Big stigma, little stigma

Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin have me thinking about stigma. Here’s Erving Goffman in Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963):

And even where widely attained norms are involved, their multiplicity has the effect of disqualifying many persons. For example, in an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual Protestant father of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. Every American male tends to look out upon the world from this perspective, this constituting one sense in which one can speak of a common value system in America. Any male who fails to qualify in any of these ways is likely to view himself—during moments at least—as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior; at times he is likely to pass and at times he is likely to find himself being apologetic or aggressive concerning known-about aspects of himself he knows are probably seen as undesirable. The general identity-values of a society may be fully entrenched nowhere, and yet they can cast some kind of shadow on the encounters encountered everywhere in daily living.

Goffman’s project was to ‘decenter’ stigma by noting that in some dimension almost everyone is one-down and painfully aware of it. Just about everyone has a touch of double consciousness, and the management of that eerie social disconfirmation of identity is a game known and played by all; his text is a handbook of familiar rules and strategies. Since the culture wars of the sixties even the white boys have started blushing, or at least bristling, under the onslaught of the stigmatized stigmatizing back.

It may look like Goffman is talking about what I’ll call ‘little stigma’, contingent embarrassments, and one of the standard criticisms of the book is that ‘big stigma’, structuring identities like race, class and gender, operates at a different scale with different dynamics. I think the genius of the book is how he is able to show big structural effects emerging from little interactive causes, but that’s a long technical discussion. Read the book. More immediately, the question this election and some of its key players raise is whether big stigma is eroding into the mass of overcomeable little stigmas like height, weight, age, education, accent, cultural style and so on that irritate, hinder and even incapacitate us without ever rising to the level of structural disqualification. I am not therefore suggesting that racism, sexism and classism have been overcome and are now stigma-free, but that the scale of that stigma may be changing in the U.S.. (I am also not suggesting that weightism, ageism, etc., are trivial burdens.)

That race has become little stigma is certainly the argument of Obama’s candidacy. Faced with the presumption that big structural racism would disqualify him categorically from the presidency, his response is ‘I don’t think so, let’s see’. He hasn’t made race an issue because he doesn’t think race is an issue [or rather, a special issue that needs to be his issue]. Although Clinton’s candidacy had to have the same premise regarding gender, her and her supporters’ demographics pushed toward a more old-school rhetoric of embattled exclusion.

Big stigma entrepreneurs like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright have tried to push Obama the same way, with no success. The barbarism of schematized identities (a terrific concept from Jennifer Cascadia found here) and their associated stigmas is that life without them cannot be imagined. Obama is imagining this life, and attempting to live it. So far something like half of this country, millions and millions of people, would like to help and join in with that.

Perhaps Tocqueville will turn out to have been right yet again when he wrote that “When inequality is the general rule in society, the greatest inequalities attract no attention. When everything is more or less level, the slightest variation is noticed. Hence the more equal men are, the more insatiable will be their longing for equality.” — Democracy in America (1835/1840). Perhaps our tolerances have grown very fine. We’ll need to get to work next on sexualities, the last of the ‘acceptable’ big stigmas which remains structurally excluding, at least in national politics.

“Science as a Vocation”

Max Weber’s famous essay, delivered as a speech at Munich University in 1918, has since been regularly attacked and dismissed for attempting to create clear distinctions between the ethics of scholarship and politics, and between facts and values. We certainly think we know much more now about the many and subtle ways even our most scholarly interests, perceptions and interpretations are conditioned by politicized factors like class, race, gender, culture, and so on. Weber knew this. He also knew that surrendering to it and treating all knowledge as naked politics made any kind of clean, reliable data for informed decision-making impossible. Might as well just run around shouting “Yay us!” at that point. His essay is not so easily dismissed and remains worth grappling with, as I suggested in my comment on yet another remarkable post on Easily Distracted about the perils of political engagement.

While I was dredging through my copy for that part of the argument I found again one of my favorite passages, a beautiful and devastating diagnosis. Enjoy:

Consider the historical and cultural sciences. They teach us how to understand and interpret political, artistic, literary, and social phenomena in terms of their origins. But they give us no answer to the question, whether the existence of these cultural phenomena have been and are worth while. And they do not answer the further question, whether it is worth the effort required to know them. They presuppose that there is an interest in partaking, through this procedure, of the community of ‘civilized men’. But they cannot prove ’scientifically’ that this is the case; and that they presuppose this interest by no means proves that it goes without saying. In fact it is not at all self-evident.

Cheers.

12 vole rollable solar panels

Welcome to my blog, o seeker of knowledge. I suspect you meant “volt,” but paws a whale and sea if their’s something hear that chicklets your pantry.

Hard

At a (contentious) faculty meeting at Cal State some years ago a colleague said something so completely funny that despite (or because of?) my tendency to remember only bad jokes it has stayed with me ever since. He remarked that higher education is the only big business in which the customer always demands less.

Tell it to the poor souls who run Student Services, but for those of us on the instruction side this can seem like an ironic definition of our lives. For those students this description fits it is, of course, a form of the game of limpy, or strategic incompetence as I have recently discussed. I am not automatically outraged by this as some of my colleagues are. I understand why the students might not instantly be excited to yummy up our dead voles. In this economy they’re stuck with college. Part of my job is to show them the value of the knowledge, skills and perspectives I am offering, that there’s lemonade to be made with these lemons.

It’s not my job to meet them more than half way, however. Limpy is a zero-sum game in which every bit of work I do is work the students don’t have to do. In the classroom and elsewhere its classic performance is to turn every simple little thing into a baffling, difficult fuss where it’s less bother for me to step in and tell them exactly what to do than to wait for them to figure it out themselves. Nope. Once I’ve determined that the question I’ve asked or the task I’ve assigned is clear, their effort must take over. My understanding of the social dynamics of awkward silence is far greater than theirs, and sometimes I must exploit this. Low standards do them no good.

Today I will be poking my students with this thought: If you make simple things hard, you make hard things impossible. Expedients become habits, and with habits, as James tells us, you’d better have good ones.

Default theories

There’s a terrific post up at In Harmonium on “Epistemological Battlespaces.” Bouncing off a variety of sources, including an earlier post of mine, and drawing on years of research, Marc considers a series of ideal-typical “meta-epistemologies” that often underlie (or rationalize) conflicts. It’s a banquet for thought.

Marc’s work made me think of a discussion I often have with students when I’m introducing them to formal theory of whatever kind. As you may know, college teachers of theory are often met with wrinkled noses and squinted eyes when theory comes up; theory is something eggheads do far from the ‘real world’, at best sort of a cultural boiled spinach. So the first task is to yummy up theory by showing that it’s something we all do, for good reasons, and may want to do better. I do this by talking about what I call default theories.

Theories are basically ways of explaining or making sense of things. Like the C: drive on a computer, a default theory is the first place you go when you’d like to know why something happened or what it meant. Everybody’s got one. If your default theory promises explanation or understanding, you stop there, boot up the operating system, and don’t look any farther. This is obviously just a different metaphor for the ‘boxes’ we’re sometimes told it’s good to think outside of.

Default theories are also where you go back to if you try some other theories and they don’t work out. Usually our tolerance for failure is much higher for default theories than for the ones we learn later. Default theories get built into our basic input-output system, so they’re pretty rough-and-ready. We then build a whole worldview onto their kernel, and this can become quite elaborate.

Here are some default theories about how and why stuff happens, corresponding to several overlapping worldviews:

It was Fate
It was God’s will
It was me, I did it
It was them, they did it
It was the government/Trilateral Commission/international Jewish conspiracy
It was human nature
It was hormones
It was the Devil

I’d be tempted to call all of these species of theodicy except that they are accounts of good as well as evil.

From the standpoint of people living inside them, default theories are effective and comforting orientations toward a big, confusing, sometimes scary world. From the standpoint of egghead theories the defaults are delusional, incoherent garbage that needs to be thrown out, or at best accepted as raw data about the perhaps exotically beautiful ignence of the masses. In his post, Marc starts with an illuminating contrast between “civilized discourse” based on open-minded reasoning from facts and its opposite, a narrow “totalitarian way of thinking.” He declines to choose up sides about which is better, and I agree in this undecision; but it also seems to me that this is a choice that is already made for each of us, by default.

Undecision

It turns out that when we’re undecided we may not be. Science reports a study by Canadian and Italian researchers who used image and word association to tease out self-declared undecided people’s political precommitments with 70% accuracy.

According to Denise Gellene of the L.A. Times (via the N&O) “[t]he researchers said it’s all part of an unconscious decisiveness that manifests itself in the hundreds of mundane, snap decisions people make every day, such as choosing which shoe to put on first or which seat to take on an empty bus.”

Yah. And we don’t even need a fancy theory of the unconscious to explain habituated pseudo-intentionality, although we do need a cultural theory to explain why some people are so resistant to the unremarkable observation that much of our living and thinking is automated for ease of handling.

If, as the study suggests, we’ve all mostly made up our minds already, I wonder about the conditions (psychological, sociological) under which people are inclined to defer or not defer their moment of bringing decision to consciousness. A vulgar behaviorist might wonder if there are rewards and punishments for some people for being, or appearing, decisive, deliberate, open-minded or accommodating. A good study would probably find that these conditions are highly situated, so that people who are inclined to defer decision in one context may be much more decisive in others. The great speckled ditherer is probably a rare bird. Power is certainly in play, but there’s power in both deciding and not deciding, so that’s another situated analysis.

And if undecisive people have already decided, what does this say about decisive people? It may be that only in cases of fundamental ignorance or complete disinterest is persuasion possible. Otherwise, as William James said, when we think we’re thinking we’re merely rearranging our prejudices.

Outside the box

There’s always a box. There are many of them. The best we can do is think outside this one. Sometimes that’s enough.

Historiography

Marge: “My professor told me that history is written by the winners!”

Homer: “Funny, I thought history was written by LOSERS. Heh, heh.”

Male dominance

I’m watching the Olympic women’s marathon, and the leader (a Romanian in her late 30s) is running mile splits under 5′ 30″.

I have a personal basis of comparison because back in my early 30s I got in pretty good shape and was running distance, 10 miles at a time. A good split for me was in the low 8s. Every once in a while I’d crank it up as fast as I could for a mile just to see what I could do. Low 7s. These women are running marathon splits almost 30% faster than I can sprint.

Guys who want to talk about male dominance want to cite that world-class men currently run faster than world-class women, and ‘the average man’ may currently run faster than ‘the average woman’. Interesting, but personally irrelevant. I am not those men. These women, in this particular field of physical accomplishment, are as far beyond this particular man right here as the hare is beyond the tortoise.

Yay them.

Dead zones

I don’t want to stay on this downer too long or I’ll start to attract a disturbing flock of readers, but I do want to take a stab at Dan’s question about what sorts of sink scarcity have us in trouble. Here’s just one example from this morning’s paper (Raleigh News and Observer, p.4A; the source is AP, to whom I will not link due to their peculiar ideas about intellectual property on the ‘nets, so I have typed in this quotation myself in old-fashioned fair-use style, for purely educational purposes of course; AP is reporting on today’s issue of Science, who I doubt they’ve paid for the privilege):

Sea life strained as ocean chokes: Like a chronic disease spreading through the body, ‘dead zones’ with too little oxygen for life are expanding in the world’s oceans. … Pollution-fed algae, which deprive other marine life of oxygen, are the cause of most of the world’s dead zones [about 400]. Scientists mainly blame fertilizer and other farm runoff, sewage and the burning of fossil fuels.

This is actually old news as a general trend; the study in question is part of the ordinary scientific process of adding precision and robustness (note I did not say certainty, which science as an empiricism does not claim to offer).

The problem is not just the fact and scale of dead zones, but their ability to create tipping thresholds in dynamic ecological systems. When things are in dynamic balance (not equilibrium but ‘metastability’) as ecosystems are, change effects are not additive but chaotic. So you can roll a boulder along, sometimes for quite a way, but once you get to the cliff that n+1 bit of push is going to change things pretty dramatically and irreversibly.

The problem, of course, is that the world’s very, very large population has been made possible by the sort of high-intensity farming practices that dump large amounts of fertilizer into waterways; and that population generates lots of organic waste as a natural entropic throughput of converting the food the fertilizer grows into energy; and the waste has to go somewhere, so yet more algae food in the water. (Or you can dry and burn the poo, which gets us into the energy economy and global warming, as does the methane from the poo before you burn it or dump it.)

In the article linked in the last post Daly talks about charging ’sink rents’ (payments to use global waste-absorbtive capacity) and wonders if OPEC might be in a good position to charge and enforce them with respect to petroleum use. I’m not sure how sink rents would work to discipline human organic waste, although I suppose we could imagine some pretty creative corking technologies being developed. I’m just sayin’.

Update: Thanks to Profacero for a fascinating reflection on various aspects of life in Lima, Peru including this arresting analysis:

Is Lima, then, a viable place to live? In the long term, no, because the smog and traffic will only worsen and with any small problem the city will run out of drinking water – studies have been done which show why. People do not realize this. A minister of the government recently announced that people in the country would just have to migrate to cities so as to have access to potable water (the streams and rivers having been polluted by mining and other activities), because the country cannot afford to put a source of potable water in each town. There are numerous problems with his statement but one of them is that concentration of people in cities is not a solution to the water problem.

It sure isn’t! Certainly not for the folks downstream, poo problem again, and certainly not when the drinking water runs out. Across the ocean Sydney, Australia is also in peril of running out of water due to overpopulation, pollution and climate change. No worries, mate, they’ll just ship it in from Tasmania.