Reply to Thesis Eleven symposium

Status groups as micro/macro link

Barry Barnes remarks that he entered sociology via the empirical study of groups in the natural sciences, such as adherents or opponents of Kuhnian paradigms, and that these can be theorized as Weberian status groups. It is useful to broaden Weber’s point that insiders distinguish themselves from outsiders by focusing on characteristics that are easily identifiable and difficult to change. Weber was thinking of ethnic groups’ physical appearance, as well as cultural differences in lifestyle. One could question how immutable scientific paradigm factions are; but they are quickly recognizable by insiders because of the shorthand and jargon in which they speak. In my personal experience, I probably lost a couple of academic jobs by my wording of casual remarks in ostensibly sociable conversations. The micro-sociology of conversations is crucial for boundaries – something that the current academic world is recognizing, on the negative side, as ‘micro-aggressions’. Still to be recognized are the positive micro-mechanisms that make ‘networking’ work, how favourable feelings with others are created in intellectual circles and elsewhere. The cliché ‘it’s who you know, not what you know’ is wrong, since you have to know something to contribute to the interaction, at least in groups built on social and intellectual skills, above all a tacit sense of the lay of the land.

These techniques and practices were exposed in the pioneering work of Goffman and Garfinkel, with emotional and other micro-mechanisms elaborated by Scheff and others nearer my age. If status group is a concept combining micro-interaction, emotion and cognition (AKA ‘culture’), this is indeed a central building block to larger macro-stratification.

Micro-macro: Charisma or shame?

Anthony King, as intrepid a field researcher as one could find, also takes up the theoretical issue of building from micro to macro. Here he questions whether IRs provide sufficient explanation of the link. He singles out the process by which an intense IR focuses on the person at the center of attention and choreographer of rhythmic entrainment (AKA collective effervescence), to become a charismatic leader.

This is one way that IRs build micro-encounters into loyalty to organization, both in movements-in-action and time-spanning institutions. But it misses leaders who are not at all charismatic – Eisenhower, George C. Marshall, Adenauer. And the emotional solidarity of groups can generate rebellious rather than loyal followers, as in the fragging of US officers in the Vietnam War by black soldiers. As King shows in his recent book, Command: The 21st Century General (2019), a detailed history of battlefield command structures from the First World War to the present – even the most charismatic generals relied on a supportive staff to keep material logistics and routine communications flowing. Recent armies have increasingly bigger headquarters groups programming all manner of contingencies and decision points, amounting to collective, if anonymous, leadership.

King concentrates the micro-macro link too narrowly on one kind of outcome of IRs – those that generate energy stars. IRs can also focus on horizontal solidarity in egalitarian teams. And there are others kinds of successful IRs besides inspiring crowds. Ike was a specialist in getting people to get along with each other (his handling of Montgomery and Patton, Churchill and DeGaulle); and he worked quietly but firmly behind the scenes to end the Korean War and stop the McCarthyite witch-hunts in the US government of the early 1950s. As indicated in my discussion with Barry Barnes, skill in micro-interaction is knowing the lay of the land, whichever emotions are chosen to work with. Scheff’s theory of avoiding tacit shame is an important mechanism for keeping up the institutional order. I would consider this a sub-type within the general theory of IRs, that individuals gravitate towards interactions which increase their EE (even if it is modest amounts rather than charisma), and try to avoid interactions where they are out of synch and thus lower their EE. The latter process Scheff dissects in detail as shame, including its self-conscious aspect.

My formulation of IR theory emphasizes the process of EE-seeking; Scheff emphasizes the negative process of avoiding shame. The latter process is socially conservative, keeping institutions going – not because we get much out of them but because of shame for not fitting in. My side of IR theory is more on the agents of change, power, and success. Of course reality is full of both (probably more of the shame-avoiding conservatism of institutions), and it is valuable (if not inspirational) for Tony to point this out.

Failure of peace dialogue groups

Lea David applies IR theory to peace dialogue groups, where equal numbers of Israelis and Palestinians spend extended time together discussing their antagonistic history. When they also spend ‘backstage’ time in non-ideological activities (sports, hiking, etc.) they often make friends as individuals; but solidarity divides along ethnic lines in their serious/formal discussions, where emotions about past and ongoing grievances produce a shift to collective pronouns, together with micro-displays of unease and shame over their interactional failure on the big issues. These IRs have some built-in inequalities: everyone discusses in Hebrew, and the auspices of the programs are from the Israeli side. And once they leave, everyone is back in a highly unequal world unaffected by their discussions.

I have two comments: The problem is similar to efforts at affirmative action to integrate black Americans into the institutions of mainstream whites. As Elijah Anderson writes in Black in White Space (2018), black encounters with ‘liberal’ whites are formal occasions of frontstage talk focusing on ideals, and aim to be sympathetic to complaints from blacks about unconscious ‘micro-aggressions’. But backstage among themselves, blacks recount white slights, circulate atrocity stories (especially of middle-class blacks being mistaken for ghetto criminals), and strengthen their separate identity rather than integrating into mainstream, color-blind solidarity.

My second comment is programmatic and cautiously optimistic: We have examples of the failure of IRs meant to bridge Israeli/Palestinian and white/black American divides. On the positive side, Meredith Rossner (2013) has shown when Restorative Justice (RJ) conferences succeed or fail in bringing about reconciliation between victims of crimes and their assailants. They succeed when the small group of supporters of each side undergo a shared emotional experience contagiously spreading among all participants. They fail when the offense is not taken seriously enough to generate strong emotions (RJ for traffic offenses has little effect, at best bringing about insincere apologies); or when the experience is felt as a mere formality. Rossner finds that successful IRs produce lasting results, with lower re-offending rates several years later, and less fearfulness among victims. So what are the crucial differences between successful IRs in RJ and the unsuccessful Israeli/Palestinian dialogue groups? It may be that the primary object of attention, in the RJ situation, is a particular action involving particular persons; in the Israeli context, the object is the general relationship between the groups, and their emotions about large-scale events. Is it possible to organize peace dialogue groups that explicitly focus on the personal experiences of those present, and avoid generalized discussions of history and stories that participants have heard from someone else? In IR theory, the micro-details of the interaction, such as exactly what is focused upon, make a big difference in outcomes.

Violence, moral qualms, and friction

Michael Mann again demonstrates his skill in marshalling scholarship and analysing causal patterns that makes him the most informative sociologist writing in our times. He has found a fruitful topic in discussing moral qualms about killing in combat, vis-à-vis Clausewitzian friction. However, I don’t feel myself the target of the first of these arguments since my theory is not based on moral qualms but on the emotional/physiological condition I have called ‘confrontational tension/fear’ or CTF. Having looked at a great deal of micro-evidence on behaviour in violence-threatening situations – especially from the police, but also riots, small-scale fights, robberies, sports – it is clear that there is a very strong physiological, embodied reaction to these situations, and that it is mostly unconscious. Moral qualms (or indeed other moral beliefs) exist empirically as what one says to others, or repeats to oneself in internal dialogue; and these are created or sustained in interaction rituals which successfully generate shared emotions and rhythms. Morality is generated in conversational rituals. But reports from soldiers in combat, and police confronting suspected weapons, do not report verbal consciousness but distortions of time, vision and hearing, often referring to a ‘dream-like’ state or ‘going on auto-pilot’.

CTF is a physiological reaction, which is most intense in face-to-face interactions where antagonists can see each other’s eyes, and thus are caught up in the human tendency for mutual entrainment. (Jonathan Turner has assembled evolutionary evidence for why this emotional-communication-sensitive physiology led to humans’ greater ability for social coordination, via the mechanism of IRs.) The combination of antagonistic goals and face-to-face mutual focus generates bodily tension. It can also generate fear of being hurt, but that is a separate process; fear of being hurt and confrontational tension/fear can combine in the same result (incompetence in violence), but they can be distinguished, conceptually and empirically. Thus detailed videos and photos of fights typically show a sequence of facial display of anger initially, shifting to fear and tension when actually striking a blow. Fear of being hurt is probably displayed by shrinking behaviour as well as facial expression, and is visible before the violence starts, and in place of expressions of anger. I am winging it here, since my research has concentrated on the moments when violence breaks out; thus we need to look more systematically at the fear-of-being-hurt pattern, and to develop more micro-analysis of the differences and relationships between fear-of-hurt and CTF. Since there are research groups active in Berlin, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and elsewhere looking at emotional indicators in violent situations, probably we will learn more about this issue.

Mann concludes that over-firing in combat is more common than non-firing. The CTF mechanism is at work here. It is a variable driven by pumping adrenaline, and can be indexed by heart rate. At extremely high levels (over 180 beats per minute, BPM) it tends towards bodily paralysis (‘freaking out’); above 140 BPM it causes loss of fine motor coordination, which particularly affects aiming a gun or weapon, and ability to hold one’s fire. The fraction of persons who become competent at violence have developed ways to keep their heart rate down in the 120 BPM range. I have listed a number of pathways circumventing CTF (finding an emotionally weak victim, focusing attention on one’s support group, avoiding eye contact, attacking from a distance). These on the whole are borne out by Mann’s reports.

Since most the micro-evidence that I cite comes from small-scale civilian violence, fights, riots, and police, I could make my theoretical argument without using S.L.A. Marshall (1947) (although in fact reading SLAM gave me my first lead when I started collecting photos of violence in the 1980s). I agree with Mick that moral qualms are of little importance in combat. The IRs that take place in and around the combat zone generally focus on the solidarity of our group, and solidarity generates its own local morality. The rising prevalence of PTSD and consciously voiced moral qualms among veterans of recent wars (at least in Western armies) needs explanation. I suggest that solidarity of troops in foreign war zones contrasts sharply with their experience after returning home, where being a veteran on the whole has become a low status. They go from intensely supportive IRs to a felt lack of resonance with civilians when they are back. This could be investigated in the interactions of everyday life.

On the second point, Mann rightly points out organizational, structural, and situational conditions for non-firing by infantry and low kill rates of fighter pilots. Why the rise in firing rates since the Second World War? The US military explicitly tried to remedy the SLAM problem, by changing from practice with unrealistic static targets to more dynamic settings; instead of emphasizing aiming, it has drilled soldiers into quick reaction and high volume of fire. The trend has been to all automatic weapons, with lightweight bullets (so that more bullets can be carried and fired). Tony King has also documented recent training of elite troops in mock enemy villages, where small groups synchronize their movements like a dance troupe. In effect, this is making a fighting routine into a highly successful IR, with the predictable result that individual soldiers and marines report high enjoyment of these exercises.

Mann is correct in pointing to multiple causes of non-firing, especially those lumped together as friction. Friction has three forms: physical drag; informational fog; and human emotions. High-tech Western militaries since the 1990s have attempted to overcome friction by replacing human actors with computers and remote sensors, with humans remaining present mainly to service and repair automated weapons systems. Nevertheless, my conclusion from reports on high-tech combat are that the contagion of emotions which are central to organizational breakdown are still operative in the combat zone; the aim of combat continues to be to break down enemy organization, above all by inflicting on opponents’ networks a contagious feeling of hopeless defeat. This is paramount in asymmetrical wars against low-tech ‘terrorists’, where most of the emotional advantage is on the low-tech side. My novel, Civil War Two (2018), is a thought-experiment of two equally high-tech armies fighting each other. My conclusion is that such a war would generate considerable friction of its own, tending to degrade high-tech war back into its more low-tech forms.

Educational credential inflation, intellectuals, conflict

Su-Ming Khoo provides an accurate and comprehensive summary of my research on educational credential inflation and on the network dynamics that have driven abstract thinking throughout history. She marks the limits of my work for not being evaluative, and for the absence of other voices from outside the dominant centres of thought. The Sociology of Philosophies (1998) is over 1000 pages long, and took over 30 years to write. I am proud of having expanded coverage from the conventional few dozen ‘great names’ in Greece, medieval Islam, and Europe, to examine the contributions of several thousand ‘secondary’ and ‘minor’ thinkers; and to cover the sophisticated and often parallel developments in Indian, Chinese, and Japanese intellectual history. I wanted to do more on Korean and Tibetan thinkers, but was persuaded that the book was too long already, and that it seemed best to finish it in my own lifetime. I would correct one point: although in many areas I had to rely on translations, I have made use of texts not just in English but in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek. I have only a smattering of Chinese and Japanese and none of Sanskrit and Hindi, but enough contacts with the scholarly network to locate the most important studies of rival Buddhist, Confucian, Vedic, Hindu sectarian and other lineages, and this made it possible to write about them as interacting networks. If someone has done a more comprehensive social history of intellectual life in the long-term histories of India, China, or Japan, I would love to read it.

Absence – yes, of course. There are calls now for attention to subordinated epistemologies. I welcome this, and advocate the network method: locate as many sources as possible giving names of persons whose ideas have had followers; trace their biographies, focusing especially on chains of mentors and pupils; on early-career contacts with persons who turn out to be influential later; their location in centres of discussion; on splits and rivalries, especially on the topics where innovative directions are taken. I believe we will continue to find that ‘networks are the actors on the stage’ of intellectual life, and that individual creativity is a social product.

Khoo is unhappy that I don’t moralize more, or visualize future social betterment. I have no particular talent for this; plenty of other people do it, and moralizing is not going to languish if I don’t play that end of the field. Moreover – and this is particularly important for my work on what violence is really like – trying to be as detached and objective as possible is essential for seeing patterns that are obscured by partisan blinders. Thus I treat cops and robbers, soldiers and ‘terrorists’, protest demonstrators and crowd-control forces with the same analytical apparatus; and this gets us further than the usual dichotomy of good guys vs. bad guys that once vitiated criminology and social movement studies.

One can make the philosophical argument that all discourse has some purpose and thus a tacit moral grounding. I agree: my value commitment is to the intellectual world and its analytical advancement. I realize that not everyone makes this a primary value, and that is fine. We could pursue reflexive self-analysis further. But I’ve seen what happened when ethnomethodology followers (especially in SSK and ANT) have gone down that path, and I have other work to do.

Khoo seems to endorse Seidman’s argument that any analysis focused on conflict derives from the ideology of market utilitarians and their premise of individual self-interest as the prime mover of action. This seems to me absurd. Conflict as prime mover has been proposed by historic thinkers as far removed from market capitalism as Mo Di, Kautilya, Heraclitus, Marx, Weber, and Michael Mann. Donald Black’s Moral Time (2011) argues that any change in social positions, either vertically or horizontally on the distance/intimacy continuum, will generate conflict; and both sides will claim to be morally right.

Perhaps what Khoo is driving at is that I ought to propose a pathway to end the reproduction of stratification through credential inflation. Here it is relevant to comment on Steven Loyal’s comparison of my work with Bourdieu’s. His theory is pitched at an abstract level where the overall pattern is static; all individual movement and quantitative shifts in education reproduce the same inequality. As noted, I was concerned to test the technocratic claim that increasing high-tech drives credential expansion. Updated analysis continues to show, even in the digital age, only a small proportion of education provides high-tech skills; and the most advanced entrepreneurs drop out of school to seize innovative opportunities learned in their informal networks – cutting-edge skills that the long sequence of credential-seeking cannot provide.

Several new dynamics have emerged since I wrote The Credential Society in the 1970s. (A new edition in paperback will appear in 2019, with new introductions bringing the analysis up to date.) As the percentage of the youth cohort attending university expands to 70 to 80 percent in some countries, it has become apparent that the costs of education exceed the income gains for all but an elite minority. There are periodic slowdowns and disillusionment with the credential system, along with waves of revival as alternatives fail and hopes expand again for making it through to the elite. But credential inflation differs from monetary inflation in that printing more money is cheap, but funding mass universities is expensive. Thus political controversies over the costs of schooling have increased. This pattern will intensify in the future.

A second change is that the sinecure aspect of work has declined. Above all in lucrative financial and high-tech organizations, elite employees are pitted against each other as their performance is monitored, and more productive workers are made to take over the work of those dismissed. The ongoing computerization of work and use of Artificial Intelligence puts pressure on the elite, so that instead of pleasant sinecures it has become a rat-race (ask anyone who works in New York or London). Thus the advance of high-tech capitalism is squeezing income and labour-force participation, at the same time that credential inflation reaches unprecedented heights.

Do we have a theoretical basis for predicting what will happen? My chapter in the co-authored book with Immanuel Wallerstein et al., Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013), says that Marx’s theory of the future collapse of capitalism accurately predicts what will happen as computerization and AI displace what remains of middle-class employment, thus eliminating the purchasing power of consumers on which capitalism relies. Michael Mann’s chapter does not agree with me, but presents another scenario of long-term catastrophic change via climate. On theoretical grounds, I think socialism is coming perhaps 20 or 30 years from now; and (to intrude a rare value-judgement) that will probably be a good thing.

Structure and time-dynamics of nationalism

Sinisa Malešević discusses missing links between my Weber-inspired geopolitical theory of rising and falling state legitimacy and Durkheimian time-bubbles of nationalism in times of crisis. He sets these in the larger context of discussion between primordial-ethnic origins of nationalism, and modern state-constructed nationalism, largely of a banal everyday sort. Malešević’s important recent contribution, Grounded Nationalisms (2019), is to show that nationalism is built into the structure of the territorial modern state and its politics. In contrast to historic patrimonial regimes organized as networks of armed households linked by dynastic marriages and cutting across languages and ethnicities, the modern territorial state is a bureaucratic impersonal administration downplaying family connections. It has penetrated households everywhere on its turf, initially for taxes and military service, but in the process providing infrastructure of transport, communications and monetary regulation. Its downstream results include fostering economic prosperity – and being held responsible for its lack; as well as facilitating large-scale social movements aimed at the target of the state as an instrument for fulfilling their demands. This is a crisp synthesis of the Weber/Gellner/Tilly/Mann theory that has now become the paradigm theory of the modern state.

Malešević’s key point is that as this structure fosters mass political mobilization, both from above and from below, it generates the all-pervasive belief that political legitimacy must be based on the sovereignty of all the people – those who reside within and are subject to the authority of each particular state. Tackling critiques of nasty virulent nationalism, Malešević points out that nationalism is an inescapable ingredient in the ideology of any political movement – Left or Right, populist, life-style, or special interest – all of which claim to be in the name of ‘the people’.

It follows that the bellicosity of any particular nationalist movement is variable and needs to be explained by other factors. Here is where my mechanisms of geopolitics-based legitimacy and time-bubbles come in. The geopolitical theory is about the construction of ethnic identity through power-prestige in the interstate arena of war and diplomacy; states with rising power-prestige (usually those that win wars) are able to assimilate their varied ethnicities into a single language, culture, and name (e.g. the rise of modern France, Britain, US, Russia/USSR, China); geopolitically declining states (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, late USSR, future US?) are riven by ethnic revolts. On a shorter time-scale, variations are empirically observable, in three-to-six month periods of flag-waving solidarity sparked off by national crises, as in my research on the aftermath of the 9/11/01 attacks, and similar peaks and slumps in the Arab Spring enthusiasms of 2011 and their mostly sad fates.

What are the holes in this synthesis? Malešević points out that the geopolitically-based theory only works for ‘Great Powers’ (now disguised in such euphemisms as G-8, G-7, UN Security Council, etc.). Explaining nationalism in smaller and necessarily peaceful states requires something else. Here state penetration, both coercively through policing and by channelling banal everyday life, keeps up a lower-intensity nationalism in our cognitive categories, intermittently pumped up by emotional assemblies like athletic competitions. We can sharpen our theories by putting them to the test. What do they predict for the future of the EU, and its component parts? For Russia, and the old Soviet bloc? For China, India, the US? For an ‘Islamic State’? Are our theoretical mechanisms focused enough to point out the crucial variables?

When is populism strong or weak?

Ralph Schroeder raises the question of explaining the strength of populist movements. These define national identity restrictively and contentiously against upstart ethnic movements, and against cosmopolitan elites concerned with border-spanning global projects and universalistic ideologies. Cosmopolitan elites are accused of hypocrisy, since they prosper while leaving their fellow-nationals behind. This is a point that resonates with the critique of the alleged meritocracy of educational credentialing; and with the more widely-recognized populist complaint against compensatory quotas (explicit or disguised) for underprivileged identity groups.

To explain when and where populist conflicts surge, do we need to abandon the level of geopolitical and military crises, and search for conditions internal to each state? Schroeder notes that geopolitical variables don’t predict here, since the cases cut across rising and declining, large and small states. I would quibble about including China as a case of populist mobilization. Its emphasis on assimilation to a national Han Chinese identity does not come from a mass movement hostile to elites. Criticism of elite corruption have come not from below but have been unleashed at the top in intra-elite struggles – both in the Cultural Revolution period and in Xi Jinping’s drive to consolidate personal power. The government’s coercive policy against Uighurs, Falun Gong and other challenges from below is an instance of using the tools of state penetration, in high-tech forms of surveillance, which are also an inheritance of modern state-building. This reminds us even more forcefully of Malešević’s point that all forms of politics can be justified by national sovereignty of ‘the People’, vaguely and variously conceived – including the totalitarian form that previously surged in the 1930s and 40 s. When and why this happens, rather than other kinds of state penetration, is another theoretical question we urgently need to address.

Schroeder focuses on a trajectory made famous by T.H. Marshall, the trio of political, civil and social rights. But this extrapolation from a century or so of historical experience in the West European model is not necessarily a universal trajectory. Liberal humanitarians have never been very good at explaining the existence of themselves. We assume we are the default category, and the spearhead of historical progress. But this is hardly the only social movement mobilized by modern state penetration. We come back to Malešević’s implied question: since nationalism is a component of all modern social movements (or virtually all; not the cosmopolitans?), under what conditions do nationalist concerns become exclusionary? And what determines how virulent they become? Social scientists have never been very convincing in explaining fascism and totalitarianism, either, on an analytical level where we can give the conditions when these arise. (Mann’s book The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005) provides a strong theory about episodes of violent massacres, but that is a more limited question.) Cosmopolitans and fascists, opposite ends of the spectrum, are still blind spots in our theorizing, even as we have gotten better on processes in the middle.

We have serious tasks for the future. But being able to define problems is a step towards solving them. I am impressed by what has been accomplished by the social scientists I have known and read in my lifetime, and confident in what our successors will accomplish after us.