Interview with a sociology professor, Part ii

Vilfredo: O.K., you wanted to know how come our society was so screwed up, right?

A.B.: I thought that’s what I wanted. I wanted to talk about government intervention in our lives. I wanted to talk about why people who are supposed to cherish liberty so willingly give their rights to every government liar and thief that comes along. I’m a little disappointed to hear that the ideal I share with Thomas Jefferson of a free and self-sufficient individual won’t really work in practice.

Vilfredo: I never said that, Aaron. I said that the cultural value of the rugged individualist plays into the hands of capitalists who want to be free to invest only capital and reap the profits created by the life effort of workers. Neither rugged individualism nor capitalism is bad things in themselves. The ideal of self-sufficiency and individualism is by no means common among humans societies. Far more often people see themselves, correctly, I think, as part of a community first, and an individual second. It is far more important for these people to be firmly connected with their group than to stand up for any individual rights someone else might value. To be separated from one’s family or clan often meant death, and people often do die from being permanently cut off from their families. Slavers know that fewer captives will die if they take whole families. If they capture slaves singly many die for no apparent reason. Buying slaves from their family, however, doesn’t seem to have the same effect, since the slave feels their sacrifice benefits the family. Slavery is still very, very common in the world, by the way. You can purchase a man, woman and especially a child in pretty much any nation on earth, including this one. The most vulnerable, of course, are women and children from over-crowded, poverty stricken areas, but slaves come from all kinds of places, and some are white and largely modern middle class. Slavery is a fascinating topic, incidentally, but not one people want to talk about much, particularly if you broaden the term "slave" to mean indentured servants and wage slaves. But, we won’t.

A.B.: That’s good.

Vilfredo: The ideal of the rugged individualist is just that, an ideal, but not well founded in reality. In reality, humans are physically shaped by their propensity to congregate. Huge parts of our brain are given over to the recognition of human faces, and human facial expression. We are not individuals in any meaningful sense, and haven’t been for millions of years, we’re a social critter, and that’s what has shaped us. A common narrative holds that we speak as we do because the use of fire to cook foods increased the food yield by allowing tougher foods to be eaten. The increased food yield meant more humans, but it also meant that a human was more likely to get food from other humans than her or himself, since the food had to be processed by someone- a service. Softer foods meant smaller jaws and more sensitive lips and tongues, which allowed more facile speech. In other words, cooking food is what changed us from rugged, thickly built, individual and family focused animals into talking, bargaining, bullshitting very social people who live in huge groups.

A.B.: So, if I were a Neanderthal, being a self-sufficient, rugged individualist would be great? I could finally enjoy liberty and freedom?

Vilfredo: Sorry, Aaron, but not many people I know are less suited to being a solitary dweller than you. You love people, you can’t stop talking, and you’re squeamish about things like ambushing your enemies for drinking from your waterhole. Instead, let’s talk a little farther, and I think we can fine-tune your question.

A.B.: Hey, I go off my by myself all the time, with no one for miles.

Vilfredo: And, I’ll bet you talk to yourself the whole time, and when you get home after you’re so glad to see your Honey.

A.B.: Back to your point?

Vilfredo: To recap, humans are social animals with big brains that live a long time, know each other well, and need each other to survive. Humans are so social that if you let them, they will inhabit all kinds of things with interaction, including imaginary friends, lovers at 900 numbers, pen pals they’ve never met, gods and devils of all kinds, dogs cats parakeets goldfish and iguanas, and even computers. Turns out that people will interact with a computer program that randomly says "yes" "no" "please tell me more" and a few other phrases. It works best if you tell them they are communicating with another person through the computer, but you can tell them it is an interactive computer program designed to test them for something, or don’t even tell them that, just tell them to type something into the computer and respond to what the computer says. People are, primarily, communicators, it’s how we make our living, it’s our specialty, like running fast is a cheetah’s specialty or smelling bad is a skunk’s.

A.B.: Right. Where is there room in there for liberty?

Vilfredo: A good question, and one answered by landmark behaviorist B.F. Skinner, in "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" almost 35 years ago, though his formulation doesn’t completely satisfy me. Still, everyone should be familiar with his work, at least BFD and some of his later works. You would probably enjoy Walden Two, Aaron, since it describes a utopian situation Skinner felt was possible, provided you abandon the idea of the person as an autonomous agent. Read it, you’ll like it. Anyway, we’re back to "what is liberty". So, what about that, what does "liberty" mean to you, Aaron?

A.B.: It means being left alone by authority, being allowed to do as I wish, provided I don’t hurt anyone else. For reading on the notion of Liberty, I suggest the works of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. That’s where my idea of liberty arises. I guess your phrase "rugged individualist" covers it well enough.

Vilfredo: Cheer up! It wasn’t me who first used that phrase, I think it was Herbert Hoover. As an ideal, rugged individualism has a lot to offer. Still, even Jefferson was connected. You’ll recall that he thought every person should be willing to lay down his or her life to protect the republic. I’ve read my Jefferson, he advises you invest not in your government, but in your fellow citizen. He’s actually supporting the idea that individuals find freedom in the framework of society. Let’s talk about the idea of authority. What is that?

A.B.: Someone with authority is someone who has power over you.

Vilfredo: So, I guess the person with the most authority in your life is your wife.

A.B.: Ah, well, no.

Vilfredo: Your mom? The people at your church? Your friends? The people at your club? These are the people who generally have the most control over us. For a lot of people as kids, Mom is the big authority, even if Dad is the disciplinary arm of the family.

A.B.: I didn’t really mean family and whatnot, I mean the government, civil authority.

Vilfredo: But, there is a blending of authority from family to community and finally to official entities like cops and so on. Authority is the social right to control the actions of other persons. To talk about authority, we have to start with what an individual is.

A.B.: Of course. Why?

Vilfredo: Because it is our experience as a person that gives meaning to the notion of authority. What is a person? Do you remember "The Social Construction of Reality" by Berger and Luckmann? A contemporary of BFD, it talks about individuals as "social locations".

A.B.: I do remember. We are who the people who interact with us say we are.

Vilfredo: It might be better phrased to say "humans experience the world in an inter-active, symbolic way, including other humans." This line of reason, symbolic inter-actionism and similar approaches to the construction of the social world, holds that we re-create the world in our minds, including other people. It is this insight that meaning for humans is always relative and socially significant that gave birth to new ways of talking about the individual. It turns out, if you are stripped of your history, of what you think other people know of you, you are stripped of your identity. Imagine waking up on a mountaintop with total amnesia. You could still speak, still knew all the words in the language, but you would have no history, and so nothing to found anything on, and so nothing to say. This idea works well with both SCR and BFD. We are socially created beings, not simply socially sculpted, but literally composed of symbolic meaning, even to the "self". Symbolic interactionists have teased a lot of understanding from their approach. Authority, symbolically, is the result of your agreement to live within the form of the culture.

A.B.: Which means liberty is what?

Vilfredo: It’s what it is to you, in context with your society. Maybe liberty means the right to live like a bee. Liberty doesn’t necessarily mean total freedom, it has cultural meaning. The individualism you value is particularly strong here in the West. It is popularly imagined that lone individuals and families settled the West. That isn’t true on two levels. First, the government, with troops and contracts and at great public expense, settled the West. Second, the idea of the "lone pioneer" is nothing but romance. True pioneer communities were really more like communes, with people heavily reliant on each other.

A.B.: I personally know a pioneer. She’s a rugged individualist.

Vilfredo: Oh, she lives on a mountaintop?

A.B.: Pretty much.

Vilfredo: A real hermit, eh? Never sees anyone, no one comes to visit?

A.B.: Well, to be honest, there is pretty much always someone up to see her.

Vilfredo: Why is that?

A.B.: I guess because she’s always treated people fairly, and has always been willing to help folks when they need a hand, without expecting repayment.

Vilfredo: Think "commune".

A.B.: So, is there nothing at all to my sense that we are losing our liberties?

Vilfredo: We are probably more free now that we’ve ever been, Aaron. Still, there is no doubt you are right, technology has invaded our lives, and it is to the interest of both the corporations and the government that our liberties be curtailed and our privacy mined for data. Very few actors in the 20 percent who can change things are willing to defend privacy on the electronic frontier. There are a few; you should support them. I’ll leave a list. But, otherwise, and particularly in the United States, yes, your privacy is being invaded, your civil rights are being curtailed, there is no end in sight.

A.B.: Aha! Why! Why are people letting it happen?

Vilfredo: Because times are bad. Successful revolutions don’t happen when times are bad, Aaron, they happen when the common person has a growing sense of power. The common person today has very little sense of power. Their lives are impacted by events in other nations, events they don’t have the time to understand. They have to trust their leaders, which is always a mixed bag. In addition, for 80 percent of the population, voting isn’t an exercise in power, it’s a chance to identify a bandwagon and jump on it. They form political affiliations for the same reason they have a favorite sports team. For them, what matters is that they know who they belong to, so they know what they believe. The true facts of politics, the abuse of power by the wealthy, the abuse of the truth by the powerful, these are beyond them, and beyond their meaning of politics. For these people, it is fine for the vice president to shoot a person with a shotgun, evade authority for hours, and simply deny any wrong doing instead of allowing an investigation, but it is wrong for the most powerful man in the free world to get oral sex from a willing subordinate; that they get upset about. You will never get these folks to understand the situation; freedom isn’t something they can use. The other 20 percent probably benefit from things the way they are, so don’t expect much from them. The other thing is, as I said, the bureaucratic form. It is very powerful, it is context so it demonstrates "emergence" or the appearance of characteristics not obvious in constituent systems. Bureaucracy transcends the nation state, and the computer has made it possible to identify and follow nearly every person alive, certainly every person in developed countries. Your bank, your cell phone, your doctor’s office, all have important information about you. So does your computer. Owning a computer means your are connected with all kinds of people through "automatic updates." For most of us, we have no idea what our computer is doing online most of the time. It communicates with other computers all the time. Our computer also holds a lot of personal information. For all these reasons, privacy, and so liberty, suffer.

A.B.: Well, forecast, then. What will "liberty" mean tomorrow?

Vilfredo: To be honest, no one can say. Human history isn’t made like that. We live in a world that has no regard for our meaning. It is possible that something will happen which will reduce the population, like global TB outbreaks for example that could, as with the plagues of Europe, kill millions and last centuries. It could be the end of big oil and cheap energy, and the reality of airplanes with no fuel to fly and TVs that are dark because there is no coal or natural gas. It could be global climate change; the weather has always been a huge factor in the development of civilizations. Any of these things could smash the fragile global system and the world would again function as an open system. On the other hand, if none of those things happen, I see the same dystopia than others have seen, with human existence reduced to the functions of bees in a hive. Bees in a hive: Look at the number of people wearing very small telephones in their ears. We’re really one short step away from a hands-off communication device implanted between the eye and the ear in the cheek bone. We will be in instant communication with everyone. Bzzzzzz. Still, what is the nature of the change that’s coming? How will things change? I’ve often spoken with older civil rights workers who are dismayed at the new definitions of their struggle they encounter in younger people of color. Times change, the next generation is born in a new context, with new needs and new cultural symbols. Still, and if you live long enough you’ll see it, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Each generation goes through the same metamorphosis, the cycle rolls on, but does anything change? There isn’t any easy measurement to determine if things are getting better for people, remember, but there are things we can measure that are changing. The size of the globe is changing, the size of the population is changing, human tinkering with the mechanisms of nature is changing, the system is closing up. It is a cycle, but it is like the cycle of feet climbing a ladder or legs pedaling a bicycle; the parts may be cycling, but the whole is changing location. When you look at a bureaucracy, you can easily see how that would happen. As the population grows and resources become increasingly controlled, the ideals of the American Frontier of individualism and independence will give way to ideals of place and interdependence. The bureaucracy as a logic form has always been very good at protecting itself and spreading its influence. A hundred and fifty years ago most of us lived by making, growing or harvesting things like chairs, wheat and timber. Very few of us live that way now. Most of us, like university professors, live by providing a service that society values and pays for, and we do it in a bureaucracy. I think things will continue as they have in the last few thousand years. And then, there’s China, a giant who has been suffering the last few centuries, but who is waking up now. Learn to speak Cantonese, is my suggestion for that.

A.B.: So, how can a person be free?

Vilfredo: Re-define freedom to fit what you have. That’s what most of us do. People have always feared the powerful for good reason, Aaron. You know as well as I do that governments kill people on the least pretext, just as tribes and clans used to do. Times are probably as good now as they ever were for the common person. We get to see our children grow to adults, something humans didn’t see much for most of history. There is something else you can do.

A.B.: What?

Vilfredo: What you already do. Work for social justice in small ways. Insist on it in your community, your church, your family. Speak out, that is what your web site is for, you are speaking out, giving voice to the realities of life. Be your own ideal, which I think you are already doing.

A.B.: Wow. Well, thanks for letting me post your thoughts on my site.

Vilfredo: My pleasure. It’s hard to get airtime these days. I appreciate the chance to catch ears, or in this case, eyes.