The Forest and the Trees

by Allan Johnson

  Racial isolation makes it easy to perpetuate stereotypes, because people never have to test them against reality. If we change the structure of race relations, however, by creating opportunities for people to work and study together, we make it easier for stereotypes to fall apart in the face of hard evidence about what people are really like.19 In this way, integration lessens racial stereotyping and increases cross-race friendship, especially when people work together on teams and depend on one another to accomplish goals they have in common. This is one reason why the military and athletic teams have generally done a better job of dealing with racism than other systems.

  The interplay between culture and structure is fundamental to social life, as when a shift in cultural values prompts a shift in the structural distribution of power. At several points in the history of education in the United States, for example, the value placed on student autonomy and personal growth increased so much that the power structure in many schools shifted to give students greater control over what they studied and how.

  Structural shifts can also stimulate cultural change. As recently as the 1960s, divorce was still considered to be so shameful that it could ruin a political career. As the number of divorced people grew, however, they became more visible, and divorce became more socially acceptable and therefore less of a liability.

  Similar cultural shifts are occurring around sexual orientation as gays, lesbians, and bisexuals come out and increase their visibility as members of families, communities, workplaces, schools, and places of worship. Acceptance of same-sex marriage increased dramatically between 2003 and 2013, with one of the main causes being the increase in the number of heterosexuals who know someone who is lesbian, gay, or bisexual.20

  Such patterns show how different aspects of social systems can both reinforce and contradict one another, producing strain that changes paths of least resistance. Patterns of privilege and oppression continue in part because they conform to powerful cultural ideas about the superiority of men, whites, heterosexuals, and other dominant groups. Those same patterns, however, also violate important cultural values about equal opportunity, fairness, tolerance, freedom, and respect for differences.

  This kind of contradiction has produced for the United States what Gunnar Myrdal calls “an American dilemma”21 that forces people to confront the fact that a way of life that includes racism violates some of the nation’s most cherished values. Martin Luther King Jr. and others in the civil rights movement used this contradiction as a powerful source of leverage during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather than calling on white people to change cultural values, they instead challenged white people to honor and live up to existing values. This approach forced many white people to make a choice between such values as fairness and equal opportunity on the one hand and the ongoing reality of racism and white privilege on the other. As Myrdal predicted, the resulting tension continues to produce pressure for change.

  The role of contradiction in social life was first seriously explored by Karl Marx, who developed it into a major part of his analysis of how capitalism works as a system.22 Capitalism is organized around a core set of relationships between (1) machinery, tools, factories, and other means of production, (2) those who own or control the means of production (capitalists, corporate managers, and investors), and (3) the workers who do not own or control the means of production but use them to produce wealth in return for wages. Capitalists profit from this arrangement by keeping for themselves a portion of the value that workers produce. Workers get what they need by holding onto as much of that value as they can. So, if workers produce $5 million worth of goods above the cost of materials and other expenses, they get to keep only a portion of that value for themselves, with the rest going to capitalists and investors.

  Marx sees this arrangement as inherently contradictory. In the simplest sense, the interests of workers and capitalists conflict—each succeeds only at the expense of the other in what is essentially an exploitative relationship. In a related sense, capitalists are encouraged to keep as much for themselves as they can to increase their wealth. But if capitalists keep too much, workers won’t have enough money to buy what they produce, which defeats the very purpose of the economic system and precipitates a crisis.

  In a third sense, the capitalist system is contradictory in its drive for economic efficiency—producing the most wealth for the lowest cost. In the typical capitalist society, efficiency is measured as the cost of producing each product (each car, each bushel of wheat) in terms of the number of hours of labor it requires. If efficiency improves, this means that workers are producing more each hour but without being paid proportionately more as a result. Producing twice as much per hour, in other words, does not result in being paid twice as much.

  The more efficient and productive workers are, the worse off they are in that their share of the total wealth they produce goes down. This explains in part what has happened in the United States since the 1980s—productivity and corporate profits have increased while workers’ incomes have stayed the same or actually declined as the overall level of social inequality has gone up. Between 1994 and 1995, for example, the median household income increased faster than the rate of inflation for the first time in six years but was still below the average for 1989. When only employment earnings are counted, median earnings actually fell.23 Since 1999, adjusting for inflation, average household income has fallen each year.24

  From Marx’s perspective, the only remedy for such contradictions is to change the structure of capitalism itself—the relations between workers, owners, and the means of production—and the relationship between capitalism and other institutions, especially the state. But such change threatens the basis of privilege enjoyed by the capitalist class. Since the capitalist class has a great deal of power and political influence, the idea of changing the structure of capitalism runs into fierce opposition any time it is suggested, as happened to the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and 2012. As a result, the contradictions are never resolved and the system is kept stable by other means, especially through the power of the state. Early in the twentieth century, for example, the labor-union movement ran into stiff and often violent opposition from employers. Federal and state governments often stepped in with troops and police to protect the private property rights of owners of factories, trains, and other capital.

  Intervention of this kind continues today, although in ways less likely to involve the overt use of force (except in emerging capitalist industrial societies, such as South Korea). After the 2008 crisis in the financial industry, for example, the federal government provided tens of billions of dollars to protect large banks from failing, and declined to prosecute bank officials who engaged in illegal practices that caused the crisis and ensuing financial loss for tens of millions of people.25

  The state also uses its resources to soften capitalism’s negative consequences for workers with such programs as unemployment compensation, Social Security, welfare and medical benefits, low-interest mortgages, college loans, occupational safety regulations, and laws that forbid unfair labor practices and regulate the flow of immigrants who might compete for jobs. All these benefits are necessary because of consequences produced by capitalism. If workers were able to keep more of the value of what they produce and full employment were a serious national goal, there would be less need for welfare and unemployment compensation. And if the profit motive and competition that underlie capitalism did not encourage employers to relentlessly cut costs, there would be less need for federal regulations to require businesses to spend money to ensure a safe environment for workers.

  This kind of counterbalancing of one part of a system (such as the economy) by another (such as the state) can stabilize and perpetuate systems at all levels of social life. When a marriage is in trouble, for example, it’s not unusual for couples to have a child in the belief that this will bring them closer together. In other words, they change the family’s structure to keep it going. In more subt
le ways, spouses may change the family role structure to compensate for a dysfunctional relationship. Children, for example, may be drawn into a situation in which a parent expects them to meet the parent’s needs in inappropriate ways, in extreme cases sexually as well as emotionally. This kind of triangulation can continue for years as part of a family system in spite of the damage it does to children. In each case—whether capitalist economics or the family—structural strain in one part of the system is connected to changes in another.

  Systems within Systems

  Much of the focus on social structure centers on statuses as ‘parts’ that make up systems. This is especially true of role relationships. But as the relationship between capitalism and the state shows, we can also look at what goes on between systems, where systems themselves are parts of still larger systems.

  To understand something like stress in families, for example, it makes sense to begin with the family itself. Families in industrial capitalist societies experience all kinds of stress and strain—worry about making ends meet, buying a home, keeping up with the mortgage, sending children to college, getting good health care, taking care of children when both parents have to work, coping with emotional problems, the threat of divorce, and patterns of violence and abuse. Looking at the family as a system, we can ask how it works and how family members participate in ways that ease such problems or make them worse.

  The nuclear family structure, for example, places a heavy burden on just two adults, a burden that would not be nearly as hard to carry if it were spread out among many adults, as in extended families. On an individual level, men’s willingness to shoulder their share of responsibility for household work can make a huge difference in family life, beginning with the level of stress and strain on working wives and mothers and their relation to husbands and fathers. That choice, of course, is influenced by a larger system in which male privilege exempts men from having to feel responsible for such tasks, however willing they may be to ‘help out’ when asked.

  Since everything is always connected to other things, we cannot understand what goes on in a family by looking just at the family. We also have to see how the family and its members exist in relation to other and often larger systems. The family survives in relation to an economy in which goods and services are produced and distributed. When the economy is organized to value profit above the welfare of people who participate in it, conflicting interests are built into the relation between economy and family.

  Investors, for example, do not buy stock in companies as a way to provide jobs for people who, in turn, can then support families and raise children. Investors invest as a way to take surplus money and turn it into more money, and the most efficient way to do that under capitalism often results in a loss of jobs and dislocation and strain in families and communities. Family life is affected by forces far beyond the family itself when corporations lay off workers and send jobs overseas to make themselves more competitive and profitable in relation to other corporations, or when wages don’t keep up with inflation and both spouses are forced to work outside the home. The stress that so many families experience today isn’t just about the family but also about structured relations that connect the family to other systems.

  Such patterns are found in every social system. Towns and cities, for example, are related to one another and to larger systems, such as counties, states, provinces, and societies, and those relationships profoundly affect what goes on within them. We cannot understand the crisis of U.S. inner cities without looking at the relationship between cities and suburbs. In many large cities, school systems are desperate for money, and student populations are overwhelmingly of color and lower and working class. This combination all but ensures continued inequality in education and training.

  Part of the problem is that each community is responsible for funding its own schools. As middle-class people migrate to the suburbs, urban populations become increasingly impoverished and unable to provide for basic services, including education. One structural solution is to redraw school district lines in ways that spread the load of educating children more broadly. If school districts were based on counties or regions, for example, then a city and all its suburbs would be considered one large school district, and funding would be spread evenly throughout.

  Where the lines that define school districts are drawn is a matter of structural boundaries that define school districts in relation to political systems. It changes the definition of who is responsible for what, of what ‘we’ means when we say things like, “We’re in this together,” and who is included in the responsibility to educate ‘our’ children. And when political boundaries determine how financial responsibility is distributed, they also touch on the structural distribution of wealth, which is a major reason why suburban communities resist enlarging the boundaries of school districts.

  Given the relation of systems to other systems, we need to expand the basic principle of sociological practice we began with in Chapter 1. Not only do individuals always participate in something larger than themselves, but those ‘somethings’—those systems—also exist in relation to something larger than themselves. To do this kind of work, it is important to think across the different levels on which social life happens, to see how groups are connected to organizations and communities, how organizations and communities are connected to societies, how societies are connected to one another, and how individuals participate in it all.

  4

  Population and Human Ecology

  People, Space, and Place

  Most sociologists see social life as a matter of culture, social structure, and the interaction through which people participate in systems. But this view leaves out the fact that social life always happens some place and involves some number of people.

  We could describe an office where people work, for example, as a system having beliefs, values, norms, a role structure, distributions of power and income, and so on. And we could look at how people use language and behavior to interact and make the office system happen from one day to the next. Suppose, however, the company downsizes by cutting the number of workers by a third. What changes then, and how do we make sense of it?

  The system’s structure is the same—the same roles to be performed and the same unequal distribution of power and rewards. The culture is also unchanged—same rules and goals as before. What has changed is the number of people who participate in the system, and, as anyone who survives a layoff knows, the effects of this change can be profound, as fewer people must do the work once done by many more, and usually with no increase in compensation. They may have a mix of feelings—lucky to have a job at all or guilty in relation to those who no longer do, followed by anxiety and depression over what might happen next, knowing that no job is secure. They may also be suspicious of management that seems to care more about stockholders and the bottom line than about people who have been with the company for many years. Such feelings, in turn, can affect the entire system, as cynicism, resentment, and fear emerge as prevailing attitudes in the worker subculture.

  Numbers count, from the smallest level of social life to the largest. Every teacher and student knows how much it matters whether a class has five students or five hundred, how difficult discussion is in the latter, and how much pressure there is to participate in the former. And we are having to learn rapidly about the problems linked to an expanding global population, especially in parts of the world least equipped to clothe and feed the people who live there. Whether the numbers are figured in tens or in billions, we need tools to see how they affect social life and its consequences.

  We also need ways to pay attention to the fact that systems and people exist not in the abstract but in a material world of space and objects. If five students in a seminar are seated around a small table, for example, the conversation will be much more productive than if they’re scattered about an auditorium where they have to shout to be heard. If they are seated in a circle of chairs with no desks or t
ables to separate them, the conversation is likely to be more personal, which is why I often use this arrangement to talk about sensitive topics, such as privilege and oppression, so that participants will be aware of how they feel as well as what they think. On a larger level, spatial arrangements matter just as profoundly. White privilege, for example, depends on the physical segregation of different racial groups, an arrangement that reinforces the structure of privilege and helps maintain racial stereotypes by minimizing contact across races. In this way, millions of people are literally kept in their place.

  Part of the human relation to space and place is a matter of physical arrangements, from residential segregation to the placement of furniture in a room. But that relation also has to do with how people use the materials found in physical environments, especially natural resources. A college classroom, for example, reflects a complex relation between social systems and the physical world, from using materials to make furniture and audiovisual equipment to drilling for oil to burn in furnaces that heat classrooms, to using nuclear power to generate electricity to run computers and lighting. The classroom also reflects a world in which the system of production is so efficient that a small number of people grow enough food for everyone and millions of people can spend their days reading books and learning to think in new ways instead of working in agriculture.

  Social reality, in short, always includes a biological and material reality. Numbers count. Space, place, and geography matter. People are born in numbers large and small and migrate from place to place. The stuff of the Earth is transformed into the endless shapes and forms that humans are capable of giving it. This is the material reality of population and human ecology, and paying attention to it can inform and deepen almost every sort of sociological practice.