Mirror Sites:
CSUDH - Habermas - UWP - Archives
Practice Module on This File Not up yet.

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Soka University Japan - Transcend Art and Peace
Created: September 22, 2002
Latest Update: September 22, 2002
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Identity, Charisma, and Solidarity

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, September 2002.
"Fair use" encouraged.

In following a search on subjective authenticity, I cam across Chalres Linkdholm's Charisma. I down loaded the following sections because it will serve to give us some background against which to discuss identity and solidarity. Each is essential. Each matters. But the interests of the individual rarely coincide completely, so that there is always a tension between them. This is one of the tensions we need to understand in the discussion of hazing and sororiities and belonging, and why all that matters.

I'll get back to the essay on this tomorrow. But I thought that meanwhile you might like to read ahead.

From Charisma by Charles Lindholm
On the Boston University Site. Link added September 22, 2002.

Intimate Relationships

" Within the European-American context, however, the major alternative forms of charisma are found not in public, secular realms of capitalist consumption, nor in the worship of the nation, nor in entertainment, nor in religion, either orthodox or magical. Instead, people experience merger and self-loss in more intimate circumstances. For instance, as "haven in a heartless world" (Lasch 1977), the home in middle-class America ideally provides an atmosphere of intimacy and warmth where feelings of unconditional participation in the group are supposedly not only allowed, but favored. It is thus the locus for private community that stands opposed to the struggle and antagonism of the public world. ". . . .

"Love has another function too. It gives an accepted image of rapture and communion; an escape from the world of competitive individualism. All the world loves the lovers because the lovers' regard for one another is a reaffirmation for everyone that transcendence over human hostility and alienation is possible. The lovers also are a pleasurable reminder to each onlooker of his or her own experience of or hope for falling in love and escaping from the antagonisms and irritations of daily life. The tremendous quantity of love songs, stories, movies, poems testify to the function of love imagery in soothing and pacifying the public, and reducing the tension of existence in the modern world. At p. 205

"Furthermore, as we have seen, charisma in the modern context is not so easily controlled, even in its mild world-affirming guise. These groups too tend to develop world-rejecting inner cores and grandiose leaders. Thus, despite a "normalization" of charismatic activity, the pressure of the overarching social formation and the dynamic between the demands of the group and the psyche of the leader means that these groups may still make millennial claims, stirring up the (end of p.208) "enthusiastic fervor of the acolytes, whose intensity of commitment will often be in marked contrast to the apparent triviality or pragmatism of the avowed purposes of the group. Membership in the community will tend to gain priority over its ostensible purpose and loyalty to the leader will preclude critique. We are likely then to see increasing polarization, the prevalence of mythical thought, and an unwillingness to compromise. Along with this, we will witness too the adulation of theatrical and emotionally febrile leaders who retain power by publicly mirroring and intensifying the ardor of their constituencies. Under pressure, such charismatic groups and their symbolic leaders may spiral into psychotic fantasies and collapse.

"But if we continue to have relative stability, increased charismatic involvement in the modern age is not necessarily destructive. We know that charisma offers the strength and the imagination for achieving change. Yet it also can be, contrary to Weber, a factor in maintaining order. In the fragmented and isolating conditions of modernity, threats to personal identity can be warded off by membership in collectives gathered around a charismatic figure. Such a collective provides a revitalizing emotional common ground for the drifting individual in a world that seems hostile and heartless. The experience of vivid fusion with the charismatic other within the group permits a continuance of life and felt significance when the daily world has lost its enchantment. Such participation can offer a resting point and moment of transition, giving strength and support for construction of a new identity.

"The problem of the modern era is not the charismatic experience per se: "charisma," after all, means a gift of grace. In essence it has no substantive content beyond being an immediate ecstatic experience, providing a visceral and ecstatic moment that is outside of and opposed to the alienation and isolation of the mundane world—a memory upon which ordinary life can be constructed. The paradigm established by Weber and Durkheim, and restated by psychological theory, claims, in fact, that society is based upon a deeply evocative communion of self and other, a communion that offers not reason, but lived vitality. Without this electrifying blurring of boundaries, life no longer has its savor, action is no longer potent, the world becomes colorless and drab. (end of p.209)"