions. A number of the subjects in the study said that Jews stick to themselves and that they are aggressive. The traits also tend to set up “no win” scenarios for the out-group. As Adorno wrote: “To the prejudiced, the Negro is ‘dull’; if he [a prejudiced person] meets, however, one of outstanding achievement, it is supposed to be mere overcompensation, the exception that proves the rule. No matter what the Negro is or does, he is condemned.”
The contradictions can ignored because stereotypes are mental frames. They determine how one views the world. This means that even positive experiences with a member of an out-group will not necessarily conflict with the stereotype. As Adorno says: “There is no simple gap between experience and stereotypy. Stereotypy is a device for looking at things comfortably; since, however, it feeds on deep-lying unconscious sources, the distortions that occur are not to be corrected merely by taking a real look. Rather, experience itself is predetermined by stereotypy.”
Indeed, the more extreme the stereotype, the more it is disconnected from what most of us would call reality, the more likely it can remain “pure.” Think of Marjorie Taylor Green’s comments about Jewish Space Lasers or the Q-Anon theory that Liberals and Hollywood stars are trafficking children to drink their blood. They even take a “sinister pride” about having “solved a riddle otherwise unsolved by mankind.” And, “the more primitive” that these “drastic formulae are, the more appealing they are at the same time, since they reduce the complicated to the elementary” and offer “emotional, narcissistic gratifications.” In other words, conspiracies are fun. The more absurd the conspiracy, the more fun it is.
This is counter intuitive. It seems like the closer a stereotype is to reality, the more likely it would be to persist. Adorno, however, argues the opposite is true. The stereotype can remain “pure” and unaffected by its lack of alignment with reality, by the very absence of any kind of normal validation—fact, history, science, psychology, sociology, etc. The more absurd the stereotype, the more it seems to reduce a complex and confusing world to a simple story. While, to many of us, simple explanations are highly suspect on the surface, the prejudiced “feel themselves to be ‘in the know’ with respect to all kinds of dark secrets.” The secrets bring clarity to a complex reality.
In Crowds and Power, Elias Canetti says that groups must grow to remain coherent. Adorno agrees. He says that the anti-Semite cannot “sleep quietly until he has transformed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset.” How can people remain absolutely convinced that they are right? By converting the entire world to their cause. Anyone who will not become part of that world needs to be dealt with, even if that means “sending them back where they came from” or “eradicating them.” Adorno says, “The extreme anti-Semite simply cannot stop.”
This could not be a happy life. Adorno says that the anti-Semite “seems to terrorize himself even while he terrorizes others.”
How are the non-prejudiced different? They tend to view others as individuals, and they demonstrate empathy for others. As we envision a better America and argue for a strong democracy, we need to speak about respecting individuals and empathizing with others. Even more foundationally, we need to heal ourselves.
I don’t know if James Baldwin read The Authoritarian Personality, but he discussed race issues in the United States as if he had. Here is a quote that sums up Baldwin’s view:
I have always been struck, in America, by an emotional poverty so bottomless, and a terror of human life, of human touch, so deep, that virtually no American appears able to achieve any viable, organic connection between his public stance and his private life. This failure of the private life has always had the most devastating effect on American public conduct, and on black-white relations. If Americans were not so terrified of their private selves, they would never have become so dependent on what they call “the Negro problem.”
Many of the Americans quoted in The Authoritarian Personality also speak of “the Jewish problem.” The real problem, if we understand Baldwin, is with the inner lives of too many white Americans. If we are going to heal our country, if we are going to stabilize democracy, we must work together to heal ourselves.
This means, also, that we should reflect on our own moral outrage. As I am condemning Trump or MAGAs, I need to ask: What does this say about me? Can I learn to recognize the diversity within the MAGA movement? Can I speak with more empathy?
Now, I am going to step away from Adorno and Baldwin to add an observation that, for me, says something important about our divided country. It’s going to sound a little sappy, but I think it provides some insight, even though it is admittedly a gross generalization. There are people who believe that love is conditional and limited. They feel the need to denigrate and diminish others who might take their share of love. Then, there are people who believe that, as one shares love, it expands. They are more willing to empathize with others and work toward an idea that was at the core of many of the American colonies—the Commonwealth, the common wealth shared by all, the common good that makes America a better place for all of us. Which kind of person is living a fuller, more meaningful, and more content life? Which kind of person will help us to move closer to the aspirational goals in our founding documents?