Art And Survival: In Dialogue

ON THE INTERFACE BETWEEN PSYCHOLOGY AND CULTURE: A Dialogue with Michael L. Penn, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology at Franklin and Marshall College

PART I: CULTURE AS THE SYMPTOM OR THE SIGN OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL CONDITION OF A PEOPLE

KRM: Professor Penn, tell me more about your work and what it is you are currently doing.

MLP: My work is in three main areas. I write and study in the epidemiology of gender-based violence, the problem of violence against women and girls around the world. I study hope and hopelessness and I write on the interface between culture and psychology, i.e., the relationship between psychological processes and cultural processes.

KRM: Give me a synopsis of your work in terms of the interface between psychological processes and cultural processes.

MLP: Well, my work is based upon the assumption that culture is a by-product, is a fruit, is the result of psychological processes of consciousness. And so, you might imagine the human psyche as having the capacity to bring forth certain fruit in the same way that a tree brings forth fruit according to its nature, and the human psyche brings forth fruit according to its nature. So, when we see the culture of people, we understand their psychological nature. If you want to understand what a people believe in, think about, hope for, are consumed with, or what they are concerned about, you look at what they make and you look at how they make it. Therefore, you look at how their psychological processes are translated into the industries, the music and the artifacts of a culture. Really, you might think about culture as being the symptom or the sign of the psychological condition of a people. That is fundamentally what I am interested in.

KRM: There are several works from African-American theologians such as Wyatt T. Walker and James Cone who contend that the roots of all African-American music-making is found in the spirituals. Based upon that premise, both of these writers say that with respect to African-American music: if you want to get a good sense of where black people are at any given time in the history of this country, you can look to their music.

MLP: It would be so because whatever we do is really a manifestation of the soul's discourse. For example, the human spirit, the human soul, the human psyche, has the power, the capacity, the need to express itself. And if you want to know the condition of the human psyche, the condition of the human spirit, you simply find out how the human spirit is expressing itself, most particularly for people in their arts.

The arts of a people are closest to that people's spirit. In fact, we know from the work of anthropologists that if you can understand the creative output of a people, then you know fundamentally the workings of a people's heart. So, far more than their industries, which are really functional, the arts express the longings, the deepest passions, the deepest concerns of a people. So when these creative products are elaborate and rich and inspiring, you know that the human heart, the human soul that gave birth to those arts, are dealing with deep complex processes. Where the art is superficial, trivial, based fundamentally on gratifying the senses, we know that the people have in a certain sense strayed from some core sense of their humanity. They are migrating more towards the animal aspects of their nature.

KRM: How does our social environment impact upon the things we articulate through our culture?

MLP: To my understanding, three forces influence what a person does and produces, how a person creates, what a person is. One of those forces is obviously biological. In other words, we inherit a lot of who we are from our biological ancestors; our immediate parents and their ancestors. So much of what we are constitutionally, tempermentally is a result of the experiences that impacted on the biology of our forebearers. So that would be one major influence. The biological stuff that we are made of is really a gift to us from our ancestors. It determines to a very, very great extent our thinking and our functioning in the world, our creativity in the world.

The second force, of course, has to do with the immediate environment in which we come of age. We might be seen as kind of raw material. We might be seen as clay. That clay is molded into something by the people with whom we interact from the time we leave our mother's womb until the time that we die. So, in effect, the clay of our being, the products we produce, the things that we think about, the things that we hope for are fundamentally given to us, shared with us and made important to us by the people that we interact with on a day-to-day basis. So if we are interacting with people who are molding us in a particular way, then we inevitably, being a by-product of them, produce products that are similar to the kinds of products that they themselves have come to value, that they themselves have come to see as important.

The third factor is that every human person in my understanding has also a unique dimension to their being which is not confined or limited to their biology or their social history. That has to do with their own human spirit, their own human soul. That is the innate dimension that makes every individual unique and gives every individual the capacity to say "no" to their biological heritage and "no" to their social context. This is the source of human freedom so that we can rise above and transcend our history, we can transcend our biology and we can create something and give something to our culture that was not prescribed by our biology and was not prescribed by our history. This is really when human beings are being uniquely creative. Most human beings fundamentally are imitators of whatever they experience, whatever they have been told. They are really carrying out their own biological history. Very few individuals rise to the level of true creativity in which their own spirit, their own soul is bringing forth out of the invisible world new creations that the culture, that the people have not previously seen.

So I would say that these three forces, the powers of the human soul or the human spirit, social forces and biological forces determine what an individual, what a culture and a people produce as art or industry.

KRM: From your experiences -- and I want to get beyond thinking about art to thinking about psychology and the psyches of various human beings -- how do market values and a market way of thinking impact on our psyches?

MLP: I think this is a very good question and a very complex one. I had been working recently with a group called The Authenticity Project. They have some very interesting things to say about this. Some of the things that this authenticity group says is that for any society the most important question of that society is the value hierarchy of that society. In other words, the value hierarchy of a society will determine how that society is structured.

What do I mean by value hierarchy? Everything in the world can be rated with respect to its value. Things have either what we call intrinsic value or extrinsic value. Let me give you an example. If I have a $5.00 bill, the $5.00 bill has value because a group of people got together and said: whensoever you shall see that $5.00 bill, you will give to the bearer a certain value. When a society takes that value away, that $5.00 bill is of no value whatsoever. So the value of the $5.00 bill is conditional upon the agreement of a group of people that it is of value. They bestow upon it its value. And they take that value away. The things that are of extrinsic value therefore have temporary value. The value is fleeting. It comes and goes. In other words, the value is manufactured value and the whole purpose of advertising is to persuade you that this temporarily constructed value is of real value. In other words, it is intended to persuade you to be able to exchange things that are of real value for it. For example, your time, your energy, your thinking, perhaps even your family, your well being. For example, people who sell cigarettes fundamentally sell the idea that it if you give of your health by smoking this cigarette, they will exchange for it a certain degree of honor, a certain degree of nobility; you can look chic when you go outside. In other words, the idea is to connect something that is not really of value with something which is of value, and therefore have the value imposed by association. Many market economies exist because they create value and they persuade people that the value they have created is of real value. These are the things that are of extrinsic value.

Of course, there are other things that are of intrinsic value. Their value is derived from their inherent identity, their inherent nature. For example, the sun is of intrinsic value. The sun is of intrinsic value because it is the source of life to the biosphere. It doesn't matter what you think or what I think about the value of the sun. If the sun were to stop shining, all in nature would perish. So, we know that it is of value because we cannot live without it.

Some cultures say that human beings are of intrinsic value. Some cultures say that human beings are the highest expression of value in the known world. So therefore, the preservation, the protection of human honor, human dignity, human consciousness is the most important goal of any legitimate society. Any society that exchanges the lives of human beings, the well being of human beings for other less important values, (for example the $5.00 bill that I talked about or other trivialities), that culture fundamentally has betrayed the people that constitute that culture. So, the authenticity group is really concerned with evaluating cultures according to the value structure that animates that culture. Because the value structure that animates a culture determines ultimately the health of the culture and the health of a people who participate in that culture. Does that make sense?