Feasibility conditions on social reform

Several earlier posts have raised the issues of social change and social progress (post, post). People sometimes want society to be different (change), and they want it to be better (progress). But not all outcomes are possible, and some possible outcomes are not sustainable over time. So how should we think about sweeping prescriptions for social change? What constraints does social reality impose upon the reformer? And what kinds of moral and political constraints should be respected as we advocate for change?

Consider an analogy with the natural sciences and engineering.  Physics and the natural sciences set the boundary conditions on what kinds of structures can be built and used.  Engineering design involves acquiring a detailed knowledge of the natural properties of materials and structures, and then designing artifacts that satisfy human needs.  The human-built world is not determined by the laws of physics, since there are countless different technologies that could have satisfied human needs consistent with physics; but it is constrained by the laws of physics.  What is the corresponding relationship between the social sciences and social reform?

Let's begin by giving a schematic definition of a reform program. A program for reform consists of several things: a representation of the existing social world; a critique of some aspects of that world; a prescription for what the reformer believes would be a better social world; and a developed strategy for moving society from here to there. Reformers think that a specified set of changes will make for a better environment for some aspect of human life, for a group or for the population as a whole.  The representation of the current social world may include several different kinds of elements: representation of typical social behavior, representation of existing institutions and practices, and representations of things like justice, power, inequality, and repression.

For example, suppose one was an anti-racist reformer in the US in 1850 or 1950. The diagnosis of the present may be that current institutions and majority attitudes, behaviors, and practices systematically repress, demean, and stunt members of the racial minority. The reformer's goal may be the creation of a society in which racial oppression, discrimination, and bias do not exist. And the strategy may be to create powerful coalitions of players in society who will work effectively and quickly to disassemble racist laws and institutions and to educate the public to leave behind their racist attitudes and beliefs.

So what are some of the basic conditions of realism and feasibility that a legitimate program of reform must satisfy? For a proposed reform agenda to be rationally supportable, its goals must be feasible and accessible. The institutions, practices, and behaviors it postulates as an end state need to be consistent with what we know about how a society works. And there needs to be a possible pathway through which society can move from here to there.

In other words, the social reformer needs to demonstrate that --

• The described social arrangement can be implemented, given ordinary people and ordinary social processes and mechanisms; in other words, the social arrangement doesn't require a miracle to be achieved.
• The arrangement will have a significant likelihood of being sustainable and self-reproducing, given ordinary people and ordinary social processes. No miracles are needed to sustain the new society.
• There is a feasible pathway that can take us from here to there, consistent with ordinary people AND some set of moral constraints (democracy, commitment to legal processes, no illegal use of force). 
• The described social arrangement will be efficacious: it will have the social effects that it is planned to have.

A little more specifically, the program of reform needs to be consistent with our best understanding of how ordinary human beings behave.  It needs to create incentives that are consistent with ordinary human behavior; and the behaviors that result from these incentives need to reinforce the stability of the institutions that the program postulates. We don't need to offer a strong theory of universal human nature, in order to maintain that there are elements of motivation and psychology that are common among human beings and that will continue to drive their behavior in the future.

Second, the program needs to envision institutions that work correctly together: they successfully coordinate behavior, motivate citizens, raise public revenues, and maintain order as a coherent system. For example, we could have little confidence in a theory of the future that postulated a wide range of public services and a fiscal model that depended entirely on voluntary contributions by citizens to society's coffers. And we would likewise be skeptical about a vision of the future that aggregated local functions like trash collection and building inspections to the national level.

Third, we would want to specify that we need to have a theory of democratic feasibility: that there is a strategy of change that can be successfully executed within the constraints of a democratic society. No "dictatorship of the proletariat" on the road to a more just future; no use of violence by a minority party aiming to achieve its goals by force.

The social sciences can assist with each of these challenges.  Consider first the "ordinary behavior" condition.  Empirical studies of human behavior -- motivations, modes of reasoning, schemes of action -- provide a rich set of tools in terms of which to assess the likely behavior of individuals within a hypothetical social context.  Ethnography, social psychology, applied rational choice theory, and the philosophy of action all have much to contribute on this issue.

Turn next to the "institutional workings" condition.  One of the central tasks of the "new institutionalism" is to provide theories of the mechanisms and processes through which specific institutions interact with human actors to bring about social outcomes.  So institutionalists from sociology, political science, and economics have many of the tools necessary to provide an assessment of the likely workings of a specified set of hypothetical institutions.

The social sciences are also relevant to assessing the democratic feasibility requirement.  Policies are implemented by governments, and governments are subject to a variety of political constraints. Within a democratic electoral system governments are unavoidably concerned about the effects of various policies on the electoral blocks upon which they depend.  We can reason in some detail, as Adam Przeworski does in Capitalism and Social Democracy, about the feasibility of maintaining an electoral majority in favor of a given reform program over the period of time that would be required.

There is an important implication in all of this.  Envisioning a better future for our society is a good thing.  But in order to have a defensible plan for creating that future, we need to make the very best use possible of the social sciences in order to assess the feasibility, stability, and efficacy of the ideas for which we advocate.  Not all visions for the future can be realized; and some visions turn out to have unintended and unanticipated consequences that have proven disastrous.

International social science

Last month the International Social Science Council (ISSC) launched a major review of the status of the social sciences worldwide (link).  The report was commissioned and partially funded by UNESCO.  The full report is available as a PDF file, and it is an important piece of work.  It includes review essays by leading social scientists and chiefs of social science research organizations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and it makes an effort to provide a fairly comprehensive snapshot of the current state of affairs in the institutions, funding, and patterns of collaboration that currently drive social science research programmes in almost all regions of the world.  (It is interesting to observe that there is not a single mention of social science research in Israel.)

The primary focus of the report is on the institutional settings within which social science research takes place globally: for example, funding systems, universities and institutes, peer review systems, and publication systems.  To what extent are these institutions, in various regions of the world, succeeding in supporting and encouraging the kinds of social science research that will further the policy and informational needs of the publics they serve?  And to what extent are there substantial differences across regions of the world with respect to the depth and effectiveness of these institutional supports for the social sciences?

Here are three high-level changes in the social sciences that are noted in the report:

Three changes in the environment of social science production are particularly likely to affect their content, role and function. These are first, globalization, leading to the parallel internationalization of some public concerns and of social science research itself; second, changes in the institutional and social organization of social sciences; and third, the increased role of new information technology (IT) in the production and dissemination of social sciences. (1)

A more pervasive finding that structures many chapters in the report is the idea of "divides" within and across the world's communities of social scientists.  Most fundamental is the gap in resources and institutional capacity that exists between North and South with respect to social science research:

For any observer of social sciences worldwide, the most striking divide is between countries and regions. There is not much in common between a social science department in a well-endowed university of the global North and a social science research institute in a Southern country suffering from economic and political instability. (3)

(Here is a map indicating widely different levels of spending on tertiary education across the globe:)

But the report also highlights divides across the practices of the social sciences that reflect real differences in intellectual commitments:

From an epistemological point of view, social sciences have been diverse and are characterized by a multiplicity of methods, approaches, disciplines, paradigms, national traditions and underlying political and social philosophies. (3)

Before undertaking such a survey, it is necessary to have a working conception of the definition and role of the social sciences.  The report takes a pragmatic approach; the social sciences are "the disciplines whose professional association is part of ISSC" (3).  But here is the closest the report comes to framing the intellectual task of the social sciences:

The social sciences are concerned with providing the main classificatory, descriptive and analytical tools and narratives that allow us to see, name and explain the developments that confront human societies. They allow us to decode underlying conceptions, assumptions and mental maps in the debates surrounding these developments. They may assist decision-making processes by attempting to surmount them. And they provide the instruments to gauge policies and initiatives, ‘and to determine what works and what does not’. (9)

Another organizing thread in the work of this large team of collaborators is the idea that the social sciences are most valuable when they make a contribution to the solution of important social and political problems.  They specifically refer to a set of common challenges that are of concern to virtually all the regional research communities surveyed here:

Challenges such as environmental change, poverty, financial crisis and inequality, as well as trends affecting human societies such as ageing, marginalization and the rise of cities as strategic economic spaces in the global economy are occurring everywhere but take on different forms according to local contexts. The authors discuss a wide array of challenges and trends, but other challenges such as gender issues, public health concerns, security, food crisis, migrations, diversity and integration, and burning issues and trends could also have found a place in this section. (9-10)

The greatest value and interest of this report is the degree of detail it is possible to glean from the summary reports provided by the regional associations of the social sciences.  This gives a cumulatively detailed impression of the ways in which the social sciences are framed in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, as well as North America and Europe.  Here is a nice example from Huang Ping's survey of the status of the social sciences in China, where Ping provides historical context for Chinese social science:

In terms of what we see today, the status of the social sciences in China can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the first generation of Chinese students and scholars returned from Western countries, mostly the UK and the USA, after completing their degrees or their research.

After the Second World War and since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, social sciences in China have developed along three traditions: Chinese scholarly academia, especially Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism; focusing on economics in line with Soviet influences and Marxist studies; and later, Western approaches.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), social sciences almost disappeared and were hardly taught. After the opening-up process initiated in 1978, social sciences, along with science and research in general, were resumed and given a mandate to support the reform process. The Soviet influence gradually disappeared, and Western, especially US, social science approaches became the most influential. Sociology, for example, had been banned since 1952 and was reintroduced in 1979. During the past decade, traditional Chinese academic traditions have been reintroduced in universities and have caught the interest of an increasing number of students. (73)

The report does not explicitly attempt to map the range and diversity of research priorities in different regions of the world; but it is possible to begin to do so by paying close attention to the surveys offered by the regional associations for social science research. Topics vary across regions. What is more difficult to assess is the degree to which epistemologies, theories, and intellectual frameworks vary as well -- though Sandra Harding's contribution points in this direction. (See an earlier posting discussing work by Gabriel Abend on "Styles of Epistemology" (link).)

Particularly interesting for me are short pieces by Saskia Sassen ("Cities in today's global age"), Craig Calhoun ("Social sciences in North America"), Akhil Gupta ("Construction of the global poor"), David Harvey ("A financial Katrina?"), Jon Elster ("One social science or many?"), and Sandra Harding ("Standpoint methodologies and epistemologies: A logic of scientific inquiry for people").

In short, this is a genuinely interesting and detailed review of the status of the social sciences in the world today, and anyone with an interest in the "sociology of the social sciences" and the globalization of social knowledge will want to read it carefully.

The Chinese-American Left in the early 20th century

There hasn't been much historical scholarship on the forms of political activism that existed within the Chinese-American communities in the US in the early part of the twentieth century. Historical research on the Chinese-American community has more often focused on poverty, discrimination, employment, immigration law, and racism. A very important exception to this is the life-long research of Him Mark Lai, collected in a fascinating recent book (Chinese American Transnational Politics, edited by Madeline Hsu). And, as Lai demonstrates, it is a fascinating and important story.

Lai was an independent scholar who devoted a lifetime to historical and archival research on the history of the Chinese communities in the United States. He was trained as an engineer and had a career as a mechanical engineer for Bechtel in San Francisco. But what he really cared about was history. And he became a founding pioneer in the field of Chinese-American studies. Here are several links to biographies and archives of Lai's contributions (link, link).  Here is how Lai frames his analysis of the Chinese-American Left:

The different Chinese left movements from the later nineteenth through the greater part of the twentieth century were offshoots of important political and social movements of the West.  Probably because the Chinese population constituted only a small minority in the United States, little scholarly attention has focused on the historical development of these movements among them.  This essay strives to piece together information scattered among many publications and oral sources to reconstruct this history and the varying roles of the individuals involved.  This essay emphasizes activities concerning Chinese people in America rather than interpreting the inner workings, conflicts, or ideological leanings of global left movements.

Two factors stimulated the emergence and rise of left-wing activities among Chinese in America: the desire to improve their status in America, where they faced exploitation and racial oppression, and the hope of modernizing China into an internationally respected nation. (53)

The topic of interest here is the political identities that began to emerge within Chinese-American communities in the 1920s and 1930s. This is interesting for several reasons: the fact of an indigenous left in the US during these decades, which poses the questions of influence and alliance within the American left and radical working class movement; and the fact of rapid political development for reform and revolution in China itself, which raises the question of influence of Chinese radical thought on American Chinese intellectuals and activists. Lai documents the appearance of anarchist, socialist, and communist thought in leaders and intellectuals in leading Chinese-American communities, and he attempts to tease out the intellectual and political influences that created this efflorescence of the Chinese left in the US.  (Here is an interesting link to short texts referring to Chinese anarchists in the United States in the 1920s.)

One potential influence that conspicuously did not occur was deliberate recruitment of Chinese people by left labor organizations in the US. "Even the Socialist Party, despite its emphasis on the common interests of the proletariat regardless of race or nationality, was hostile toward Chinese labor" (53).  Only the IWW was able to genuinely embrace the anti-racist principles of the theory of socialism; only the Wobblies made determined efforts to organize and mobilize exploited Chinese workers in the US.

A key influence on Chinese-American activists was the impact that had been created in China by exposure to socialist and anarchist critiques of modern society.

During this period, Chinese Marxists and anarchists were chiefly intellectuals and students who had gone abroad to study and become politically active reformers and revolutionaries.  Through Japanese and European writings, they learned about the ideas of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx, Engels, and others.  Many articles touching on these doctrines appeared in newspapers and periodicals established by reform and revolutionary organizations in Hong Kong and Japan (54).

(Here is an online review by Jason Schultz of Arif Dirlik's book, Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution.  Dirlik gives a good representation of the thread of non-communist radicalism in China.)

These developments among Chinese activists and intellectuals diffused to the Chinese diaspora and concentrated Chinese populations abroad.  "Around the turn of the twentieth century, first the reformers, then the Hongmen, followed by the revolutionaries, founded newspapers in major New World Chinese communities such as San Francisco, Honolulu, Vancouver, and New York City" (55).  "The teachings of Proudhon, Bakunin, and Kropotkin gained in popularity as petty bourgeois Chinese intellectuals embraced the concept of committing acts of terrorism to help destroy the old order" (55).  "Around 1907-08 the IWW recruited two Chinese sympathizers in San Francisco to translate some of their literature.  In 1909 a Honolulu book club was already in existence and met periodically to discuss such works as 'A Critique of Socialism,' 'Scientific Socialism,' and 'Marx'" (55-56).

Some of these political-social theories began to have an influence on ordinary working people in the Chinese communities of the United States.  "Immigrants from China, many influenced by anarcho-syndicalist philosophies, were active in labor issues among the Chinese population on the North American mainland.  The widespread labor unrest in the United States and Canada that peaked during the years following World War I probably contributed to such developments" (58).  "One of the first major labor organizing efforts occurred in Vancouver, with the founding of the Zhonghua Gongdang [Chinese Labour Association] in 1916 and that group's efforts to organize sawmill workers in the area. In 1918 and 1919 the association led successful strikes that won on such issues as shortening the workday from ten to eight hours" (58).  "In the United States, Chinese spearheaded a major labor organizing effort in 1918, when Chicago waiters organized the Mon Sang Association to demand better working conditions.  However, the largest group of Chinese organized workers was the Sanfanshi Gongyi Tongmeng Zonghui [Workers' League of San Francisco, or Unionist Guild], founded in 1919 in San Francisco, which at the time had the largest population of Chinese shirt-factory workers" (58).

Anarcho-syndicalist ideas appear to have the earliest appeal to Chinese-American activists; but Marxism soon came along as well.  "Chinese in America showed interest in Marxism as early as December 1919, when Oi-won Jung, a KMT party member who had also been active in the Chinese Socialist Club, helped organize Xin Shehui [New Society] in San Jose, California, 'to study capitalism and communism and the radical politics of the New Russia'" (61).  But, Lai argues, this influence did not reflect a connection between Chinese activists and the Communist Party of the United States of America; rather, the influence proceeded from debates occurring in China around the direction and strategies of the KMT. And the mortal split that eventually occurred between the KMT and the CCP forced division between radical Chinese groups in the US as well (70).

This summary only touches upon the complex and fascinating narrative that Lai constructs, interweaving the local grievances expressed by the Chinese-American community and the increasingly complex political relationships that evolved in China between KMT and CCP groups as China struggled towards revolution.  It is a history well worth reading, and gives a good illustration of the power of "micro-history" as a way of discovering the underlying complexities of macro-level, world-historical phenomena -- revolution, ideology, racism, injustice, and resistance.

(And now, for something completely different -- Monty Python's version of anarcho-syndicalism:)

Public intellectuals in France and the US

What is the role of the intellectual in France in 2010?  And has that role declined in the past several decades?  Have the media and the internet profoundly eroded or devalued the voice of the intellectual in public space?  The Nouvel Observateur takes up these questions in a recent issue devoted to "Le pouvoir intellectuel" (link).

The line of thought is a complicated one.  Jacques Julliard frames the question by proposing that the public imagination of the intellectual involves a narrative of precipitous decline since the active engagements of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus.  There was a conception of the engaged intellectual who brought his/her ideas and convictions into opposition when state and society were going wrong -- Algeria, Vietnam, capitalism.  And, Julliard suggests, the common view is that the current generation of intellectuals have not succeeded -- perhaps have not even attempted -- at bringing theory, critique, and value into the public sphere.  Jean Daniel captures the idea in his editorial: "Faut-il rire des 'intellos'?"

But -- here is the complexity -- Julliard refutes this idea.  The tradition of the public intellectual is not attenuated or corrupted in France; rather, the current generation of intellectuals are in fact engaged and involved.  It is nostalgia for a golden age -- the age of Liberation, Communism, and Existentialism -- that foreshortens the reputation of the intellectual today.  But the golden age is a myth.

Tout cela est faux, archifaux, et prouve seulement que Saint-Sulpice n'est séparé de Saint-Germain que par quelques enjambées et par la piété du souvenir. Et revenons aux faits. [All this is false, badly false, and only proves that Saint-Sulpice is only separated from Saint-Germain by a few steps and the piety of memory.  Let us return to the facts.]

Julliard points out five salient facts. First, we sometimes confuse the intellectual and the literary artist.  The artist is valued for the aesthetic quality of his/her works, whereas the intellectual is valued for the significance of the impact of his/her ideas.  Second, the impact of Sartre and Camus on France's wars in Algeria or Vietnam was minimal, and later generations of French intellectuals have actually exercised greater influence.  In fact, Julliard argues that Lévy, Glucksmann, and Finkielkraut were more effective in their own interventions about policy in Bosnia than Sartre or Camus on the colonial wars.  Third, Julliard argues that modern media, including the blogosphere, have provided the contemporary intellectual with a much more powerful platform for disseminating ideas and values than was available to Zola, Sartre, or Camus.  He cites debates on the Israel-Palestine conflict, global warming, immigration, European governance, and even philosophy and literature, as locations of debate where modern media have amplified the voices of intellectuals.  Fourth, there is the question of designation: who decides who the "intellectuals" are?  The media select their talking heads; what confidence can the public have that these are the best voices available?  Julliard even suggests that there has been an inversion of quality; the telegenic pundit acquires reputation as a savant, rather than the savant being sought out as a pundit.  And fifth, there was a tendency of the "engaged" philosophers of the generation of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Camus, to be engaged in service to a cause -- Communism, most commonly.  So the positions offered by these intellectuals were often enough not "intellectual" at all; they did not follow from the principles, ideas, and methods of the thinker, but rather derived from the position of a party or camp.  Today's intellectuals, Julliard suggests, are interested in ideas rather than ideologies.  And with this commitment they have returned to the real vocation of the intellectual:

En rompant avec l'idéologie abstraite au profit de l'universel concret, les intellectuels, du moins les plus novateurs d'entre eux, sont revenus à leur fonction essentielle : la critique sociale, et d'abord la critique de leur propre pratique. [Dispensing with abstract ideology, today's intellectuals have returned to their essential function: social criticism, and especially criticism of their own practice.]

So Julliard's telling of the story expresses several key points: France needs public intellectuals; there are several overlapping generations of thinkers who are filling this role (and more to come); and in fact, the decline of ideology and the rise of media and the Internet makes the voices of intellectuals more effective rather than less.  In his editorial in this issue Jean Daniel reaches a similar conclusion: "En un mot: depuis que nous n'avons plus confinace dans des idéologies, nous avons un frénétique besoin des idées. C'est-a-dire des intellectuels." [In a word: since we no longer have confidence in ideologies, we have urgent need of ideas; which is to say, intellectuals.]

In continuing the theme, Nouvel Obs returns to the debate of 1980 by talking again with several of the young intellectuals it consulted in that year.  Pascal Bruckner, Luc Ferry, and Gilles Lipovetsky offer their perspectives on the role of ideas and intellectuals in French society from the vantage point of 2010 (link).  And there is a challenging interview-discussion with Alain Badiou and Alain Finkielkraut on communism (link).  So Nouvel Obs is doing its part -- it is helping to bring to the fore debates and thinkers who can help France navigate into the twenty-first century.

There is one form of practical proof of the importance of intellectuals in contemporary France that is not so visible from the United States: the depth and pervasiveness of the presence of deeply thoughtful scholars and writers on French radio and television.  For a taste of the breadth and depth of the voices of intellectuals in French society today, consult the list of podcasts made available from radio programming at France Culture (link).  Particularly rich are Les nouveaux chemins de la connaissance (link) and Repliques (link). These programs exemplify serious voices, serious debates, and nuanced and extensive discussions.

In the United States it seems that the whole issue of the public intellectual plays out differently than in France.  To begin -- the great majority of the "public" have virtually no interest in or respect for academic discussions of issues.  Fox News, talk radio, and blistering political blogs fill that space.

Second, however, there is a subset of the American public that does have an appetite for more detailed and nuanced treatment of the issues that face us.  Slate.com has between 5 and 8 million unique readers a month; the Huffington Post logged about 10 million visitors in December, 2009; and NationalReview.com logs about 4.5 million readers a month.  The Facebook page for "Give me some serious discussion and debate about crucial issues!" could be huge.

Looking at the question from another angle -- the academic world in the United States is itself a meaningful segment of the workforce.  There are about 1.5 million post-secondary teachers (professors and lecturers) in the United States, and the majority of these have doctoral degrees.  Of these, a smaller number fall into traditional "intellectual" disciplines: English literature (74,800), Foreign literature (32,100), History (26,000), Philosophy and Religion (25,100), and Sociology (20,300), for a total of 178,300.  In engineering, mathematics, and the sciences there are another 262,600 post-secondary teachers.  (These data come from a Bureau of Labor Statistics snapshot for 2008 (link).)  So a small but meaningful proportion of the US population have advanced degrees and intellectual credentials.  They are a core segment of the audience for public intellectuals. And, of course, you don't have to be an academic to be an intellectual.

Further, there are a host of specialists and experts on specific crises -- environment, finance, globalization, war -- who are called upon to comment on specific issues, and there are specialized "think tanks" that promote and disseminate research on critical public issues.  Moreover, voices like that of Bill Moyers have offered critical and nuanced perspectives on public television (link) (regrettably, now off the air).  And the United States has a number of prominent academics who speak to a broad public -- Henry Louis Gates, Jeffrey Sachs, Martha Nussbaum, Cornel West, Michael Walzer, and James Gustave Speth, to name a few.  So there is a domain of intellectual discourse that succeeds in escaping the confines of the academic world and the limiting echo-chamber of cable television; this domain helps to create and feed an intellectual public.

Overall, it seems fair to say that public intellectuals have little influence on public opinion and public policy in the US today.  Perhaps Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) still has a lot of validity.  But maybe, just maybe, it is also possible that the Internet is beginning to offer a bigger footprint for serious analysis and criticism for the American public and American policy makers.  Perhaps there is a broadening opportunity for intellectuals to help define the future for the United States and its role in the world.  And perhaps we can be more like France in this important dimension.

Truth and reconciliation commissions

When does a society need a process of "truth and reconciliation" along the lines of such processes in South Africa, El Salvador, and Argentina?  Here are some recent examples of truth and reconciliation processes:  the fate of the "disappeared" in Argentina (link); Indian Residential Schools in Canada (link); Korean War civilian casualties (link); Liberian civil conflict (link); lynchings in the US South (link); and, of course, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (link).

The general theory of TRC is that a society is sometimes grievously divided over events and crimes that have occurred in the past, and that honest recognition of those crimes may lay a foundation for reconciliation within the society. Here is a summary statement of the purpose of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission from the South African Ministry of Justice:

... a commission is a necessary exercise to enable South Africans to come to terms with their past on a morally accepted basis and to advance the cause of reconciliation.

But what more can we say about what facts might trigger the need for a TRC process?

First, such a process is only invoked when there is a serious history of injustice within the community, leading to a situation in which one group has been badly treated by other groups or powerful institutions.  The stakes need to be high for current members of society in order to justify establishing a TRC.

Second, a TRC process seems to be most needed when the consequences of the past injustice persist into the present: the bad things that happened in the past continue to burden some groups in the present.

Third, there is an implication of abiding resentment and rancor within the current population. The injustice of the past continues to be a source of emotional division between members of the relevant groups. This is the reconciliation part of the agenda: by honestly confronting the facts about the past injustices, the groups subject to this treatment may be in a better place to resolve their rancor. And more practically, honest recognition of the past may lead to concrete steps in the present to restore the interests and rights of affected groups.

Fourth, there is a common feature of violence and subjugation in the instances where TRC processes have been invoked to date: pogroms, mass killings, lynchings, and other forms of inter-group violence.

So what are some important examples of historical circumstances where TRC is called for? There are many:

• The expatriation of French Jews by the French government into the hands of the Nazis, leading to the deaths of thousands of people from this community.
• The Rwandan genocide.
• The Argentine military's policy of "disappearing" large numbers of its opponents, involving secret imprisonment, torture, and murder.
• White violence against black people in the American South, enforcing white power through lynchings, shootings, and violent intimidation.
• Organized ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Croatia, Bosnia, and Slovenia.
• The fact of slavery as practiced in the United States through Emancipation.
• The crimes of death squads in El Salvador in the 1980s, including a degree of US support and involvement.
• Robert Mugabe's use of ZANU-PF paramilitary thugs in Zimbabwe to maintain his political power.

Here is the immediate question of interest in this posting: how do the facts of northern race relations fit into the parameters of truth and reconciliation?  In the Detroit area the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion is calling for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to honestly examine the history of race and residence in the region (link).  The Roundtable states that --

The establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, inspired by the process that took place in South Africa, will allow us to develop an appropriate understanding of past injustices and to envision constructive remedies to create a new regional culture of fairness, equal opportunity and prosperity.

(Here is a link to the Facebook page for the organization in which the initiative is launched.)

So let's ask the crucial question: are the patterns of racial segregation and inequality of opportunity that are unmistakably involved in most US large cities an appropriate cause for a process of truth and reconciliation?

In many ways the answer appears to be "yes." Urban segregation was and is a source of massive injustice for black Americans.  It embodied a quasi-permanent pattern of inequality of opportunity and outcome on African-American citizens.  It was the result of specific but often hidden social practices that embodied a pattern of white privilege.  And these practices sometimes involved actual and threatened violence.  So entrenched discrimination and segregation constitute social harms that meet most of the criteria mentioned above, and the truth about the underlying mechanisms is not widely known.

In short, most honest observers would probably agree that the history of racial segregation in Southeast Michigan reflects serious injustice and continues to inflict harms on people in the region today.  These harms include disproportionate levels of poverty, unemployment, inadequate education, and differential health outcomes.  And many would agree as well that social injustices of this magnitude need to be addressed openly and honestly.

The map of the Detroit metropolitan area below represents a measure of "neighborhood opportunity" across the region.  It is published in an important report, "Opportunity for All," by john a. powell and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University (link).  What it documents in a very visual way is the current effects of past and present practices of residential segregation: the areas of high African-American population line up very precisely with the areas of low "neighborhood opportunity".  (Here is a keynote address by john a. powell to the Michigan Roundtable for Diversity and Inclusion (link) that lays out the data in great detail.)

So a sustained and honest effort to uncover and disseminate the historical causes of these patterns of racial segregation in the region is a positive step forward.

What is perhaps more difficult to answer is the question of efficacy.  Do these TRC processes actually work?  Do they succeed in changing attitudes in the populations in which they operate?  Do they help communities develop more harmonious and collaborative approaches to the problems they face?  And does "truth" lead to "reconciliation" in a significant number of cases?  The Michigan Roundtable conducted a survey of racial attitudes in Michigan in 2009, and one question in particular stands out.  In 2009 56% of residents said that we will have racial equality "in 100 years" or "never," compared to 48% in 2008.  In other words, well over half of all Michigan citizens despair of achieving racial equality within five generations.  And 68% of African American citizens in Michigan expressed the same lack of hope.  We need to do better than this at achieving real racial equality; the question is, whether the proposed Truth and Reconciliation Commission can help us move forward in practical and effective ways.

Concrete sociological knowledge

Is there a place within the social sciences for the representation of concrete, individual-level experience?  Is there a valid kind of knowledge expressed by the descriptions provided by an observant resident of a specific city or an experienced traveler in the American South in the 1940s?  Or does social knowledge need to take the form of some kind of generalization about the social world?  Does sociology require that we go beyond the particulars of specific people and social arrangements?

There is certainly a genre of social observation that serves just this intimate descriptive function: an astute, empathetic observer spends time in a location, meeting a number of people and learning a lot about their lives and thoughts.  Studs Terkel's work defines this genre -- both in print and in his radio interviews over so many years.  A particularly good example is Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do.  But Studs is a journalist and a professional observer; does he really contribute to "sociological knowledge"? (See this earlier post on Studs.)

Perhaps a better example of "concrete, individual-level experience" for sociology can be drawn closer to home, in Erving Goffman's work.  (Here is an earlier discussion of some of Goffman's work; link.)  Here are the opening words of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1956):

I mean this report to serve as a sort of handbook detailing one sociological perspective from which social life can be studied, especially the kind of social life that is organised within the physical confines of a building or plant. A set of features will be described which together form a framework that can be applied to any concrete social establishment, be it domestic, industrial, or commercial. 

The perspective employed in this report is that of the theatrical performance; the principles derived are dramaturgical ones. I shall consider the way in which the individual in ordinary work situations presents himself and his activity to others, the ways in which he guides and controls the impression they form of him, and the kinds of things he may and may not do while sustaining his performance before them. In using this model I will attempt not to make light of its obvious inadequacies.  The stage presents things that are make-believe; presumably life presents things that are real and sometimes not well rehearsed. More important, perhaps, on the stage one player presents himself in the guise of a character to characters projected by other players; the audience constitutes a third party to the interaction -- one that is essential and yet, if the stage performance were real, one that would not be there. In real life, the three parties are compressed into two; the part one individual plays is tailored to the parts played by the others present, and yet these others also constitute the audience. Still other inadequacies in this model will be considered later.

The illustrative materials used in this study are of mixed status: some are taken from respectable researches where qualified generalisations are given concerning reliably recorded regularities; some are taken from informal memoirs written by colourful people; many fall in between. The justification for this approach (as I take to be the justification for Simmel's also) is that the illustrations together fit into a coherent framework that ties together bits of experience the reader has already had and provides the student with a guide worth testing in case studies of institutional social life. (preface)

 Goffman's text throughout this book relies on numerous specific descriptions of the behavior of real estate agents, dentists, military officers, servants, and medical doctors in concrete and particular social settings.  Here are a few examples:

[funerals] Similarly, at middle-class American funerals, a hearse driver, decorously dressd in black and tactfully located at the outskirts of the cemetery during the service, may be allowed to smoke, but he is likely to shock and anger the bereaved if he happens to flick his cigarette stub into a bush, letting it describe an elegant arc, instead of circumspectly dropping it at his feet. (35)

[formal dinners] Thus if a household is to stage a formal dinner, someone in uniform or livery will be required as part of the working team. The individual who plays this part must direct at himself the social definition of a menial. At the same time the individual taking the part of hostess must direct at herself, and foster by her appearance and manner, the social definition of someone upon whom it is natural for menials to wait. This was strikingly demonstrated in the island tourist hotel studied by the writer. There an overall impression of middle-class service was achieved by the management, who allocated to themselves the roles of middle-class host and hostess and to their employees that of maids -- although in terms of the local class structure the girls who acted as maids were of slightly higher status than the hotel owners who employed them. (47-48)

[hospitals] Thus, if doctors are to prevent cancer patients from learning the identity of their disease, it will be useful to scatter the cancer patients throughout the hospital so that they will not be able to learn from the identity of their ward the identity of their disorder. (The hospital staff, incidentally, may be forced to spend more time walking corridors and moving equipment because of this staging strategy than would otherwise be necessary.) (59)

[hotel kitchens] The study of the island hotel previously cited provides another example of the problems workers face when they have insufficient control of their backstage. Within the hotel kitchen, where the guests' food was prepared and where the staff ate and spent their day, crofters' culture tended to prevail, involving a characteristic pattern of clothing, food habits, table manners, language, employer-employee relations, cleanliness standards, etc. This culture was felt to be different from, and lower in esteem than, British middle-class culture, which tended to prevail in the dining room and other places in the hotel. The doors leading from the kitchen to the other parts of the hotel were a constant sore spot in the organization of work. (72)

So Goffman's sociology in this work is heavily dependent on the kind of concrete social observation and description that is at issue here.  Much of the interest of the book is the precision and deftness through which Goffman dissects and describes these concrete instances of social interaction.  This supports one answer to the question with which we began: careful, exacting and perceptive description of particular social phenomena is an important and epistemically valid form of sociological knowledge.  Studs Terkel contributes to our knowledge of the social world when he accurately captures the voice of the miner, the hotel worker, or the taxi driver; and a very important part of this contribution is the discovery of the singular and variable features of these voices.

At the same time, it is clear that Goffman goes beyond the concrete descriptions of restaurants, medical offices, and factory floors that he offers to formulate and support a more general theory of social behavior: that individuals convey themselves through social roles that are prescribed for various social settings, and that much social behavior is performance.  (This performative interpretation of social action is discussed in an earlier post.)  And this suggests that there is a further implicature within our understanding of the goals of sociological knowledge: the idea that concrete descriptions should potentially lead to some sort of generalization, contrast, or causal interpretation.

Short thoughts from Clifford Geertz

Clifford Geertz was a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and he succeeded remarkably well in bridging the gap between the university and the public in many of his "postings."  (I think of these contributions as a pre-web version of a blog.)  Many of these contributions are collected in a superb recent volume, Life among the Anthros and Other Essays, edited by Fred Inglis.  These range from his first contribution to NYRB in 1967, "Under the Mosquito Net," on Malinowski, to his last in 2005, "Very Bad News," a review of Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Richard Posner, Catastrophe: Risk and Response.  A common theme across the essays is the often surprising and sometimes comic misunderstandings that have occurred across major geo-cultural cleavages, including especially the west and Islam.

Geertz had a splendid eye for making sense of ideas and meanings -- pulling out the figure from the ground.  Here are a few lines on the significance of Foucault:

Foucault's leading ideas are not in themselves all that complex; just unusually difficult to render plausible.  The most prominent of them, and the one for which he has drawn the most attention, is that history is not a continuity, one thing growing organically out of the last and into the next, like the chapters in some nineteenth-century romance.  It is a series of radical discontinuities, ruptures, breaks, each of which involves a wholly novel mutation in the possibilities for human observation, thought, and action....  Under whatever label, they are to be dealt with "archaeologically,"  That is, they are first to be characterized acording to the rules determining what kinds of perception and experience can exist within their limits, what can be seen, said, performed, and thought in the conceptual domain they define.  That done, they are then to be put into a pure series, a genealogical sequence in which what is shown is not how one has given causal rise to another but how one has formed itself in the space left vacant by another, ultimately covering it over with new realities.  The past is not prologue, like the discrete strata of Schliemann's site, it is a mere succession of buried presents. ("Stir Crazy," 1978, 30)

This is a very concise, insightful statement of Foucault's position, and certainly more understandable than any particular stretch of The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language.

Or consider a key and enduring topic for Geertz: the difficulties that intrude on gaining a single, consistent, and fact-based representation of another culture.  "In Search of North Africa" was published in NYRB in 1971, and poses many of the questions of plural interpretation and perspective that are hallmarks of Geertz's own meta-view of ethnography.  

Academic monographs, social realism documentaries, and belletristic essays compete to develop a representational form in which Maghrebi society can be caught and communicated.  The first result of the dawning realization that though society doubtless exists independently of the activity of sociologists, sociology does not, is a proliferation of genres.  The second, still so faint as to be scarcely visible, is the development of the sort of radically experimental attitude toward modes of representation that set in so much earlier elsewhere in modern culture. (62)

Here Geertz raises the questions of objectivity and perspective that are unavoidable in the human sciences.  "The document makers [of films and books] are, if anything, even more bound to the notion that social reality is presented to them directly and that the main thing is to look at it with sufficient care and the appropriate attitude."  But, Geertz suggests, the relationships between social reality, representation, and knowledge are more complicated than this.

Here is one reason why the simplistic realism of the documentarian won't work: 

North Africa doesn't even divide into institutions.  The reason Maghrebi society is so hard to get into focus and keep there is that it is a vast collection of coteries.  It is not blocked out into large, well-orgaized, permanent groupings -- parties, classes, tribes, races -- engaged in a long-term struggle for ascendancy. It is not dominated by tightly knit bureaucracies concentrating and managing social power; not driven by grand ideological movements seeking to transform the rules of the game; not immobilized by a hardened cake of custom locking men into fixed systems of rights and duties. (63)

Or, in other words, the business of choosing a conceptual scheme and then applying it objectively to Maghrebi society is doomed from the start; the social activities, groupings, and transactions themselves are fluid and ever-changing.  "Structure after structure -- family, village, clan, class, sect, army, party, elite, state -- turns out, when more narrowly looked at, to be an ad hoc constellation of miniature systems of power, a cloud of unstable micro-politics, which compete, ally, gather strength, and, very soon, overextended, fragment again" (63). (This perspective converges closely with the ideas offered in the plasticity and heterogeneity threads here.)

And what about catastrophe?  Geertz takes up Jared Diamond and Richard Posner in one of his last contributions to NYRB in 2005.  Geertz acknowledges the bad news all around us, when it comes to the ways in which human society seems to be capable of destroying itself through its own activities.  But he has a bone to pick with both of them: they really don't get down into the sociology, the psychology, and the cultural frames of the people who make up our modern societies.  And yet these contextual, local details matter enormously in how a group responds to catastrophe. Here is Geertz's critique of both Diamond and Posner:

What is most striking about both Diamond's and Posner's views of human behavior is how sociologically think and how lacking in psychological depth they are.  Neither the one, who seems to regard societies as collective persons, minded super-beings intending, deciding, acting, choosing, nor the other, for whom there are only goal-seeking individuals, perceiving and calculating rational actors not always rational, has very much to say about the social and cultural contexts in which their disasters unfold.  Either heedless and profligate populations "blunder" or "stumble" their way into self-destruction or strategizing utility maximizers fail to appreciate the true dimensions of the problems they face.  What happens to them happens in locales and settings, not in culturally and politically configurated life-worlds--singular situations, immediate occasions, particular circumstances. But it is within such life-worlds, situations, occasions, circumstances, that calamity, when it occurs, takes intelligible shape, and it is that shape that determines both the response to it and the effects that it has. (165)

In a word, Geertz puts it forward that even our largest concerns about our social futures require the kind of detailed, meaning-inflected and locally specific understandings that a certain kind of ethnographic imagination brings forward.  We need "local knowledge" to navigate a global future.

This volume is a great example of the role that a certain kind of publishing can play in our intellectual lives: capturing and refreshing the insights of thinkers and observers over a period of decades.  Geertz's ideas in this volume were the product of his evolving mind from the sixties to the end of his life; and it is enormously stimulating to keep that long evolution in front of our minds as we grapple with our own issues and innovations.  We tend to think only of the most recent ideas and contributions as "cutting edge"; but there is a hugely important dimension of historical depth that we can discover by returning to the insights of earlier generations.

(See an earlier post on Robert Darnton that illustrates another important intellectual corpus laid out in the pages of decades of the NYRB.  The image above is, of course, a photo of a Balinese cockfight, one of Geertz's ethnographic icons.)

More on jobs and people in Michigan

Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz did an important empirical study of regional adjustment to employment shock in 1992 (link). Here is their central conclusion:

"We have shown that most of the adjustment of states to shocks is through movements of labor, rather than through job creation or job migration." (54)

In other words, they find that the US labor market is fairly well integrated, and an extended period of unemployment and low wages leads workers to seek new opportunities in other regions. (Here is a recent book by Katz and a collaborator; The Race between Education and Technology.)

What implications does this have for Michigan? Let's say that Michigan's unemployment rate will adjust to approximately the national rate by 2020, and that the national rate will recover to 6% by then. This implies 6% unemployment for Michigan, compared to 14% today. Let's assume that less than half of the recovery comes from new and imported jobs. What does this imply for out-migration and population loss for the state?

The arithmetic is straightforward. There are currently about 4.2 million jobs in Michigan and 681,000 unemployed workers, for a labor force of about 4.9 million. (Here is a page of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Michigan; link.) What would it take to bring Michigan's unemployment rate down to 6% by 2020? Here is one solution: 150,000 new jobs and 250,000 out-migrants from the labor force. And assuming that each worker has one dependent on average, this means a loss of about 500,000 people from Michigan's current population of about 9.9 million--for a total population of 9.4 million in ten years.

This is a significant but not overwhelming loss of population -- about 5%. And the number of jobs required on this scenario is moderate and achievable -- 150,000 new jobs in ten years. This amounts to about 4% jobs growth per year.  We can make some educated guesses about the demographics of the population that leaves the state -- they are likely to be young, they are likely to have children, and they are likely to be better educated than the general population. So the economic and social impact of this exodus is likely to be greater than their 5% share of the general population. But all of that conceded, it would appear that there is a reasonably achievable pathway for Michigan to dig itself out of its current crisis.

So let's get serious about preparing the ground for a healthy recovery; let's enhance K-12 education, extend the reach of university attainment, improve the quality of life in our cities, and get serious about redesigning our state's fiscal system.

Spatial patterns in the US

Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States.  The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State.  The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country.  The final image is a photograph of the United States from space at night, showing the concentration of lights across the country.  Basically the images correspond to where people live; where they travel; and where they exchange data.  Unsurprisingly, the maps line up very well.

The most interesting question to consider is not the structure of the networks represented by air travel and internet activity.  The nodes of both air travel and internet traffic line up exactly with the cities and metropolitan areas represented in the population map, and they align well with the concentration of lighted areas in the bottom frame as well.  The patterns of both air travel and internet traffic take the form of a swath extending from the dense eastern corridor of the US (Boston to Washington) to California (San Francisco to San Diego), with Chicago standing out as a significant node in the middle of the country.  This is entirely obvious and predictable; travel and communication follow population density.

Rather, the more interesting question is this: to what extent is there evidence of internet and air traffic at a node that is disproportionately greater than would be expected given the population of that node?  This is the kind of question that drives Saskia Sassen's classification of cities as local, regional, national,  and global (The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo and Global Networks, Linked Cities).  (Here is an earlier post on Sassen's work.)

Fundamentally, a city that originates 10 times the volume of internet traffic compared to other cities of similar size is worth looking at in detail.  Its activity level suggest an exceptional concentration of organizations and people that are unusually integrated into global networks of communication and data exchange.  It is a location for knowledge-intensive activity: high-end services, banking, universities; and it is a place with intensive relations to other nodes.  Likewise, a city that originates 5 times as many air-travel passengers as comparably sized cities elsewhere is likely to be a specialized location for business and high-end service activity (or else a population of very dedicated tourists).  In other words, the most interesting feature that these data sets might show us about the economic roles of US cities is not visible in the graphics presented here.

So it would be very interesting to be able to "divide" the activity levels represented by the middle two graphs by the populations represented by the top graph, so we could see which cities in the US are "super data exchangers" and "super travel generators".  And this would give us an indication of the degree of high-end, knowledge-intensive activity that is concentrated in the place -- thereby providing a measure of its importance in the national and global economy.  It is possible, for example, that Ann Arbor or Madison would show up as spikes of internet activity relative to their relatively small populations; and Raleigh-Durham might show up as a spike of air travel relative to population, reflecting an unusual concentration of high-end service businesses in this region.  The above-average data and air-traffic nodes are perhaps the dynamic centers of 21st-century economic activity.

Likewise, it would be interesting to identify the cities that have lower-than-expected levels of travel or internet activity; this would suggest local economies that are somewhat more self-contained and less integrated into the national economy than other locations.  And it would be interesting to see if there are significant pairings among locations for either kind of transaction; for example, is the volume of data exchange between Los Angeles and New York significantly greater than that between New York and Chicago or Boston?  And would this serve as an indicator of the degree of economic and business integration between these specific locations?

These views of the United States are interesting because they allow us to see the country as an inter-connected system of places and activities. They serve as something like a dynamic CT scan of the brain: certain connections between places "light up", providing an indication of systemic activities that warrant further investigation.

(The middle panel was published in the Harvard Alumni Magazine (link).  The population map comes from Urbanomnibus (link).)

Michigan's population loss

Earlier posts have raised the possibility that Michigan's jobs crisis will lead to significant population loss (link, link, link).  The basic idea is this: Michigan has lost more than 800,000 jobs since 2002.  Its population in 2002 was about 10 million.  The current unemployment rate in the state is about 15%, or just under.  In order to bring the unemployment rate back to the 2002 levels (~6%), roughly 800,000 jobs need to be created; or else the working population needs to decline by about that much.  Assuming one dependent for each worker, that amounts to a loss of about 1.6 million people.  Other combinations are possible; create 400,000 jobs and only 800,000 Michigan residents would leave; etc.

So what is the situation of out-migration today?  Here are some recent reports over the past twelve months:

• Detroit News 4/2009: Eight-year population exodus staggers state (link)
• AnnArbor.com: 89,844 residents lost 2005-2008 link
• CrainsDetroit 12/23/09: population falls below 10 million; low birthrate and high out-migration responsible link
• Michigan State University report on population loss 12/09 link
• Toledo Blade: Michigan is tops in 1-year population loss 12/09 link
• Detroit Free Press: Rochelle Riley, City's rebirth at risk over lack of births link
• Data Driven Detroit: data sources on population in Detroit link

And where are Detroit metro families going?  Here is a map Forbes published (link) showing the destinations in 2008:

Notice that almost all the lines are red, indicating out-migration.  Compare that with the pattern of migration for Seattle:

And Chicago:

In other words, a significant amount of out-migration has already occurred in Michigan, and there is no indication that this process will slow down.

In fact, some observers have argued that Michigan's population losses have been less than expected in the past 18 months because of the generally bad economic conditions in other parts of the country (and because of the difficulty of selling a house).  But if this is a factor, then we should expect an increase in out-migration when job creation takes hold in other parts of the country.

There is another worrisome part of this story: the fact that the best-educated and most talented people are likely to be the first to go.  They are nationally competitive with skills that can bring value to employers in other parts of the country; so population loss is likely enough to be talent-drain as well.

It is hard to find any political or business leader in the state of Michigan who believes that it is possible to create 100,000 new jobs a year in the state over a prolonged period.  This seems to imply chronic high unemployment in the state for a very long time, with all the features of poverty, poor health, and low quality of life that comes along with this scenario.

So is there a different possible future for Michigan that assumes a different paradigm: a smaller population; smaller cities; but a more robust and diverse economy and a higher overall standard of living?  Is it time, perhaps, to be planning for a smaller but more prosperous and healthy state?

There are many serious challenges that this transformation would create.  A declining population implies a declining tax base; so state and municipal revenues would decline as well.  School systems were built for a certain level of capacity; take 15-25% of the children out of a school system and you have a funding crisis in the schools as well.  Detroit's Mayor Dave Bing is grappling with the need to consolidate the land area of the population served by the city of Detroit, in order to achieve a balance between resources and needs.  And, of course, the state would continue to lose representation in the House of Representatives.  So designing a strategy for "smaller, healthier, wealthier" is not simple.  But it may be time to begin thinking along these lines.

UPDATE December 28, 2010

The results of the 2010 census are now available, and Michigan is the only state in the country to have lost population since 2000.  The country as a whole gained 9.6%, whereas Michigan lost .6% of its population -- roughly 60,000 people.  Here is a news article from AP (link).