Splinters in Your Eye. Martin Jay
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own colleagues at the time in their classic study The Authoritarian Personality.39 Mindful of the ways in which fascism had been welcomed by personalities trained to obey tyrannical fathers rather than absorb maternal love, the authors of The Authoritarian Personality had argued that such families produce a child who “can apparently never quite establish his personal and masculine identity; he thus has to look for it in a collective system where there is opportunity both for submission to the powerful and for retaliation upon the powerless.”40 Unprejudiced “democratic” characters, in contrast, “received more love and therefore have basically more security in their relationships to their parents. Disagreements with, and resentment against, the parents are openly worked out, resulting in a much greater degree of independence from them. This independence is carried over into the subject’s attitude toward social institutions and authorities in general.”41 It was this version of the family, so champions of the exhibition have argued, that Steichen tacitly hoped to foster.
Although Horkheimer too favored this version of the family, he feared in “The Concept of Man” and elsewhere that it was in danger of disappearing even in ostensibly democratic countries such as the United States. This anxiety was not, however, apparent in his introduction to the exhibition. Instead, he contented himself with vague assurances that the images exhorted people to “support each other rather than torment each other and work together to the best of their ability to bring about a world constitution based on reason with which everyone can be satisfied. And that this constitution is possible.” This was clearly not the occasion, he must have reasoned, for sour pronouncements about ubiquitous threats to the type of nonauthoritarian family he thought necessary to realize that utopia.
What about the exhibition’s more general evocation of “man” as a kind of extended family? In his introduction, Horkheimer turned to the American “melting pot” experience as the source, to cite his words once again, of the healthy “awareness that there are close ties of kinship between all members of the human race, that there is a brotherhood of mankind.” Unlike Roland Barthes, with his bitter question, “But why not ask the parents of Emmett Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man?,”42 he did not pause to ponder how pervasive that awareness actually might be in the racially divided America of his day. Instead, he optimistically asserted that through the magic of empathetic visual identification, the viewer, and here he is talking to the citizens of Frankfurt, “can even see himself in the native in the jungle.”43 Whether or not the reverse was just as likely to be true is not a question he felt compelled to pose. Nor did he voice any concern about the gender implications of evoking universal “brotherhood” as the model of familial solidarity or think twice before invoking the stereotype of non-Westerners as “natives in jungles.”
In response to these absences, recent defenders of the exhibition’s intentions have pointed to Steichen’s acknowledgment that the title had, in fact, been suggested by his brother-in-law, poet Carl Sandburg, who had traced it to various speeches by no less an admirable figure than Abraham Lincoln.44 The distinguished pedigree of the phrase, they contend, points to its implications not only for racial equality but also for women’s suffrage, which Lincoln had explicitly championed. So, by tacitly endorsing the rhetoric of the human family and not foregrounding his anxiety over the crisis of actual families, Horkheimer, the inference might be drawn, was actually supporting the inclusivist agenda pursued by Steichen.
There is, however, another pedigree for the metaphor, which Horkheimer himself had in fact noted elsewhere with alarm. In his study of “Authoritarianism and the Family Today,” which appeared in 1949, he had noted that the Nazis had employed the rhetoric of the nation as a collective family, which had meant not only the suppression of class and other social differences but also the creation of dangerous pseudo-biological kinship distinctions that served to stigmatize alleged outsiders as racially inferior. Extending the boundaries of the putative family to the species was admittedly designed to avoid such in/out group distinctions, but it tacitly perpetuated them when it came to the domination of other animals, who were treated as not part of the family of man. Horkheimer, indebted as he was to Schopenhauer, was, in fact, an earlier critic of the instrumental treatment of animals.45 But none of this anxiety about the ambiguous implications of humanism and the family metaphor was evident in his introduction to the exhibition.
Nor did Horkheimer ponder the limits of understanding more general human relations in familial terms. Not only have patriarchal analogies been easily abused in antidemocratic defenses of monarchy—for example, Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, famously the target of John Locke’s ire—but paternalist rule in general was in tension with the right of an allegedly “immature” subaltern to full autonomy. Spousal violence and child abuse were, after all, lamentably widespread practices, rarely protested until recently.46 The metaphor of brotherhood as idealized human interaction, even when extended to mean siblings in general, was also vulnerable to the charge that it forgot the ability of brothers, at least since Cain’s assault on Abel, to become rivals, indeed deadly ones. If humankind were really a family, might it not just as well be a dysfunctional one? Think, for example, of the house of Atreus—or even the family of Antigone, that epitome of sibling love, who was, it must be remembered, the daughter/sister of Oedipus, not exactly a model of filial piety.
More fundamentally, the extension of kinship to embrace the entire species, while plausible on some attenuated genetic level, ignores the powerful distinctions between endogenous and exogenous groupings that underlay the incest taboo so fundamental to human civilization. Politics, it might be said, is the art of learning to live with exogenous others, who may be marriage material, but until the knot is tied, are anything but kin, loving or otherwise. At best they may be recognizable neighbors in a tightly knit community, but they are more often anonymous strangers within the borders of a more capacious and impersonal society or a fortiori aliens outside its borders. If politics means anything, it means dealing impersonally with rivals and adversaries, as well as friends, both genuine and of convenience, who are not in any meaningful sense bound to us by the affective ties of family. A political community, as we know, is more imagined than real, the inclusivity of its members premised on the exclusion of those outside its boundaries. We may owe temporary hospitality to strangers should they come to our shores seeking succor—Kant thought it was the one binding law of a cosmopolitan world order47—but not permanent domicile in the way we might to family members. Toleration of otherness and respect for what makes us all human does not mean absorbing the stranger into our family, no matter how extended we might construe it. Moral duty does not rest on ties of affection and indeed might at times contradict them, and it is impossible to build a healthy polity on emotional grounds alone. Indeed, as Hannah Arendt once remarked, “Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this very reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical human forces.”48
All of these considerations were absent from Horkheimer’s introduction and did not surface to derail his enthusiasm for the familial metaphor underlying Steichen’s exhibition. But before we dismiss him too quickly as yet another Cold War apologist for “photographic ideology,” it would be wise to pause with his self-evident motivation, which helps explain the difference between his response and that of Roland Barthes to the exhibition. In a Germany still struggling to move beyond the insidious ideology of racial hierarchy and ethnic exclusion that had brought such a ruinous outcome, it was necessary to swallow whatever qualms one might have about the potential costs of overly abstract humanist universalism and the implications of extending the metaphor of a family from the nation or race to the species. At a time when Martin Heidegger’s elevation of Being over humanity as the central focus of philosophy posed a danger to the hope of making a clean break with the Nazi past, it was important to remind Germans that Kant still remained relevant and that his thought might be compatible with liberal American intellectual traditions as well. Against the existentialist insistence that essentialism was an outmoded philosophical concept that transformed one contingent set of conditions into a dubious universality of reductive sameness, it was healthy to remember the critical work that the concept of essence might do when it is transformed from an eternal truth into a normative potential to be realized historically.49
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