Getting Back to the Social Order Problem

Contemporary academic practitioners of the social sciences give little attention to questions of the nature and maintenance of social order.  Insofar as they touch on it at all, they tend to assume order to be inherently unjust and oppressive.  Our conferences have become celebrations of “transgression,” even while the conference goers not only conform carefully to the ideologies of their colleagues but also follow the highly patterned rituals of colloquia.

The refusal to take order seriously as a theoretical issue is a fairly recent historical development.  In 1951, Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils described the problem of social order as "one of the very first functional imperatives of social systems.”  This problem is not only a philosophical issue,  it is also a practical matter since the order or disorder of a social system has immediate consequences for the lives of its members.

 Dennis Wrong’s 1994 book, The Problem of Order, was one of the few relatively attempts in the past few decades to revive examination into this fundamental subject.  Wrong, the product of an older generation of social scientists, considered the forces that hold people together in social groups. Wrong pointed out that this term has two closely related but distinct meanings. It can refer to regularity or rule in human social interactions and it can refer to patterns of cooperation among actors.  He argues that people develop regularities as norms, roles, and institutions in the course of recurrent interactions.  In this sense, social order tends to "take care of itself," since the lives of human beings largely consist of interactions with others.  These interactions, though, may differ greatly in character, since they may be products of a variety of motivations.

The second type of order problem, according to Wrong, is that of conflict versus cooperation.  This is not an absolute choice, as suggested by Hobbes' unfortunate and misleading description of the natural human state as a "war of all against all."  Humans in a state of total conflict could exist no longer than the time it would take parents to murder their children. Perfect cooperation, at the other extreme, seems to be a social state that exists only in the imagination.  In response to classic functionalism's "oversocialized" conception of cooperative order as the product of norms imposed on individuals from an external society, Wrong argued that human beings produce particular blends of conflict and cooperation from expectations developed in the course of their dealings with one another.

It seems to me that one of the main tasks for social science today is to turn away from its obsession with advocacy and return to the issues of what constitutes order in social life, how it is maintained, and why societies vary in their combinations of conflict and cooperation.

Proposition 8, the Balance of Power, and Limited Government

Seth Long has an interesting post on the judicial overturn of California's Proposition 8. He points out that a majority of the 80% of California voters who cast ballots chose to end same-sex marriage in the state. Therefore, this represented the democratic will of the majority. In overturning the proposition, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied the popular will by fiat.

I believe that Long is touching on some of the central concepts in the American political system here: the ideal of majority will and that of individual rights.  One of the consistent problems of democracy is the potential for the tyranny of the majority.  Under a purely democratic system, if a majority of people want to disenfranchise a minority they can do so: the will of the majority holds, whatever it may be. In the early years of the Republic, concerns of majority tyranny frequently concerned debtors voting their interests over those of creditors, which could dispossess the creditors of legitimately acquired assets and create an unsound economic system.  This may still be a problem: T.H. Marshall's idea of political democracy leading to economic democracy could be interpreted as majorities dispossessing minorities by voting to redistribute resources.

The members of the founding generation had two responses to the problem of majority tyranny.  One was the balance of power or mixed system response. Derived from Aristotle, this involved trying to balance the virtues and vices of democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy by incorporating elements of each. John Adams, uneasy about both democratic excess and elite power, was the foremost exponent of the balance of power approach. Interestingly, Adams and those of similar mind did not see the judiciary, but the upper house of the legislature as the aristocratic element in American government. This was one of the reasons that until the early twentieth century senators were appointed by state legislatures, rather than directly elected by the people. The senate was supposed to be a brake on democracy, rather than an expression of it.

However, the main structural limitation on democracy historically came to be the third branch of government, the judiciary, as the concept of judicial review developed from the time of John Marshall onward. Through judicial review, the courts exercise a veto over legislation because the courts decide whether a law or policy enacted by the people or their representatives is consistent with the Constitution. While a law or policy may be judged unconstitutional on a variety of grounds, violation of constitutionally protected rights has stood out as the most prominent. This has created a tendency for the courts to extend the idea of constitutional rights and for parties who cannot realize their political ends democratically to urge the courts to re-define those ends as rights.  If, for example, marriage is a matter of legitimate state policy, then the democratically elected representatives of states (or the voters directly, in a proposition system) can define marriage in the way that the representatives and voters believe will best serve the polity. If marriage (to anyone or anything one chooses) is a matter of individual right, then the aristocratic judicial branch can intervene to annul the will of the majority.  This is why same-sex marriage opponents have generally sought their goals through voting and legislation, while proponents have generally sought theirs through the courts.

The problem in the balance of power response to the problem of majority rule lies in the question of where to find the proper balance. Clearly, the courts have increased the number of rights people have, giving the courts ever greater power, creating the danger of a "kritocracy," or absolute rule of judges. There is also the problem of where judges find these rights.  The founders were heir to a natural law perspective, but contemporary courts have leaned more toward the utilitarian view that rights are defined by social ends. I argue that the "compelling national interest" defense of affirmative action is a utilitarian approach to legal rights. Race-based preferences, according to this defense, can be held constitutional and efforts to end those preferences can be held unconstitutional because the preferences are assumed to serve a social end. This makes rights dependent on the social and political program of the judges. In the case of defining marriage, I think judges sometimes lean toward an unrecognized expanded version of a natural law concept of a right (people have the inherent right to be happy, getting married as they choose makes them happy [supposedly], therefore all people have the right to marry as they chose) and sometimes toward a utilitarian concept of what judges believe will lead to a nondiscriminatory society.

The other response among the founders of the Republic to the problem of majority tyranny was limited government. If Adams leaned more toward balancing the powers of government, Thomas Jefferson leaned more toward limiting what government can do.  This response was essentially an argument for an equality of citizens based on independence. Jefferson in the elegance of Monticello was the equal of the poor yeoman because each could live on his own without hierarchical dependence. This response may be the most congenial to Long who would ideally prefer that government stay out of marriage altogether.

It is true that we all generally like government intervention when the government is on our side and tend to become anti-government pursues policies we don't like. Ultimately, though, I think the same-sex marriage debate does not easily fit into a "left-right" political dichotomy or of supporters of individual liberty versus supporters of government interference.  Instead, I think this issue involves a range of perspectives. There are traditionalists, who believe that marriage as historically defined is correct and should be maintained by government and that judicial interference simply involves the courts imposing the wrong policies. There are democratic institutionalists, who believe that majorities define their legal and social institutions, and that aristocratic courts illegitimately extend individual rights in violation of those institutions.  There are consistent libertarians, who follow the eloquent formulation of Jimmy McMillan on this topic ("If you want to marry your shoe, I'll marry you").  There are limited civil libertarians, who believe that the courts should mandate the specific kinds of rights that those limited libertarians favor. Finally, there are group-rights advocates dedicated to the advancement of  group interests and willing to employ whatever legislative or judicial means will advance those interests.

Made of Paper: Travels in Arabia Deserta

For a time in the second half of the 1970s I worked as a bicycle messenger in downtown San Francisco, pedaling up and down those steep hills carrying packages and letters between offices. I often spent my time off in the old San Francisco library, a beautiful old building with vaulted ceilings, wide staircases, and spacious reading rooms. The building is still there, but the library has been moved across the street, to quarters as inspiring as a warehouse. I discovered many treasures in the old place, but one of the works that made the deepest impression on me at that time was the two-volume Travels in Arabia Deserta by Charles M. Doughty.

Doughty was among the most eccentric of the eccentric English adventurers of the nineteenth century. A poet and scholar, a century before I read his book Doughty made his way to the Arabian Peninsula. Although he sought the help of his own government and that of the Ottoman Empire, the officials left him on his own in his journeys among the Bedouin tribesmen, who were traditionally xenophobic and then under the spreading spell of the Wahabi sect of Islam. Unlike the swashbuckling Captain Richard Francis Burton, Doughty openly presented himself as a Christian, which won the grudging admiration of some Bedouins but inspired others to threaten his life. Doughty was often beaten and mistreated. His patient endurance of this type of treatment later led Burton to denounce Doughty as a poor representative of English manhood. But some Bedouins treated Doughty, known among them as “Khalil” with friendship and kindness. His survival was probably due to concerns about how the Ottomans would respond to the killing of a Westerner, appreciation for Doughty’s simple medical skills, awe at his sheer audacity, adherence to Bedouin customs of hospitality, and reluctance to murder someone whom some of the Bedouins viewed as a lunatic.

The adventure story is only one side of the work, though. Doughty believed that the English language was in a state of decadence and required renewal by going back to its ancient qualities. He wrote Travels in Arabia Deserta in a archaizing dialect of his own devising, drawing primarily on the style of the King James Bible, but also on Spenser and even Chaucer. The effect is of the heritage of English literary language confronting the Arab world, a marvelous model for this deeply traditional English meditative soul confronting the harshness of an alien culture.

Doughty’s mannered style crept into my own writing for a while, probably with unfortunate results. Although it draws on so many influences, his language was so uniquely his own that it only fits the world that is his book. I think Travels also contributed to my own wanderings around distant parts of the planet in the years after I read it, although I was fortunate to face none of Doughty’s hardships.

Selecting the ten best books you’ve ever read is a popular game. My own list changes from time to time, but Travels in Arabia Deserta is always on it. Without question, I would rank it as the finest travel book ever written.

A Call to National Servitude

In January 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and National Engagement of the Association of American Universities and Colleges released its report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future. The report called for a program of civic learning and of training in civic engagement that would pervade every aspect of higher education.  This program would be linked to similar efforts at all other levels of schooling. In the words of the report, "[t]he central work of advancing civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education must, of course, be done by faculty members across disciplines, by student affairs professionals across divisions, and by administrators in every school and at every level. The fourth prominent group of actors are the students themselves [bold in the original]. The collective work of these groups should be guided by a shared sense that civic knowledge and democratic engagement, in concert with others and in the face of contestation, are absolutely vital to the quality of intellectual inquiry itself, to this nation’s future, and to preparation for life in a diverse world" (p. 2).  It called for fostering "a civic ethos across all parts of campus and educational culture" (p. 31)

The report cites a breathtaking array of “pressing issues,” including “growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more.” The answer to all of these problems lies in “expanding students’ capacities to be civic problem-solvers.” The report does not go into detail about how the professors and teachers, who do not necessarily possess such great social problem solving skills, will produce this generation of superbeings, but it does recommend that institutions foster what is variously called a “democratic ethos” and a “civic ethos” on every campus through “service learning” and “community engagement.”

The AAC&U is a highly politicized organization with its own distinctive view of how American society should be reconstructed and a fondness for expressing this view in the millenarian rhetoric of “struggles” and “calls to action.” Immediately after the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, the AAC&U issued a statement applauding the president’s election as a “…historic moment made possible by many years of struggle.” Not surprisingly, the AAC&U has had close ties to the Obama administration and its task forces operate as federal policy planning committees. This most recent task force issued its “call to national action” at an official White House event with the melodramatic title, “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission,” sponsored by the White House Office of Public Engagement and the U.S. Department of Education.  

A Crucible Moment not only demands the participation of every person involved in education, but it insists that every course in every subject incorporate its message. Issued as “a call to national action,” the social and political agenda it intends to implement in every classroom comes with the imprimatur of the U.S. Department of Education. As I read the report, I find its demands for inculcating a “democratic ethos” perplexing. Beyond the fact that in the traditional American democracy neither the government nor committees sponsored and subsidized by the government decide what type of ethos the people should have, the ideal of integrating all levels of schooling into a unified social program, and inserting this program into every subject appears to be promoting a kind of new bureaucratic corporatism, aimed at absorbing everything into the state and leaving nothing outside the state. 

Made of Paper: The Golden Bough

In his wonderful biography of James G. Frazer, Robert Ackermann observes that modern anthropologists often regard Frazer as an embarrassment. Aside from briefly visiting Greece, Frazer did no field work. His voluminous output owed much to the fact he spent almost his entire life at a library writing table. The Golden Bough generally takes travelers’ tales uncritically as reports of beliefs and practices in societies around the planet. Frazer had no clear concept of culture and his comparative approach wrenched ideas out of their context of meaning. Working without the idea of culture, his modern critics object, Frazer imposed the same positivistic evolution away from magic and toward science on all societies everywhere.

The Golden Bough was one of the grand explications of human life and thought that I read in my early twenties when I was reaching for some sort of comprehensive understanding. Today, I acknowledge some of the criticisms of the work, but I still believe that it is important and should be read in its entirety. Inspired by J.M.W. Turner’s painting of the golden bough incident in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which a priest of the goddess Diana was ritually murdered by his successor, Frazer made his way through a multi-volume account of mythological themes, describing how societies around the world have repeated themes such as the dying and reviving god, ritual sacrifice, and scapegoats.

At one level, The Golden Bough is a majestic compendium of myths. I think it also occupies an important place in the history of ideas, though. Frazer was educated as a classicist and became one of the founders of anthropology. He marks the turning from thinking about Greek and Roman antiquity as a canonical model to thinking about Greek and Roman society in the same way that Europeans were beginning to think about other societies.  His comparative approach to these societies did largely ignore culture, but I’m not sure that is entirely a problem because in finding similar patterns that could be lifted out of different contexts, Frazer was moving toward finding common forms of human thinking, or what we would today call cultural universals. Sitting in the library may have limited his depth of understanding and led him into some factual errors, but it also made possible a breadth of vision and synthesis that would not have been possible for an anthropological specialist.

Reading The Golden Bough as a founding work of late modernity, the questions I have about it have less to do with its methodological flaws in analyzing other times and places than what Frazer may unwittingly tell us about his own time and ours. The rejection of antiquity as the measure of the present, as it had been since the Renaissance, may have left modern social thinkers without historical normative standards, placing everything that happens on the same plane.  Frazer recounts anecdote after anecdote drawn from locations around the world, and these are held in place only by the fact all the anecdotes and all the locations follow the same movement away from magic and toward science. 

No First Amendment for Her

Crystal Dixon was the head administrator of human resources at a public university, the University of Toledo. Ms. Dixon raised controversy when she wrote a newspaper column stating her opinion that homosexuals do not need the protection of civil rights laws. Ms. Dixon is black, and her argument rested on the distinction between race and sexual preference, as well as on her own moral disapproval of homosexuality. Although she did not write the article in her professional capacity, the University of Toledo fired her. She sued, but Judge David A. Katz has now ruled that she did not have First Amendment protections from being dismissed because her job involved hiring and firing, although there is no evidence that she ever treated any employees or potential employees unfairly because of her views.

This seems to me a strange and dangerous decision. People have the right to hold their own views on morality. If a job requires them to keep these views quiet in order to carry out their tasks (as may sometimes be the case), still the job cannot encompass their entire lives. When a public employer dictates that these views cannot be aired outside of the job, though, the government attempts to define what kinds of moral views are correct or incorrect.

RIP NCLB?

Today, by executive order President Obama waived the requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act for 10 states, prompting writers at the Huffington Post to speculate “it could be the beginning of the end for No Child Left Behind.”  One of the questions we might want to ask is: why should it be within the power of the president to say what requirements will or will not bind school districts around the nation? Beyond the issue of the limits of presidential authority, though, lies the problem of the legislation itself, an effort to use the power of the federal government to mandate educational performance and egalitarian educational outcomes.

Almost immediately after entering the Presidency in January 2001, President George W. Bush announced an educational reform program intended to “express my deep belief in our public schools and their mission to build the mind and character of every child, from every background, in every part of America.” The No Child Left Behind bill reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965, setting the educational program of the twenty-first century on the foundation laid in the era of the Great Society.

            No Child Left Behind prescribed the annual administration of standardized tests to children in grades 3 through 8 and required that all states develop progress objectives to ensure that all groups of students would reach proficiency (which is another way of saying at or above average) by 2014. The test results and the progress objectives were to be broken down by classifications of poverty status, racial and ethnic groups, disability status, and English proficiency. All groups were to advance at the same rates on essentially the same measures of achievement.

            Following in the direction set by the initial Great Society bill, the administration of President Bush took keen interest in closing the achievement gap through testing. Indeed, closing the racial and ethnic (Latino) achievement gap, and achieving universal equality among categories, seemed to be a primary focus of No Child Left Behind. While the Bush administration opposed affirmative action in education, it made racial and ethnic categories a key part of its strategy for using testing and corrective measures in schools to eliminate group variations in outcomes.

            One of NCLB’s key concerns, then, was with the idea of equity on a single scale, with school, district, state and federal efforts concentrated on the historically disadvantaged or educationally weakest groups. There were penalties for any school that failed to meet goals for any group, including special education students and students who did not speak English (on English administered tests). Students could transfer out of schools that had failed to meet standards for any group. In addition, school districts had to use federal Title I funds to pay for extra tutoring or other educational services for students in schools that consistently failed to meet overall goals or goals for specific groups.  The idea that uniformly high educational achievement could be distributed by schools to all children had left schools with the responsibility, and the blame, for any shortcomings.

            Critics who recognized the redistributive basis of NCLB were disturbed by the program’s concentration on what were presumed to be the weakest performing subgroups. Schools could be penalized if any groups failed to meet preset goals. For example, NCLB mandated that all students must achieve a given state’s “proficient” level in “challenging” academic standards by 2014. As already noted, “All” includes everyone from students with severe learning disabilities to Limited English Proficient (LEP) students. However, LEP students are those who by definition score low on English tests. As noted in a report by Professor Christine Rossell in 2005, “if you define a group by their low test scores, that group must have low test scores or someone has made a mistake,” Thus, it is logically impossible to ever close the achievement gap between LEP students and those fluent in English, because as soon as a LEP student becomes proficient in English, they are reclassified as fluent English students. Trying to close this gap is logically on par with lifting every student to above average academic achievement.

            The No Child Left Behind legislation did recognize the role that the society outside of schools, especially family, plays in the educational success of children. However, rather than acknowledge that the family domain marked a major limitation in the effectiveness of any public schooling efforts to boost academic achievement, the education bill glossed over this inconvenient truth by attempting to re-shape families. Believing that public schools can artificially manufacture the critical family involvement ingredient in student school success, the bill mandates in Section 1118 that in order to receive federal funding under the Act, local education agencies shall implement:

 “programs, activities, and procedures for the involvement of parents in programs assisted under this part consistent with this section. Such programs, activities, and procedures shall be planned and implemented with meaningful consultation with parents of participating children.”

            The “meaningful consultation” with parents did not refer to discussions with parents of educationally successful children, but to educational authorities trying to involve the parents of children failing in school. The implication of this provision of NCLB was that government could somehow recreate the family involvement that leads to higher academic outcomes, and should intervene to do so. This assumed governmental authority over the families of the disadvantaged, and also assumed the power of educational planners to re-shape families and communities at will.

            Meanwhile, the families of relatively advantaged children, largely avoiding the direction of planners, managed to continue to give their own children a true head start. The most dramatic example of this could be found among those outside of the school system altogether. A major policy analysis of 11,930 homeschooling families compared the academic achievement of these families’ children with students in private and public schools.. In this study, homeshoolers scored significantly higher on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS) than students in private or public schools. Moreover, the greater the number of years of homeschooling (which is to say the fewer the years of formal schooling), the higher the average score of the home schooled. As for the academic credentials of the parent educators, there was no relationship between a parent having a state-issued teaching certificate and the academic performance of the homeschooled child. Home schoolers also did significantly better on the ACT than the non-home schooled.