Chapter Three: Socialization
© David Weissman, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0197.03
1. Conflicted Aims
We say that agents having autonomy and free will are responsible for their effects; yet responsibility is attenuated if individuals satisfy familiar rubrics: grocer, spouse, parent, or judge. For rights and duties are socially bestowed, not privately earned if one inherits status by virtue of filling a role, rather than by creating a singular space of one’s own. People often achieve identity by submitting to formulaic tastes and vocations, though some mold identity to a personal design. Imagine older women surrounded by adoring relatives and friends after a lifetime caring for them. Compare their virtue to the self-concern that ignores stabilizing social relations. Though there is a contrary strand to our thinking: man is made in the image of God; all are members of the kingdom of ends. Mill’s On Liberty is a secular version of our fantasied atomism:
This, then, is the appropriate region of human liberty. It comprises, first, the inward domain of consciousness, demanding liberty of conscience in the most comprehensive sense, liberty of thought and feeling, absolute freedom of opinion and sentiment on all subjects, practical or speculative, scientific, moral, or theological….Secondly, the principle requires liberty of tastes and pursuits, of framing the plan of our life to suit our own character, of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow, without impediment from our fellow creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them, even though they should think our conduct foolish, perverse, or wrong. Thirdly, from this liberty of each individual follows the liberty, within the same limits, of combination among individuals, freedom to unite for any purpose not involving harm to others, the persons combining being supposed to be of full age and not forced or deceived.1
Most everyone would be happier living at peace with neighbors in handsome, productive circumstances while enjoying a family, friends, and one’s talents. The individuals of this dream enjoy both skills and the resonance provoked by their virtuous effects on others; yet these aims conflict because social structures, even Mill’s voluntary collaborations, shape individual development and initiatives to their advantage. We drive safely because that’s prudent and because laws require it, though this often requires sitting in traffic jams that make commuting hellish for all who do it. This is socialization, sometimes defending, other times vandalizing the lives of its willing collaborators. How else could we satisfy a desire for the autonomy and enjoyment of individual lives, when crowding and scarce resources require laws that facilitate movement or proscribe harm?
This might be our aim: loosen social demands in order that individuals have space to discover their talents and use their opportunities. Collaboration provides the goods and services required to sustain life to a desired standard. Now couple this effect to an additional aim: balance a society’s work with tasks that liberate workers to think and choose. Teach varied skills; break up routine with varied responsibilities; mechanize work that’s only repetitive. Read Marx, and believe the sincerity of his respect for talent and his regard for the poor.2 We won’t liberate the poet in everyone; we can introduce elasticity into social demands that suffocate choice and self-discovery. Most of agency’s effects occur with little premeditation: like kicking a stone. But those identified with a human cause—as parents affect their children—ring with the purpose and values of agency. More than duty, there is passion, self-discovery, and one’s humanizing effects on others. Many actions are private initiatives—start a business, take a walk—but many others are social obligations founded in rules or roles. Filling a role is a measure of the habits acquired with experience; we‘re effective because of stable skills and personal discipline. But why do we persist when conditions oppose us? Is it pride, or the anxious response to socialization and acquired duties: do we satisfy partners who expect efficiency in tasks complementary to theirs?
Imagine that a role’s occupant is conscious of the irony in his posture: he’s aware that his identity is compromised by the tasks, status, and advantages that consume him. “I accept its duties,” he affirms, “but I am not its creature.” How does he reconcile that difference? Some roles are chosen, others are inherited or acquired unintentionally: the job taken when nothing else is available. Later, when autonomy and identity are mediated by a role that consumes identity and aspiration, one responds as the person he or she has become. Would one do this job had there been other choices? Perhaps not; many people have roles that were acquired rather than chosen. One infers from Mill’s three regions of liberty that he didn’t know such people. His acquaintances, or only those he imagined, wanted no abiding obligations to other people. One thinks of them tending gardens, keeping diaries, or dressing for dinner when eating alone. Why do it; or, when a first impulse has passed, why continue doing it? There might be no reason but habit, though the explanation might also be a dreadful moment in social history—a Victorian social purgatory—or an inflexible idea of singular selves.
Is there relief from these extremes: Mill’s atomism or the holism that leaves no space for autonomy?
2. Idiosyncrasy
What fraction of purpose or action is rightly ascribed to individuals and their private aims when much is subsumed under socially sponsored rules or practices? Does selfhood—including purpose, desire, and moral identity—have currency distinct from George Herbert Mead’s “generalized other,”3 or from one’s roles in a family, business, or team? This question is unresolved since Plato’s allegory of the cave.4 It describes people locked in place while discerning vague shadows on the wall before them; they ascribe character to the shadows while coordinating their interpretations. Adjusting those stories to make themselves mutually intelligible—learning to tell the same story—they see the same things: I know who I am by knowing what makes me recognizable to you.
But is that all I know myself to be? Kant and Hegel agreed that passions are too feeble a basis for personal identity. Often verging on the chaotic, feelings make us opaque to ourselves. One supposes that Kant and Hegel were equally impatient of personal fantasies, however generalized. Like Plato writing of the Forms, their ideas of selfhood invoke the universality of reason, its content and virtues. Kant located selves within the kingdom of ends where each thinker realizes his or her rational nature by affirming the categorical imperative;5 Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirt supersedes particularity and contingency by introducing a trajectory that buries individuals in layers of universality and necessity.6 Alternative formulations save particularity by affirming it (as Nietzsche did), or by making individuality the emergent effect of sociality. So, Mead argued that I know what I mean or intend (hence who I am) when knowing how I would respond to your responses to me.7 A succession of actions—each a response to the other and an anticipation of the other’s likely response to the first—locates both agents within this evolving dialectic. Other accounts are less ingenious but more straightforwardly social: children learn the language and habits of their caretakers, then the rules and roles of a community. They are comfortable among themselves and recognizable to adults by virtue of knowing society’s constraints, including their duties and the spaces left to choice. Rules are observed because deviants are ostracized.
Is personal identity altogether subordinate to one’s social identity? Am I a cipher when shorn of socialized habits and roles? Each of us has powers—muscular, artistic, or intellectual—made determinate when imagination and initiative shape determinable roles and opportunities. The idiosyncrasies of one’s powers and inclinations are obscured when tastes and desires are subordinate to the norms, duties, and roles that secure and support us. But socialization also has disruptive effects, not least because of a discomfort that all feel to some degree when obliged to satisfy rules or roles designed to fulfill holistic or abstract interests. What dare I be when situations oblige me to construe myself in ways that suppress an abiding idea of myself? How do I relieve the pain of wearing shoes made for no one in particular?
Philosophers obsessed by the obstacle of verifying other people’s intrapsychic experience emphasize public criteria for private thoughts and feelings. They construe our uniformities as evidence that privacy and idiosyncrasy are extinguished for want of intelligibility or because altruism makes us self-effacing. Verificationist bookkeeping ignores private differences, as if they were nothing at all, though privacy and interiority may be inexpungable. There may be more within us than public criteria acknowledge: thought and feeling may be lurking, careful not to ruffle the surface of public talk. Bluetooth, mind to mind, would dispel all doubts—I know what you’re thinking—but that technology is a step away. The demand for public verification is, all the while, quixotic: we have tastes and desires unknown to others, as well as talents unknown to ourselves. We are conscious, often self-conscious, but never directly observed by others because one’s companions are obliged to infer what they can’t perceive. We might construe behavior as the test and essence of selfhood, were it established that mind’s content reduces to amorphous feelings or percepts. But that misdescribes mind’s faculties and content: perception is often clear; thought and plans are often cogent and precise. We have the surmise—credited to Kant but familiar since Plato—that experience is organized by schemas—rules—that differentiate thoughts or percepts while configuring them in ways appropriate to an aim.8 Someone who makes his way, wordlessly, into a bank vault by picking the lock proves the clarity of his thinking.
Listen to what people say; hear their word choice, and the precision with which they say it: acknowledge that you know how they think. Though something more, something provocative because disruptive, is also apparent. Kant distinguished reproductive from productive imagination: one uses schemas to recreate tableaux of sorts previously experienced; the other prefigures experiences that may have no antecedents. Everyone has memories, most of them jejune. But there are also people with ideas that are remarkable or merely odd; these are the artists Nietzsche celebrated. Most move among us like unobserved comets passing Earth, though some are acknowledged as they revise our ways of thinking, doing, or making. Publicity corrupts its artists when society requires that innovations be framed in terms comprehensible to popular tastes. Hence the social cycles of inertia and renewal: we’re somnolent when practices and persuasions are reduced to a lowest common denominator; we awaken to new ideas. Some practices cycle mindlessly—buttons on a sleeve, skirts above or below the knee—others evolve when gifted individuals, artists and others, breach a society’s boundaries by extrapolating to possibilities unknown.
Reconsider a time of stasis; notice that homogeneity and conformity were more the result of suppression than the absence of difference. We speak a common language but interpret it with nuances peculiar to ourselves. A few of us paint, think, or play in ways that others are slow to perceive or understand, yet wit takes ideas and practices in surprising directions; we generalize, analogize, or extrapolate to outcomes that were unforeseen. People resist these changes, then embrace them; sociality covers over the breach, hardly conceding that anything has changed. Yet look more closely at the ways people think and act; see all that is distinctive in their ways of construing and expressing information or performing familiar tasks. Individuality is a constant imprint on thought and practice, though we satisfy the demands of organization and cooperation by ignoring it.
Are these real differences or only a libertarian fantasy; where is diversity in people doing common things while having common thoughts? It flourishes under the veneer of a regularizing gloss. We learn different content or subtly different abilities because of different orientations or interests, or because we vary in our capacities for acquiring information or skills. These are obstacles to socialization and evidence for autonomy, because each of us is a barrier to uniformity. Idiosyncrasy suggests that people are autonomous to this degree: we acquire information and skills in ways calibrated to our perspectives, aims, and capacities. Hence this all but ineliminable conflict for everyone living with others: we can’t learn current doctrines, tastes, or practices without suppressing something vital in ourselves.
We are formed by our societies without being their creatures. My barber described his mother to me earlier today. She’s eighty-four and lives alone in a village outside Palermo. She has a bad knee; her short-term memory is poor; but she presides over a domain—her home—and won’t compromise her autonomy. Having visitors, she climbs a ladder in her garden to pick fresh fruit for their breakfast; they return to New York finding that she’s hidden all her monthly retirement money in their suitcases. Why? Because caring for her children, in her way, is her vocation.
Is it vaguely ridiculous that old people insist on their autonomy? A principal choreographer died a week ago at eighty-eight. He was in his hospice bed on his last night, silent and immobile, when the hospice doctor visited him. May I ask you several questions, she asked? No response. May I ask you two questions? Still no response. Are you in pain, sir, and if so, where? The choreographer rose out of his bed: “You are my only pain.” The doctor called his dance company the next morning to say that he had weakened overnight and might die during the day: “Except that in his case, maybe two weeks.” He died that day. (As told by the company director.)
3. Talent
Talents aren’t known until there are opportunities for their education and expression. This coupling is tricky because cultures are specific and proud; why search for talents unknown or anomalous with established practices: there’s no demand for a Caruso or Michael Jordan if no one sings or plays basketball.
Agency embodies an essential irony: we are autonomous, though our actions are unintelligible, illegal, or ineffective if they fail to satisfy social interests or standards. This discrepancy expresses two constraints on agent talents: what we do—tasks we inherit or acquire—and the fact that standards for doing them well are socialized. Speaking intelligibly to others requires that one use a language they understand. The performance condition requires skill; the social condition requires the reciprocities of people having similar skills. Differences are suppressed because we have interests and needs that individuals can’t satisfy alone: a shortstop plays his position by adjusting to the styles of his teammates; intimates speak to one another in ways that each has learned to hear. Differences persist because we speak a public language while using it in distinctive ways.
Social energy falters when old patterns and the habits defending them are the only defense against stasis and decline. Add the costs of personal frustration and the loss gains urgency. Society as much as its members often needs regeneration, but what’s to be done when identifying and cultivating unknown powers seems thankless? Three steps are incumbent: i. Regard everyone as a luminous space, a center of mostly unsuspected talents or inclinations. We needn’t pretend to know those energies or their details; it’s enough that we acknowledge the possibility of achievements that express unknown abilities. ii. Let tolerance for difference abet early learning in practices that are standardized to some degree: including reading, mathematics, or play. Encourage improvisation directed by a question: what would you like to do today and what tools do you need for doing it? Let teachers sometimes observe children rather than instruct them; see what is done when we don’t know what it is or how to direct it. One of New York City Ballet’s premier male dancers was raised on a Navajo reservation in New Mexico. Imagine the tolerance and insight of the parents who encouraged him. iii. Let adults show patience and respect for inclinations that seem odd or unproductive in one another. Let people grow when they seem past the age of growing.
Why do societies change, often radically, when socialization is a persistent stone that weighs on the imaginations and practices of its members? They’re altered by circumstances—economies, governments, wars, or climate—and by individuals who rise unbidden with effects that were nowhere anticipated.
4. Interiority
Interiority is two things: a resonant private space, and the educable sensibility that fills it. Individuals vary: singularity shines through because interiority never yields entirely to the demands of collaboration or social discipline. Behavior is sometimes uniform—we cooperate or submit—though we hear the same messages differently. Interiority is indestructible so long as one retains an autonomous nervous system that filters information in ways conforming to one’s values, attitudes, understandings, and desires. The system may be suppressed or manipulated, but its resistance is evidence that interiority has force and form. Words used to characterize it—character, personality, and sensibility—are allusive but superficial because the experiential side is the only one clearly perceived or understood; its physiological structure is inferred, not inspected.
Gaston Bachelard’s example of interiority—he compared houses to homes—can’t be faulted.9 Most houses were never one’s home; they evoke no memories and have no meaning to visitors who see only a structure and its furnishings. Those are markers to one for whom the house was home, but she looks past them, remembering how things were used, with whom, and when. The structure may be serially repurposed across the history of its occupations; but home is a fixture—specific but different—in successive biographies. Someone new to a house looks on passively; former residents are alight. For sensibility is a tripwire. Its design and construction are subtle and idiosyncratic, with meanings, aims, and persuasions superimposed on temperament: we’re sanguine and steady, or edgy and reactive. The array of its variations has values too diverse for easy reduction to the simple means prescribed by rules, roles, or generic identities. Though people submit to common standards because submission is rewarded, and resistance is punished; or idiosyncrasy is sedulous and safe because it’s ignored by social demands and identities. Yet homes aren’t better if all are equipped in the style of a transient motel. So is experience diminished if generic identities strip members of purpose and vitality. Do we want what we separately need? Or do we desire the same things irrespective of their worth? Is interiority allowed to breathe?
Homes want furnishings; interiority needs cultivation. Children won’t cultivate thought, feeling, or skills if parents and teachers don’t show them how they’re acquired. Watch anyone skilled in a task and ask how he or she has come to its mastery. There are self-made craftsmen or athletes, though most learned discipline from a teacher. This is the anomaly of our differences: having distinct talents and separate private spaces in which to enjoy them, our talents acquire form by incorporating the ways of our culture’s socialized pursuits. Being athletic, one learns the games of his or her community; liking music, we learn its instruments. Individuality takes form as the student incorporates a social resource. Instructors represent this aspect of local culture to subjects who embody their social messages in ways that are self-transforming. This is the alternating cycle—back and forth—as a society slows to teach, then advances on the skills of those it has taught.
Why is interiority elaborated in some, but ignored or suppressed in others? Is it odd that all a team’s players are distinctly talented and trained, while advertisers treat their fans to the same vacuous messages? This division is costly because it creates a society of mutually unintelligible castes: people who enjoy their educated skills or tastes, and those satisfied by generic distractions or rewards. My analogy—woods to societies—fails at this point because sustainable ecosystems are usually coherent: relations among their niches make them mutually sustaining. That is not so where respect for interiority is reserved to people who are well-educated and financially secure or to those who are socially entrenched because they perpetuate class traditions.
Do we educate for generic efficiencies (everyone learns to read) or the cultivation of each member’s personal taste and judgment? The first ignores our differences; the other makes us mutually estranged (you like languages, I prefer math). Disparity is expected with educations sensitive to our differences, though routines calculated to enforce uniformity—boot camp and rote learning—punish the variability of those instructed; we live by many of the same rules without living in the same ways. Nodal causation somewhat mitigates these effects because its regularizing norm—live and let live—tolerates individual variation. People controlling their individual talents and lives will be different. Tolerance mitigates mutual impatience.
5. Social Space
Walk along a beach on a clear day when space seems void of limits; we don’t see its geometry or intrinsic force fields. Social space is like that when we move through it unopposed. Compare playing a game that invokes a nest of regulations: there are rules of the game, including the roles and responsibilities of team members; regulations that limit fraternization; regulations prescribing the character of relations between opposing teams (penalties for aggression); and regulations proscribing or prescribing conduct appropriate to any social relation (saying thank you or hello).
Walking together seems unproblematic; walking down a crowded street is only one or two steps less constraining than playing a team sport. For regulations enable collaborations by articulating the social spaces where they form. This idea—articulated social spaces—amplifies the idea that human societies resemble a stand of trees. For if the autonomy of each tree is qualified by forest ecology, so is the autonomy of human agency qualified by the layered regulations that constrain activity and collaboration in a densely occupied social space. Think of people uncomfortable in big cities. Disliking the noise and agitation (what locals experience as energy), they’re disoriented by the vague apprehension that the social space is informed by layers of constraint. They intuit that each person, resident or visitor, has only a narrow path within the system of regulations that define his or her space. Don’t tell these visitors that the freedom of city residents is greater than any they know. For their city is a plenum of opportunity. Yes, it embodies layers of constraint, but also systems and domains that teach and incite the passions and talents of its residents. There is disruption when artists and entrepreneurs alter aims and perceptions, but a city excited by diversity and organized for business pauses and stabilizes. Private lives are less hectic in quieter cities, but Athens, Venice, Paris, and New York are instructive: agitation is productive.
Notice too this offsetting tension: the social space of regulations is an ethos informed by three “transcendentals”: the good, the true, and the beautiful. This is the culture of Plato’s cave: emerging from darkness, we rise in light that enables and impels. We satisfy social scruples and maybe these ideals because education and opportunity foreclose doing otherwise. Consider goodness, because its value is pervasive and least contested. Activity creates and sustains it by way of the reciprocities established and the effects achieved as work is done. Friendships, families, and neighborhoods, businesses, schools, and communities are the spawn of activities initiated when people are interdependent and effective, but needy. We often appraise agency’s effects by citing gross material changes: washing clothes or painting a fence. Though salient examples would have us consider one another. How are we altered, partly by things we do, partly by our bonds to partners? This is moral resonance; it has memory and extension. We create webs of moral conscience without knowing how far or deep they go. People respond when news spreads in morally resonant communities: someone falls in the street; others stop to help. An expert at making prostheses responded to pictures of amputees in a distant war by making limbs for its victims; his effects were magnified when other makers volunteered their help after learning of him. Hospitals, police, and firemen embody these values.
Truth is instrumental; no plan enhances its success by misrepresenting an activity’s aim, partners, terrain, or resources. Yet true answers to these four questions exceed practicality because none are more essential to our nature and self-understanding: What am I, or what are we? What is the character of other people and things? What is my, or our, place among them? What is it good to do or be? Other questions may also seem urgent: Is there a god, if so, what is its nature, and how are we judged? Every inquiry has one of these topics as its generic directive; truth is their animator. Now beauty. Moral goodness requires our engagements with one another; the inquiries seeking truth are propelled by accumulated insights. Some things are beautiful in themselves; others require the imagination and skill of single artists. They would be largely mute without the styles in which they train, though artistic genius is mostly autonomous in the rare people having it. They elaborate on traditions or exceed them, without explaining why they’ve deviated, or how observers should regard their innovations. We accept a tradition’s gaps without being able to explain, or even notice them.
Too much preoccupation with the good, the true, and the beautiful is likely to sabotage any project they inspire. We ignore them because they aren’t perceived as relevant to all that’s pedestrian in everyday life or because too much concern for them makes us clumsy. But these are the vectors animating social space. Are they “transcendental,” implying an origin out of nature? Not really. It’s our need and aspiration, individually and collectively, that drive them.
6. Normativity
How do regulations acquire their force? The threat of punishment is one reason, though most people are motivated by an urgency that evokes the collective interest and passion of Rousseau’s “general will,” not by fear. We respond to the requirements for effective sociality by acknowledging its layered conditions. Some concern the tasks or roles appropriate to an activity’s aims or participants: drivers and their passengers. Others determine one or another dimension of the social context where the activity is performed: students and teachers; parents and children. Some are legislated; others are well-marked, though usually informal. Habermas has emphasized the shared interest in procedures that enable coordination.10 John Dewey’s idea of privacy—it binds individuals sharing an aim—combines this regard for collaboration with that of efficacy, tolerance and respect.11
What is normativity? Kant ascribed it to an a priori imperative, though it has the simpler basis intimated in Aristotle’s remark that man is a social animal: we need and are, mostly, comfortable with one another. Discomfort is sometimes real; violence is our pathology. But we defer to bonds and regularities that enable safety, efficacy, and well-being. There is normativity in all the practices sanctioned by mutual deference.
7. Socialization
We accommodate ourselves to a society’s structure and aims as we go our separate ways. The result is socialized autonomy: singular persons sharing the common forms of thought, cooperation, and sensibility.
7i. Socialization is the public bath where personal differences are nuanced or suppressed. It has four primary modes: ia. We commit ourselves to friends, spouses, or partners. ib. Thought, feeling, taste, and behavior conform to local standards. ic. We choose or inherit roles in families or businesses, cities or states. Roles differ with one’s occupation or aims, but here, too, we learn practices that normalize relations and tasks: playing midfield or third base is roughly the same, whatever one’s team. id. We satisfy local laws: whatever direction you’re going, whatever your destination, traffic laws are mostly the same. Idiosyncrasies are submerged, without being extinguished.
7ia. Commitment: We bind ourselves to others in passion, duty, or as partners sharing an aim. Individuality is submerged or suppressed in each of these modes, though it shapes our ways of performing standard tasks. Does passion express affection or lust; am I committed to this team, this game, or to my salary? The actions of people doing the same things for different motives may look the same, but individuals, and sometimes their partners, know the difference.
7ib. Local standards: Predictability and safety, productivity and civility require that we do ordinary things in recognizable ways. Yet standards are satisfied in ways sensitive to local differences. I once went miles out of my way after seeing the sign for a prize-winning ice-cream store, only to find that vanilla was the one flavor sold.
7ic. Roles in associations and organizations: Associations are assemblies of people having a shared interest; members usually have the same or similar duties and rank. An organization’s members are distinguished by their functions: doctor or nurse; student or teacher. Each of an organization’s roles has distinctive duties and freedoms, so aspirants educate themselves for the tasks to be assigned. Applicants are often required to pass a certifying exam, though not one so standardizing that it eliminates personal styles or idiosyncrasies. Cab drivers are often terrifying, though all have passed an exam.
7id. Laws: Laws standardize practice without effacing distinctions introduced by lawyers or accountants speaking for their clients. Regularizing behavior doesn’t eliminate private interests.
7ii. Socialization may have either of two aims: obliterate difference or manage it. There are societies of both sorts. Both tell us how to behave, what to suppress. Both relegate autonomy and idiosyncrasy to three places: iia. inclinations; iib. the choice of vocations; and iic. an altered perception of sociality.
7iia. Inclinations: We want and like different things. Every economy able to produce more than the rudiments of well-being responds by supplying a variety of goods and tastes: bread for those who want it, but butter and jam, too.
7iib. Vocations: Vocations are often inherited; those chosen are expressions of inclination, opportunity, or need. Every vocation, whatever its origin, introduces us to a version of sociality that is focused by a practice, task, or aim. Each is distinguished by its ways of binding agents doing the same or complementary work: parents to one another and their children; buyers to sellers. Every such relationship is a collaboration; each requires give-and-take to succeed because partnership in complementary roles is a negotiation. But cooperation drains autonomy when participation is obligatory and terms are rigid. Agents who have little or no freedom to define their roles must, nevertheless, establish viable relations to partners in complementary roles. Think of teachers and their students, soldiers and their officers. The roles are determining, but there’s latitude for accommodation.
7iic. An altered perception of sociality: Socialization is often construed as a homogenizing process: we acquire generic identity as fans, workers, or citizens. But there is a different way to understand us: neither generically nor by way of the organizing rules or roles that make us anonymous. Nodal causation is the critical difference. Episodic causes occur many times a day, some in predictable sequences, others randomly. Most are incidental to an agent’s identity: we close a door or turn off the lights. Causation of this other sort occurs, as noted in Chapter One, when many agents preside at once within assembled domains. Trees are nodal: each nurtures and defends things living within or around it. An ensemble of trees—a wood or copse—is an ecosystem in which each tree affects others while sovereign in its space.
Human societies are more like forests than we imply when reducing their members to single agents or homogenized classes: Jack or Jill; men or women. Trees are rooted: each stands amidst a changing ensemble of others, or alone. Humans approximate these ensembles when each participates in associations or organizations distinguished by their aims or traditions. Think of these as alternate canopies, each having its style of affiliation, all posing specific constraints—rules and roles—on the tasks and freedoms of their participants. Each ensemble assigns some degree of freedom to its participants, but none—a saving grace—eliminates idiosyncrasies that distinguish agents from one another. Citizenship is usually more permissive than church membership; friendship is less constraining than a priesthood. Participating in several assemblies at once, we alter our expectations and behavior accordingly: some are flexible; others demand responses that are prescribed and specific. Why are trees a cogent analogue in these variable circumstances? Because each affects others, while having latitude to secure and nourish itself.
Personal differences intrude everywhere, though philosophy tells homogenizing stories. Mill’s On Liberty and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right define our dialectical extremes, one for the individualism that sets us apart, the other for the rationalism that makes us indistinguishable. Both are caricatures. Look for social texture, and you find diversities they obscure. Every person is a persistent source of effects that overlap those of other nodes. Together, they add dissonance but also variability and viability to the whole. This is true of particular undertakings, and of generational trends. Mapping a society from above, one sees centers of intense activity—families, businesses, or schools—distributed in low-density savannahs. Look closer, and you see individuals active in ways that satisfy both themselves and their reciprocally related partners, not isolated persons or generic ciphers. Sameness from a distance is difference close up, because the sustaining activities are a function of motivation and individual skills.
Sociality construed nodally is liberating because it acknowledges that an ensemble’s constituents—its people and their relationships—vary in character, purpose, and effects. Their differences don’t incite hostility if tolerance and laws normalize social life. Activities once perceived as disruptive or inane are digested in the stabilizing flow of fruitful diversity. Hip hop isn’t grand opera; many people are indifferent to both.
8. Collaboration, Cooperation, Command
Consider these three modes of sociality: i. people having common or complementary aims plan a way of achieving their aims; ii. they choose or inherit roles within that design; then iii. cooperate to achieve its aims. Having a specific role entitles people to command the work of partners who supply their information or resources; it obliges them to satisfy those who await successful completion of their tasks. There is also the benefit achieved when a society’s members respond to imperatives in the work of its thinkers and artists: they digest ideas or products with feeling or understanding sufficient to incorporate or reject them.
8i. Collaboration: “In the beginning,” said Locke, “when all the world was America,”12 one could go to a trackless wilderness and carve out a space in which to live without having to defend against the jealousies of people like those Hobbes described.13 But life would be hard. It’s easier when tasks are shared by specialists, each doing his or her part better than a single person doing all of it. Collaboration implies either or both of two activities: participants formulate a design that synchronizes the tasks or interests responsible for completing a project, or they coordinate their work while doing the tasks required to finish it.
8ii. Cooperation implies the reciprocal accommodations of the people (or machines) performing a project’s tasks. Agents make themselves accessible to those from whom they take unfinished work, and intelligible to those to whom they pass it when their part is done.
Collaboration and cooperation are two aspects of the reciprocities essential to the formation and work of productive systems: families, schools, businesses, or states. Little of any complexity or social value is achieved without them; hence the pressure on individuals to participate, to conform. Glaring exceptions—cubist painting and Beethoven’s late quartets—are apparent, but they too are works created in the social dialectic of thinkers who elaborate their differences when provoked by history and their peers. 8iii. Command: Agency is confusing because of looking these two ways: it implies the autonomy of individual agents, while making them responsible for behavior that satisfies social norms. Am I entitled to a voice of my own, or am I an instrument responsible for sustaining Mead’s “generalized other”? Agency loses its personal force if every action is calibrated to whatever passes as social duty or momentum. We cherish the idea of freedom without realizing the exemption it promises from systems and regimes that suppress tastes, talents, and the social relations enabling their expression. Command is saved for dreams; we retreat because the insecurity we fear is closer at hand than the success of initiatives we imagine.
Watch people going to work in the morning, then leaving at night. See them patient and sturdy, then exhausted and depressed. Some enjoy their work, but many do not. Could we be more secure; better used; more autonomous; better able to fix vocations for ourselves? Is there no way to reduce self-alienation in the regimented societies where self-identity is mostly social identity? Could there be incremental changes that make economic and social organization responsive to individual initiatives? Rather than dread the time when technology reduces opportunities for human employment, let’s encourage the progress, already centuries old, that liberates workers from dismal jobs. Give substance and status to autonomy; relieve the stress of work by discovering, educating, and exploiting talents. Societies transformed by art or thought would sometimes feel anarchic: people going every which way. But there would be less anger, less despair, fewer people feeling that no one cares who they are or what they’re worth.
9. Cities
Generic talk of men or women, workers or management obscures their identities by effacing significant differences. Homogenization is hard to resist because generic abstraction is easy, and because it’s often appropriate: a subway’s many riders are mostly faceless; destinations are different, but all need an efficient service. There are three versions of urban socialization. Two are apparent in cities where gemeinschaft and gesellschaft are competing modes of social organization.14 A third style maximizes autonomy.
Gemeinschaft—community—implies the intimacy of people bound by beliefs and practices focused by religion, vocation, or shared pride in a team. Tribal meanings inform participants who recognize and defer to one another; all find solace with those who understand the world as they do. Gesellschaft signifies rationalized systems where efficient housing, transportation, and bureaucracy bind workers to their jobs. Efficient services supply basic needs, but anomie saves residents from obligations to unrecognized neighbors. Anonymity reinforces privacy; it makes interiority a principal resource. Yet gesellschaft reduces the motivating force of interiority: sensibility is devalued because it’s not easily monetized or managed, and because it has no social cachet to people who shun its cultivation.
Urban attitudes look these several ways: to rationalized neighborhoods and services; to ethnic communities that preserve traditional beliefs and practices; and to the vocational communities of musicians, dancers, writers, or artists. Georg Simmel stressed the interiority of residents who enjoy cities where the conditions for work, transportation, housing, food, health, education, and governance are rationalized. But his “metropolitan man” goes everywhere to listen or gawk.15 His motives are expressed sotto voce: forgive us if we enjoy all that is quaint nearby. These sophisticates are consumers; they live in towns where critical functions are reorganized on efficient principles, but they enjoy difference, and imagine that paying for lunch helps to sustain it. Their cities have trajectories like that of Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood in New York’s West Village as it passed from neighborly community to urban efficiency. She lamented the loss of low buildings and local streets, but her perspective was transitional: relations to her neighbors were business like; all were committed to defending their turf from threatening intruders. Frequent reference to “eyes on the street”16 was less a profession of community than fear that their neighborhood would be violated.
Louis Wirth described a deeper interiority where vocations are enabled by the efficiencies of technology and professional services:17 we sacrifice the warmth of family doctors if local medical practice is competent and reliable. Effects magnify when cultivated professionals enrich schools, concert halls, and galleries by supporting artists who have come to their cities for jobs, training, or excitement. This is socialization of a singular kind: go where others challenge you to learn what art can be, while you write or paint in ways of your own. Artist communities are the unplanned genius of city density: members cultivate their skills under the direction of teachers and fellow workers, while propagating creative spaces of varying sizes and intensities. Communities assemble spontaneously in neighborhoods where rents are cheap, and cafes want the trade of artists who challenge one another while exchanging ideas. There are academies where training is sustained and formal, but also schools where experience is the teacher. International finance is one of those; its complexity requires bankers, lawyers, and accountants who perfect their skills while working with one another. These many centers—of business, invention, ballet, or sport—justify the crazed title of Rem Koolhaas’s early book, Delirious New York: delirious because of its energy, diversity, and unpredictability.18
Most of city life is ordinary rather than distinguished. It isn’t usually inventive or intense: predictability and safety require that it be so. Yet the steady pursuit of everyday life is not ordinary or uniform: people trained to satisfy social norms distinguish themselves in small ways. Personality shows because one dresses a little differently, or one does his work with a distinctive twist. Some train drivers on the New York subway pull smoothly into stations; others lurch. Is that intentional, or the effect of poor control? One isn’t sure, though standing passengers stretched forward and back know the difference. For nothing is regularized to the degree that effective instruction and command would have it; we don’t learn the abstract standards, or we resist them in the name of idiosyncrasy. Military discipline often crushes personality, though some armies encourage it, because battlefields aren’t training exercises: initiative is required when situations aren’t predictable. City dwellers are adaptable because city life isn’t always routine. You shake yourself when something irregular happens; you stop to help or walk away.
The third style of urban socialization is here in the distinctive array of one’s interests and duties. Residents are socialized by having to make choices of their own for work, housing, or friends. People living in smaller communities fear the homogenization of city life; they see mass transit and traffic jams, they feel the energy, but dislike the mutual indifference. Confused by residents who choose new tasks or duties when overburdened already, they see excess where residents see opportunity. The city churns; and every resident endures episodes or conditions he or she dislikes. But residents experience and experiment with local diversities. All have tastes, inclinations, and an acquired personal rhythm: how much can one tolerate; what does one enjoy?
10. Disequilibrium
Imagine a situation in which two conditions are satisfied: every person discovers and cultivates a talent before taking a job that exploits it. Better still, each functioning adult has a space in which to enjoy his or her talents while having a vocation that is socially useful or, at worst, innocuous. All resemble the autonomous medieval goldsmiths about whom Marx fantasized.
These conditions are ideal. In biology, they would be sufficient for life-sustaining health; here in human experience, these are conditions for psychological and social health. Distributive justice requires that equilibrium—talents educated and enjoyed—is a condition achieved by all a society’s members. This is an unrealizable aim, though justified because we need an ideal: we can’t fix a broken arm without considering the shape of those intact. Equilibrium implies that several personal conditions are satisfied: we educate talents whose exercise gives pleasure to the agent, while earning a decent standard of living and the respect of others. The athlete is paid by his team while working with mates who value his play; the lone artist has the respect and financial support of people who value her work. Complexities ramify, usually to the disadvantage of equilibrium, so we ignore them in order to sketch and justify the ideal.
Imagine being secure in a job that exploits a highly developed skill. One has financial and institutional support for work that is socially popular (sport) or tolerated (humanities professor). There is no gap between a preferred activity and one’s job. Work is sometimes frustrating, but persistence and skill eventually succeed. Compare the disorientation of people who cannot say what they do, except to tell where they report about matters whose significance eludes them. They are paid; efficiency may have earned them promotions. Yet it isn’t clear to them that their product or activity serves more than a rhetorical or cosmetic aim. Wanting something visibly worthwhile, they find it in themselves, not because of a deeper insight into ultimate values, rather because a productive talent has weight that’s absent in job titles and made-up vocations. Marx was succinct: we want work that exploits a talent we enjoy using; control of the work we do; credit for doing it; and financial support that enables us to continue using the skill while caring for those for whom we’re responsible. These satisfactions are mostly private; few are sources of great wealth, though securely employed carpenters, gardeners, or violists are admirably placed. Why? Because they discovered and refined a talent, and because they’ve escaped lives of frustration appeased by distractions.
Equilibrium is therapeutic; it resolves the tension created when people are confused because of wanting self-expression in circumstances that reduce them to jobs, debts, or responsibilities they can’t ignore. Yet this characterization may seem false; people of all ages want affiliation and recognition in styles approved by their cultures or societies; the benefits lavished on others are rewards they want for themselves. Unrealized talents occasion no regret when people like their jobs, clients, and fellow workers: an unsuspected skill for speaking Dutch has no cachet in a society where no one else speaks it. Promotion, respect, a steady income: these are rewards with immediate satisfactions. Do these effects compensate for the failure to plumb some part of oneself? They are a compensation, if one doesn’t realize having talents whose cultivation would be transforming.
Why does equilibrium seem alien? Because achieving it is an accident in circumstances never designed for personal advantage; only a small fraction of adults do what they want to be doing, given their talents or skills. Why aren’t more people favored? Because society is a machine organized to defend and sustain the majority of its citizens in ways that promote the stability of its government, economy, resources, and bureaucracy. Are most adults beset by duties that can’t be foresworn short of bankruptcy, child desertion, or divorce? Why be surprised that deep gratification eludes us or that we persist as health allows, hoping all the while that our children may do better?
Disequilibrium has several causes. Population density, primitive social services, oligarchy, prejudice, and economic organization are slow to relent. Freedom to is sometimes lauded as the most desirable power of all. Though modes of production and conceptions of well-being require forms of organization that largely preclude the discovery or cultivation of personal talents. We see ourselves as workers of a kind having effects of a kind; we’re appraised for work we do, not for work we might have done if significant talents had been discerned, educated, and used. Many factors—industrial organization, labor unions, media, and marketing—consolidate these emphases, though there are other ways of perceiving who we are, and what we might do for ourselves and one another.
Is there a plausible way to reconstrue ourselves and our circumstances? The analogy proposed above may be liberating. Construe human societies on analogy to forests: each tree matures under the protection of the forest canopy, while providing cover for life within, around, and under it. See human autonomy as intrinsic and inalienable, while acknowledging that there is no effective autonomy without social rules, roles, vocations, and resources. We can’t be autonomous apart from societies that nourish, protect, educate, and employ us. Established ideas reject this middle ground: we are generic ciphers intelligible to employers, marketers, and ourselves by way of the work we do or things we buy.
Change will be conceptual before it’s material: we won’t honor ourselves or one another until we integrate this schizoid perception so both parts can breathe. Each of us knows him- or herself as a singular mix of thoughts and feelings, aims, and anxieties; but also as a person having generic roles and duties. How do we join incongruent identities without distortion? How can I be perceived as a node in a social ecosystem, perceived by others and myself as both autonomous and responsible to people or things dependent on me? This will be slow to happen because each person’s access to desirable material goods depends on a narrow vocational focus: doing this, whatever it be, to get what the agent and family or friends need or desire.
There is also a conceptual failure, one having a long history. We emphasize freedom from but say too little of the factors or influences from which we want relief; we say even less about freedom to, its preparation and aims. The Enlightenment sought liberation from dogma and authority, both religious and royal. Having achieved these objectives, it left the choice of one’s aims to personal discretion. Why this tolerance? Because democracy came to have an extended meaning. No longer restricted to a notion of sovereignty—government by the people—it became a generalized permission: let everyone decide his or her aims and means, given respect for laws that serve the public interest. Nothing in this formulation urges a more careful consideration of who we are or what we need. Those are issues safely ignored when we skip forward several centuries to an economy that dazzles us with goods and services that were once unimaginable. Can we alter this point of view if we suppress its frustrations? That’s not likely when conditions for change are so much weaker than the constraints and inducements holding us in place.
1 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), pp. 11–12.
2 Karl Marx, “Excerpts from James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy,” Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingston and Gregor Benton (London: Penguin, 1975), pp. 259–78.
3 George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society, ed, Charles Morris (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 440.
4 Plato, Republic, Collected Dialogues, eds. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (New York: Pantheon, 1961), 514a-517e, pp. 747–49
5 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 41–42.
6 See G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. G. B. Baillie (New York: Harper, 1967).
7 George Herbert Mead, George Herbert Mead: On Social Psychology—Selected Papers, ed. Anselm Strauss (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 50–51.
8 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s, 1965), pp. 180–87.
9 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), pp. 7–8.
10 See Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action: Reason and the Rationalization of Society, Volume 1, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984).
11 John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens: Swallow Press, 1954), pp. 15–16.
12 John Locke, The First and Second Treatises of Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), p. 92.
13 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 89.
14 Ferdinand Tonnies, “On Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft: Conclusions and Outlooks,” Perspectives on Urban Society: Preindustrial to Postindustrial, ed. Efren N. Padilla (Boston: Pearson, 2006), pp. 92–99.
15 Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” Perspectives on Urban Society, pp. 134–44.
16 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 56.
17 Louis Wirth “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” Perspectives on Urban Society, pp. 134–44.
18 See Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York (New York: Monacelli, 1997).