The Forest and the Trees Read online

  We need to be clear that there is no such thing as giving up one’s privilege to be “outside” the system. One is always in the system. The only question is whether one is part of the system in a way which challenges or strengthens the status quo. Privilege is not something I take and which I therefore have the option of not taking. It is something that society gives me, and unless I change the institutions which give it to me, they will continue to give it, and I will continue to have it, however noble and egalitarian my intentions.9

  Because white privilege is built into the system itself, I don’t have to like it or believe in it or even do anything to receive it. When I go shopping at the mall, salespeople and store detectives don’t follow me around as if I were going to steal something. They don’t swoop down on me and pointedly ask, “Can I help you?” as if I were a suspicious character or something other than a serious customer. But for people of color, such treatment is a common occurrence, and it usually doesn’t matter how well they dress or how much money they have to spend.10

  Most people would agree that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect, but when some are and some are not simply because of which social category they belong to, then an oppressive system of privilege is at work. And whether I like it or not, as a white person I benefit from that by getting something of value that is denied to others. Once I see this, it is hard to avoid asking how I participate in the system that produces such consequences. What are my responsibilities? What could I do differently that would contribute to different outcomes? How can I be part of the solution to racism rather than just part of the problem?

  In other words, by making me aware that I am involved in something larger than myself, sociological practice gets me off the hook of personal guilt and blame for a world that I did not create and that is not my fault. At the same time, however, it makes me aware of how I choose to participate in that world and how and why those choices matter. I have no reason to feel guilty simply because I am white, but I also do not have the luxury of thinking that racism and white privilege have nothing to do with me.11

  Personal Solutions Cannot Solve Social Problems

  If the shape of social life is rooted in relationships between people and the systems they participate in, then those relationships are also where social problems will or will not be solved. Personal solutions are just that—personal and individual—and they cannot solve social problems unless they include changes in how people outwardly participate in social systems. An individualistic model encourages us to think that if enough individuals change, then systems will change as well, but a sociological perspective shows why change is not this simple. The problem is that social life is not just a product of people’s personal characteristics and behavior, for these arise out of their participation in social systems. In that sense, social life depends on how people are connected to one another through the structures of social relationships, and systems do not change unless relationships change.

  An individualistic model also doesn’t work in practice, because personal solutions arise primarily from a sense of our own personal needs, and focusing our attention on personal needs is a path of least resistance. Once we find a solution to the problem that works for us personally, we’ve accomplished our goal and are likely to leave the larger problem behind rather than continue to work on it to help make things better for others.

  In the United States, for example, personal solutions are the typical response to the problem of economic insecurity, which seems to be a way of life for the vast majority of people in many capitalist societies, as we saw all too clearly after the financial crisis of 2008. Rather than stop and ask how the economic system itself sets us up to feel insecure, the path of least resistance is to work hard to establish our own private zones of safety within an insecure system, hanging on to what we have while leaving everyone else to fend for themselves.

  Not surprisingly, this strategy does not lower the overall level of insecurity and poverty in society as a whole—it does not, in other words, solve these social problems. Instead, it shuffles people in and out of various levels of well-being and security, like a game of musical chairs. As long as I have a chair for myself, why raise questions about the fact that there aren’t enough chairs to go around?

  Sociological practice uses more complex models of change that focus on several different levels of social life at once. Consider, for example, the problem of pollution, which a growing number of communities around the world have to deal with. Suppose that people in your town start getting sick. Large numbers of children don’t show up for school, and local clinics and hospital emergency rooms are jammed with patients who turn out to be suffering from chemical toxins.

  On a purely individual level, we could say that we have figured out why people are getting sick. And to solve the problem in terms of individuals, we could just treat each sick person until they get well and change people’s behavior so that they don’t get sick again. If the toxic chemicals are in the water supply, then don’t drink the water. Buy bottled water instead. Each person now has a solution to the problem, assuming, of course, they can afford to drink bottled water or install expensive filtration systems in the home. It would probably turn out that, as in most communities, some people would be able to afford the individualist solution and some would not, which means that some people would still get sick. Of course, we might enact some kind of collective response to this inequality by providing subsidies for poor people to buy bottled water, but notice that we still would not have done anything about the underlying problem of polluted water. We would simply have found a way for individual people to avoid the effects of drinking it.

  To take the problem to a sociological level, we have to ask about social systems and how people participate in them, and so far we have not said anything about people getting sick as a systemic problem. People are told to change their personal behavior by not drinking water out of the tap. But nothing’s been said about the possibility of something larger going on that might require changing the system they are participating in.

  Suppose we trace the toxin backward from each faucet and wind up at the local reservoir. From there, we trace it to the surrounding soil and a stream, and from there to a local chemical plant that employs a large number of people in the town. Now we have a different explanation of why people are getting sick and a different solution: get the plant to stop dumping chemical waste in ways that wind up in the town’s water supply.

  Suppose, however, that the people who run the company say they cannot do that because it would cost too much, and the business they are in is so competitive that they would have to close down the plant and move to where people care more about their jobs than they do about polluted water. And if the owners close down the plant, many local people will lose their jobs, the effects of which will ripple throughout the town as fewer people have money to spend in local businesses or pay in taxes to support schools and other services.

  Now the problem of what is making people sick is more than a simple matter of how the plant is run. The problem is also related to larger systems that the plant as a whole participates in and to the company’s powerful position in relation to the community that depends on it for jobs. The nature of the economic system—competitive global capitalism—shapes the choices that plant owners make in ways that affect the quality of water that people have to drink. That economic system is tied to unequal distributions of power and wealth and to cultural values about the desirability of making a profit and the right of people to do what they want with private property, perhaps even dumping toxic waste on land they own or in streams that run across their property. Ultimately, the town may have to confront the company’s power over the lives of residents and choose between powerful competing values about how communities and societies should work.

  Taking the problem to the level of systems does not mean we ignore individuals. It is not a matter of one or the other, because sociological practice looks at social life in re
lation to systems and how people participate in them. People often box themselves into a false choice between attributing a problem to society and blaming it on individuals. But social life doesn’t work that way. The choice is hardly ever as simple as one or the other, of society or individuals, because societies and individuals exist only in relation to each other. The challenge of sociological practice is to see how this relationship works. If we don’t, we go back and forth between acting as if individuals play no part in creating social problems and acting as if people behave in a social vacuum without being affected by the kind of society they live in.

  There is a third alternative, which is both/and instead of either/or. Systems do not change without people changing at one point or another, and no system can change through individual change alone.

  It’s Even Messier and More Interesting

  The language of ‘systems’ and ‘individuals’ can make things seem a lot simpler and more clear-cut than they really are. It encourages us to think of systems as things, as rigid molds that people must fit into. In some ways, a social system is thinglike in that we can identify characteristics, such as the distribution of power or rules or a physical setting or positions that people occupy as participants. ‘School,’ for example, conjures up some predictable images—rooms with chairs in rows, cafeterias, gymnasiums, libraries, computer labs, students, teachers, locker-lined hallways, bells ringing at regular intervals, rules, grades, teachers having power over students, administrators having power over teachers, semesters, vacations, teaching, learning, graduation. Because such images of this thing we call ‘school’ are relatively fixed in our minds, we can experience it as being thinglike.

  In other words, we can think of school as something outside of us, as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘me’ or an ‘us.’ People attend or work in ‘it,’ but the people are not it, and it is not the people. In that way, school is like the game of Monopoly in a box. People take it out (go to school), play it for a while (teach, study, administer), and then put it away (go home). And that is pretty much what it is, or so we might think.

  But social life is messier and more interesting than that, because in many ways social systems are not something. Each is an ongoing process. Social systems are continually being created and re-created as people do things to make them happen. The associations we have with ‘school’ are just words on a page, images in our minds, until people actually participate in the process of school as a system. When they do, some familiar patterns shape what goes on, but there is also an enormous amount of variation around those patterns as people put their own spin on how they are going to participate. ‘It’ never happens in exactly the same way twice, because what we call ‘school’ is as much about what people do as it is about all the associations we have with the idea of school as a kind of social system.

  While we may not be aware of it at the time, at any given moment, any of the people in a school could do something unexpected that would shape how school happens in that time and place. We may have a general understanding of what school is in the same way that we understand what Monopoly is. And we can use such knowledge to predict with some accuracy what the general patterns will look like in a given school on a given day. But there is a great deal that we cannot predict, because in an important sense, ‘school’ happens only as it happens. In this sense, school literally is what people do when they identify themselves as ‘in school.’

  What makes social life and sociological practice messy and interesting is that both ways of looking at things are true. When I visit a college classroom and sit down with students, for example, I can feel how the situation of school limits what I see as my options. I know in general what I’m expected to do and what, therefore, would be considered inappropriate for that situation. But as I sit there looking at the students, there is also a sense in the air of ‘So, what are we going to do?’ Although we all know that we’re in school and that this means many things are very unlikely to happen, we also don’t really know what is going to happen, because it hasn’t happened yet. So, I say something to start things off, or a student asks a question or makes a comment on something they have read, or something else altogether happens. And so it goes from there, as ‘school’ unfolds, emerging from how these people choose from moment to moment what they are going to make of their participation in this system.

  If we want to explain what happens during that time, it is not enough to understand what school is about as a social system, and it’s not enough to understand who the people in the room are as individuals. What happens depends on both /and—it depends on both the system these people are in and how they choose to participate in it.

  What makes things still messier and still more interesting is that in important ways, we are not all in the same situation. Because we occupy a variety of social positions within each system, we tend to experience each situation differently. We are shaped differently by it, limited by it in different ways, and therefore tend to participate differently. What school is about, then, varies depending on whether you’re a student or a teacher, female or male, Asian American, Native American, white, Chicana, African American, older, younger, working class, lower class, middle class, upper class, immigrant, native-born, heterosexual, bisexual, lesbian, gay, transgender, with or without a disability, employed, unemployed, married, single, with or without children. Such characteristics locate us in different ways in relation to other people and to social systems. They affect how we see ourselves and others, how they see us, and how we treat one another as we participate in making a system happen. When we say that we are always participating in something larger than ourselves, it is important to remember that ‘we’ is not a homogeneous term. There are multiple we’s in social life, and an important part of sociological practice is to see how this affects what happens.

  Into the Practice

  All forms of sociological practice are ‘sociological’ because they flow from the same basic questions: what are people participating in and how are they participating in it? The work can vary in the balance it strikes between the two questions, with some work leaning more toward one or the other. A study of how people use language to affect how other people see them, for example, might pay little attention to the social systems where such behavior takes place. Or a study of the world economy might never look at the fine details of how people interact as they participate. But the connections between systems and people are always there for us to follow toward a deeper grasp of the complex web that makes up social life and our experience of it and ourselves. Although the main focus in the rest of this book is on systems, questions about how we figure in social life are never far off, for without people to make systems happen from one moment to the next, there would be no social life to understand or anyone to care one way or another.

  The next three chapters lay out a systematic way to think about what makes one system different from another in terms of its cultural, structural, and population/ecological characteristics. Keep a couple of things in mind as you read these chapters. The first is that I’ve never found a clear, coherent way to describe this approach all at once. I find it easier on the mind to break it into pieces taken one at a time—hence separate chapters on culture, structure, and population/ecology.

  The problem with doing it this way is that in reality, the pieces do not occur separately, but only in relation to one another. It is similar to studying human anatomy. There is no nervous system, for example, without a circulatory system, and yet anatomy textbooks devote separate chapters to each system, as if each were a distinct entity existing on its own. To the extent that each system is distinct and separate, it is only so in our minds, since nerves, vessels, and the body are completely bound with one another. We can invent ways of thinking that allow us to imagine a circulatory or nervous system as something apart from everything else, but this is only a device, a learning tool that makes things easier to comprehend. As a device, explaining things in this way also raises a challenge by disto
rting the nature of reality, which I try to put back together later in the book.

  The other problem with carving things up is that something has to come first, and it can be tempting to infer a rank of importance from the order in which topics appear, as in ‘Culture must be the most important because it comes first.’ Thinking that would be a mistake. I begin with culture because as a writer and a thinker, I am drawn to words and symbols and how humans construct reality in their minds. I have a special affinity for culture, so that is where I begin, knowing all the while that everything is connected to everything else in complex ways that require us to grasp not only the parts but also the whole, to which we turn in Chapter 7.

  2

  Culture

  Symbols, Ideas, and the Stuff of Life

  As I sit in my office—which happens to be in the house where I live—and type these words, I hear a loud rumbling sound from beyond the window. I stop and look out to see a darkening western sky. In the narrowest sense, when I say, “I hear,” all that means is that whatever makes the ‘sound’ does so by making the air move. The moving air hits my eardrums and makes them vibrate, and a complex mechanism in the ear turns the vibration into an electrical impulse. The impulse goes to my brain, which then has the experience of ‘hearing’ a sound. And when I ‘see’ a darkening sky, all that happens is that light enters my eye, where it is converted to electrical impulses that go to my brain, which turns them into something I experience as a visual image. Of course, the process doesn’t stop there, because almost immediately a string of words flashes across my consciousness: “Uh-oh, thunder.” Then more words: “It’s gonna rain in the upstairs windows.” I go upstairs and close the windows. More words: “I’d better turn off my computer so it doesn’t get zapped by lightning.” I turn it off, unplug it, and go watch out the window. But no lightning flashes, and no rain falls. The western sky gradually clears. “False alarm,” I say to myself, and I go back to writing.