|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
MORALITY AND MASS SOCIETY1
THE SOCIAL LOCATION OF HUMAN MORALITY
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Loss of Self. In managed mass societies, it is profitable to
divorce self from social organization in the
productive process; it is expedient to circumvent the self
structure in the marketplace, and it is easy if not necessary to do
so in the micro-politics of everyday life.
The old model of self, anchored firmly in the structure of social networks, is hostile to the interests of advanced monopoly capital for using and discarding workers; for playing one worker off against another; for moving factories and jobs away from communities; for using one set of workers to watch and manage and exploit another set of workers; for the anonymity of the marketplace in which profits set the tone and purpose of interaction.
The old model of self, useful in caring and sharing with others within the larger structure of community is hostile to the needs of elites to separate and to fractionate blocs of people into individual units of power and wealth. Such a massified form of individualism fits excellently well the control needs of elitist societies in that the concentration of social power in the interests of the collective is prevented; in that the vast transformations possible informed by moral power are defeated; in that the democratic structures possible using modern electronic technologies are subverted; and the boundaries of social space are miniaturized thus making the corporation that much the larger.
The old model of self in which socially constructed social identities mediated moral behavior is displaced by a new structure of self in which bureaucratic rules, marketplace needs, and authoritarian orders shape the every day decisions of workers, students, customers, and voters alike. In such a massified society; in such an individuated society; in such a self.less society, moral behavior disappears. Shameless behavior is seen on every hand. The only rule is don't get caught using other people to privatized purpose.
The old model of self useful in a society oriented to producing goods and services is hostile to the need of capital to control labor costs. The old model of self oriented to frugality, thrift and modest levels of consumption is hostile to the need of capital to dispose of goods in the marketplace. The traditional model of self packed full of social identities linked to cooperative social endeavor is most certainly hostile to the market imperatives of capital or the accumulation goals of the capitalist.
Advertising, as a mythic form, suggests a new model of self while it parasitizes on traditional social identities attempting to generate publics via the family role-set, ethnic identities or sex- linked identities. The privatized self of the affluent consumer is the model of self pushed in a thousand commercials. One is to measure happiness and despair in terms of possession and fashion. One is to measure success in terms of wealth and portfolio. One is to gauge the worth of the self in terms of display and posture.
A structure of self in which shared values mediate human
behavior is hostile to one in which private goals are to be met.
A structure of self in which reciprocity in a role set informs
human behavior is hostile to private success. A structure of self
in which others mirror one's behavior, express approval or dissent
and thus mediate one's behavior is hostile to personal power and
personal control of the negotiated order which ensues.
The Social Location of Morality. Most researchers; indeed most
people, falsely locate morality
in the person of the acting individual. That has never been the
case. In a society organized to maximize the control of behavior
of people by dramaturgy, electronic, psychology, and social
research, still less is it true.
In every stratified society the locus of morality is at the apex of the pyramids of power, wealth and social honor. As those structures become more stratified with more and more layers of bureaucratic offices between the apex and the effector apparatus, morality becomes diffused at each echelon; dissociated from the individual. Orders, policies, programs set arbitrarily arrogate moral responsibility to the 'leadership.' Rules, regulations, and role specifications rob the employee of moral rights.
When decisions are to be made by lower echelon employees, these decisions are limited to the routinization of authority to rational application to cases which come before the employee. If the employee fails to follow routine out of ignorance, mischief or out of sheer human compassion, that employee is retrained or replaces...thus does authority made cowards of us all...cowards in terms of moral courage...the courage to do the right thing; the courage to transcend rules, orders and commands. Thus do we become the instruments of the moral will...or immoral will...of others.
Of course, to their credit, people do transcend the instrumental rationality of bureaucratic logic and do respond to the simple human need of welfare clients, students, prisoners, patients or migrants. Employees in a bureaucracy, still attune to their own humanity, empathize with the client of the corporation or the university or the mother on welfare and do violate the rules. In such violation is the reunification of self and morality.
This is not to claim that violation of
rules is everywhere emancipatory...many
rules are wise indeed.
What is happening is that, for right or for wrong, the individual has engaged in moral action; has reunited self and society; has weighed the needs of the collective against the needs of the individual and has come down on the side of mercy more than ratiocination. Morality has been relocated in the balancing of conflicting values by thinking, acting, compassionate human beings...and that is the human product.
Not all of us can be Prometheus and bring light to the world; argue with the gods who would destroy humans to make way for their one-eyed monsters. Not all of us can be Nakatetes and put the devil behind us. Not all of us are wise beyond the wisdom of the collective. And many of us break rules for the most banal or venal of reasons...be that as it may, still the location of morality is shifted from bureaucratic authority at the 'top' of the pyramid of authority to the individual actor.
In the best of times, morality is a dialectic process in which we, each, shape the behavior of us all. In the worst of times, the morality of thought and action is absorbed to the offices of power and deployed against the human project.
The concept of praxis tries to assimilate the delicate and changing dialectics of morality. Praxis, as a concept in the arsenal of emancipatory writing, tries to make it possible in the shadowy world of words to relocate morality where it belongs: one foot in the soul of the individual and one foot in the ethos of a society. We return to the place of praxis in the human project in other essays in this volume.
Mass Society and Morality. The logics of massification; the tendency to treat the individual as the locus of social morality aborts the dialectics of morality. Treating persons as if they are the final arbitrators of their own behavior speaks against all the assumptions of Symbolic Interactional theory, of societal reaction theory, of reference group theory...even of labeling theory.
While many disagree about the structure of mass society, in this essay, the referent is to a society in which a large scale organization is the typical unit of social involvement through the routines of the day. The large scale organization usually takes the form of a bureaucracy. The bureau is organized in a tri- partite structure: elite governing body; 2 or more echelons of employed functionaries to embody the technical rationality of the bureau rule or policy; an anonymous mass of individuals processed by the functionaries according to the rules.
This structure defines and incorporates a mass social institution. Prisons, universities, hospitals, state welfare agencies, military and police forces, schools, factories, retail stores, commercial sports enterprises as well as many religious denominations have such a structure. These often exist side by side with much more intimate; much more collective social units.
In a mass society, the ordinary rules of hermeneutics are set aside. Rather than trying to facilitate and to stabilize inter- subjective understanding, the rules of social exchange are designed to minimize authentic intersubjective knowledge. In such a society, the assumption from Symbolic Interactional Theory about the role of Significant Others and of the Generalized Other must be reconsidered.
It is valid, in a curiously distorted kind of validity, to dismiss or evade the effect of others on one's own behavior. There are forms of social organization in which the Significant Other, as conceptualized by Henry Stack Sullivan, becomes insignificant. One can think of a son who thanks his mother for working as a char woman to put him through medical school...and then releases her to work as a charwoman for her own benefit. One can think of a businessperson who has had the benefit of public education, the G.I. Bill, public health controls, hot lunch programs, Small Business loans, and tax incentives who brag that they are self made men...mostly men.
In societies which stress a one-sided individualism, the assumptions of symbolic interactional theory; the norm of reciprocity; the Collective Conscious are assiduously discarded. The salesperson or the Publicist do not want others to know the game plan; do not want symbols to affect their own behavior in the same instant it affects the behavior of others; do not intend to act in ways compatible with the intersubjective meanings of a speech act. The point is to maximize personal and corporate gain while maintaining the dramatic semblance of reciprocity. Trust me.
In such a social formation, it is appropriate to speak of the rugged individual or of the 'self made man.' But to so speak is to discount the vast heritage upon which we all build our lives. It is to dismiss the contributions others have made up to the point that we are in possession of enough wealth or power to use to gain our own will even against the will of those at whom we direct power.
In societies which collect social power, concentrate it in the office of the Pope or President or First Secretary or CEO, then deploy that power to control smaller, weaker units of social organization...there it is appropriate to speak of the acting individual...not the corporate entity wielding collective or economic power but the single individual coming before Pope; coming in front of that President; or, mayhap, standing against the rules of that CEO.
In such social formations, there are indeed such entities as individuals...ontologically speaking, but there are also giant bureaus who benefit from the aborted dialectics of power.
In those societies where the power of the individual is assimilated to the power of the corporation or bureau, there is a vast unfreedom. In those authoritarian societies of which Jean Kirkpatrick speaks where one has all freedom of action in the nooks and crannies of society while outside of the large scale organizations which wield collective power, one can speak of freedom. But it is the most trivial and trivialized kind of freedom. It is the freedom to be disconnected for the social world in which one must work; must learn; must heal, must worship or must write.
In the USA, everyone has every freedom to purchase a television station and to speak freely in support of one's own class interest. One has the right to listen to William Buckley or to George Will or to Harry Reasoner...but one does not have the right to enter the studio, sit down and quietly speak of other viewpoints. One has the freedom to turn the channel to a football game; to a Nature program; to a concert or sitcom but one hasn't the right to enter into a genuinely public Public Sphere and discuss the priorities of use of the media.
One has, equally, the freedom to subscribe to the New York Times, or the Detroit News or the Denver Post or the Los Angeles Times and read what those who own the media have to say. One has the right to subscribe to In These Times, Telos, or to the Insurgent Sociologist if one has heard about them and if one does not use them to challenge authority on the job, in the classroom or at the pulpit.
The freedoms of a mass society are the micro-freedoms of
the isolated individual or group; they are not the
profound freedoms, the significant freedoms, the strong
freedoms of effective public discourse.
Theory and Ideology Those theories of morality which speak of
stages in the moral growth of the
individual: Piaget, Kohlberg, and the generations of moral theorist
which follow them...these theories accept blindly the assumption
that moral behavior should be; need be; must be located in the
person of the single acting subject.
In the moment when such theories are studied, validated, taught and used to judge people; in that moment does theory become ideology. While it may be perfectly true that one is at stage two or stage five in moral development in every reasonable scaling device, still such findings bypass, overlook, disregard the social context in which stage three moralities develop and stage six moralities are discouraged. It is far easier in some social conditions to act on stage five morality than in other social formations. Try acting principled in a concentration camp or in a corporate office.
Those who live in abject poverty and are swung through the portals of social space by the dynamics of the world economic system have very little control over the flow of jobs to and from their communities. Those who are detached from the agrarian society and are born in the center city have very few skills with which to grow food or build lodging. Those who are subjected to the economics and ecology of pollution have very little choice in the quality of air or the quality of life they lead.
To Tell the Truth
The worthlessness of worldly things
is easy when a poet sings;
But if your child is crying then
its fine to have a thing to spend.
To rise above the madding throng
is noble in a poet's song;
but if your child is ill abed
then you stoop to bring her bread.
To tell the truth is fine indeed;
In every church we hear it spread.
But if your child has no roof,
Then truth can find a different proof.
Its fine to say that honor grow
and must, before all values, go;
But if you hear your children cry
then out the window honor fly.
If there are transcendent reasons why we, rich and poor alike, lie, steal, cheat, betray, and deceive in the micro-politics of everyday life, then the run of morality in the macro-politics of an emerging world economic system still more minimizes morality.
In a mass society, very few of us are likely, by reason of personality, parental guidance, religious upbringing or by reason of insight...few of us can be morally responsible for the crime in our cities, the pollution of our environments, the brutalization of handicapped people or the foreign policy of our state.
The Politics of Morality When the Ollie Norths of the National Security Agency do things in secret at the behest of the Reagans of the world, such acts do real mischief in the world. But, Reagan acts outside of the Constitution; outside of the Congress; outside of the oath of office and thus makes moral cretins of us all. We did not discuss the sale of arms to Iran; we did not discuss the use of profits from the sale of arms to Iran for the secret wars in Nicaragua, Afghanistan or Angola. If children are murdered by mercenaries hired by the CIA, we are not responsible and yet we should be...it is our country; our Constitution; it is our soldiers who do the bombing and who engineer the murder. It is our money which pays for the death squads in Central America; it is our moral onus that children, women, soldiers are killed.
As moral agents in whatever stage of moral
development, we must have access to national and
open debate on such subjects...things done in
secret preempt our morality.
But by far the most of us bend to the rules of the bureau;
bend to the power of the tyrant; bend to temptation of the wage.
Those of us who do must be watched. We will use the power against
the general interest; we will use guile and guise in aid of
privatized and asymmetrical gain; we will use the morality of those
who still have it against them...we will break faith, betray trust
and exploit your capacity to believe in a thing. We are dangerous
to the human project.
Formal Control Systems The most direct consequence of all this is that the social self is not longer the mediator of behavior--and there can be no self-control oriented to prosocial activity or to the common good if there is no socially anchored self. The mediation of behavior by informal group interaction ceases to be effective as behavior comes to be mediated by private urges, wants, needs, interests, proclivities and compulsions. Another basic assumption of symbolic interactional theory becomes invalid. The dialectics of social control set forth in such constructs as the looking glass process; societal reaction theory; or labeling theory are missing.
Formal social control becomes necessary as
self-control is subverted by the structure of
power and managerial tactics.
Law becomes a major source of ordered behavior as the self succumbs to the assault on it by professional educators, scientific managers, and hapless bureaucrats. Police, surveillance, efficient court systems, "modern" prisons, and professional rehabilitation become technically mandated since authentic social control within a matrix of supportive others is not possible.
In a society where the state experiences a fiscal crisis as it tries to take care of all the low profit services neglected by private capital, capital-intensive modes of control also become attractive: psycho-surgery, mass produced drugs for depressed adults or uncontrollable school children, electronic implants, or group counseling become non-revolutionary ways to respond to the crises in capitalism.
All sorts of self-help programs are developed from Alcoholics Anonymous to the "born gain" movement as the fiscal crisis pushes the state to privatize the problems of control and management. Private support groups, private therapy groups, private police groups, together with self-help books, subliminal tapes and biofeedback kits help return the responsibility for control to the informal group.
These three responses all shift the onus of a poorly organized society from its institutions to the poorly organized self-system as if these two social units were unconnected. Voluntary organizations are to step in and pick up the moral debris of a managed mass society.
At the very time that the resources of those in the surplus population are cut back; at the same time the resources of those in the lower echelons of the working class are reduced by wage give- back, by more taxes, by inflation...at the time when more and more behavioral problems arise for the sons and daughters; brothers and sisters; mothers and fathers of those in the lower ranks of the economic order, the state removes resources which would enable such private forms of social control. Failing the first lines of social control, formal institutions seem to make sense.
At the very time the dynamics of those market and work institutions work to loosen the connection between self and society, more demands are put on the self to assume the task of solving the problems of capitalism. There are limits to this use of self. However, we can begin to handle these problems if we have a coherent analysis of what is happening. Bad theory produces bad policy. For those genuinely committed to dealing with social control problems, the social sources of the self is a place to start that analysis.
Self Esteem and Mass Society Just as there are no measures
of shame or morality possible in
a mass society using the technics of dramaturgy to manage
consciousness and thus defeat the self system, there can be no
measures of self esteem or social honor. Where morality is usurped
by the collective or by the corporation, there can be no pride or
honor in whatever one does.
The effort to measure self esteem or to scale social honor becomes an exercise in futility. People who are shameless do not think about what others think. They do not reflect upon themselves, take the responses of others into account and thus, feel mortification or pride in what they do. The looking glass process is clouded and obscured by the false needs of privatized desire. We see morality dimly, as though a glass darkly.
Such people are forever frozen at level two moral development; if they are likely to get caught, they pause and reconsider hurting others. If they are caught, they experience chagrin and irritation that it was they who were caught and not some one else equally without scruple.
New Sources of Self Esteem The architects of illusion sell the
client without honor an illusion of
honor. The Public Relations Industry will, for a fee, create the
dramaturgical impression of estimable worth. They will create a
persona for one; market it on the mass, anonymous, media, use
surveys to measure effectiveness of the illusion and rescript the
lines and history of the customer to fit the anxieties and hopes of
a mass audience...and thus gain public esteem for one without
substantial cause for it.
Madison Avenue industries will, for a fee, polish the image of South Africa or Argentina or Guatemala. Hirelings who know how to measure hope and belief with redeem the scoundrel politician to the April Day. All honor, esteem and respect become market commodities along with faith and belief in an electronically based sociology of fraud.
Those who are disconnected to the social base; those who lack
a set of estimable social identities; those who live and work in a
moral vacuum; those whose talents are hired to manage and
manipulate masses of unknown others for unknown purpose...these the
moral casualties of mass society seek other measures of worth and
status.
Give us two days of your time
and we will remold you.
...Hudson's Ad
They join fitness centers to make their muscles and bodies the object of admiration. They turn to the Zodiac identities to find out what and who they really are. They shop at Jacobson's to get computer based recommendations for just the right clothing; they stand before color monitors to select just the right cosmetics. They read How-To books; What-If books; and Kiss and Tell books in order to project just the right image.
There are better uses to which to put dramaturgy. There are better uses to make of trust. There are better grounds for the allocation of social honor and interpersonal esteem. It takes a very special society; a very special democracy; a very special social psychology to ensure such. Praxis is possible only in a praxis society; morality is possible only in a moral society; shame is possible only in a society in which the self mediates one's own behavior. It is an exercise in mystification to try to measure praxis, morality or moral worth in a worthless society.
CONCLUSION The task in the 21st Century for moral agents; for
moral theorists; for moral science is to reclaim
responsibility with interactionally rich and informationally rich
politics. If then we decide to kill, at least it is our moral
responsibility.
In mass societies, the social self is circumvented by the tactics of management science; by the technologies of theatre; by the deployment of social research; by the insights of psychology. In such a society, moral behavior is in jeopardy.
In mass societies, the concentration of social power in the bureaucratic office; the stratification of power by echelons, and the enforcement of bureaucratic rules by instrumental rationality, in such societies, moral agency is stripped from the self system and appropriated by bureaucratic authority.
In market societies where possession and wealth motivate human behavior, those with money and property rights preempt the moral process to their own purpose.
In stratified societies where power and wealth magnify the will of the elite, the dialectics of morality are distorted.
In dramaturgical societies where one is coached to speak lines; to gull audiences; to manage consciousness; to modify behavior outside of the logics of discourse...in dramaturgical politics where impressions given off do not necessarily coincide with intentionality; in dramaturgical religion where the morality of the minister is remote from the members of the parish; in dramaturgical markets where the sizzle masks the substance; in such societies, morality falls upon hard times.
In such societies, theories of morality which locate moral authority, moral action, and moral onus in the person of the boss, or the owner, or the manager or the professor, or the general, in those societies, such theories mystify and misdirect moralists.
In these societies, the stage of morality at which the individual tends to operate is predecided by the logics and the control tactics of them. One cannot be the object and the agent of one's own morality when one is disconnected from the locus of action. It is difficult for one to stand up against the power of the state and say, I protest. It is rare that one oppose the power of the Church and say, Still the Earth turns round the Sun.
To their credit, still there are such people...still they mutter; 'Penso, Credo, Fido; ergo Sum.'
TO MARX
Early Wise and Brave in Season You could think and you could reason. Right you guessed at rising morrow Men may come to worst than sorrow.
As a man undishonored You saw a road and where it led, and scorned to tread the mire one must since one may come to worst than dust.
Safe to rest, no dreams, no waking; Here's a wreath dear friend I've made. 'Tis not a gift that's worth the taking But wear it now; it will not fade.
...adapted from Housman
The Mutable Self
We are the hollow men we are the stuffed men leaning together headpiece filled with straw, alas.
Our dried voices, when we whisper together are quiet and meaningless as wind in the dry grass or rats' feet over broken glass in our dry cellar.
The eyes are not here There are no eyes here in this valley of dying stars in this hollow valley this broken jaw of our lost kingdoms.
This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends not with a bang but a whimper.
T. S. Eliot
Note on the origins of this article: I had been lecturing on the social location of morality in my Self and Society class at Colorado State University for years when Tony Cortese., a colleague, asked me to read his paper on morality...I gave him my class notes on the social location of morality...a few years later a book under his name came out with that topic...curious, I looked to see if he gave credit to that help I had given...to my great dis-appointment, there was no mention at all...he had simply taken credit and now makes a career out of the topic...
...we all take ideas and forget from whence we got them...so did, I would assume, Tony Cortese.
