The Forest and the Trees Read online

  Why does this continue? A major reason is that people tend to think only in terms of individuals, as if a society or a university were nothing more than a collection of people living in a particular time and place. Many writers have pointed out how individualism affects social life by isolating us from one another, promoting divisive competition, and making it harder to sustain a sense of community, that we’re all in this together. But individualism does more than affect how we participate in social life. It also affects how we think about social life and how we make sense of it.

  If we think everything begins and ends with individuals—our personalities, life stories, feelings, and behavior—then it’s easy to think that social problems must come down to flaws in individual character. If our society has a drug problem, it must be because individuals just can’t or won’t say no to drugs. If there is racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and other forms of privilege and oppression, it must be due to people who have a personal need to behave in racist, sexist, and other oppressive ways. If there is terrorism in the world, it must be because of certain kinds of people— terrorists— who by their nature feel compelled to engage in terrorist behavior. And if the U.S. Congress can’t get anything done, something must be wrong with the senators and representatives. In short, bad things happen because of bad people.

  If we think about the world in this way—which is especially common in the United States—then it’s not hard to see why members of privileged groups become upset when they are asked to look at the benefits that go along with belonging to that particular group and the price those benefits require other groups to pay. When women, for example, talk about how sexism affects them, individualistic thinking encourages men to hear this as a personal attack: “If women are oppressed, then I must be an evil oppressor who wants to oppress them.” Since no man wants to see himself as a bad person, and since most men probably do not consciously intend to act in oppressive ways toward women, men may feel unfairly accused.

  In the United States, the idea of individualism goes back to the eighteenth century and, beyond that, to the European Enlightenment and the certainties of modernist thinking. In this period, the rational mind of the individual person was recognized and elevated to a dominant position in the hierarchy of things, separated from and placed above even religion and God. The roots of individualistic thinking in the United States trace in part to the work of William James, who helped pioneer the field of psychology. Later, the importance of individualism was deepened in Europe and the United States by Sigmund Freud’s revolutionary insights into the existence of the subconscious and the inner world of individual experience. Over the course of the twentieth century, the life of the individual emerged as a dominant framework for understanding the complexities and mysteries of human existence.

  We can see the tendency toward individualism in bookstores and bestseller lists that abound with promises to change the world through self-help and paths to individual growth and transformation. Even on the grand scale of societies—from war and politics to global financial meltdowns— individualism reduces everything to the personalities and behavior of the people we perceive to be in charge. If ordinary people in capitalist societies feel deprived and insecure, then the individualistic answer is that the people who run corporations are greedy or the politicians are corrupt and incompetent. The same perspective argues that poverty exists because of the habits, attitudes, and skills of individual poor people, who are blamed for what they supposedly lack in character and motivation and told to change if they want anything better for themselves.

  From an individualistic perspective, the way to make a better world is to put the ‘right people’ in charge, or to make better people by liberating human consciousness in a New Age, by changing how children are socialized, or by locking up or getting rid of people who will not or cannot be better than they are. Psychotherapy is offered as a model for how to change not only the inner lives of individuals but also the world they live in. If enough people heal themselves through therapy, then the world will ‘heal’ itself as well.

  The solution to collective problems, such as poverty or natural disasters or terrorism, then becomes a matter not of collective solutions but of an accumulation of individual solutions. If we want to have less poverty in the world, the individualistic answer lies in raising people out of poverty or keeping them from becoming poor by changing what sort of people they are, one person at a time. Or the way to end mass murders, such as the 2014 killings in Isla Vista, California, is to identify all the individuals who might be inclined to carry out such acts—through mental health screening, for example—and then somehow stop them before it is too late.

  Individualism, then, is a way of thinking that encourages us to explain the world in terms of what goes on inside individuals and nothing else. We have been able to think this way through the human ability to be reflexive, which is to say that we have learned to look at ourselves as selves with greater awareness and insight than before. We can think about what kind of people we are and how we live in the world, and we can imagine ourselves in new ways. To reimagine ourselves, however, we first have to believe that we exist as distinct individuals apart from the groups, communities, and societies that make up our social environment.

  In other words, the idea of the individual has to exist for us to think about ourselves as individuals, and the idea of the individual has been around for only a few centuries. Today, we have gone far beyond this by thinking of the social environment itself as just a collection of individuals, of a society as people and of people as society, and of the key to understanding social life as merely understanding what makes the individual tick.

  If you grow up and live in a society that is dominated by individualistic thinking, the idea that society is just people seems obvious. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the difference between the individual people who participate in social life and the relationships that connect them to one another and to groups and societies. It is true that you cannot have a social relationship without people to participate and make it happen, but the people and the relationship are not the same thing.

  That is why the title of this book plays on the old saying about missing the forest for the trees. In one sense, a forest is simply a collection of individual trees, but it is more than that. It is also a collection of trees that exist in a particular relation to one another, and you cannot tell what that relation is by looking at the individual trees. Take a thousand trees and scatter them across the Great Plains of North America, and all you have are a thousand trees. But take those same trees and put them close together, and now you have a forest. The same individual trees in one case constitute a forest and in another are just a lot of trees.

  The ‘empty space’ that separates individual trees from one another is not a characteristic of any one tree or the characteristics of all the individual trees somehow added together. It is something more than that, and it is crucial to understand the relationships among trees that make a forest what it is. Paying attention to that ‘something more’— whether it is a family or a society or the entire world—and how people are related to it lies at the heart of what it means to practice sociology.

  The One Thing

  If sociology could teach everyone just one thing with the most profound effect on how we understand social life, it would, I believe, be this: we are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we have to understand what it is that we are participating in and how we are participating in it. In other words, the key to understanding social life is neither just the forest nor just the trees but the forest and the trees and the consequences that result from their dynamic relationship to each other.

  The larger things we participate in are called social systems, which come in all shapes and sizes. In general, the concept of a ‘system’ refers to any collection of parts or elements that are connected in ways that coalesce in
to some kind of whole. We can think of the engine in a car as a system, for example, a collection of parts arranged in ways that make the car go. Or we can think of a language as a system, with words and punctuation and rules for how to combine them into sentences that have meaning. We can also think of a family as a system—a collection of elements related to one another in a way that leads us to think of it as a unit. These include such things as the positions of mother, father, wife, husband, spouse, partner, parent, child, daughter, son, sister, and brother. Elements also include shared ideas that tie those positions together to make relationships, such as how ‘good mothers’ are supposed to act in relation to children or what a family is and what makes family members related to one another as kin. If we combine the positions and ideas and other elements, then we can think of the result as a social system.

  In similar ways, we can think of colleges or societies as social systems. They differ from one another—and from families—in the kinds of elements they include and how those are arranged in relation to one another. Colleges and universities have such positions as student, president, and professor, for example, but the position of ‘mother’ is not part of the academic system. People who work or study in colleges and universities can certainly be mothers, but that is not a position that connects them to those systems.

  Such differences are a key to how systems work and produce different kinds of consequences. Corporations are sometimes referred to as families, for example, but if we look at how families and corporations are actually constructed as systems, we can see how unrealistic such notions are. Families usually don’t lay off their members when times are tough or when they want to boost the bottom line, and they usually don’t divide the food on the dinner table according to who’s the strongest and best able to grab the lion’s share for themselves.3 But corporations dispense with workers all the time as a way to raise dividends and the value of stock, and top managers routinely take a huge share of each year’s profits even while putting other members of the corporate ‘family’ out of work.

  What social life comes down to, then, is a dynamic relationship between social systems and the people who participate in them. Note that people participate in systems without being parts of the systems themselves. In this sense, ‘father’ and ‘grandfather’ are positions in my family, and I, Allan, am an individual person who actually occupies those positions. It is in this sense that I ‘am’ a grandfather. This distinction is easy to lose sight of, but it is crucial. It’s easy to lose sight of because we are so used to thinking solely in terms of individuals. It is crucial because it means that people are not systems and systems are not people, and if we forget that, we are likely to focus on the wrong thing in trying to solve our problems.

  To see the difference between people and systems, imagine that you are in a social situation, such as a church wedding, and someone who has never been in this particular place walks in the door and looks around. Perhaps the visitor is a woman whose car has broken down, and she is looking for a phone so that she can call for help. Most likely, she will know immediately where she is in a social sense and, even more important, will have an accurate idea of what the people in the room expect of her even though she has no personal knowledge of them whatsoever. So long as the visitor can accurately identify the social system in which she is participating and her position in it, she will be able to behave appropriately without violating the expectations that go with that situation.

  Thinking of systems as just people is why members of privileged groups often take it personally when someone points out that their society is racist or sexist. “The United States is a racist society that privileges whites over people of color,” for example, is a statement that describes the United States as a social system. It does not thereby describe the individual people who live there, which has more to do with how each of us participates in this society.

  As an individual, for example, I cannot avoid participating in this society in one way or another, and I cannot help but be affected and shaped by that. But how all that plays out in practice depends on many things, including the choices I make about how to participate. I was born in 1946 and grew up listening to the radio shows of the day, including Amos ’n’ Andy, which was full of racist stereotypes about black people (the actors were white). Like any other child, I looked to my environment to define what was ‘funny.’ Since this show was clearly defined as funny from a white perspective in a white-dominated society, and since I was born into a white family, I laughed with everyone else as we drove along listening to the car radio. I even learned to do the voices of ‘black’ characters and could entertain my family with renditions of classic lines from the show.

  Many years later, those racist images are firmly lodged in my memory, because once they get in, there is no getting them out. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see the racism in them and how they are connected to massive injustice and suffering in the society I grew up in and participate in today. As an individual, I cannot undo the past and I cannot undo my childhood. I can, however, choose what to do about race and racism now. I cannot make my society or the place where I live suddenly nonracist, but I can decide how to live as a white person in relation to the privileged position of ‘white person’ that I occupy. I can decide whether to laugh or object when I hear racist jokes. I can decide how to treat people who are not classified as white. I can decide what to do about the consequences that racism produces, whether to be part of the solution or just part of the problem. I do not feel guilty because my country is racist, because the creation of racism in this country was not my doing. But as a white person who participates in that society, I feel responsible to consider what to do about it. The only way to get past the potential for guilt and see how I can make a difference is to realize that the system is not I, nor am I the system.

  Nonetheless, systems and people are closely connected to each other, and seeing how that connection works is a basic part of sociological practice. One way to see this is to compare social systems to a game such as Monopoly, which we can also think of as a social system. The game has positions (players, banker), it has a material reality (the board, the pieces, the dice, play money, property deeds, houses and hotels), and it has ideas that connect those elements in a set of relationships. Specific values define the point of the game—to win—and rules spell out what winning consists of and what’s allowed in pursuit of it, including the idea of cheating.

  Notice that we can describe the game without saying anything about the personalities, intentions, attitudes, or other characteristics of the people who might play it. The game, in other words, is something that we can describe all by itself, and it exists regardless of whether anyone is playing it at the moment. The same is true of all social systems. We don’t have to describe actual senators and representatives, for example, to describe the U.S. Congress as a social system whose characteristics distinguish it from other systems.

  I don’t play Monopoly anymore, mostly because I don’t like the way I behave when I do. When I used to play Monopoly, I would try to win, even against my children, and I couldn’t resist feeling good when I did (we’re supposed to feel good) even if I also felt bad about it. Why did I act and feel this way? It wasn’t because I have a greedy, mercenary personality, because I don’t behave this way when I’m not playing Monopoly. Clearly I am capable of behaving this way as a human being, which is part of the explanation. But the rest of the explanation comes down to the fact that I behave that way because taking all the money and property for yourself is what the game of Monopoly is about.

  When I participate in the Monopoly system, greedy behavior is presented to me as a path of least resistance, what I am supposed to do if I want to feel that I belong. And when I play the game, I feel obliged to follow its rules and pursue the values it promotes. I look upon the game as having authority over the people who play it, which becomes apparent when I consider how rare it is for people to suggest changing the rules (“I’m sorry, honey,�
�� I say as I take my kid’s last dollar, “but that’s just the way the game is played”). If we were the game, then we would feel free to play by any rules we liked. But we tend not to see games—or systems—in that way. We see them as external to us and therefore not ours to shape in any way we want.

  What happens when people participate in a social system depends on two things: the system and how it is organized, and what people actually do as they participate in it from one moment to the next. What people do depends in part on the positions they occupy in relation to other people in the system (in Monopoly, everyone occupies the same position—player—but a classroom includes teachers and students, and a corporation can have hundreds if not thousands of positions). People are what make a system happen. Without their participation, a system exists only as an idea with a physical reality attached. If no one plays Monopoly, it is just a bunch of stuff in a box with rules written inside the cover. And if no one plays ‘Toyota Motor Company,’ it is just a bunch of factories and offices and equipment and rules and accounts written on paper and stored in computers. In a similar sense, a society may be organized in ways that promote racist or sexist outcomes, but for these consequences to happen—or not—someone has to do or not do something in relation to someone else in the context of one social system or another within that society.

  For its part, a system affects how we think, feel, and behave as participants. It does this not only through the general process of socialization but also by laying out paths of least resistance in social situations. At any given moment, we could do an almost infinite number of things, but we typically do not realize this and see only a narrow range of possibilities. What the range looks like depends on the system we are in.