Immediacy

Fred Emil Katz

Description

Explores a new paradigm for understanding social-psychological situations in which we live our lives.
Along the way it illuminates the seductive appeal of cults and false messiahs, ways in which morality can be ennobling as well as deadly, the power of prayer, and the hidden side of personal careers.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Sociology
• Social sciences
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: AuthorHouse
• Date de parution: 16 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781504979092
• Langue: English

Extrait

IMMEDIACY
OUR WAYS OF COPING IN EVERYDAY LIFE
FRED EMIL KATZ


AuthorHouse™
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© 2016 Fred Emil Katz. All rights reserved.
 
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.
 
Published by AuthorHouse  12/06/2022
 
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7910-8 (sc)
ISBN: 978-1-5049-7909-2 (e)
 
 
 
 
 
 
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
 
 
 
Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.
Table of Contents
Overview: The Need to Examine Immediacy
Transcendence of Immediacy: Introduction
Transcending One’s Immediate World: Revisiting Viktor Frankl
Bridges to Transcendence: Why We Praise God While Coping with Extreme Sickness, Death, and Misfortune
Cults: Once Again We Are Surprised and Shocked
The Case of the False Messiah: Adolf Hitler
Personal Moral Virility in the Immediacy of Daily Life
Constricted Immediacy: Introduction
A Reassessment of the Milgram Experiments
Blindings Against Immediacy: Som e Moral Games We Play When We Confront Unpleasant Realities
Moral Dilemmas in Immediacy: Knowing Too Little, Knowing Too Much
Impingings, Linkages, Shadows and the Shaping of Immediacy: Introduction
The World of Riders--And the Dynamics of Immediacy
The Immediacy of Distance: The Case of Cheap Sausage and the Acceptance of a Murderous Regime
Exclusivities: Shadows We Create Over Our Moral Immediacy
Shaping Immediacy––The Particular Ways We Look at the World: The Case of Gestalt Psychology
Transformations of Immediacy: Introduction
The Second Path in the Course of Personal Careers: Escalating Dualities
Moral Mutation––The Immediacy of Tomorrow?
Switchings: Drastic Reconfigurations in Immediacy
Fusions That Create a New Immediacy: A Look at Some Aspects of the Spanish Inquisition
The Unknowable in Immediacy: Introduction to the Location of Local Autonomy
Immediacy and Not-Knowing : The Case of Bounded Indeterminacy: An Essay in Systems Theory 1
Conclusion
Related Books by Fred Emil Katz
Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil. Albany, NY SUNY Press, 1993.
Routes by which ordinary people can come to participate in social horrors.
Confronting Evil: Two journeys. Albany, NY SUNY Press, 2004.
Sequel to the Ordinary People ...book with return visit to Fred Emil Katz’ birthplace.
We Live in Social Space: A Window to a New Science. Bloomington, IN. AuthorHouse, 2017.
Dedication
To three of my teachers at Guilford College who gave me wondrously agitating gifts:
 
David Stafford, whose own life exemplifies that science and humane concerns can go together,
 
Frederick Crownfield, who showed me a vision of science––derived from his teacher at Harvard, Alfred North Whitehead––that is passionate in its search for order, irreverent to existing orthodoxy, and disciplined in its focus on a few core issues;
 
Robert Dinkel, who tantalized me with the idea that alongside practical application of science––in his own life he parlayed science into great commercial success––a stronger science of human behavior need not remain a vague dream. We can help to make it happen.
 
If the following effort comes somewhere close to their teachings, it will serve a worthy purpose.

I thank John Wiley & Sons for permission to use an edited version of my paper “ Indeterminacy in the Structure of Systems” which appeared in the journal Behavioral Science (copyright, John Wiley & Sons Limited), and I thank Brain Research Publications, Inc. for permission to use an edited version of my chapter “Bounded Indeterminacy: A Component Part of the Structure of Systems” which appeared in the book, Collective Phenomena and the Application of Physics to Other Fields of Science, edited by Norman A. Chigier and Edward A. Stern. In the present book, the section titled “The Unknowable in Immediacy” is an amalgamation of both of these previous publications.
Overview: The Need to Examine Immediacy
From the moment of our birth, every single one of us must cope with the immediate world around oneself. Our survival depends on it. Our happiness depends on it. Our effectiveness as human beings depends on it.
Charles Darwin taught us that species––of plants, of organisms––are in a life-and-death struggle for survival while coping with the immediate circumstances they encounter. Darwin’s focus was on the survival process itself, in which the environment––the immediate surroundings––sets the terms of the contest and determines the outcome. The environment carries out the natural selection. It is nature’s grand enforcer as to which species will thrive and which will die out.
In Darwin’s scenario we focus on large populations––species––rather than individuals. This distracts us from dealing with the actual ongoing life struggles of individual creatures. Yes, species are in survival struggle. But so are individuals. And it is the individual who, invariably, loses the struggle. Each of us dies – but not before a life-long effort to cope with the here and now, in which we actually find ourselves.
Yet Darwin provides the valuable insight that the transaction between an organism and its environment is crucial if one wants to understand how life is lived. In this book I shall dwell on such transaction by humans as individuals. The focus is on the individual social-psychological situation in which transactions take place. This situation is poorly understood, but we can understand it better. Much human pain and suffering is based on needless ignorance about this situation. Our ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge––of not having enough information––but of inadequate ways of looking at the information we do have. We have to create new ways of looking, so that we may see better.
Many researchers have looked at the social-psychological situation in which humans are living their lives. From the twentieth century, names such as Erving Goffman and Kurt Lewin come to mind. I shall not dwell on the work of these two researchers, except to say that their focus was on how the “field” (in the work of Lewin) impinges on the individual, and how the individual’s “self” (in the work of Goffman) is presented to a social context made up of people who evaluate you, and whose judgment you are trying to influence. However I shall quite unabashedly and deliberately make use of work by some researchers from this tradition––notably work by Stanley Milgram and Viktor Frankl––to present a particular point of view of the social immediacy in which humans operate. To do so, I shall change the various researchers’ own interpretations of their work.
I shall have us look at social-psychological immediacies as distinct phenomena in their own right. They will be shown to have dimensions that need to be reckoned with when we try to understand how and why people do what they do. I shall examine the following dimensions of immediacy:
 
1. Transcendence: How the structure, pressures, and strains of an immediate situation may be overcome through linkage to a context that goes beyond the immediate one in which individuals find themselves.
2. Constriction: In a sense this is the converse of transcendence, namely, how a particular setting in which social behavior takes place can be entirely sealed off from influence by anything outside that setting. As a result of such constriction––especially when it is couched as “moral” constriction––people may do things in one context that they would regard as entirely abhorrent if done in another.
3. Impingings: How external and distant elements can intrude into an immediate situation and permeate it, even though the immediate situation has an identity of its own.
4. Transformation: How changes can produce new immediacies in terms of personal life and careers, as well as in a larger, societal dimension.
5. The unknowable in immediacy: How some forms of not-knowing are both inevitable in how life is lived and are actually necessary. They are an inherent component part of many social systems.
In the following pages I suggest that Immediacy does not merely make a difference in how people lead their lives. It can have an identity and momentum of its own. Immediacy can be shown to have self-organizing and self-sustaining properties. Finally, I operate from the faith that many of the processes operating in Immediacy are patterned and orderly, and can be understood.
This point of view, this paradigm, will be developed and illustrated through essays on topics as varied as cults, Adolf Hitler as a false messiah, the famous Milgram experiments on people’s willingness to inflict pain on innocent people, a sociology of sexuality, evolution theory, the role of anti-Semitism in fifteenth-century Spain (using Benzion Netanyahu’s study) and, finally, in an essay on the importance of not knowing (I call it indeterminacy) is explored.
The following essays are offered in support of the immediacy paradigm. A paradigm is a venture. Any paradigm must stand or fall on the basis of its capacity to answer one challenge: Does it contribute to our understanding of the world in which