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The Threat of Aggression
George A. Kelly
The Ohio State University
Printable PDF
Paper presented at Humanistic
Psychology conference in Old Saybrook, CT (November
27-29, 1964). Reproduced from the
George Kelly page of the
Ecology of Mind site.
CONTENTS
This conference has been convened to consider
the topic of humanism in psychology. But I am not sure I have a
very clear idea of what humanism is. Ostensibly it has something
to do with man though I have often doubted that it had to do with
anyone I know. Nevertheless, I suppose that when psychologists
get together and say that we ought to revive humanism it is
because they are alarmed by the tendency of their discipline to
ignore man, except as an inexhaustible source of data, and to
become preoccupied, instead with their own bibliographies,
expendable animals and the rituals of laboratory science. A
humanistic 'turn of events would, then, be one, I presume, in
which the focal importance of living man would be reaffirmed and
psychology would no longer be pursued for its own sake.
Those who attempt to revive humanism are likely
to point to the culture of classic Greece as an example of what
they would like to restore. That culture, as I understand it, was
characterized by man's audacity in the face of adversities
imposed by the gods or by nature. Its heroes asserted themselves
as men, as men they dared challenge what their history and their
gods told them was inevitable, and, as men they often suffered
frustration and defeat. Yet while history, more often than not,
continued to reaffirm its verdicts, the men we as humanists want
to remember are those who refused to acquiesce to the facts of
life.
HUMANISM AND CLASSICISM
But neo-humanism, it seems to me, is often no
more than a form of classicism; that is to say, a preoccupation
with adventure as a historical fact, rather than a present
enterprise, a preoccupation with a state of affairs to be revered
and restored, phrase by phrase and stone by stone. And the modern
classicist is related to the humanist's heroes of the Fourth
Century B.C. or the Fifteenth Century A.D. in about the same way
the Twentieth Century Daughters of the American Revolution are
related to the Eighteenth Century signers of the Declaration of
Independence.
There were, undoubtedly classicists among the
Greeks too, and it may be a little unfair to try to assess their
role from this distance. Whatever it was they stood for, they
were probably pretty skeptical of what was going on and I am sure
they were always trying to revive something. I do not know what
they managed to accomplish but there is little reason to believe
it was their influence that made Greek culture either humanistic
or classic. Nor does our admiration for the humanism of other
times and places make humanists of us now, any more than does
tracing our ancestry to a hero who fought for civil rights in the
American Revolution mean that we have any stomach for the civil
rights battles of our own generation. Indeed, I must note that
the most heroic figures in today's struggle for human values
regard their ancestors more in pity than in pride.
Humanism is then, as I see it, not something we
revive. Revivals are the work of classicists. Humanism, instead,
has to do with the present, the novel, the defiant, the alive,
and with what the classicists often argue cannot be done. Where
the classicist documents historical certainties, the true
humanist fumbles with present uncertainties. The classicist seeks
to be historically right; the humanist continually risks being
historically wrong, in order to set something right. The humanist
is aggressive and hopes thus to achieve better things, but the
classicist, threatened by the humanistic enterprise, equates
aggression with hostility, and hostility, in turn, with
destruction.
THE HUMANIST PARADOX
Now there is another theme in humanism. It is a
secondary theme that derives from the first. and I think it makes
sense only when expressed in the context of human audacity. This
is the theme that whatever is truly characteristic of man is good
and should therefore be preserved and protected against any
distorting influence. Man in the light of his audacious
achievements, should be encouraged to go on being the kind of
person he has so aptly proved himself to be; he should express
himself; he should go right ahead and be audacious. But he should
not be permitted to tamper with human nature; that is carrying
audacity too far!
It is this secondary theme - a theme sometimes
identified as permissiveness, sometimes as
non-aggression, sometimes as respect for the dignity of man -
that often colors the meaning of humanism. Thus humanism appears
to have created for itself a paradox. The audacity of man in
general has proved to be so valuable a human asset that the
audacity of any particular man must be restrained from impinging
upon it. Man must express himself - that is very very important -
but never, never must he express himself in such a way that
anything human will be affected.
One way out of this paradox is to believe that
the nature of man is such that if he does express himself - his
true self - he will harmonize with all other men who truly
express themselves. This is to say that the intrinsic nature of
man is intrinsically compatible with its collective self, and
that disharmonies arise only out of extrinsic distortions, or,
possibly, out of temporary immaturities.
Another way out is to say that man cannot be
manipulated except as his nature conspires. Whatever he does, it
is he who does it. And the fact that he does it under certain
imposed conditions in no way denies his dignity, but, instead, stands as a credit to his personal achievement
["under optimal psychological conditions" as
we sometimes say]. A child learns to play the piano well by being
forced to practice four hours a day. That is not suppression;
that is a human accomplishment. When he grows up he will probably
be proud of it - and perhaps think of himself as a first class
humanist. A depressed person is disciplined to a hospital routine
of scrubbing floors and scouring toilets. As a result he
finds himself too busy to worry. So, again, man
prevails! See how the organism's ingenious adaptability has
contrived to substitute reality for imagination? How fortunate!
Not everyone is able to do that!
But it is difficult for me to see how either of
these constructions can provide an escape from the
humanist's paradox. The interpretation of man as a naturally
harmonious being, who likes other people in proportion to his
admiration of himself, seems to ignore the fact of human tyranny.
Whether he can rise above this unpleasant fact is another
question. But it appears to me to be as presumptuous to regard
man as naturally good as it is to label him as inherently
evil. Moreover, we are still much too busy sorting out good from
evil to be altogether clear about which is which, or
whether man is wholly one or the other.
The other construction of man - the
construction of him as an ingenious conformist, a slave who is
smart enough to know his place - is not very encouraging to the
fellow who doesn't want to be a slave, or practice his music
lessons or live in Levittown on the banks of Walden Pond. He
persists in thinking that under other circumstances he might
accomplish a lot more. He may be right. And then, again, he may
be wrong, for some men do accomplish more under a reinforcement
schedule than when left to their own devices. And what is the
humanist going to say about that?
THE MEANING OF THREAT
The human enterprise is, at best, a
touch-and-go proposition. Any assumptions we make about what is
good, or what is evil, or what will open the door to the future are best regarded as temporary only, and any conclusions we
draw from our experiences are best seen as approximations of what
we may eventually understand. The human quest is not about to be
concluded, nor is truth already partly packaged for distribution
and consumption. Instead, it seems likely that whatever may now
appear to be the most obvious fact will look quite different when
regarded from the vantage point of tomorrow's fresh
theoretical positions. Yet it is a misfortune that man should be
so set on being right at the very outset that be dares not risk
stupidities in an effort to devise something better than what he
has.
This brings us back to the audacity of man,
which, as you already know, I have come to regard as the primary
humanistic theme. I like that theme. But let us not overlook the
fact that this audacity is the very thing that men fear when they
see it about to be expressed - and as often admire when it has
run its course. In a world where vast experiments are being
undertaken, where new psychological devices are being employed, and strange societies are being constituted, we dread the
far-reaching implications of what is about to happen to us.
This is threat. To feel that one is on
the threshold of deep changes in himself and his way of life is,
I think, its essential feature. Threat is, from
this point of view, a personal experience, not a set of
circumstances. Moreover, it is in the context of threat - or
dread - that the two terms - aggression and hostility - become
subjectively synonymous. And may I point out the curious fact
that they have become synonyms both in the language that
diplomats use and in the language that psychologists use - as well,
it seems as in the language that humanists speak.
So how do we encourage human audacity without
inviting one man's initiative to suppress another's?
This is the humanist's dilemma. It is also the dilemma of
democracy - how do you give political sovereignty to a people, or
a state, bent on suppressing its minorities? So, also, it is the
problem of the economist - how can you have a free enterprise
system that produces the Bell Telephone Company, and still claim
that you have anything that even remotely resembles free
enterprise? And it is the problem of the liberal scholar - what
happens when you are liberal with the board of trustees of a
state university?
AGGRESSION
Before trying to find a humanistic answer to
these questions, let me turn to a psychological matter. We call
aggressive men hostile because what they do seems destructive,
especially when it is turned toward us. We don't want them
to meddle with our lives. Thus we judge them by what appears to
happen to us as a result of their initiative.
But what happens to us is not to be confounded
with what is happening within them. What they undertake is not
measured by what we experience. If one is to have an adequate
psychology of man, it must be a psychology of the actor, not the victim. This is to say that behavior needs to be
explained within the fact, not before or after the fact. Our own
reaction to what another person attempts is scarcely enough to
account for what he is trying to accomplish. Nor do our hurt
feelings constitute a psychological analysis of his behavior.
Now may I go on to say that this equating of
aggression with our projection of destructive intent is the
outcome of Nineteenth Century notions about scientific
determinism. To think scientifically about the psychology of man
has seemed to mean that we must regard him as an intervening
variable - called an "organism" - in a
stimulus-response couplet. Our ventures collapse when challenged
by an aggressive colleague. How shall we explain it? Simple! The
collapse is the observed response; he is the obvious stimulus;
and we are the organismic victim caught in the S-R squeeze. His
aggression caused our downfall; and what more do you need to
explain what the rascal was up to?
A stimulus-response psychology is, of course,
one in which human responses are explained in terms of their
external antecedents - their stimuli. And stimuli, in such a
system are reciprocally explained in terms of what they produce -
their responses. That is the solipsism - or equation, as we
prefer to call it in mathematics. If I am threatened, then the
person whom I see as the stimulus explains my experience. If I
can cope with his aggression only by contemplating a profound
change in myself, then the scoundrel must be hostile.
Psychotherapists will recognize this as something that turns up
rather frequently among their patients. But it is much more
widespread than that; it is a conclusion commonly reached by all
those who live out their lives according to the formula of
stimulus-response.
But stimulus-response psychology is not the
only possible kind of psychology. We can, if we wish, employ
a psychology which casts its explanations in terms of what the
person himself is doing, not what others do to him or what they
think he has done to them. Aggression, in such a psychological
system, is more akin to initiative. It is an expression of the
audacity of man, even as he ventures into the realm of
psychology. The aggressive man - like the humanist - may be one
who risks being wrong in order to set something right - or in
order to find out what rightly explains his fellow man.
HOSTILITY
Now hostility, in this way of thinking, may, or
may not, involve aggression, and aggression may, or may not,
involve hostility. The two constructs are propositionally
independent of each other. If we are to employ a notion of
hostility within this kind of psychological system we must
understand the hostile person's enterprise in terms of his
own outlook, not merely in terms of the threat that others
experience when they seek to come to terms with him. Since any
system of psychology must provide some explanation of the means
by which a person checks up on himself, it becomes important to
understand how the implications of such a check-up are
incorporated. In stimulus-response theory the check-up is cast in
terms of reinforcement, that is to say, by ascribing some kind of
stimulus quality to the response itself, or to its
consequences, which will feed back into the system. But in
personal construct theory the check-up is provided by
confirmation of expectations. This is to say that if the
expectations that follow from one's construction of events
continually fail to materialize, a revision of the construction
system is called for. This means that defeat must be recognized,
failure identified, and tragedy experienced if man is to
survive, and all the more so if man is to achieve anything of
humanistic proportions.
But a major revision of one's construct
system can threaten him with immediate change, or chaos, or
anxiety. Thus it often seems better to extort confirmation of
one's anticipations - and therefore of the system that
produced them - rather than to risk the utter confusion of those
moments of transition. It is this extortion of confirmation that
characterizes hostility.
A nation, before admitting that its long leap
forward in the defense of human life has proved invalid may
destroy millions of lives, when those lives disclose evidence of
the failure of the system. A country may go to war to displace
responsibility for its failures. A man may commit murder to
discredit what has proved him wrong. And, since hostility may
employ passivity as well as aggression, we may find spiteful
obedience used to simulate validity in a crumbling system, or
solicitous affection used to smother a child's unexpected
independence.
Nevertheless, whether undertaken by aggressive
or passive means, hostility is, in a personal construct
theoretical system, an extortional undertaking designed by the
person to protect a heavy investment in his own construction of
life. And, if, perchance, his hostility proves
destructive of others, then that, unfortunately, is the way it
must be. The economy must be preserved; the fact that the elderly
starve in India or on the other side of town is incidental.
Heresy must be controlled; too bad that intellectual curiosity on
the campus must be denied. Bombs must be dropped; to be sure
children will die, but who can say it was we who put them in the
target area. From our point of view it is a precious way of life
that we defend - Cadillacs and all. But what the hostile man does
not know is that it is he who is the eventual victim of his own
extortion. With the adoption of hostility he surrenders his
capacity to judge the outcome of his way of life, and without that capacity he must inevitably go astray.
The acknowledgment of defeat or tragedy is not
a destructive step for man to take. It characterizes, instead,
the negative outcome of any crucial test of our way of life, and,
it is, therefore, an essential feature of human progress toward
more positive outcomes. Hostility does not, for this very reason,
contribute to human achievement. Primarily because it denies
failure it leads, instead, to the abatement of the human
enterprise, and substitutes for nobler undertakings a mask of
complacency.
A STEP FOR THE HUMANIST
In this way of thinking, which I have proposed
for the humanistically inclined psychologist there are three key
notions that must be lifted from the context of stimulus-response
psychology and recast in the light of a psychology of the man
himself, they are threat, aggression and hostility.
Threat, for the man himself, is the experience of
being on the brink of a major shift in his core construct system.
Aggression, for the man himself, is one's own initiative,
not what that initiative may lead another to do or feel. And so
with hostility too, hostility is the extortion of confirming
evidence to present to oneself when there seems too much at stake
to undertake the personal changes that natural evidence requires.
The humanistic psychologist's dilemma -
how to protect human audacity from human audacity without
stifling human audacity - finds another kind of solution when we
manage to step outside the stimulus-response solipsism. It is the
hostile, and not necessarily the aggressive enterprise, that must
be guarded against. The aggressive effort to understand man, or
to experiment with ways of accomplishing psychological feats
never before achieved, is not intrinsically destructive. It may,
of course, be hazardous.
It does become destructive, however, when one
tries to make it appear that disconfirming events did not
actually arise, or that what failed to occur actually happened.
And this, in turn, is generated by the notion that we ought
always to be right before we commit ourselves, a notion that
later makes it very hard to concede our mistakes, or to revise
our construction of the world when our heavily invested
anticipations fail to materialize.
Humanism reflects audacity in man. But this
audacity, when it substitutes extortion for disconfirmation,
disengages itself from the world and abandons the future of
mankind. Humanism, while it openly experiences defeat does not
succumb to it, for to do that would be to give up
man's aggressive undertakings altogether, and, with
them all the aspirations that arise from being tragically human.
Thus the experience of tragedy and not the sense of certainty is
the basis of all hope, and is indeed the most
essential step in the bold pursuit of better things. And that, I submit,
is a notion that lies close to the heart of the human
enterprise.
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