The Forest and the Trees

by Allan Johnson

  Looking at attitudes and how they work is a useful way to see how various aspects of culture combine to produce complex and powerful results. Although culture consists primarily of what we cannot see—symbols, ideas, and feelings—it also includes the material world that humans construct as part of their social environment.

  Material Culture and the Stuff of Life

  The reality we construct is both nonmaterial and material. For example, we can think of music as a form of culture, as patterns of sound that we recognize as music rather than noise. In many cultures, music is expressed in a symbolic form using notes, sharps, flats, rests, and the like that musicians must know to ‘read’ what other musicians write (although one can play music without being able to read it). But as a part of culture, music also has a material basis for its existence, from the paper it is printed on to the brass, wood, steel, animal skins, bones, shells, and other materials that go into making instruments. In industrial societies, the hardware for producing and reproducing music seems to expand daily, from microphones and mixers to electric violins, synthesizers, and MP3 players.

  What all this means for sociological practice is that to understand music or any other part of social life, we have to pay attention to its material and nonmaterial aspects and how they are related to one another. The terms of social life are not simply embodied in who we are as people but also embodied in how we shape the physical world, from the furniture we sit on to the cities and towns we live in.

  Material culture exists because human beings seem to have an inherent tendency to transform the world as we find it. Whether it is to cut a path through the woods from the village to the water source, plant a garden, lay down a highway, build a house, or turn iron ore into steel, we seem bent toward the creative work of turning one thing into something else.

  How we do this matters on several levels. In the most immediate sense, the material world we create directly affects our own physical existence. The telephone, for example, takes our limited ability to hear and extends it across thousands of miles. In the opposite direction, the walls of buildings—especially windowless ones in buildings where many people work— can shut us in and close us off from the world around us and the people in it. By itself, the human body cannot do very much. Our senses of smell, sight, hearing, taste, and touch do not measure up very well compared with those of many species. We cannot fly, and most mammals can outrun or outswim us without too much trouble. In the overall scheme of things, in short, we’re an awkward and limited bunch.

  But our ability to invent material culture more than makes up for these limitations, which is a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that we can do creative things that are otherwise far beyond our reach. The curse is that we can use material culture to do damage beyond our wildest imaginings. The human ability to pollute and otherwise destroy the life-sustaining capacity of the planet is so vast and complex that we are only beginning to grasp the scope of it. And our ability to use technology not only to eradicate entire species whose presence we find objectionable but also to slaughter other human beings in huge numbers continues to increase, with no apparent end in sight.

  Beyond our physical existence, material culture also affects the terms on which social life is lived. It affects how we perceive reality, how we feel, what we value and expect from other people, and how social relationships are structured around such issues as the distribution of power. When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type in the fifteenth century, for example, he helped bring about a social revolution. For the first time, it was possible to take information or an idea, reproduce it in written form, and distribute it to a huge audience. This meant that it now mattered whether most people could read and write, because when books were created by hand, only the wealthy could afford them. As literacy spread, ideas, information, innovation, and invention spread right along with it.

  In the simplest sense, a printing press is just a machine, a collection of parts arranged in a certain way. Its social significance comes from how it has been used, especially in choosing what to print. Since what people read influences how they perceive and think about the world, it was inevitable that groups would struggle to control the printing press as a way to control the flow of information and ideas. At one time or another, just about every government in the world has tried to limit people’s access to printing presses and related technology and what they print on them. In the 1980s, the Romanian government went so far as to require people who owned typewriters to register them with the police so that the authorities could use samples of their type to identify the origin of antigovernment writing. If you had a criminal record or were seen as someone who posed “a danger to public order and security,” you could not own a typewriter at all.17

  In less-authoritarian societies, the state has less control over printing and publishing. This doesn’t mean that most people have access to this material culture, however, because it is quite expensive. As a result, writes Michael Parenti, freedom of the press exists primarily for those who own the presses or have the money to buy space in newspapers and magazines and print what they want to say.18 Increasingly, the public flow of ideas and information is controlled by a shrinking number of corporations that expand by merging and buying one another. This is happening across all areas of mass media, from television, radio, and film to books, magazines, and newspapers. The rate of acquisitions and mergers and the consolidation of power and control is so rapid that it’s difficult to keep up with who owns whom. It is hard to find a major book publisher, for example, that isn’t owned by another company, sometimes a still-larger publisher but increasingly a corporation that otherwise has nothing to do with publishing.

  Why does this consolidation in the flow of ideas and information matter? It matters because what can appear to be a diversity of independent news, information, and analysis can, in fact, flow from a small number of sources whose interests take first priority. As one commentator responds to a series of acquisitions and mergers (which have since undoubtedly been superseded by still more shuffling of ownership, power, and control):

  Watch a Little, Brown book become a Book of the Month Club pick, a Warner paperback and a Warner Brothers film that is featured in People, reviewed in Time, with a soundtrack album on Atlantic Records, shown on HBO, parodied in Mad and finally developed into a TV series by Lorimar. And all of the money— along with all of the choices—will be left in the hands of Time Warner, Inc.19

  What looks like a free and open marketplace of ideas turns out to be something else altogether (although it remains to be seen how this consolidation of power will be affected by the increasing use of the Internet and social media to provide information and analysis). The situation has been even more extreme since the 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that corporations are ‘persons’ under the Constitution and entitled to contribute as much money as they want to political campaigns.20

  Social control over the flow of ideas would be an issue even without the trend toward consolidating power in mass media. Almost none of the media, for example, has anything serious to say about capitalism and how it affects most people’s lives. If you want to learn more about this, you won’t find it on television or the radio, even on the supposedly liberal-biased public networks. Nor will you find it in newspapers, news magazines, or the lists of major book publishers. Why not? It could be that there isn’t anything critical to say because capitalism is so close to perfection that, aside from minor flaws, it’s as good as an economic system can get. Given the amount of suffering and crisis that has become almost routine in the world, however, it is unlikely that we’ve arrived at such a happy state.

  It is more likely that the mass media are silent on the subject of capitalism because they are organized in ways that make silence a path of least resistance. For example, almost all of the mass media are capitalist corporations. As such, they are owned by stockholders looking for the highest return on their investm
ent and controlled by executives whose fortunes depend on how well they serve stockholder interests. In other words, those who own and control the mass media have a vested financial and power interest in preserving and promoting capitalism as an economic system. They have little to gain and a lot to lose by suggesting there might be something wrong with it. This makes them unlikely to question or undermine the system that makes their power and privilege possible.

  None of this means that the mass media control what we think about a particular issue, but they do have a great deal of control over what issues we think about. And if they can control whether we see something like capitalism as an issue, they do not have to worry about how we see it as an issue. In this sense, the most profound use of media power is not in what is printed, filmed, or broadcast but in what is not. It’s no wonder that even as major social problems, such as privilege and oppression and chronic economic insecurity, affect more and more people, it does not occur to the media to ask how a system as powerful and pervasive as capitalism might be part of the problem. This silence is what made the Occupy Wall Street movement so unusual when it emerged in 2011, challenging not only capitalism but also the power of corporations to influence government for their own gain at the public expense, even to the extent of violating laws without being prosecuted.

  Clearly the problem has less to do with the existence of material culture, such as the printing press or television camera or Internet server, than it does with how this culture is used in a particular system. If we overlook the difference between the thing and how it’s used, material culture can take on a life of its own, as if it has power over us all by itself. Computers, for example, take a lot of blame for supposedly controlling people’s lives, but the problem is not the machine. The problem is in our relationship to the machine and how we think about it, both of which we control more than we know. A computer is, after all, just metal and plastic and amounts to nothing more than that unless someone plugs it in, turns it on, and tells it what to do. As such, a computer is nothing more than what we make it to be and has no more significance than we choose to give it. In the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Europe, for example, workers saw machines as evil because machines were being used to replace and control workers. The words ‘saboteur’ and ‘sabotage,’ in fact, come from the practice of taking wooden-soled shoes—sabots—and throwing them in the works to disable or ruin the hated machines.

  Today, the use of machines to replace and control workers is expanding rapidly, primarily in the form of computers and robotics. Nothing about the machinery itself, however, requires this to happen. More efficient production could be used to reduce the number of hours people work and still provide enough goods and services to meet everyone’s needs. In a capitalist economic system, however, this is not what ‘efficient’ means. A capitalist organization increases efficiency by maximizing production and minimizing cost—especially the cost of labor—which leads to higher profits. So, the ‘leisure’ that workers gain from the increased use of ‘labor-saving’ technology tends to be the spare time afforded by unemployment or forced early retirement rather than a full-time job that demands less from them in return for being able to earn a living. Amid a technological explosion, people in the United States are not working less; they are working more, and without much to show for it.21

  The stuff of material culture cannot tell us what it is about. For that, we have to see where material culture fits in a social system; how people perceive, value, and think about it; and what they do with it. As such, material culture can take social life in many different directions at once. The computer, for example, can be used as an instrument of oppressive control. It can store enormous amounts of personal information about people and be used to invade their privacy and monitor their every movement in the workplace and beyond. In some businesses, workers must use a coded key card to enter or leave any room, including the bathroom. This provides information about where workers are from one moment to the next throughout the day, even at times when you might think it is no one’s business but their own. On a larger scale, governments use cell-phone technology to track people’s movements and additional technology to monitor e-mail and phone calls on a global scale.

  Technology, however, can serve any purpose we can imagine. The Internet, for example, makes it possible for anyone with a computer and an online connection to access a worldwide communications system that—so far—is virtually impossible for anyone to control (which hasn’t stopped some governments, such as in Egypt and China, from trying). The Internet consists of millions of individual computers connected in small networks that are themselves linked to one another to make larger networks. No one knows from one day to the next how many computers are involved, and certainly no one can know all the billions of possible routes that connect those computers to one another. There are no central switching stations as there are in telephone systems, no centralized control points to shut down or regulate the flow of information. If one computer network isn’t working, then information is simply routed to its destination through one of countless other networks. E-mail messages don’t even travel in single units but are first broken into ‘packets,’ which are sent off in different directions and reassembled in their original form at their destination.

  It is virtually impossible to control such a decentralized system as a whole, which is why governments interested in controlling the flow of information—which includes most governments—are working hard to invent technology to control cyberspace. And with good reason: in Egypt, for example, the authoritarian regime of Hosni Mubarak was brought down in 2011 by a popular uprising that mobilized protestors largely through the use of the Internet and cell phones.

  Although material culture gets relatively little attention in sociological work, it can play a complex and paradoxical role in social life. We create this material culture and make it part of our identities, and yet we often experience it as separate and external—autonomous and powerful in relation to ourselves. We tend to identify with it in the sense that we come to depend on it so heavily that we cannot imagine life without it. At the same time, we can easily forget that it’s nothing more than something human beings have made.

  The danger of identifying with material culture is that we may hang onto it even when it produces terrible consequences. We think we cannot live without cars, air-conditioning, cell phones, and CO2-producing power plants, but global warming makes clear that in the long term, we cannot live with them.22 There is also danger in seeing material culture as alien and separate from our ability to create it. It is dangerous because even if we want to change or get rid of it, we may feel helpless or, worse, that it isn’t our responsibility in the first place. This is how we can find ourselves feeling and acting as if we are at the mercy of inanimate objects.

  It is all too easy to forget that the sum total of any culture is the product of the abundant potential of human imagination. “We live in a web of ideas, a fabric of our own making,” writes philosopher Susanne Langer.23 But as we live inside this web, what it appears to be at the moment is always only part of what is possible. This profoundly limits our ability to grasp the larger sense of what is going on. We live as though we exist inside a little box of reality constructed from cultural stuff—whether in a family, at work, online, or in society at large. And we rarely see beyond it, primarily because we do not even know the box is there. We act as though what we see is simply all there is. But it’s not, and to imagine something more, we first have to see it for what it is. In other words, to see beyond the box, we first have to take a serious look at the box, which is what sociological practice urges us to do.

  Our Box, the Best Box, the Only Box

  Living inside a box that we can’t see out of makes it easy to assume that other cultures either don’t exist or, if they do, are either just like ours or not worth the bother of getting to know, a phenomenon known as ‘ethnocentrism.’ We are like infants who see themselves and their experience as the c
enter of the universe and with no awareness that there might be anything else beyond what we know.

  The ‘box’ goes with us wherever we go, including other societies, which, of course, have cultures of their own. I vividly remember being deep inside Mexico and hearing a U.S. tourist’s angry outburst at a restaurant waiter who would not accept dollars as payment for the meal. The tourist could not imagine a place where dollars were not the currency of choice and refused to allow any other possibility. His tone conveyed the unmistakable message that being from the United States gave him a sense of arrogant entitlement, as in “Who are you to refuse my money?” But it also reflected an underlying phenomenon that is nearly universal—the difficulty in seeing beyond our own society.

  The tourist’s blind arrogance was ethnocentric, but he was also ethnocentric in his assumption that any culture other than his own was inferior. He assumed that U.S. dollars were a superior currency to Mexican pesos and that the waiter should accept, if not be grateful for, an offering of this more-valuable currency. However, at that time the peso had a much more stable history of maintaining its value than did the dollar and, if anything, the U.S. tourist held a less-desirable currency. But in a world seen through ethnocentric eyes, none of that mattered. The tourist resisted anything that might raise questions about the comfortable box he lived in, beginning with awareness of the box itself and even the possibility of something else.

  Ethnocentrism is everywhere and not peculiar to any culture. It is what led Europeans to call the Americas ‘the New World’ and to assume the right to name it, conquer its peoples, and plunder its resources. It is why Columbus Day is celebrated in the United States to recognize the ‘discovery’ of America, even though North America was discovered many thousands of years before by migrants from Siberia to Alaska. Ethnocentrism explains why white Australians celebrate the ‘founding’ of Australia in 1788, even though numerous tribal groups trace their lineage back to ancestors living there some forty thousand years before the coming of Europeans. It is why the Japanese first greeted shipwrecked European sailors as ‘barbarians’ and promptly executed them. And it’s why virtually every country that goes to war underestimates the courage, tenacity, and resources of its opponents, often assuming victory will come in a matter of weeks or months, as when the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.