The Ideology of American Prisoners of War

A classical interaction setting of guards and prisoners. The formal rules and the place (barracks, walls, wire fence, moat and so on) are imposed by the prison administration. The sequence of action unfolds upon this base. If everyone accepts the frame the system operates placidly.

Not likely, a number of POW books and movies assure us. The on-going war continues and the prisoners drag their feet and challenge and discomfit the guards-enemy as much as they can and dare. Most audaciously, the prisoners try to escape and return to active duty. All this is serious business. Violent injury and death are in the offering for guards and prisoners both. Only the most active are up to it. Most do their time and try to come out alive and as psychologically whole as possible.

An international treaty adhered to by most nation-states sets an overarching convention governing behavior in war. The treatment of POWs is part of this legal code. The person has dropped or surrendered his weapon. He is no longer an offensive threat. He is defenseless and though he may be retained in custody he is to be treated in a humane and civilized fashion. It is a peculiar protected status in a world at war. Locked in a prison camp one is safe but escaped one again becomes fair game. The code does not permit torture. The code does not permit the unwilling giving of any but the most simple identity information by prisoner to guard.

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Terrorist organizations and bands, revolutionary armies, kinship and religious militias, criminal groups, rogue states do not recognize nor abide by the war convention norms.

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The long-running Cold War had hot interludes. The Vietnamese War is currently part of the U.S. presidential campaign because one of the candidates was on active military duty there and was captured and spent a number of years as POW under trying circumstances. It is part of his biographical narrative.

The North Vietnamese regime at the time broke the War convention on prisoners of war in at least two ways. (1) It illegally tortured American prisoners. (2) It attempted to indoctrinate prisoners or convince them to broadcast propaganda to a world audience. These two actions are related. Each man was tortured until he gave in and made the false confession.

Under these conditions the informal organization of the prisoner group was an important element in the resistance of its members. They offered emotional and practical support to each other though their means of communication were extremely limited, and they set their own counter-norms of correct behavior.

The jailers used rewards like better food, improved living conditions, hope for early release home in a classic carrot and stick system of conversion. To the minor extent they were successful they split the American group but also strengthened it by offering the example of shame in giving in. The response of the Americans in rejecting, hating, disdaining the non-conforming other in their midst paradoxically reinforced the rule itself by example. You can test the emotional strength of a rule by your response when you witness its breaking.

At the time the now senator felt that the few non-conformists had somehow slipped out from under the American ideology, that they did not have the basic belief of conventional religion and patriotism that could carry them through the cruel prisoner treatment they encountered.

But looking back he was proposing a very narrow elite ideology (as did General Eisenhower in World War II) which in its statement excluded a large portion of the American experience. The American ideology, the American personality needed a much larger tent even then and certainly today. Seeing this clearly and realizing this as a society sets the more inclusive unity and solidarity in which we all participate. It has been there all along though sometimes the man blowing the horn calling it out has been off key.

All Ideologies Are Wrong Headed

Pareto was suspicious of stated motives. Too many people performing the same kind of action offer vastly different reasons. Freud felt that the motive for an action frequently is not easily accessible to the actor. The gap defined by the inarticulable urge is filled by a convention, something that seems normal.

At the social level knowing the norm or the rule or the law is usually all we need. The fact that the individual is lively and capable of logical thought is about as deep as we have to go. Following the correct way is like following the yellow brick road. There it is, there you go.

But the issue returns. The individual who knows not why-he-does is matched by confusion and disagreement over the correct, right, conventional way. One group’s straight and narrow is another’s twisted and convoluted. So the intra-psychic conflict has a parallel in the ideological disagreements in social life.

In the individual’s life the task and the act versus the motive and the reason are like hands waving and yet not meeting. It is not clapping. So in social life the task and the act may not mesh with the conflicting and confusing ideologies. A social order is there, remember, no matter the ideology.

In the Second Iraq War the lean volunteer military combat units have been augmented by civilian firms organized as work formations. The famous Army Engineer battalions have given way to large construction firms on assigned projects. Army mess cooks have been replaced by commercial caterers. The military police have passed on guard and escort duty to bouncers and private eyes. These shifts can be seen as changes in accepted convention. Notice that the same tasks, the same suite of acts, seem no longer to be motivated by duty and public service or, as Durkheim might have called it, by altruism, but instead by an emphasis on profit, a motive extolled to the extreme by the governing politicos.

The specific group of believers can form around the ideology like the gang rallying around the new charismatic teacher; or the group can generate the faith like all other aspects of culture. The agreed correct way is in the going consensus. Over time we forget the origin and simply accept–just as the child adopts the parental language.

But sometimes ideology becomes another disconnect. The conventional reason why becomes a studied blindness. Certain options are made to disappear and with them the possibility of a pragmatic appreciation of reality.

I have been particularly startled by the civilian escort guards for State Department diplomats in Baghdad. The job gets done but the civilian organization and its workers are outside of the military chain of command and have an unclear legal position and are possibly much more expensive than the most obviously sensible military organization for this duty that they replaced. The U.S. Marine Embassy Guards is an established and long standing, specially trained elite force. They guard the American diplomats at their work around the world and the slight extension of the service to trips outside the compound should fall within their competence. And organizationally and legally there are no problems.

Even if the marines were excused from this service for whatever reason, there are other military units and other agencies of the federal government who could substitute for them–the Air Force Security, the Military Police of the Army, the U.S. Marshals Service, all with respectable traditions and reputations.

We have to wonder at the choice that was made to go with profit motive instead of altruistic service. We have to suspect that an ideological bias was at work; a vision that blocked out a range of sensible and moral pragmatic opportunities. The executives in office would argue to the contrary that they have discovered the new and profitable way. Parading as conservative their acts are shockingly radical.

The old altruistic, public service Army is made lean and mean. A lot of its supposed rear echelon functions have been relegated to what we have called the second wave (businessmen and workers for profit, journalists, and eccentric tourists). A change of ideology at the political center finds a new way of doing war.

For me it is a disappointing discovery something like the invention of the designated hitter in American baseball. Some change is unnecessary and dumb especially if it goes against my own ideology. But sometimes the new just doesn’t work as expected. Sometimes it’s a ding-a-ling error.

Old Jock advised the new recruit, “Don’t volunteer for nothing.”

My Kingdom for a Horse

This notion of fate, the insignificant event tipping a larger outcome, involves man’s relationship to the horse. Without this animal the man is in deep trouble. Yet at one time in our human story none of us had one. And now in our era of the combustion engine, electricity and atomic energy he is no longer our boon companion. Once the horse, as part of the natural world, was beyond the conscious control of our pre-literate ancestors and he is almost beyond our conscious need now.

But the taming of the horse was a human discovery and invention. At one time the horse was wild, at another he was part of our domestic establishment. Now he is an entertaining noble beast. Our conceptual and physical control was a giant leap that changed our way of living. We multiplied our suzerainty over that part of nature necessary for our survival. The human over the horse is a cultural event and a significant but now diminishing part of our civilization.

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Yesterday, June 7, 2008, in the Belmont Racetrack on the eastern border of New York City a three year old thoroughbred horse named Big Brown lost a race that he was odds on favorite to win and lost his chance to join the short list of Triple-Crown winners that hasn’t been extended for thirty years. Themes repeated and associated with the horse: fate and power.

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The horse figure is so dense, it gallops off in all directions. Think of the man-horse combo, the centaur of Greek mythology. I like the story of the totemic link, the image of the centaur who assists the human female in her fertility quest, the half-wild lover. The tiger who the vast majority of women think they have dated/married is more probably a centaur. A better deal, two for one, the wild passion and the cultural patina.

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The horse-racing industry and the social forms it takes are significant modern topics. The game is a simple race where small athletic men ride a small herd of horses each of whom strives to cross the finish line first and win the prize.

There is an oval track up to one and a half miles in circumference on one side of which are stands where over 100,000 spectators can congregate.

The audience is stratified socially by the comfort and service available: (1) The enclosed club-house with restaurant, air conditioning, exclusive betting windows, cleaner bathrooms. (2) The stands with reserve seats at higher level and therefore with a better view of the field (3) The standing room next to the track whose only amenities are some barrels for throw-away trash and losing tickets.

The audience in the democratic American mode sorts itself out by the fees it is willing to pay but the symbolism is stark: the blue collar manual and craft employees who work for wages are on their feet; the white collar gang and professionals who work for salaries and fees are seated; and the wealthy and powerful executives, legislators, politicians, and high-rolling investors are dining and drinking at cloth covered tables. We sort ourself, not really troubled by the differences we see as style of life choices. There might be moments of discomfort when one wanders into an unaccustomed section but these are unofficial.

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The breeding, care, feeding and training of the horses are the tasks around which the core of the institution forms. The trainers. jockeys, and assorted others setup and present the displays that are the races. The crew are itinerant and follow the circuit from track to track through the year. It is a definite and distinctive way of life, the taste of which is found in the autobiographies and memoirs of owners, trainers and jocks.

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The gambling which interests me because it was my father’s avocation is closely associated with the sport. There is talk of improving the breed but it all feeds back to winning and taking home some money. The cuts in the pool for taxes and administration increase the certainty of the average bettor losing. On the face the random betting odds are unfair. One wins less and loses more. As usual the house is sure to win in the long run and its short run take is pretty certain as well.

The informed, energetic, and hardworking gambler can win by understanding the true odds if he has the patience to wait out and bet heavily against the spotted error of the majority. It is a full time job.

Probably for most of us it makes more sense to ride a horse than to bet on him.

Say hello to the next horse you meet.

Early in the American Invasion of Iraq

The time is the beginning of the Second Iraq War in 2003. The American invasion comes in three waves, one military, the other two not.

(1) The shock. The American Army offensive goes in and overruns the Iraqi Army quickly. The formal classical war is completed in a few weeks. Elements of the Iraqi social order have been destroyed. The tenor of ordinary Iraqi life changes radically.

(2) The camp-followers. Civilian business types, journalists, and a rag-tag of international adventurers and eccentric travelers follow closely. Energetic elements of this grouping meet and interact with curious and responsive Iraqi civilians (most obviously in Baghdad) and together construct an unexpected through truncated and transitional social order.

(3) The rump. A large number of overseers and late witnesses descend for official tours like crows on a corn field. A category of very important persons (VIPs) made up of American legislators and politicians and the famous and the wealthy from around the world who claim to study the situation and see things for themselves. The trip and the tour become (and continue to be) a hot ticket, hosted by the U.S. military and the emerging upper ranks of the Iraqi polity.

It is a mixed metaphor pattern. Each sector is very different yet there they are in the reality of the event and the model we describe is merely a reflection of what was.

In the analysis of the concrete we look for pattern, in this case at a low level of abstraction. We are not sure where it will lead but we make a start. Here is a violent physical strike that disrupts an on-going social order and brings with it elements of a temporary replacement. Social order is as we find it–the seemingly institutionalized and rock-solid (an illusion fostered by certain classical architectural styles) can be replaced by a transitional, temporary, fleeting order and all the mixed states between. We describe and speculate about this passing social reality. The order is in the pattern. The time in place is part of the pattern. Short or long, the pattern is the fact.

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War is interactive, the unit act applies. The sides engage like a violent chess game or a debate. Their actions are contingent, one upon the other, and the unrolling of the event is the concrete consequence. On the Iraqi side the image is a series of beaches.

(1) The first beach is the Army and the regime’s state apparatus. They hold out briefly, spew propaganda and raise an ambush and violent initiative where they can but as soon as they are overrun they close shop. Tutti a casa, everybody go home. The system of order from the top collapses.

(2) The second beach, the people in all their variety, fall back to a combination of ethno-religious-kinship survival forms. They are the ones who gather each morning around the hotels where the America second wave stay and essentially shape up–present themselves as translators and drivers with cars, and skilled workers in government and crafts looking for a connection with the brand new but still unformed regime.

(3) The third beach are the hidden ideologues, the warriors, the intransigents, the criminals and crazies who are to initiate and participate in the terror counter-attack that will end this short moment of an American-Iraqi Eden.

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I am speculating off my recollection of the information offered by the news media over several years. I am trying to find a sociological way into the immediate and the concrete. It is imperfect but, for me, a step beyond the crude political posturing of all of our U.S. political candidates.

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The social make-up of the American waves is starkly different. The membership of each is recruited from different sectors of our society. In my speculation I will be exaggerating distinctions. Social life in its multiplicity thwarts the simple understanding. So think of the differences as a matter of emphasis. In the distribution of a characteristic there will be expected differences in probability for each grouping.

I’ll chart the characteristics of each group with an emphasis on differences…

Army

Rural-small town, Younger-older, High school–Jr. College, Employee for wages, Physical, Fundamental faith, Hierarchical, Practical, Local, Get by financially.

Camp-followers

Urban, Younger, University, Self-employed-contract, Secular, Intellectual, Egalitarian, Theoretical, International, Comfortable financially.

Evaluators (Rump)

Suburban, Older, Law School, Professional practice, Political, Waffling on religion, Collegial, Self-centered, National, Financially secure

The parts the members of each wave play are determined by the career lines their families and local communities tend to emphasize and make real. The direction one takes has some relationship to where one starts. This is not perfectly determined but the vaunted social mobility turns on directed energy and mentors. Most of us are comfortable in following the way of family and friends. With an all volunteer military the distribution of the three kinds of activists suggested by the chart would seem to make sense. With the decades of draft mobilization these differences in career lines were obliterated though over time the pressures that distorted the mass mobilization of the 1940s and 1950s to the biased and twisted mobilization later were in response to the different career lines of different sectors of our society. The history of draft avoidance by so many of our political leaders now is a reflection of what we could call our social class and status career patterns.

In this Second Iraq War the majority of the American people are not involved actively. The three waves have volunteered and opted in. On this prior choice we have another question. The avoidance of a mass mobilization is historically determined. The experience of Vietnam with a biased mass mobilization for an unpopular war leading the radicalization of an entire generation has set the limit. So against the three waves we have the unmobilized rest of the U.S. society. The current political rejection of the inept and error-prone leadership is about as radical as we are likely to get now.

The Second Wave. Camp Followers and Tourists in Iraq

The successful American military blitzkrieg invasion of Iraq was accompanied and followed by a second wave. Some journalists and photographers were accredited and contained within select military units. But an unanticipated and unregulated group of free lance journalists also entered the country without permission. And an unnumbered group of businessmen, adventurers, tourists, missionaries and ideologues flooded in as well. They came in mainly over the just opened borders with Syrian and Jordan using newly formed Iraqi taxi services.

Altogether we can think of them as similar to the traditional camp followers found around military camps and posts. The pattern: the military action establishes a social space that is filled by a different order of invaders whose existence is totally dependent on the military.

This second wave in Iraq was involved in four functions: (1) Information and propaganda (journalists and photographers), (2) Commerce and construction (salesmen, traders, business representatives), (3) Education and belief. (ideologues, missionaries, teachers), (4) Tourists. (adventurers, excitement-seekers. Those seeking a second chance.). From the other side another stream of visitors were the Jihadists and Suicide-nicks seeking to confront the Great Satan. These fed into the terrorist groups that emerged later.

The Iraqi people came out to greet this second wave. They sought jobs and contacts, were curious about the new ways, and invited these strangers into their homes and lives. On the fringe were the loud voiced nay sayers, they came up on every American TV screen as part of the street crowd. We thought of it as free speech but it was the start of systematic intimidation that later became terror explosions in markets and stores and restaurants and against American troops in transit or on patrol.

In commerce the local stores were full of merchandise from around the work. The street markets were busy. Auto traffic and extensive travel based on cheap petrol and a developed road system was very active. Students were back at school at all levels.

This second wave was extended and enhanced by the extreme capitalist ideology of the American political regime. Military supply and food service and engineering services and even guard functions were contracted out to connected corporations and companies who sent in a whole layer of civilian mercenaries. Repairs that should have been temporary until a viable peace was in place were contracted out and at great cost either never completed or proved shoddy. Accountants now complain that they can’t trace the money spent.

This second wave process was stopped by a sustained Iraqi counter-offensive that went on for several years. It was a three sided conflict. Sunni and Shia activists each attacking the ordinary civilian population of the other and each separately attacking the occupying American Army. Americans struck back episodically at the militants in both groups.

Within the past year what we might call the Sunni and Shia centers each turned on its own crazies and supported by the new American resolve to deny these same crazies any secure base seem to be approaching a resolution of the conflict.

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The sociological interest in any form and process is in the possibility of finding a discovered form in one setting repeated in another. I hope that some of you will join me in thinking this through by considering other historical cases.

I would suggest a similar pattern in

(1) The American Civil War. The invasion and occupation of the U.S. South involved different orders of second wave.

(2) Gold Rushes. For an American audience the California and the Alaska Rushes are most familiar. The prospector/miner mass occupation of the presumed gold fields disrupt the local social patterns and set the space for the second wave.

(3) Natural and man-made catastrophes. The rescue and intervention groups following could be thought of as the second wave.

There was a third wave in Iraq which I have been thinking of as the rump. I’ll share a few notes on it in my next post.

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.

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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.

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

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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.