Word: fromm
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Fromm Foundation supports what the majority of the musical world ignores: new music. A rare chance to hear contemporary string quartets this Sunday. --Kenneth Hoffman...
...Fromm does not agree with B.F. Skinner's plans for altering man through altering society. "Skinner," he writes, "recommends the hell of the isolated, manipulated man of the cybernetic age as the heaven of progress." According to Fromm, reinforcing peaceful behavior is not enough unless the reinforcers take into account Freud's discovery that the forces driving man are often unconscious. In spite of the emphasis he puts on man's passions and unconscious drives, Fromm believes that the most important determinant of a man's character is society. Echoing arguments he has sprinkled throughout...
...Fromm is often eloquent as a chronicler of society's sicknesses, but he gives only cursory attention to their cures. Sadism will disappear, he says, "when exploitative control of any class, sex, or minority group has been done away with." This can be done "only if the whole [social and political] system as it has existed during the last 6,000 years of history can be replaced by a fundamentally different...
...times, Fromm's premises seem as sweeping as those Utopian prescriptions. His picture of the peace-loving primitive man is unconvincing ("Wars among primitive hunters are characteristically unbloody"). His explanation for the rise of patriarchal rule during the urban revolution seems equally shaky ("No longer the womb, but the mind became the creative power, and with this, not women, but men dominated society...
...spite of the distinctions Fromm tries to make between his approach and Skinner's, he falls victim to his own criticisms of the behaviorists. As with Skinner, his recommendations that society change its "system of production, ownership and consumption" depend on faith in man's manipulability and desire to change...