A Question for Culture

January 19th, 2008 Posted in Culture

Back to the mysterious heart of the group: I am guessing that it is very rare for any human grouping when confronted by a demanding event to be without a hint of a governing concept in its responses. Call it the veiled premise.

We are now broaching a fundamental idea that appears to contradict two other processes on whose existence we have been insisting: (1) invention or the human proclivity to reduce mystery, and (2) human choice where the people have the option of accepting or rejecting a particular social order. If there is a persistent attitude or a value, a part of the culture that has the quality of an anchor or a rigid unyielding position it would most assuredly limit or distort any hope of a new idea or a new option for action. Social processes and patterns however simplified in popular presentation come from complex sources. The complications are not only in the attempted explanations but in the observed behaviors as well. The dialectic, the rejected, the resistant, and the multiplicity of sources deny simplicity.

Thinking of rules and values and such we presume a formality in style where these guiding principles are inscribed or approach this state in a settled (or even rote) memory. They are instituted. But the holding of this knowledge, of its content and implications, the enforcement of its strictures is a specialized function. Only a small part of humanity can recite chapter and verse of these rigid forms. For the rest of us the law, morality, rules, norms are imprecisely retained and trail off toward inarticulate hearsay and, in the extreme, skirt silence. True there is the observed behavior patterns but these almost always take the form of the probability distribution. Implied is the existence of tendencies, leanings that are informal, that are understated, that are not firmly established and therefore not easily recognized or called up. They trend toward incoherence and as such can be brushed aside as non-existent. We can class this part of the whole culture as the unvoiced—distributed unequally into segmented sections of the population.

So the elements of culture can be described as ranging along a dimension of formality: instituted down through informal to understated to unverbalized and finally closing in on incoherent. These states are distributed in various mixtures through the several segments of the group.

The now archaic concepts of folkways and mores, I am arguing here, have an actual modern content. The paradox of something shared by a particular grouping, whose range and borders may be imprecise–we are not sure of location or meaning. It is there as a potential. It seems to be involved in the ongoing unrolling of events but until it is expressed (pressed out) it remains a shimmering multitude of possibilities. Remember the old song that went “I met a man who wasn’t there.” The rule or consensus is apparently not there but then the patterned action appears. Is the rule an artifact of the act a la Pareto? Or is it a latent presence? How does this part of culture operate?

Consider opinions which are constantly called up and measured in public opinion polls. They are recovered as answers to specific questions in the form of forced choice: for or against, yes or no, agree or disagree. The answers to a refined series of questions posed to a panel of people about the same subject reveals a sequence of different answers that form an order of more to less that can be projected as a unified dimension. Example: ask questions about the value of abortion such as “abortion is a sin,” “people who perform or assist at abortions should be applauded,” and so on. Call them questions a, b, c,…x. The answers indicate degrees of pro or con opinions about the legitimacy of abortion. Then you have the ordered distribution of opinions yyyyy through yyyyn, yyynn and so on to nnnnn. This array can be thought of as identifying varying degrees (more through less) of liberal to conservative attitudes toward abortion. Paul Lazarsfeld called attention to this use of survey questions in the “The American Soldier” (in the third volume). It is a familiar research form among psychologists and social psychologists.

So we can call out innumerable dimensions by contrasting dialectic positions or simply stating dilemmas that in themselves do not imply an absolute and immovable morality. For example: for or against guns, for or against use of alcoholic beverages, for or against mind altering drugs, for or against dancing, for or against undifferentiated treatment of gender, for or against restricted immigration, for or against interest free loans, for or against paper money, for or against vegetarianism. And so on. The implied underlying dimensions can be thought of as abstracted summaries of attitudes or values such as liberal versus conservative, radical versus reactionary, belief versus disbelief, simple versus complex. These can also be stated as qualities of character.

Posit that all members of a society or grouping are carriers of understated values, sort of walking around value banks with unaccounted deposits. Think of these as tendencies, stated for the entire group as distributions of probabilities toward certain, momentarily uncalled actions. Again the informal, verging on toward the incoherent, culture.

Meanwhile the day-to-day experiences of group members generate a rolling out of specific issues requiring an expression of opinion or even an actual behavioral response. Issues of social significance—issues of the day—that demand opinion and action. These issues rotate into and out of public prominence, some persisting unresolved for ages, others ephemeral.

Ideally the two systems meet, the emerging issues paralleled by an array of opinion and action. They exist together for awhile, each modified by the exchanges and actions that occur and subside either with a compromise and now consciously established rule or institution or in a imposition of one view over others or in turning away, an irresolution that allows the return to the understated state as both issue and value, the return to the state of the miasma like unarticulated.

Inarticulate, unvoiced, understated, incoherent, unexpressed, rarely called out—all suggest that a sector of culture is informal, not explicitly established. This opens the possibility of presuming a content, projecting a content, inventing a content; the possibility of inauthenticity.

But this is part of the nature of the unspoken. If at time x we do not know what “a” is, but at a later time y we describe a newly discovered meaning “b” how do we know that “b” is the same as “a.” All we can argue is plausibility or that few in-the-know object or argue against or that in any case now we certainly know something specific so when we get to “c” we’ll have a real comparison.

The calling out of the inarticulate is, I would suggest, really a selection among an unknown range of the possible. The calling it “b” as against all the other possible meanings involves a choice. The unvoiced attitude is much broader and inexact than any voiced opinion that we may project back.

On her death bed, Gertrude Stein asked “What is the answer?” (a pause) “In that case, what is the question?”

Only by knowing the question, how the emerging issue is framed, can we select within the range of possible opinions and actions of an imputed hidden attitude or value base.

There are practical specialists–political operatives, propagandists, prevaricators, rhetoricians, advertising planners, and so on who are actively at work now controlling the calling forth of favored flavors of opinion and action. They help the people speak by framing the question. The outcome of controlling the issue is to control and bias the answer by precisely limiting and warping of the question or issue.

One of the tasks of sociology is to identify the dispersion of the possible content of the answer compatible with the underlying attitude and value and to reduce the control of these specialist control-the-agenda cadres. The sociologist has to ask “what are the questions?”

I am particularly troubled by the domination of the people by dictatorial regimes and cult of the personality tin horns. In the analogy of the matador and the bull, the matador represents man’s struggle against destructive natural events. So to assist in the liberation of the bull is a risk—the angry bull, untamed nature, loose in the streets of the civilized city.

Something in the Culture. I am still troubled by the politics of Charles Lindbergh in the late 1930s when he actively participated in the American First movement (a pro-fascist American group that aimed to keep USA neutral and uninvolved in the international political struggles in Europe.) He also in this period visited the Nazi regime in Germany and expressed approval of their political program. His actions were inexplicable to those who disagreed with him since he had been the iconic good American persona. He on the fascist side was the ultimate contradiction. I can only speculate: The possibilities. Lindbergh’s sense of order, revealed in his meticulous preparation for his risky adventures, and his dedication to competence and skill and discipline in his own life suggest that he would be impressed by the projection of order and control made by the fascists—making the trains run on time. He might also have been against the increasing trade union and working class agitation during the Depression. The fascists regimes were seen as bulwarks against communist expansion through an appeal to international working class solidarity. The racist and nationalist lines offered a counter-class identity—a unifying ethnic identity disrupting and denigrating internationalist class loyalty. The workers were given a biologically based superiority and the glory of being part of a conquering nation. Lindbergh might also have found an ethnic identification with the Germans within himself (This is only a wild guess) and felt a call to an old family loyalty.

At the same time another American with a possible ethnic connection to the German identity, the USA army officer Eisenhower, appears to have successfully rejected any family connection to a past identity and felt no special guilt at his later direction of a massive attack against the German people. His commitment and undivided loyalty to his army career was close to absolute.

This speculation, which may be entirely specious, still can be helpful in answering an even larger question concerning the German nation itself. For in the era following World War I the German monarchy had been displaced and a liberal-socialist democratic regime had been appointed and governed for a number of years. In the foreground meanwhile a reactionary Army supported by anti-democratic armed militias struggled against a uncoordinated communist, socialist, liberal democratic and anarchist coalition. Meanwhile the German folk were angered by the harsh peace terms imposed on Germany by the Allies and they feared the threat of working class revolt encouraged by the Russian revolution and its anti-religious and anti-petite bourgeoisie rhetoric. It appears that wealthy industrialists were in support of the most reactionary elements.

The result, the fascist party, only in existence for approximately ten years, took power in a flawed election and through manipulation of events secured themselves in power undemocratically and then fully mobilized and armed the German people and moved onward to a very destructive war.

The speculative analysis of the politics of Lindbergh and Eisenhower suggests that the distribution of the unstated attitudes and values of the German people can not be given as a narrow unity. The struggles of the 1920s suggest a wide dispersal.

The Nazi regime itself becomes the Gertrude Stein question that calls forth the opinion and action of the German people out of their supposed fund of unexpressed attitude and value. The unassigned reserve fund is drawn upon for a particular currency. And something within the nature of the culture of a segment of a civilized people is revealed.

The political actions of the anti-democratic party seals the outcome. Control of the state power, the legitimation of the fascist militias, mean an immediate repression of all opposition—contrary cadres are destroyed or driven underground. The propaganda for the new anti-democratic line is broadcast wholesale, teachers and educators are purged and those remaining adopt the new line. People are called out to rallies and mass demonstrations for indoctrination in action. Their puny egos are very narrowly empowered. Minority groups are stigmatized, hounded and violently attacked. Their neighbors are cowered—“no that is not me”—shared humanity is denied.

The inundation of an entire society by garbage!

The ideas of attitude and value imply a limit There is the assertion of something to do associated with a rejection of something else. The gross responses to the question—agreement (opinion and action in the suggested direction), a zone of indifference (no attention or response), and finally denial, rejection, disagreement, are in conflict. At the onset this is the situation. Relative success or failure in the initial response and the other processes kick-in and magnify the result. But the key is the surfacing of negative responses.

We are confronting the need to prove, or argue, the existence of a persistent unverbalized part of any culture—unmobilized attitudes and values that manifest as elements in forming a group’s rolling out of opinions and actions.

The model of the trial by jury: Even where culture is nailed down in a formally recognized text or in an existing memorized folklore the need to apply it to particular cases leads to an appeal to common sense which is understated culture on the verge of being articulated. The trial applies the text to a specific case. The Judge explains the law and offers methods of defining concepts—text and method. The lawyers represent the dialectic, they contest the issue of whether or not a transgression of the law (and by whom) has occurred by presenting evidence—witnesses, material objects. Being so obviously high powered intellects with commensurate incomes and trophy wives and girl friends one wonders why they are not permitted to decide the outcome of the presentation for themselves. Why would they need a jury? Under the Latin system of justice a trained lawyer investigates the case pro and con and then sums it up conclusively and presents it to a court for final decision. The jury’s part minimized. But in the English system the jury has the responsibility of determining fact. They are limited by the definitions and methods of the judge and lawyers but even in a truncated form the final decision is their’s. From the welter of evidence, almost jumbled into incoherence by judge and lawyers the jury must decide fact.

The jury is a sample of the community. Its members represent as a probability, the common sense of the community—that is the understated, the unverbalized, the quiescent attitudes and values (treated as an array of the possible with attached probabilities). They are a line into this great unknown, where even high powered legal minds can not penetrate except through this panel that has almost randomly been called out. You only find it in its real form by forcing it out through the posed question. The jury system ergo appears to presume the existence of this residual unformalized sector of culture. So common sense is in the legal system considered a significant part of the shadowy heart of a group’s culture.

Lawyers, assisted by renegade sociologists, aim to slant this common sense toward their sides by limiting the jury appointments of certain sub-cultural categories in favor of others more attuned to their messages, and so thwart the process—but this thwarting has been there all along through the history of jury selection—by biasing of the sample.

There are other signs of its existence. We are investigating, remember, the cultural analogue of the psychoanalytic unconscious energetic. When you ask about the content of that which can not be expressed directly you have an impossible task by definition. If it is unarticulated, a tendency, a verging on meaning, it (in itself) does not have a formal, conceptual face. A question is posed and a specific answer is expressed—the concept. But this is a mere inexact sampling, like drawing a bucket of water from the world’s oceans, seas, lakes, rivers, ponds, pools, ice flows, water vapors, steam vents. You know the contents of the bucket but the inarticulate, unvoiced whole remains a mystery. .

In psychoanalysis there is a history of the use of myths and stories to identify types of relationships and their effect on psychic order. The Oedipus story is an important one, central to Freud’s analysis of the developmental process of the male from early childhood onward. But each individual’s story—the time and place, the particular people and their particular relationships, the additional actors in the scene, the actual content–is quite unique. In psychology the interest is in the distinctive individual. Each case requires its own paradigm. The Wolfman, Dora, were real people with unique stories. The myth and social story is something else. Actually it resides in the plain of the social (plural). It indicates a modal, average for a group, It represents a pattern of the whole (or of a segment) group. Jung multiplied the number of these stories, myths, social types available for psychoanalytic use and located them in a group psyche. But I would suggest they are less occult and actually emerge from this unarticulated miasma of shared culture—the socialization process is not all pedantic, precise, formal—transmitted as unarticulated attitude, value and associated emotion. Myth, fairy tales, old wives tales, stories, influential novels and such are part of this informal culture. Not the same as the total glob of it but concepts that emerge in response to particular types of action demanding issues.

Another example: Within a larger grouping sub-groups of different types—involving divergences of cultural experience and conditioning—can be identified whose members will share arrays of probabilities for attitudes and values that differ from those of other identified groups. The differences could be ethnic, generational, gender, or based on specific historical experiences—like veterans who served in a particular war. Or sectional identities, or graduates of certain schools and colleges. The posed question will reveal differences in probabilities of answers. These differences trace to differences in attitudes and values that are not worn on a formal printed badge but reside in a shared even though understated understanding or leaning.

While elsewhere we have emphasized the singular, self-directed, tendency in artistic production there is also a sharing among artists as well—styled as schools, or movements, reflecting shared experience and the expression of critique of previous work. So some of the artistic output of an era will be carrying a common leaning, understanding, perception representing a conceptual rendering of the otherwise undeclared parts of common cultural value. Paintings, sculpture, plays, novels, dance, music songs reflect off this hidden side.

Electricity is an energy that can be transformed into many forms—light, heat, motion, sound. The cultural hidden energetic might take the similar multi-task forms.

Then there are the aforementioned manipulators, who I admit I love to hate. Those who try to control the question asked and gain a part of the arc of torque, the spin. If we pull out the plum from the cereal we sense we are using their thumbs. They are witnesses for the existence of this imprecise cultural sector. Activists, cadres, rhetoricians repeating via advertising, public relations politics, lobbying the correct line.

Then the proof of existence by resistance. . The group refuses the ploy. Cadre promotions that hit the bump in the night and fall short: the Edsel, gay marriage, the Prohibition amendment, privatized social security…. .

There is a dark side. Hate as part of the collective heritage. So much energy expended on the control and suppression of the American Indian, the forced immigration from Africa, the control and limit of the factory worker. Racism, antisemitism, exclusion.

And then there are the people who actually act like sheep. Can’t think for themselves, the option of holding an independent opinion is rejected—the retreat from freedom. No decision or opinion or action without the word from the leader. Only the leader and his cadre have opinions. The members of this anonymous mass who seem to never think for themselves seem to have no access to the common sense except to always and forever defer to the anointed other.

Think of the silent, non-articulated part of culture as an underground seam. The called-out expressions are shafts pointing toward the unvoiced mass. Remember the images of hidden, silent, unobserved—the underwater part of an ice berg, internal organs, unused passages. To the extent that the unformulated element in culture exists, it can influence the rolling out of social organization and social events and incidents– encourage, resist, warp, help set the rails in place—similar to articulated culture except not up-front or obvious. Fuzzy culture. What it is turns on how it is accessed. The answer is a function of the question. The consensus of a meeting has something to do with its agenda. Please remember this and constantly call it to the attention of others.

^^^^^

A recent novel on Lindbergh by Philip Roth. “The Plot Against America: A Novel” 2004.

Gregory Bateson investigates a hidden side of culture in his book “Naven” 1936.

The Gertrude Stein quote is from http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Gertrude_Stein They cite Alice B. Toklas “What is Remembered” as the original source.