The Forest and the Trees

by Allan Johnson

  If the beliefs that identify democracy with capitalism are false or merely hide the truth that underlies the problems that plague us, then the almost sacred protected status of ‘the obvious’ becomes a trap, with us right in the middle.

  Values, Choice, and Conflict

  In a sense, every cultural idea rests on a belief of some kind, because to think about something we first have to see it as something that exists, even if only in our imaginations. But many cultural ideas go beyond basic questions of fact to construct a more complex social reality. Cultural values do this by ranking things in terms of how socially desirable they are—how good or bad, better or worse, superior or inferior they are judged to be.5

  In many cultures, for example, education is valued above ignorance; honesty above dishonesty; profit above loss; kindness above cruelty; cleanliness above filth; married above single; sex above celibacy; rich above poor; heterosexual above gay, lesbian, or bisexual; white above color; male above female; and being in control above not being in control. In each case, cultural beliefs define what is being compared and ranked. We have to know what we mean by ‘education’ or who qualifies as ‘white’ or ‘heterosexual,’ and beliefs provide the answer. Values take this a step further with a rough hierarchical order that gives various aspects of social life a vertical dimension. In other words, it is not just that ‘heterosexual’ and ‘lesbian’ differ in what we think they are, for cultural values also rank one as preferable to the other.

  Values loom large in our lives because they provide a way to choose between alternatives that might otherwise appear equivalent. Almost everything we do involves a choice among different values, although the choice may come to us so easily that we are not aware of it as such. We decide which clothes to wear each day (or whether to wear them at all); whether to work longer hours to earn more money or fewer hours to spend more time doing other things; whether to get a job right after high school or to go on to college; whether to have sex with someone we feel attracted to; whether to object when we hear sexist, racist, and other forms of oppressive talk; whether to spend the evening reading or watching a movie or surfing the Internet; whether to tell friends about our sexual orientation or keep it to ourselves; whether to vote and for whom; whether to have an abortion or bear a child; or whether to tell friends a truth they would rather not hear. From trivial matters to decisions that can transform our lives or the life of a nation, we are always weighing the relative value of what we see as our alternatives, and cultural values shape how we go about it.

  Values do more than influence how we choose between one course of action and another, for they also affect how we perceive and treat ourselves and other people. When values rank European above Latin American, for example, or male above female, or not having a disability above having one, people are sorted into different places in a social hierarchy of worth. This process makes such problems as privilege and oppression more than issues of seeing differences among people. It also ranks entire categories of people in ways that exclude, devalue, and oppress some and include, elevate, and privilege others. The effects of such ranking can be as monumental as the genocidal wars of ethnic cleansing in Rwanda, Darfur, or Bosnia or as subtle as a white waiter’s seating a black customer next to the kitchen door and never coming back to take an order. But in every case, what is at stake are the dignity and worth of human beings and the cultural justification of systemic patterns of privilege and oppression.

  Like other aspects of culture, values tend to have a taken-for-granted quality about them. We experience them as a natural part of reality, not as socially constructed ideas about reality. Our preference for what we value feels so immediate and comes so easily that we assume our particular values are a universal part of the human experience, that there was not a time or a place when people did not feel this way. For some preferences, this is probably true. Even infants would rather be warm than cold, comfortable than in pain, fed rather than hungry.

  But most of what we value is what we learn to value through socialization in a particular system’s culture. A powerful way to see this is to experience cultures that promote different values than our own. A few years ago, for example, I traveled to Norway to visit relatives. We spent several days in the city of Oslo, where the extensive train system runs within the city and outward toward surrounding communities. I was startled to notice trains without conductors to collect fares or punch tickets and train and subway stations with no ways to make sure people paid their fares—no gates, no turnstiles, no ticket booths. I watched people board the train, take out a multiple-ride ticket, and insert it in a machine that punched it each time they rode the train. And I saw people buy single-ride tickets from machines on station platforms and then put the tickets in their pockets since there was no one to collect them.

  I cannot imagine U.S. transportation systems operating in this way, and the reason is that the two societies have such different cultures. Norwegian culture includes beliefs that the train system essentially belongs to everyone, that it cannot keep running if people do not pay the fare, and that most people will therefore pay as part of doing their share. The culture also places a higher value on trust than it does on making sure that no one gets away without paying. And it places a higher value on a sense of belonging to the community and doing your bit to make it work than it does on getting something for nothing.

  In the United States, however, the belief is that most people will not pay for what they can get for nothing and that getting something for nothing is more important than fostering a sense of community and shared purpose. There are exceptions, especially in smaller communities. In the small town where I live, for example, it is common in the summer to see roadside stands with fruits and vegetables for sale and no one there collecting money, just an open cash box and a sign listing prices. And some colleges have student honor codes instead of exam proctors and other kinds of policing to prevent student cheating. In both cases, a value choice is being made regarding how to organize the system. I am sure that some people take vegetables without paying and that some students cheat and get away with it, and these behaviors violate some important values. But something regarded as even more valuable is gained in this type of system, for people are able to live and work in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect that is hard to maintain if we are always assuming that everyone will cheat whenever they get the chance.

  The more I see of other cultures, the more aware I am of my own culture as a culture, and the more I see that things are not just what they are but are what my culture makes them out to be. I can also see that when I make choices, I always choose from a limited range of alternatives offered by my culture. This suggests that we never truly make anything like a ‘free’ choice. As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer puts it, when it comes to values, “We want what we will, but we don’t will what we want.”6

  In other words, when I feel myself wanting a new car, I don’t realize how my wanting a new car is connected to a cultural value placed on material possessions—more stuff is better than less, and new stuff is better than old, and stuff I don’t have is better than stuff I do. Since we are socialized into a set of cultural values and do not choose how that happens, the values we acquire limit us in ways that are hard to see until we step outside and realize they are not all that’s possible.

  In that sense, my ‘freedom’ to want a car is shaped by an economic system that depends on ever-expanding markets and rising profits, both of which depend on encouraging people to measure their lives more by the products and services they consume than, say, by spiritual enlightenment or helping people less well-off than they are, thus setting us up to see the accumulation of material wealth as an essential part of a happy and successful life. This is true of just about everything we value. Whether it’s using plastic surgery to ‘improve’ how we look, aspiring to a college education, not objecting to racist comments as a way to fit in, or seeing our country as superior to all others, we rarely realize how much our culture l
imits our preferences to a narrow range of possibilities. And we also do not realize how radically different our options might be somewhere else.

  As an individual, I can be aware that culture exists and shapes my perceptions and experience, including what I think I want. As someone born and raised in the United States, I can see how materialistic my culture is and choose to live my life differently by pursuing other values. But I will always be doing this in spite of my cultural background, as an act of going against what I was raised to value as a path of least resistance. I can expand my freedom only by liberating myself from the narrow range of choices that my culture—that any culture—offers the people who participate in it. To do this, I need to step outside the cultural framework I am used to so that I can see it as a framework, as one possibility among many. Stepping outside is an important part of what sociological practice is about, and such concepts as culture, beliefs, and values are important tools used in the process, for they point to what we are stepping outside of.

  We can go against our culture, because cultures are not rigid frameworks that determine who we are and what we do. Values cannot tell us what to do in every possible situation, because most situations involve combinations of values that are impossible to predict. Instead of giving us clear rules for how to choose in every situation, values provide general guidelines for how to weigh one alternative against another. As social psychologist Roger Brown puts it, values are like rules of grammar that we use to interpret sentences that we’ve never seen before.7

  How we apply those rules, however, is up to us. It is generally regarded as good, for example, to choose honesty over dishonesty. But what happens when that value conflicts with another, such as love of family? If murderers come looking for my brother and ask me where he is, you can be sure that I’ll do what I can to send them in the wrong direction. But what if my brother is the murderer? What if I’m in the position of David Kaczynski, who realized that his brother, Theodore, might be the Unabomber, whose package bombs killed several people and severely injured numerous others between 1978 and 1995? Do I turn him in for almost certain imprisonment or death, or do I choose loyalty to kin as a higher value and remain silent?

  There is no book of answers to such questions, which makes value conflict an enduring source of struggle and anguish. The issue comes up over and over again, whether about protecting the environment at the expense of jobs, making birth control and sex education available in schools, providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, or controlling access to guns. Values provide us with raw materials and rough guidelines for weighing alternatives, but they cannot tell us how to use them.

  As part of any culture, values underlie the paths of least resistance that shape how people participate in systems. As a way to regulate people’s behavior, however, values can suggest only how we ought to behave. What they lack is something to back them up and turn them into statements about how we must behave or else. Adding the ‘or else’ to a value gives us something stronger—a norm.

  Norms, Morality, and Deviance

  The difference between what is valued and desired and what is expected and required is a social consequence in the form of a reward or punishment. If you take a cultural value and turn it into a rule enforced with rewards and punishments, then you have a norm, a value with teeth that can bite if you don’t choose the path of least resistance it prescribes.

  When David Kaczynski considered whether to turn in his brother to the police, he had to do more than weigh competing values. He also had to consider his behavior in relation to norms and the consequences that go with them. On the one hand, if he turned his brother in, he would be rewarded by a grateful public for ending a nightmare of violence against innocent people. At the same time, he might be punished by family members for violating family norms based on loyalty to kin. On the other hand, if he remained silent, he risked being shamed by a public outraged at his disregard for future victims of his brother’s violence. His family, however, might reward him for his loyalty to kin. In either case, his dilemma wasn’t simply about choosing between more- or less-valued alternatives. He faced real social consequences no matter what he chose to do.

  Notice how changing the system he participated in could change the social consequences of his actions. If his family were formed around both kinship and organized crime activities, then his situation might look quite different. Instead of choosing between his duty to society and loyalty to his brother, he would also have to consider what would happen if turning in his brother caused the police to take a close look at his family. To avoid that, he might turn his brother in not to the police but to his family, who might then deal with his brother in its own way to protect the family’s ‘business’ interests.

  Like every aspect of culture, norms are made up. They are not what people do but ideas about what people do. Like beliefs, norms refer to some aspect of reality, such as the definition of murder. Like values, norms are linked to cultural judgments about what is considered more or less desirable: murder is bad, but killing to protect your country is good. Norms go a step further, however, by linking beliefs and values to social consequences that would not otherwise happen. If a man sets off a bomb near a crowd of people, as at the Boston Marathon in 2013, the result will be injury or death. Whether he’ll be arrested, however, and what will happen to him then, depend on what the norms look like, and these can be changed any time a lawmaking body decides. If he is punished, it will not be simply because he has hurt or killed people. It will be because he has violated a norm that prohibits such killing.

  To see the difference, consider how he might use a bomb to kill people with different consequences. If he flies a bomber during wartime, for example, or controls a drone flying over Pakistan, he will be rewarded for accomplishing his mission, especially if he is courageous in doing so. The objective consequences might be the same—a bomb explodes and kills people, including children and innocent adults—but the social consequences depend on the norms that apply in that system. If a pilot’s plane is shot down after he drops the bomb, he might be prosecuted as a criminal by his captors if their norms define the killing as an act of murder. In short, we cannot tell what the social consequences of an action will be unless we understand the social system in which it takes place.

  Norms are ideas about not only how people behave but also how they appear and, in some cases, who they are. If you walk naked down Main Street at noon on a cold January day, the objective consequence might be that you’ll catch a cold or people will see what your body looks like. The social consequences, however, will most likely be something more—from receiving disapproving looks to being arrested. In a nudist colony, however, the social consequence would be acceptance, and disapproving looks would be reserved for people who walked around without taking off their clothes.

  Norms about personal appearance can be so powerful that we feel bound by them even when we are by ourselves. I was once camping by a lake in a remote section of Vermont, for example, when I decided to go for a swim. I was standing in a beautiful grove of birch trees with no one but my wife for miles around, taking off my clothes and about to put on a bathing suit. Suddenly, with one foot in and one foot out, I was stopped by a question that popped into my mind: why am I putting this suit on? Unable to think of a good reason, I took a wonderful skinny dip, temporarily beyond the reach of cultural norms.

  At such moments, we may wonder why norms exist in the first place. Why should anyone care whether we wear clothes at all or clothes that are considered ‘appropriate’ for the occasion? Why should such rules matter so much that people might be ridiculed, shunned, or even arrested and locked up for breaking them? For that matter, why should we feel justified in shooting someone who is running off with a computer that we consider to be our ‘property’? The answer lies in deeper questions of what social systems are about, which, like most important questions, have more than one answer.

  One answer comes from what is known as the functio
nal perspective, which is based on the idea that every social system has certain requirements that must be met for it to work. From this perspective, norms exist because without them, systems would fall apart or foul up in one way or another. This makes sense, given that social systems are organized around relationships among people, and relationships consist largely of what we expect of one another. Since norms define and enforce expectations, it follows that a social system cannot do without them.

  Norms also play an important part in defining a system’s boundaries by giving us a way to tell insiders from outsiders and by controlling who gets to be one or the other. To belong to a community, for example, you have to go along with its culture to a certain degree, and you can often tell members from nonmembers by who does and who does not. If you break the rules, you risk punishment, including being thrown out altogether. This is not just because you have violated a norm but because the norms are connected to beliefs and values that define reality and what is considered important. The surest way to gain acceptance and influence in a group is to adopt its culture openly and from the outset. Rejecting a culture is the surest way to be rejected yourself, no matter what you might have to contribute.