In the meantime, individuals rise and fall in the class system, and the stories of those who rise are offered as proof of what is possible, while the stories of those who fall are offered as cautionary tales. The system itself— including the huge gap between the wealthy and everyone else and the steady proportion of people living in poverty—stays the same.
A second type of antipoverty program seems to assume that individuals are not to blame for their impoverished circumstances, because it reaches out with various kinds of aid that help people meet day-to-day needs. Welfare payments, food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid soften the impact of poverty, for example, but they do little about the steady supply of people living in poverty. There is nothing wrong with this approach in that it can lessen the amount of suffering. But it should not be seen as a way to solve poverty, no more than army field hospitals can stop wars.
In relation to poverty as a social problem, welfare and other such programs are like doctors who keep giving bleeding patients transfusions without repairing the wounds. In effect, Murray tells us that federal programs just throw good blood after bad. In a sense, he is right, but not for the reasons he gives. Murray would merely substitute one ineffective individualistic solution for another. If we do as he suggests and throw people on their own, certainly some will find a way to run faster than they did before. But that will not do anything about the ‘race’ or the overall patterns of inequality that result from using it as a way to organize one of the most important aspects of human life.17
Liberals and conservatives are locked in a tug of war between two individualistic solutions to problems that are only partly about individuals. Both approaches rest on profound misunderstandings of what makes a problem, such as poverty, social. Neither is informed by a sense of how social life actually works as a dynamic relation between social systems and how people participate. This misunderstanding is also what traps them between blaming such problems as poverty on individuals and blaming them on society. Solving social problems does not require us to choose or blame one or the other. It does require us to see how the two combine to shape the terms of social life and how people actually live it.
Because social problems are more than an accumulation of individual woes, they cannot be solved through an accumulation of individual solutions. We must include social solutions that take into account how economic, political, and other systems really work. We also have to identify the paths of least resistance that produce the same patterns and problems year after year. This means that capitalism can no longer occupy its near-sacred status that holds it immune from criticism. It may mean that capitalism is in some ways incompatible with a just society in which the excessive well-being of some does not require the misery of so many others. It will not be easy to face up to such possibilities, but if we don’t, we will guarantee poverty its future and all the conflict and suffering that go with it.
Making Men’s Violence Invisible
As we saw in the Chapter 1 discussion of suicide, when behavior and experience vary by such characteristics as gender, age, and race, it raises questions about the relationship between people and the systems in which they participate. Whether we are comparing women to men or Japanese to Hungarians, the focus is on the kind of observable patterns that tip us off that something social is going on.
The word ‘observable’ brings up a pattern that is itself important, which is that some patterns are more likely to be noticed than others. For example, considerable public attention is paid to how patterns of teenage girls getting pregnant vary by race, education, and social class. But there is little mention of the equally—if not more—important pattern of young adult men impregnating teenage girls. Since impregnation is an essential cause of pregnancy, you would think this pattern would be of great interest, but it’s not. The behavior of teenage girls is scrutinized, but not the behavior of men.
The invisibility of men’s problematic behavior is even more true of the global epidemic of violence, ranging from battery, rape, suicide, and murder to mass murder, terrorism, and war. Since the overwhelming majority of violence is perpetrated by men, one would expect a great deal of interest in how a single social status could account for so much violence, but the reality is just the opposite—the phrase ‘men’s violence’ rarely appears in public conversation, even when that is the focus of attention.
In 2012, for example, two major mass murders occurred in the United States, one in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and the other in an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. In the news coverage that followed, experts were asked why such things happen and, in particular, what the shooters had in common that might explain their behavior. In each case, the answer was the same: the murderers had different psychological profiles and therefore did not conform to any pattern that might help provide an explanation. In one news report, photographs of these and several other shooters were arranged in a row—all white males—and still the experts said they had nothing in common. Even when the news anchor pointed out that all were white males, the response was to ignore the question. This observable pattern of ‘not seeing’ the gender pattern is repeated routinely from politicians to newspaper op-ed pages.
This, then, is the sociological puzzle: why is there so much silence about men’s violence? Why has it become ‘normal’ to act as if this clear and unambiguous pattern isn’t there?
On the most basic level, the silence comes from using an individualistic model of the world that interprets ‘men’s violence’ on the basis of the assumption that nothing exists beyond the individual. To ask, then, what it means that most violence is perpetrated by men appears to link violence not simply with the individual men who do it but with the simple fact of being a man. Since the word ‘men’ is taken to mean all individual men grouped together, any question about ‘men’s violence’ is bound to be seen as an accusation that all men are violent. Many will then object that most men are not violent, which, of course, is true, but this response can stop the conversation right there or, more often, keep it from starting in the first place. Hence the silence.
If our point of view is sociological, however, the meaning of ‘men’s violence’ is quite different. ‘Men’ now refers to something more than a sum of individual men. It takes on a larger meaning by naming a social category in a social system, a position that locates people in relation to a social context that shapes their experience and behavior. Now questions about ‘men’s violence’ also have a larger meaning: Is it significant that the overwhelming majority of perpetrators of violence occupy the same social status? Is there something about the paths of least resistance that go along with that position that might explain the pattern? These are the questions about ‘men’s violence’ that really need to be asked, but we never get that far because the individualistic model takes us down a path that leads to a dead end of defensive arguments about whether all men are violent or nonviolent, good or bad.
Whether a category of people is made visible or invisible depends on its position in a social system. In systems of privilege, things done by members of subordinate groups that make their group look bad are likely to be noticed and portrayed as characteristic of the group as whole, because this supports the idea that they are inferior and deserve to be subordinate. In contrast, things that make them look good tend to be overlooked or seen as a reflection of only the exceptional individual (the presidential election of Barack Obama, for example, and his popularity among voters were accompanied by an increase rather than a decrease in prejudicial views of black people in general among white people).18 For dominant groups, the pattern is reversed: men’s violence is seen only in relation to individual men who commit violent acts. It is not seen as something arising from a system of male privilege in which violence is a path of least resistance for men to follow themselves or to support in other men. The result is that violent men are perceived as having nothing in common with one another or the male population as a whole.
This double standard is
enforced in part by the fact that dominant groups have a great deal of power. By controlling virtually every major social institution, from the economy and government to higher education and the mass media, men also control jobs, resources, and the flow of information, including what kinds of questions are pursued and reported by journalists, discussed by politicians, and researched by social scientists.
The protective cloak of silence surrounding men’s violence goes still deeper into the structural and cultural underpinnings of the system of male privilege. Women and men, for example, experience intimate and dependent relationships with each other, especially in families. This would be impossible without our being able to believe that, unless they show otherwise, the men in our lives—fathers, sons, brothers, husbands, friends, lovers—are ‘good’ men with whom we are safe. Because gender is part of what defines so many important relationships, and because intimacy requires a level of trust that makes us vulnerable to others, we have a deep interest in believing that violence is not gendered, that gender is not a determining factor in either the cause of violence or in who winds up as perpetrators or victims.
It is no small thing, then, to identify ‘men’s violence’ as something that is not only a real phenomenon but also the basis for an ongoing and often terrifying epidemic reported in the daily news. If this particular man, this mother’s son, this woman’s husband, this child’s father, whom everyone thought was kind and decent, can do such things, then what is it that makes us believe some other man, someone we know, will not?
An even larger and deeper level lies beneath the silence, one that goes beyond concerns about the individual men in our lives. In a patriarchal worldview, * manhood is defined as not only an ideal for men and boys but also a universal standard that applies to everyone, the purest expression of what it means to be a superior human being. Patriarchal manhood is a prerequisite to greatness, the defining attribute for any position that is culturally defined as worthy of honor, admiration, and respect. Any woman who aspires to be president, for example, or a firefighter, a soldier, a corporate CEO, or a hero of any kind will be measured by the standard of patriarchal manhood, while a man will not be judged on his ability to meet the expectations of womanhood.19
The patriarchal ideal of manhood also applies to our society itself, to the idea of America and what it means to be American. Every society has a cultural mythology, the living collection of images and stories, folktales and songs, documents and history lessons, films and anthems, monuments, flags, speeches, and commemorations that we rely on to tell us who we are and what our nation is about. Richard Slotkin’s account of the origins and evolution of the American mythology reveals a national story that for hundreds of years has centered on men and their ability to dominate and control.20 The objects of that control have included the Earth and its nonhuman species, Native Americans, Mexicans, and others who refused to surrender their land to American expansion, enslaved Africans and other peoples of color whose exploited labor was indispensable to American wealth and power, Southern secession and rebellion, white workers and immigrants, Filipinos who refused to let their country become a colony of the United States following the Spanish-American War, and a long list of nations and groups considered to be a threat to American interests.21
From The Last of the Mohicans and ‘Custer’s Last Stand’ to ‘The Greatest Generation’ of World War II and the U.S. Navy SEALs storming the refuge of Osama bin Laden, the focus of the American story has been not merely on men but on a masculine view of national strength, pride, superiority, and exceptionalism, the liberty and power to dominate the world and act without restraint. All of this is ultimately backed by a capacity for violence and the willingness to use it.
Theodore Roosevelt, for example, who was twice elected to the presidency, stated repeatedly that the most important measure of America’s national strength is its virility, that to be truly American is to be virile, and that virility has no higher or more powerful expression than a nation’s ability to impose its will on others, including, and especially, through the use of violence.22 Presidents since Roosevelt may have been less explicit, the language more encoded, but the mythology has remained the same: nothing matches the kind of national angst and outrage that follow an American combat defeat or the thrill that comes with victory. And there are few ways to more quickly cast doubt on presidential leadership than for the commander in chief to show a reluctance to use force.
The people of the United States have not, of course, been of one mind about this story. There has always been vocal and sometimes passionate dissent. But violent manhood as an instrument of American will and an indicator of national character and greatness has ruled the day almost from the beginning. With the exception of the Vietnam War, the withholding or withdrawal of public support has not been prompted by the belief that the use of violence was wrong or excessive, but because a war has not been successful, a failure to win in a timely way. With recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, public support weakened only because the wars came to be seen as going on for too long and not worth the monetary cost and continued loss of American lives.23 There has, however, been no national outpouring of opposition or regret, much less shame, for the suffering and loss of life in local populations resulting from the U.S. invasion of these countries.
Manhood and the capacity for violence are not, of course, the whole of the American cultural mythology, but without them and the consequences they have and continue to produce, the story would be all but unrecognizable. This is why so much is at stake in the decision of whether to openly acknowledge the reality of men’s violence, for to do that is to risk confronting the principle of dominance and control that lies at the core of the patriarchal worldview that, in turn, informs and shapes individual lives and our society as a whole. To avoid that, we focus on what we tell ourselves is nothing more than the actions of a few evil or crazy individuals rather than question the patriarchal system and its core principles that underlie American manhood and its connection to violence.
From love to poverty, from voting to violence, the reality of social life comes in layers and dimensions that often go unnoticed and unexamined. The power of sociological practice lies in its unique worldview, from which we can connect those layers and dimensions to provide a coherent understanding of social systems and how we live our lives in relation to them.
7
Sociology as Worldview
Where White Privilege Came From
Like most students, when I was first studying sociology, I thought I was acquiring a body of knowledge—facts and concepts and how to use various intellectual and practical tools for creating new knowledge through research and thinking creatively about the human condition. What I did not realize until much later was that I was also changing my worldview, the largely unconscious collection of beliefs and values out of which we construct what we take to be reality itself.
The idea, for example, that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves—social systems that we can observe, describe, and understand—is not one that I grew up with or that I see in use even now when I observe the world. Most people, from the president of the United States to my casual friends, seem to live inside an individualistic worldview that, in this way, is quite different than the one described in these pages. As a result, when we observe the world, we tend to ask very different questions because, literally, we are experiencing the reality of things in ways that are themselves quite different.
A news item about poverty in America, for example, reports that the percentage of people living in poverty not only is high but also has remained unchanged for more than six years in spite of the so-called recovery from the economic collapse of 2008. The individualistic worldview prompts the reporter to ask how we can improve the lives of people living in poverty by changing their individual circumstances (such as welfare benefits, Medicaid, food stamps, and unemployment insurance) or the kind of people they are (such as education, job training, and attitude adjust
ments). In contrast, I also want to know how social systems can be changed so that as all kinds of people participate, poverty will be far less likely to result in the country as a whole. Different realities, different questions, and different answers make all the difference.
The sociological worldview I’ve described in this book is not, in its most basic ideas and principles, a very complicated thing, which is one of my favorite things about it, because it also has such power to shape how we perceive and interpret reality and the kinds of questions we ask about what we do not know. But it is also powerful, I believe, because it works, because it is grounded in the reality of how things are in a way that individualistic thinking is not.
One of the most important things I’ve learned from sociological practice is that the relationship between systems and the people who participate in them is profoundly dynamic. The patterns of social life that result from people going about their lives by following paths of least resistance are predictable, and yet we can never know for sure what we are going to do from one moment to the next. The result is that nothing really stays the same, no matter how much it may seem to. Systems are always being created and recreated—their cultures, their structural patterns, their ecological arrangements, their population dynamics. And, in important ways, we are always being created and re-created as social beings interacting with people as participants in one system or another.
A sociological worldview is also powerful because it works on every level, from a simple conversation to global politics. The bottom half of Figure 4 shows the relationship between systems and people that we first looked at in Chapter 1. But now we are in a position to say more about the nature of social systems and how social life actually happens. Every system has various characteristics, as shown in the top half of the model, and these are all connected to one another. This is to say, for example, that changes in structure may prompt changes in culture or in the dynamics of population and human ecology, just as changes in culture can lead to changes in the other two.
The Forest and the Trees Page 19
