How are an individual’s political values formed?

Human beings have attitudes, behaviors, habits, stereotypes, and values. And somehow these mental attributes are developed or acquired in the course of normal human social life. But how, when, and with what results does this process work? And how persistent are a set of attitudes and values once established in the individual?

The topic here is a deeply interesting question — what forms us as the adult human beings with values and a moral framework that we eventually become? For the past fifty years political scientists and social psychologists have discussed a theory of the formation of political attitudes and values that emphasizes the “impressionable years”. This theory holds that children are fairly fluid in their values and political affinities, and that young people are most open to new values and ideas in the years between 17 and 25 — essentially the years of a traditional university education. And there seems to be survey evidence supporting the idea that the formative events of that period in a given person’s life become bedrock to their political identities, with relatively little change in later years.

David Sears is one of the early founders of this approach. He presented some of his ideas as early as 1975, and in 1983 he describes the “impressionable years” hypothesis in these terms:

A third view could be termed the impressionable years viewpoint, which suggests that any dispositions are unusually vulnerable in late adolescence and early adulthood, given strong enough pressure to change. In other stages of life, people are resistant to change, and of course, even in the most vulnerable life stage, they would not change in the absence of substantial pressure to change. At all ages, the content of the disposition is irrelevant. A specific and particularly interesting instance of the impressionable years hypothesis is the generational effect. This occurs when a sizable number of those in the supposedly impressionable life stage (late adolescence and earlly adulthood) are subjected to a common massive pressure to change on some particular issue, for example, when the nation is engaged in an unpopular war. It presumably yields interactions of birth cohort and dispositional content. The final viewpoint is persistence, which suggests that the residues of early (preadult) socialization are relatively immune to change in later years. This asserts a simple main effect of age, with dispositions acquired primarily in the preadult years. (“The Persistence of Early Political Predispositions: The Roles of Attitude Object and Life Stage”, Wheeler and Shaver, Review of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983: 81-82)

This theory suggests that the ambient political and cultural environment of one’s “impressionable years” (18-25) represents a powerful influence upon his or her lifetime political attitudes and values. The theory has been subjected to some rigorous quantitative efforts at empirical evaluation, with some evidence supporting its accuracy. Especially interesting is Krosnick and Alwin, “Aging and Susceptibility to Attitude Change” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology [1989] 57: 3 : 416-425). They found a reasonable level of support for the impressionable-years hypothesis. Here is their abstract:

Two hypotheses about the relation between age and susceptibility to attitude change were tested. The impressionable years hypothesis proposes that individuals are highly susceptible to attitude change during late adolescence and early adulthood and that susceptibility drops precipitously immediately thereafter and remains low throughout the rest of the life cycle. The increasing persistence hypothesis proposes that people become gradually more resistant to change throughout their lives. Structural equation models were applied to data from the 1956-1960,1972-1976, and 1980 National Election Panel Studies in order to estimate the stability of political attitudes and unreliability in measures of them. The results support the impressionable years hypothesis and disconfirm the increasing persistence hypothesis. A decrease in the over-time consistency of attitude reports among 66- to 83-year-olds was found to be due to increased random measurement error in their reports, not to increased attitude change.

For the Boomer generation (or the middle part of it anyway), the impressionable years were 1966-1974 or thereabouts. Major events during the period? Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968. Major unrest along racial lines occurred in dozens of cities in the US, including Chicago, Newark, and Los Angeles. The Kerner Commission report on urban unrest was released in 1968. The war in Vietnam became more and more divisive for American young people. The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act had been enacted in 1964 and 1965. Large demonstrations took place in Chicago in 1968 during the Democratic Convention. The first Moon landing took place in 1969. The feminist movement became a powerful national voice for equality in 1970 or so. The Watergate scandal and President Nixon’s resignation took place in 1972 and 1974. Tumult, large social protest movements, corrupt politicians, a seemingly “no-exit” war in Vietnam — the impressionable years for men and women born around 1950 were very different from those of people born fifteen years earlier or fifteen years later. With only one or two exceptions, these events helped to create habits of mind that counseled resistance, the power of public opposition to injustice, and the particular evils of American racism.

How does the impressionable-years theory contribute to the question of the rise of far-right attitudes and values (racism, xenophobia, receptivity to an authoritarian leader, male supremacy) among some young American and European men in the 2010s and forward? Were there features of life for young men and preadults in the period of roughly 1995-2010 that would explain the eruption of racist and authoritarian attitudes in the cohort coming of age during those years?

Two large factors are often mentioned. First is the prominence of racist and extremist social media influencers who have captured sizable audience of young men to subscribe to their hateful conspiracy theories. Nick Fuentes is just one example. But this isn’t entirely helpful; aren’t these right-wing entrepreneurs responding to the demand for hate created by an emerging generation rather than creating it? And second is the drumbeat of “anti-woke” impulses, trolling and “owning the libs”, and deliberately flouting norms like “don’t admire the Nazis”, “don’t deny the Holocaust”, or “don’t use the language of vile racism” in political discourse. (This is reflected in the recent scandals of encrypted chats by young GOP activists revealed in fall 2025.) Some of this extends back to the reckless language of conservative activists like Pat Buchanan and the John Birch Society (link), whose ranting took place before many of these young men were born. These “anti-woke” thrusts seen to resonate with this segment of young conservative men. Offending people is the goal, not the unfortunate side effect. And the “manosphere” is where it percolates in social media posts, game chats, Youtube videos, and encrypted Telegram chat rooms. But here again — did the John Birch Society and the Tea Party lay the ground for the radical far-right attitudes of one segment of Gen Z, or do we need to look for other causes that more directly impacted the lives of these young people?

The rise of the political attitudes of far-right extremism among young people is quite dangerous for our democracy, and dangerous for the groups who wind up being the objects of the vitriol. The language and demonstration of racist and neo-nazi social-political attitudes reflected in the “Unite the Right” riots in Charlottesville in 2017 speaks for itself: this is a movement based on white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and nostalgia for “strong leaders” who can fight for these values. And Trump, his closest allies, and his MAGA movement seem to encourage this hate-based ideological world. Stephen Miller is a true believer and Donald Trump has a long history of racist statements and ridicule. 

There is another complication as well: the far-right extremist faction of this age group is virulent and uninhibited; but it is a minority of its own generation. There are other “political attitude groups” in the same generation whose values are quite different — egalitarian, anti-racist, and affirmative of the value of an inclusive multicultural democracy. And, of course, there is the large group of young people who are disaffected from existing political institutions in the United Staes, frustrated by diminished opportunities for themselves and others, but inclined to turn away from any kind of political activism at all. They are “disaffected and disinvolved”. So the “impressionable years” hypothesis has a bit of a problem here as well: how is it that the experience world of the United States for young people in the period 1995-2010 gave rise to such different families of political attitudes among its young people? Part of the answer probably lies with the fact that the experiences of daily life differ widely across social and economic classes in the United States, across regions of the country, and across racial lines. So we might hypothesize that young men in Hamtramck, Michigan whose childhood reflected persistent deprivation; who did not find opportunities in high school that led either to better-paying job opportunities or to higher education; and who developed a rising level of resentment when they visited Somerset Mall in Oakland County for the standard of living that would never be theirs might develop political attitudes that highlighted resentment, disassociation from political loyalties, and an openness to antagonism to other ethnic and racial groups.

This topic relates to the questions raised by Desante and Smith in Racial Stasis (link), who focus on whether there has been substantial generational change on the topic of racial attitudes and prejudice since the 1960s.

Group identities and inclusive multicultural democracy

The United States is a multicultural democracy. This is simply an empirical fact; the country is a democracy (imperfect by many important measures); and it is multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-national. So what is involved in helping bring about a transition to an “inclusive” multicultural democracy — a social and political order embodying fundamental equality across all groups, developing a political psychology of mutual respect for the dignity and freedoms of members of other groups, and creating an environment of reasonably harmonious social and political life across and within different communities?

Jack Citrin and David Sears address some of these questions in American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism (2014). The book is a notable contribution in many dimensions, but of special interest to the topic of inclusive democracy is their effort to gain empirical insight into the “ethnic” or group identities of the groups that make up our population, and some ideas about the social processes that contribute to the formation of those identities. Here is how they characterize social identities:

Social identities refer to the dimensions of one’s self-concept defined by perceptions of similarity with some people and difference from others. They develop because people categorize themselves and others as belonging to groups and pursue their goals through membership in these groups. They have political relevance because they channel feelings of mutuality, obligation, and antagonism, delineating the contours of one’s willingness to help others as well as the boundaries of support for policies allocating resources based on group membership. Indeed, the intimate connection between the personal and the social bases of self-regard becomes clear when one recalls how quickly an insult to the dignitity of one’s group can trigger ethnic violence. (Citrin and Sears 2014: 31)

A person’s social identity may depend on many different kinds of personal characteristics: religion (evangelical vs. Protestant vs. Muslim), gender (M, F, X), region (Midwestern vs. South vs. Long Island), or occupation (blue collar, white collar, service). But Citrin and Sears underline the particular importance of racial and ethnic affiliations in U.S. social and political life.

This approach views racial and ethnic minorities as having especially strong ethnic identities, a sense of common fate with fellow group members, and perceptions of discrimination against their own group. These psychological foundations, we suggest, underlie the normative precepts of identity politics and multiculturalist ideology, particularly resonating with its emphasis on privileging ethnicity as a primary social identity. (19)

And they draw special attention to the relatively unique features of African-American identity in the United States, which they refer to as “black exceptionalism”:

Third, the black exceptionalism model hypothesizes that African Americans have always faced a uniquely powerful color line, one that is not completely impermeable but that continues to be difficult to crack. Despite their linguistic assimilation and their significant and ongoing contributions to a common popular culture, many blacks are excluded by the legacy of the past from the level of integration into the mainstream that voluntary immigrant groups have undergone, and, we argue, are continuing to undergo. Indeed, of all the major ethnic and racial groups blacks have, on average, by far the strongest levels of aggrieved ethnic group consciousness. Young blacks are especially likely to have strong group consciousness, suggesting enduring obstacles to interethnic cooperation. (22)

The black exceptionalism perspective argues that African Americans remain subjectd to uniquely high levels of prejudice and discrimination. Key to this view is the notion of the inertial power of history. Even as laws change, fundamental social practices and the mentalities of ordinary people typically follow only slowly, as in the classic contrast of “stateways” with “folkways.” The residues of racial prejudice in the behavior and attitudes of ordinary Americans have persisted long after the Emancipation Proclamation and 1960s-era civil rights legislation eliminated formalized racial inequality from the law books. (35)

It is important to reflect on these last two points. The persistence of racial prejudice and discrimination in US society is evident. There is indeed a “uniquely powerful color line” in the US. Likewise, the consequent social, economic, and political disparities for African American individuals and families are well-documented, whether we consider health status, family wealth, or educational opportunities. Black exceptionalism is not simply a perspective; it is a well understood historical reality (though a reality that the Trump administration is working very hard to conceal). (Here is an earlier post on this topic.)

In this book, and the research supporting it, Citrin and Sears are primarily interested in a problem that is somewhat distinct from the question of white racial attitudes. They are interested in the question of “national identity” in the context of multiple “ethnic or racial identities”, which they regard as the key issue raised by multiculturalism. Does the fact that Alice identifies as an African American woman make her less likely to have a strong affinity with the nation as a whole? Is she less “patriotic” than a typical member of another ethnic group? Is there a process of “assimilation” through which local identities (“Polish-American”, “Cuban-American”) subside in favor of a composite “American” identity? (For that matter, is this part of the hysterical reaction offered to the Bad Bunny halftime show by the right?)

On this orientation, the question raised by American Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism is whether specific ethnic and racial identities are compatible with an overarching “civic” or “national” identity. They consider three broad frameworks: cosmopolitan liberalism, soft multiculturalism, and hard multiculturalism. The question of whether levels of “racial and ethnic antagonism” have changed in various groups is secondary. In fact, the topic of generational change in racial attitudes — the question of whether Millennials are less racist than Boomers — is not addressed here directly at all. And yet Sears is himself one of the chief architects of the “symbolic racism” school of thought — the idea that the key change between generations has been the replacement of “old-fashioned biological racism” by a more “color-blind” racism that nonetheless perpetuates antagonism and fear by whites of African Americans.

So how are we to move beyond this “uniquely powerful color line”? Racism is a reality that is conveyed through individual actions and institutional effects. Part of progressive change must take the form of change of attitudes and culture on the part of white people, and of young people in particular. So it is especially important to have empirical and sociological data about the evolution of white racial attitudes since 1950. How have white attitudes, beliefs, and stereotypes about African American people changed during these decades? Has there been generational change? The “impressionable years” hypothesis—which suggests that individuals are highly susceptible to attitude change during late adolescence and early adulthood, and then “crystallize” and remain stable for the rest of their lives—is a cornerstone of some theories of political socialization (Krosnick and Alwin, “Aging and susceptibility to attitude change”). Did the dramatic moments and struggles of the civil rights movement change the way that young white people thought about their black compatriots? (The revolution was televised!) Did the Obama presidency or the Black Lives Movement move the dial? Are we a less racist society today when it comes to attitudes, stereotypes, and expectations? The arguments offered by DeSante and Smith in Racial Stasis suggest — not very much (link). And Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2022) fills in many of the blanks in Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. We need to have a new surge of practical thinking about how a more genuinely inclusive and respectful “culture of multiculturalism” will come about.

Memory and culture after 1989 in Central Europe

The years following the collapse of the socialist-Stalinist regimes of eastern Europe were not comfortable for the people of the GDR, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, and many other countries. The economic arrangements of a centrally planned economy abruptly collapsed, and new market institutions were slow to emerge and often appeared indifferent to the needs of the citizens. The results of "shock therapy" were prolonged and severe for large segments of these post-socialist countries (Hilmar 6-8). Till Hilmar's Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain tries to make sense of the period -- and the ways in which it was remembered in following decades. 

Here is how Hilmar defines his project:

I ask: how it is possible that people who underwent disruptive economic change perceive its outcomes in individual terms? A common answer is to say that we live in neoliberal societies that encourage people to put their self-interest first and to disregard others around them. People have become atomized and isolated, the argument goes, and they have unlearned what it means to be part of a community. They have forgotten what we owe each other. Yet something is not quite right about this diagnosis. It assumes that we live our lives today in a space that is somehow devoid of morality. It thereby misses a crucial fact: people are embedded in social relations, and they therefore articulate economic aspirations and experiences of a social dynamic. In this book, I daw on in-depth interviews with dozens of people who lived through disruptive economic change. Based on this research, I show that it is precisely the concern of what people owe each other -- the moral concern -- that drives how many people reason about economic outcomes. They perceive them, I demonstrate, through the lens of moral deservingness, judgments of economic worth that they pass on each other. (3)

The central topic, then, is how individual people remember and make sense of economic changes they have experienced. Hilmar places a locally embodied sense of justice at the center of the work of meaning-making that he explores in interviews with these ordinary people affected by a society-wide earthquake.

Hilmar's method is an especially interesting one. He compares two national cases, Czechoslovakia and the GDR, and he bases his research on focused interviews with 67 residents in the two countries during the transition. The respondents are drawn from two categories of skilled workers, engineers and healthcare workers. His approach "enabled a focus on people's work biography and their sense of change in social relations" (15).

His central theoretical tool is the idea of a moral framework against which people in specific times and places interpret and locate their memories. "The memory of ruptures is guided by concerns about social inclusion. What makes a person feel that he or she is a worthy member of society? In our contemporary world, the answer to this question has a lot to do with economics" (17). Or in other words, Hilmar proposes that people understand their own fates and those of others around them in terms of "deserving-ness" -- deserving their successes and deserving their failures. And Hilmar connects this scheme of judgment of "deserving" to a more basic idea of "social inclusion": the person is "included" when she conforms to existing standards and expectations of "deserving" behavior. "A person's sense of accomplishment and confidence -- in the professional, in the civic, as well as in the private realms -- are all part of a social and normative ensemble in which the grounds for acclaim are social and never just individual" (18). And he connects this view of the social and economic world to the ideas of "moral economy" offered by E.P. Thompson and Karl Polanyi. A period of inequality and suffering for segments of the population is perceived as endurable or unendurable, depending on how it fits into the prevailing definitions of legitimacy embodied in the historically specific moral economy of different segments of society. In the Czech and German cases Hilmar considers, social inclusion is expressed as having a productive role in socialism -- i.e., having a job (39), and the workplace provided the locus for many of the social relationships within which individuals located themselves.

The central empirical work of the project involves roughly seventy interviews of skilled workers in the two countries: engineers and healthcare workers. Biographies shed light on large change; and they also show how individual participants structured and interpreted their r memories of the past in strikingly different terms. This is where Hilmar makes the strongest case for the theoretical ideas outlined above about memory and moral frameworks. He sheds a great deal of light on how individuals in both countries experienced their professional careers before 1989, and how things changed afterwards. And he finds that "job loss", which was both epidemic and devastating in both countries following the collapse of socialism, was a key challenge to individuals' sense of self and their judgments about the legitimacy of the post-socialist economic and political arrangements. Privatization of state-owned companies is regarded in almost all interviews as a negative process, aimed at private capture of social wealth and carried out in ways that disregarded the interests of ordinary workers. And the inequalities that emerged in the post-1989 world were often regarded as profoundly illegitimate, based on privileged access rather than. merit or contribution:

People grew skeptical of the idea that above-average incomes and wealth could in fact be attained through hard work. Instead they began to associate it with nepotism and dishonesty. On these grounds, researchers posit that the principle of egalitarianism returned as the dominant justice belief after the bout of enthusiasm for market society. (94)

This is where the idea of "deservingness" comes in. Did X get the high-paid supervisor job because he or she "earned" it through superior skill and achievement, or through connections? Did Y make a fortune by purchasing a state-owned shoe factory for a low price and selling to a larger corporation at a high price because he or she is a brilliant deal maker, or because of political connections on both ends of the transactions?

The discussion of social relations, informal relations, and trust in post-socialist societies is also very interesting. As Delmar puts the point, "you can't get anything done without the right friends" (118). And social relationships require trust -- trust that others will live up to expectations and promises, that they will honor their obligations to oneself. Without trust, it is impossible to form informal practices of collaboration and cooperation. And crucially: how much trust is possible in a purely market society, if participants are motivated solely by their own economic interests? And what about trust in institutions -- either newly private business firms or government agencies and promises? How can a worker trust her employer not to downsize for the sake of greater profits? How can a citizen trust the state once the criminal actions of Stasi were revealed (138)? What was involved in recreating a basis for trust in institutions after the collapse of socialism?

Through these interviews and interpretations the book provides a very insightful analysis of how judgments of justice and legitimacy exist as systems of interpretation of experience for different groups, and how different those systems sometimes are for co-existing groups of individuals facing very different circumstances. And the concrete work of interview and interpretation across the Czech and German cases well illustrates both the specificity of these "moral frameworks" and some of the ways in which sociologists can investigate them. The book is original, illuminating, and consistently insightful, and it shows a deep acquaintance with the literature on memory and social identity. As such Deserved is a highly valuable contribution to cultural sociology.

(It is interesting to recall Martin Whyte's discussion of generational differences in China about the legitimacy of inequalities in post-Mao China. The Mao generation is not inclined to excuse growing inequalities, whereas the next several generations were willing to accept the legitimacy of inequalities if they derived from merit rather than position and corrupt influence (link). This case aligns nicely with Hilmar's subject matter.) 

Social cognitive frameworks and social class

It is evident that all of us "filter" the social worlds that we inhabit according to a set of expectations, assumptions, stereotypes, and values. We understand a social interaction that we ourselves participate in, or merely observe, through these assumptions and filters. We might describe these systems of thought as "social-cognitive frameworks" -- the collection of basic assumptions that an individual possesses in terms of which he or she conceptualizes and frames the social world around him, and some of the basic norms, values, and pro/con attitudes that influence behavior in everyday environments. These frameworks are not inevitable or uniform within a particular society. Instead, they are influenced by ordinary experiences in life in work, neighborhood, family, school, and military settings. And surely they vary dramatically by one's position in the systems of class, gender, race, ethnicity, caste, and status within which one lives. Here I would like to explore one aspect of how these social-cognitive frameworks are constituted through an individual's early and young-adult experiences -- the world of work.

A social-cognitive framework involves something like a taxonomy of the various categories of people around one, along with powerful social emotions: who can be trusted? Who feared? Who is a potential friend and ally, and who is an adversary or enemy? Which groups are thought to be admirable, and which contemptible? Are there socially specific indicators or labels that guide judgments like these -- a way of dressing, a tattoo, a readiness to smile, a motorcycle? And, finally, a social-cognitive framework involves a set of values and orienting goals for the individual -- the activities and achievements that he or she aspires to attain.

For example, what do Amazon warehouse workers think of the professors they may encounter when they visit Madison or Ann Arbor -- what assumptions do they make about the professors' social attitudes? And vice versa -- what assumptions do professors make about the hourly working people they encounter? And what about the technical specialists at the warehouse or factory -- how do the Amazon workers think about these "white collar" "professional" men and women, and how do they behave towards them?

I’ve mentioned in an earlier post that George Orwell attempted to get inside the social-cognitive frameworks of the working class men and women with whom he interacted in the north of England, as recorded in The Road to Wigan Pier. He paid close attention to the ways these men and women talk, dress, eat, work, and raise their children, and made it very clear that these practices and mental frameworks differ a great deal from other social strata in England in the period. Orwell identified his own class origin as "lower-upper-middle class", and has a clear understanding of the distinctive social views of that segment of English society:

I was born into what you might describe as the lower-upper-middle class. The upper-middle class, which had its heyday in the ‘eighties and ‘nineties, with Kipling as its poet laureate, was a sort of mound of wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded. Or perhaps it would be better to change the metaphor and describe it not as a mound but as a layer—the layer of society lying between £2,000 and £300 a year: my own family was not far from the bottom. You notice that I define it in terms of money, because that is always the quickest way of making yourself understood. Nevertheless, the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system; rather like a jerry-built modern bungalow haunted by medieval ghosts. Hence the fact that the upper-middle class extends or extended to incomes as low as £300 a year—to incomes, that is, much lower than those of merely middle-class people with no social pretensions. Probably there are countries where you can predict a man’s opinions from his income, but it is never quite safe to do so in England; you have always got to take his traditions into consideration as well. A naval officer and his grocer very likely have the same income, but they are not equivalent persons and they would only be on the same side in very large issues such as a war or a general strike—possibly not even then. (chapter 8)

Here is his portrait of the lower-middle class gentile view of the working class:

And what is this attitude? An attitude of sniggering superiority punctuated by bursts of vicious hatred. Look at any number of Punch during the past thirty years. You will find it everywhere taken for granted that a working-class person, as such, is a figure of fun, except at odd moments when he shows signs of being too prosperous, whereupon he ceases to be a figure of fun and becomes a demon. It is no use wasting breath in denouncing this attitude. It is better to consider how it has arisen, and to do that one has got to realise what the working classes look like to those who live among them but have different habits and traditions. (chapter 8)

Where do these social-cognitive frameworks come from? Orwell tries to answer this question as well.

I have dwelt on these subjects because they are vitally important. To get rid of class-distinctions you have got to start by understanding how one class appears when seen through the eyes of another. It is useless to say that the middle classes are ‘snobbish’ and leave it at that. You get no further if you do not realise that snobbishness is bound up with a species of idealism. It derives from the early training in which a middle-class child is taught almost simultaneously to wash his neck, to be ready to die for his country, and to despise the ‘lower classes’.  (chapter 8)

And Orwell is persuaded that these assumptions are deep and stable, once established.

 A middle-class person embraces Socialism and perhaps even joins the Communist Party. How much real difference does it make? Obviously, living within the framework of capitalist society, he has got to go on earning his living, and one cannot blame him if he clings to his bourgeois economic status. But is there any change in his tastes, his habits, his manners, his imaginative background—his ‘ideology’, in Communist jargon? Is there any change in him except that he now votes Labour, or, when possible, Communist at the elections? It is noticeable that he still habitually associates with his own class; he is vastly more at home with a member of his own class, who thinks him a dangerous Bolshie, than with a member of the working class who supposedly agrees with him; his tastes in food, wine, clothes, books, pictures, music, ballet, are still recognisably bourgeois tastes; most significant of all, he invariably marries into his own class. (chapter 8)

Throughout Orwell's essays there are two consistent themes: that the social perceptions and attitudes of English men and women differ dramatically by class, and that (unlike many of his counterparts) he has a fundamental respect for the values and perspectives of working people. His analysis of the poetry of Kipling, for example, is very much concerned with the worldview of social relations that it expresses.

Charles Sabel addressed this question of worker mentality (or what I am calling "social-cognitive frameworks") in Work and Politics. One of the most interesting parts of Sabel's book is the attention he gives to the consciousness and values of various strata of workers. His description of the "craftsman's ethos" is particularly intriguing, since it pertains to a category of labor that is in a sense a carry-over from pre-modern handicraft economies:

From the point of view of the middle class, the craftsman is a contradictory figure, capable of tasks that presuppose self-esteem and assertiveness, yet in a more general way lacking both. Despite his apparent social proximity to middle-class managers and social scientists, he has remained as mysterious to them as the other parts of the working class. The craftsman's autonomy on the job is frequently attested: Not only does his independence often make supervision superfluous, but he frequently outwits managers in complex negotiations over work rules and piece rates.... Yet it has been repeatedly shown that the craftsman's attitudes toward education, child rearing, and the social hierarchy are those typical of what might be called a subaltern social class. Where the middle-class manager teaches his son to questions rules and inquire into the justification of hierarchy, the skilled worker often teaches his son to accept both respectfully. (82) But to judge by the few studies of the experience of apprenticeship itself, however organized and by whomever administered, the programs teach two related lessons. The first concerns objects and techniques, the second the social preconditions and implications of the craft's knowledge. (83)

Sabel's answer to the question, what are some of the the primary determinants of a person's social-cognitive framework, is to point to the circumstances and values inculcated in technical training programs and internships. These processes of formation and training lead to an orienting set of values and aspirations. And these values are distinct from those that a similarly talented young person would gain from a university education in engineering. Sabel writes:

Incorporation into a new social world also defines the craftsman's hopes for the future, and in ways that shed light on his apparently inconsistent behavior in the labor market. What counts for him now is technical prowess, not place in an officially defined hierarchy of jobs: Titles are not important, savoir faire is. Careful studies by Siegfried Braun and Jochen Fuhrmann show that this is precisely the opposite of the middle-class attitude. The middle class conceived of a career not as a series of successively more complex jobs, but as a progression through a socially recognized hierarchy of posts, each patently more prestigious than the preceding one. The craftsman wants to be able to do something; there is evidence that he is often indifferent to or ignorant of the career possibilities -- understood in the middle-class sense -- that apprenticeship opens to him. (84)

 

Sabel refers to this value orientation as a craftsman ethos, and he believes it is a distinctive social-cognitive orientation to the contemporary world of work.

These passages provide clear documentation of the workings of distinctive social-cognitive frameworks across class (in England, anyway). And it seems likely that a similar ethnographic account could be provided for the many forms of social separation that exist in modern US society as well: across lines of race, religion, gender, ethnicity, and age cohort, for example. Further, these differences of perspective are important, since they create the environment in which social interaction, friendship, or political solidarity arise. Social cohesion and political persuasion are important but challenged goals in twenty-first century United States (as well as other countries); and it seems apparent that group-specific differences in social expectations and assumptions about other groups are likely to be important for cohesion, conflict, and persuasion.

This raises a very interesting question: where does this kind of inquiry fit within the domain of the social and behavioral sciences? Is it a question for ethnographers? For micro-sociologists like Erving Goffman? For social psychologists or opinion researchers? For journalists like Barbara Ehrenreich and Studs Terkel? And more abstractly, is it possible to formulate a better theory or landscape map of the socially situated actor that takes into account the formation and influence of diverse social-cognitive frameworks?

Greenblatt's new historicism

Stephen Greenblatt is a pathbreaking literary critic. But since the 1990s I've also looked at Greenblatt as a genuinely innovative and insightful contributor to the historical social sciences as well. He poses questions that are enormously important for anyone trying to make sense of humanity in history. What is a cultural identity? How do background social, cultural, and ideological conditions shape the individual's mental frameworks?

Greenblatt's advocacy and formulation of the "New Historicism" is an important contribution to literary criticism. But it is likewise a very important contribution to a topic of current interest to me, the question of the making of human cultures in concrete and heterogeneous terms. Nasrullah Mambrol does an excellent job of providing an exposition of the main ideas of the new historicism in a series of essays in Literary Theory and Criticism, including "New Historicism" (2020; link), "New Historicism: A Brief Note" (2016; link), and "Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism" (2017; link).)

Of special interest to current philosophy of social science is the heterogeneity and plasticity that the "New Historicism" presupposes concerning cultures and worldviews. Here is how Mambrol (2017) summarizes this idea:

In contrast with this earlier formalism and historicism, the New Historicism questions its own methodological assumptions, and is less concerned with treating literary works as models of organic unity than as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.” New Historicism also challenges the hierarchical distinction between “literary foreground” and “political background,” as well as between artistic and other kinds of production. It acknowledges that when we speak of “culture,” we are speaking of a “complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs.”

Mambrol highlights this feature of "world-view heterogeneity" in his "New Historicism" piece (2020):

Unlike the prewar historicists, they [the New Historicists] refused to assume that Renaissance texts mirrored, from a safe distance, a unified and coherent world-view that was held by a whole population, or at least by an entire literate class. (Mambrol, 2020)

Culture and worldview are not "unitary" entities; rather, there are important differences across a population and within a generation with respect to very important aspects of identity. This is relevant to the interpretation of literature because it implies that the critic needs to try to work out how the author related to "the complex network of institutions" of culture that were prevalent in his or her lifetime. Here is Mambrol:

[Greenblatt] argues that the scene in which his authors lived was controlled by a variety of authorities— institutions such as the church, court, family, and colonial administration, as well as agencies such as God or a sacred book—and that these powers came into conflict because they endorsed competing patterns for organizing social experience. From Greenblatt’s New Historicist perspective, the rival codes and practices that these authorities sponsored were cultural constructions, collective fictions that communities created to regulate behavior and make sense of their world; however, the powers themselves tended to view their customs as natural imperatives, and they sought to represent their enemies as aliens or demonic parodists of genuine order. (Mambrol 2020)

To put it simply, there was no unitary mentality of sixteenth-century English culture; rather, there were multiple narratives and texts with rather different implications for the individual. We might ask, though Mambrol does not, whether all such variants were equally powerful, or whether one or more were "hegemonic"; and the answer seems obvious: powerful institutions like the church and the state also had powerful means for conveying the lineaments of their preferred ideology. But hegemony does not imply univocal acceptance, and as Gramsci insisted, resistant voices and thoughts are possible even within "hegemonic" ideological forces. This means, as Greenblatt is very eloquent in discovering, that subversive and critical ideas in literature can emerge from a contentious set of ideologies, some of which are "hegemonic". (See James Scott's similar view about "hidden transcripts" in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts; link.)

Mambrol suggests that Greenblatt's 1987 essay "Towards a Poetics of Culture" is an important place where readers can find clarification and amplification of the purpose and ideas of the New Historicism (link). The essay is published with a few minor changes as chapter one of H. Aram Veeser's The New Historicism. Greenblatt is emphatic about several points. The New Historicism is not a new "theory" of criticism or of the relationship between literature and the social environment; it is not a manifesto. Instead, it is a call for recognition of the fluidity of culture and worldview, and the many-many relationships that exist between the many cultures of a time and the literatures and artistic creations of the time. Literature emerges from concrete social and mental arrangements in society; but the relationships that exist are not deterministic, and -- crucially -- different authors respond to different versions of the mental frameworks of their time. Here is Greenblatt:

I propose that the general question addressed by Jameson and Lyotard—what is the historical relation between art and society or between one institutionally demarcated discursive practice and another?—does not lend itself to a single, theoretically satisfactory answer of the kind that Jameson and Lyotard are trying to provide. Or rather theoretical satisfaction here seems to depend upon a utopian vision that collapses the contradictions of history into a moral imperative. (kl 370)

His critique of both Jameson (New Marxism) and Lyotard (Post-structuralism) is that both systems are flawed precisely because they hope that a single abstract theory of capitalism can answer the question of the relationship between literature and society. No! Rather, historical inquiry -- inquiry that is sensitive to detail, to contingency, and to the heterogeneity of social and structural realities -- will suffice to provide a partial answer to a question such as: How did Shakespeare's cultural and mental world influence his plays? Historical research, not theoretical development and application, can allow for meaningful and illuminating answers to particular questions like these; and there are no general theoretical answers to the big question: How do social institutions influence or determine artistic and literary creation?

These comments have to do with literary interpretation. But the point is relevant for social scientists for a similar reason: rather than asking, "how do white working class men think about Donald Trump?" or "how do Latina women relate to the Democratic Party?", we need to be receptive to the idea that there is no single answer to the question. There is variation across each of these groups. At the same time, the ideological struggle between "white supremacy", "Reaganite rejection of government power", and "adherence to liberal democratic values" reflects a hugely important battleground of identities and mental frameworks in the contemporary United States. Greenblatt's masterful analysis of the currents of authoritarianism in contemporary US politics, and the Trump presidency in particular, through his analysis of Shakespeare's tyrants, is brilliant (link). And the aptness of Greenblatt's treatment of Richard III as a foil for Donald Trump illustrates an important point: tyranny depends on shaping values and expectations in the public. And for mysterious reasons, it is hard to dispute the fact that Trump and his acolytes shifted the terms of public thinking about the state and political legitimacy. What seemed like unhinged bravado when candidate Trump uttered these words now seems only an obvious truth today (as quoted in The Guardian in 2018): "US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is so confident in his support base that he said he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue “and shoot somebody” and still not lose voters."

What is the relevance of "New Historicism" to the idea that humanity is self-creating when it comes to culture? The connection is straightforward. Greenblatt demonstrates in his criticism and his more reflective writings that literary creation emerges from an intellectual and moral world that is full of difference, change, and contradiction; that the ambient ideas of a time are sometimes horrible, sometimes dominant, but never univocal; and that writers like Shakespeare have the ability to create something new for human beings to contemplate as they consider morality, social existence, and the tasks of living together. This implies a capacity for creativity that extends beyond literature and into morality and narratives of identity.

Buffy the existentialist vampire slayer

Here is a hard question. Can the creators of television shows and other kinds of pop culture be understood sometimes to pose fundamental and important questions about human life and morality? We probably all believe that great novelists are able to confront and explore hard human moral predicaments and life contradictions -- often in ways that are more penetrating than the most astute philosophical writings on these subjects. Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment, Gustave Flaubert in Madame Bovary, James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time, Alice Walker in The Color Purple -- all of these writers have complex moral imaginations and they confront and question some of the profound issues of real human lives. Can the same be said of the creators of television series? Is there an existential or moral side to Hill Street Blues or Grey's Anatomy? And what about Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

I suppose the conventional answer is that there is a sharp and uncrossable line between great literature and popular television culture -- the former can be profound and insightful, whereas the latter is unavoidably shallow and empty, from a philosophical or moral point of view. Shakespeare was great in ways in which Steven Bochco could never attain. And yet this seems not to be so clearly the case as one might imagine. Many viewers of The Wire, for example, have felt that the series has some very important sociological insights about race and urban life in America today, and David Simon is credited for a genuine artistic achievement in the five seasons of the show (link). 

This brings me to Buffy. At first glance the series looks like pure adolescent fodder, with a dollop of horror show stirred into the mix. The show is the creation of Joss Whedon, who has earned a great deal of praise for his creativity and also some harsh criticism for his style and behavior with the cast in production.

The concept of the show is fairly simple. Buffy is a high school sophomore in California, a new arrival after her expulsion from another school for unexplained absences. As it turns out, her absences and other forms of weird behavior all stem from the fact that she is a "slayer" -- the unique young woman of her generation who is specifically ready to confront and slay the vampires and other demons that most of the normal world fails to see. The series rolls out a handful of high school kids as main characters, as well as a growing roster of horrible and long-lived demons and vampires just seeking a way to overturn the dominion of humans on earth. The high school side of the story is roughly as engaging (or unengaging) as Community, another television series about young people who are students at a community college -- pure sitcom. But the secret world of demons and vampires that makes up the dramatic thrust of the plot of Buffy is complex and involving. And this fictional world is involving because of the issues of evil, freedom, personal identity, responsibility, and "soul" that it raises. (Here is an appreciation of the show in Vox by a pair of talented television critics; link.)

Two characters in particular carry a great deal of the moral and existential weight of the series -- Angel and Spike. Both are vampires who have managed to regain their souls, while retaining their memories of their horrible actions as soulless vampires over a thousand years. Each of them has committed terrible acts against humans, without conscience. Having regained their "souls", they are able to reflect on these acts in the past, and to reflect on their personal responsibility or culpability for these past actions.

These are philosophical issues; if only there were a philosophical tradition within which they might be discussed. It turns out that there is such a discourse. The Whedon Studies Association was formed a few years ago by a number of individuals with a serious interest in Whedon's corpus, and it has attracted a number of very interesting discussions and commentaries on Buffy. One contribution that I find especially valuable is an article written by Dean Kowalski, a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, titled "Visions of the Soul: Looking Back on Buffy and Angel" (link). Kowalski approaches the topic in a rigorous philosophical way: What is the soul? What different interpretations of "soul" have been offered in explication of Whedon's fictional universe? How do these theories help to shed light on the moral situation of the various characters in the drama? Kowalski considers an ontological theory of the soul -- "the soul is a thing that a person possesses; when he or she is infected by a demon he loses his soul and becomes a vampire". And he considers an existential theory -- "the soul is a metaphor for our capacity for moral choice". A vampire regains his soul when he or she chooses to act in a deliberate and free way. A vampire is a soulless monster; but he or she or it can become good by exercising a capacity for choosing to act in a morally good way; she can regain her soul. Kowalski quotes Scott McLaren, an early contributor to the Whedon Studies Association:

Scott McLaren acknowledges that “soul-talk” on Buffy and Angel can be interpreted metaphorically. He writes, “The soul can also be defined existentially: Angel resists temptation not simply because he ‘has’ a soul... but rather because, existentially, he makes a deliberate moral choice” (McLaren 13). McLaren further claims that “soul-talk” is also “an existential metaphor for a particular moral orientation” (13). Thus, the soul as metaphor can apply to any one ethically significant choice or a concerted effort to continue making similar choices. Due to the emphasis upon altering one’s own existence via the choices one makes, let us call this the existentialist interpretation of the soul. 134

Like a good literary critic, Kowalski and the other authors he discusses make substantial use of the details of the dialogue and plot to provide evidence for their claims; and like a good philosopher, Kowalski engages in careful conceptual analysis and analytical probing to attempt to gain clarity about difficult moral questions. It is therefore a little difficult to identify Kowalski's own genre. His article is a careful philosophical essay on freedom, identity, and the concept of the soul; and it is also a detailed analysis of the thought-world involved in a seven-season drama about supernatural creatures who do massive evil. This may be confusing; but it is also very stimulating and challenging, in exactly the way that a philosophy essay ought to be. It is good philosophy on a non-orthodox topic.

So what about Buffy? Does the series over its seven seasons have "literary or philosophical" value? Here is a very interesting quote about Buffy the Vampire Slayer from Emily Nussbaum in the New Yorker (quoted in the Vox article linked above):

[1999] was a year when I was not yet a professional TV critic, just a woman, standing in front of a television show, begging everyone to love it. Every week, I watched The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I was an avid fan of both, convinced that [Sopranos creator] David Chase and [Buffy creator] Joss Whedon were turning television into something radical and groundbreaking, the former by deconstructing the mob genre (as well as capitalism and psychotherapy), the latter by forging a mythic, feminist-inflected meld of horror, comedy, and teen drama.

What this implies to me is that there is no clear line between those genres that provide real insights and those that do not -- Madame Bovary on one side of the line, The Young and the Restless on the other. Rather, talented creators take up their tools in many locations and in many genres, and it is possible to find substantive, important discussions of large human questions across a very broad range of cultural products. And along the way, it is possible that some of the toughest moral questions that we face may find some degree of clarification as a result of the dramatic and creative work done by people like David Simon and Joss Whedon.

One reason I find the hidden world of Buffy the Vampire Slayer of interest is the unexpected convergence it seems to create with the allegory I wrote in the blog a few months ago (link) -- without any knowledge of Buffy. In that entry I imagined a thousand-year-old man attempting to uncover and come to terms with the sometimes awful things he had done in earlier centuries -- which sounds a lot like the situation of Angel in the series. And my reason for writing the allegory was to consider whether there is a serious insight we can learn from this imaginary story that helps us make sense of the evils of the twentieth century -- certainly one of the toughest moral questions we can pose for ourselves. But in a way, it seems as though Joss Whedon has something equally ambitious in mind as well for his teen-oriented horror show.

Does philosophy offer consolation?

image: Martin Buber

Alain de Botton's Consolations of Philosophy poses a bit of a puzzle. Why "consolations"? And why philosophy? How does philosophy come into the picture? For many professional philosophers from the past seventy-five years, the answer would be: not at all. Philosophy, in the analytic tradition anyway, is not concerned with the individual person's subjective wellbeing, or the way she or he thinks about life's challenges, disappointments, and tragedies, or the human predicament from the inside. So "consolation" isn't part of the job at all. It's hard to imagine Quine or Carnap thinking much about the topic, or even taking it seriously. And likewise, it's hard to see Berkeley, Hume, or Kant engaging in this strand of conversation. But it isn't hard to imagine a rich conversation on this general range of topics with with philosophers from other traditions and times -- for example, Plato, Seneca, Montaigne, Ricoeur, Buber, or Levinas. We might think most broadly of a divide between the "underlaborers of science" view of philosophy (Locke) and the "interpreters of the human condition" view of philosophy (Socrates).

In fact, we need to recognize from the start that philosophy is not one unified thing. Carnap on the foundations of empirical knowledge is as intellectually distant from Martin Buber on the I-thou relationship as zoology is from organic chemistry. Philosophy is not defined by its etymology; philosophy is not "the discipline embodying the love of wisdom". "Love of wisdom" does not define a unified discipline at all. The tradition of philosophy that derived most strongly from issues about the nature of empirical knowledge, and that eventually became philosophy of science and mathematics and the school of analytic philosophy, is profoundly different from the tradition woven around the moral realities of a human life -- the examined life -- from the ancients to Montaigne. Locke and Socrates are indeed miles apart -- as are Ryle and Buber. Most categorically, we might say that they have nothing in common but the name.

Is there a term that could be used to encompass the approach to the kinds of reflections associated with Socrates, Epicurus, Seneca, and Lucretius more adequately than simply "philosophy"? Perhaps there is -- a term that also derives from ancient philosophy and plays a key role in Aristotle's ethics. This is the concept of phronesis, or practical wisdom. In contrast to two other kinds of human knowledge identified by Aristotle (episteme and techne), phronesis has to do with "wisdom in the conduct of action". Contemporary philosophy seems to be best understood as the lineal descendent of the study of episteme. This kind of philosophy already has a name; it is "epistemology". If we understand the challenge of acting wisely as including the pursuit of a clear and justified understanding of one's guiding values and purposes, then the study of phronesis would encompass the kind of self-reflection and deliberation characteristic of Socrates and Epicurus. So we might call it "phronesiology," in analogy with "epistemology". (Oddly enough, this word is already in use; look it up on Google!) This distinction permits a reconsideration of the branches of philosophy. The kind of examination of the genuine value of a human life well lived that is the central purpose of Botton's Consolations of Philosophy and Status Envy has a very natural home in the family tree of philosophy; it is a developed theory of phronesis.

Consider this discussion of phronesis (practical wisdom) in Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, sect. 5:

Regarding practical wisdom we shall get at the truth by considering who are the persons we credit with it. Now it is thought to be the mark of a man of practical wisdom to be able to deliberate well about what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respect, e.g. about what sorts of thing conduce to health or to strength, but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general. This is shown by the fact that we credit men with practical wisdom in some particular respect when they have calculated well with a view to some good end which is one of those that are not the object of any art. It follows that in the general sense also the man who is capable of deliberating has practical wisdom.

Here is a more specific passage in which Aristotle offers a specific analysis of the goods a person pursues (NE Book 1, sect. 1). Notice that it has much the same character as the reflections in which Botton, Epicurus, and Montaigne are engaged:

Further, men seem to pursue honour in order that they may be assured of their goodness; at least it is by men of practical wisdom that they seek to be honoured, and among those who know them, and on the ground of their virtue; clearly, then, according to them, at any rate, virtue is better. And perhaps one might even suppose this to be, rather than honour, the end of the political life. But even this appears somewhat incomplete; for possession of virtue seems actually compatible with being asleep, or with lifelong inactivity, and, further, with the greatest sufferings and misfortunes; but a man who was living so no one would call happy, unless he were maintaining a thesis at all costs. (Book 1, sect. 1)

Here Aristotle asks some fundamental questions: What do men pursue, what are the authentic goods towards which they should aim, and what are the merely instrumental goods? Further, Aristotle postulates that we can answer these kinds of questions through abstract, reasoned analysis and deliberation -- or in common terms, "philosophy".

Now we can understand better what Botton means by "philosophy". Botton's underlying premise is that there is an ancient tradition of reflective thinking focused on the human condition, from the individual subjective person's point of view. This kind of philosophy raises questions of self-definition, self-awareness, an understanding of one's position in the world, and the nature of the situations in the world that influence one's aspirations, happiness, and satisfaction. For Botton, philosophy is about the human condition, in celebrations and moments of happiness, and in illness, disappointments, and death. And the philosophers whom Botton admires most are those who spent their lives taking seriously the question, what is it to be a human being? How should I live? This is the branch of philosophy that cares about reflection, self-definition, and critical assessment of one's own life and the lives of others. Or using the term just introduced, it is "philosophy as phronesiology". 

So what about "consolations"? What is it to be consoled? What is it to need consolation? Here is one interpretation: Consolation is part of a complex relationship between a person, his or her expectations of life, and a severe disappointment. It may be the tragic loss of a loved one, or being fired from one's job, or having a really bad book review for a book one spent years writing. It is a shocking divergence between what one wants and what one unexpectedly gets. To be consoled is to be reconciled with a circumstance that seems horrible, unhappy, and impossible to accept. Reconciliation does not imply erasure of the bad event; rather, it implies coming to see that the event can somehow be incorporated within a broader understanding of the context. One's phronesis can be broadened. And this seems to require something like a reorientation towards one's expectations of life and the world. For example: We've arrived at the exotic luxury restaurant for a long-anticipated meal with a valued group of friends; but the restaurant is unexpectedly closed. We are deeply, profoundly disappointed. Consolation comes when we reflect on the source of our disappointment -- the anticipation we had experienced of unforgettable conversation with special friends in the context of a unique gastronomic experience. We then readjust our thinking -- the friends and conversation are still available to us, the gastronomy is a brief and fundamentally unimportant pleasure, and we can have our "dinner with Andre" at the Wendy's down the road. As Botton demonstrates in the sad story of Marcia, mother of Metilius who died young, consolation may take the form of recognition that fate is haphazard and cruel; there is no meaning to a tragic death of a young person; and yet one's grief must come to an end and one must live again (8).

So, once again, why philosophy? In what sense can "philosophy as phronesiology" lead to consolation? Botton suggests that there is a tradition of thought, encompassing Socrates, Diogenes, Epicurus, the Stoics, and others that provides something like an answer. If one has thought deeply and extensively about the human condition, the things one really values, the randomness of "luck", the brevity of life -- that is, if one has thought in the ways that Epicurus or Seneca reflected -- then bad fortune, betrayal, the collapse of a business enterprise, and the loss of a loved one all have a place in one's map of the nature of life. It is no more than magical thinking to wish that bad luck had not happened to me; it is in the nature of bad luck to strike without warning. Best prepared is the person who has recognized the possibility of bad luck, who has sorted out the goods that are genuinely important, and who has acted persistently with one's talents and creativity to bring those goods to fruition during the time one is allotted. This person can be consoled by philosophy, or through philosophy.

Orwell's study of mentality and culture

George Orwell wrote a great deal of literary criticism, book reviews, and intellectual commentary, almost always with a down-to-earth plain speaking that entirely rejected the lofty English conventions of academic writing. (Here is a fairly comprehensive Kindle collection of his essays, A Collection of Essays.) What I find interesting about Orwell's literary commentaries is their honesty, seriousness, and nuance. They are completely fascinating to read. Orwell really wants to get to the bottom of this point or that, whether it concerns Tolstoy, Dickens, Kipling, or Henry Miller. Orwell was extremely broadly read, both in English literature and European literature more generally. And he has specific, thoughtful reactions to all of it. Moreover, his opinions are non-doctrinaire. Although Orwell brings his own orientation about the social realities of England and Europe and he is always aware of the social conditions of workers and farmers that are often unnoticed in literature, he rejects entirely the cant of English Marxist theory and vocabulary. 

His analysis of Tolstoy's surprising polemic against the literary value of Shakespeare as a playwright ("Lear, Tolstoy, and the Fool") is a good example of Orwell's literary imagination. He takes Tolstoy's claims seriously, tries to give a credible interpretation of them, and refutes Tolstoy's central biases against Shakespeare. Likewise, his extensive treatment of Charles Dickens is enthralling -- Orwell finds that Dickens has almost no acquaintance with ordinary laborers in spite of his sympathy for the poor, and that his desire to improve society turns almost entirely upon an exhortation to the rich to be more kind rather than a demand for structural change in society. And his treatment of Kipling -- an author usually dismissed as a pure jingoistic cheerleader for British colonialism -- is quite nuanced.

[Kipling] identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, 'In such and such circumstances, what would you DO?', whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions. Where it is a permanent and pensioned opposition, as in England, the quality of its thought deteriorates accordingly. Moreover, anyone who starts out with a pessimistic, reactionary view of life tends to be justified by events, for Utopia never arrives and 'the gods of the copybook headings', as Kipling himself put it, always return. Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally. This warped his political judgement, for the British ruling class were not what he imagined, and it led him into abysses of folly and snobbery, but he gained a corresponding advantage from having at least tried to imagine what action and responsibility are like. It is a great thing in his favour that he is not witty, not 'daring', has no wish to ÉPATER LES BOURGEOIS. He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks. Even his worst follies seem less shallow and less irritating than the 'enlightened' utterances of the same period, such as Wilde's epigrams or the collection of cracker-mottoes at the end of MAN AND SUPERMAN.

Literary criticism is one thing; but Orwell has another goal in discussing the published word that has nothing to do with literary values. Rather, in his treatment of popular literature -- penny novels, boys' magazines, murder mysteries, even poetry -- Orwell is interested in discovering something important about the mental worldview of a particular generation. In particular, he is especially interested in the generation of young English men of his own age, born in 1900 or so, living through the Great War, and plunged into World War II, fascism, and totalitarianism. He tries to form a connection between the content, style, and social assumptions of a body of "boy's stories", for example, and the effects these assumptions and styles are likely to have had on the mental frameworks of the boys of a specific generation. He provides a fairly detailed content analysis of these stories and their presentation in the pulp magazines of the period.

Orwell is quite explicit in believing that the earliest influences on the development of a child -- books, stories, comics, postcards -- have a profound effect on their adult sensibilities and imagination. In "Why I Write" he puts it this way:

I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in--at least this is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own--but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.

Take the interesting example of A. E. Housman's Shropshire Lad.

Among people who were adolescent in the years 1910-25, Housman had an influence which was enormous and is now not at all easy to understand. In 1920, when I was about seventeen, I probably knew the whole of the SHROPSHIRE LAD by heart. I wonder how much impression the SHROPSHIRE LAD makes at this moment on a boy of the same age and more or less the same cast of mind? No doubt he has heard of it and even glanced into it; it might strike him as cheaply clever–probably that would be about all. Yet these are the poems that I and my contemporaries used to recite to ourselves, over and over, in a kind of ecstasy, just as earlier generations had recited Meredith's 'Love in a Valley', Swinburne's 'Garden of Proserpine' etc., etc. 

It just tinkles. But it did not seem to tinkle in 1920. Why does the bubble always burst? To answer that question one has to take account of the EXTERNAL conditions that make certain writers popular at certain times. Housman's poems had not attracted much notice when they were first published. What was there in them that appealed so deeply to a single generation, the generation born round about 1900? ("Inside the Whale", 1940)

Or in other words, what can we learn about the mentality of boys and adolescents around the time of the Great War from the resonance and importance of the poetry of Housman for them? Here are the makings of a theory:

But Housman would not have appealed so deeply to the people who were young in 1920 if it had not been for another strain in him, and that was his blasphemous, antinomian, 'cynical' strain. The fight that always occurs between the generations was exceptionally bitter at the end of the Great War; this was partly due to the war itself, and partly it was an indirect result of the Russian Revolution, but an intellectual struggle was in any case due at about that date. Owing probably to the ease and security of life in England, which even the war hardly disturbed, many people whose ideas were formed in the eighties or earlier had carried them quite unmodified into the nineteen-twenties. Meanwhile, so far as the younger generation was concerned, the official beliefs were dissolving like sand-castles. The slump in religious belief, for instance, was spectacular. ("Inside the Whale", 1940)

Now consider an even more interesting influence of words on boys: the adventure stories published for decades in pulp magazines in England ("Boys' Weeklies", 1940). Orwell writes of the news shops where these magazines were sold:

Probably the contents of these shops is the best available indication of what the mass of the English people really feels and thinks. Certainly nothing half so revealing exists in documentary form. Best-seller novels, for instance, tell one a great deal, but the novel is aimed almost exclusively at people above the £4-a-week level. (Orwell, George. A Collection of Essays. Kindle Edition)

This is Orwell's distinctive insight: the popular literature for boys implicitly records the features of a mentality at a time and place. More exactly, these publications (pulp magazines) both reflect the mental worlds of young boys and shape those mental frameworks; and, in Orwell's view, the shaping of values and social assumptions is quite purposeful on the part of the bourgeois publishers who stand behind these magazines. In order to uncover that mental worldview, Orwell provides an analysis of the whole group of magazines that fill this niche:

Falling strictly within this class there are at present ten papers, the GEM, MAGNET, MODERN BOY, TRIUMPH and CHAMPION, all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the WIZARD, ROVER, SKIPPER, HOTSPUR and ADVENTURE, all owned by D. C. Thomson & Co. ... 

Each of them carries every week a fifteen–or twenty-thousand-word school story, complete in itself, but usually more or less connected with the story of the week before. The Gem in addition to its school story carries one or more adventure serial. Otherwise the two papers are so much alike that they can be treated as one, though the MAGNET has always been the better known of the two, probably because it possesses a really first-rate character in the fat boy. Billy Bunter. 

The stories are stories of what purports to be public-school life, and the schools (Greyfriars in the MAGNET and St Jim's in the GEM) are represented as ancient and fashionable foundations of the type of Eton or Winchester. All the leading characters are fourth-form boys aged fourteen or fifteen, older or younger boys only appearing in very minor parts. Like Sexton Blake and Nelson Lee, these boys continue week after week and year after year, never growing any older. Very occasionally a new boy arrives or a minor character drops out, but in at any rate the last twenty-five years the personnel has barely altered. All the principal characters in both papers–Bob Cherry, Tom Merry, Harry Wharton, Johnny Bull, Billy Bunter and the rest of them–were at Greyfriars or St Jim's long before the Great War, exactly the same age as at present, having much the same kind of adventures and talking almost exactly the same dialect. And not only the characters but the whole atmosphere of both Gem and Magnet has been preserved unchanged, partly by means of very elaborate stylization.

Here are the main conclusions that Orwell reaches:

Of course no one in his senses would want to turn the so-called penny dreadful into a realistic novel or a Socialist tract. An adventure story must of its nature be more or less remote from real life. But, as I have tried to make clear, the unreality of the WIZARD and the GEM is not so artless as it looks. These papers exist because of a specialized demand, because boys at certain ages find it necessary to read about Martians, death-rays, grizzly bears and gangsters. They get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them. To what extent people draw their ideas from fiction is disputable. Personally I believe that most people are influenced far more than they would care to admit by novels, serial stories, films and so forth, and that from this point of view the worst books are often the most important, because they are usually the ones that are read earliest in life. It is probable that many people who would consider themselves extremely sophisticated and 'advanced' are actually carrying through life an imaginative background which they acquired in childhood from (for instance) Sapper and Ian Hay. ...

If that is so, the boys' twopenny weeklies are of the deepest importance. Here is the stuff that is read somewhere between the ages of twelve and eighteen by a very large proportion, perhaps an actual majority, of English boys, including many who will never read anything else except newspapers; and along with it they are absorbing a set of beliefs which would be regarded as hopelessly out of date in the Central Office of the Conservative Party. All the better because it is done indirectly, there is being pumped into them the conviction that the major problems of our time do not exist, that there is nothing wrong with LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism, that foreigners are un-important comics and that the British Empire is a sort of charity-concern which will last for ever. Considering who owns these papers, it is difficult to believe that this is un-intentional.

Orwell finds that there is a specific social worldview, an ideology, permeating these stories, and that this worldview serves to frame the social and political perceptions of boys as they enter adulthood. Further, he believes that the ideological content is deliberate: 

ALL fiction from the novels in the mushroom libraries downwards is censored in the interests of the ruling class. And boys' fiction above all, the blood-and-thunder stuff which nearly every boy devours at some time or other, is sodden in the worst illusions of 1910. The fact is only unimportant if one believes that what is read in childhood leaves no impression behind. Lord Camrose and his colleagues evidently believe nothing of the kind, and, after all, Lord Camrose ought to know.

The worldview that is embedded in these stories is one grounded in snobbism, the natural superiority of the wealthy, the inevitability of rich and poor (and winners and losers in society), and the permanence of the current social order. What is unlikely to emerge from such stories is -- rebelliousness, resistance, and rejection of oppression.

And yet -- all of those mental characteristics of rebelliousness and resistance did emerge among some children, soon to be adults, in the 1930s in England -- including in Orwell himself. So at the most, we must regard this "worldview-shaping" power of children's books and stories as being a partial thing, just one of many influences that eventually shape and constrain the imagination and perception of the adult. How would Orwell explain his own escape from the mental constraints of this ideological framework, into the independent-minded socialism that guided his actions for the rest of his life? From the autobiographical essay ("Such, such were the joys", 1947),  published posthumously, the thread of an explanation is visible: "I was always an outsider, I conformed externally but never within myself." He describes his own development in these words in "Why I Write":

I was the middle child of three, but there was a gap of five years on either side, and I barely saw my father before I was eight. For this and other reasons I was somewhat lonely, and I soon developed disagreeable mannerisms which made me unpopular throughout my schooldays. I had the lonely child’s habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

Isolated, undervalued, lonely; independent, critical, socialist, committed to acting as I think best. The clue seems to be that independence of mind is nurtured by a certain degree of "outsiderness". 

Here is something akin to a manifesto from the same essay:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows.

It is striking to reflect that the United States in the 1930s does not seem to have produced its own version of George Orwell -- leftist, independent, honest, anti-totalitarian, and non-ideological. There were Communist intellectuals; but I cannot think of the kind of independent-minded social critic in the United States whose work might be thought to be as original and penetrating as that of Orwell. Why is that? Was there a particular niche for non-conformist intellectuals like Orwell in England that was lacking in the United States in the 1930s? And did that culture persist into the 1950s and beyond? How close to the Orwell example of social criticism does Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath come (both the novel (1939) and  the film (1940))? Are Michael Harrington, Howard Zinn, Murray Levin, or Noam Chomsky analogous intellectuals on the left?