THE PERSONALITY OF THE FUTURE
The image of a new man (few ever speak of a “new woman,” except as an afterthought) also haunted the Communists. The Soviets still speak of the coming of “Socialist Man.” But it was Trotsky who rhapsodized most vividly about the future human. “Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser and more perceptive.His body will become more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more melodious. His ways of life will acquire a powerfully dramatic quality. The average man will attain the level of an Aristotle, of a Goethe, of a Marx.”
As recently as a decade or two ago, Frantz Fanon heralded the coming of yet another new man who would have a “new mind.” Che Guevara saw his ideal man of the future as having a richer interior life. Each image is different.
Yet Reszler persuasively points out that behind most of these images of the “new man” there lurks that familiar old fellow, the Noble Savage, a mythic creature endowed with all sorts of qualities that civilization has supposedly corrupted or worn away. Reszler properly questions this romanticization of the primitive, reminding us that regimes which set out consciously to foster a “new man” have usually brought totalitarian havoc in then* wake.
It would be foolish, therefore, to herald yet once more the birth of a “new man” (unless, now that the genetic engineers are at work, we mean that in a frightening, strictly biological sense). The idea suggests a prototype, a single ideal model that the entire civilization strains to emulate. And in a society moving rapidly toward de-massification, nothing is more unlikely.
Nevertheless, it would be equally foolish to believe that fundamentally changed material conditions of life leave personality or, more accurately, social character, unaffected. As we change the deep structure of society, we also modify people. Even if one believed in some unchanging human nature, a commonly held view I do not share, society would still reward and elicit certain character traits and penalize others, leading to evolutionary changes in the distribution of traits inthe population.
The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, who has perhaps written best about social character, defines it as “that part of their character structure that is common to most members of the group.” In any culture, he tells us, there are widely shared traits that make up the social character. In turn, social character shapes people so that “men* behavior is not a matter of conscious decision as to whether or not to follow the social pattern, but one of wanting to act as they have to act and at the same time finding gratification in acting according to the requirements of the culture.”
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