Thinking about Social Materialist Psychology

David Smail

Introduction

I had thought in many ways that my book Power Interest and Psychology said pretty well all I wanted or was likely to say on a social materialist approach to psychology. At the start of the second decade of the twenty-first century, I have, after all, been retired for quite a while from clinical practice as well as from any academic involvement. However, I find that ploughing on into my seventies in no way insulates me from the world, and particularly not from its social iniquities. I may no longer have even the slightest purchase on the already minimal power that occupation of some kind of official role or affiliation offers, but I still need to understand what is happening to and around me and others from a broadly 'psychological' perspective. And the more iniquitous the world becomes, the greater the pressure to say something about it.

As I did before with Power, Responsibility and Freedom, I shall write this in instalments, rather as the spirit moves me. I thought about doing it as a kind of blog, but my experience with trying to run a blog on this website has not been encouraging: although there is a handful of regular contributors with useful and interesting things to say, there is also a continuous deluge of rubbish, advertising and incoherent postings that I just haven't the time or the patience to attend to. All I want to do is say what I think in the hope that it may help a few readers to clarify for themselves what they think, and perhaps to take the social-materialist enterprise forward in whatever ways they see fit. As it is, anyone who wants to can contact me by email, and I shall be very happy to incorporate as footnotes into the text (with their permission, of course) any points they make which might be of interest to other readers.

I don't intend - or not yet, anyway - to buttress what I write with extended argument, academic references, etc. More than anything, this will be a kind of sketch of points I think need to be addressed by a social materialist approach. What seem to me more or less key concepts I will put in bold typeface. I should also say that I may edit what I have written as I go along, though I hope in the end to arrive at a version that can stand as a finished text.

Psychology could be about so many things. What most people expect it to be about – and indeed what I expected it to be about before I went to university in 1957 – is to furnish knowledge about why people think and act and feel and imagine the way they do. The possession of such knowledge might be expected to provide certain forms of power: the power to gain social advantage, perhaps, to be able to win friends and influence people, or maybe to help those suffering from emotional injury or mental disorder. Or possibly it might just be about acquiring a depth of insight into the workings of the self – the acquisition of wisdom or spiritual peace. In these ways, a psychologist might be expected to be an uncomfortable companion: one who can see beneath the surface into your unspoken – perhaps unknown - weaknesses and subterfuges, your guilty fears and secret longings. The ultimate psychological achievement would thus be the ability to ‘read minds’. For these reasons, many people are wary of psychologists, and many psychologists may be tempted to pride themselves on the possession of such special powers.

We psychology students of the mid twentieth century were taught that scientific psychology was not at all about the mysterious workings of the ‘unconscious’ or the elaboration of internal worlds that introspection might yield, but simply about the measurement, prediction and control behaviour. This was the era of behaviourism, which sought to excise from the field many of the forms of knowledge and enquiry envisaged above, leaving only a solid, dependable, scientifically established and communicable basis on which to survey and develop an account of human conduct. Many found this prospect dry and unexciting, an offshoot of philosophical positivism that robbed us of our humanity and the wonders and satisfactions of subjective experience.

Over the past half century there has been more or less continuous dispute among psychologists about what psychology should be and do, and how it should be and do it. Behaviourism did not achieve the hegemony it so confidently expected and proclaimed, though it still has its adherents, mainly in academia. Fashions came and went, and continue to come and go; mini-paradigms jostle and haggle, but without any ever becoming regnant. Even so, psychology, both as a subject of academic study and as applied in health, education, business and elsewhere has prospered enormously. In 1950 the British Psychological Society had 1,897 members. In 2010 it had approaching 50,000.

In view of the relatively smooth and uninterrupted progress of psychology – at least in the Western world - one might expect to be able to identify success in the kinds of enterprise we had originally hoped for it: significant contributions to our knowledge of how people function in relation to the world. In particular, one might hope that real advances have been made in our understanding of what for much of the time under consideration we have thought of as ‘mental illness’.

This, however, has not really happened. Psychology has certainly been busy, but (despite all protestations) not so much as a science, rather as an unacknowledged quest for power.

Freud’s pursuit of the hidden meaning of dreams, advertising’s search for undetectable means of persuasion, the use of ‘lie detection’, the interest of the military in ‘psychological warfare’, sophisticated means of interrogation and ‘brainwashing’, all testify to psychology’s fascination with the possibility of esoteric knowledge giving some individuals advantage over some others. Sometimes this leads to the development of spectacularly successful spin-offs: the quest to make machines that are, psychologically at least, indistinguishable from people (‘artificial intelligence’), has had a huge impact on information technology, weapons systems and so on. But for the most part psychology’s obsession with secret power has led either to fairly unsubtle forms of trickery or to commonsense observations that, even when wrapped up in jargon or deliberately obscure ‘theory’, require no particular scholarly acumen.

To arrive at socially influential bodies of ‘knowledge’ it is not necessary to speak the truth. In its day astrology was widely regarded as valid and even necessary to an understanding of the workings of the world, and in some parts of the globe still is. Many consider religion as revealing fundamentally important truths. For unbelievers these are of course systems of belief, not knowledge, but this is not to deny their potency. They are potent to the extent that people believe in and act upon them; once people cease to believe in them, they become the stuff of madness. If you believe in God as part of a religious community, you have a call on the respect of the rest of society; if you proclaim an entirely individual relationship with a supernatural entity, you are likely to be locked up.

In most of its manifestations—in particular those familiar within the wider culture—psychology is a phenomenon of this kind. That is to say that, though it dresses itself in the guise of scientific knowledge, it is underpinned not by any demonstration of its truth but rather by the readiness of a community of people (psychologists) to profess its validity, as well, of course, as the readiness of the wider public to credit what they are told. Psychology does not have any justifiable claim to saying anything true about our place in and relations with the world, and cannot demonstrate the validity of any such claim. But it certainly does have potency, in much the same way as astrology once did.

The history of psychotherapy illustrates this state of affairs very well. Starting out, more or less, as the brainchild of Sigmund Freud and his associates, its adherents have fluctuated over the decades in terms of their intellectual preferences and allegiances, but its fundamental project has remained much the same: the ‘talking cure’ has appeared to one and all an—almost self-evidently—desirable and valid undertaking. This despite the fact that it has throughout been impossible to demonstrate any scientific validity for its practices (let alone its theories), and its currently most successful guise (in the form of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and its derivatives) is almost ludicrously simplistic and implausible. Psychotherapy has gone from strength to strength in terms of social acceptance and even political influence, but it has not advanced one millimetre as a scientifically valid body of knowledge. The steady accumulation of a critical literature establishing that this is indeed the case—that psychotherapy constitutes an entirely naked emperor—has done nothing to diminish the equally steady accumulation of imperial power.

The explanation of this is that psychotherapy has no more interest than psychology itself in speaking the truth—in scientific validity—but has a very considerable interest in the acquisition of social influence and material gain. Psychology is not a science standing apart from and seeking to understand our place in the world, but an enterprise which can only be critically understood if it becomes itself an object of inquiry which is more concerned with truth than with social influence. We need, so to speak, a meta-psychology for the study of ‘psychology’, or, to put it another way, a psychology which will turn on and reflexively subsume what we have come to know as ‘psychology’ within a framework that may actually yield something we could plausibly claim as knowledge.

In its early days, before behaviourism asserted its pragmatic grip on the discipline, psychology did show some—albeit embryonic—signs of pursuing an interest in trying to unravel some of the complexity of what it is to be a human subject in a social world. The speculations, reflections and investigations of men such as Gustav Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Edward Titchener, William James, William McDougall, Kurt Lewin, widely varied though they were, were born of a curiosity which extended beyond the largely commercial concerns of the likes of J.B. Watson and Sigmund Freud. That kind of intellectual interest –almost gentlemanly curiosity—about our psychological nature has now disappeared from the ‘official’ scene. That is to say, the kind of psychology developed in universities and practised in clinics is these days concerned solely with survival in the relevant markets.

Perhaps the greatest shortcoming of psychology is the assumption that, as a discrete intellectual discipline, it must deal with individuals, whether as ‘psyches’, minds, souls, subjectivities, or indeed bundles of behaviours. This assumption is virtually built in to what qualifies it as a branch of study separate from, in particular, sociology and anthropology. But, however much we may feel ourselves to be independent entities essentially cut off from ‘other minds’, we are not: we cannot be understood out of the context of the society which forms us and shapes pretty well all the faculties, abilities and experiences that mark us out as human. Even ‘social psychology’ tends to find it hard to shake off focussing ultimately on the factors such as will, intention, personal ratiocination and action which we have been taken as definitive of psychology itself; the concern tends too often to be with people as collectivities of individuals rather than with people as themselves social creations.

To their credit there have been, and no doubt still are, some psychotherapists who did become aware of this fatal flaw of psychology, and who developed theoretical positions which took account of the social influences which make us who we are. Karen Horney, Erich Fromm and Harry Stack Sullivan, a psychiatrist, were three such figures. But, though briefly influential, their contributions have been largely forgotten and few students of clinical psychology these days have even heard of, let alone studied them.

Any psychology worthy of serious consideration must pay attention to two broadly defined areas of study: on the one hand, the social structure in which individuals exist (the social environment), and on the other our embodied nature as human beings (the biological environment). These are inseparably inter-related and interact in highly complex ways which, in part at least, define each other. It is this interwoven complexity which is indicated by the term ‘social-materialist psychology’.

Environments—especially social environments—may change dramatically over time, and for this reason any form of psychological enquiry seeking to understand them must also be ready to change. Concepts which may help to illuminate at one time may become quite useless at another. There is no system of psychological thought and observation that transcends time and place to explain human conduct once and for all: our understanding is, unfortunately, fated to hang on to the coat-tails of events, possibly able at times to clarify their psychological nature helpfully, but always having to play catch-up with them and never able to anticipate them with certainty. Psychology, as far as it is a science at all, is one in which we seek to understand ourselves, and, if successful, that understanding inevitably changes ourselves. Psychologists cannot stand outside humanity in the way that other scientists—to a much greater extent, at least—can stand outside their subject matter.

In what follows, then, an attempt is made to identify and define just some of the factors which appear to be important for the understanding of human conduct at a particular place and time: human society in the developed world in the early years of the 21st century.

This is in fact a pretty uncomfortable place to be, in pretty strange times. The world teeters on the edge of economic catastrophe which we as a society seem incapable of influencing in any significant way, just as we seem unable to put a brake on the damage we wreak on our habitat. There seems to be a wanton destructiveness on the part of those who run our world and an unshakable passivity on the part of those who are its victims. In our dealings with each other there seems to be scarcely any evidence of the reason, truth, sober judgment and ethical conduct that up until a few decades ago we at least pretended were important factors in the smooth running of society. Although, of course, we in the developed world still ‘have it pretty good’ in comparison with the lives of our forebears in past centuries, there are indications that we are slipping backwards: expunging the social benefits that followed on from two terrible world wars, re-installing greed and usury on scales that would have been unimaginable to those who in past times condemned them as sins, laying waste to our environment with the wild enthusiasm of lemmings. And once again we see the resurgence of the evils identified by William Beveridge: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness. Wisdom and good figure scarcely at all in the political landscape. At every level of society, power seems to lie in the hands of knaves and fools, and greed, ignorance and stupidity have become almost necessary qualifications for those who aspire to a role in the transmission (and willing reception) of influence within the social structure.

It is not my intention here to enumerate or analyze the psychological ills that arise in this context, widespread and intractable though they are, but to speculate in a little more detail about some of the social mechanisms and human characteristics whereby distal influences maintain their hold on individuals, very possibly ending up as the proximal experience of pain and distress.

Necessary features of a social materialist psychology

Motivation
Motivation has of course always been a central concern of psychology. This has often taken the form of looking inside individuals to try to identify what makes them tick. This may involve postulating biological drives (e.g. for food, security, sex, etc.) and it may involve talking to people: asking them in one form or another (interviews, questionnaires, etc.) why they act or think as they do. The trouble with this kind of focus on the individual is that it tends—perhaps unconsciously—to downplay the importance of our being social animals and to over-value the role of cognition in our being able to give an accurate account of our actions. Most of the time we don’t know and cannot say why we do things and cannot even see the workings of the social machinery that moves (motivates) us. We have, of course, no difficulty in concocting stories (‘narratives’) about our motives and we are more than ready to claim credit for what we do right and apportion blame for things that don’t turn out so well. Where they occur in people of some prominence, these stories of virtue and vice are obsessively scrutinized and worked over by the media and one would be forgiven for thinking that explanations of this kind are all we need for the understanding of conduct in general, but in fact they are of very little interest to serious students of motivation.

I discussed these issues in much greater detail in Power, Interest and Psychology, and I don’t want to go all over that ground again here, but I certainly don’t think we would get very far without acknowledging the fundamental roles in social organization of power and interest, and reference to their workings will occur often in what follows.

Power is the principal dynamic (motivating force) of social structure, and interest constitutes the mechanism of its transmission. We respond to the influences that bear down upon us, and mediate the influences that we can bring to bear on others (i.e. we receive and transmit power) not through appraising them cognitively (though such appraisal may not be irrelevant) but according to our interests, of which we may or may not be aware, and about which we may or may not be mistaken.

In some ways the elevation of interest to fundamental status in understanding conduct greatly simplifies the psychological task – much more so than, for example, seeking rational accounts of people’s beliefs and intentions. It even helps with the old behaviourist aim of ‘predicting and controlling’ behaviour: as almost all investigation and debate in the media demonstrate to the point of bored frustration, once you know someone’s interests you know what they are going to say and do with an accuracy far greater than their own protestations. The televisual concern to ‘balance’ political reportage becomes vacuous because all that happens is that opposing sides rehearse their entirely predictable interests (and buttress them usually with entirely invalid arguments and justifications).

But in other ways interests are far from easy to unravel. If, for example, the operations of power and interest were transparent, one would expect democracy eventually to lead to a situation in which particular attention was paid to the welfare of the majority, since the majority would be unlikely to vote against their own interests. Patently, however, this is not the case: what happens, rather, is that the security and welfare of the majority are sacrificed—absolutely blatantly—to the welfare (bottomless greed) of a tiny minority (‘the one percent’).

That people can act (vote) so obviously against their own interests takes some explaining. No doubt Marxian false consciousness has a lot to do with it, but a social materialist psychology needs to work towards an account of what it is about the nature of people and about the nature of their social environment that facilitates the corruption of interest by corrupting power.

Tools of social engineering
Here’s a nice place to hold an extended birthday party:-

You may find it instructive to read all about what went on at the party (even if only a quarter of it is accurate) in the Daily Mail.

The Daily Mail is of course to be found along with the other tabloids in your local newsagent’s. There is nothing like a newsagent’s to get an insight into some of the principal preoccupations of those who like to read about what the celebrities are up to.

Latish on a Saturday afternoon the shop is beginning to look pretty scruffy. The floor is sprinkled with broken crisps and sticky jelly-babies that the toddlers around customers’ ankles have started to consume even before their minders have paid for them. Older kids are untidily glancing through comics and magazines with no sign of actually buying them. A few newspapers have also spilled onto the rain-wet floor and are being trodden on as the customers come and go. One small child is loudly and insistently badgering his mother to buy him a small plastic toy. She doesn’t seem to want to say yes or no, but looks to be approaching an explosive outburst of irritation. The queue is long because most people are buying lottery tickets together with the chocolate and cigarettes that will cheer their weekend. Many of the lottery customers, most of whom look grey, tired and overweight, buy a surprising number of tickets of various denominations: ten pounds-worth seems not unusual.

This is not an exclusive part of town, and most of the people in the shop are in low-paid jobs or not working at all. It is fairly obvious what interests the shop is serving: needs for comfort (sweets, cigarettes), distraction (celebrity gossip, football news) and hope (the lottery).

At the other end of the socio-economic scale, the interests of the party-goers around Porto Montenegro are not really so different, but met by more up-market commodities: fine food and wine, exclusive socializing and sex, gambling and playing the stock exchanges. What is extraordinary, and needs some explaining, is how the contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor (and it must be remembered that poverty reaches much greater extremes on the planet) come about and are tolerated – if not celebrated – by almost all concerned. Why is there not universal moral outrage, bloody revolution?

Distraction, hope and comfort, certainly, are important in keeping the dispossessed from getting too restive about their lot. Bread and circuses are, of course, an old story and far more effective in subduing dissent than chains, the anticipated loss of which may too easily become a stimulus to revolt.

‘Giving people what they want’ (the maxim of the tabloid editor) is so effective because it engages our most fundamental embodied interests. The behaviourists showed that positive reward is more effective than negative punishment well before the postmodernists elaborated the notion of seduction. Helping people ‘feel good’, however superficially and fleetingly, will keep them ‘satisfied’ even in the most abject of circumstances. Hence, at least in part, the preoccupation of modern politicians with the possibility of generating feelings of ‘well-being’, with which they seek to replace economic security. Pacify their nervous systems with temporary treats—like giving a baby a dummy—and you will be able to pick people’s pockets much more easily. (Obesity, which our rulers seek to present as the personal choice of greedy and misinformed individuals, is most often the direct result of keeping people happy while depriving them of any significant form of social power. So is drug and alcohol addiction.)

However, if people can most conveniently be kept in line through one kind or another of seduction, other forms of discipline cannot be entirely disregarded, especially among the better-informed and managerially significant middle classes. Here, for example, obedience to authority becomes more obviously important. The extent to which people look for, accept, and do not question authority is truly remarkable. Perhaps, as social apes, we are hard-wired to watch for and obey authority (but not so hard-wired that we cannot help it). Perhaps authority is an inescapable product of social hierarchy. Whatever the case, authority is cited and invoked ubiquitously and ceaselessly as a reason for doing and believing.

There are of course radically different kinds of reasons for believing. At one extreme, for instance, you may have the warrant of your senses—your body telling you that something is or is not the case, while at the other you may submit to the authority of social status—somebody telling you what is or is not the case. Of course neither type is infallible, but it may well be that you more readily accept social authority than you do ‘sensual warrant', even though often the latter will be more reliable than the former. This is probably because power lurks behind social authority whereas the promptings of your own senses are buttressed by not much more than your own personal judgement. Authority is the word of power.

The transparent operation of social power has become particularly prominent in recent decades with the rise of managerialism in the service of corporate plutocracy. Whereas not so long ago social structure—for example in the public service—provided a kind of exoskeleton for the operation of the informed personal judgement of the professional, it is now much more often designed and constructed to determine professional judgment. In this way, it becomes directly in the person’s interest to identify and perform what is required of him or her by the powers that be rather than to investigate and elaborate aspects of the world which may (but also may not) be turned into theoretical, technical or practical knowledge. The reality in which we are embedded swiftly becomes the reality of power and not the reality of experience, and the criteria of truth reside not in any empirical test, but in the status of those who pronounce it. This, among other things, provides fertile ground for the flourishing of make-believe.

Among the earliest limitations that unrestrained free markets have to burst through are those imposed by reality and truth. Critical understanding based on an informed assessment of actuality is the enemy of the exuberant satisfaction of commodified needs on the creation of which late capitalism depends. This is why knowledge and ability have been ousted from our culture in favour of public relations and the creation and management of wishful thinking. The careful, intelligent study and thought which are needed to develop an accurate understanding of the world beyond our skins has been so devalued as to become almost invisible, and those who fostered them have been replaced by an army of ‘management consultants’, ‘trainers’ and PR people, whose embarrassingly superficial ‘insights’ and shallow nostrums have escaped out of the Business world to infect all institutions of public life, including education, health, and indeed politics—British prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron being supreme examples of the amoral practitioners of persuasion.

The media of mass communication and entertainment collectively provide the principal manufactory of make-believe. Television, for example, cannot by its very nature reflect or elaborate social reality if only because it renders those upon whom its cameras turn instantly corrupted by bad faith, i.e. concerned to present themselves in a favourable (as opposed to truthful) light. It is also probably more heavily edited than any other medium and by more opaque interests. Tabloid newspapers for the most part don’t even pretend that their role is to instruct or inform, but rather to influence through shameless seduction. Even the most high-minded publications have an over-riding interest in surviving in a marketplace, and this is likely to colour pretty well everything they publish.

The successful shaping of public opinion can be a mixed blessing for those who seek it, since public opinion may itself become (or be seen to be) a power to be reckoned with. An example of this may be seen in the slavish way politicians feel they have to conform, or at least appear to conform, to what the mass has come to expect (as measured by opinion polls and focus groups, etc.). Policies adopted by political parties of whatever persuasion become more and more alike as the 'leaders' seek to follow opinion rather than establish new or different directions for the society they purport to serve. Populism replaces progressivism. But public opinion, not least because of the ways in which it is shaped, is in very large measure ignorant, capricious and resentful. Ignorance, caprice and resentment are not good foundations for social policy.

The transformation of our society from one searching for an understanding of and basis in social and material reality (even if with only partial success) to one sunk in make-believe has been extraordinarily rapid. In part, of course, this has been because of the ruthless exertion of power by people like Margaret Thatcher who put themselves forward as the enthusiastic champions of corporate ambition and free-market greed. But this cannot be the whole story. One also has to explain the rapidity and universality with which the populace fell into line. Of course much of this was because, alongside the provision of bread and circuses, their material interests were either furthered or (more often) threatened, and the vast majority had little choice but to conform with the revised social values directly impinging on their lives. But even those who could have resisted for the most part didn’t (witness the almost instant conversion of proudly independent academics into craven free-market lackeys), and even those who more or less had to submit appeared mostly to do so willingly. What is it about people that allowed all this to happen?

Qualities of mind
Homo sapiens is not particularly well named. Whatever the hopes and expectations of the Enlightenment thinkers who first so classified us, we are certainly not, speaking generally, particularly wise, and we certainly don't know as much as we like to think we do. No doubt our use of language sets us apart from other animals, but we also often attribute to our linguistic constructions an independent reality that they don't have. Reason is indeed a human achievement, but it is not one we are all innately blessed with. Science is a cultural accomplishment of the very highest order, but to flourish it needs nurturing with a care it is not always given: it is all too easily corrupted and perverted to serve interests other than sapientia.

Though far from an easy read, Susanne Langer's three-volume Mind: an Essay on Human Feeling does about as much as anything could to show how our struggle to make sense of the world, our concern with symbolization, religious observance, artistic expression, and so on, has roots far, far deeper and more distant than the abstract manipulation of language-based thought. Feeling is basic to human experience and conduct in a way that logical reflection is not and the preoccupation with 'cognition' within contemporary psychology barely scratches the surface when it comes to trying to understand ourselves. Feelings are suffused with meaning, and we act on them - as do other animals - most of the time without reflection. And when we do so reflect, it is as often (indeed, more often) to deceive ourselves and/or others about their meaning as it is to clarify it.

We feel and act and react with our bodies. Mental operations are rooted in bodily activity and do not constitute a detached, non-physical sphere where reason can operate untainted by our fleshly interests.

If Reason is to illuminate our social activities and interests it has to transcend as far as possible its origins in imagination, the bubbling pre-verbal cauldron of meaning, and turn outwards to a world which we trust exists independently of our own fantasies, wishes and perspectives. However much we do trust in the existence of such a world and seek to explore its nature, we still cannot entirely detach it from our interests (in the sense defined by Habermas in Knowledge and Human Interests) but this doesn't mean that the fruits of reason are simply our own inventions and that truth is a merely relative concept without any objective reference.

Knowledge of the world - indeed the universe - and our place within it is hard won, and once won is not easily maintained and preserved.The exercise of reason is arduous and its products may be difficult to recognize. Its methods, where they exist, are not inborn, but taught and acquired socially. They are easily feigned and subverted and attached to false authority. As so often in the course of human affairs, truly significant insights and ideas, knowledge and precept, are almost instantly caught up in the nets of base interests and turned into their moral inverse.

There is, thus, very little 'natural' in the operation of reason, and we are far more at home with the easy attractions of fantasy. As observed above, during the 1980s (and since) swathes of decent, idependent-minded people occupying social positions of some influence (that is, largely managerial positions designed to mediate the interests of power) rapidly became enthusiastic advocates of the cruelty and greed of the 'free market'. Just like the bankers whose world (temporarily) fell apart at the turn of the century, people were carried away by a fantasy of socio-economic organization and personal gain that was backed by authority and supported by a 'narrative' designed to give it credence at the highest as well as the lowest intellectual levels. Such fantasy is an organized and elaborated alternative to and substitute for reality, and is supported by our profound and ubiquitous susceptibility to magic.

Magic moves us far more readily than reasoned assessment of what is the case. Magic allows us to project upon the world not our understanding, but our wishes, and we are quickly made vulnerable to any apparatus of make-believe that may be put in place to bend our conduct to its interests. The prominence of fantasy in contemporary popular culture testifies not only to a kind of mental indolence to which we are by nature all too prone, but to a social structure in which the vast majority of us have no real access to power (no real influence over our lives). In this kind of situation the lure of magic is almost irresistible - witness, in recent years, the resurgence of 'alternative' belief systems and fundamentalist religion. However valid the moral core of religious belief may be, religions seem to turn almost instantly into magical systems whereby the profound difficulties of life and death may be relieved of their sting. The more the mass of society is drained of real power to affect their lot, the more people turn to religion to provide them solace (the effectiveness of such solace resides, however, not in magical prospects of eternal life, etc., but in the solidarity with others which shared belief provides).

To be continued...