A.B. reporting. I’m doing an interview with a friend of mine who is a professor of sociology in a college north of here. As a college student, he was a counselor in the group home I stayed in, and not so far from me in age. He taught me to play chess, and in the course, we became friends. Over the years he has sent me reading material, and web sites, and these have informed my worldview.
He visited me over this past spring break. I asked him to answer a few questions for me for an article on the site. Happily, he agreed, requesting that I change his name as I have with most other people on the site. He said, "I like the idea of teaching incognito." I wanted to call him "Dr. Socio" but he nixed that and insisted on "Vilfredo" after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist of the late 19th century.
Here is the transcript:
A.B.: What is sociology?
Vilfredo: You know, over the years the official definition has remained "the study of humans social organization" but the meaning of those words are broad. Sociology is a huge science, with many people using many different methodologies to study humans, their interactions, and the social context that arises from their interactions. Some micro-sociologists are more like psychologists in that they study very small interactions, known as social-psychological analysis. Cultural sociologists are much like anthropologists. Some are practicing sociologists and they are often marketers or social designers. An interesting branch of sociology is empirical sociology, in which real world data is mashed through some very sophisticated mathematical processes, and models of human behavior are created, like models of the weather; those sociologists are more like physicists. Some study the flow of money, and they are much like economists. Some follow the flow of power and they are historical and political sociologists. Some sociologists study the global system; they are macro sociologists or globalogists. In other words, there are sociologists studying every level of organization, using a variety of empirical, observational, and philosophical methods to arrive at an understanding of humans, and how their interactions give rise to "emergent" systemic entities such as families, cultures, societies, and political and economic structures.
A.B.: So, sociologists know everything there is to know about people and what they do.
Vilfredo: Some might, I sure don’t. I’m a simple professor and theorist.
A.B.: What theories have you come up with?
Vilfredo: You’ll notice I’m using the name of Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian sociologist and economist who determined that the existence of the elite, the 20 percent of the people who own 80 percent of the wealth in most nations, is systemic. Think of a river, in which a certain amount of water is on always on top, but it isn’t always the same water. In short, it is the social system itself which creates the powerful 20 percent, not some feature of the people, their families, or their location in history. Yes, we can follow things like family and social networks, and some families stay on top for hundreds of years, but those things are merely "benchmarks" by which we can follow the flow of power that society creates. I used Pareto’s work, as Parsons and others in sociology and economics have, and applied it to the education of sociology. I demonstrated how 20 percent of universities turn out sociologists who occupy 80 percent of desirable teaching positions.
A.B: That must have interested your sociologist colleagues.
Vilfredo: Oh, you bet. For awhile at sociologist gatherings I was treated as though I had active leprosy on my cheek and right hand. Eventually, as people always do, they forgot me altogether.
A.B.: Well, let’s lighten the pace here, some of this sounds kind of thick.
Vilfredo: That could just be me, I often come across as a little thick.
A.B.: Let’s start with something simple. Why is our society so screwed up?
Vilfredo: (Laughing). That’s a great question if you want a four-hour answer.
A.B.: Give us the short version.
Vilfredo: Right. Well, your question is a good one because it demonstrates the characteristic of humans which cause them to behave in ways that create social structure and global capitalism. That characteristic, as Pareto and others have shown us, is Mind. The English title of Pareto’s best-known work is "Mind and Society." Mind is nothing more than the experience of meaning. We seem to experience mind and the flow of meaning, or time, as linear, meaning one thing follows another smoothly. That isn’t true, the flow of meaning is complex, created of repeating, self-similar elements, which happen in cycles, but which occur in chunks, or "fits and starts". Look at it this way: you don’t see the electron beam that makes up the picture on an old style cathode ray television, what you see is smooth motion on the screen, not a flitting beam of light. Mind, and the experience of meaning is like that. Culture is like that, indeed, culture can be seen as "solidified meaning". Culture constrains our behavior in every society, but culture only exists because we continue to act within it. This reflexivity, interaction between scales or levels of analysis, is what gives social structure such durability, why we have things we call "China" or "capitalism".
A.B.: O.K. Maybe I should remind you of the question: Why is our society so screwed up?
Vilfredo: Right, I’m answering that. Let’s just say that it is meaning, more specifically, abstracted meaning, and particularly shared abstracted meaning, which causes us to act, and our repeated and habitual actions cause social structure. An easy example is a new toy, say a doll. We’ve all seen this, someone makes a doll and it might languish on the shelves for months, but then someone in the 20 percent of people who set social trends will notice the doll and tell everyone in America about it. Suddenly, the price of the doll strengthens as more and more people want it. The more people who have it, the more people who have to get one. Eventually, the doll will appear in the black market at many times its price, and people will pay it. For a short time, our social attention on the doll meant that there would be social structure around the doll. Something measurable happened in society, and it happened because a whole lot of individual people shared meaning about the doll. We can talk about the Berlin Wall, which for a generation was a strong symbol. We shared meaning about it. Here, the meaning we shared was more complicated. The wall meant a lot of things to a lot of people, on both sides. We had different meaning about it, and different meaning about the fall of the wall. It doesn’t have to be the same meaning at all, social features can and do show social durability precisely because people share strong, opposed meaning about it, like the Wall. Suppose suddenly, like dogs or monkeys, we stopped viewing the wall as a political thing, and viewed it simply as a barrier. In a day, people would have built ways around it. The easiest crossings would change over night, as shops moved in to take advantage of the flow of people, just like rivers and lakes used to be, just like highways and railroads create today. Simply changing how we saw the wall would change society.
A.B.: Right. So how come our society is so screwed up?
Vilfredo: I’m glad you’ve asked. It depends what you mean by "screwed up."
A.B.: I mean the average person is suffering while the wealthy are doing great. I mean the government is thrashing our liberties in the name of "protecting us" from a weak and distant enemy. I mean social inequality is increasing. Why can’t people insist on better, more just government?
Vilfredo: Cycle theory sociologists say that things change cyclically in societies, but any "progress" one finds in those cycles is purely interpretational. Others say that, yes, there are cycles, but the lot of the individual in terms of socially valued measurements such as "property ownership" or "slave ownership" or "uniform civil liberties" is improving. That distinction is important because it focuses the question on this: what do you mean by screwed up? In many ways, people are better off than ever in history. It has been pointed out that not even the royalty of Europe lived like the common person in America does today. They had no sanitary sewers, no knowledge of hygiene, no telephones, and on and on.
A.B.: So, things aren’t screwed up?
Vilfredo: I think those measurements are spurious, they are accurate but don’t mean what they imply. They address the distribution of technology, but not really who is "better off." Who can kill whom, or send the to die in battle? Who controls who can marry whom? Who decides what is a crime, and what is valuable to society? Those are measurements of liberty. Some theorists insist that the ideals you would like to use as benchmarks of a "good society", meaning strong individual rights, personal autonomy and so on, feed in to the benefit of capitalism. It is possible that with less personal freedom but more social connectedness, people would be better off. Don’t forget Emile Durkheim’s original work, "Suicide" where social connectedness is a protective feature. Indeed, study after study concludes that the individualistic, capitalist cultures of Western Europe and particularly the United States are very dysfunctional, when considering the well being of people. We have more medicine, for example, than, say, Cuba, but less wellness. Our culture is isolating and alienating, our people increasingly suffer from depression and anxiety and a host of newly described diseases which no one understands and no one can effectively treat. The problems are medicalized with drugs instead of addressing the wellness of a whole person. On the one hand, it is true that a person is safer on most city streets today than they were a century ago, it is also true that we have more of our people in prison than ever in our history, or the history of any modern nation including Great Britain at her worst, the highest incarceration rate in the world. Some philosophers point out that as things progress in some ways, they get worse in others. For example, at one time criminals were punished by public humiliation, or injury or death. Whatever it was, it was quick. But social norms favoring "humane treatment" gained strength, and instead of losing an eye and being done with it, people were incarcerated. Is it more humane to snatch an eye, or to put someone in prison for decades, and saddle them with a prison record and social stigma for the rest of their lives?
A.B.: I guess it depends, what body part do you lose, and how long a prison sentence are we looking at?
Vilfredo: So, your measurement of "better" is becoming kind of cloudy, isn’t it? A philosophical value you have is shifting to accommodate reality! We’ll mention that putting people in prison creates jobs for bureaucrats, but killing them on the spot doesn’t. Are we more blood-thirsty than other cultures? Consider some of the early Central American societies that were particularly bloody. Some cultures had mass human sacrifice, blood literally flowed in streams from the bodies of victims. Children were drugged, fed clay, and killed by being crushed in a twisting sheet, or under piles of rocks. Still, there is strong evidence that the deaths of these relative few strengthened the well being of the empire and the personal well being of the people, most of whom felt strongly connected, and most of whom were in no danger of being ritually sacrificed. Are the people of those cultures better off, or worse off than ours, where we use sports competitions and international war to feel connected?
A.B.: Does this mean that society will never progress, liberty and dignity will never be valued and protected?
Vilfredo: It means that the nature of humans will not change, and the nature of the cultures and societies they create will not change. However, levels of organization are growing, emergence will become evident. It means, also, that for the moment, capitalism, particularly the global capitalism of the neo-capitalists, is very exploitive. Goods and even humans are flowing from the undeveloped countries to the developed countries. This is a temporary stage, though, and it has already been going on for a few thousand years. Political conquest is always economic conquest, but conquest itself results in an exchange of culture. It doesn’t only flow from the "hegemony" to the "peripheral" nations, look how Britain has changed as she conquered people and assimilated humans and culture. You think "chutney" is a British food? The kind of flow of wealth and people we are talking about is the result of capitalism acting as though it were in an open system. It started somewhat slowly but began to rush in the West from 1400 or so, like water rushing down a drain. The "triangular trade" of slaves from Africa to the New World, and New World goods, grown and made with slaves, to England, and empty ships returning to Africa. That kind of exchange continued, tapering off in the late 20th century, and becoming increasingly complicated in the 21st century as China enters the stage after a short, few hundred year hiatus. The world is getting smaller. In an open system you can bring energy in from the outside to power it. But technology has shrunk the globe, it is a closed system now and it will have to behave differently to continue. There will have to be areas of greater resources and areas of lesser resources, because the system is virtually powered by difference. However, the global system in a closed environment will act more like the sun. The sun is freaking hot, but it has areas which are much more freaking hot than others, and that shifting provides the nuclear pile at the heart of the system and the relative differences it needs to keep working. The global capitalist system will soon work the same way, a closed system with a shifting of wealth, but not the draining of people and resources we’ve seen.
A.B.: I guess I asked a stupid question.
Vilfredo: There is no question so stupid that a yakity professor can’t make it a learning experience.
A.B.: Well, I have too much to absorb now. Let’s take a short break and go get a beer.
Vilfredo: Oh, I was just getting started!
