The Forest and the Trees Read online

  While playing Monopoly, for example, I could reach over and take money from the bank whenever I want. Or when someone I like lands on a property I own, I could say that I’ll give them a break and not collect the rent but then happily collect it when someone I don’t like lands there. But people would probably object that I wasn’t playing ‘fair’ or by the rules. Since I would rather people not be angry with me or kick me out of the game, it’s easier to follow the rules even when I’d rather not. And so I usually do, following the path of least resistance that’s presented to people who occupy the same position I occupy in that particular system.

  This is why people might laugh at racist or heterosexist jokes even when they make them feel uncomfortable—in that situation, to not laugh and risk being ostracized by everyone may make them feel even more uncomfortable. The easiest—although not necessarily easy—choice is to go along. This does not mean we have to go along or that we will, only that if we do go along, we’ll run into less resistance than if we don’t.

  In other situations, paths of least resistance might look quite different, and giving a friend a break or objecting to racist humor might be seen as just what we’re supposed to do. In relation to my children, for example, I’m supposed to do whatever I can to help them—that is the path of least resistance that goes with the relation between parent and child in the family system (except, perhaps, when we’re playing Monopoly). However, I’d never want my daughter or son to be a student in one of my classes, because then I’d have to choose between conflicting paths of least resistance associated with two different systems. As a teacher, I’m supposed to treat my students the same, but as a father, I’m supposed to favor my children above other people’s children. The path of least resistance in one system is a path of much greater resistance in the other, producing what sociologists call ‘role conflict.’4

  Figure 1. Individuals and social systems: A dynamic relationship.

  Social systems and people are connected through a dynamic relationship, pictured in Figure 1. People make systems happen—consciously or not—and systems contain paths of least resistance that shape how people participate. Neither people nor systems exist without the other, and yet neither can be reduced to the other. The complexity of my life is not some predictable product of the systems I participate in, nor is a social system an accumulation of my own and other people’s lives.

  What results from all this are patterns of social life and the consequences they produce for people, for systems themselves, and for the world—in short, most of what matters in the human scheme of things and beyond to the Earth and other species affected by how we live. When we can identify how a system is organized, we can see what is likely to result if people follow the paths of least resistance. We know, for example, where the game of Monopoly is going just by reading the rules of the game. We don’t have to know anything about the individuals who play it, except the likelihood that most of them will follow the path of least resistance most of the time.

  On the surface, the idea that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves may seem fairly simple. But like many ideas that seem simple at first, it can take us to places that transform how we look at the world and ourselves in relation to it.

  The Individualistic Model Doesn’t Work

  Probably the most important basis for sociological practice is that the individualistic perspective that dominates current thinking about social life is wrong. Everything we do or experience happens in relation to a social context of some kind. When a wife and husband argue about who will clean the bathroom, for example, or who will take care of a sick child when they both work outside the home, the issue is never simply about the two of them, although it may seem so at the time. We have to ask about the larger context in which something occurs.

  We might ask, for example, how this instance is related to living in a society organized in ways that privilege men over women, in part by not making men feel obliged to share equally in domestic work except when they choose to ‘help out.’ On an individual level, he may think she’s being a nag, while she may think he’s being a selfish jerk. But the issue is never as simple as that, because what both may miss is that in a different kind of society, they might not be having this argument in the first place, because both might feel obliged to take care of home and children.

  In similar ways, when we see ourselves as a unique result of the family we came from, we overlook how each family is connected to larger patterns. The emotional problems we struggle with as individuals, for example, are not due simply to what kind of parents we had, for their participation in social systems—at work, in the community, in religion, in society as a whole—shaped them as people, including their roles as mothers and fathers. An individualistic model is misleading, because it encourages us to explain human behavior and experience from a perspective so narrow that it misses most of what is happening.

  A related problem is that we cannot understand what goes on in social systems simply by looking at individuals. In one sense, for example, suicide is a solitary act done by an individual, typically while alone.5 If we ask why people kill themselves, we are likely to think first of how people are feeling when they do it—hopeless, depressed, guilty, lonely, or, in the case of soldiers and suicide bombers, obligated by honor, duty, loyalty, or religious belief to sacrifice themselves for someone else or what they identify as a greater good. That might explain suicides taken one at a time, but what do we have when we add up all the suicides that occur in a society for a given year? What does that number tell us, and, more importantly, about what? This was the question posed by the great French sociologist Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, in his classic work Suicide.

  The suicide rate for the entire U.S. population in 2010, for example, was 12 suicides per 100,000 people. If we look inside that number, we find that the rate for males was 20 per 100,000, but the rate for females was only 5 per 100,000. The rate also differs dramatically by race and country and varies over time. The suicide rate for white people in the United States, for example, was higher than that for any other racial group, more than double the rate for black and Latino people and 30 percent higher than the rate for Native Americans. The highest rate for any major demographic group is found among white males.

  There are also variations among countries. While the rate in the United States was 12 per 100,000, for example, it was 22 per 100,000 in Hungary but only 6 per 100,000 in Italy. So, in the United States, males and white people are far more likely than females and black people to kill themselves, and people in the United States are twice as likely as Italians to commit suicide but only one-half as likely as Hungarians.6

  If we use an individualistic model to explain such differences, we tend to see them as nothing more than a sum of individual suicides. If males are more likely to kill themselves, then it must be because males are more likely to feel the emotional states associated with suicidal behavior. In other words, the psychological factors that cause individuals to kill themselves must be more common among males than they are among females or more common among people in the United States than among Italians. There is nothing wrong with such reasoning. It may be exactly right as far as it goes, but that is just the problem—it does not go far enough. It does not answer the question of why these differences exist in the first place.

  Why, for example, would males be more likely to feel suicidally hopeless and depressed than females, or Hungarians more likely than Italians? Or why would Hungarians who feel suicidally depressed be more likely to go ahead and kill themselves than Italians who feel the same way? To answer such questions, we need more than an understanding of individual psychology. Among other things, we need to pay attention to the fact that such words as ‘female,’ ‘white,’ and ‘Italian’ name positions that people occupy in social systems. Acknowledging this fact draws attention to how those systems work and what it means to occupy those positions in them in relation to paths of least resistance.
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br />   Sociologically, a suicide rate is a number that describes something about a group or a society, not the individuals who belong to it. A suicide rate of 12 per 100,000 tells us nothing about you, me, or anyone else. Each of us either commits suicide during a given year or we do not, and the rate cannot tell us who does what. In the same way, how individuals feel before they kill themselves is not by itself enough to explain why some groups or societies have higher suicide rates than others. Individuals can feel depressed or lonely, but groups and societies cannot feel a thing. We could consider that Italians might tend to be less depressed than people in the United States, for example, or that in the United States, people might tend to deal with feelings of depression more effectively than in Hungary. It makes no sense at all, however, to say that the United States is more depressed or lonely than Italy.

  While looking at the psychological process in individuals might explain why one person commits suicide, doing so cannot explain patterns of suicide found in social systems. To explain systemic patterns, we have to look at how people feel and behave in relation to systems and how those systems work. We need to ask, for example, how societies are organized in ways that encourage people who participate in them to experience various psychological conditions or to respond to them in suicidal or nonsuicidal ways. We need to see how belonging to particular social categories shapes people’s experience as they participate in social life and how their participation limits the alternatives they think they can choose from. What is it about being male or being white that can make suicide a path of least resistance?

  How, in other words, can we go to the heart of sociological practice to ask how people participate in something larger than themselves and see how this affects what they do? How can we see the relationship between people and systems that produces variations in suicide rates or, for that matter, everything else that we do and experience, from having sex to going to work to dying?

  Just as we cannot tell what is going on in a system only by looking at individuals, we also cannot tell what is going on in individuals just by looking at systems. Something may look like one thing in the system as a whole but like something else entirely when we look at the people who participate in that system. If we look at the kind of mass destruction and suffering that war and terrorism typically cause, for example, an individualistic model suggests a direct link with the kinds of people who participate in it. If war and terrorism produce cruelty, bloodshed, aggression, and conquest, then the people who participate in such activities must be cruel, bloodthirsty, aggressive people who want to conquer and dominate others. When viewing the carnage and destruction that war and terrorism typically leave in their wake, we are likely to ask, “What kind of people would do such a thing?”

  Sociologically, however, the question is misleading, because it reduces a social phenomenon to a simple matter of ‘kinds of people’ without looking at the systems those people participate in. Since we are always participating in one system or another, when someone crashes an airplane into a building or drops a bomb that incinerates thousands of people, we cannot explain that action simply by figuring out ‘what kind of person would do such a thing.’

  In fact, if we look at what is known about people who fight in wars, they appear fairly normal by most standards and anything but bloodthirsty and cruel.7 Most accounts portray the experience of being in combat as alternating between extreme boredom and extreme fright. Soldiers worry much less about glory than they do about not being hurt or killed and getting themselves and their friends home in one piece. For most soldiers, killing and the almost constant danger of being killed are traumatic experiences that leave them forever changed as people. They go to war not in response to some inner need to be aggressive and kill but because they think it is their duty to go, or they see enlisting as a way to be of service to their country, or they have seen war portrayed in books and movies as an adventurous way to prove their manhood (a standard that applies to both men and women in combat), or they do not want to risk family and friends rejecting them for not measuring up as true patriots, or they are afraid of being sent to prison if they refuse to be drafted.

  People are not systems and systems are not people, which means that social life can produce horrible or wonderful consequences without necessarily meaning that the people who participate are horrible or wonderful themselves. Good people participate in systems that produce bad consequences all the time. I am often aware of this in the simplest situations, such as when I go to buy clothes, food, or electronics. Many of the clothes sold in the United States, for example, are made in sweatshops, some in the United States, but most in nonindustrial countries, such as Indonesia and Thailand, where people often work under conditions that resemble slavery in many respects or for wages that are so low they can barely live on them. Similarly, many of the fruits and vegetables sold in grocery stores are harvested by migrant farm workers who work under conditions that are not much better. And in 2012, shocking revelations emerged about the treatment of workers in Chinese factories where Apple iPads and iPhones are manufactured. If these workers were provided with decent employment conditions and paid a living wage, the price of clothing, food, and electronics would be significantly higher, which means that I benefit from the daily mistreatment and exploitation of thousands if not millions of people. The fact that I benefit does not make me a bad person, but my participation in that system does involve me in what happens as a result.

  It’s About Us and It’s Not

  If we start from the idea that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves and that social life flows from this relationship, then we have to consider that we are all involved—even if indirectly—in the social consequences that result, both the good and the bad. By definition, if I participate in a racist society—no matter what my race—then I am involved in white privilege and the oppression of people of color.

  As an individual, I may not feel or act in racist ways, and in my heart I may even hate racism, but that is beside the core sociological point that I am involved in one way or another by virtue of my participation in society itself.8 If the path of least resistance is for people to take what I say or write more seriously because they perceive me as being white, for example, then I am likely to receive a benefit of racism, regardless of whether I’m aware of it. In doing so, I have unwittingly participated in racism. This raises the question of how society works and how I participate in it—whether I actively defend white privilege, let people know that I am against racism, or just go about my business and pretend there is no problem to begin with.

  From this perspective, it doesn’t make sense to use the words ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ as nothing more than ways to describe the character of individual people, because the most important factor in perpetuating privilege and oppression is how social systems are organized, including the paths of least resistance they lay down for participants to follow regardless of what kind of people they are.

  In his book Portraits of White Racism, sociologist David Wellman argues that ‘racist’ and ‘racism’ should refer to anything that has the consequence of perpetuating white privilege, regardless of the intentions or character of the people whose behavior brings about that result. Most people believe, for example, that it’s good for children to go to school in their own neighborhoods. Since racial segregation in housing is still pervasive, however, such a policy also has the consequence of perpetuating racial segregation in schools, which a considerable body of evidence shows is not good for students of any race, but especially for children of color. Those who advocate for neighborhood schools often protest that their position has nothing to do with race, which may be true of their intentions as individuals. But the consequence of such a policy has a great deal to do with race and the perpetuation of white privilege and the oppression of people of color that results from that privilege.

  Getting clear about the relationship between individuals and social systems can dramatically alter how we see potentia
lly painful issues and ourselves in relation to them. This is especially true for people in privileged groups who otherwise resist looking at the nature and consequences of privilege. Their defensive resistance is probably the biggest single barrier to ending privilege and oppression. Most of the time resistance happens because, like everyone else, people in privileged groups are stuck in an individualistic model of the world and cannot see how to acknowledge white privilege as a fact of social life without also feeling personally to blame for it. And the people who are most likely to feel this way are often the ones who are otherwise most open to doing something to make things better.

  When we look at a problem such as racism sociologically, however, we can see how it is both about us and not about us. It is not about us in the sense that we did not create the racist society we all live in. As I was growing up white, for example, no one asked me whether it was okay for white people to use Amos ’n’ Andy to make fun of black people and keep them in their place beneath white privilege. And if they had asked me, I doubt that as a small child I would have known enough to object. In this sense, white people who have grown up in a racist environment have no reason to feel guilty when they hear people express anger about the existence of white racism and the harm and suffering that it causes.

  Racism is also about me personally, however, because regardless of whether I am aware of it, I am always making choices about how to participate in a society that is organized in racist ways and that makes behavior that perpetuates white privilege a path of least resistance. Regardless of how I behave, as a white person I am eligible for privilege that comes at the expense of people of other races. As Harry Brod argues: