Sociology

Fine art and all that: just another case of marketing and self-aggrandizement?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Fine art and all that: just another case of marketing and self-aggrandizement?

 

So, I’ve been an amateur artist for decades.  Because I had full time work teaching sociology at a community college, I couldn’t indulge my predilection for painting, drawing and other forms of artistic expression except during summer breaks, but even then only sporadically.  I did find the time to read art books though, both how-to books and books on art history and about individual artists especially the Renaissance greats, the Dutch and Flemish masters, the Spanish painters Goya and Valasquez, the Impressionists and German and Austrian Expressionists like Egon Schiele.  I’ve only been marginally interested in North American painters, printers and sculptors.  I do have a lot of respect for Rothko, Diebenkorn, O’Keeffe, Rivera, Kahlo, Moore, Henri, Close and some of the Canadian Group of Seven as well as Colville and the Pratts.  But I probably shouldn’t name drop.  It can quickly get undignified and there are too many  artists I would undoubtedly miss mentioning.

 

Whatever we can say about art, it’s as much about who the buyers are as who the producers are.  Otto Rank (in Truth and Reality) argues that art is the expression of a strong ego although he’s also quick to point out its superego dimensions. I think that social institutions (summarized by the term ‘superego’) not only drive artistic expression, but the buyers of ‘art,’ to a large extent, dictate content.  Virtually none of the great Renaissance artists did work for the sheer pleasure of it although there must have been an element of joy, accomplishment and personal satisfaction in the work.  They were more often than not commissioned and if they strayed at all from the vision that church leaders had, as Caravaggio did in a depiction of Saint Matthew[1], his work was rejected and he had to start over again with a work more in line with their ideas of how Saint Matthew should be portrayed. In other words, they were constrained by the superego.  Of course if artists didn’t get commissions they starved.  And who commissioned their work?  Well, it sure wasn’t the poor. 

 

In the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, the Church was the principle source of income for artists.  Some wealthy politicians and merchants were able to commission self-aggrandizing works, but it was mainly the Church that was interested in art.  Much of the artistic production of the great masters was designed to respond to the Church’s need to glorify God, the saints and other sundry notables.  When the city-states dominated Italy, the masters of those cities were able to spend their fortunes on paintings of themselves and their families as long as the artists were willing to portray them in very flattering ways, eliminating annoying blemishes and poorly curved noses and chins.  When the aristocrats and especially the monarchs of Europe eclipsed the Vatican’s power then the painters and sculptors produced the most lavish and spectacular marketing-type works.  David’s work is a great example of this.  His monumental works are political statements in their own right.  His The Coronation of Napoleon, which hangs in The Louvre, is a blatant glorification of political power.  David was Napoleon’s ‘official’ painter and neither men did things in a small way.  David was Napoleon’s marketing department. 

 

Real, significant changes in the content of paintings accompanied the rise of merchant capital in but not really until well past the Reformation when the shine went off the Protestant shunning of ostentation especially in Italy and Holland.  Then merchants had their portraits painted by the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals.  Van Dyck was plugged into the aristocratic world and worked in England a great deal.  I’m not interested here in setting out a detailed or even general art history of the Western World.  I’m not at all qualified to do such a thing in the first place.  But I have studied history extensively, particularly political economy and that’s my perspective.

 

My point here is that artists and their patrons are caught up in a dance of power wherein the former want to freely express their egos while the latter want to shackle those very egos to their own superegos.  The world of art in Flanders and Holland was incredibly diverse and millions of paintings were produced in the late 17th and early 18th centuries in several genres.  However there was a conspicuous absence of ‘religious’ art during this period.  There was no market for it so none was produced.  There were great markets where paintings and art works were sold; they ended up in the hands of the burgeoning middle class to decorate their homes.

 

Now, the situation has been altered such that art supplies are easily purchased by millions of people and art training is everywhere.  There are thousands of YouTube videos on every aspect of art imaginable.  Millions upon millions of paintings and sculptures, sometimes quite good ones, flood local markets and the internet alike.  This is all ‘stuff.’  We seem to be producing more ‘stuff’ just for the sake of it, art works included.  Needless to say, I’ve left out whole areas of artistic expression here like the theatre and music but I’ll leave that for another day.  Suffice it to say that the same ideas I’m applying to visual art are also generally applicable to the performing arts.  There’s always been ‘high’ art and ‘folk’ art.  The former seems to get into the history books more easily. 

 

I’m vulnerable to a lot of fault-finding here, of course, because my sweep has been very general and I haven’t at all taken account of some of the very important transition periods in the history of art where tensions between artist and patron are intensified and artists search for new patrons.  I’m thinking here specifically of the mid to late 19th century and the advent of the Impressionists.  Most of them never really made a lot of money while they were alive.  Their egos overpowered the superego of the time and they were thus shunned for their self-aggrandizement and their lack of humility. 

 

I’ve set down a little over 1000 words here, barely an excursus into the subject but I think that there is a palpable tension around ‘art’ now that needs to be explored.  Some people have already explored the domain and have laid down some stones of understanding along the pathways therein, but as I like to produce ‘things’ like paintings and sculptures, I also want to explore the significance of that travel in writing.  I’m particularly interested in exploring the role of ego development within the context of a weakened ‘community.’ I’m thinking that with the hyper-individualism that plagues the world today we may end up producing ‘art’ for an audience of one, ourselves.  And so what if that happens?

[1] See the introduction of E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art, the Phaidon pocket edition.

Quality of Life – What the hell is that?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 6 Comments

So, as I engage in producing the 2013 Quality of Life report for the Comox Valley Social Planning Society I’m struck with the number of questions I have about just what quality of life means. I’ve determined that it’s not about comfort or serenity, the lack of problems or adversity, happiness or the lack of it, wealth, health, recreation, culture, fast cars, sex, food or much of anything else.  It’s not even only about personal, individual feelings and circumstances. So what is it about?  There are a number of organizations that have produced quality of life indices and reports.  The UN is into it: (http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/).  The Canadian Index of Wellbeing (CIW)(https://uwaterloo.ca/canadian-index-wellbeing/) has determined that the quality of life in Canada is declining regardless of the fact that the Gross Domestic Product may be rising.  We are obviously into contiua here.  The UN rates countries on a continuum of quality of life using a large number of indicators in three categories, heath, education and living standards.  The CIW uses dozens of indicators and eight domains or categories: community vitality, demographic engagement, education, environment, healthy populations, leisure and culture, living standards and time use.  Some of these domains address individual dimensions of wellbeing, others how community affects personal wellbeing.  The CIW is on to something here, I find.  On a continuum of wretchedness to bliss, I expect that a person living on the streets of Kolkata would be at the wretchedness end of the scale while someone living in a fancy house on the beach in Comox would be on the other (blissful) end without being too categorical about it. However, the world is never as simple as it seems and I’m not a good judge of the quality of life of a person living on the streets anywhere, especially India. 

To me, some self-determination is important in thinking about quality of life as is sociality.  So, for me, life in a prison isolation cell would qualify as extremely wretched even though health, sanitation and food would not necessarily be issues.  And there are tradeoffs.  Idleness due to unemployment may adversely affect income, but there is a certain liberation in not having to go to work.  Problem is, we have developed strong moral, legal and political objections to unemployment to the point where the unemployed are considered morally weak, self-indulgent, lazy and worse.  So not working (for the employable) carries a stigma and the unemployed suffer opprobrium.  

I suppose, for me, quality of life hinges on a number of factors including basic health, a roof over my head, access to effective sanitation, enough money to keep food on the table, clothes on my back and maybe go out the odd evening to a movie, a day in the park or on the beach, a visit to a library or an art gallery, having friends over for tea, being able to move about without too much difficulty, and community support when things go sideways.  Emergency services, then, take on more importance than they might otherwise in determining quality of life.  The question is, can I count on the help of others in the community if I get sick, lose my source of income, my house burns down, I get beat up on the street or bullied at work?  

Of course, comparison is the foundation of quality of life studies and indices.  How do I measure my wellbeing?  Well, it will be good or bad in comparison to the person next to me or in the next town, city, province or country.  If I have nothing to compare my life to others, the whole question of quality of life is meaningless.  As for the Comox Valley, what makes this place unique in terms of quality of life?  I’m not sure there is a basis for comparison with other similar sized communities on Vancouver Island.  

These are just some of the thoughts I’ve been having recently on the subject of quality of life. There’s lots more…for later.

What’s going on here?

~ Roger JG Albert

So, I haven’t exactly been burning the place up with posts these days. The reason is that I’m distracted by other work. I’m working on the Comox Valley Social Planning Society’s (CVSPS) 2013 Quality of Life (QofL) report. It’s the fourth report to come out since 2002. This is a major undertaking and is taking up a lot of my time. I’m doing the work pro bono which I feel is OK since I’m retired from teaching and want to keep my hand in the research side of my career. I’m generally inclined to get paid for what I do, but this is an exception to my rule. Along with my work on the QofL report I’m also involved in the Comox Valley Housing Task Force on the Future Directions Committee. I post occasionally on my ‘homelessness’ blog (rogeralbert.org) if you want to see what I’m up to in this field of interest I have. And I want to continue to paint, draw and sculpt. Carolyn, meanwhile, would have enough work to keep me busy in the gardens here for the whole summer along with the fact that there seems to be an endless, renewable source of chores to do and little tasks I need to accomplish as time goes by. And I need to keep fit! Today that meant a 5 kilometre walk (a short one today) followed by a 45 minute workout in the gym this afternoon. That, in a nutshell, is why I’ve been neglecting this blog. That doesn’t mean I’m disinterested in the topics I bring up here. On the contrary, the last one I raised is very close to my heart and I will pursue it with vigour once some of these other projects are out of the way, especially the QofL report. If you’re interested, the last QofL report is available on the CVSPS website: http://cvsocialplanning.ca. I recruited a few of my students a few years ago to work on the last report. This one is mine to do. It’s a good thing I have been able to recruit some very competent help for the ‘data collection’ end of things. I’ll still do the writing and editing, but I’ll need a lot of help to gather the information needed to get this thing off the ground.
So that’s what I’m up to for the moment. Things can change. BTW, check out my art blog too: http://rogeralbert.blogspot.com. I posted a couple of pieces I recently completed for a fundraiser. Check them out.

Pronoun ‘bending’ in English Conversation

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Pronoun Switching.

In an article by Gary Mason in the Globe and Mail (Saturday, April 13th, , 2013, p. S1) Christy Clark , the premier of British Columbia, is quoted as saying: “Leadership changes people…One thing is enduring all the criticisms. I think that’s made me more resilient and forced me to dig deep and tether myself to my principles and what I believe in. You can’t endure all the barbs that have been thrown at me without really knowing where you stand and what you believe in and be firm about it.” [my emphasis]

Now, this is not a comment on the content of Clark’s statements. My observation here is not about what Clark says but about how she says it. Furthermore, I’m not contending that Clark is special in any way by the way she makes her statement. The linguistic pattern Clark employs here is pervasive. We call it pronoun switching or pronoun bending. Here’s another example:

“A Reuters article by Michael Perry in Sydney, Australia reported on the high suicide rate among farmers in Australia following years of drought. He quotes a farmer ‘Mick’ who wrote a book about his experiences. In this book he writes: “I just want some cloud and some rain…The stress is just so constant and long and it’s like someone grabbing at me by the throat and slowly choking you a bit more each day.” (Comox Valley Record Daily, Thursday June 9, 2005) [my italics]

Now, why would Clark switch in mid-sentence between using you then me and then going back to you in the rest of the sentence? She could just have easily said: “ I can’t endure all the barbs that have been thrown at me without really knowing where I stand and what I believe in and be firm about it.” So, what’s the difference between these two constructions, hers and mine? Well, for one thing, mine is more consistent. It uses the same level of personal pronoun consistently throughout the sentence. The focus is on I and me. Clark, meanwhile, moves from the first person pronouns I and me to the indefinite (in this case) pronoun, you.

Same goes for the article by Michael Perry. Why would ‘Mick’ not say: “The stress is just so constant and long and it’s like someone grabbing at me by the throat and slowly choking me a bit more each day.” Why switch to you? It doesn’t make any sense to say it chokes ‘you’ in this case. It had nothing to do with me.

There isn’t a lot of scholarship on this topic. I’ve done library and internet searches (as have some of my students) and come up with a number of sources, but only two that address directly the use of what they call the indefinite you. That was a few years ago, but I doubt if things have changed much in the last six years.

Hyman approaches the subject from the perspective of English and what I came to understand as pragmatics (although he doesn’t use the word) while Senger is a psychiatrist. He concludes that the use of the indefinite you is an ‘ego defense mechanism.’ We’ll come back to that in my next post. Hyman argues that the use of the indefinite you is ‘youbiquitous.’ In other words, it’s pervasive in English speakers all over the world. An analysis of interviews on the CBC program ‘Q’ has established this fact at least in this context, but I’ve paid a lot of attention to this phenomenon over the last few years and it’s absolutely pervasive. Now that you know that people use ‘you’ not pointing to one person or a group of people present in a particular place, that is, in the indexical, vocative-deixic sense, but in an indefinite sense meaning people in general, you won’t be able to stop yourself from hearing it everywhere.

[This is the first in a series of posts on this topic. The next one explores the Senger analysis of the use of the indefinite you and will include a paper some students wrote in 2006 on the subject. Later I will post the results of an analysis (by some of my students in 2010 and me) of a number of CBC Q interviews by Jian Gomeshi that highlight the use of the indefinite you.]

How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

How to turn a world lacking in enemies into the most threatening place in the universe – Le Monde diplomatique – English edition.

Tom Engelhardt has published an interesting analysis of America today and its leadership in this article.  Read this article, it’s well worth it.  However, Engelhardt is missing a crucial dimension in his analysis.  He argues that Americans are lead by people who create ‘enemies’ at every turn, not real ones, but made up ones all over the world, enemies incapable of doing the US much harm at all, if any.  He argues that external enemies can be useful and so they are.  They provide a way of maintaining domestic solidarity and compliance in the face of perceived external ‘enemies.’  Without these ‘enemies’ Americans may have the time and inclination to really think about what the real problems are with their country.  Engelhardt refers to the number of people who die every year in the US by suicide by gun (19,000), homicide (11,000) and automobile crashes (32,000 and rising again) as evidence that Americans have selective outrage when it comes to how people die.  More people die on American highways every year than are killed in all of its ‘wars.’  All of this is fine analysis but it leaves out one important issue. What is the real reason for the need for enemies?  That’s where Ernest Becker comes in.

Some social scientists may dispute the lack of empirical evidence in his work, but I fail to see their point.  No, Becker’s analysis of the role of ‘the enemy’ in his book Escape From Evil was not arrived at following lab experiments.  It was arrived at after careful historical and anthropological analysis of how and why we make war, why we kill and take joy in it, why we are so quick to follow a ‘leader’ who promises us prosperity.  Becker aims to show how our fear of death and yearning for immortality lead us to all kinds of very distasteful behaviour towards our fellow women and men.  According to Becker we perpetrate evil in our attempt to eliminate evil.

So, reading Engelhardt should be followed by a reading of Escape From Evil which will help to put his work into a more fundamental context.

It’s about time I publish a new post!

~ Roger JG Albert

Not much action on this blog lately! Truth of the matter is that I got very ill early in March and stayed that way for most of the month. Nasty flu. Then I confess that I’ve had outrage overload for a bit and find myself uninspired to write. So, what I’ve decided to do is leave current affairs alone for a while. I’ve got over 50 posts on current affairs and I want to give that interest of mine a break. [We’ll see how long that lasts!] Instead, in this blog, I want to address some issues around evolution, particularly the notion of evolution as it applies to social institutions. As Harold Innis (1894-1952), the economic historian and political economist who spent most of his career at the University of Toronto after getting a PhD from the University of Chicago, was quick to point out, following many others including Thorstein Veblen, that empires come and go. There is no example to the contrary. Every empire in the history of our species on this planet is either deceased or moribund. Go back as far as you like. Empires don’t last forever, So the question is not whether or not an empire – say, the U.S.-centered finance corporate empire – will survive, the question is how will it die? How did the Roman Empire wane and die, for instance? Or the British Empire? Are there patterns in these events or processes? Indeed there are. Imperial overreach is a concept used to try to explain why empires fail. There are different versions of it (http://www.mmisi.org/ma/32_03/lankevich.pdf) as these two reviews of Paul Kennedy’s book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 make clear. But for me, it’s fairly straightforward, say in the case of Rome. Here’s how it works.

An empire is born in the ruins of previous failed and exhausted quasi-states. Said empire begins to grow slowly by conquest. In that it faces sometimes strong external opposition but also domestic strain because the more military conquest is the favoured instrument of international relations, a ‘thinning’ of the young males in the population is inevitable. As well, there is the stress of volatile consumer markets caused by military conquest. But wait! The empire grows stronger. Conquest brings wealth and new recruits. Military success fuels more military activity and the armies get spread farther away from home. In order to maintain conquered lands, military leaders from the Empire’s armies become governors and bureaucrats of far-flung provinces. There aren’t enough Romans to keep this machine in play so one strategy is to free trusted slaves or not enslave some of the opponents of the Empire, the really nasty ones (warlords, really) in what we now know as France, Germany, and Britain, negotiating with them instead entry into the Empire’s sphere of trading activity while allowing them to maintain land holdings of their own. Once this practice becomes commonplace, there is an internal threat to the Empire and that is the erosion of slavery, the real economic base of the Roman Empire. Rome grew too widespread geographically to control all of its subject peoples from Rome. Communications strategies just can’t keep up with the logistical and military demands of maintaining an empire like Rome, keeping enemies at bay and conquering new territories. That’s imperial overreach. The American Empire won’t fail for the same reasons because essentially there is no ‘American’ Empire.

The prevailing empire in the world today is not based in any country or nation state and it’s not geopolitical. It’s financial. As Thorstein Veblen was keen to point out, states are creatures of higher order institutions like private property and class power. Capital rules. In our times (for the last 700 years or so) merchant capital slowly gained in power at the beginning of the feudal period and held on to power pretty well into the early 19th century in Europe. It was replaced as the dominant form of capital by industrial capital which itself slowly gave way to finance capital in the second half of the 20th century. This is an evolutionary process. Marx sees the driver of this as the process by which capital replaces labour in production. Of course this is too simple a presentation of a very complex process, but essentially, that’s it. Of course all capital is a product of human labour, but capital has had a smaller and waning use for labour in the productive process as automation, Fordism and technology become prevalent. The price of labour-power varies in different parts of the world and for different occupations, but there is a long-term tendency for the value of labour to fall everywhere.

My point is that countries are not in charge, nor are politicians. Capital is and has been for some time. For centuries it’s been in a struggle with labour, the only reason capital exists, to gain a larger part of the value produced by human labour. For centuries now, capitalists have tried and largely succeeded in reducing the value of labour with the help of the state. In the US now we have the spectacle of corporate business leaders and politicians openly sharing the same bed, seemingly without any guilt or shame whatsoever. And we have the pathetic spectacle of vast numbers of people completely ignorant of how they are being manipulated by the state and its communications corporations blithely going about their lives in the belief that the American (and in my case, Canadian) government acts on their behalf. Flags fly everywhere. Patriotism is a powerful force. However, it’s not powerful enough to counter the despair and angst that will drive many marginalized and disempowered people from turning on each other and others in a desperate search for meaning in their lives in the absence of a good, well-paying job and a sense of social security.

The end of the finance capitalist empire will come only when it has reached and dominated every nook and cranny on the planet and when it has exhausted itself in trying to eliminate labour. Finance capital is well on its way to dominating the entire planet. Countries are still based on land and borders and are thus restricted in their activities. Corporations have few restrictions now and want even fewer in the future. Countries and their citizens don’t stand a chance against finance capital because they operate within an old paradigm. That paradigm is based on the false assumption that countries have economies, trade with one another and are the basic global unit of analysis. Yes, countries can still go to war with one another, but the more finance capital and production infiltrate every corner of the planet it makes less and less sense to bomb the hell out of your own factories in the target countries because chances are that where you’ve located them to take advantage of low wage costs. Global war is a thing of the past as global production drives us and our labour-power into a global market. That doesn’t mean that threats of war and local military operations aren’t useful to reduce domestic dissent by targeting a foreign enemy. We’ve experienced over the last hundred years or so the consolidation of states into larger and larger units. The European Union is an example of this type of consolidation but so are the plethora of free trade agreements that are part of the geopolitical map these days. And why this expansion? To help in the free flow of capital and labour. Globalization is foremost a process of freeing up capital to move as it sees fit unencumbered by elected parliaments and other political institutions. It’s also about the control of labour by the free movement of production. If a ‘Canadian’ forestry company moves one of its sawmills to the Philippines to take advantage of cheap labour there, it’s effectively controlling labour in Canada.

After decades of study and observation of geopolitics and capitalist production I can’t help but conclude that the future will be fraught with uncertainty as governments give up power to finance capitalists and we are left with no democratic way of deciding anything about our lives. Politicians have sold us out for a pittance and now we’re increasingly at the mercy of the big banks and business corporations that are psychopathic by their very nature, unrestricted in their expressed need to pollute the planet at will, dominate our lives with pharmaceuticals aimed a lot less at making us healthy than to making corporate profits, and privatizing all public lands and services. Profits rule. Who gives a shit if they serve to help us or kills us.
Marx predicted that the end of the capitalist mode of production will come when labour has been largely replaced by capital in human production. Machines don’t buy commodities so by eliminating workers and replacing them with machines, the capitalist class is eliminating itself. What’s the fate of countries like the US and Canada? Well, before it gets better it will get much worse. There is bound to be class war in the US and all over the world, it’s just a matter of time. Throw enough people out of work and out of their homes, make cities impossible to live in and see what happens. We haven’t suffered enough yet to push us into precipitating a revolution, but we’re headed in that direction. What can stop the momentum?

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 2)

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 5 Comments

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 2)

 

So, I asked in the first part of this discussion two posts ago: What criteria would you use to determine whether your society is ok or not?  A number of you commented.  You mentioned things like civility, or the lack of it and the discrepancy between training and getting work related to that training, something especially important for recent graduates of training programs.  One of you noted that this is a very complex question!  Indeed it is.   Sociologists have seen this question as one of the most important in sociology.    To even ask whether your society is ok or not implies a number of basic questions and assumptions.  The first regards the definition of society itself.  First point to consider here is that society, the word, represents what many sociologists consider to be a system of interrelated and interdependent institutions and structures with a particular culture whose job it is to keep the whole thing running smoothly.  ‘Society’ does not equate with ‘country.’  The concept of ‘Canada’ is a political one.  Harold Innis argues that if we use Canada as a basic unit of analysis, we allow politicians to lead us about by the nose and that’s not terribly pleasant or effective as the point of departure in an analysis of society.  Society does not stop or start at borders.  I’ve argued elsewhere that Canada is not a very useful unit of analysis for a number of reasons.  (https://rogerjgalbert.com/2012/07/27/is-canada-a-capitalist-country/)

 

There may be many ways of deciding whether a society is OK or not.  Much depends on how we conceive of a healthy society.  Functionalists like Emile Durkheim were very clear in their sense that a ‘healthy’ society is one where there is a balance between individualism and collectivism, that is between the needs of the individual to stand out, especially in a competitive situation, and the needs of the group for solidarity.  Too much individualism and the glue that holds people together in society fails and the whole thing comes crashing down.  Too much collectivism and individuals fail to thrive and innovation falls flat and as a result society itself stagnates and fails.  So, according to Durkheim and his colleagues, a balance between individualism and collectivism indicates a healthy society. But what practical tool or way can we measure this?  Durkheim came up with suicide, or more accurately, the suicide rate.  Suicide itself is imponderable.  It’s impossible to ask a suicide why he or she did it.  Even leaving a suicide note may not tell the whole story.  So it’s not suicide per se that interested Durkheim.

 

But what about the suicide rate?  The suicide rate is measured by dividing the number of suicides in a population by 100,000 people in the population. It varies according to some very predictable social conditions.  Canada’s suicide rate is about 11 per 100,000 and men commit suicide at a rate 3 or 4 times the rate of women and that means that women have a rate of close to 5 and men more like 17. Single people commit suicide at higher rates than married people.  People from different regions commit suicide at different rates. In Nunavut, the rate is 71.  Now that’s way over the Canadian average.  Durkheim asked himself what accounted for this variation.  After conducting extensive research, the first ‘real’ sociological research of its kind, he dismissed imitation and ‘insanity’ as causes of suicide.  Read his book Suicide for the details.  Suffice it to say that Durkheim concluded that suicide rates varied with the amount of integration and individuation evident in a society.  He identified 3 major types of suicide, anomic, egoistic and altruistic.  He also identified fatalistic suicide as a way of keeping his theory in balance.  (See this Wikipedia entry for a bit of an ok discussion of Durkheim’s views on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_(book)) His whole idea is that too much integration or too much individuation is ‘bad’ for society.  By this argument, if Canada’s historical suicide rate is 11 per 100,000, but in Nunavut it’s 71, Durkheim would say that it’s because there is not enough social integration in the north.  Colonialism has marginalized a formerly very stable society and now people have no social glue to hold them together.  They’ve lost their traditional means of doing so and they have no new ones because they’ve been systematically excluded from them at every turn.  So, their suicide rate goes ballistic.

 

On the other side of the ledger, if Canada’s suicide rate suddenly fell to 2 or 3 per 100,000, that would be equally bad because the historical balance that existed in Canada to keep its rate at 11 was no longer extant.  So, if fewer people commit suicide, that’s also an indication that there is something wrong in society, in this case, namely that the glue that hold people together in society is too strong and prevents people from expressing themselves individually, even if that means to commit suicide. Now this is where my students’ heads began to explode.  How could it be that fewer people committing suicide is a bad thing?  Well, Durkheim’s analysis is not about individual wellbeing, it’s about social wellbeing.  Durkheim’s theory is based on the premise that society is like an organism itself with a life of its own.  My body is composed of billions of individual cells, but my life is not the sum of those individual cells.  My life is more than the sum of the cells that make up my body.  If at some time I suffer a major trauma and lose millions of cells (as in an arm or leg) my body can survive that.  The survival of my body is what’s important, not the survival of individual cells, maybe not even millions of them.  Makes sense even though it’s counter-intuitive.

 

So, from this perspective, balance is what’s crucial to a society’s health.  Throw off that balance and suffer the consequences.  Durkheim’s view also has as a basic premise that like all organisms, including societies, are composed of parts (organs) that have to work well on their own as well as work together for the good of the whole organism.  If certain parts no longer function properly, the whole organism is in jeopardy.  That goes for individual human organisms as well as for societies.  If education isn’t doing its job, the whole rest of society suffers.  If families aren’t socializing children properly, the whole society is stressed.  If the economy or the polity fail, the whole social structure is in danger.  Thus, for Durkheim, sociology is social pathology, how societies go wrong. So now, looking at your society, do you think everything is in balance?  If it is give examples of how.  If you think it isn’t also give examples of how.

 

I’m not suggesting for a minute that I wholeheartedly agree with Durkheim’s views, but he has a point.  See if you can use his theory to make some sense of your own society.  In my next post I’ll outline another theory about how society can be OK or not.

 

 

 

You don’t have an RRSP – Shame on You!

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

The Daily — Registered retirement savings plan contributions, 2011.

Click on the link above to see Statistics Canada’s latest accounting of RRSP contributions.  Turns out the median contribution in 2011 was $2,830.  This is not a huge median contribution but up from the previous year by a bit.  Twenty four percent of tax filers contributed to an RRSP in 2011.  That’s not what I would consider a big percentage. So what else are people doing to prepare for retirement?  Of course a certain percentage of taxpayers contributed to registered pension plans.  Just over 6 million contributed to pension plans, public and private sector (other than the CPP).  That means that a quarter of Canadians have a pension plan or RRSPs to help them survive in their retirement years.  That’s it!  We know that Canadians are also saving less and around 50% of Canadian households would be in significant financial trouble if they missed just one paycheque.  Doesn’t look good for us.

I write this because the TV ads for RRSPs this time of year make it seem as though everybody contributes to RRSPs and what’s wrong with you that you don’t.  Their aim is to use the old tried and true strategies of shame and guilt to increase RRSP business.  First we get urged to spend because if we don’t the economy will go for a crap.  If we haven’t got the money to spend, we need to borrow and the Bank of Canada has made it easy to do that so we dutifully borrow more and more money to buy things, things that we depend on to give our lives meaning.  Now we get berated for not saving enough and we hear on the radio that Canadians are further in debt than ever before.  Shame on us!  We don’t spend enough and we don’t save enough!  We borrow too much and we’re not productive enough.  We must be completely responsible for the poor performance of the economy.  We’re so fickle and untrustworthy.  Poor government, just trying to do what it can to help us out even though we’re hardly worth the effort.

The banks and the government along with their very well paid public relations firms have been playing us like a violin.  Maybe it’s time for all of us to really try to figure out what’s going on out there and to stop taking on the load of shame and guilt they want us to carry so that we blame ourselves for the problems in the Canadian economy and don’t look elsewhere, like at the banks and the government themselves.

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 1)

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

We’ve got this all wrong. (Part 1) OR: What criteria would you use to determine whether your society is ok or not?

 

One of the most popular perspectives in sociology from the 1930s until the late 60s was structural-functionalism.  Some people are still functionalists but they’re usually pretty quiet about it these days.  Functionalism has a long history in Western thought but structural-functionalism is of more recent American vintage.  Functionalism was an early European anthropological perspective that was adopted enthusiastically by the American sociologists Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton.  Functionalism or structural-functionalism are often uses interchangeably but it’s not my aim here to discuss the distinction or the similarity between these terms.  I have ulterior motives.

 

I start this with a reference to sociology and functionalism and that’s because I’m a sociologist, at least according to the document hanging on my wall in my office.  But functionalism has counterparts in all scientific disciplines.  Some disciplines seem to still embrace the concepts at least at an elementary level and use the perspective in teaching.  As far as I know in human biology classes there is still talk of anatomy and physiology, that is, of the structure of human organs, cells, systems, etc., and their functions.  I know that in anthropology there is still reference to the various aspects or institutions of cultures and their function or role in the lives of those cultures.  In fact, in sociology, that is also true.  Most introductory texts break up society into parts, education, religion, family, economy, polity, art, etc., and the role they play together to keep a society functioning properly or in equilibrium, which is the ideal social state according to sociological functionalists and other scientists too for that matter.

 

There is some validity to the structural-functionalist perspective, but it’s limited.  The perspective has been overwhelmed by much more relativistic perspectives such as the so-called interactionist perspectives but I’ll explore that some other day.  It’s certainly true that human bodies have organs and they function more or less well.  Emile Durkheim (1858 to 1917) actually referred to sociology as social pathology or the study of what goes wrong with societies or how they get out of kilter.  He also referred to sociology as the study of morality but I’ll also leave that for another day.  The point here is that in sociology a major perspective sees society as being composed of parts, which serve a function more or less effectively.   The family is supposed to serve the function of socializing children and providing a warm, emotionally supportive environment in which children grow up.  Religion is supposed to look after our spiritual needs.  Education has the task of preparing each generation of people to undertake their adult roles.  The economy is supposed to take care of our biological needs for food and other material things we need to live in a particular society at a particular time.  If all the parts of society are doing their job, everything is cool and society is working as it should.  Of course, I wrote earlier that this perspective has limitations and it does.  One of the main limitations is that it treats society as an organism that stands by itself and is, in a sense, sui generis (self generated).  I’m being somewhat unfair to functionalism, but not essentially.  But that’s not the only problem with functionalism.  It wants society to be balanced, but it often isn’t and some institutions or parts of society don’t always do what they’re supposed to do in the way that they’re supposed to.  Robert K. Merton understood that and came up with the idea that some things like families are sometimes dysfunctional and the task of the sociologist is to show how things can be put right again.  Well, today I want to look at dysfunction in ‘the economy.’

 

First, I want to be clear that I’m not a functionalist in the least but that doesn’t prevent me from writing about ‘society’ from that perspective.  It’s a simplistic perspective because it’s basically ahistorical, but for the moment just pretend that you’ve gone into your doctor’s office and she’s trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with you.  Pretend that you’re a doctor of society trying to figure out what’s ‘wrong’ with your society.  What criteria would you use to determine whether your society is ok or not?  This is not a rhetorical question.  I’m interested in your answer.  Write a comment.