Love in Space

Every road leads, if you continue on far enough, to anomaly, to contradiction, mystery. A satisfaction of sorts at the start of a journey, to know where you are going for a while.

I can hardly believe that at the beginning, in my initial project, I touched the end. Like the tyro swimmer jumping into the deep end of the pool, one soon gets the idea. It is clear and simple yet complex. A trick to learn, a great seriousness to appreciate, and finally a joke of which the comedian is the butt.

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My first project in graduate school was astonishingly demanding and it presumed a wide understanding of the sociological enterprise which I did not have at the time and which I did not appreciate that I lacked. In the event I stumbled upon a gold bearing lode with more than enough material questions for the work of several lives but my digger’s intuition failed me and though I marked the place I wandered off and never came back.

This project might have the quality of unpalatable medicine for some of you. Medicine in the sense of a disagreeable experience that promises a positive result to follow. The promise of heaven in the middle of a trying life. The combination of mate selection and residential propinquity can have a dry and dreary quality because it is unsophisticated, innocent and not especially significant. But if you can bear up to the discomfort you will find unexpected and, hopefully, salutary consequences. Let us see.

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Propositional Inventory was in, and my professor, Rick H., had determined to construct one for Family Studies. It seemed to follow from his annual reviews of the literature. The idea: list all the propositions stated and possibly proved in all the articles and research reports from the beginning of the 20th century. Then track the associations among these propositions into nets, and finally reveal the interconnected theories at the most abstract level. Like standing Euclid on his head. Instead of enumerating the limited number of presumably true rules and logically deriving the propositions that closely reflect geometric experience, we start with the triangle, the square and the circle or, even further into the concrete, we start with the fir tree, the plot of ground for a garden and the ball, and work our way back to the infinitely extended straight line and the mystical pi.

I was not completely committed. The jump from the bunches of research observations, no matter how precise or statistical, to the unifying and governing abstract concepts seemed to me to be a leap of blind faith, like a trapeze artist, presuming a catcher floating somewhere in a thick fog ahead, letting go the bar and tumbling into his act. Look out below!

Further, how many apples hit philosophers on their conventional and unresponsive heads before Newton? Surely each disciplined observer makes the connections between concept and research act for himself as best he is able. It is his obligation to push the implications of his research results. All the reviewer can do is hope to be hit by the apple on the bounce and catch any missed implication.

A vast mining enterprise, tunneling into the mountain of articles, concepts and supposed facts again and again, each article, concept and fact a new entrance. No guarantee that we would have the moment of originality required to see the equivalent, in sociology, of Newton’s discovery of the unity, through gravity, between the motions of the falling apple and of the heavenly bodies.

Also the unresolved confusion between the desire for an abstract, objective and generalized understanding of the social field, the ability to perform an unbiased analysis, and the desire for practical results for ideologically defined problems. To reduce divorce rates, while perhaps an admirable goal in itself, is not the same as understanding divorce as part of the existing marriage system. Conceptually they go in different directions. For the apple grower the apple falling from the tree is another question to which gravity might not provide the answer. A large portion of the family research had this ideological quality. The life of the miner was going to be complicated by the mix of gold and pyrite and the need to distinguish between them but without a sure identifying test. There were mixed minerals in the mountain and confusion for the digger. The presumption of conceptual uniformity from one research project to another is itself dubious. There is the danger that an inventory might be dragging the digger’s mule and the digger himself where they might not want to go. But it was an interesting challenge so I buckled down

The project: To show by example how the propositional inventory might work. I selected what appeared to be a simple test. A series of some 14 independent studies about a very narrow range of the real world, so the data generated and the operations in their collection in each case were similar, The logos or title of these studies, “Residential Propinquity and Mate Selection.” summed up the theory involved quite nicely.

This is the way the studies operated: the researcher went down to his local marriage license bureau, selected a time frame for cases included, copied the home addresses given by each pair on their marriage license, and then, using a map and a uniform measure of distance, measured their separation. Then, aggregating the information, counting the number of couples at each distance, closer together to farther apart, finishing with a distribution.

Uniformly, propinquity, that is closeness, was found to govern. More selectors were living nearer their eventual mates than farther away. At each step outward the number of licensed couples diminished.

This is tail wagging the dog research. You find a cheap source of data and after you work it up you worry about what your research question might be. It is honorable work but truncated, conceptually out of context.

Pattern is where you find it. A design is implied. Our senses discern a predictability, a repetitiousness, a clustering. In sociology when something is random, gives no information except its own state of entropy we say it has no pattern.

Pattern is what we seek through we may not be certain how it will become manifest. It hovers around the immediate moment of behavior or a sequence of moments or a mix of sequences. Sic transit gloria mundi: here then gone like a struck match in the night. We look for the residue, the mark, the index.

Patterns can be directly and intentionally made. The marching band for example forms up in a rectangular shape. The members all face the same direction. They play the same tune and they march to the same beat, stepping off together. The pattern is obvious.

In other situations there are no conscious forms. On direct observation we see a random mishmash. We have to process the information sometimes without a clue. We pummel it like a lump of dough, throw it into a pan and wait an hour and then we may delight in the shape of the loaf.

The field for love in space might have had this mystery in the initial collection of data. The lovers were in line to sign for a license. There was no other shared objective or plan. Getting the license was the only pattern.

The propinquity effect is hidden and not at all obvious in the official records. There are several steps involved: Raw data lines on the map connecting the home addresses of selectors. These, when mapped, have a random jumbled look like the short cords of fiber mash that are laid down to form paper. Summarizing by placing one partner in a pair at an origin and drawing a distance and direction line to the other, we have a pinwheel effect. Disregarding direction we have the number of couples at each distance apart. And this can be translated into the simple two-dimensional chart that is more or less replicated in study after study.

This finding was slightly disconcerting at the time because assortive mating was assumed where the mating decision is made on the basis of love so location of residence within the same community is not considered to be a factor. The distance separating should be of a uniform randomness. In a large enough sample the proportion of couples at each distance would be, it could be argued, about the same. After all, as the saying goes, love knows no bounds. A contradiction, an initial expectation of randomness denied by the actual result, a social pattern in physical space.

We will develop this topic in phases like the peeling of an onion so you may see that though each step is in itself simple the whole expresses a complex effect.

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The conceptual frame used to explain the found pattern is speculative even though based on the theorizing of the researchers who carried out the studies. Summarizing we argued that the propinquity effect could be explained by a few simple notions. I will give a revised description here based on the central paradigm of the unit act. The decision to marry or to live together in a procreating family setting is associated, within western society, with mutually exclusive feelings of affection and erotic anticipation called love. But this state of euphoria tends to be directed at people of selected characteristics defined within the cultural order. Intuitively participants have a preferred age range, the man a few years older than the woman, a preferred sharing of religious affiliation and ethnic identity. There usually is an avoidance of great disparities of education and wealth and style of life. These informal rules operate unevenly and only as probabilities and over time can change quite considerably. Remember the idea of the people slipping out from under the cultural imperatives. At the time of these studies there was a stronger same-ethnic-religion presence in effect.

At the same time informal cultural rules also affected the ethnic-religious character of neighborhoods. There was some significant probability that residential clustering would have an ethnic-religious affinity, a tendency to congregate Again these patterns were mainly informal and certainly were not imposed blindly and universally, but they were there in operation.

So to the extent that the two cultural rules worked, the approved mate choice would be within one’s neighborhood.

From the social ecological side, distance operated independently. The unself-conscious cost of meeting when two potential selectors live in different neighborhoods, cities, states, or countries would be quite considerable. And the ordinary probability of an encounter would be very low, almost non-existent in some cases. Consider he in Los Angeles and she in Salt Lake City, even with ethnic-religious and age and other cultural traits auspicious they would need a great romantic leap to find each other. This negative effect attenuates as the distance narrows and at some unidentified point it shifts in favor of propinquity.

So the finding of the high probability association of mate selection, in the USA, with near residence would be doubly expected with the influences of culture and social ecology both pushing the decisions in that direction.

Admittedly the theory is crude. The predictive concepts only lead to comparative statements like more or less while the actual distribution can be described mathematically. But even so the terms allow for variability. Estimates can be made concerning the degree of acceptance of the various normative systems by the populations involved. Estimates of the degree of ethnic congregation might also be possible. That is norm acceptance can be high to low, the congregation can also be high to low. The varying combinations would, we might expect, result in differences in the actually measured propinquity distribution.

Other predictions: for those who have escaped or transcended the cultural imperatives regarding mate choice, propinquity will be governed exclusively by the distance paradigm. For those who follow a cultural imperative re ethnicity but live in a non-ethnically conglomerated neighborhood the propinquity effect will be reduced.

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The charting of the information can itself be varied. Treated, for example, as exchanges among a city’s neighborhoods the data takes the form of a matrix that is an index of the sentimental structure of the community. It is possible to use these measures of propinquity to track the presumptive underlying and partially governing properties. Instead of explaining the propinquity distribution we can use it, now as a matrix, to characterize the city in which it occurs.

Think of all the world’s people alive at time now. Billions of us. Now ask what is the probability that each potential pair will meet? Setting aside the question of homosexuality and variability in marriage and kinship systems for the moment, what is the probability that each potential heterosexual pair will enter a courtship relationship and then become an established sexual partnership? I am not suggesting that someone set up an appropriate computer program and to generate the astronomically long printout. Only trying to indicate one of the larger scenes that have been excluded.

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Even more, we must admit that the research and what is presumed to have been measured might not match. The distance separating the selectors has been thought to reflect the actual process of mate selection that is of central and intense importance in all of our life histories. Movies, novels, and biographies endlessly go over the same ground, how did the lovers meet? It is a concrete and unique event repeated daily in social history yet almost always magical and mysterious. But in other ways of making the marriage decision, for example cases of mail-order courtship, of parental and kinship arrangement, of pairing with emphasis on economic exchange, and in dynastic negotiations, and in marriages of convenience to secure permanent residential status for immigrants. With these the initial meeting is hardly consequential. The first encounter can be put off until after the decision.

So the official license bureau data might hide more than it reveals. The failure to consider these other forms of courtship and marriage closes out the riches of social possibility and simplifies the results. The decision to marry, it turns out, has wildly different results in wildly different cultures, each with its own preferred social organization and each with its different spatial pattern. For each the propinquity question leads to a different result and may even be negated. Suppose, for example, the rule of ethnic endogamy is in force but the group members are dispersed rather than congregated. This is the case of dynastic marriages.

In the case of the mating system practiced by the Sultans of Turkey where the political leader both asserted his excessive power by demanding that the various tribal groups and ethnic communities supply him with women and girls for his harem. This also gave each sector of the society an active connection with the maximum leader, a kinship connection. The propinquity distribution of his mating activities would tend to be flat. Women living closer wouldn’t have any greater chance than those more distant. Again, the rules defining appropriate and preferred mating can change the visible patterns.

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The process of courtship and getting to know one another is another complication. It can vary from the formal and supervised or chaperoned style to the very casual. It contains sexual attraction and possible emotional and physical relationships of varying intensity. Looked at realistically this game of courtship can even involve people not usually considered eligible for marriage—those already ensconced in that blissful state. But even some of these cases lead to a marital decision.

We know that the road to marriage is not always certain. The problematic sequence and result of the courtship interaction, intersecting with the importance of the final decision, for some participants, establishes the drama of the process. Some large portion of those who enter a courtship sequence opt-out, make a decision not to continue, to discontinue dating. And many who do continue don’t register their live-in status with the State. Then some of those who come together later draw apart and then some of them re-enter the courtship system. The marriage license statistics hardly covers the complexity of what is going on. Anomalies in the data such as couples reporting the same address, couples using convenience addresses, and people changing address during courtship merely suggest the unconfined reality. Data also fails to include local people who register their marital decisions outside of their own city. Residential propinquity as described in marriage licenses is only a very crude index of meet, court, and decide narratives. It is a sorting and shaking out process, involving the matching of individual choices in the midst of a social field.

Another complication: setting aside alternate mating systems, people meet in a variety of settings: away at college, at high school, at work, on vacation, during religious rituals, on post office lines, during travel in public conveyances and so on. Propinquity after all is usually zero and only related to relative residential location indirectly. In fact, the place and mode of meeting, the progress of the courtship, the decision to mate or not and whether to continue or not, and even the decision to register the relationship using what kind of ritual if any are the open questions.

It is easy to critique the data as faulty, but even so the skew in the curve does point to very useful distinctions that may assist in the ordering of other social observations. Space and relative distance itself sets an environmental rigidity that has consequences for people’s behavior, thoughts and feelings. But this is an ecological event, as we have been suggesting, something that can impinge on behavior outside the awareness of the individual.

Man is always here and space has to be overcome to get to there. In science fiction and in fairy tales space can be penetrated by a wish, but in every day life you have to walk or devise another material medium of transportation.

Residential propinquity is a rough index of this process. If we could put our mate selectors in a uniform space, with no distortions and ungoverned by norms and congregation, with the population distributed uniformly throughout the communal space, the distribution of residential distances would still be skewed. Conceptually we define an ideal: uniform space, uniform distribution of selectors, with no preconditions except distance. The distributions of random choices would pattern, I would wildly guess, as something very similar to a diffusion curve as measured along one plane.

The couples involved in an actual study, treated as an otherwise assorted sample, could be fitted to this ideal curve. Then the actual distribution could be fitted. This could lead to a measure of the actual deviation, a measure of distortion from the presumed direct operation of distance on marital choice. The distortion from the ideal would reflect any lack of physical and spatial uniformity and would also reflect the operation of actual normative cultural systems. The way is then open to compare the mate selection outcome of one community against another. It is logically possible that this deviation could then be explained by the method of exhaustion advanced by Coleman. In other words through knowledge of actual cultural rules and actual distortions in spatial distributions and settings we can make estimates of the amount of distortion associated with each and so explain the difference of the actual data from the ideal. To be complete we would have to be aware of the variety of social organizations involved.

This form of thinking–establishing an ideal model from intuitions about how a particular social setting works–is the preferred modus operandi of economics. So watch out again for error since we know they never are all correct.

An additional observation. The projection of social activities onto the platform on which it takes place suggests that there is a pattern to the activity itself and therefore it might be possible to predict or describe, even if only as a probability, the distribution of these acts. The platform is good old Terra Firma and this type of statement is in the realm of geography whose subject is the give and take between the configuration and content on or near the earth’s surface and the human population in transit. That’s OK. That is one of our messages; it is geography and also sociology. It all contributes to the understanding of the social field. The chart of the distances separating residential address is a geographic map. This makes it clear that we are into a two-way question: The consequence of the topography for the social activities and vice versa. Similar kinds of geometric models are used in studies of traffic patterns, of the distribution of travel trips, of marketing patterns. City planning, police analysis of crime by place also come to mind. Military strategies are decisively swayed by geographical patterns and distortions. The possibility that the abstract models used might be usefully compared exists.

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Further problems of method: Just as the official marriage license information turns out to be a limited, truncated reflection of the complex, multifaceted actual practice of courting and mate selection the questions of what rules and definitions are accepted and governing and in operation and the description of the actual space and its peculiar topography is not easily accomplished As members of the society in which these marriage decisions take place we could intuit the cultural consensus governing but this would hardly be the proof required. Assigning a cultural value after the event is not acceptable. The overthrow of the use of instinct was based upon a similar ex post facto reasoning. You find an action and you posit an instinct that explains it, or with culture you posit a cultural trait. The independent discovery of the cultural belief is required. It is too easy to ascribe a rule ex post facto to an event without adequate proof. And topography itself might require a deep awareness of the specific place. The directions and modes of transportation and the costs, including rivers, forests without paths, types and massiveness of constructions, gated and restricted communities, the location of shops and meeting places, schools and universities. All of these may be influencing what the ensconced population does.

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This paper had some success. Residential propinquity and mate selection studies after it became more complex and theoretically focused. One paper that I know of attempted to test the operation of segregation but from my understanding didn’t appear to measure what we were predicting. In any case a curve named in our honor was held up as a type of sociological event before it was denigrated, I think wrongly, and destroyed. In any case there were a large number of citations in the literature over the following 10 or 15 years before they petered out.

The density of topics evoked by this admittedly naive way of framing social decisions is quite unexpected, and at the time, hardly noticed. Enumerating: (1) Questions of method–the inexactness of meaning in the several research actions and presumptions. (2) Questions of exclusion of possibly significant parts of the social field under study: the alternate cultures and ways of organizing, the need to show how the information fits into larger social process and ecological context. (3) The outline of the explanation of the found, however flawed, distributions closely resembles Parsons’ fundamental paradigm the framing ideas associated with culture, social ecology, and social organization all meeting around and within the unit act and the consequent interaction toward social decision and outcome, and finally (4) we have been lead to the fascinating world of space-time.

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For the sociologist’s human group space and time are blank pages in which we can scribble whatever we want.

On Space and Time

(By way of explanation of what we are about: “Love in Space” and “On Space and Time” are matched, the one leading to the other, but can be read separately. The first is the more technical and longer. The second is more general and perhaps more entertaining. The dominant theme is man’s social life projected onto and patterned by space. Conspicuously incomplete, a work in process, yet a platform from which to take off for any heading in this direction.)

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The dog barks and the spaceman moves on. Either the dog must shut up or we need a larger universe.

Undaunted by my ignorance I challenge the greatest minds

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At the time of “Love in Space” I had a vastly underdeveloped interest in space and time. Wider implications hardly existed. There was a heavy bias among sociologists then against what was called social physics. Any consideration of space and time immediately called up physical laws and the idea that they could explain man and his works was abhorrent. There was a fear that science would reduce man to an object. There was also a refusal of a social biology least man be reduced to animal. But it should be obvious that we are physical and biological and also full of meaning for ourselves. We are, that is, acculturated as part of our existence in our present form. These identities are not mutually exclusive. It is like telling a man of a certain mass who is falling out of a tree reciting Shakespeare that his destiny at that moment is not governed by gravity.

For sociologists space and time have no materiality, they are simply measures invented by man for his own service. We have several metrics of direction and distance and several of before and after. There is the flat earth with abruptly terminating edges. Earth at the center of the universe surrounded by musical spheres. There is a co-existing spirit world, in fact several: Heaven, Valhalla, Shambhala, Eden, Olympus, Paradise, Hell, among others. Yet without life and objects there is neither time nor space. There is merely an infinitely extending nothingness.

The intervening distances are cluttered with landscapes and seascapes, and upward in the sky are rocks and planets, cosmic particles, suns. There is a topography that resists us, divides us, protects us. We transact. We name, search ways through, over or under. We level, gouge, dig, pile up, excavate. We build, grow crops. Intervening distance is constantly altered. We treat as demonic, as theological, give sacred significance, even ignore. The clutter acquires significance.

Time apportioned in a cycle of holidays, following the moon or the sun or an atomic clock. Day altering with night unless we are in a deep cave or mine or on a trajectory toward Mars. Wet and dry seasons, cycles of fecundity. Clouds of happenings define the intervals. Changes sequenced like the tolls of a bell.

Physicists have nagged us with queer concepts and confusions, giving time and space materiality. Time backward retrieved and space can twist, and the clock governs biological change, and the yardstick causes the child’s growth.

We each encounter the historical result up to our moment and we work on this monument in turn as we decide or are permitted or are able and pass it on again. Planting trees and deforestation. Chemical effluvia. Trash and crap. The thing we affected returning the call. Rolling on. Act on simple act. Then the unanticipated, the serendipitous.

We go from here to there, using our energy to overcome. Any infrastructure or superstructure we pay for in cash. The experience of boarding a medium and allowing oneself to be carted from one place to anther is subjectively inconsequential, a term in limbo, unless it is a new experience. We fall into nap or reverie, contemplate the passing scene and the physical qualities of our fellow passengers. We mainly maintain our personal almost encapsulated space, though we may attempt a communication with another and even find a new acquaintance or friend or lover. Yet in general it is time out time.

A flaw though, a tree across the road or a flat tire wakes us. A glitch, a crisis, a what-is-this? The electricity shuts down and the elevator stops between floors. Another knot in our personal time sequence. Hope it is not a catastrophe.

The clutters of the intervening. The challenges of the storm, the earthquake, volcano, fire, water, poisonous fumes, landslide. Misadventure among strangers. Going out may not be a picnic, though, who knows, one may hope to find a grand vacation if not utopia itself.

A great and enduring line of literature, the travel report or story, allows the busy or the meek to share vicariously the adventure and the fun of the trip toward the unknown and the undiscovered, minimizing the risk. But isolation and passivity do not guarantee against the threat or the hope of the distant. The shadow of the self, the alien from afar, might be, at this very moment, vectoring your way.

The constructs which we have called clutter can in themselves, by their interiority, expand space. The buildings and enclosures we put up divide raw space into rooms and closed off and delimited places. Hallways, stairs, balconies. The maze multiplies. Some would even include bureaus, closets, drawers, tables, furniture. A mincing, going down to pockets and wallets. All new and useful places. The perimeter of the city may remain the same while there is an expansion within.

There is a blocking off into public and private spheres. The inaccessibility of the distant place is repeated, perhaps even more decisively, locally. The intrepid explorer tracking the far places does not know parts of his home neighborhood. The private places are apportioned to individuals and groups. The person or group belongs to a place and vice versa, even if only temporarily. Even if it is only a time-share in a hot bed, to each his own. Everyone participates and contributes to the overall effect. Our sense of accessible space is, surprisingly, limited by a taboo-like system of exclusions, bans, refusals, as well as recognized rights.

The distinction is not absolute, the general sharing of the public space angles down toward the private individual through intermediary semi-publics, defined groups and self-discovered groups that share a space and exclude others. For example: the family in residence, the companions of the bed, the students and their teacher, the office workers, the factory floor, the bus driver and his passengers, the physician and his patient. You can sense the emotional identity of an established group in its space by member reaction to the visitor. It is a moment of intrusion that is covered by the forms of greeting or, if these are ignored, by the palpable tension until the newcomer is recognized and explained in some way and then integrated into the group’s experience. Think back over your own experiences in such settings. The visitor greeted and publicly announced and sometimes introduced to each member. The silent visitor. The visitor who whispers with one group member and then leaves. In the first instance there is usually a feeling of goodwill and welcoming generated. In the second instance a nagging mystery that carries over and lingers. An edginess. In the third instant, an agitation, a feeling of dislocation, a buzzing of quick consultation of members. If the stranger does not generate this stir or ripple you are in a truly public place, each person within is anonymous and self-contained. They, altogether, are strangers to each other. It is the same as walking on the well-populated business street of a city.

Some trades and professions have a more general access to private space than the rest of us because of their necessary, recognized, and valued services: Deliverers, repairers, real estate people, medical persons and such. Respect for the other’s privacy is recognized, in the cultures of which I’m aware at least, and the coming in is usually preceded by permission, stated or implied. Certain categories are excepted: Parents against infants and young children—as the child matures this can become an issue. Wardens and guards against prisoners. Police responding to a crime in progress—without an active crime the police, in civilized society, must have a search or arrest warrant issued by a validly appointed judge. The entry into another’s space by stealth is considered bad form and a serious felony. A person’s right to forcefully protect his or her private place is recognized.

Historically we visualize man, that is us, emerging from the miasma of evolutionary process into our present form sometime in the deep past. This very likely happened somewhere in East Africa. And then by trekking and seeking and moseying along, chasing game or hungering for entertainment, we expanded our range and settled, within preliterate time, into just about every crevice and nook in the world covered with the imaginary signs of “available for human habitation”. We have been filling in the details and tidying up the system since, also adding some confusion and dislocation as well.

Right now we have an address system worldwide in scope whose logic varies but is universally understandable with study. In fact our address coordinates are quite numerous: A street address for domicile and work and club and café and other associations. Also a postal address, a phone number(s), e-mail number(s), a birth and death certificate (eventually) with details of time, place and kinship, licenses of various sorts—driving; professional, trade or craft; marriage; divorce; contracts, bank accounts, records of achievement and awards, records of crimes and punishments, medical records and so on, not to mention a latitude and longitude locater through a satellite in outer-space. Also fingerprints, DNA readings.

Withal people drop out willfully, or through inadvertence, misadventure or crime. People change identity, surreptitiously or legally, have multiple identities and appear to become uncoordinated though there is never an escape from the system, merely a shift to a residual category.

Except for the cremated whose ashes are tossed to the wind and water, even the dead have addresses though historically these have been attenuated over the centuries. Except for a few mummies and lost alpine hikers buried in ice and such the mists of tide and time cover all.

Space, which we dice up so finely locally, at its far corners becomes anomalous. For example we are told that the universe is expanding, that matter that at one time filled a delimited area is found to have filled a larger area at another time. At time-one there is a border around the universe beyond which there is nothing. Into what then does this matter expand? Space, obviously, which was out there beyond the limit all along. We could say alternatively that there is nothing beyond the universal border but a potential for measurement. The implication is that there is no limit to space and to time as measures. They expand and contract as we require. When we tally the distance from one material body or speck to another, no matter how far away it may be it can be contained.

It’s the same with time, another human measure of a relationship of relative before and after. No matter how far into the past we go or forward into the future, time will encompass it without limit. Time and space only sensibly exist as relative relationships of material events. Just as it is impossible this side of madness to visualize the null of space and time, that is nothing, it is the same for infinite extent.

But even though, if you grant me this leap, time and space are social constructs empty at the margins, in everyday life and in our local experience they are very concrete and real. In our biological processes and in our physical movements and exertions they exist. We experience our natural limitations as they are tested from without. Time and distance seem to have in this way a consequence for us in our behavior. Part of the patterning of our social life can be laid against these measures.

The Mob in South Africa

Trouble has followed the Zimbabwe migrants to South Africa. In the last week there have been attacks on Zimbabweans and assorted other strangers by local gangs of roughnecks parading as warriors in and around Johannesburg but otherwise not clearly identified. The government and the press and the people expressing opinions through the Internet seem uniformly against these actions. The police are working but behind the curve. It feels like a possible moment of crisis.

Yesterday a venerable agency called the South African Institute of Race Relations issued a report on the context of the violence that is critical of the government. This agency has been around for some eighty years and supports social research, a data bank, a program to get deserving youngsters into higher education, and it issues editorial type reports and statements. I can’t vouch for their politics and purpose but their conclusions are highlighted in the local J’burg press. My impression is that the Institutes’s people see themselves as pragmatists as against the committed ideologues of the government. In any case the report offerers a theory about the violence.

The regime from the African National Congress has been in office for over ten years–long enough to frustrate the high expectations the people had at the start. The advances in the well being of the people has not materialized in large part because of the wrong- headed, the incompetent, and the corrupt in the governing cadre. A free floating frustration. The bullies are ready.

The failure is in five parts.

(1) Crime. Crime and violence have become an accepted way of life and the executive, judiciary and the police are either unwilling or unable to contain it. The attack on foreigners feels like the same old neighborhood violence focused in another direction. A placid group, neighborhood or society is less likely to fall to any kind of violence. The goons are able.

(2) Border Control. The mass influx of refugees, run-aways, the adventurers and the ambitious are in large part illegal but the police who have replaced the soldiers formerly in charge are not sufficiently trained and are without the numbers and organization needed for the job. The large numbers from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Mozambique that seem to agitate the local toughs should not really be in South Africa. In addition the diplomacy of the politicos who everyone expects should have some leverage over the Zimbabwe leadership’s behavior seems to support the policies of Mugabe and company that are driving the masses of people out in the first place. The victims have indirectly been put in their vulnerable position by the South African government.

(3) Unemployment. An inflation in unemployment seems to reach upward of 50% of the potential work force. No matter the successes in mining and manufacturing this is an economy in catastrophic free fall. Everyone’s on the dole and so has the energy to attack the other and is so demoralized and agitated to be willing to hit out at the other as well–the mob is willing.

(4) The educational institution is about as bad as it was in the pre-liberation days. The kids are undereducated and not prepared for the high tech jobs that are and could be available. Education reform is making no progress. A large uneducated, unqualified and unemployed population is in place and constantly replicated.

(5) Corruption. The governing cadres at all levels are on the take. They are egoistic and self-serving and would seem unable to seriously entertain the idea that they might be agents working altruistically for the people. This reality trumps all. No matter how sensible and remedial the reform plan the corrupt worker will not carry it out. The governing process will contain layers of gimmicks and short-falls and other mischief.

Hindsight is easy and furthermore these same issues also occur in other jurisdictions–Mexico has corruption, the USA can’t get its public education act together and can’t control the border. Crime is its own country. And how about unemployment in the rust belt? So South Africa is not alone.

Failure is measured against success. The critique indirectly says there is a right way. All you have to do is find it. The difficulty of doing the right thing in the right way and actually getting it done, it seems to me, is staggering. In Washington DC we have a brilliant young and courageous educator-administrator working all out with the support of the mayor, and she is having trouble getting dead wood teachers out of the classrooms (without a dedicated, energetic, active teacher forget about it.) This is just starters.

Remember they are in trouble because it is so comfortable for a significant part of the system to essentially do wrong. To run the cure will kill the old social order and drive out a load of its current denizens. To get the cure process in place there’s a good chance that the current leadership and associates and supports will have to be dumped. At the least all senior (and at whatever other level) incompetents have to leave, get out of the way. The cure is not through or for them. The change has to start with the people who do not want it and who work, if that term can be applied to them, or drag against it.

Remember that at the start of the Great Depression in USA Hoover’s ideology (and maybe even his self-interest) would not allow him to act with any energy, but intellectually and emotionally Roosevelt was ready and did act in a useful direction. That is the paradigm.

Blow the whistle. Start the process.

Note.

The habit of violence among the aggressors and the vulnerability of the target group carries a lot of explanatory weight. Some of the stories from South Africa also suggest an aggressor leadership cadre coordinating and goading the mob onward. It is still an open question: whether there are button pushers or not. It could be one triggering incident setting the pattern that others imitate. And no cadre needed.

Since yesterday when I started working on this post the situation in Johannesburg seems to have calmed considerably. Terrific!

Zimbabwe. Life Below the Headlines

Mr. Mugabe, the aspiring president of Zimbabwe for life, has paid his dues–ten years in prison for his liberation work. The people of the country owe him some slack. But (1) the titanic hyperinflation of the value of the currency, (2) the HIV-Aids epidemic, (3) the mass emigration of upwards of one in five of the people, (4) the catastrophic decline in the productivity of the commercial farms, (5) the police brutality toward political opponents, (6) the official fraud in the election process, (7) the tattered tourist industry, (8) the notorious corruption of government officials–in sum seem a little too much. It has been Mugabe’s watch for over thirty years and he, like Bush in the USA, carries the burden of the errors and short-falls of his administration.

That said, we must wonder at the unusual length of time he has been permitted to serve in office, and how he has allowed and/or encouraged the order of the society to devolve so far toward chaos?

The accelerating task in all of sub-Sahara Africa before, during and following the two World Wars was the replacement of the European colonial order by the local people. This was part of a similar and longer and larger imperial and colonial history covering almost the entire world. Within this process the story of Rhodesia-Zimbabwe finds its part.

This is a very long and detailed tale which in the telling is flawed by the bias of the evolving political, economic and social order itself. The story that one hears and tells depends on one’s current place as well as the active social processes within which one participates. Like religious and ideological conversion require the learning of a new and the forgetting of an old way, so we are involved with a history we remember and a history we forget.

In the early years of the new republic the president received popular support and gained and retained power through alliances and compromises. Later he threw these off and asserted himself as the singular leader. He proved himself an astute competitor for power, but in the doing isolated himself and his country from the sources of aid and assistance among the western democracies. The end of the Cold War and the loss of the alternate support from the eastern socialist regimes contributed to the current crisis.

Now finally his hold on power is reduced to naked force through the police and through gangs of toughs that the police fail to control. He also has some popular support among rural people living close to subsistence who he has aided and who, unlike the urban folk, are more immune to the seductive advantages of democracy. And his support cadre continues with and alongside him.

More covertly there is, I suspect, an unrecognized confusion in culture that supports a confusion in the possibility of unity of purpose and understanding in the society. The contacts with colonial outsiders and new immigrants from Europe, the Middle East and Asia involved more than political and military struggle–there was also a massive technical and cultural infusion. How people dressed, worked, their language and schooling, their religions, their ideologies changed rapidly if unevenly throughout the contact period.

But these new ways were always accepted into a basic continuation of things as they were. People learned English but retained their native languages as well. Many accepted Christianity or Islam but also kept elements of native beliefs. So different and intermixed cultural elements continue into the present. Most critical is what has been called tribalism or ethnicity.

The native economic order at the time of contact was a low tech family and communal agriculture. The military order and the inter-tribal patterns around this basic material fact were complex and evolving. The peoples with their various home grown ways faced, not entirely consciously, the need to adapt to the new technical order coming out of Europe.

We have all been involved in this switch to the new technical era. Each cultural and social group has had to make this transition against the texture of its own received culture and civilization. This process is still continuing.

The cultural jumble sets the context for the dilemmas of decision. Like Pareto suggested, whatever means-end schema one selects can be rationalized by appeal to an extant rule. The tendency for the sovereign to act amorally is magnified by the mix of traditions. The tendencies in the list following are not mutually exclusive.

(1) Collectivism (Durkheim’s altruism) versus egoism. The leading functionaries (the cadre) act for self rather than as agents for the whole society. This is called corruption by critics. The leading lights siphon off wealth for their own luxurious housing and associated material benefits as a matter of right (sanctioned in the older traditions of the monarch and chief).

(2) Policy decisions are based on religious and ethnic identification and the parallel social organization rather than economic ideologies. So economic policy to benefit the whole can be subverted. Disastrous economic decisions are sanctioned by appeals to ethnic and religious loyalty.

(3) The use of the justice system and the police and the military to uphold the interests of specific people rather than the equitably established law can lead to a reign of terror against contending alternate political movements or used to support an unpopular policy. The goal has priority over the means used.

(4) The charming and popular personality, the hero, the charismatic leader attracts support regardless of questions of policy and ideology. Trust is important but it is also the basic requirement of the con-game. The popular but devious leader can have a hidden agenda.

(5) The leader depends on the support of a coterie of militants and bureaucrats. Eventually their interests become as important as his own and his decisions are warped by the need to maintain and enhance his power base.

(6) Decision has more than one face. An external sponsor (the third party) requires a particular action like a democratic election that if carried out would mean loss of power for the cadre in place. So the election is called for show but is subverted in the event.

(7) There is also a difference between acts at the center and the realities in the local communities and among the ordinary people. The legal acts make no connection with the people’s reality. In a communal setting the egoistic entrepreneur can not act directly but must act with discretion and attention to the extant social order. Gifts (bribes) for headman and parties and feasts for the peasants. The good old boy has his place.

I am suggesting that corruption, dictatorship, extra-economic considerations in economic decisions, egoism and self-interest are sometimes socially sanctioned acts. It is possible that Zimbabwe careens toward social chaos while maintaining a moral (sanctioned by tradition) social order. It is like trying to bake a cake with cement instead of flour. You follow the recipe but end with a brick. Or like going to hell with a clear conscience.

I am not trying to excuse but to explain how a sane leadership cadre could self-righteously get itself and its society in a pickle.

But remember the case we are pointing at is real, concrete. It is possible that a psychological quirk of the maximum leader could explain decision and action toward chaos like a confused and dull Lord Cardigan taking the Light Brigade into the mouths of cannon.

Charge!

Note. There are sensible responses for all the socially destructive dead-ends listed in our first paragraph above. But every step out would require a change in the social order which the governing cadre can not abide. The dithering of the third party organized states surrounding Zimbabwe is painful to watch.

How Long is Too Long? Persistence in Office in Zimbabwe.

Consider: Robert Mugabe in his actions is saying that he has ascended to the office of president for life. The anomaly, the unexpected moment, is the fact that he had presented himself before the people of Zimbabwe again and asked to be re-elected. His resistance to their decision to have him stand down is an expression of his miscalculation. The seemingly irrational moment is his permitting this last election in the first place.

So we have this revealed contradiction in a culture–the president for life running for democratic re-election. The two patterns do not fit together.

^^^^^

People sent to prison do time. Found guilty, they are sentenced, locked in until their time is up and they are released. It is normal to not want to be in jail. It is a limbo, a place of waiting where movement and will are restricted. Companions are felons, mainly unreliable, aggressive. It is an uncomfortable, demeaning place. One is penned like a captured wild animal. Doing time is a mind set, an acceptance of the here and now. Not free yet reserving and preserving a real free self until the bridge of the incarcerated time is crossed.

Yet parallel to the physical time, the tick-tick of the clock, is a passing biological time that we all do in one place or another or traveling between.

In marriage, which we normally think of as forever or until death, we date our commitment and measure the time together, but we do not do time. It is a place we want to be. It is time and not time, a living approximation of paradise. The unhappy marriage is something else.

There are some places, like being the executive-governing-leader-president of a sovereign country, where some people desperately want to be. A place of being and doing, a place of action and decision, a place of eminence, omnipotence. But it is very difficult to win entrance. It is the opposite, in a way, of jail. Once the desire for it seizes you, life becomes a seat in an antechamber, an anticipation. It is a time out as in outside, not there yet. A moment before. The prisoner is inside waiting to get out; the candidate is outside wanting to enter.

Under a democratic regime the way to this job is through popular election. But in other settings it can be seized by force, inherited by kinship, earned by test. Or it can be awarded by a specially constituted group or person.

Once in, the president (maximum leader, monarch, chief or whatever) tends to stay, as in marriage, until death except, again, in a democracy where time in is limited by law and convention. This place of desire, of comfort, of stimulation that reeks of power is hedged under the democratic dispensation. It is like the successful drone’s single and final mating with the queen bee. After a long nuptial flight, after fierce competition against a swarm of others the winner has a very short moment in office, a limited though highly erotic engagement.

The elected president form (prime-minister or other similar types of sovereign leadership) is the revolutionary bourgeoisie’s answer to the overthrown absolute monarch and his supporting band of exploiting nobles. The limited term is one of the barriers to the temptations of self-interest that can wean the people’s agent away from his collective oriented duties.

The vote, with its progressive expansion toward the universal franchise, is one of the great human inventions. Since the end of the Cold War it has become widely accepted in more and more countries as a normal way to certify and sanction the limited right for a cadre to govern. The monarch’s right to govern was based on the will of the ineffable. The democratic governor’s right comes from the majority will of the people.

^^^^^

But where is the imputed source of Mr Mugabe’s right?

^^^^^

Mugabe in Zimbabwe is a concrete process. Complete description and analysis would require inquiry into all analytical categories: physical, biological, psychological, cultural, social organizational. In my next post I will make a partial start through speculations about cultural-organizational context.

Until that time…

Please note: My knowledge of Zimbabwe and all that is ordinary and derivative. My objective is simply to exhibit the sociological method and attitude (as I understand it) in action. For more on the practicalities of Zimbabwe track through the expert sources available on the web.

Buddy Wins

Early on we discovered a board game called Trouble that we all loved. Billy was 8 and Buddy was 4 then. My wife and I and the kids would sit on the floor around the decorated cardboard with three stacks of cards face down on it and a set of three dice which we would roll in turn. Everyone had a marker to move around the board and we each started the game with thirty little figurines of animals and flowers.

I do not remember all the rules but every once in a while we would turn a card over that said “Happiness, you win” or “Trouble, you lose.” No matter, we would all shout and wave our hands in the air, stamp our feet, and laugh. Our pet dog, Woof, would bark

The object of the game, naturally, was to win all the figurines but since there were four of us, three of us were sure to lose. That was the lesson: in a fair game of random chance odds are that you will lose, so enjoy the process and brace yourself for whatever end turns up.

Buddy was too young to be philosophical about losing. He could not see the value in the process for itself. For him winning was all and losing unacceptable. So invariably when he hit a losing streak he would become very angry and start to cry and punch everyone and throw the dice behind the sofa and kick the markers every which way and make such a rumpus that we had to stop the game then and there.

So eventually in order to maintain family unity we adopted a set of Buddy Rules which translated meant that no matter what the actual outcome of the game according to its established rules, other ad hoc rules and rationales and interpretations would be allowed to intervene to assure that Buddy wins. We figured that eventually Buddy would mature out and would be able to play the game, win or lose, like everyone else. And when he was around sx years old he did come around and we could play Trouble without trouble.

Reports of recent elections in Kenya and Zimbabwe remind me of Buddy Rules. The incumbent presidents, both intelligent, mature men, were ousted by an obviously aroused and democratically minded electorate who came out in large numbers to vote. The rules of the game decreed that following the election’s outcome the executive and the majority of legislative offices of the government had to be turned over to what had been the opposition. The rules decreed a shift in governing cadre. But at the last minute the party that had been in power called up Buddy Rules and twisted and stopped the on-going democratic process.

More generally, a group’s agent whose acts are supposed to reflect and represent the collective will, intention, and rules acts instead for self or for an external and separate other. There are four options for the cadre: act for the collective, act for self, act for third party, reject agency assignment and deny cadre status and responsibility.

The last time we visited this topic we considered the possibility of the group acting collectively without cadre. In our next post we will focus on the case, pro or con, of President Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

Vote as though it counts, there is some chance that it just might.

A New Rule for Baseball

I propose a change in the rules of baseball, namely the elimination of the automatic home run. The outfield fence over which the home run is hit is an artifact of the enclosed baseball field that was invented to encourage spectators to pay an admission fee. Before the enclosed field the outfield was an expanding open space that went on and on without conceptual end. The home run then was the result of swiftly running the bases before the ball could be retrieved and the runner tagged.

The home run powered by brute strength by a muscular lumbering man must initially have been an anomaly, a game popularized by Babe Ruth to supersede the fast paced Texas League game. If the ball hit on the fly over the fence is treated as a foul ball (that is it doesn’t count and the automatic home run is banned) the game will revert to its fast, youthful style and it will again be for skilled, physically normal athletes.

I can not claim any inventiveness here. I am simply calling up one of the original conditions in which the game was played. The strong men whose employment will be threatened could be hired to put on demonstrations of long ball hitting before the game or during the seventh inning stretch. They do this now in batting practice before the game. They can be recognized and honored for their strength without having it interfere with a proper sport.

For those in countries where baseball is unknown a similar effect (a change in the form of a sport) can be achieved by changing one or more rules of your local popular game. Children in their street games are constantly inventing variations to adapt their games to local conditions or simply for the fun of it.

All that would be required to activate this revision would be a game in an enclosed stadium under the new rule. I would buy a ticket to become a witness to an idea, a concept, being transformed into a social reality. The theory alone is not enough. Idea into action is called praxis and it is one of the keys, but not the only one, to social change.

^^^^^

Another suggestion that I know has been around: in basketball, at least in the formal professional game, set size ranges for players and match teams by height (small, medium, large, and extra large like men’s shirts) the way boxers are matched for weight. It will spread access to the fairly played game to a much larger playing group.

If in doubt, slide.

If I Forget, Remind Me.

Suppose you discover a film actor late in her career or even after her death. You view her work as it becomes available to you without regard to the order of time. So the images of the person you see under the disguise of role and costume are out of chronological order. Older and younger mixed together.

The subtext through all the fiction is the implied real biography of the actor herself but out of time. Disconcerting since the reports of the real are jumbled and you are introduced to it in an idiosyncratic time sequence of your own. The older can be before the younger, the intermediate after the older. In the symbols she can be her own grandmother, but in her reality she must follow her natural script.

Of course, you understand all this and you adjust. You can reconstruct the history of the real biological life, the subtext through the series of films, as her biography. You can narrate what happened when. But the subtext life is bio-cultural. The film sequence is a overlay on an overlay. A story over a story over a living.

But the symbol is not the life. The concrete moment is gone. And though it can be talked about and symbolized and recalled it is no longer there. All we have concretely are these not graspable moments which as symbols recede into a shared memory that is ever changing, expanding and contracting, as we collectively remember and forget. Our museums, dictionaries, encyclopedias, pictures and films, books, all the hard records, assist us so that even if we all forget we can still think we remember. But memory and text are selective. Actually most of the concrete is gone like smoke in a strong wind.

Years ago I met a young, then, businessman who hung out with poets and artists, something like Henry Miller befriended East Indian workers when he managed the boys and men who delivered Western Union telegrams in New York City. The nephew of one of them turns up in a Paris cat house in “The Tropic of Cancer.” This friend’s theory was that any accomplishment in art, or out, once done and recognized could, and maybe even should, be destroyed. The concrete symbol of the act of its own creation once in human memory is no longer needed. The act is the thing, the only thing. The objective manifestation is merely a relic anyway, the residue of the act. The act is the true concrete. Maybe, but it helps to have shelter in the winter. Don’t knock down the house.

Tempting: to do away with the mark, to only rely on the memory. But what if we all forget and drop into a social amnesia? What if our way of life, our style, our flair are cut off from their inceptions and developments? We do not know the past of who, what, where, when, and how of our present acts. We can’t distinguish the creative from the imitative. We don’t know who we are except that we are culturally illiterate, without history, without stories. We have lost the architect even though we still have his building.

What if we remember that we forget. Sometimes we are encouraged to forget and to forget we forgot. We are converted from one way to another and lose our own pasts. Parents fail to tell their children The chain is broken and a strand of cultural knowledge of who one is is gone. Insist on knowing this.

Consider the story of two Europeans traveling in South America who meet in a hotel lobby in Lima and after talking awhile discover they are cousins. They were strangers and now through memory they are kinsmen. Only through knowing can they make the connect. If they didn’t dance, I bet they felt like it.

The shared memory is culture. It floats on and within the biological fact. It is resilient and solid, sometimes it is onerous and oppressive, but it is fragile as well. It can disappear like a dream on sudden awakening. Hello, goodbye, I won’t be seeing you.

The subtext we discern in the unreeling movie, the concrete life of the actor, is her moment after moment experience. Her biology senses and is her life cycle. Under the cultural veneer is the living, for her and for all of us.

Now or then. Now and then. Now then. Now. Then.

Some of the Concrete is Under Deep Water. Notes on the Iraq War.

War, and specifically the ongoing war in Iraq, is an interaction sequence whose parties attempt to impose contradictory social orders on each other using forceful and fraudulent means. The key for the sociologist is in the interaction. The acts of the players are, to some extent, mutually contingent. No one knows the outcome in advance. It is only revealed in the doing.

There is complexity which can be posed as questions of the familiar who, what, when, where and how variety, essentially the order of battle. And these details, which the professional players strive to know, become more transparent during the unrolling of the sequence.

The actual encounters of real opponents, the primary actors, are here and now, moment by moment experiences whose outcomes set the stage for further acts and altogether sum up into patterns. Awareness of these events among others is never complete. Reports are gathered in command centers and mapped as a general situation. Further abstracted and sometimes doctored dispatches are issued to the various media who inform the awaiting interested audiences. We all remember the television images of the Secretary of Defense accompanied by a senior military officer talking to a room full of journalists about military actions that none of them actually experienced. But what gets through to us is still stark and vivid.

It is complex but we can think it a series of interrelated interactions. It comes to us over time. A narrative in the form of this happens then that happens. The this and that give us the images of the social order then.

We, the ordinary citizens and sociologists, get mainly hearsay of the battle and associated activities peppered with photographs of the physical residue and by an occasional direct statement from a participant. And in fact the actual event of war, dangerous and destructive and morally ambivalent as it usually is, is only a bit of information that gets its larger social meaning from its part in the whole. The cadre functions of planning, coordinating, initiating action and reaction require a standing back to see as much of the the whole as possible. The commanding general grappling with an enemy agent, and some of them are very good at it, is not doing his job.

But these fighting formations, unless they are criminal gangs only out for their own profit, represent a larger political unit of governance and ideology, and this tracks back in our system to civilian leaders. They are the directorate and the rest of us provide the support however tenuously. We provide the soldiers, the equipment and supplies and the motive. We, however distant, are involved.

The concrete sociological subject is like the black hole in astronomy, it attracts everything around it to it. We are tempted in all directions but our media, the blog, has a short and light footprint. We have to focus.

So far we have established, or tried to, that…

(1) conflict interaction is progressively revelatory. As the sequence proceeds the nature of what the action is about and who and how it is being conducted and the options for further unfolding become clearer to the more primary actors first and then those of us following however inexactly.

(2) the information available to the ordinary sociologist and all those similarly situated is limited, abstracted, and managed, and we do not know how far off it is from the pattern seen at command center. The rarest fish are in deep water.

(3) my own part in the complex event is clearly as part of the support base for the American agencies and agents primarily involved. I have not addressed my own ideology or emotional commitment or hopes and fears. Partly I hide behind a discredited objectivity, but I am blocked too by an ambivalence over options. Whatever my bias is, you can probably sense it in my writing here.

Now to characterizing the interaction sequence. It is too dense, and too distracting in its concrete minutia (even if I could gather and present it all) to be useful raw. So we will attempt to order it crudely into stages (or acts as in acts of a play). I find that each stage seems to have a governing simile or metaphor or model that initially describes what is happening, but the mood and understanding implied always proves transitory. The understanding shifts with the unrolling of the interaction sequence. The governing images appears to have informed the order projected by the players at the time (which I will not try to prove now) but they certainly were my own perceptions either then or now looking back.

(1) The invasion seems at the start to be an act of liberation similar in form to our liberating invasion of Europe in World War II. The fantasy: the people will welcome us and with our guidance construct their democratic traditions to replace the overthrown dictatorship. The military movement is swift, reminiscent of the German Blitzkrieg except the follow up infantry formations required to occupy the country are undermanned. The just prior invasion of Afghanistan seemed initially to have succeeded with special forces and air power alone. The infantry was supplied by northern tribal militias who were already in place. This image of the local militias of Kurds and Shia on call turned out to be limited to the local setting. The supporting Sunni militia in Sunni areas mobilized against the invasion–more and more actively as time passed.

At first the TV screens show the people greeting us and we have the supposed proof in the picture of the dictator’s statue being pulled down.

At the moment of apparent victory the leading American general retires without explanation or warning. He had the outsize personality of the successful military commander we have grown to expect. He should have become the chief honcho of the occupation according to prior image and expectation. Instead he is replaced by men of bland, bureaucratic and restrained character who seem strictly under the control and limit of the Secretary of Defense who is a business administrator with no experience of battle and mayhem nor governance of an occupied country.

(2) But then an unanticipated looting of all institutions including schools, museums, medical facilities, factories and, most unfortunately and ominously, ammunition dumps. There is no remnant of formal government left and the civic infra-structures of the society have been dismantled. Iraq has no bones. The fantasy: A flowering of freedom, exuberance. A bacchanalia. A Mardi Gras. The people run into the street and express their relief of the burden of the dictator as the dodo bird would. In their exuberance they foul the nest. The kissing and hugging and dancing and playing music, and shouting and crying with joy as the French would, is stretched with perverse insanity into an attack on their own world and space. The exaggerated separation of the sexes has unexpected consequences. No kisses for the liberating troops.

Meanwhile the borders are open. Journalists and writers and tourists and youths seeking adventure and businessmen with sample cases, spies (I presume) and shadowy figures dash in like the 49ers into the gold fields of California. Every hotel in the country is booked past capacity. Iraq locals with even a hint of a foreign language, with patched together cars, with skills useful or otherwise gather around and shape-up. All the miners are hiring. A lot of action. Contact. Astonishing, but temporary, exchanges. Bonanza time.

3) Turns out militarily that the chase is the thing. The ardent suitor wins the maiden and finds her a bore. Catch Moby Dick at great cost and throw him back into the sea. What now, brown cow? Turns out that the post conquest phase has received little planning attention. A junior general has been appointed civil administrator and given a tiny staff and no orders or instructions. He is in the chain of command and isn’t prepared to act independently. The commanding general, el supremo, is packing to go home. And the civilian and military order of Iraq has evaporated. It does not exist, replaced by a vacuum and over twenty of the dictator’s marble palaces and the empty office buildings of the departed governing bureaucratic cadres.

The State Department reacts and appoints as governor a career diplomat who has the character to organize a governing response quickly, with beautiful informality (I am still impressed by his desert boots and checkered shirt) and he became the occupation administrator representing the American executive at the center. The civilian and military occupation were divided against American tradition in which these two roles are joined in the commanding general (a la Douglas MacArthur). And the unexpected American occupation of a middle eastern country begins. The war is declared over by the administratively disengaged president, but as we all know it is to continue on and on.

(4) The counterattack takes the form of a hydra headed guerrilla war. The multi-part Iraqi social order produces its militias and gangs that move into offensives in all directions. They prove ingenious, aggressive, alert, swift to react. They have different objectives, many at cross purposes, and do not present a united front. For the Americans the enemy order of battle is a mystery and the gathering of information of who is doing what to whom and why is a primary concern. As we have noted the interaction, the actual experience painstakingly interpreted, supplies the answer. As I write now from the distance, and with the partial blindness imposed by my ordinary access through the media, I am much closer to knowing who it is we fight and why than I have been in following the story over the years. Through the glass darkly I see a little more.

For an earlier model we have the counterattack by guerrillas instead of line troops that occurred during the American occupation of Mexico City in the mid-19th century. The battle tactics used fitting the logic of the possible. There is also Mao’s precept–the fish in water, the activists hidden among the people.

The American response is professional but to the home front observer lethargic. The ripostes to the suicide, car, and roadside bombings come slowly. The source and direction of the other’s attacks are not totally obvious. Kidnappings, ritual executions, infiltrated enemy agents, street demonstrations, mortars and rockets, bullying and intimidation of the local people. All needed to be sorted out. Back at headquarters confusion, plans distorted. Rotation of personnel to the unexpected fronts stressing the entire military system. Large numbers of Iraqi civilians displaced, many abroad.

( 5) Abe Lincoln would have figured it out by trial and error but the executive at the center proved unable to appreciate the tactical impasse and held tight to the hunker-down and not working system in place. The political coalition of fossil fuel industry leaders and religious fundamentalists cracked in mid-term elections and the error prone executive’s party lost control over the federal legislature. The political critique of the war that has developed since except for wildly demanding immediate withdrawal of troops has proved incoherent otherwise. The center adjusted by retiring the Secretary of Defense and placing a duet of intellectuals, a Ph.D. general and a diplomat, in charge of what was called a surge–a sudden overpowering swelling and multiplication of an event like an incoming tide. This has been the governing image. Essentially the combat troops occupied neighborhoods instead of retiring at night to large insulated bases and bearded the terrorists in their local command centers and began to reduce the intimidation used against the ordinary people.

Against war eventually is a reassertion of what I take to be a universal urge to commit to the family life cycle (however locally defined). Ironically we are told that at the top of the terrorist informal hierarchy are men with multiple wives and large broods of children. They aren’t permitting war to hinder their cycles, are they?

The surge was helped a lot by what at the distance seemed the sudden conversion of the Sunni sheiks against the weird suicide prone foreign fundamentalist terrorists. We are told that the local American troops have forged alliances with these tribal militias and have quieted things down some though the mayhem continues.

War is hell.

Notes

The concrete is the theater of the journalist and the historian. The here and now to the reporter; the there and gone to the later story-teller. The sociologist might have something to add: a missed pattern, a different viewpoint or he might add confusion or a benign nothing but another voice. This futile spinning of wheels is the third risk after errors of fact and interpretation.

The interaction sequence (however complex) is like a growing plant. There is an onset and then a progressive evolving that moment by moment reveals what it is. It starts as mystery and ends as a particular history. It teaches us who and what it is in its becoming.

Solidarity Forever Maybe.

Paradoxically most of the active confrontational fronts in America can be mitigated by the recognition and acceptance of an overriding shared link, a band of unity that is based on and establishes a curing solidarity.

A relationship of solidarity is characterized by a concern for the other involving recognition, empathy, loyalty, support. The link can be as simple as a rooting interest in the same athletic club or the acceptance of a joint political objective. It is visible in the togetherness of the members of a sports team, a trade union, a military unit, a class at school. At implies unity in diversity, togetherness despite difference. It is a transcending of otherness even as this otherness is affirmed. It suggests the emphasis of altruism (service and attention to the other) over egoism (primary attention to the self.) It functions to maintain the group’s focus on its goal even where an opponent might try to upend it by manipulating differences and distinctions.

A stalled car with a dead battery. No tools, only ourselves. Our best hope would be to all join together to push it. We get our largest number into the solidarity circle by not applying an extraneous test involving gender, ethnicity, religion, style of life or whatever. All we want, as we face the inert vehicle, is to put it motion. Why not have all who agree in the goal join in? (Example: major political parties in Pakistan form a broad coalition to replace a military dictatorship. They join together even with well understood political differences to jump start back toward their democratic tradition.)

But there are blocks against even a limited solidarity. A few obvious ones, you can think of more.

(1) An absolutist commitment to one’s side of a distracting disagreement which is always kept in the foreground to block any possibility of joint action elsewhere. The curing solidarity can not form. Over recent years the priority given to the fundamental-secular conflict has blocked populist initiatives in access to medical care and in economic policy toward global warming that both sides would support otherwise. One band of solidarity suppresses another.

(2) An insistence on the iconic governance of a past event as in a feud that continues on and on past reason. It involves an exaggerated concern for balance and revenge. The persistence of conflicts over centuries, the calling up of the ancient iconic moments to undermine any newly discovered unity of purpose The repeat of this block is part of the history of the Balkans. The possibility of a curing solidarity is always negated. There is a long memory and a short foresight.

(3) Failure to recognize the acts of solidarity of the other, see solidarity as a statistic rather than a process. Acts of solidarity are always between individuals. For it to be seen as group mediated some consciousness within the group’s membership, a general recognition, has to be involved. The righteous people of Poland who, at serious personal risk, assisted Jewish brothers and sisters escaping the holocaust were acting alone or in small groups but the Danes, whose king (as cadre) had signaled a unified defiance against the fascists, were in a group defined and recognized effort. It is also possible to see a group effect in a pattern of action. Even without cadre leadership and directive the pattern of the sum of individual acts can be seen as a group connect. Even where the cadres in place negate the possibility of solidarity, the contrary acts of individuals can be seen as a silver lining.

In the history of ethnicity in the America there is an insistence on absolute distinctions of groups. A person belongs to one ethnic group or to another. There is an excluded middle of the person belonging to both or the fourth possibility of rejecting the distinction, dropping the category. The absolute distinction within the culture is heightened. There is a seemingly general agreement, a consensus, that establishes it. Frequently it is enshrined in law, philosophy. the historical record, but the people’s option to change is always in the wing. Distinctive group identities and cultures emerge and submerge. Where are the Visigoths, Vikings, Druids, Huguenots now? The descendant peoples continue but with new identities and cultures. Where were the Mormons before Joseph Smith’s walk of discovery into the the upstate New York woods? Historically and in fact the Afro group in USA is to some significant extent Afro-Euro and the Euro group has Euro-Afro links. There is a generally known but officially ignored overlap. For all of our ethnic groups this overlap goes off in all directions. Mexican intellectuals at one time defined an overriding Mestizo (Mixed) identity in the margin between Spanish and Amerindian. We in the USA could asserts a similar unitary identity as well (the mix-together with which most, if not all of us, could identify.)

I am not advocating, merely pointing out. One can not approach this subject without ruffling sensibilities in all directions. Search your own consciousness to test this assertion.

In the other direction, as I write ethnicity (and the other fronts) as an object is rapidly changing. The ideas we present can quickly fall behind the actual facts. We may be writing on the wind. But if we do not talk about it, we can not grope our way to a new, even if temporary, consensus. We have to constantly renew our metalanguage of understanding. If we don’t share we can mistake where we actually are.

In the current political cycle of the run for the nomination for president this question has arisen insistently and the need for a new language is imperative.

First the idea of race is out. We still can recognize physical differences but we understand them always in a cultural context. Socially recognized differences are always ethnic, the recognition is cultural. We don’t have groups based on eye color, but we could if we built up a new consensus. Second in the USA ethnic order varies considerably by place. We need to recognize this variability. One size does not fit all.

Whenever possible the rectification of inequities over time should move against institutions and organizations rather than against other people. Getting one’s own back is usually too late. The guilty party, the actual plantation owner for example, is long gone. The cowboys and Indians of the plains myths are shadows now. The later target for revenge might be a simple chicken like yourself. Take a deep breath and consider this before flying off the handle in public. Two wrongs do not make a right. Right? The values we claim are not limited to a zero-sum game. The freed woman does not have to be an alone-without-a-mate Amazon. There is enough freedom and equality and respect and honor for everyone. Always negotiate to find the resolution that will not destroy the achieved or hoped for solidarity.

The notion of synthesizing the difference, of finding the overriding conception, is never easy since it requires a negation of what is. We may be very reluctant to give up our revered categories. It may be dangerous to disarm before the other does. So solidarity is another level of possible resolution. We keep our differences but by finding our band of unity, no matter how narrow or how temporary, we abate our disagreements, conflicts and suspicions enough to act together to achieve what we all want and by maintaining our solidarity can get.

If the dike is breaking we all want to fill the gap regardless of ethnicity, gender, style of life, religious or philosophical difference and etcetera. Later for them, right now pass the sand bag.

Solidarity forever maybe.

Notes.

Examples of searching out the curing solidarity way.

* A judge and jury of one identity render fair justice to a defendant of another identity against all extraneous and distracting ploys. See the whole person and not the stereotype.

* Students of different identities want a fair chance to enter law school. As a society we want to balance past injustices whose consequences continue into the present. A temporary adjustment is required. Do we expel a person of one identity in favor of another or do we add a seat, expand the class size, place the cost on the school instead of the vulnerable pupil? May I suggest that we get the redress from the institution and its agencies and maintain the solidarity of the identity groups, the possibility of a unified people.

I recognize that I have slipped into advocacy. I find it very difficult and disconcerting. But it’s where my head is at the moment.