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.

How I Entered the Field and the Forest

TIME IN
Sequences of Recollection: A measure of time at work beyond hours and days is the variety of the work itself. I think of my formal efforts into my chosen part of the universal as projects. I start with limited and unfocused knowledge and strive, through research, reading, discussion with others and through my own cogitation, to reach as formal and unified an understanding of the field I have tapped as I can. So looking back I do not have a sense of clock time used but I do have an idea of the process I have experienced. I think of all my projects together as my time in.

^^^^^

THE WEST SIDE OF UNION SQUARE
What called to me first was the song of explanation. I was unhappy and stymied in my personal life. I felt shut off from effective action for myself, shut off from love and companions. I needed to know why and how. I was concerned with the psychic order within but I had no access to it. So I projected it outward onto the apparent social order around me. Both questions are valid, but I could see only one, really the two, but one projected onto and hidden within the other.

Walking along the west side of Union Square in New York City on a dark, winter night in 1951 the startling thought jolted me of the obvious disparities in wealth and life style that surrounded me and that was maintained in seemingly placid order.

In my native city of Philadelphia differences in wealth and power were not directly transparent. We lived in large economically homogeneous neighborhoods and presumed that, with some cultural enriching differences in taste and life-style, the round of life was the same for all. The rich and well-connected living along the main line of the commuter railroad in the city’s southern suburbs were beyond our experience and attention, minor features on the daily newspapers’ society pages. But in New York City the rich and poor were very close, a ten-minute walk from the tenements under the Third Avenue elevated to the fabulous apartments and town houses on Park and Fifth Avenues.

I was on my way to a college on the edge of Greenwich Village whose catalog was much more entertaining than the courses it announced. One economics professor was so boring that even he slept through the first five weeks. Then he awoke with a start and announced that he finally understood what the course was about. Came to him in a dream he was having at that instant. I can identify.

But Max N was the exception. His lectures were the ideal combination of information and entertainment. He talked about the economic and the social order. The class met in a room in the school’s basement that actually was a small theater with a small stage projected out and elevated by two feet over the audience seated on three sides. N was always the last one in. Onto the platform, removing his coat and hat and scarf and setting them neatly on a spare chair. Then seated at a small table, stage center and forward, overlooking the class but never actually seeing us, commencing his lecture slowly, at a whisper. About a country, each session a new one, and its political economy. The different parties and factions, the social classes and interest groups. The dynamics, the struggles. And the change. And the remaining the same.

He was cautiously pessimistic, things might get marginally better at most. Old, his revolutionary salad days back ten years before World War One. Hair growing out of his bulbous nose, out of his ears, his eyebrows luxurious bushes, a wild fringe around his bald pate. As the lecture advanced the sound of his voice and the call of his topic sent him into a light trance. The timber became more youthful, louder and firmer, pace up-tempo. Like a masculine clairvoyant transmitting a message from the spheres. Fascinating. And repeated weekly. He was a classical democratic socialist and he showed the strength of a Marxist analysis. But where did it lead? More specifically what was I to do?

One night after class I asked N. out for a bite and a talk. Out to a local cafeteria, a tuna-fish sandwich for him, coffee for me.

“What to do?”

The trade unions were into organizing expeditions into the South then, especially targeting the run-away textile mills from New England, which in the years since have scattered even further and are now distributed throughout the Pacific. I had dropped into a union office at a Philadelphia steel-mill to volunteer. I was told I wasn’t tough enough. This was heavy lifting

N denounced me for a bourgeois attitude and made it clear to me that there was no way forward for me from his course to a career. I packed the technique of class analysis into my old kit bag, smiled sourly, and moved on.

UPTOWN
A woman with big tits I knew, a distracting co-worker at the New York Times, accompanied me to registration at an uptown college. And there I was, listening to the lectures of Bern S, William G, Clarence S.

Clarence S. was a socialist, Bern S. an accused communist under investigation by the United States Congress, but the subject set before me was unexpectedly different. No Marxism here. Positive science it was. A tradition prior to Marx. A rejection of the religious explanation of social events in terms of good and evil though this part of it was never emphasized to we innocents. Things-as-they-are is what we want. Material fact recorded under the rule of an objective scientific method and accompanied by an associated theory. This positive sociology had its own pantheon of international pioneers showing us the way. We were to be unbiased, universal and above all scientific.

Then I came under the influence of Harold Z. A Scandinavian sociologist and novelist: Youthful, I believe that I was the older, tall, sandy hair cut in a European style, always formally dressed but slightly rumpled, slow moving, lectures always prepared and precise. He was relaxed and accessible but behind this was the formality and aloofness of the landed class who we in the U.S. imagine is represented by a monocle nonchalantly screwed into an eye-socket. It was an impressive combination.

Z was pushing, at that moment, for a rigid definition of theory and research for sociology that would guarantee the scientific status we all thought our subject deserved. Prior to Z there was no sensible transition from theory to research. There was no assurance that the two sets of events, theoretical statements, called propositions, and research facts, were isomorphic. The two events might not match. A critical question for all scientific experiment: How do you know you are measuring what you purport to measure?

Z had the answer. The concept. It has two meanings: One within the context of the proposition and theory in which it is embedded, and the other an operational definition which describes exactly how it has been observed and measured during the research work. To assure congruence these two meanings have to fit one into the other like an air-lock into its housing. Once this linkage takes the classical form of mathematics, a logical derivation of a proposition from a theory can be described that can then be verified or rejected by a research operation. Conversely any research finding under known and precise operations can be cranked back up into a theoretical proposition. So simple. Let’s do it.

The problem Max N left me, the what to do question, was answered. Positivist sociology was an expanding enterprise. The scientific method had finally found its footing in the social studies. It was only a matter of time, energy and investment for a pay-off in knowledge. And the investment was pouring in from government, industry, and foundations in the form of scholarships, fellowships, grants, subsidized meetings and publications. The social science departments at universities and colleges were expanding. There was a high level of achievement among professors and practitioners and a uniformly high level of intelligence and character. And the work was based on a generation of conceptual preparation by American academics built over the intellectual ups and downs of 5,000 years of western civilization augmented for us in the United States by the European scholars, another brilliant lot, who had been forced to migrate west by the political insanity in their home countries.

William G, the departmental chairman at General Studies, and Z were encouraging and supportive. This was the way to go. So I went.

DOWN SOUTH
Off to graduate study at a college in a southern state with a first year scholarship from a famous foundation and an appointment as research assistant to Professor Rick H.

Middle south: Iced tea in winter and barbecued pork. Low population density except at football games when thousands dressed up and congregated. Where did they hide when they weren’t watching football? One didn’t have to go too far out from the two or three block business district in our town to find log cabins. I watched a weird ritual for an hour before discovering they were boiling down fat to soap in an iron cauldron. I made a positive remark about Abe Lincoln in a diner and was rewarded by a general hush. Abe’s name was still taboo. We touched the larger national popular experience. The University’s basketball and football teams were competitively successful on the larger scene. And we even had a local character, a bookstore proprietor, famous for his long affair with a beautiful Hollywood actress. Except for an occasional hurricane it was pleasant enough. But I paid very little attention to place. My life was lived within the Sociology Department. It contained all meaning.

Over three years I was fortunate enough to work with four men of high intelligence and accomplishment, each of whom gave me warmth, encouragement and a share of his wisdom. I am more appreciative now then ever.

Rick.H. had been instrumental in my acceptance at the school. He was a physically solid but soft-spoken man Very serious but capable of an on-target joke. He had all the qualities of a dynamic CEO, smart and energetic with an ability to lead, but he consciously dampened his drive down in the service of a strongly held ethical commitment. He was a Mormon but in his work he was strictly secular, an example of the unbiased man for the rest of us. I also caught a sensitive and alert interpersonal side. He had a good fix on the personalities of all his students. He never intervened in our private lives but one could be sure of his empathy. If Freud had gotten him before sociology he would have made a fine psychoanalyst.

His specialty was marriage and the family, an interest fueled, he once admitted, by the polygamy within his family background that set his vision of life slightly askew from the rest of us. He was active in research, juggling several projects at a time, some of which were large scale and required organizing and coordinating associates and assistants. Most astonishing for me was his memory. He had the past and present literature cold. His annual reviews of research progress in the field were admirable and complete, and he was convinced that these works were valid and significant. At the moment I joined him he was starting a propositional inventory. This flowed naturally from his own work and seemed to benefit from Z’s paradigm. The time seemed right, the aim was encyclopedic. Data in droves from articles, monographs, research reports, textbooks had been accumulating in what seemed like massive middens. Now was the time to take the measure of the mountain. And this is where Rick H. put me to work.

Hank.S. who specialized in medical sociology became my second mentor. Of medium height, a starkly handsome man whose eyes had a slightly oriental cast within a ruddy face around a very long, delicate nose. Physically he was a non-foppish Disraeli. He looked slim but his arms were muscular, his chest deep. He might have lifted weights, he certainly looked athletic. He hated the formal lecture and all of his classes became informal seminars no matter how they started. He had a suite of offices at the medical school that was well away from the physical sociology department. We met there sitting in a circle, Hank, in a lightweight jacket that served as his lab coat, and we discussed our projects and subjected them to the group’s critique.

Hank was not only loved by his students but by the psychiatrists, medical doctors and dentists with whom he worked. He was charming, accessible, responsive, non-judgmental. Everyone felt close to him. Like Professor H he was empathetic. The only war story (Was it true or a riddle?) he told me shows this: In tents in New Guinea, heavy rainstorm accompanied by an incoming mortar barrage. Hank in one tent and a deeply fearful friend of his in another moaning his name: “Hankee. Hankeeee”. The man who later committed suicide. “What could I do?” asked Hank, implying that love is not the answer for adult dependency. Perhaps I was the second dependent, alone under the barrage beyond Hank’s help. Looking back and considering, perhaps Hank made the whole bowl of noodles up to convey his perception of my psychic state to me. He was trying to say something.

Hank S was a product of the University of Chicago tradition of hands-on research. The social field was their lab. Their method: a combination of accurate journalism, participant observation, anthropological awareness and acceptance of things as they are. Concepts were sensitizing and reporting tools, no more precise than required. Hank was conscious of interconnectedness, the notion of system. He understood that the dynamic of any setting was in the consequences, including contradictions, for established structures. He wanted to understand the events before him and wasn’t particularly concerned with theory. If he could describe the observed and could argue how it worked he was satisfied.

Hank was brilliant in an ad lib setting. Present him with a jumble of data and stand back. For me it was like the call of the wild to the Jack London dog, Buck. It resonated with a tendency I already had. It felt natural and right. But Hank hesitated before a blank page though I recall a paper of his that shimmered with the vibrato of the events described. Perhaps it was the difficulty of communicating this quality, the danger of being misunderstood that held him back and limited his fame and influence.

Ruby.V was the most eminent member of the department. He had been a part of a southern intellectual renaissance led by a world famous southern scholar who had retired shortly before I arrived. V was known as a demographer but his interests were quite wide, his most famous study was of the cotton industry. His energy was pretty much gone by the time I knew him.. He lectured from old notes but he was so bright that there was much to learn from him even on a bad day.

He was paraplegic, the result of infantile paralysis in his early youth in Arkansas, with a bird shaped protruding chest. Braces on his legs and arm-bracing canes, he like President Roosevelt could hardly walk. He had been hit so early that his full height was under five feet. He had a modified automobile that he used to drive himself around town. He had a wife and children. And he had established a conventional life for himself. But his high-pitched voice projected a, for me, barely understood alien cracker dialect. His office, table piled high with tumble down, oddly shuffled and dealt papers and manuscripts. Books shelved to the ceiling all round, the excess stacked into swaying towers, and V seemingly buried within the disorderly mess, only a nose or forehead visible. One felt like a Dickens’ character visiting his solicitor. Outwardly one had to get through the facade to reach the real V. Not a strenuous action for V was always there, metaphorically out in the open, accessible, reaching out. He gave me what I consider the two fundamental ideas of sociology, namely culture and social ecology. They hold the insights that, if not grasped and firmly held and applied, can lead one into the repetition of the old errors which we really want to correct.

Anthropology was my minor and I was lucky to have Jimmy Jack H, the cultural anthropologist as my fourth mentor. He had bad teeth, poor eyesight, was very skinny, hated to speak publicly and wasn’t well prepared at lectures. But he loved to write and came to class with pages of notes for his students. And if at an unexpected moment some word of wisdom or nod of approval was exactly appropriate, he delivered on target. When under Ruby V’s hints I had a staggering moment of insight into the meaning of culture while walking down a flight of stairs—it was a near conversion experience and I almost fell down from shock—Jimmy Jack approached, walking up and with a nod welcomed me to the club. He also with a few words, during a chance meeting on a campus walk, alerted me to the nature of the enterprise I was entering. “The dissertation isn’t critical,” if I may paraphrase him, “It only proves that you have promise for delivering on future projects.”

There was a fifth man, Norman D, with whom I had hoped to work. He had graduated from Harvard and was rumored to have some understanding of Parsons who was the most famous American sociologist in that era, but who was not easily accessible through his own writings. Norman was also the local expert on social class. He was a tall man, tending toward extra weight, very patrician, slow moving, slow speaking, avoiding emotion. He was the first of my professors to have his class over to his house, combining our academic work with sociability. An important act in giving a youthful group a sense of gravitas, and, for those of us who hadn’t achieved it, a realistic view of personal value. But something was wrong. It might have been departmental politics—he later decamped for Wisconsin—but our relationship never warmed enough for me to pose my question about the Positivism-Marxism disconnect which was my true, at that time, personal and professional interest, my way to a sensible dissertation which, alas, I did not know I was on.

Intergroup Solidarity in the Run for President

We can think of the campaigns for nomination and election as a game whose rules are set by party committees, federal and state legislatures, news media, all under the critique of observers and participants. The rules and patterns and technologies have changed over the past two centuries. The process feels more democratic now, more influenced directly by the people as citizen voters even though certain cut-outs still remain where the direct vote is diverted by formula to a derived count.

The self-selected candidates are constantly winnowed by gate-keepers. Though there are many parties and individuals running the media and public attention goes to the two leading parties and toward the political professionals who hold or have held significant office.

The physical, emotional and financial demands on the candidates are considerable. Each must organize a support staff to mobilize actions, speeches, events. Travel is constant. The search for funds continual. One wonders when the candidate has time to think.

Constantly on display and spot lighted, still the public reading of candidates’ characters and ideologies tends to be purposely diverted to a constructed persona. We see the best foot. In the electoral mix there is some attempt to define the opponent by the sudden revelation of a past indiscretion, a slip that damages the image.

In form there is a direct relationship with the audience (the voters). The candidate and his/her team interact with the people as the lecturer does with his listeners—the sharing of information, ideology, emotion. There is also an episodic interaction between the candidates involving mild to serious conflict, each trying to throw the other off balance.

The journalists and commentators identify significant voting blocs as tending to support one candidate or the other. Shifting the vote to one’s favor becomes the major purpose, one voter at a time; but, even more importantly, to shift to oneself the votes of social-demographic groups identified by ethnicity, gender, age, section of country, socio-economic class, level of education. For me these sum up to three major fronts of contention that express our social order in process–ever present and continuing through and over election cycles.

(1) The Afro-Euro difference. Traditionally this is the race question. In the 1930s biologists and anthropologists showed that the biological distinction of large masses of people by continent is inextricably bound with distinctions of culture. So it is more appropriately characterized as a part of ethnicity, a concept that includes biological and/or cultural qualities as appropriate. Some see the two sides as involved in a zero-sum game. The advantage for one debited as a disadvantage for the other. This vision reduces the possibility of a resolving solidarity.

(2) Fundamentalist- Secular difference. This is a Church-State issue. The moral rules of our joint civilization that should be actively enforced by the state are in question. The fundamental side wants to impose more of these rules and to appoint more of their members to positions of power in government–in education and like institutions. The secular side wants reform and revision of some of these rules and wants to maintain a strict separation of the state and the religious spheres. The distinction can be resolved by the unity of an areligious (neither anti-secular nor anti-religious) center.

(3) Progressive-Conservative difference. The distinction is in political-economy. One side represents an almost pure support for business and business enterprise as the bedrock necessary for prosperity, democracy, and justice while the other wants governmental actions to balance the distribution of surplus to the various sectors of the population. It recognizes the distortions to social support nets and infrastructure by excessive bias toward one sector over others.

There are very active other fronts involving style of life (homosexuality), gender (rights of women), other ethnic group divisions (especially the American Indian and the status of illegal immigrants), and the current prominent issue of foreign policy and military action. The same type of analysis applies–there are two generally established and contradictory sides for each issue. The distribution of the people is treated independently for each front. Essentially the person with you on one issue might be against you on another. Any correlation is a matter of practical test.

Within each of these interest categories is a further diversity of actions, tendencies, attitudes–an internal politics that requires a separate analysis.

The outcome of the election turns in part on the voters’ readings of the candidates’ characters and ideologies, and in part by the informal coalitions of voters formed according to interest identities at the moment of decision. Which of these several fronts will the people see as primary? Ethnic difference, religious difference, political-economic difference, or style of life, gender, military policy or whatever is a matter of another practical test.

^^^^^

More generally each front of contention can be overcome by the people’s social will or by social evolution. In England the distinctions of Norman and Saxon are no longer prominent. They all look like Brits now.

So in an election in which the two major candidates symbolize the political progress of two socio-political movements for social change–civil and economic rights for Afro-ethnics and for women–the possibility of overcoming these fronts would seem to be critical.

An overarching synthesis–the minimizing of ethnic and gender differences–might be out of reach, but an intermediate step emphasizing intergroup and inter-gender solidarity, if accepted, might challenge the negative karma in the body-politic, might weigh against the now weakening coalition of fundamentalists and conservatives.

Solidarity: the fostering of attitudes of loyalty, support, unity, and comradeship among the members of a social group or among members of different groups . It is often based on a narrow overriding social identity. It is symbolized by the linking of arms. Members of sports teams, of military units, of trade unions develop solidarity. It is usually asserted against an opponent of the shared identity who seeks to break the unity by appealing to other differences–the divide and conquer strategy.

The hint from the candidates is that the line of solidarity can develop along a broadly based populist political-economic program emphasizing the interests of the people in jobs, security, education.

So the question: is solidarity the answer?