Greenblatt's new historicism

Stephen Greenblatt is a pathbreaking literary critic. But since the 1990s I've also looked at Greenblatt as a genuinely innovative and insightful contributor to the historical social sciences as well. He poses questions that are enormously important for anyone trying to make sense of humanity in history. What is a cultural identity? How do background social, cultural, and ideological conditions shape the individual's mental frameworks?

Greenblatt's advocacy and formulation of the "New Historicism" is an important contribution to literary criticism. But it is likewise a very important contribution to a topic of current interest to me, the question of the making of human cultures in concrete and heterogeneous terms. Nasrullah Mambrol does an excellent job of providing an exposition of the main ideas of the new historicism in a series of essays in Literary Theory and Criticism, including "New Historicism" (2020; link), "New Historicism: A Brief Note" (2016; link), and "Stephen Greenblatt and New Historicism" (2017; link).)

Of special interest to current philosophy of social science is the heterogeneity and plasticity that the "New Historicism" presupposes concerning cultures and worldviews. Here is how Mambrol (2017) summarizes this idea:

In contrast with this earlier formalism and historicism, the New Historicism questions its own methodological assumptions, and is less concerned with treating literary works as models of organic unity than as “fields of force, places of dissension and shifting interests, occasions for the jostling of orthodox and subversive impulses.” New Historicism also challenges the hierarchical distinction between “literary foreground” and “political background,” as well as between artistic and other kinds of production. It acknowledges that when we speak of “culture,” we are speaking of a “complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs.”

Mambrol highlights this feature of "world-view heterogeneity" in his "New Historicism" piece (2020):

Unlike the prewar historicists, they [the New Historicists] refused to assume that Renaissance texts mirrored, from a safe distance, a unified and coherent world-view that was held by a whole population, or at least by an entire literate class. (Mambrol, 2020)

Culture and worldview are not "unitary" entities; rather, there are important differences across a population and within a generation with respect to very important aspects of identity. This is relevant to the interpretation of literature because it implies that the critic needs to try to work out how the author related to "the complex network of institutions" of culture that were prevalent in his or her lifetime. Here is Mambrol:

[Greenblatt] argues that the scene in which his authors lived was controlled by a variety of authorities— institutions such as the church, court, family, and colonial administration, as well as agencies such as God or a sacred book—and that these powers came into conflict because they endorsed competing patterns for organizing social experience. From Greenblatt’s New Historicist perspective, the rival codes and practices that these authorities sponsored were cultural constructions, collective fictions that communities created to regulate behavior and make sense of their world; however, the powers themselves tended to view their customs as natural imperatives, and they sought to represent their enemies as aliens or demonic parodists of genuine order. (Mambrol 2020)

To put it simply, there was no unitary mentality of sixteenth-century English culture; rather, there were multiple narratives and texts with rather different implications for the individual. We might ask, though Mambrol does not, whether all such variants were equally powerful, or whether one or more were "hegemonic"; and the answer seems obvious: powerful institutions like the church and the state also had powerful means for conveying the lineaments of their preferred ideology. But hegemony does not imply univocal acceptance, and as Gramsci insisted, resistant voices and thoughts are possible even within "hegemonic" ideological forces. This means, as Greenblatt is very eloquent in discovering, that subversive and critical ideas in literature can emerge from a contentious set of ideologies, some of which are "hegemonic". (See James Scott's similar view about "hidden transcripts" in Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts; link.)

Mambrol suggests that Greenblatt's 1987 essay "Towards a Poetics of Culture" is an important place where readers can find clarification and amplification of the purpose and ideas of the New Historicism (link). The essay is published with a few minor changes as chapter one of H. Aram Veeser's The New Historicism. Greenblatt is emphatic about several points. The New Historicism is not a new "theory" of criticism or of the relationship between literature and the social environment; it is not a manifesto. Instead, it is a call for recognition of the fluidity of culture and worldview, and the many-many relationships that exist between the many cultures of a time and the literatures and artistic creations of the time. Literature emerges from concrete social and mental arrangements in society; but the relationships that exist are not deterministic, and -- crucially -- different authors respond to different versions of the mental frameworks of their time. Here is Greenblatt:

I propose that the general question addressed by Jameson and Lyotard—what is the historical relation between art and society or between one institutionally demarcated discursive practice and another?—does not lend itself to a single, theoretically satisfactory answer of the kind that Jameson and Lyotard are trying to provide. Or rather theoretical satisfaction here seems to depend upon a utopian vision that collapses the contradictions of history into a moral imperative. (kl 370)

His critique of both Jameson (New Marxism) and Lyotard (Post-structuralism) is that both systems are flawed precisely because they hope that a single abstract theory of capitalism can answer the question of the relationship between literature and society. No! Rather, historical inquiry -- inquiry that is sensitive to detail, to contingency, and to the heterogeneity of social and structural realities -- will suffice to provide a partial answer to a question such as: How did Shakespeare's cultural and mental world influence his plays? Historical research, not theoretical development and application, can allow for meaningful and illuminating answers to particular questions like these; and there are no general theoretical answers to the big question: How do social institutions influence or determine artistic and literary creation?

These comments have to do with literary interpretation. But the point is relevant for social scientists for a similar reason: rather than asking, "how do white working class men think about Donald Trump?" or "how do Latina women relate to the Democratic Party?", we need to be receptive to the idea that there is no single answer to the question. There is variation across each of these groups. At the same time, the ideological struggle between "white supremacy", "Reaganite rejection of government power", and "adherence to liberal democratic values" reflects a hugely important battleground of identities and mental frameworks in the contemporary United States. Greenblatt's masterful analysis of the currents of authoritarianism in contemporary US politics, and the Trump presidency in particular, through his analysis of Shakespeare's tyrants, is brilliant (link). And the aptness of Greenblatt's treatment of Richard III as a foil for Donald Trump illustrates an important point: tyranny depends on shaping values and expectations in the public. And for mysterious reasons, it is hard to dispute the fact that Trump and his acolytes shifted the terms of public thinking about the state and political legitimacy. What seemed like unhinged bravado when candidate Trump uttered these words now seems only an obvious truth today (as quoted in The Guardian in 2018): "US Republican frontrunner Donald Trump is so confident in his support base that he said he could stand on New York’s Fifth Avenue “and shoot somebody” and still not lose voters."

What is the relevance of "New Historicism" to the idea that humanity is self-creating when it comes to culture? The connection is straightforward. Greenblatt demonstrates in his criticism and his more reflective writings that literary creation emerges from an intellectual and moral world that is full of difference, change, and contradiction; that the ambient ideas of a time are sometimes horrible, sometimes dominant, but never univocal; and that writers like Shakespeare have the ability to create something new for human beings to contemplate as they consider morality, social existence, and the tasks of living together. This implies a capacity for creativity that extends beyond literature and into morality and narratives of identity.

Human cultures as self-creating systems

Some philosophers and others have imagined that human beings are largely fixed in their most fundamental capacities -- their "human nature". Along with this idea is the notion that there are fundamental ethical and moral principles that are unchanging and serve always as guides to human action -- and, perhaps, that philosophical ethics or theology help to identify these principles.

We can begin by asking, what is involved in a conception of "human nature"?

• A conception of what human beings want; what motivates them
• A conception of how human beings think; rationality and reason? Emotion? Passion? Sympathy? Compassion? Hatred? Fear? Envy? Indifference?
• A view of the ways that human beings think about and interact with individuals and groups around them. Egoism and altruism; self-interest and commitment
• A view of the effectiveness of normative systems

Against these views of permanence, I want to argue for the idea that human nature and human values are malleable and are best understood as a "self-creation" -- a positing by generations over time about what human beings ought to be and to care about. Human beings create "cultures", and these cultures orient individuals' self-understandings, motivations, and moral ideas.

On this view, human beings have generalizable capacities for thinking, acting, and creating that permit us to create cultural systems that orient and underlie our behavior (link). And we have the ability to change those systems over time.

There is an intriguing resonance of this view with Sartre's view that individual human beings define themselves through their freedom and their actions. This is his view that "existence precedes essence" for human beings. Steven Crowell describes this view in his SEP article on existentialism (link):

Sartre’s slogan—“existence precedes essence”—may serve to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism, namely, the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, since that meaning is decided in and through existing itself. Existence is “self-making-in-a-situation” (Fackenheim 1961: 37). Webber (2018: 14) puts the point this way: “Classical existentialism is ... the theory that existence precedes essence,” that is, “there is no such thing as human nature” in an Aristotelian sense. A “person does not have an inbuilt set of values that they are inherently structured to pursue. Rather, the values that shape a person’s behavior result from the choices they have made” (2018: 4). In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being—what makes her who she is—is not fixed by her type but by what she makes of herself, who she becomes. The fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that one’s identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to “exist” is precisely to constitute such an identity. It is in light of this idea that key existential notions such as facticity, transcendence (project), alienation, and authenticity must be understood. (Crowell, “Existentialism”)

But there is a wrinkle: Sartre's view concerns the idea of the "self definition" of an individual human being, whereas the view I am exploring here concerns the idea of the self-creation of human normative and symbolic cultures. Communities over time created their systems of values and social practices that define their social behavior and their subjective identities. Greek cultures were in the process of making themselves through the centuries that separated Homer from Socrates and across the cultural differences separating Sparta from Athens. Deep as Sartre's thinking about existentialism was, this view seems even more fundamental about the moral situation of humanity.

This is not a new idea. Johannes Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) offered a historicist view of human nature, advocating the idea that human nature is itself a historical product and that human beings act differently in different periods of historical development. (Michael Forster's essay in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides an excellent exposure to Herder's philosophy; link.) Herder's ideas are expressed in numerous works, including especially Ideen Zur Philosophie Der Geschichte Der Menschheit, Volume 1 (1791). Here is a representative passage from Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Book XV, chapter 2) (included in German History in Documents and Images):

2. The progress of history shows, that, as true humanity has increased, the destructive demons of the human race have diminished in number; and this from the inherent natural laws of a self- enlightening reason and policy.

In proportion as reason increases among mankind, man must learn from their infancy to perceive, that there is a nobler greatness, than the inhuman greatness of tyrants; and that it is more laudable, as well as more difficult, to form, than to ravage a nation, to establish cities, than to destroy them. The industrious Egyptians, the ingenious Greeks, the mercantile Phoenicians, not only make a more pleasing figure in history, but enjoyed, during the period of their existence, a more useful and agreeable life, than the destroying Persians, the conquering Romans, the avaricious Carthaginians. The remembrance of the former still lives with fame, and their influence upon Earth will continue eternally with increasing power; while the ravagers, with their demoniacal might, reaped no farther benefit, than that of becoming a wretched, luxurious people, amid the ruins of their plunder, and at last quaffing off the poisoned draught of severe retaliation. Such was the fate of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Romans: even the Greeks received more injury from their internal dissensions, and from their luxury in many cities and provinces, than from the sword of the enemy. Now as these are fundamental principles of a natural order, which not only shows itself in particular cases of history, or in fortuitous instances; but is founded on its own intrinsic properties, that is, on the nature of oppression and an overstretched power, or on the consequences of victory, luxury and arrogance, as on the laws of a disturbed equiponderance, and holds on coeternally with the course of things: why must we be compelled to doubt, that this law of Nature is not as generally acknowledged as any other, and does not operate, from the forcibleness with which it is perceived, with the infallible efficacy of a natural truth? What may be brought to mathematical certainty, and political demonstration, must be acknowledged as truth, soon or late; for no one has yet questioned the accuracy of the multiplication table or the propositions of Euclid. (link)

Herder is "historicist" about human nature. The logical implication of historicism is that human individuals become specific culturally instantiated persons through their immersion in a culture at a time. This casts doubt on all forms of “essentialism” about human nature and about the characteristics of a people or a culture. Cultures and their value systems are contingent; and the human individuals to whom they give rise are contingently different from their predecessors and successors in other generations. Or, in other words, human beings create themselves through history by creating cultures, norms, and schemes of thinking. It also has a radical implication for the possibility of change in humanity: our histories change us, and we change the histories we make. It also implies a radical anti-essentialism about social identities: there is nothing essential about being an Armenian, a Spaniard, a Buddhist, or a Jew. National and cultural identities have a certain stability over time. But they also change over time. National and cultural identities are themselves historically located and historically malleable.

Sonia Sikka's Herder on Humanity and Cultural Difference: Enlightened Relativism is an excellent and detailed discussion of this aspect of Herder's philosophy: culture, nation, "a people", and a historicist approach to the concept of human nature. She argues that Herder endorses the anti-essentialism about "peoples" and identities described here.

Herder is actually not as strong a cultural essentialist as is sometimes thought. He explicitly acknowledges that cultures are not internally uniform, that they fuse to form new combinations, and that their evolution is shaped by interaction with one another. On the latter point, far from holding the view that cultures should shun foreign influence, Herder largely sees cultural interaction as a good thing, as long as it is not the result either of violence or of imitation arising purely from a sense of cultural inferiority. Sikka, 7

This historicist view of human nature stands in opposition to —

• Philosophical fundamentalism — human nature is fixed and unchanging
• Moral foundationalism — there is one permanent and unchanging set of moral principles that are binding at all times
• Biological fundamentalism — human behavior is governed by a “code” created by the evolutionary history of our species

Against these ideas, this view holds that human beings are “general-purpose culture machines” capable of creating cultural and moral innovations that permit them to live better and more harmoniously together.

So what about biology? Has evolution made us into a certain kind of social animal after all, with pre-coded moral motivations and norms? some sociobiologists have imagined so. but philosopher Allan Gibbard provides a more plausible view in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.

Human cooperation, and coordination more broadly, has always rested on a refined network of kinds of human rapport, supported by emotion and thought. A person sustains and develops this network, draws advantages from it, and on occasion keeps his distance from it. He does these things only in virtue of a refined configuration of emotional and cognitive dispositions..... (27)

We evolved as culture emerged through our evolving. We evolved to have flexible genetic propensities — propensities to be affected profoundly in response to culture. We evolved to interact with others, in response to culture, in ways that themselves constitute having a culture. We acquired not a shapeless capacity for culture, but perhaps a whole configuration of adaptations to the kinds of cultures humans form and sustain. (28)

So Gibbard’s view is that the evolutionary history of hominids took place in a setting of social groups, where psychological capacities supporting cooperation were favored (possessed selection advantage). Gibbard’s view, then, is that the evolutionary history of hominids (including homo sapiens) resulted in a species that had a range of psychological “tools” or capacities that could be activated or deployed in a wide variety of ways. This prepared homo sapiens to become “cultural animals”, capable of creating and living within social groups and cultural systems. And this process of creation had a great deal of flexibility — as human technological and linguistic capabilities also demonstrated great flexibility.

These ideas provide an important naturalistic basis for interpreting human morality and meaning: we human beings have created the cultural and normative systems in which we live, sometimes with deeply admirable effect and sometimes with monstrous effect. And we have the collective capacity to change our cultures. 

Further, this historicist / existentialist understanding of the human being within human culture is encouraging when it comes to the topic of “confronting evil”. It provides a basis for the idea that we are capable of changing our values and expectations of each other. And equally importantly, learning of the capacity of “ordinary men” to do horrible things can lead us to attempt to create new values and new institutions that make atrocities like genocide, mass enslavement, and state oppression less likely. Confronting the evil of the twentieth century with unflinching honesty, then, can change humanity.

Do norms and moral attitudes change over generations?

Moral philosophers have often written of ethical obligations, principles, and theories as if they were timeless and unchanging. Kant, for example, argued that moral obligations follow from the structure of rationality itself. The utilitarians -- Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick -- held that moral obligations are defined by the principle of maximizing happiness -- whether in the time of Socrates or Neo (the protagonist in the Matrix).

But really -- it is entirely unbelievable to imagine that philosophy and pure reason can discover an apriori, timeless system of moral truths. Values and norms are created by human beings living in concrete social circumstances. Rather, moral philosophy should be understood as a dialogue with the moral culture of a time and place, rather than an attempt to discover moral certainties valid beyond human experience. Seen in this way, the "reflective equilibrium" approach to moral epistemology advocated by John Rawls is the most plausible way of understanding the epistemic status of moral principles. This is a coherentist rather than a foundationalist epistemology, involving a back-and-forth adjustment of specific judgments and more general principles until a reasonable level of consistency is achieved. (Here is an earlier discussion of these ideas about moral reasoning; link.) And if human beings' considered judgments change over time -- if tormenting animals for entertainment is accepted in 1600 but largely rejected in 1900 -- then the moral theory that corresponds to this system of judgments and principles will be different as well.

Organized religions have advocated for fairly specific "codes of conduct" for practitioners (followers, or even all human beings). Religious codes of conduct are usually based on authority rather than philosophical argument -- authority of the Koran or the Bible, authority of the founders, or authority of specialists who speak for the divine beings. But assuming a naturalistic view of the world, it is clear that the religious codes of a time are somehow an expression of the ambient moral attitudes of the time, perhaps with innovations introduced by charismatic teachers and leaders. Religious moral prescriptions rest upon the practical sets of social and interpersonal norms that exist in the communities in which these groups and bodies of doctrine emerged.

There is also an evolutionary question to be posed. What is it about the evolutionary history of primates and human beings that has led to the evolution of a central nervous system that is capable of normative behavior? Is there an evolutionary dimension to the moral emotions (or the underlying cognitive capacities that permit the embodiment of moral emotions)? Is an inclination to fairness or kindness "in our genes" in some way? This is a question that philosophers and psychologists have undertaken to investigate. Allan Gibbard's analysis in Wise Choices, Apt Feelings is especially nuanced, and serves well as a rebuttal to crude forms of sociobiology (the idea that human behavioral characteristics are hard-wired as a result of our evolutionary history). (I discuss these issues in a 2010 post on the moral sentiments (link).) Significantly, Gibbard's view leaves a great deal of room for "plasticity" in the moral emotions and the normative systems that are embodied in concrete social traditions and groups. So biology does not entail a particular moral system.

All of this means that we need to consider the question of "moral thinking and choice" in a historically and empirically specific way. We need to investigate the moral psychology or culture of moral attitudes that exist at a time and place. Plainly human beings do in fact have a capacity to act normatively -- to make choices based on their moral emotions, moral perceptions, and moral reasons with regard to a situation. What are the particulars of this embodied set of psychologically real perceptions, motivations, and actions? What are the specifics of the normative "grammar" of a particular time and place? How do individual human beings acquire the moral competence that guides the moral perceptions and choices he or she is inclined to make in particular human circumstances? And how do these embodied complexes of moral competence change over time?

Two questions are evident when we reach this point. First, how is the moral psychology of a particular epoch created? What features of history, circumstance, and culture led to "village mentality" of medieval France? For example, what are the important influences that lead individuals in a time and place to pity animals, favor telling the truth, and want to take care of their children? And how much variation is there within a given cultural community, at a given time, in both the content and intensity of these features of moral psychology?

The second question is even more important. Are there processes through which the moral psychology of a time, the moral consensus, changes and -- perhaps -- improves? Is there a moment between generations when "sympathy for one's kin" becomes more generalized and becomes "sympathy for one's neighbors", and eventually "sympathy for distant human beings"? Is it possible for a human population to "bootstrap" its way to a more benevolent and just way of living, through gradual change in the moral attitudes of individuals?

As a thought experiment, we might imagine a survey of practical moral questions that could be used to map the moral consciousness of human populations at various times and places -- a survey of all of humanity, extending from Homeric peasants to men and women in India, China, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, over a 3,000-year period of time. (Think of it as an episode of The Good Place, but drawn from a long historical stretch of time. Lots of funding will be needed for the time-travel part of the research.) Here is a sample set of questions that might serve as a diagnostic tool for probing a moral worldview in a historical setting:

1. Is it permissible to torment animals for entertainment?
2. Is it permissible to enslave prisoners of war?
3. Is it right to kill prisoners of war?
4. Is it permissible to beat one's children?
5. Is it permissible to beat one's spouse?
6. Is it permissible to beat one's neighbor when one is annoyed by his behavior?
7. Do I have a reason to pay attention to the wellbeing of my neighbor's children?
8. Do I have a reason to pay attention to the wellbeing of distant and unknown children?
9. Is it permissible to send one's parents away to deprivation when they become old?
10. Is it permissible to lie to one's siblings about their inheritance?
11. Is it permissible to lie to an unknown customer about the defects in a used car (or old horse)?
12. Is it permissible to steal one's neighbors' sheep?
13. Is it permissible to steal the sheep of people from a distant village?
14. Is it permissible to tell lies about the practices of people from other groups?
15. Do I have a duty to intervene when another person is behaving violently and immorally?
16. Is it permissible and respectable to behave entirely self-interestedly?
17. Do the powerful have a right of sexual coercion over less powerful individuals in their domain?
18. Should one be generous to the poor?
19. Should one be kind to strangers?
20. Should one tolerate the non-conformity of one's fellow villagers?
21. Is it important to act rightly, even when no one is in a position to observe?
22. Is it permissible to make fun of the gods in the privacy of one's home?
23. Is it permissible for an official to accept remunerations in order to provide a service?
24. Is it permissible for landlords to collect rents from tenants during a time of severe consumption crisis?
25. Is it permissible for the priests to live in luxury while ordinary people struggle for existence?

Of course this is just a thought experiment, though historians and anthropologists may be able to make some provisional guesses about how different social groups would have answered these questions. And even in the narrow cross-section of cultures that are alive and well in different places in the world today, it would seem likely that there are important differences across communities in the answers that are given to these questions.

Another way of probing the moral worlds of people in other cultures and times is through literature. Literature almost always revolves around the actions and motives of individuals in social groups -- friendships, families, villages, armies, social classes, or nations. And often the drama of a novel or play derives from the author's efforts at probing the reasoning and motivations of the various protagonists. So we might speculate that it is possible to triangulate to a "Shakespearean" ethical code, a "Tolstoyan" ethical code, or a "Flaubertian" ethical code -- working backwards from the bad behavior of some of the actors and the admired behavior of others. Martha Nussbaum often emphasizes the moral insights made possible through literature (e.g., Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature). This too would be a very interesting exercise: what is the ordinary, day-to-day code of moral behavior that is presupposed in War and Peace?

All of this suggests a fairly high degree of plasticity in the moral frameworks and mentalities of people in different traditions and cultures.

But now, the crucial question: what kinds of effort and what kinds of lived experience might have the effect of improving the moral culture of a civilization in the making? Is it possible for humanity to become morally better over time? Can human communities learn from their mistakes?

There seem to be at least two levers that might allow for moral learning. The first is an extension of empathy and compassion beyond its current borders. The moral intuitions of a community may change when individuals are brought to recognize in greater fullness the lived experience and capacities for happiness and suffering in other human beings; individuals may broaden their compassion for more distant strangers. And the second is the moral experience of fairness and cooperation as a crucial element of social life. No one wants to be treated unfairly; everyone wants a level of reciprocity from others. And social relations work best when there is a reasonably high level of confidence in the fairness of the institutions and behavior that prevails. Is slavery morally unacceptable? We might hope that a culture comes to see the misery and pain of the enslaved, and the fundamental unfairness of the master-slave relationship. "If our positions were reversed, I would fundamentally reject being enslaved; this gives me a reason to reject this system even when it advantages me." This is the perspective of reciprocity (link).

This is the conclusion I wanted to reach in connection with the atrocities of the twentieth century: the possibility that a deepening of our culture's understanding of the wrongs that occurred, the human suffering that was created, and the steps of social and political change that led to these outcomes, can lead as well to a meaningful change in our moral culture and behavior. By recognizing more fully the horror of the shooting pits, perhaps our political morality will change for the better, and we will have a heightened practical and moral resistance to the politicians and movements that led to murderous totalitarian dictatorships.

(Moral Psychology, The Evolution of Morality: Adaptations and Innateness, Vol. 1, edited by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, provides extensive and stimulating discussions of naturalism as a setting for understanding human moral reasoning and action. Richmond Campbell's article on Moral Epistemology in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an excellent review of the question of the status of moral beliefs; link.)

Entertainment as a valuable thing

Quite a bit of the GDP of the United States goes into a broad category we can call "entertainment" -- television, video streaming services, books and newspapers, concerts, theatre, sports events (live and broadcast), and video games. The entertainment industry amounts to $717 billion in the US economy (link), and professional athletics adds another $73.5 billion (link). This category approaches a trillion dollars, and we haven't even taken account of the video gaming sector. US GDP is about $19.4 trillion; so entertainment in all sectors may amount to 5% or more of the total US economy.

It is interesting to take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics American Time Use Survey (link) to get an empirical idea of how Americans of varying ages spend their time each day. Table 8A breaks down "time spent in primary activities for the civilian population 18 years and over". Out of a 24-hour day, personal care activities and sleeping amount to 18 hours per day; organizational, civic, and religious activities amount to .27 hours per day; and leisure and sports activities amount to 4.12 hours per day. Work takes 3.94 hours per day (on average; 4.96 hours for men and 3.07 hours for women). (These are averages over a population, which explains the relatively low number of hours spent working.)

Both these observations demonstrate that millions of people value entertainment: they pay for it and the spend their time engaging with it. So entertainment is plainly valued in the lives of most people. But we can still ask a more fundamental question: what is the good of entertainment? Should society be organized in such a way as to facilitate the ability of people to find and consume sources of entertainment? Is more entertainment better than less?

There are a few simple answers to the question.

First, people often want to be entertained and choose to be entertained, and it is a basic principle of liberalism that it is good for people to exercise their liberty by doing what they want to do. (Liberty principle)

Second, people take pleasure in being entertained, pleasure is an important component of happiness, and happiness is a good thing. Therefore entertainment is a good thing, and people should be in a position to be entertained. (Happiness principle)

Third, sometimes "entertainment" is developmental and fulfilling of human capabilities for imagination, empathy, and ethical reasoning. By watching Citizen Kane or reading The Fire Next Time, people gain new insights into their own lives and the lives of others; they extend their capacity for empathy; and they enrichen their ability to think about complex social and moral topics. Martha Nussbaum makes this point in her discussions of the value of literature in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life and Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Nussbaum's views are discussed by Heather McRobie in OpenDemocracy (link). These outcomes too seem intrinsically valuable by the individuals who experience them. This view of the potential value of "entertainment" converges with the capabilities approach to human wellbeing. (Human development principle)

But, of course, not all forms of entertainment are uplifting in an intellectual or moral sense. Six seasons of The Sopranos probably didn't result in much intellectual or moral uplift for the millions of viewers who enjoyed the series, and an earlier generation's interest in Gunsmoke, Bonanza, and Car 54 was probably equally unrewarded. So what about "pure entertainment", without moral, intellectual, or aesthetic redeeming value? What about Tetris, Solitaire, Grand Theft Auto, or the Madden NFL franchise? What about Downton Abbey?

J. S. Mill, far-sighted media critic that he was, distinguished between higher and lower pleasures, and argued that the former are inherently preferable to any agent who has experienced both over the latter. His reasoning is based on his view that human beings have higher faculties and lower faculties; the higher pleasures exercise the higher faculties; and anyone who has experienced both will prefer the higher pleasures. Here are a few lines from Utilitarianism.

Now, it is an unquestionable fact that the way of life that employs the higher faculties is strongly preferred to the way of life that caters only to the lower ones· by people who are equally acquainted with both and equally capable of appreciating and enjoying both. Few human creatures would agree to be changed into any of the lower animals in return for a promise of the fullest allowance of animal pleasures; no intelligent human being would consent to be a fool, no educated person would prefer to be an ignoramus, no person of feeling and conscience would rather be selfish and base, even if they were convinced that the fool, the dunce or the rascal is better satisfied with his life than they are with theirs. . . . If they ever think they would, it is only in cases of unhappiness so extreme that to escape from it they would exchange their situation for almost any other, however undesirable they may think the other to be. Someone with higher faculties requires more to make him happy, is probably capable of more acute suffering, and is certainly vulnerable to suffering at more points, than someone of an inferior type; but in spite of these drawbacks he can’t ever really wish to sink into what he feels to be a lower grade of existence. .... It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. (14)

This position is based on Mill's idea that people who have experienced both kinds of pleasures will choose the higher (demanding, challenging, aesthetically and morally complex) pleasures over the lower pleasures. But this view seems to be largely refuted by the current entertainment industry; the audience for bad television certainly includes a proportionate share of Mill's counterparts today (college professors, literary critics, journalists, and pundits). Plainly, there are many millions of people who have indeed experienced both higher and lower pleasures, and continue to enjoy both.

So Mill did not have a very good psychological theory of "entertainment", even if he had a good aspirational philosophy of living. I doubt that Netflix would want JS Mill to serve as programming chief for its upcoming seasons.

There is probably a nugget of truth in the idea that the challenge and complexity of an activity is a dimension of its continuing appeal to the individuals who engage in the activity. Perhaps Go masters and chess masters take greater satisfaction in their games than do checkers players and aficionados of tic-tac-toe, and people who love literature may take more satisfaction from a novel by Boris Pasternak than Nora Roberts because of the relative complexity, unpredictability, and nuance of Pasternak's love story. But it is clear that pleasure in entertainment derives from more than this: humor, suspense, nostalgia, complicated plots, character development, amazing special effects, depictions of human emotions, violence, plots that speak to one's own experience, and so on indefinitely. Why these elements produce pleasure, however, is still unclear.

Perhaps we need to go back to ancient Greek philosophers in our quest for the sources of pleasure in "entertainment". Is Aristotle right that we enjoy tragedy because of the catharsis it provides, and comedy, because of the physical pleasure we take in laughter? Does Epicurus have anything to tell us about why we enjoy watching Breaking Bad and Blazing Saddles? Can the Stoics shed light on why Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (1964) and Heaven's Gate (1980) were so very unpopular with the movie audience? Does Plato have anything to say about whether Waiting for Godot is really entertaining, and whether people can take pleasure in viewing it?

Sociology of life expectations

Each individual has a distinctive personality and orienting set of values. It is intriguing to wonder how these features take shape in the individual's development through the experiences of childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. But we can also ask whether there are patterns of mentality and orienting values across many or most individuals in a cohort. Are there commonalities in the definition of a good life across a cohort? Is there such a thing as the millennial generation or the sixties generation, in possession of distinctive and broadly shared sets of values, frameworks, and dispositions?

These are questions that sociologists have attempted to probe using a range of tools of inquiry. It is possible to use survey methodology to observe shifts in attitudes over time, thereby pinpointing some important cohort differences. But qualitative tools seem the most appropriate for this question, and in fact sociologists have conducted extensive interviews with a selected group of individuals from the indicated group, and have used qualitative methods to analyze and understand the results.

A very interesting example of this kind of research is Jennifer Silva's Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty. Silva is interested in studying the other half of the millennial generation -- the unemployed and underemployed young people, mostly working class, whom the past fifteen years have treated harshly. What she finds in this segment of the cohort born in the late 1970s and early 1980s is an insecure and precarious set of life circumstances, and new modes of transition to adulthood that don't look very much like the standard progress of family formation, career progress, and rising affluence that was perhaps characteristic of this same social segment in the 1950s.

Here is how Silva frames the problem she wants to better understand:

What, then, does it mean to “grow up” today? Even just a few decades ago, the transition to adulthood would not have been experienced as a time of confusion, anxiety, or uncertainty. In 1960, the vast majority of women married before they turned twenty-one and had their first child before twenty-three. By thirty, most men and women had moved out of their parents’ homes, completed school, gotten married, and begun having children. Completing these steps was understood as normal and natural, the only path to a complete and respectable adult life: indeed, half of American women at this time believed that people who did not get married were “selfish and peculiar,” and a full 85 percent agreed that women and men should get married and have children (Furstenberg et al. 2004). (6)

Silva is interested in exploring in detail the making of "working class life adulthood" in the early twenty-first century. And her findings are somewhat bleak:

Experiences of powerlessness, confusion, and betrayal within the labor market, institutions such as education and the government, and the family teach young working-class men and women that they are completely alone, responsible for their own fates and dependent on outside help only at their peril. They are learning the hard way that being an adult means trusting no one but yourself. (9)

At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health. Rather than turn to politics to address the obstacles standing in the way of a secure adult life, the majority of the men and women I interviewed crafted deeply personal coming of age stories, grounding their adult identities in recovering from their painful pasts—whether addictions, childhood abuse, family trauma, or abandonment—and forging an emancipated, transformed, and adult self. (10)

Key to Silva's interpretation is the importance and coherence of the meanings that young people create for themselves -- the narratives through which they make sense of the unfolding of their lives and where they are going. She locates the context and origins of these self-stories in the structural circumstances of the American economy of the 1990s; but her real interest is in finding the recurring themes in the stories and descriptions these young people tell about themselves and their lives.

For Silva, the bleakness of this generation of young working class adults has structural causes: economic stagnation, dissolution of safety nets, loss of decent industrial-sector jobs and the rise of insecure service-sector jobs, and neoliberalism as a guiding social philosophy that systematically turns its back on under-class young people. It is sobering that her research is based on interviews carried out in a few cities in the United States, but the findings seem valid for many countries in western Europe as well (Britain, Germany, France). And this in turn may have relevance for the rise of populism in many countries as well.

What is most worrisome about Silva's account is the very limited opportunities for social progress that it implies. As progressives we would like to imagine our democracy has the potential of evolving towards greater social dignity and opportunity for all segments of society. But what Silva describes is unpromising for this hopeful scenario. The avenues of higher education, skills-intensive work, and better life circumstances seem unlikely as a progressive end of this story. And the Sprawl of the grim anti-utopian novels of William Gibson (Neuromancer, Count Zero) seem to fit the world Silva describes better than the usual American optimism about the inevitability of progress. Significantly, the young people whom Silva interviews have very little interest in engagement in politics and supporting candidates who are committed to real change; they do not really believe in the possibility of change.

It is worth noticing the parallel in findings and methodology between Silva's work on young working class men and women and Al Young's studies of inner city black men (The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances). Both fall within the scope of cultural sociology. Both proceed on the basis of extensive interviews with 50-100 subjects, both make use of valuable tools of qualitative analysis to make sense of the interviews, and both arrive at important new understandings of the mentalities of these groups of young Americans.

(Here is a prior post on cultural sociology and its efforts to "get inside the frame" (link); and here is a post on "disaffected youth" that touches on some of these themes in a different way; link.)

Ethics as culture

Gabriel Abend has recently published The Moral Background: An Inquiry into the History of Business Ethics, a remarkable book on what seems initially to be a small subject -- a history of the academic field of business ethics. I say "seems", because in Abend's hands this topic turns out to be a superb subject for the emerging field of the sociology of culture. (I should explain that the subject might seem small to a philosopher, because the discipline of business ethics is low-prestige within philosophy and is generally regarded as too applied to count as "serious" philosophical ethics. For Abend, however, it is an important subject precisely because it is "applied" and because the activity to which it pertains is highly consequential in the contemporary world and the world of nineteenth century capitalism as well.)

Michele Lamont is often cited as the person who gave new impetus to the sociology of culture in the past decade (e.g. in Money, Morals, and Manners: The Culture of the French and the American Upper-Middle Class; link, link). (Lamont is one of the editors of the Princeton series in which this book appears). Lamont has given new energy to the study of how cultural values structure ordinary life in a variety of settings, and also has provided some powerful examples of how to approach this problem empirically. And Abend brings such great detail of focus to his investigation that his study sets a new standard for what is required in a study of public culture. One of the intellectual antecedents of Abend's approach is the micro-sociology of Erving Goffman. Like Goffman, Abend is interested in tracing the public manifestations of a cultural epoch -- not the subjective experience that may underly it.

What Abend wants to understand is the actual history of the field of business ethics. He isn't trying to discover the patterns of behavior that are found among businessmen, or the ethical ideas they embrace. Rather, he wants to tease out the material and ideological content expressed by professional "business ethicists", largely found in schools of business. What has been the public expert discourse on business ethics over the past century, and what framing assumptions about the ethical field does this discourse presuppose?

The book scrutinizes the content of business ethicists' understandings and prescriptions -- taking into account their context, the audiences they were addressed to, and the cultural repertoires they drew upon. ... Much like sociologists and anthropologists of science, I am interested in the tools, devices, technologies, methods, and tactics business ethicists came up with and avail themselves of. Manuals of proper behavior, success manuals, pamphlets, biographies, obituaries, typologies, illustrations, and codes of ethics are not neutral, interchangeable containers of information. They are social things, with particular causal histories and social functions, and whose particular modes of operation, modes of existence, and materiality must be analyzed as well. (11)

He correctly observes that there are three levels of ethics that can be considered from a sociological point of view:

First, there is the level of behavior or practices. ... Second, there is the level of people's moral judgments in the least, and societies' and social groups' moral norms and institutions. ... In this book I introduce a third level, which up to now has not been recognized as a distant object inquiry: the moral background. (17)

His interest throughout the book is with the third level, the moral background. This refers, essentially, to the frameworks, concepts, and principles of reasoning that people have in mind when they think ethically or normatively.

Moral background elements do not belong to the level or realm of first-order morality. Rather, they facilitate, support, or enable first-order moral claims, norms, actions, practices, and institutions. (53)

Moral background includes six kinds of topics, according to Abend:

1. Kinds of reasons or grounds that support first order morality
2. Conceptual repertoires
3. what can be morally evaluated
4. what counts is proper moral methods in arguments
5. whether first order morality is assumed to be objective
6. metaphysical conceptions about what there is and what these things are like. (18)

He compares the moral background with the meta-scientific beliefs that scientists bring to the study of nature or society.

What is it that members of a scientific community share, exactly? For one, they likely share many social and demographic characteristics. That helps account sociologically for their having become members of that community in the first place. More important, they have common epistemological and ontological intuitions, dispositions, or assumptions. They agree on how you go about answering a scientific question, and what kind of evidence and how much of it you need to corroborate a hypothesis. (28)

This focus is particularly interesting to me because it provides additional leverage on the problem of offering a vocabulary for the background conceptual resources that are a necessary part of all social cognition. As has been noted several times in earlier posts, there is an important body of conceptual and factual presuppositions that human beings unavoidably use when they try to make sense of the world around them. And the framework itself is only rarely available for inspection. So it is a valuable contribution when sociologists like Abend, Gross, or Lamont are able to pinpoint the content and structure of such systems of tacit cognitive framework in action.

The discussion of conceptual repertoires is particularly detailed and helpful. Abend defines conceptual repertoires as "the set of concepts that are available to any given group or society, in a given time and place" (37). He makes the valid and important point that conceptual schemes are culturally specific and historically variable; "this repertoire enables and constrains their thought and speech, their laws and institutions, and, importantly, the actions they may undertake" (37). He offers as examples of moral concepts ideas like these: "dignity, decency, integrity, piety, responsibility, tolerance, moderation, fanaticism, extremism, despotism, chauvinism, rudeness, ..." (38), and makes the correct point that ideas like these show up in some cultural and historical settings and not in others. So the realities that can be "seen" and experienced by historically situated people depend on the schemes or repertoires they have available to them in those settings. (The topic of conceptual schemes has come up frequently here. Here are a few earlier discussions; link, link, link.)

Abend finds two thematic sets of beliefs and concepts that largely serve to characterize most approaches to business ethics, which he refers to as "standards of practice" and "the Christian merchant." The first approach works on the assumption that ethical standards like honesty are good for business, all things considered, and that the function of business ethics writings and teaching is to help business people come to see that their interests dictate that they should conform, even when there are strong incentives to do otherwise. The second principle argues that there are higher moral standards that govern behavior, and that prudent adherence to rules of honesty does not get to the heart of business ethics. Broadly speaking the first approach is scientific and consesquentialist (JS Mill), while the second is theological and deontological (Kant). (In Kant's memorable phrase, "tell the truth though the world should perish.")

Abend demonstrates that the field of business ethics is substantially older than it is usually thought to be, extending back at least a century. To demonstrate this point he makes interesting use of Google's Ngram tool, a research tool based on Google's massive collection of scanned books, and finds that the phrase "business ethics" begins to take off around 1900, passing "commercial morality" in 1912 and "business morality" in 1917. All the other phrases go into a sustained decline in books from 1920 forward, while "business ethics" takes off.

The Moral Background is a major contribution to the emerging field of cultural sociology. Especially important among the virtues of Abend's research is his ability to work through a huge body of historical material from the subject -- the founding of various business schools, speeches by public officials about business scandals, the utterances of pro-business organizations like chambers of commerce, newspaper cartoons about business scandals, philosophical writings about ethical theory -- and to find meaning in these disparate sources that point back to the "moral backgrounds" from which they emanate. This is a truly gigantic task of intellectual integration, and Abend's book sets a high bar for future studies of the cultural meaning of intellectual, practical, and normative social realities.

How professionals think

photo: Morris Engel, Dock Workers 1947 (link)

The topic of how actors arrive at their choices and behavior has come up a number of times here. The rational choice model has been considered (link), and other, more pragmatist approaches to agency have been considered as well (link). Finally, a number of posts have considered the idea of character as a key determinant of action (link).

A team of distinguished experimental economists have recently provided a different perspective from any of these on the subject of agency and action. Alain Cohn, Ernst Fehr, and Michel André Maréchal recently published a provocative piece in Nature that appears to show that a certain segment of white-collar professionals (bankers) make very different decisions about their actions depending on the “frame” within which they deliberate (link). If they are thinking within the everyday frame of personal life and leisure, their actions are as honest as anyone else’s. But if they are prompted to think within the frame of their professional environment, their actions become substantially less honest. That professional environment is the large international bank.

Here is the abstract to their paper in Nature:

Trust in others’ honesty is a key component of the long-term performance of firms, industries, and even whole countries. However, in recent years, numerous scandals involving fraud have undermined confidence in the financial industry. Contemporary commentators have attributed these scandals to the financial sector’s business culture, but no scientific evidence supports this claim. Here we show that employees of a large, international bank behave, on average, honestly in a control condition. However, when their professional identity as bank employees is rendered salient, a significant proportion of them become dishonest. This effect is specific to bank employees because control experiments with employees from other industries and with students show that they do not become more dishonest when their professional identity or bank-related items are rendered salient. Our results thus suggest that the prevailing business culture in the banking industry weakens and undermines the honesty norm, implying that measures to re-establish an honest culture are very important.

Their research is an exercise within experimental economics. The methodology and findings are described in a brief article in Science Daily (link):

The scientists recruited approximately 200 bank employees, 128 from a large international bank and 80 from other banks. Each person was then randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions. In the experimental group, the participants were reminded of their occupational role and the associated behavioral norms with appropriate questions. In contrast, the subjects in the control group were reminded of their non-occupational role in their leisure time and the associated norms. Subsequently, all participants completed a task that would allow them to increase their income by up to two hundred US dollars if they behaved dishonestly. The result was that bank employees in the experimental group, where their occupational role in the banking sector was made salient, behaved significantly more dishonestly. 

A very similar study was then conducted with employees from various other industries. In this case as well, either the employees' occupational roles or those associated with leisure time were activated. Unlike the bankers, however, the employees in these other industries were not more dishonest when reminded of their occupational role. "Our results suggest that the social norms in the banking sector tend to be more lenient towards dishonest behavior and thus contribute to the reputational loss in the industry," says Michel Maréchal, Professor for Experimental Economic Research at the University of Zurich.

The test activity is a self-reported series of coin flips. Participants are asked to flip a coin a number of times and are informed that if they report more successes than average for the group, they will receive a cash reward. Here are graphs that capture the central findings of the study:

The left panel represents the distribution of successful coin tosses reported by the control group, while the right panel reports the average number of successes reported by bank employees in bank-salient conditions. The right panel is visibly skewed to the right in comparison to the control group, which indicates that individuals in the professional-identity group misrepresented their success rate more frequently than the control group. They were less honest within the terms of the experiment.

This is a striking set of findings for a number of reasons. First, it strongly suggests that there are strong markers and incentives within the social environment of the bank that lead its employees to behave in dishonest ways. There is something about working in and around a financial institution that appears to provoke dishonesty. This sounds like a "culture of workplace" kind of effect. It suggests perhaps that bankers are acculturated over an extended period of experience to possess traits of character and behavior that lead them to behave dishonestly.

But second, the data seem to refute the "culture and character" interpretation. The same set of experiments supports the finding that when these same individuals approach the coin-tossing task with a mental framework oriented towards everyday personal life, their choices revert to the generally honest behavior of the broader population. In other words, these findings do not support the idea that banking either recruits or creates dishonest people. Rather, the findings seem to imply that banking encourages dishonest behavior within the specific framework of banking business and only while the workplace signals are salient.

This research has gained broad exposure in the past several weeks because of its possible relevance to the past thirty years of bank fraud and financial crisis that we have experienced. But really it seems more interesting for the theoretical insight it provides into the difficult topic of agency: how do people think about the practical issues that confront them? How do they decide what to do?

These findings suggest that we should explore further the notion that actors possess distinct mental frames that they can take up or put aside readily, and that lead to very different kinds of behavior when confronting the same kinds of problems. Further, we should consider the possibility that these frames are highly portable and contingent: the actor can be led to choose one frame or the other, with important behavioral consequences. This finding seems to point in the same direction as ideas advanced by Kahneman and Tversky in much of their work together, including Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.

(I chose the photo of dock workers above to raise the idea that workplaces may have many different configurations of behavior that they create through signals and incentives. This may serve once again to suggest that Cohn, Fehr and Marechal's work may lead some researchers to examine other workplaces as well. Are policemen incentivized towards aggressiveness? Are dock workers incentivized towards solidarity? Are doctors incentivized towards interpersonal insensitivity?)

Culture change within an organization

It is often said that culture change within an organization or workplace is difficult -- perhaps the most difficult part of trying to reform an organization. What do we mean by this? And why is this so difficult?

The daily workings of an organization depend on the activities and behavior of the people who make it up (and those with whom it interacts). People have habits, expectations, ways of perceiving social situations, and behavioral dispositions in a range of stylized circumstances. Their habitual modes of behavior may conform better or worse to the official rules and expectations of behavior in the performance of their roles. If there is a practice of stretching the lunch hour, for example, absenteeism at 2:00 may be a significant drag on efficient work processes. As Crozier and Friedberg note in Actors and Systems: The Politics of Collective Action, individuals within organizations are not robots programmed by the rules of the organization; they are willful and strategic actors who interact with each other and with the rules of the organization in complex and sometimes non-conformist ways (link). Or in other words, the culture of the workforce -- the habits, practices, and ways of thinking of the participants -- can significantly interfere with the intended workings of the organization.

Moreover, these habits and expectations are often mutually reinforcing. The fact that A, B, and C have certain ways of conducting their work often reinforces the similar behaviors of D. For example, the Baltimore police detectives in The Wire have fairly specific habits and expectations when it comes to encounters with the corner boys in the drug trade -- a lot of use of force, a harsh tone of voice, a ready display of disrespect. These habits of behavior are infectious; new recruits model the behavior of their elders, and soon they are just as violent and disrespectful as the previous generation. So a police commander who wants to reform the style of policing in his district is faced with a difficult problem: changing policing means changing behavior of individual police on the street, but the tools available to the commander to bring about these changes are very limited. So the habits persist in spite of orders, regulations, briefings, and seminars.

Within a Fordist understanding of organizations, these conflicts between habits of behavior and the official expectations of the organization can be resolved through supervision: non-conformist behavior can be identified and penalized. Violent detectives can be punished or dismissed; line workers who break the rules can be fined; call center workers can be disciplined when they deviate from their scripts. But there are at least two problems with this approach. One is the cost of close supervision. It isn't realistic to imagine having enough supervisors to detect a high percentage of bad behavior by workers. And the second is the nature of much of the work within modern organizations, which depend on creating a space of autonomy and independence for the worker.  An architect, surgeon, or professor doesn't do his or her best work within a regime of time clocks, keystroke loggers, and penalties.

So the problem of culture change within a modern organization comes down to something like this. Organizations involving the productive activities of well educated specialists need to rely on a high level of self-motivation and self-direction on the part of its workers. Therefore modern organizations need to encourage high level contributions to the organization's goals through means other than close supervision and a code of penalties and rewards. This means finding ways of aligning the personal values of the worker with the goals and processes of the organization. The organization needs to create an environment of development and work in which the individual worker wants to achieve the key goals of the organization -- rather than disregarding those goals to pursue his/her own agenda in the workplace. In turn this means persuading the worker of some basic realities about the organization: that it is fair towards all workers, that the goals of the organization are worth achieving, and that the managers of the organization are talented and capable.

All is well if these assumptions about the organization are widely shared by workers and managers. If, on the other hand, there is a high level of cynicism and disaffection among workers or a high level of self-serving among managers, it is likely that the performance of both workers and managers will deviate from the organization's expectations of how they will behave. A culture of shirking, self serving, and "easy riding" will undermine the effectiveness of the organization. The problem of culture change is the problem of changing those assumptions and habits on the part of workers and managers.

There seem to be a few fairly obvious ways of trying to improve the culture of a given organization. One is to insist on a high degree of transparency in the organization so that workers and managers can come to have confidence in the basic fairness of the workplace. A second is to find ways of communicating the value of the work being done by the organization in a way that is clear and motivating for workers and managers. A third is to be effective at expressing the respect and appreciation that the organization has for the workers. And a final means is to recruit well when filling open positions, mindful of the intangible characteristics of behavior that the organization needs to proliferate. Will this candidate adapt willingly to expectations about cooperation and respect within the workplace? Will that candidate be able to embrace the values and purposes of the organization? Does that candidate have prior experience that permits us to judge that he/she will contribute strongly and willingly to the tasks of the organization?

Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology is Paul Rabinow's ethnography of Cerbus, the laboratory where the genetic research tool PCR was invented. The study provides a good example of how studies of professional workplaces can shed light on the outcomes of innovation and effectiveness that we want to achieve.

Greenblatt on civilization

Steven Greenblatt's recent book, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, is an ambitious widening of Greenblatt's intellectual palette. The title of the book refers to one of the central ideas in the metaphysics of Epicurus: the idea that atoms sometimes deviate from their straight courses, permitting collisions. This fact, according to Epicurus, is the only possible source of freedom of the will. So swerving is what takes determinacy out of nature and human action.

That is why it is necessary to admit the same thing for the atoms, namely, that there is another cause of motion besides blows [from collisions] and weight, which is the source of our inborn capability [to act freely], since we see that nothing can come from nothing. For the weight of the atoms prevents it from being the case that everything happens as a result of the blows [of collisions], which are like an external force. But that the mind itself does not have an internal necessity in all its actions, and that it is not forced, as though in chains, to suffer and endure, that is what this tiny swerve of the atoms, occurring at no fixed time or place, accomplishes. (The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writings and Testimonia, kl 1610)

Greenblatt's book shows a great deal of regard for the philosophy of Epicurus and the voice of Lucretius. Lucretius's poem was a passionate follower's presentation of the philosophy of Epicurus. Lucretius aimed to present the materialism, empiricism, ethics, and atheism of Epicurus to Roman literati in the most convincing way possible, because he was himself a devoted follower of Epicurean philosophy. Greenblatt gives a good exposure to what some of those ideas and values were, and he believes that its rediscovery in the early fifteenth century had a major influence on the development of western culture from that point forward.

But this isn't primarily a treatment of Epicurus or Lucretius or philosophical ideas.  Instead, it is an account of the fragility and contingency of books and ideas in history.  Greenblatt relates the circumstances of the rediscovery of Lucretius's The Nature of Things by Poggio Bracciolini in the early fifteenth century. It was Poggio whose obsession with ancient words and books prevented the permanent loss of this work. Poggio isn't romanticized. But it was his passionate commitment to Latin rhetoric, grammar, and thought, and his conviction that the current times were a corrupt deviation from the ideals of the ancient world, that led him to his pursuit of forgotten manuscripts throughout Europe.

Greenblatt paints a vivid picture of the intellectual environment of educated secular men like Poggio in the circumstances of early-Renaissance Rome and Florence and the complicated windings of the Catholic Church within that world. This is fascinating and absorbing all by itself, similar to Greenblatt's work in Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare.

But even more fascinating is a persistent subtext, unspoken but visible: human civilization itself took a disastrous "swerve" when Christianity took hold and the values, knowledge, and secular lives of the ancient world were all but extinguished. The humanism of Greek and Roman philosophers was eclipsed and largely forgotten, and a harsh and punitive religious orthodoxy took its place. The vile and bloody murder in 415 of Hypatia by a Christian mob in Alexandria captures well this transition (kindle loc 1435). Books, independence of thought, the love of learning for its own sake -- these values so prominent in the ancient world were suppressed and forgotten.

Nothing more emblemizes this swerve than the clarity of Lucretius and the near extinction of his thought in the emerging world of Europe after the dark ages. The rediscovery of the Lucretius book permitted the reintroduction of a revolutionary set of philosophical ideas into the Renaissance world that had enormous and emancipating effect. And yet it was a near thing: without Poggio's determination to rescue ancient books, this manuscript might well have eventually have turned to dust.

What seems particularly interesting about this episode is the force it gives to the idea that every aspect of human history is contingent. There is no teleology; there is no tendency towards better and better systems and values; there is often not even a cumulativeness of human achievement; there is only the helter-skelter randomness of key events that push developments in this direction or that.

Here is a good article by David Konstan on Epicurus in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; link. There are affordable Kindle editions available for the writings of Epicurus and Lucretius, as well as Greenblatt's own book.

Thinking poverty in the inner city

I find the question of how other people think to be one of the most interesting angles we can raise about the social world. By "thinking" I mean breaking down the world of experience into useful categories, reasoning about cause and effect among these items, and organizing one's activities around how he/she understands the world.  What are the mental frameworks through which people conceptualize and organize their daily social experiences? This is pertinent to the notion of an actor-centered sociology, and it is resonant as well with the social-ethnographic research done by people like Erving Goffman. (Here is an earlier post on the topic of social cognition, and here is a thread of posts on Goffman.)

This set of questions is particularly important across the lines of division that separate us in modern US society. The question of how poor Appalachian women think about America, or young black inner city men do, or how white suburban teenagers think about their futures, are all deeply interesting questions. And I fully expect that there are interesting and profound differences across and within the mental frameworks of these various groups.

A sociologist who breaks new ground on this kind of question is Alford Young, a sociologist at the University of Michigan.  His work falls within the field of "cultural sociology", and he works on issues of race and poverty in urban America. His recent book The Minds of Marginalized Black Men: Making Sense of Mobility, Opportunity, and Future Life Chances is a brilliant effort to get inside the mental frameworks of poor young black men in Chicago.  As he points out, most of American society has a pretty simple theory of the consciousness of inner city young men, and it fears what it sees.  Violence, drugs, and disaffection are the main correlates.  And Young demonstrates that these ideas are wrong in a number of important ways.

Rather, this work aims to show that research that focuses on these men’s anger and hostility hinders a more complex exploration of how they take stock of themselves and the world in which they live. (8)

Young's book builds a case on the basis of twenty-six interviews he conducted in 1993 and 1994 in the West side of Chicago. Young emphasizes the value of conversation:

What stayed with me over the years, especially as I went to the University of Chicago for graduate studies, was that a great deal could be learned about other people from extended conversations about mundane, everyday matters. (preface)

This is, obviously, a work of qualitative research. It is based on interviews with a relatively small number of individuals. Young's research hypothesis is that these individuals, while not statistically representative, can shed a great deal of light on the lived experience of young black men in their circumstances and the ways in which these individuals come to think about those circumstances.

Young wants to probe the worldviews of these young men; and he also wants to develop some theories about how they acquired these worldviews.  What were the factors -- structural, cultural, familial -- that led to these fairly different bundles of assumptions, frameworks, and beliefs about how society works?  And he is particularly interested in probing how these young men conceptualize stratification, inequality, racism, and discrimination.  If there is one major surprise in the book, it is the fact that for many of Young's respondents, these topics are not important and not much thought about.

Young argues at length that the mentalities he discovers through these conversations defy stereotypes. He rejects the idea of a "lower-class sub-culture" with a distinctive set of ideas about consumption and favors instead the idea that there are significant and interesting variations within the population of young black urban men.

Thus, it is important to pay attention to what people articulate as their own understanding of how social processes work and how they as individuals might negotiate the complex social terrain, rather than simply looking at their actions.... In order to advance this type of understanding, this study seeks to elucidate these men’s worldviews about a particular range of issues and concerns related to socioeconomic mobility. (10)

One thing that is particularly interesting that emerges from Young's analysis is the fact that these men turn out to have fairly different ideas about their own possibilities for mobility and a better life. And Young finds that these differences correspond to the extent of experience the individual has had outside the neighborhood.

The degree of exposure that the men have had to the world beyond the Near West Side emerges as key to understanding the differences in the breadth and depth of their worldviews. Such exposure might have come about for some through a few months of work in a downtown fast food restaurant, for others, through incarceration in a penal institution. Whatever the circumstances, such exposure provided opportunities for these men to interact across racial and class lines. Overall, interaction with other worlds led to the acquisition of a more profound understanding of the inequities in social power and influence, and how these forces can affect individual lives. Quite often it led to intimate encounters with racism. (14)

In addition to the inherent ethnographic importance of better understanding of this segment of our society, Young believes that this kind of inquiry can shed light on important social mechanisms that influence mentality.  He singles out social isolation and poverty concentration.

Social isolation refers to the lack of contact or sustained interaction with individuals or institutions that represent mainstream society.... Poverty concentration refers to the social outcomes resulting from large numbers of impoverished people living in great proximity to each other.... The introduction of the concepts of social isolation and poverty concentration created an analytical space for including and assessing the effects of an enduring lack of social and geographic connection between the urban poor and other, more affluent people. (31-32)

This connects to Young's other recurring theme, the idea of the importance of social capital and social networks for the formation of one's cognitive frameworks and for the horizon of opportunity that presents itself.

Cultural capital is the knowledge of how to function or operate in specific social settings in order to mobilize, generate responses from, or affect others such as social elites. Finally, social capital has a twofold definition. On one hand, social capital depends on the degree to which an individual is embedded in social networks that can bring about the rewards and benefits that enhance his or her life. In this way, social capital is seen as a precursor to the acquisition of other forms of capital (money, information, social standing, etc.). On the other hand, social capital has been identified as the package of norms and sanctions maintained by groups so that positive or desired outcomes occur for all members, especially those that no single member could achieve on his or her own. (59)

The extracts from interviews that Young provides -- on home life, school, work, life in the streets, and other topics -- are superb, and you feel like you've had a rare opportunity yourself to talk with these young men.

There are many surprises in Young's findings; for example, the less contact residents of the Henry Horner Homes had with the rest of Chicago, the less concerned they seemed to be about racial discrimination and injustice. Here is an exchange with Barry:

When I asked him “Do you think you are treated fairly in society?” he paused for a moment and then said, “I guess so. I guess I’m treated fairly, I guess.” I waited to see what else he might say, but nothing was forthcoming. After some gentle prodding Barry told me that he “just didn’t know no white people,” and that was why it was so hard for him to say more in this part of our discussion. (113)

Here is how Young understands Barry's responses about race:

Barry’s life history involved extreme social isolation not only from labor markets and other institutions relevant to upward mobility, but also from some of the most mobile and connected people in his own neighborhood, such as gang members, college-bound athletes and other students, and other individuals who maintained social ties beyond neighborhood boundaries. Barry’s lack of social ties denied him much-needed experience with people in different positions along the social hierarchy of American life. Barry’s social world included few people other than the low-income residents of the Near West Side. These are the same people he went to school with, sold drugs to, and lived amongst. The scantiness of Barry’s social networks paralleled the narrowness of his views on mobility and opportunity. (115)

Barry was highly isolated, but Devin was not. And here is how Devin answers similar questions:

Devin amplified his earlier remarks by making the following point about black-white relations in America:

I think they [white people] look at me as the, not my people, but to the racists, they look at me like the enemy. They feel that we all blacks is out to get them. Which I believe like this here, I’m is out to get them. . . . Yes. . . . Because they getting too much money. We fight for, we fought for the United States, not them. We went to war. We got to stand up for our rights. We not getting treated right. We’re not even getting equal rights.

Having lived lives that involved either the most interpersonal conflict or the most intimacy with people of high social status and wealth, it is not surprising that Ted, Casey, Peter, and Devin had the most conflict-oriented worldviews about stratification and inequality in American life. (131)

How does this research help with the practical challenges of moving forward in a more just way?  Young addresses this question too:

If a better day is to come for poor black men, then researchers and other parties who are sensitive to their plight must commit themselves to a new perspective on these men. In order for their lives to truly improve, increased employment and job-training opportunities need to be brought into their lives. These men certainly would benefit from an expanded and more secure labor market, but, as we have seen, there is much more that must occur for them to improve their lives. As the men’s testimonies about work make clear, however, increased employment opportunities alone will not deliver them from socioeconomic disadvantage. Information about municipal labor market opportunities, including the options and possibilities in the modern urban world of work and the means and mechanisms for accessing better employment, are as important as the jobs themselves.

Of course, this is the utopian vision of change. The current public view of these men is perhaps best conveyed by the “three-strikes and you’re out” rationale of recent governmental initiatives on crime and delinquency, increased incarceration rates for nonviolent offenders, and other law enforcement initiatives that have resulted in the removal of many low-income black men from the public landscape. This approach goes hand in hand with the public reaction to notions of the underclass, which centers on control and containment of an apparently troubling constituency. (202)

Economic development is of course needed in our cities.  But Young makes a crucial point that I would paraphrase in different terms. The extreme residential segregation that most American cities contain is itself a major obstacle to social mobility -- not only in terms of economic opportunities, but in the very fabric of how different groups understand the social world around them. Segregation is epistemic as well as economic.