The Revolt of the Primitive: An Inquiry into the Roots of Political Correctness (Paperback)

Oakland University Business Professor Howard S. Schwartz has published an understated yet powerful book which formulates the modern-day onslaught of political correctness (PC) as a "revolt of the primitive." Schwartz seamlessly blends psychological and political analysis of some of the principal horrors brought upon our cultural by the depredations of political correctness and feminism. And he shows us that a subconscious desire to reunite with a primordial mother may underlie society's pervasive misandry.

Schwartz proposes in well-reasoned prose that men work in order to engage an indifferent world and transform it in a way that enhances the maternal world and brings them back into close contact with the feminine. "It is precisely the instability of the male sex role that has driven the achievement for which men have been responsible in the sphere of work." Since men depend on women's validation and appreciation, male psychology is in a bit of a bind, implicitly giving the female power. "The feeling of [women's inherent superiority] arises from a fantasy, and a fantasy that men and women collude to preserve." Traditionally, women gladly gave that power back in a mutual flow of generosity and praise. Today, increasingly, women are instead exploiting this superiority toward their own self-preoccupied ends.

Psychologically, Schwartz starts his analysis by noting that females may feel a primordial connection with their mother that males can never enjoy. In order to maintain the maternal bond, a vision of mother as perfectly good is helpful. But in order for this
statement to have meaning, who is to balance the equation by being "not good"? Obviously, man, the "other," who in his fatherly role "acts both as the agent of the external world and as our agent in helping us learn how to live in the world." Man is the perfect fall guy, as it were. "His achievements were bad, and his failures were bad. His presence was bad, and his absence was bad. What he did was bad, and what he didn't do was bad¼. The idea of evil must be created if the idea of perfect goodness is to be preserved¼"

Moreover, as some feminist authors have explicitly spelled out, male sexuality acts, on a symbolic if not literal level, to separate women from their identification with the primordial mother. PC thus derives its peculiar power in part from the roots of our own psyches. And we come to understand "how political practices that would, to anyone with a foothold in reality, seem foolish and absurd, look to [PC advocates] to be practical and righteous."

Schwartz does a good job periodically incorporating analysis of the differences in modern society that have led to these sea changes. One contributing factor is our current distance from reality in industrial society. At one point the author adroitly comments on how women's traditional role is less crucial today primarily due to all the modern conveniences we now enjoy. As a result, women can consider other options that were unthinkable back in the days when if they didn't arise before dawn to renew the fire, the family (including the breadwinning father) couldn't get comfortably dressed.

However many times we may have heard fragments of the stories, one cannot help being chilled to witness Schwartz' penetrating eyes surveying the horrors which
PC has brought upon our universities and our military. Schwartz provides a number
of little-publicized examples regarding the virtual formal annexation of universities by PC forces-political student newspaper censorship at Wellesley, a lack of appropriate response to a racial discrimination hoax in Kalamazoo, Michigan, totalitarian and probably unconstitutional employee diversity indoctrination at the University of Cincinnati, the PC-motivated devastation of the counseling psychology department at Minnesota's Saint Cloud State University, a Wesleyan class entitled "Pornogaphy: Writing of Prostitutes."

In order to sustain itself, Schwartz shows, PC generates a "drive to the extreme," where
ever more desperate searching for examples of racism and sexism is required in order
to justify the PC machinery's continued existence. The "moralization of the issue of race and its ideological cognates" has been one of the key forces depriving certain groups [white males] of the capacity to assert their own claim to the distribution of resources and to defend themselves from attack. PC thereby requires one to rule impermissible portions of one's own psyche out of bounds, a process which is greatly facilitated by projecting these elements onto others who can then be hated and despised in place of oneself. White males are the recipient of choice for these projections.

Intriguingly, Schwartz points out that real racism, in which another race is hated and despised, most commonly for unwanted traits the racist person has in themselves, it itself thus a form of projective identification. How effective, he asks, can PC then be in the ostensible combat against racism? Schwartz demolishes PC's absurd suggestion that only whites can be racists and demonstrates with a few well-chosen examples the very real power minorities and women do hold in today's PC society. Perhaps most devastatingly, Schwartz shows that PC has not served its purported beneficiaries very well, "prevent[ing] robust discussion of serious problems within the lower classes of the African-American community and¼ guarantee[ing] that their very real problems would remain and even worsen."

Only Schwartz could have gotten away with such an extensive analysis of the already overexposed Tailhook scandal. The author concludes that the accused officers' gravest crime was their male sexuality. They were guilty of taking pride in their sex, of their unapologetic maleness, which is subconsciously perceived as an attack because it threatens the completeness of female sexuality. Such attitudes cannot be permitted if the revolt of the primitive is to be sustained.

Very little fault can be found in this fine book. Occasionally, Schwartz seems to get bogged down in his extensive research, devoting more space than really seems justified to analyzing one particularly absurd feminist article. At times, the author's Freudian emphasis also seemed a bit overdone to me. And yet much of his reasoning retains its validity regardless of which psychological modalities are applied.

Schwartz concludes with some trenchant analysis of the wrong-headed drive for women to serve in combat roles, which the author depressingly and brilliantly shows, cannot help but undermine the military's mission. It will "create a fault line not at the nation's boundaries, but within the military itself." Schwartz shreds William Pollack's goddess-worshipping claims about boy's violence, noting that the Littleton, Colorado killers had plenty of room for self-expression but needed some firm boundaries to be set on their behavior. Finally, Schwartz writes that far worse than the PC-produced decay of many of our most critical social structures is the undermining of self-criticism. We have lost our ability for critical introspection and if we don't wake up soon, we may lose much, much more.

As usual, this book will be least read by those who need it most. But don't let that keep you away from Howard Schwartz' truly exceptional achievement in "Revolt of the Primitive."

Schwartz’s thesis is built on Freudian foundations. He argues that the image of the primordial mother, the infant’s fantasy of the ideal mother who makes the child the centre of her world, is the primitive, archetypal motivation behind political correctness, and explains its psychic power. Rather than deal with the mature trade-offs that male/female relationships require, proponents of ideological victimhood have found that they can compel society to attempt to take on this role of primordial mother, and men, including powerful men, dependent on women for psychic validation and admiration of their accomplishments in the world, are reduced to infantile dependence, doing what ‘Mom’ says, and thus unable to oppose the irrationality.

I think that Schwartz is on to something. I am not a fan or follower of Freudian psychology, but Schwartz makes a solid and detailed case for his conclusions, and demonstrates an extraordinarily good fit with the facts. He supports his argument with extensive analysis and examples from the feminist ideological takeover of the universities and the military. Ironically, it is men’s very success in dealing with the real world, in conquering major issues of daily survival through technology and social organization, that has prepared the ground for this problem. For, as he says in his conclusion,
“I referred earlier to the tremendous wealth and power that postwar civilization has developed. These have seemed to make the very idea of reality obsolete, but it is not obsolete, it is only distant. … How did we get to this? How did it happen that Western civilization, at the height of its greatest achievements, would give its best minds over to the task of taking itself apart? The answer, of course, is an old one. … this turns out to be the classic material of tragedy. It is hubris. We pushed reality back so far that its existence became only a rumour. Then we suppressed the rumour. We said it was politically incorrect. It interfered with our grandiosity, and we chose our grandiosity.” [p.212-213]

The Revolt of the Primitive is not an easy read. It is written in an academic style that at times I found too difficult to follow. For instance, Schwartz’s detailed explanation of Freud’s and Chasseguet-Smirgel’s psychoanalytic theories of childhood had me skipping pages — despite the fact that I am passionately interested in the subject of this book and probably more academically inclined than most. This is not a book that an average reader will take in at one reading. Yet, the depth of analysis and extraordinary originality of this work is worth the effort. Schwartz may have given us, and I say this with awareness of the extent of the claim, the first foundation stone in our desperate need to understand what is happening to us today, and which threatens to bring our society to its knees.

Reviewer David Shackleton is a thinker and writer on gender, and editor and publisher of Everyman: A Men's Journal. (...)

In the newest, paperback edition of "Revolt of the Primitive", Howard S. Schwartz takes us on a journey into the world of the "Politically Correct"-a land not so much intended to punish some because of their gender, sexual preference, race or ethnicity-as the domain of the primitive mother, where all who have not been loved in the past will be loved more to compensate, and where those who have been loved in the past will be hated for having stolen that love. An outgrowth of the 1960's and 1970's "socio-cultural revolution" taught by and intended for middle-class, college-educated people, the United States of America now twists in the winds generated by the Cyclops-like child of this experiment. Like a modern-day Odysseus, Schwartz warns us of the shrill song of feminist sirens, identifying with the Primordial Female and luring us to our destruction on the rocks of insanity. We come to see, as if through-a-mirror-darkly, what lies behind women having their legs shaved by inebriated Navy pilots at Tailhook, teenagers in Littleton engaging in a one-way running gun battle in the school halls, and educated administrators in academe suffocating in their corseted rules and by-laws as they write "gender-less" rules for the arcane--like a modern-day Scarlet O'Hara who-"...will just think about it, tomorrow." Schwartz wants us to think about it today, before the rocks destroy the fragile vessel of our nation's democracy.

The new edition-looking less like a Chemistry text and more like a good read on an airline flight-contains a very beautiful postcard of the author's journey into the social revolution nirvana in the 60's and 70's. Post 9/11 Schwartz warns us that the soft recesses of the primitive, primordial mother-goddess will not shield us from the destruction of bin Ladens-who live in the world of sharp swords, jet-fueled 727 missiles and a liking for all things yang-male. Until the Primordial Goddess envelopes Osama and his bad-boys, somebody in the nation will have to wake up, crawl out of the envelope, and find whatever yang is still available to strike at least one plane with a sharp edge-to remind us that sometimes, even revolutions need to find a mid-point on an axis.