This is why when new students flood a college campus in the fall, they wander around looking lost—they are lost, and this makes it easy to pick them out from a crowd. They break rules left and right because they don’t know the rules even exist, and so they may be forgiven for a while. But there comes a point when they are expected to know what is what and are held accountable for what they do as the price of being included. They have crossed a boundary defined in part by their relationship to a set of cultural ideas about who they are in relation to something larger than themselves.
In this sense, it doesn’t matter what the norms actually are in a social system, so long as there are some. When children create a club, for example, one of the first things they do is make up rules that have to be obeyed to belong. To have a club without rules is unthinkable, no matter how silly or contradictory they may be. The rules themselves do not matter as much as establishing a sense of something larger that members can feel part of, which, in turn, also tells them something about who they are.
The great French sociologist Émile Durkheim sees this collective sense of ‘we’ as the necessary foundation of social life and the only way to control people’s behavior.8 This collective sense is what morality is really all about— not just a set of rules about how to be a good person, but a shared sense of what the essence of a social system and its people consists of. It is from that shared sense of ‘us’ and ‘it’ that morality draws much of its power and authority, for to violate moral rules is to risk our sense of belonging to the system itself—the family, the community, the society. From Durkheim’s sociological perspective, the most important thing about morality is not behavior but the feeling of attachment that binds people to a group, community, or society when they support its moral rules. Without this, people feel lost, and systems can fall apart.
From this perspective, when people break a rule, they do much more than that, for they also violate a sense of boundaries and raise questions about who they are in relation to an entire system. If you wear the ‘wrong’ clothes to work, people start wondering whether you really belong there, whether you’re really committed to what the place is ‘all about.’ You might think, “What’s a dress code got to do with morality?” In the usual sense of what makes a good person, the answer is probably “Not much” in most systems most of the time. But in a larger sociological sense, morality is a basis for defining what a group or society is and what it takes to be accepted as a member. This makes the answer more complex. Whether it is rules about killing people or how to behave at the dinner table, all norms have some bearing on belonging and commitment that can tell us as much about ourselves as about the systems we participate in.
If morality is basically about belonging, then it follows that people who are seen as outsiders will be treated as deviants, violators of a moral code. This is what happens when people are stigmatized, treated as deviant not because of something they have done but because of who they are.9 This often plays a key role in various forms of social inequality and oppression. In many ways, such characteristics as race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, and religion are often used to define deviant categories of people who are then treated as outsiders by dominant groups. They are denied the normal, everyday benefits of belonging, from being treated with courtesy and respect in a store to being able to find a place to live, walk safely down the street, or get a job that reflects their abilities.
For centuries, for example, women have been regarded as deviants—as incomplete, flawed versions of men, whose minds and bodies render them weak and not up to the standards of a fully developed and competent human being.10 In most valued occupations and professions, women may still find themselves treated as outsiders and be told in ways both subtle and overt that they have no right to be there and are unwelcome. Whether a woman is not invited to join a group of men going out for a beer after work or finds a used condom in her desk drawer and suffers other forms of harassment, the underlying message and its effect are the same.11
The use of norms to exclude and oppress entire categories of people suggests something going on that a functionalist perspective does not help us see. It makes sense that systems are organized in ways that regulate what people do, but it makes much less sense to argue for some kind of social need to regulate who people are in terms of such traits as the color of their skin or whether they identify as gay or straight. It is hard to see why a society would require arrangements that not only elevate and privilege some groups but also routinely inflict suffering on everyone else.
Systematic patterns of exclusion, exploitation, domination, and abuse make more sense from what is known in sociological practice as ‘the conflict perspective.’ The conflict perspective also focuses on systems but primarily as a setting for conflict around patterns of social inequality. Culture is where we get most of the ideas we use to define reality, to differentiate superior from inferior, and to identify the rules of social life. It is therefore not surprising that privileged groups use their power and influence to shape culture in their own interests, including the perpetuation of privilege.
Consider, for example, cultural ideas about private property. The idea of property has not been around for very long, dating back no more than several thousand years. For something to be regarded as property, it has to occupy a particular position in a social relationship. When I say that the land my house sits on is my property, I’m saying that the people of my community and society recognize my right to live on it and do pretty much what I want with it, although not without limits. This allows me some control over who comes onto the property and how they treat it. With few exceptions, my property cannot be changed, destroyed, or taken away from me without my consent, unless it’s done by a nonhuman force, such as an earthquake. In this sense, property is not something (or, in the case of people held in slavery, someone). Instead, property is a set of ideas about the relationships that connect ‘owners’ to what is socially regarded as their property and to other people and social systems, such as communities and societies.
What we call ‘property’ exists only when cultures have beliefs that define it as real. Like many Native American tribes, for example, the Wampanoag traditionally viewed land as part of nature and not something that people could own. They could live on it, farm it, hunt on it, worship it, and admire its beauty, but they could not treat it as property. When English settlers came to the island of Nantucket off the southern coast of Massachusetts, however, and ‘purchased’ land from the tribe, the Wampanoag believed they had sold the English only a right to share in use of the land. They were dumbfounded, then, by what the white settlers did next: the English arrested and punished anyone who ‘trespassed’ on what they now regarded as ‘private property.’ The Wampanoag could no longer walk on or otherwise use the land, because it no longer ‘belonged’ to them. The Wampanoag social system had no place for such ideas. To the Wampanoag, the norms of English culture defined a relationship to the land that simply was not possible.12
In theory, norms that protect private property serve the interests of everyone who has any, whether it’s my iPad or Exxon’s oil wells. And the more property you own, the more you benefit from those norms. But protection takes on greater significance when property is a basis for systems of privilege and oppression. When owning property gives people power over others, then any norm that protects property rights also protects the inequality of power and privilege and what people are able to do with it.
In the United States, for example, a tiny portion of the population owns or controls the vast majority of wealth, especially the factories, machinery, tools, and other resources that people use to produce wealth and to make a living. The wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families own almost 90 percent of all the wealth, the top 10 percent own 73 percent, and the wealthiest 1 percent own 35 percent. By comparison, the bottom 40 percent own 0.2 percent. Across the world as a whole, the pattern is much the same, with the top 20 percent owning 85 percent of all wea
lth and the bottom 50 percent owning barely 1 percent.13
A lopsided distribution of wealth does not mean that norms protecting private property exist only for the elite who own most of it. It does mean, however, that while the law protects everyone’s property, it also enables the elite to maintain its privileged position, including its ability to increase its share of wealth even further. If you own or control businesses and factories, you can decide who works and who does not, how they work, and what becomes of the goods and services they produce. You can decide whether to close up shop and move production and jobs to another region or country where labor costs are lower, environmental and worker safety laws and labor unions are weaker, and profit margins are therefore higher. You can tell communities and states that unless they give your company tax breaks, you will move to a ‘friendlier’ business climate. And when states and communities agree to such demands rather than see jobs go elsewhere, people who live and work in these areas have to make up the lost taxes or make do with less money for schools and other government services.
Seeing how different aspects of social life fit together is an important part of sociological practice, for everything in social life is connected to something else. Notice, for example, that a culture cannot include values and norms about property unless it also has a cultural belief that defines such a thing as property as real in the first place. Notice also that norms that seem to support one value are likely to affect other values as well, so that what appears to be just about protecting property can also be about preserving an entire social order based on privilege and oppression.
Such patterns of interconnection appear in every aspect of social life: the connections that we see right away and most easily are usually just the tip of the iceberg. In this way, sociological practice can take us beneath the surface toward the deeper truth of what is going on, why it matters, and what it has to do with us.
Attitudes: Culture as Feeling
Beliefs, values, and norms have a huge influence on how we perceive reality, how we think about it, and how we behave. If we look at heterosexist prejudice, for example, we can see how elements of all three kinds of ideas combine. Prejudice against gay, lesbian, and bisexual people values one sexual orientation above all others. The values are typically propped up by beliefs that define sexual orientation as a type of person and make heterosexuals look better. Heterosexuality, for example, may be seen as natural and healthy, while anything else is seen as unnatural, a disease or perversion, or an offense against God.
Since heterosexism elevates one sexual orientation above others, it becomes a form of privilege in that heterosexuals are treated better simply because of their sexual orientation. Like all forms of privilege, heterosexual privilege is supported and maintained by norms that in various ways keep lesbian, gay, and bisexual people in their place by discriminating against them in such areas as housing, work, and parental and spousal rights. A lesbian couple might live together and share their lives for twenty years, yet if one becomes seriously ill, her parents and not her life partner are likely to be the ones legally recognized as having the right to manage her care and finances if she cannot manage them for herself.14
As powerful as beliefs, values, and norms are, they do not account for the feelings involved in prejudice. Hatred, disgust, or fear directed at gays, lesbians, and bisexuals, for example, is not a belief, a value, or a norm, even though such emotions may be closely connected to cultural ideas. Straight men may feel contempt for gay men and connect that feeling to beliefs and values that render gays contemptible in straight men’s eyes. And they may express their contempt through norms that disadvantage and oppress gays. In both cases, the contempt is more than a feeling. It is also a cultural attitude that blends belief, value, and emotion in ways that shape how we feel and behave toward people or, for that matter, the Earth, ideas, or just about anything else.15 The feelings can be as intense and momentous as unbridled public hatred. Or they can be subtle and everyday, in the hidden sense of unease that straight men often feel when they are around gay men.16
In each case, the feeling is more than an emotion, for it is rooted in a social system and a culture that goes with it. Feelings depend on how people define the reality of what is going on, what matters most, and what is expected of them and regarded as socially appropriate. Whether they take the form of the most intense heterosexist hatred in a violent crime against gays or the most restrained politeness at the dinner table, attitudes are a complex blend of ideas and feelings that shape how people participate in social life.
Some emotions are probably hardwired into us as a species. Small children, for example, do not have to be taught to feel afraid. Fear is certainly an emotion, but it’s not a cultural attitude unless it is connected to beliefs or values. Some years ago, for example, my wife wanted to expand our household by adding a snake to our two dogs and two goats. When I first heard the suggestion, I reacted as most people in this society would: “You want a what?”
Eventually, however, I was persuaded to consider that there was no reason to feel afraid or disgusted other than what I’d learned from cultural attitudes about snakes. I went, I saw, I touched, and I discovered much to my surprise that this creature was, in fact, a gentle being with skin that felt like fine leather. Perhaps most importantly, I realized that for all my bad feelings about snakes, this animal—Oya is her name—had far more to fear from me than I from her. She can barely hear or see and explores her environment primarily by smelling with her tongue. I could kill her whenever I wanted, and she would barely see it coming. Oya, however, would never strike at me unless she felt threatened and, even then, could not hurt me very much unless she got lucky. When I tell this story, people almost always react with a mixture of disgust and fear, even though only a few of them have been close enough to snakes to hold them or look in their faces. Their fear is less about actual experience than about growing up and living in a social system whose culture is full of frightening images of snakes.
In one sense, then, attitudes can be primary emotions, such as fear, that are attached to various cultural beliefs and values. By itself, fear is not an attitude, but a cultural fear of snakes is. Many attitudes, however, are emotions that exist only in relation to a social context. Contempt and disgust, for example, exist only as expressions of negative judgments, and you cannot judge something without using beliefs and values. You can teach infants to fear just about anything—a banana, a person—just by pairing it with something inherently fearful, such as violence or sudden loud noises. But you cannot teach infants to feel disgust for something, because they have no way to form ideas and judgments about anything until they learn to use language.
Put something delicious in a baby’s mouth, for example, and it’ll be gone in no time. But put the same thing in my mouth and tell me that it’s dog meat (a delicacy in many parts of Asia), and it won’t stay in my mouth for long. My reaction of disgust won’t be because of the taste but because of cultural ideas about what I think I’m eating. Give a juicy hamburger to someone who enjoys eating meat and, when they’re halfway through eating it, say that it’s made of ground cat and watch how they react to see the power of cultural attitudes in action. Even if you then tell them that it’s not really cat, they may still refuse to eat it.
The mix of emotions, beliefs, and values is at the core of what makes a cultural attitude. Pride, shame, guilt, love, hate, loyalty, reverence, respect, disrespect, haughtiness, humility, pity, patriotism, sympathy, empathy, gratitude, arrogance—all exist only in relation to ideas about the object of the feeling. This is also true of what is often thought to be an absence of emotion, as in attitudes of detachment or emotional deadness. In this sense, there is no such thing as being ‘unemotional,’ because ‘unfeeling’ is as much an emotional state as ‘deeply moved’ or ‘enraged.’ Very often, when people say they don’t feel anything, they are experiencing a kind of flat emptiness that is very much an emotional state, even though they may not call it that. And it i
s a feeling that can shape how they behave in powerful ways. It can mask and underlie great cruelty, for example, or make it easier for people to kill thousands in warfare, to do things that might sicken and horrify them if they allowed themselves to feel those feelings instead of the feeling of flat, detached I’m-just-doing-my-job efficiency that often takes their place.
Although we do not think of it as such in this culture, ‘unemotional’ is a powerful attitude that is especially expected of men and, not surprisingly, those in positions of power. The only emotion that is routinely allowed and encouraged in men is anger, because anger, like emotional detachment, makes it easier to exercise power and control. Since many cultures link standards for manhood and leadership to men’s ability to keep themselves in a seemingly unemotional state, anyone who aspires to those positions will feel compelled to adopt that attitude. The attitude combines a feeling of emotional detachment with cultural beliefs about the consequences of allowing various kinds of emotions to influence judgments and decisions. It is also connected to values that rank stereotypical masculine inexpressiveness above the stereotypical feminine tendency to be openly ‘emotional.’ As a result, women, who are culturally encouraged to be ‘emotional,’ will be encouraged to cultivate an ‘unemotional’ attitude if they want to be taken seriously and succeed in the male-dominated business and professional world.
This dynamic happens with many forms of social inequality—those in lower positions are often culturally stereotyped as more emotional than those in higher positions, and this perception can easily be used against them. When black people or women express anger at discrimination in the workplace, for example, they risk triggering stereotypes of black people and women as overly emotional and therefore out of control and needing to be controlled by others. This, in turn, is used to argue that they are unsuited for higher positions, because they do not display appropriate attitudes.
The Forest and the Trees Page 7