Crime, Law & Social Change 23: 147-156, 1995.

147
9 1995 KluwerAcademic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

Socialist humanism and the problem of crime

Thinking about Erich Fromm in the development o f
critical/peacemaking criminology

RICHARD QUINNEY
Northern Illinois University, Department of Sociology, Illinois 60115, USA

Abstract. Crime is understood as a problem of human existence. Assumed is the intersub-

jectivity of social reality, and the need for an interdisciplinary and integrative approach to
criminology. Along the way, a consideration of (1) the relativity of things human, (2) the
modes of having and being in contemporary society,(3) the interdependenceof all things, and
(4) the way of peace. The ideas of Erich Fromm are germaneto our thinking in the development
of a peacemaking criminology.

What is important in the study of crime is everything that happens before

crime occurs. The question of what precedes crime is far more significant
to our understanding than the act of crime itself. Crime is the reflection of
something larger and deeper.
As a critical criminologist, I find it ever more difficult to witness crime
or to think about crime. Instead, I envision a world without crime. And that
vision comes from imagining a world that would not produce crime. To be
critical, to be a critical criminologist, is to imagine what might be possible in
this human existence.
The ground upon which we stand may be named. As with all naming, words
simplify the complexity of reality but point the direction of our attentions. I
now use these words to describe my grounding: humanist, existential, Bud-
dhist, pacifist, and socialist. I assume the intersubjectivity of social reality,
and my approach is interdisciplinary and integrative. Thus my turn of late,
in search of support and elaboration, to the life and work of Erich Fromm.
Our thoughts about crime, and our actions of peacemaking, are furthered by
Fromm's socialist humanism,
My central assumption throughout is the interconnection between the inner
peace of the individual and the outer peace of the world. The two develop
and occur together. The struggle is to create a humane existence, and such
148 RICHARDQUINNEY

an existence comes only as we act peacefully toward ourselves and one

another.
Great care, then, is taken in our response to crime. Our actions - our social
policies - are to be consistent with our understanding of crime. And let it
be maintained that the realization of peace in our own everyday lives is the
best social policy. This is positive peacemaking in criminology and criminal
justice.

The relativity of things human

We begin necessarily with an understanding of human existence. All things

human (and otherwise) change. Nothing remains the same. There is no per-
manent substance to anything. In the flux of change and impermanence, in
this human world, we mortals can cling to nothing. Cling to naught is our
earthly imperative.
What then is real? What can be perceived as real? Simply to ask is to realize
that reality is ontologically existential. All human perception is intersubjec-
tive, a creation of the lived experience. At the beginning of my book The
Social Reality of Crime (1970, p. 4), I had written that "we have no reason to
believe in the objective existence of anything." To this day I am happy to be
counted among the existentialists.
As to the problem of what is real, and how reality may be known, the matter
goes far beyond the traditional debate over the objective and the subjective. It
has to do, rather, with the human mind's inability to think and to see beyond
its own innate construction. How can we know for certain of the existence
of anything, including existence itself?. The mind is the grand piano which
provides the space for the mice - our thoughts - to play. We humans cannot
step outside of our existence. And we cannot know, in the larger scheme of
things, or non-things, if the grand piano is other than a dream. The dream of
a cosmic dreamer. Why not?
It is not for us to know that which cannot be known. To have such knowledge
is not to be human. The simple teaching of Buddhism (Seung 1982): "Only
don't know" We have the mind to ask questions of the reality of our existence,
universal and otherwise, but we do not have the capacity to answer with
objectivity and certainty. As Albert Camus (1955) noted: "The absurd is the
essential concept and the first truth" Entirely reasonable, then, is our perpetual
ambivalence, or uncertainty, and our fear of life and death. Humility, mixed
with wonder, makes more sense than the continuous pursual of scientific
knowledge.
We stand before the mystery of existence. Our understanding is in the
recognition of our common inability to know for certain. Our fate, and our
 SOCIALIST HUMANISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CRIME 149

saving grace, is to be compassionate beings, in all humility. Whatever may

be known is known in love. Not in manipulation and control, not in the
advancement of a separate self and a career, but in the care for one another.
That is reality enough.
In these times, the only approach to reality - and to truth - that makes
sense is one that is existentially grounded. We remind ourselves, again and
again, that any construction - as with all knowledge and understanding -
occurs only in the context of personal experience. Jean-Paul Sartre (1992,
p. 58) observed that any notion of truth that is abstract and removed from the
struggle of everyday life is but a form of ignorance and bad faith. The truth
that comes from our intersubjective struggle to be human - a truth however
relative and lacking of the absolute - is the real truth. And our thinking and
our writing, as critical criminologists, are an intimate part of the struggle for
existence.
But this is not to say that we humans do not desire certainty, do not seek the
absolute. The absurdity of our human condition is that we have the mind to ask
about reality and truth, but we do not have the innate capacity to answer the
questions. Existentialism offers us the courage to entertain the ambiguity of
our existence. To have what the novelist Milan Kundera (1988, p. 7) calls "the
wisdom of uncertainty" Without such wisdom, we humans create worlds that
are cruel and oppressive. Kundera observes: "Man desires a world where good
and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible
desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded
on this desire." We humans have, as Kundera notes again, "an inability to
tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely
at the absence of the Supreme Judge" To this I would add that in our time (in
our epoch) the law, the modem legal system with its criminal justice apparatus,
is a result of our inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human.
In the absence of God, the law has become Supreme Judge. There must be
another way to live. But first we would have to accept the human condition.
To accept what Kundera (1984) referred to on another occasion, in the very
title of his novel, as the unbearable lightness o f being. As existentialists, we
are learning - and living - the nature of our being.

To h a v e or to be

An understanding of our being, and how we might realize that being, is

enhanced by exploring once again the writings of Erich Fromm. Although
several books of Fromm's writings have been published posthumously (1992;
1994), Fromm's last book was To Have or to Be ?, published in 1976. Before he
died in 1980, he (1978, p. 220) noted that he was working on a sequel, a book
 150 RICHARDQUINNEY

on "a godless religion" It was to be a study of religious experience in which

the concept of a supreme being, a god, is "unnecessary and undesirable,' The
pursual of a nontheistic perspective is reflected also in Fromm's study of Zen
Buddhism in the 1960s (see Funk 1982; Fromm 1992). Throughout his life of
eighty years, Fromm proclaimed the central importance of the human being
- and the human spirit - in the creation of a better world.
In 1965, Fromm edited a collection of international essays, titled Socialist
Humanism. Introducing the book, Fromm (1965, pp. vii-xiii) outlined his
basic vision. Humanism, in simplist terms, he said, is the belief in the unity
of the human race, and the potential of human beings to be perfected by their
own efforts. Socialist humanism is human development in relation to the full
development of society. It is the ending of the epoch of prehistory, as Karl
Marx had noted, and the opening of the epoch of human history. For Fromm,
as well as for Marx, human history is to go beyond a theistic belief in the
existence of God, and beyond the ethic of consumption that dominates capi-
talism. One other premise was common to the essays in Socialist Humanism,
and it was the "conviction that the urgent task for mankind today is the estab-
lishment of peace" (p. xii). Peace and the realization of the human project go
together; they are one and the same.
In the introduction of To Have or to Be?, Fromm discusses the two main
premises of capitalism, in addition to the economic contradictions, as the
sources for the failure of the great promise of unlimited progress. First, there is
radical hedonism, seeking the maximum pleasure, trying to satisfy the desire
to possess. And second, egotism, selfishness and greed. The remainder of the
book is a rich, erudite, and compassionate examination of our contemporary
human condition.
The crucial problem, Fromm observes, is that capitalism promotes the
having mode of existence over the being mode. He writes (p. 3): "In a culture
in which the supreme goal is to have - and to have more and more - and in
which one can speak of someone as 'being worth a million dollars,' how can
there be an alternative between having and being? On the contrary, it would
seem that the very essence of being is having; that if one has nothing, one is
nothing." The imperative is to create individuals and societies based on the
being mode of existence.
For Fromm, ultimately, love is the essence of being human. His most
popular book is The Art of Loving, published in 1956, and reprinted several
times since. Love opens us to the fullness of our being. "Love is an activity,
not a passive affect; it is 'standing in,' not 'falling for.' In the most general
way, the active character of love can be described by stating that love is
primarily giving, not receiving" (Fromm 1989, p. 20).
 SOCIALIST HUMANISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CRIME 151

Fromm then observes that love is difficult to find and to practice in con-
temporary society. Love disintegrates in such a world. He (p. 75) opens his
chapter "Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society" with
the following observation:
If love is a capacity of the mature, productive character, it follows that
the capacity to love in an individual living in any given culture depends
on the influence this culture has on the character of the average person.
If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to
ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit
resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the
question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer or our
Western life can doubt that love - brotherly love, motherly love, and
erotic love - is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken
by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms
of the disintegration of love.

The basis of peacemaking criminology is compassion and love. A love that

not only allows us to identify ourselves with others, but allows us to know
that we are one with another, that we are one. Such love makes a different
world, a world without crime.

Everything is everything else

Erich Fromm's interest in Buddhism began as early as the mid- 1920s. Decades
later, at the end of the 1950s and in the early 1960s, Fromm studied inten-
sively the works of D.T. Suzuki. His contact with Suzuki resulted in several
writings and collaborations (1960a; 1960b). Fromm's critique of irrational
authority and his preference for rational insight combined with mysticism
were significantly shaped by his experience with Zen Buddhism (see Funk
1982, pp. 88-128),
Zen Buddhism is essentially existential and humanistic. In the moment, here
and now, we humans experience the wonder of our existence. The ultimate,
even the very notion of the ultimate, cannot be known by discursive thought.
We are left with living our lives dally. Awareness, found in the practice of
meditation, a concentration in the moment, is the focus of life (see Fromm
1992, pp. 31-54). There is a sense of the interconnectedness of all things, and
a compassion for all that exists.
We are interrelated - "not just people, but animals too, and stones, clouds,
trees" (Aitken 1984, p. 10). We are an integral part of everything. Nothing
exists by itself; nothing has a separate existence, a separate self. As Thich
15 2 RICHARDQUINNEY

Nhat Hanh (1988, pp. 51-52) writes: "In the light of emptiness, everything
is everything else, we inter-are, everyone is responsible for everything that
happens in life" As human beings we are intimately connected to one another,
in all the joy and all the suffering of the world. As human beings we are of
nature, we are nature, one with the world. The truth is our interbeing, beyond
the dualistic thinking of the Western mind.
Thus, we are aware of the impermanence, the emptiness, of the word.
And peace comes in the awareness of impermanence - and interrelatedness.
One of my favorite observations on such awareness, and the relation of this
awareness to peace, is from Stephen Batchelor's book (1983, pp. 105-106)
Alone With Others, subtitled An ExistentiaI Approach to Buddhism. Batchelor
writes: "Lasting and stable peace of mind is achieved not through discovering
the permanence of anything, but through fully accepting the impermanent
as impermanent and ceasing to insist that it is otherwise. Likewise, genuine
contentment is found in realizing that what one previously assumed to be
capable of providing satisfaction is actually unable to do so" He concludes:
"As the new vision unfolds, our basic anxiety and our sense of meaning-
lessness are dissolved in the growing awareness of the profound mystery of
interrelatedness that permeates all phenomena."
Such awareness is not merely another form of having, a having of more
knowledge. Rather, it is in the sphere of knowing. Fromm (1976, p. 28) writes
in To Have or to Be?:

Our understanding of the quality of knowing in the being mode of existence

can be enhanced by the insights of such thinkers as the Buddha, the
Hebrew prophets, Jesus, Master Eckhart, Sigmund Freud, and Karl Marx.
In their view, knowing begins with the awareness of the deceptiveness of
our common sense perceptions, in the sense that our picture of physical
reality does not correspond to what is "really real" and, mainly, in the sense
that most people are half-awake, half-dreaming, and are unaware that most
of what they hold to be true and self-evident is illusion produced by the
suggestive influence of the social world in which they live. Knowing,
then, begins with the shattering of illusions, with disillusionment (Ent-
tiiuschung). Knowing means to penetrate through the surface, in order to
arrive at the roots, and hence the causes; knowing means to "see" reality
in its nakedness. Knowing does not mean to be in possession of the truth;
it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in
order to approach truth ever more closely.

The being mode of knowing allows us, as Fromm (1992, pp. 117-120) also
observed, to go beyond ourselves, outside the ego. We turn to others.
 SOCIALIST HUMANISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CRIME 153

The implications for peacemaking are evident. Directly following Thich

Nhat Hanh's (1988, pp. 51-52) line that "everything is everything else" and
that "everyone is responsible for everything that happens in life" is the follow-
ing, simple observation: "When you produce peace and happiness in yourself,
you begin to realize peace for the whole world"
Where does this lead in our criminology? The objective is clear: to be kind
to one another, to transcend the barriers that separate us from one another,
and to live everyday life with a sense of interdependence. Returning to the
source, as in the Zen search for the ox (see Sekida 1975, pp. 223-237), we
go to town, enter the marketplace, with helping hands. Criminology is our
service.

Peace is the way

Social action - our service - comes out of the informed heart, out of the clear
and enlightened mind. We act with an understanding of our own suffering
and the suffering of others. If human actions are not rooted in compassion,
these actions will not contribute to a compassionate and peaceful world. "If
we cannot move beyond inner discord, how can we help find a way to social
harmony? If we ourselves cannot know peace, be peaceful, how will our acts
disarm hatred and violence?" (Dass and Gorman 1985, p. 185). The means
cannot be different from the ends; peace can come only out of peace. "There
is no way to peace," said A.J. Muste. "Peace is the way."
As in Mahatma Gandhi's satyagraha, the truth is revealed in the course of
action. And, in turn, it is truth as presently conceived that guides our action.
Gandhi's Hindu and Jainist based concept of satyagraha was derived from the
Sanskrit word Sat for "it is" or "what is", things as they are. Graha is to grasp,
to be firm. "Truth force" is the common translation of satyagraha. Gandhi.
often spoke of his inner voice, a still small voice that would be revealed in
the preparedness of silence (see Erikson 1969, pp. 410-423).
Truthful action, for Gandhi, was guided by the idea of ahisma, the refusal
to do harm. Oppression of all kinds is to be actively resisted, but without
causing harm to others. In An autobiography: The Story of My Experiments
with Truth, Gandhi (1957, p. 349) describes ahimsa as the refusal to do harm.
Moreover, compassion and self-restraint grow in the effort not to harm.
Gandhi's insistence upon the truth is firmly within the tradition of socialist
humanism. As Kevin Anderson (1991, pp. 14-29) has shown in his essay on
Gandhian and Marxian humanism, both are a radical rejection of Western
capitalist civilization. Both posit a future society free of alienation, and both
share a confidence that human liberation is on the immediate historical agenda.
In reconstructing criminology, we are informed by a socialist humanism.
154 RICHARDQUINNEY

Erich Fromm included in his 1965 collection of essays, Socialist Humanism,

an essay on Gandhi by the Gandhian scholar and former secretary to Gandhi,
N.K. Bose. In the essay, titled "Gandhi: Humanist and Socialist" Bose (p. 99)
describes the satyagrahi, the one who practices satyagraha, as a person who
lives "according to his own lights" one who opposes (does not cooperate
with) what seems wrong, but also one who "attempts to accept whatever may
be right and just" in the view of the opponent. Bose continues: "There is
neither victory nor defeat, but an agreement to which both parties willingly
subscribe, while institutions or practices proven wrong are destroyed during
the conflict?' A humane society is created in the course of individual and
collective struggle.
To be remembered, all the while, is the single objective of peace. Whatever
the technique, whatever the philosophy or theory, the movement toward peace
is the proof of any thought or action. Erich Fromm spent a lifetime working in
the movements for peace. He was a co-founder of SANE, an organization that
sought to end the nuclear race and the war in Vietnam. Late in his life, Fromm
worked on behalf of the 1968 presidential nomination campaign of Senator
Eugene McCarthy. In the campaign, Fromm (1994, p. 96) wrote: "America
stands today at the crossroads: It can go in the direction of continued war and
violence, and further bureaucratization and automatization of man, or it can
go in the direction of life, peace, and political and spiritual renewal?' His call
was to "walk the way toward life?'
Our response to all that is human is for life, not death. What would a
Gandhian philosophy of existence offer a criminologist, or any member of
society, in reaction to crime? To work for the creation of a new society,
certainly. But, immediately, the reaction would not be one of hate for the
offender, nor a cry for punishment and death. In a reading of Gandhi, and
a commentary on punishment, Erik Erikson (1969, pp. 412-413) writes the
following:

Gandhi reminds us that, since we can not possibly know the absolute truth,
we are "therefore not competent to punish" - a most essential reminder,
since man when tempted to violence always parades as another's police-
man, convincing himself that whatever he is doing to another, that other
"has it coming to him?' Whoever acts on such righteousness, however,
implicates himself in a mixture of pride and guilt which undermines his
position psychologically and ethically. Against this typical cycle, Gandhi
claimed that only the voluntary acceptance of self-suffering can reveal the
truth latent in a conflict - and in the opponent.

Punishment is not the way of peace.

 SOCIALISTHUMANISMAND THE PROBLEMOF CRIME 155

Responses to crime that are fueled by hate, rather than generated by love,
are necessarily punitive. Such responses are a form of violence, a violence
that can only beget further violence. Much of what is called "criminal justice"
is a violent reaction to, or anticipation of, crime. The criminal justice system,
with all of its procedures, is a form of negative peace. The purpose being to
deter or process acts of crime through the threat and application of force.
Positive peace, on the other hand, is something other than the deterrence
or punishment of crime. Positive peace is more than merely the absence
of crime and violence - and of war. "It refers to a condition of society
in which exploitation is minimized or eliminated altogether, and in which
there is neither overt violence nor the more subtle phenomenon of structural
violence" (Barash 1991, p. 8). Positive peace is the attention given to all
those things, most of them structured in the society, that cause crime, that
happen before crime occurs. Positive peace exists when the sources of crime
- including poverty, inequality, racism, and alienation - are not present. There

can be no peace - no positive peace - without social justice. Without social

justice and without peace (personal and social), there is crime. And there is,
as well, the violence of criminal justice.
The negative peacemaking of criminal justice keeps things as they are.
Social policies and programs that are positive in nature- that focus on positive
peacemaking - create something new. They eliminate the structural sources
of violence and crime. A critical, peacemaking criminal is engaged in the
work of positive peace.
Thus our socialist humanism, the attention given to everyday existence,
love and compassion, and social justice. Our efforts are not so much out of
resistance, as they are an affirmation of what we know about human existence.
The way is simply that of peace in everyday life.

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