Thinking with Dan
Regular readers of this blog, all three of you, may notice that I have set aside plain dress. This does not mean I am no longer a Conservative Quaker or that I have been kicked out or, as we would say, read out of meeting, far from it. Within Conservative Quakerism, plain dress is an individual leading (where does that contradiction land on the group-grid axis?) and so it is well within the realm of our religious understanding that I would and could wear it for ten years and then set it aside. My new wardrobe does allow me to blend into a fairly wide array of American cultural settings where I once stood out like a sore thumb, a change that has proven interesting. But, without the bonnet, Gemeinschaft Girl no longer seems appropriate, and since Dan Kahan could never spell it, I took pity on him and adapted two words that probably are familiar to him: anomaly and outlier.
I’m going to start with my response to his (at this point two-post series) on cultural cognition “profiling”(1)(2). And I will start with where I find we are in agreement.
A “weak” group way of life inclines people toward an individualistic worldview, highly “competitive” in nature, in which people are expected to “fend for themselves” without collective assistance or interference (Rayner, 1992, p. 87). In a “strong” group way of life, in contrast, people “interact frequently in a wide range of activities” in which they “depend on one another” to achieve their joint ends. This mode of social organization “promotes values of solidarity rather than the competitiveness of weak group” (ibid., p. 87). (1)
The only thing I would add to this is the observation that “weak” group ways of life seem to appear amidst a sense of resource abundance and that “strong” group ways of life seem to appear amidst a sense of resource restriction. The further observation that these perceptions may or may not be objectively accurate, but nonetheless inform people’s assessment of risks and ultimate behaviors, seems well within the construct of CCR, if all of this is bit intellectually interpolative on my part.
The difficulty is not the individualist/communitarian part of the scale, but the hierarchical/egalitarian north and south poles of the group-grid schema, or the high-grid/low-grid designations, that feels incompletely bounded.
A “high” grid way of life organizes itself through pervasive and stratified “role differentiation” (Gross & Rayner 1985, p. 6). Goods and offices, duties and entitlements, are all “distributed on the basis of explicit public social classifications such as sex, color, . . . a bureaucratic office, descent in a senior clan or lineage, or point of progression through an age-grade system” (ibid, p. 6). It thus conduces to a “hierarchic” worldview that disposes people to “devote a great deal of attention to maintaining” the rank-based “constraints” that underwrite “their own position and interests” (Rayner 1990, p. 87). Finally, a low grid way of life consists of an “egalitarian state of affairs in which no one is prevented from participation in any social role because he or she is the wrong sex, or is too old, or does not have the right family connections” (Rayner 1990, p. 87). It is supported by a correspondingly egalitarian worldview that emphatically denies that goods and offices, duties and entitlements, should be distributed on the basis of such rankings. (1)
I have not, yet, had a chance to read Gross & Rayner, 1985, or Rayner, 1990, yet, so I will accept Dan’s interpretation as representative. And problematic. I’m not sure whether to conclude that the group-grid axis of CCR and my conception are actually elucidating differing schemas and not talking about the same observed groups at all or whether my conception is simply wrong. My conception of the hierarchists, as I have noted elsewhere, is not that they are in love with the hierarchy but that they are convinced of the moral authority of the system that produces the hierarchy or the moral authority that they believe created the system. For example, one can place moral authority in the Constitution and believe that it creates a moral system of government, or one can place moral authority in God/the Bible and believe that it creates a moral system of society and government. It follows fairly easily that these sources of moral authority become inviolable in some ways for high-grid individuals.
High-grid viewpoints are not any more about maintaining one’s position and interests than low-grid viewpoints. The interesting, and frustrating to egalitarians, thing about high-grid viewpoints is that it absolutely includes lower status people who are not particularly being rewarded under the system. They support the system because they see essential Good in it, not that they themselves expect to be immediately rewarded by it. High-grid/communitarian individuals, in particular, will perceive limited resources that are rightly shared under their system. Each person has his or her place and good is accomplished by fulfilling one’s role.
High-grid individuals see a moral system that produces justice by being a Good system. Moral authority is invested in the system. Individuals are viewed as weak and prone to moral error. The system either helps to rein in wayward behavior (high-grid/communitarian) or, more fatalistically, (high-grid/individualistic) individuals are powerless within the system and suffer fairly natural consequences (and should not be protected from such natural consequences) for behavior that goes against the system. The system is the corrective, whether created by a benevolent God or the invisible hand of the market.
Conversely, in my conception, low-grid individuals consider the best systems as nonmoral and tend to view systems as fundamentally prone to being immoral. Moral authority is invested in the individual. Systems corrupt otherwise morally competent individuals to behave immorally. The snippet above describes an egalitarian culture that denies hierarchy based on the sorts of things hierarchical individuals have tended to organize themselves around, but it does not mention the sorts of things that do seem to egalitarians to be appropriate ways of determining status: education, where one lives, how one earns one’s living, how much wealth one possesses. It isn’t that there is no hierarchy, it is just not organized around the same principles. People without wealth or a Harvard degree will sometimes chafe under this more unofficial but fully functioning hierarchy.
So when Dan asserts, I believe on behalf of Douglas and Wildavsky, that
“The same orientation toward environmental risk [that there is little or no environmental risk] should be expected for individuals who adhere to the hierarchical worldview: in concerns with environmental risks, they will apprehend an implicit indictment of the competence and authority of societal elites.” (1)
I am just not seeing it. I have definitely observed hierarchical-individualists who, as he mentioned, dismiss environmental concerns because, ultimately, it will restrict commerce. I don’t know any hierarchical-communitarians who feel that environmental concerns are “an implicit indictment of the competence and authority of societal elites.” I’m not even sure who the societal elites are in America. Each cultural viewpoint seems to have established its own system of elites. However, I do know hierarchical-communitarians who feel that environmental concerns are an implicit indictment of God and God’s power and dominion. Hence my differing construction of what high-grid means and how it is lived out.
In my system of organization, when the system is considered nonmoral, the system is egalitarian. (When the system is considered created by a moral authority that imbues it with moral integrity, the system is hierarchical.) So Communism as elaborated in the U.S.S.R. under Stalin would be egalitarian, which is what it claimed, and not hierarchical/conservative, as some intellectuals like to now assess it as. A corollary would be that under egalitarian systems, leaders would tend to be considered superior as individuals and superior in their personal moral character, which hierarchists would perceive as egalitarians engaging in a cult of personality. Under hierarchical systems, leaders would be bound to claim their authority via the true higher moral authority, whatever that was, and could not claim to be personally morally superior only morally acceptable by behaving within the bounds set out by the higher authority, which egalitarians see as a hierarchical habit of forgiving their leaders for any and all moral indiscretions and a general indifference to that leader’s personal moral integrity.
Stanley Fish, in his recent opinion piece in the NYTimes, nicely describes the system (in this case the government) as nonmoral (his “government of laws”):
“A government of men is one in which laws issue from the will and desires of those who happen to be in authority. In a government of laws the preferences of men (and women), even those holding high office, are checked by the impersonal requirements of an impersonal law.”
He also offers up some of the opposing perspective: “It’s constitutional [secession], in this view, because a government in the act of eroding constitutional values is itself unconstitutional and has become a tyranny.” Or as I would put it for this viewpoint, the originally moral system set up by the Constitution has been corrupted by individuals into an immoral system. For the hierarchical individualist Tea Partier who perceives the government’s moral authority as enshrined in the Constitution, those advocating and legislating around a nonmoral conception of government are morally corrupt and corrupting. [I don’t frankly think there is anything humans engage in that is entirely nonmoral.]
So, back to CCR theory. One thing that I don’t see addressed in CCR is the human habit of espousing and claiming an ideal without actually implementing that ideal. The ideological commitment that egalitarians have to tolerance is, in my observation, as successfully practiced by its believers as the Christian theological commitment to love as Christ loved: some absolute saints, some absolute sinners, a great deal of failure to meet the ideal. Similarly, one can have an ideological commitment to autonomy, and one can feel one has achieved this if one has sufficient personal material, physical and mental resources, but one cannot actually be autonomous. From my cultural viewpoint, one can be unaware of one’s interdependence, but that is an error not a success story.
It seems to me that CCR theory faces two distinct challenges to its being more widely adopted (& cited) in intellectual material. One I will call the cultureless conceit: the innate sense all human beings seem to have that they just do what is right, good and normal and those other people over there doing weird and distinctive things have a culture. So discussions revolving around culture that includes them can feel unnatural or even alarming.
The other problem is the perception that culture is an immoral influence on people. Particularly in the egalitarian quadrants that the learned elite substantially inhabit, I have observed that culture is often viewed as an immoral system that induces individuals to abdicate their personal moral responsibility to assess situations “objectively” and causes them to judge things via a cultural viewpoint. To do so is weak, immoral and wrong. In these low-grid quadrants, particularly on the individualistic side, culture is a bad word. This means that the foundational concepts within Cultural Cognition of Risk theory run counter to their cultural worldview, and the theory's argument that people do/believe things for cultural reasons means they have been fundamentally immoral. CCR is telling them that they cannot help but be immoral. From this perspective, CCR is implicitly indicting their moral competence and needs to be rejected.
Thanks, Dan Kahan, for letting me think along.