Holes in the Social Order

February 15th, 2008 Posted in Invention

The High Line in Manhattan, New York, an abandoned west side elevated railroad track stopped its active transportation role around 1980. Neither the city government or the railroads paid it much attention after. Taxes were paid, obstructions set in place to discourage trespassers but otherwise nothing. A portion of the line at one extreme was dismantled but a mile and a half long elevated structure remained and reverted to nature. Flowers, grasses and trees took over and a quiet wild place grew in an almost totally man constructed and defined city.

The politicos approached it as a real estate question, a contest between dismantling (reclaiming the air and ground space for commercial development) and converting (making it an unrolling elevated urban park.) Their discussions and posturing went on for years.

Meanwhile urban explorers found ways onto the structure and began to use it for leisure adventure–walking the line and enjoying the unexpected vistas. Some of these visitors began to alter the environment by adding modest sculptures and artistic graffiti. Primitive paths were engineered through the blocks. There were small attempts at gardening. Writers and photographers (amateur for the most part) recorded experiences and observations and word filtered out to others–the second wave who followed the pioneers.

The withdrawal of active attention by government and commercial ownership opened the space for some of the ordinary people to enter and find new uses and ways. And this is the model we emphasize here–the unexpected niche in the social order and social space.

I presume that no social order is perfect. Whatever the system or pattern anomalies will come to the attention of some participants. It is like finding holes in an supposedly impenetrable wall.

More generally there is, for some segment of the people, a shift in socio-cultural meaning (and associated social action) of a place or situation while the dominant forms of the governing order continue on the established paths. A perceptual change is made or discovered and a new social form or usage emerges.

In the Cities of the Dead in Cairo, Egypt new immigrants to the city reside within thousand year old burial shelters. The claim that over a million people live there suggests that this hole has become an institution. The new way, whose origin may be obscure, begins to take a firmer form.

So there is a process. An anomaly, a new action, the number of persons involved initially minimal, then a cascade of possibilities for development.

Then there is the collision of the ordinary need for a place to sleep with either an inability or an unwillingness to pay the rent. The search for the free and secure bed-down. Among the solutions: (1) the famous crawlspaces under Grand Central Station in New York City where people camped in near total darkness among pipes and conduits; (2) sleeping under the bridges of Paris; (3) the squatter settlements in various European cities–people taking over empty buildings as homes; (4) hobo jungle camps near railroad depots during the Great Depression.

Fugitives, outlaws, run-aways sometimes find cover with informally constituted nets of ideologically or commercially motivated assistants that develop within a general population otherwise indifferent or antagonistic. (1) The historically noted underground railroads, consisting of secret routes of linked safe houses through which Afros from the old pre-USA Civil War South made their way to Canada. (2) A similar system developed for fugitive radicals in the 1960s and 1970s Vietnam war era. (3) Many fascists accused of war crimes found nets composed of people holding a compatible ideology, assisted by the bribed and anything-for-a-buck crowd, to carry them to safe havens in North and South America. In each case the path is social, the queue marking the connects exists for the few involved while it remains invisible to the established authority and the larger community.

These niches and opportunities that for some answer a critical survival need become spaces for adventure and exploration for others. There are local and international explorer groups (formal and informal) that encourage this type of project.

Taking advantage of these holes may involve trespass and other official crimes and misdemeanors. Some personal risk is often inherent. As with mountain climbing and spelunking, it makes prudent sense to plan, prepare for these expeditions. This finding and exploiting of niches is not always benign. Down criminals and those with psychotic ideation are also active.

We follow the same old sociology: collecting an open set or class of similar situations or events that define an abstract model that describes the order and process that all members of the set seem to share. The model has an if-the-shoe-fits quality. Any new event or situation encountered can be narrowly understood by its match with a previously known set and model.

A rough sketch of the model …

(1) A anomaly, hole, niche in the established order emerges or is discovered.

(2) The initial visitors to the new social space or situation investigate and act within the newly revealed possibilities.

(3) The governing authority or even the ordinary people pay little or no attention to the new possibility. Laws and taboos may be involved but these define and describe the intersection of orders within which the anomaly is formed. Authority does not choose to recognize or act to restrict or exploit the new possibilities. The key is this temporary or even relatively permanent indifference of the carriers of the established order. When this authority becomes active the niche opportunity either closers or becomes more difficult for the adventurers to exploit

(4) The possible processes include: (a) discovery and abandonment–essentially the new option is less attractive than expected, the hole disappears, development is ended, (b) the new way is successful but knowledge of it remains limited and restricted–it becomes one person’s or a small group’s secret. This situation may continue indefinitely. (c) The new way attracts more people, becomes a widely recognized social order of its own, (d) the larger society pays attention and either suppresses the new way or transforms it to integrate with the dominant order.

A few other related situations: black and gray markets, hedging in financial manipulations and gambling, lobbying and legislative actions where there is either a finding or enacting of loopholes. The legislative earmark, the midnight planting of pork barrel scams into pending laws is discovered and expanded by members of Congress. It can take years for journalists and the general public to become aware, to hear the whistle-blowers.

This model, is a sub-set of the even more general notion of invention (making-up and finding) that we wrote about in posts #53, 54, 56, 57. It supports the argument that invention is a continuing and ubiquitous human activity that guarantees the sustained push toward socio-cultural change.