Human Behavioural Biology

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

In my opinion, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford University is one of the most compelling lecturers I’ve ever encountered.  His course on Human Behavioural Biology addresses the links between neural functioning and behaviour.  His work on stress and depression are critically important as a point of departure for anyone involved in clinical work on these issues or for anyone suffering from stress or depression.  For years I used his National Geographic video called Stress in my Sociology classes to show how class distinctions affect even biological functions and can cause poor health and early death.  In this film he compares Olive baboons in Kenya to people working in the British bureaucracy in Whitehall.  He notes that the higher one is in the social structure in terms of power and prestige, the less one is stressed out and the less one shows the characteristic signs of stress like the use of medications and the loss of work productivity, often involving long absences from work on sick leave.  It’s happened to me. I twice took long periods of leave due to stress at work.  I know of what he speaks.  The feelings of frustration and impotence are extreme when we are faced with lots of responsibility and no or little authority.

Sapolsky’s entire course on Human Behavioural Biology is made availably by Stanford University on YouTube.  There’s probably 20 hours of lecture material here, but worth every minute of it.  Your TV could not be put to better use.  Enjoy!

What Sociology is For Me (in 1990). Yes, you can chuckle…

~ Roger JG Albert

Alright, you’re allowed to chuckle a bit as you watch this video.  It’s me in 1990.  Yes, I still have a full head of hair, and it’s still brown. The quality of the video is very poor.  It’s probably 4th generation.  I won’t win any Academy Award for this performance, either.  We filmed this (Dan Moscrip, the Knowledge Network director and his crew) starting early in the morning on Granville Island and finishing twelve hours later at the Bloedel Conservatory.  I memorized my script as we went from venue to venue.  Probably my favourite venue was in Chinatown, shooting over the crowd.  This was all great fun.

So, maybe I didn’t win an Academy Award, but I still go along with the message I was trying to get across 22 years ago…with some minor adjustments I might make.  Now…have a look:

The Christian Idiom

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 3 Comments

I was raised Catholic, but it didn’t take me too long into my late adolescence to realize it wasn’t for me.  There was so much belief, blind faith and not a lot of evidence.  Isn’t that the point of religion, really?  When I was 17 or so I was told by a priest that I shouldn’t be reading a book by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.  I was still a practicing Catholic at the time, but I was stunned when this former physics teacher of mine at Collège St-Jean in Edmonton, told me that I wasn’t ‘intellectually prepared’ enough to read de Chardin. According to the Gaiamind website (gaiamind.com):

“Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a visionary French Jesuit, paleontologist, biologist, and philosopher, who spent the bulk of his life trying to integrate religious experience with natural science, most specifically Christian theology with theories of evolution. In this endeavor he became absolutely enthralled with the possibilities for humankind, which he saw as heading for an exciting convergence of systems, an “Omega point” where the coalescence of consciousness will lead us to a new state of peace and planetary unity. Long before ecology was fashionable, he saw this unity he saw as being based intrinsically upon the spirit of the Earth: ‘The Age of Nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the Earth.’ ”

Methinks my former physics professor was slightly disingenuous about his motives for telling me I wasn’t ‘intellectually prepared’ to read de Chardin.  Anyone still steeped in Catholic doctrine would have to reject de Chardin.  It’s easy to see that from the above quote.   de Chardin’s work contradicted the Catholic Magisterium and many of his books were censored by Rome. He basically rejected the whole Biblical account of creation in Genesis.   His Le Phénomène Humain published posthumously strayed far from the dogma of the Church.  So, fearing the loss of yet another young adherent to the Church, my Oblate physics teacher was really imploring me to avoid reading heresy.  But it was too late.  I was already on a road to greater intellectual curiosity.  I read works by ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz.  I read popularizations of anthropology such as Robert Ardrey’s The Territorial Imperative. I read The Origin of Species.  Later, at Simon Fraser University, I would quote Ardrey in an anthropology paper to be told that my professor that he was a charlatan. What can I say, I was a newbie.

In any case, my point here is that de Chardin opened my eyes to thinking about the world and the universe in very different ways from what is contained in Catholic doctrine.  Biblical accounts taken literally made no sense to me whatsoever.  I read the Bible over and over again and continued to be mystified by the language, the smiting of one’s enemies, and the gnashing of teeth.  It took me some time to realize that taken metaphorically, the Bible makes much more sense than it does literally.  de Chardin led the way in my awakening on this front.  I don’t subscribe to Biblical accounts of creation any more than de Chardin did and I can definitely relate to his view of the cosmos.

For de Chardin (and science, for that matter) there is ‘immortality’ in the universe in the sense that matter and energy are not lost, but are constantly ‘reconfiguring’ and ‘reconstituting’ themselves.  As the saying goes, we are the stuff of stars.  The matter that makes up my body has always existed and always will.  The particular configuration of matter that is me is transitory, but the matter that is me is eternal and immortal.  So, in a sense, I ‘believe’ in immortality.  Humans, however, aren’t generally satisfied with such an abstract idea of immortality.  No, we want something more tangible such as the soul upon which to hang our hopes of individual immortality.  We really want to be ‘ourselves’ eternally, as if our deaths never happened, cavorting and enjoying ourselves in heaven with our earthly companions and with God overseeing everything like a cosmic party host.  This is a picture of God as very human like and of humans as very god-like. For de Chardin, God has no specific connection with the human species.

For de Chardin, God is the universe, the Omega as he called it.  That is a far cry from the story of creation in the Bible, but if our denial of death is as profound a drive as Ernest Becker suggests, the fall from grace symbolized by the eating of the forbidden fruit and the subsequent split of humans into our symbolic and material selves whereby our symbolic selves are immortal and our material selves are mortal makes more sense.  Our bodies are our own worst enemies.  They die.  They betray us at every turn.  They are fundamentally evil.  It’s our symbolic side that is good, pure and immortal.  So the story of creation in the Bible is idiomatic.  It metaphorically concretizes the goodness of the power of the universe, the abstract power we cannot understand and from which all life emanates, and the badness of matter which at every turn bleeds and dies.  The interesting thing here is that people get caught up with the Bible’s literal explanations and don’t, as de Chardin did, see the story of the unfolding universe in the Genesis code.  How long we will need to bend to metaphor and idiom rather than face the reality of the universe full face is anyone’s guess.  More on this later.

Death Denial

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

If there’s a constant in human history, it’s death denial.  Ernest Becker, in the last book he published just before his death in 1974, The Denial of Death, explores and explains the pervasiveness of death denial in all cultures all over the globe.  I cannot recommend this book highly enough for anyone interested in trying to come to grips with their own death, but also with the death of cultures, ways of life and all cultural artifacts.  According to Becker, individual death is a given, at least in the physical sense, but as human beings, we can’t accept that inevitability, so we devise sometimes very elaborate systems of death denial.  For Becker, cultures themselves are immortality projects designed to deny death.  The Christian idea of the soul is a great immortality project.  The body dies, the soul lives on forever.  Take that, death!  Life 1, Death 0.  So, Christians can live thinking that when they die, they live.  That’s comforting, I guess, if it’s possible to really believe that.  My sense is that doubt is hard to cast aside.  Is there really an afterlife?  After all, it’s just promises, no proof.  It’s also my sense that one way to assuage guilt over doubt is to affirm the death denying ideology of the soul more firmly than ever.  I’m not picking specifically on Christians here, everybody else does it too.  There are atheistic religions like Buddhism but they also have mechanisms that promise some form of immortality.

None of this is surprising.  In the simplest of biological terms, living organisms, particularly the sentient ones, ‘want’ to continue to live.  It’s a basic drive.  Becker’s book, Escape From Evil, published shortly after his death by his wife, Marie, and his publishers, expresses this beautifully in its first few pages.  We are driven to fight the two pillars of evil in life: disease and death.  Disease injures our potential to enjoy life, to revel in a good meal, an excellent glass of wine, or a particularly spectacular sunset.  Death takes away everything, all enjoyment, all time, all everything.  What greater evil can there be?  So we devise elaborate schemes to make us feel like none of this will ever happen to us?  Not to humans.  We are the chosen species.  We are not like other animals.  We are special under the sun.  And if anyone dares say otherwise, well, that’s most unfortunate for them.  They must be dealt with in the harshest of terms because if our death-denying ideologies are proven to be weak or just plain lies, then we die…forever.  Aboriginal cultures everywhere, when faced with the power of colonialism, abandoned their traditional practices and took on the beliefs of their captors and colonizers.  Why continue to put faith in an immortality-ideology that failed to protect them in their most trying moment?

Now, of course, the most powerful immortality-ideology is capital accumulation and wealth.  But we know that this kind of ideology, no matter how powerful cannot promise us immortality.  Still, there are many people today who live and die for ‘freedom’ to accumulate capital to get rich.  They are, in fact, willing to kill the very planet they occupy so that they might live forever.

This short post barely scratches the surface of the importance of Becker’s work.  I’ll come back to Becker over and over again in posts to come.

 

Death is necessary for life…

~ Roger JG Albert

Try eating live things.  They don’t like it and usually put up a fight.  The fact is that we normally like to eat our food dead.  There are situations where we like to get close to the line between life and death, say when we boil lobster or crab alive, or when we go to a restaurant featuring live fish in large tanks and pick out our dinner as it swims by.  But by and large we like to be assured that our food is nicely and fully dead.  Vegetables are no problem.  We hardly consider them alive in the first place although they are of course.  Not everyone likes their veggies, but their dislike is generally not based on whether or not they are dead.  With animals, it’s another matter.

We ‘relate’ to animals, animate things, especially if they’re young, cute and cuddly.  When we in the West find out that some people in China and Korea eat young dogs, preferably St-Bernards, we find it hard not to gag or throw up.  We know that ‘veal’ really means baby cow but we try not to think about it. Lamb is the same, baby sheep.  So are weaner pigs, that is, pigs that have just been weaned.  We know killing happens.  We wouldn’t be able to eat steak, bacon, roasts or ham without the killing. It’s just not right to think about it or bring it up in polite conversation.  The fact is that humans slaughter millions if not billions of animals every year (for food or as ‘pests’), sometimes by specialists like in the West, but by lots of non-specialists in Africa and other ‘poor’ parts of the world too.  People all over the world realize that they like to eat their food dead and somebody has to do the dirty deed.  Now, isn’t that an interesting way of putting it: do the dirty deed?  Of course you’ve heard that.  To do a dirty deed…ultimately means killing someone or something. The reference to dirt we’ll come back to.  But for now, let’s face it.  Although we don’t like to admit it, death is really important to us.  But of course death is important to us not just in terms of the food we eat.

If things didn’t die, things couldn’t live. If people didn’t die, there would be standing room only on the planet in very short order.  We think there’s a lot of people on the planet now!  If people didn’t die, I’m not sure how they would be born, but that’s an issue for another post.  So our underlying unquestioned assumption that life is good and death is bad is patently ridiculous.  Not that we’ve ever shied away from espousing ridiculous ideas.  No, people need to die so others may live.  The problem is all about the quality of death and dying.  We know that we are born at one point, grow up, mature and then die, at least on a ‘normal’ trajectory.  There’s lots of variation in the length of time we live.  For instance, in some parts of Africa an individual is lucky to live to be 37 years of age.  Here in Canada we’re looking at a normal life span getting into the eighties.  In the ‘poor’ countries, many children die very young.  We think that’s a shame, really. But we don’t like to think about it too much.  We see the starving children in the OxFam or whatever commercials and cringe a little, but it’s not really our problem.  Distant death is barely death at all whether we are talking about time (as in death centuries ago) or space, (as in death in Somalia or Mali, far away in Africa).  We have some vague sense that many people die in Canada every year, but we don’t really know how many, nor are we particularly interested.  But death gets more interesting the closer it gets to us, especially so close that we just can’t deny it.

When my cousin’s daughter was murdered on Halloween night last year, I was shocked and angry.  She was just at high school graduation age.  Some very disturbed young man -who’s since been caught and faces first degree murder charges – killed her that night and she’ll never be coming home. Many other thousands of people died that same day all over the world, but that doesn’t matter.  What matters is that someone in the family met a very tragic, unnecessary death.  I didn’t know Taylor Van Diest personally.  She lived a long distance from where I live on Vancouver Island.  My uncle Denis (my father’s brother) moved his family (including Taylor’s mom) to the Okanagan Valley decades ago.  He’s since passed away.  That broke the tie that kept our families in close contact.  Since then we’ve had large family reunions, but I haven’t attended many of them.  Too busy working most of the time.  Families drift apart.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  It’s just the way it is in a world that encourages radical insularity and downplays family except for ideological purposes.  Still, when a family member meets such an untimely death, it hurts.  For the immediate family the pain must be almost unbearable and it doesn’t wane.  The passage of time does little to heal the still gaping wound that is the absence of Taylor.  But, like I said, death is only meaningful to us when it’s close and it’s importance to us is inversely proportional to it’s distance to us in time and space.  What I’ve found in my career is that there isn’t just one kind of death.  There are many kinds of death just as there are many kinds of life.  Taylor’s death is not the same kind of death as the death of the pig that made it possible for me to eat bacon this morning.  One seems senseless, the other necessary.  We are horrified by Taylor’s death, rightly so.  When my father-in-law lay dying at Burnaby General Hospital twenty-three years ago, I was struck by the traffic noise, the talk in the hallway, the realization that death matters little to most of us most of the time.  The world doesn’t stop every time a person dies even though we think it should when that person is close to us.  No, we are really little affected by death.  Our systems of death denial are very  strong indeed making it all the more horribly distressing when the experience of death is so personal that our usual systems of death denial no longer work and we have to face it unmediated by ideology.  The experience is soul destroying and extremely isolating.  The visceral reaction of most people in this situation is to reach for meaning anywhere it can be found.  No search for meaning is entirely satisfactory.  There is always a residual emptiness.

To finish this up, I want to just say that death is not the opposite of life.  Living and dying are one in the same thing.  Distinguishing between the two is the result of a feeble attempt on humanity’s part to deny death.  To be blunt about it, the moment we are conceived we are on a death trajectory. How can we live with that realization without effective ideologies of death denial?  More on that in the next post.

Texas Addendum 1

~ Roger JG Albert

I learned something else in Texas, but also on the way there and back.  The other NIC faculty members that received awards and that are featured in this NIC  Press Release, are people who can be justly proud of their achievements.  I was honoured to stand among them during the Awards Ceremonies and to share meals and time with them when we weren’t involved in ‘official awards business.’  I worked (and travelled lately) with a bunch of dedicated, caring, hardworking and quirky people.  Quirkiness is a very positive character attribute in my mind.  To be quirky means to leave the rules of the game on the sidelines when it’s appropriate.  It means doing things tangentially sometimes or obliquely, avoiding the frontal, rulebook approach to practice and behaviour.  Rules are made to be broken as long as a greater ‘care’ is to be achieved.  I can say that many of my colleagues put students first.  If that makes them quirky, well, we need to celebrate that.  The NISOD celebration of excellence and the conference in Austin are a celebration of quirkiness.  I shared a room with 1200 other quirky people last week.  I’m happy to be counted among them.

What I learned in Texas.

~ Roger JG Albert

Well, we were in Texas a mere 4 days.  Not a lot of time to gather a very sophisticated impression of the place or the people.  Still, because I was there to collect my award medallion of excellence from NISOD, the National Institute for Organizational and Staff Development, we got to meet people from all over the United States and parts of Canada.  Over 1200 people received awards and over 2000 attended the conference that was held in conjunction with the Awards Ceremonies.  To a large extent, all the people we met in the conference rooms, breakout sessions, exhibition hall, out on the streets and in the restaurants, basically wherever we went, the people were no different than what one might find walking the streets of Vancouver.  Most people are polite, honest, mind their own business and keep to themselves. Like people everywhere they are absorbed in their daily lives, trying to make a living or leave a trace on this planet by doing something worthwhile and significant. All want to be heroes to some extent, recognized by their fellow human beings, looked up to if possible, but at least not denigrated and diminished. We met a young man, a waiter in a restaurant, who we engaged in conversation.  He was not only a waiter, but a concert musician and new music writer.  He beamed when we acknowledged the value of his endeavours and wished him luck while promising to visit his website.  On our last day there, we stopped for coffee at the Café Crêpe, a small coffee shop attached to our hotel. I realized that this was a French themed establishment, but I was surprised a little to find out that the owner spoke impeccable French.  He told me  in French that he had arrived in Austin when he was 22 years old, decades earlier, and had stayed to work and make a life although he returned to France 3 to 4 times a year until 9/11 when he reduced his travel because of new travel restrictions. Another young man we met in a thrift shop upon learning that we were Canadians (I tell most people we meet, it’s a great ice breaker.) told us that although he lived his whole life in Austin, he always wanted to move to Quebec City. He asked us what we knew about Quebec Cite and if we thought moving there would be a good idea.  Of course, we said.   It’s a cliché, but everyone has a story, or many stories.  Everyone wants their story or stories to mean something.  If there’s a universal human characteristic, that’s it.  If there’s a point to the NISOD Awards Ceremony, that’s it.

Of course, that’s not all I learned in Texas.  Aside from any commentary I might make on people I met in Austin, I was struck by the construction of condominium towers going up in the downtown area.  Whole neighbourhoods are being bulldozed, making way for new construction.  I was told that there will be 25,000 more people living in the downtown core of Austin in 5 years than there are now.  It’s a city growing at a two-digit rate.  Given the state of the American economy, Austin has to be an exception.  The freeway and highway systems are extensive and traffic moves well, to a large extent.  We took a tour outside of downtown one day and I was impressed by the number of over and underpasses, but I also thought about how much it would cost to maintain them.  I heard more than once how high taxes were in Texas.  It’s amazing how seldom people actually make a correlation between the services they receive from the state and the amount of tax they pay.  Somehow, they think that they should not have to pay any taxes while still enjoying all the benefits they take for granted every day of their lives that are provided by the state.  People are strange.  That’s another thing I learned in Texas.

I learned a lot more in Texas, of course and I’ll get around to writing more about it soon.  If you have any questions about my time there, leave a commentary.  Ask away.

 

Texas here we come

~ Roger JG Albert

So, an award was bestowed upon me.  I will be attending the NISOD conference (http://www.nisod.org/conference/) to receive an Excellence award.  I was chosen along with four other members of North Island College’s staff and faculty for this distinguished award.  I first thought of it as a teaching award, but it’s for more than my classroom activity.  I’ve been very active over the years in community organizations and in community-based research.  I also sat on the college board for seven years, chaired my department for several years, was part of the dean’s advisory committee and I spent some time on the Education Management Committee (when it existed).  Wherever you looked, I was there.  Frankly, I wasn’t always welcome where I was.  I was also the first president of the NIC faculty association.  It was very tense when we organized in the early 90s, and the president at that time was eventually gracious in accepting our presence on campus.  Still, there was no shortage of controversy.  One thing that always rankled the administration was the fact that there was a faculty member on the Board.  It was a source of constant conflict as the administration and community members of the board insisted that I was always in conflict of interest.  Nasty things were said, the tension was palpable at times,  but I survived.  And now I’m retiring.

I am honoured to receive this award.  It means some recognition for the work I’ve put into my classroom, online and interactive television teaching over the past 30 odd years as well as for my other activities at the college and in the community.  I know it’s a bit of a cliché to say so, but many other faculty members at NIC are deserving of this award.  There are some excellent young teachers at the college who should be in line for this award.  As I said, I am honoured to receive this award, but it would be nice if younger faculty members got the award and were able to attend the annual conference in Austin, Texas.  They could then share some of their new-found knowledge with other members of the college community.  There should be an award for old farts like me, but more like the one they give out at the Oscars for lifelong contribution to filmmaking.

So, we’re off to Texas.  I’ll try to get a blog post out while I’m there, maybe a commentary on the city and the conference.  Why not?

Does Class Matter in Canada?

~ Roger JG Albert

A script I wrote in 1993 for a Knowledge Network telecourse.

There are various ways that we can think about the question: Does Class Matter in Canada.  Because the question arises in the context of the conflict perspective in sociology, I want to address it from that perspective, but from a classical conflict perspective as well as from a more contemporary perspective.  From the classical conflict perspective in sociology, the question relates to the genesis of capitalism.  That is, to what extent class analysis can explain the course of history.  There is a contemporary conflict perspective on the question too, but it focusses on inequalities in society and life chances.

 

The question “Does Class Matter” arises partly because, in the popular mind, history is created mostly by politicians and political and military decisions.  That’s what gets into the history books.  Class, by any definition, doesn’t enter into the picture.  But there’s more to it than that.  In an article called “Does Class Matter,?” Wallace Clement of Carleton University notes that class analysis is currently under attack for being too narrowly focussed and for not bringing ethnicity, region and gender sufficiently into sociological and historical analysis.  I agree with Clement when he concludes that these factors are important, but that fact alone doesn’t lessen the importance of class.  And it’s necessary to point out, I think, that class doesn’t refer only to the “economic” relationship between the working class and the capitalist class, it refers to the entire spectrum of relations in society that are the experience of living in class society.

 

Class does kind of hit you square between the eyes, though, in a situation like the one surrounding closure of the Cassiar mine in northern British Columbia in February, 1992   In this case, the “company,” a subsidiary of the Princeton Mining Corporation of Vancouver, decided to close the mine for various reasons.  The effect of this closure, whatever the reasons, was the dislocation of 400 workers and their families, who were required to move out of their community, the company-owned town of Cassiar.  The place was then put up for auction.  The mine owners had every right to close down the mine and, in a sense, miners have to expect that mines must eventually shut down.  The decision on the part of the mine owners, nevertheless, demonstrates clearly the absolute power that the capitalist class has in disposing of the working class as it sees fit without regard for community, democratic process or anything else.  There’s no question of who’s in control here.  Same goes for mill shutdowns in Port Alberni and in single-industry towns all over the province.  Just ask the people of Sparwood how they were affected by the bankruptcy and shutdown of a Westar mine there.

 

The clear demonstrations of power by the capitalist class in these circumstances are not so clear in others, especially with regard to the experience of everyday life in capitalist society.  Many contemporary conflict theorists have focused on class inequality and its effects in everyday life.   Here, the overwhelming “collective consciousness” or ethos of capitalist life more often than not masks its class-based origins and sometimes, as with racism, family violence or education, there seems to be no connection whatsoever with class.  We have the illusion of living in a relatively classless society.

 

Class analysis from a classical conflict perspective is not concerned so much with documenting the personal experience of life in capitalist society as with how history unfolds in the dynamics of class conflict.  According to Marx, if you occupy a position in the class that owns the means of production, the factories, mines, mills, etc., then you are considered a member of the ruling class.  If not, you’re working class.  Obviously, however, there are significant differences in the life chances of a bank vice-president sitting in the top floor office in a downtown Vancouver skyscraper and those of a kitchen worker in a fast food restaurant, even though they’re both, technically, working class.  Furthermore, there are a number of ways that we get sorted out in our society, by gender, ethnic origin, religion, education, occupation, income, citizenship, organizational affiliation, etc…

There’s a very significant fragmentation and stratification of the working class in our society.

 

There’s very little chance of moving from one class into another in our society if we think in terms of a ruling class and a working class.  Hope burns eternal in most of us, however, of “getting ahead,” or of doing just a little bit better than the Joneses…even if we’re all on welfare.  Even at this level, however, there is really not as much mobility as you might think and we hold our relative positions in the class structure remarkably consistently from generation to generation.  The reason is that once a particular group gains an advantage in the class structure, it will do whatever it has to to maintain, strenghten and transfer that advantage to the next generation.

 

When sociologists talk about life chances in capitalist society, they refer to the ability or potential to live a happy, healthy and economically secure life…to quality of life.  It’s pretty obvious that there are different qualities of life, that there are major differences in the life chances of a single mother on welfare and those of a college president.  Conventional wisdom and liberal ideology don’t recognize the existence of social class, so inequality between a single mother on welfare and a college president is always seen as the result of personal characteristics.  The burden is always on the individual.  You occupy your place in society because of intelligence, or lack of it, willingness to work, thrift, courage, etc… By this analysis, those of you who have poorly-paid jobs, who are unemployed, underemployed, or on welfare, with low levels of schooling and no money are that way because you’re stupid, aren’t willing to work hard enough, or you’re wimps, or all three.  You may even believe that yourselves.  If you’ve bought the dominant ideology in our society, you probably do go along with this “cream rises to the top” business.

 

The problem is that persistent inequality in our society is not explainable with reference to personal characteristics alone although they may play a role in some cases.  In our society there are gradations of statuses on the basis of income, occupation and education.   Sociologists often refer to these gradations as strata or classes.  These should not be confused with the classical conflict definition of class, which refers only to your relationship to the means of production.  It’s not quite as simple as this, but if you score high on all three characteristics, good job, high education and lots of money you are considered upper class.  Score low and you’re lower class.  It’s only too obvious we’re not all equal in terms of condition, but what about opportunity? We have equal opportunity don’t we?  If we work hard, we can get ahead, can’t we?  Sorry to disappoint you.

 

If you were born female to native parents in Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands what do you think your chances would be of being appointed to the Board of Directors of Noranda, or General Motors, or the Bank of Montreal?  Would your chances be any better if you were born male to a single mother in Burnaby?  What about if you were born male or female to the president of a major corporation living on the waterfront in West Vancouver, in Point Grey or Shaughnessy?  What all of these questions address is the relationship between social stratification, social mobility and life chances, but at the individual level.  Stratification goes much beyond the individual level.  It is a social fact.  What we have a hard time accepting is that we are somehow locked into a particular strata or class.  Is there social mobility? Let’s look at the way most of us think of as the best way to get ahead: education. Is there a class bias in access to higher education in B.C.?  Is a post-secondary education accessible to all and does it lead to social mobility and a better life?  In a paper called Education Under Seige: Financing and Accessibility in B.C. Universities, published in 1985 but still very much relevant today, Neil Guppy of UBC concludes that there has been no democritization of access to university.  He reports, based on a study he conducted that vocational institutes and community colleges cater to working class or lower middle class students while universities continue to cater to upper and upper middle class students.  And the reality is that a university education still produces greater material rewards so unequal access to university tends to reinforce social inequality.

 

For most of us, most of the time, class, defined both in classical and contemporary terms, has an enormous influence on our life chances. There you have it.

Class: What is it?

~ Roger JG Albert

On Class: A script for the Knowledge Network Sociology Series.

By: Roger Albert

© 1993 Knowledge Network.

 

Boy, that guy sure has class!  Have you ever heard that before?  Or maybe you’ve heard: she doesn’t have much money, but she’s sure got class!  Well, what do we mean by class in this context?  We can’t just say “well, you know what I mean”…because this is a sociology course and sociologists don’t say “well, you know what I mean.” Sociologist need more than that.  As sociologists we can’t assume that other people know what we mean, or that we share their meanings with them.  So what DO we mean by class here?  I think that we’re communicating a whole lot of things when we talk about class like this. although I think that we’re mostly unconscious of the content of this kind of communication and its symbolic significance.  We can tell a bit about what’s important to us, and what we value by paying attention to the hidden messages in our conversations.  Implicit in the notion of class as I just used it in my examples is the fact that in our society people have different incomes, occupations and educational levels and those who have lots of income, prestigious occupations and lots of education are better than people who don’t .  They can afford to dress expensively, drive new luxury cars, eat in “classy” restaurants.  We admire them, wish we were like them and see them as being successful.  People who are less wealthy but who have discriminating tastes and try to emulate the people who have more are given thumbs up for giving it a good shot.  It also happens, of course, that we run across the comment: boy, that guy’s loaded, but he’s got no class at all! In this case, we have expectations of what rich people do, how they behave, you know, swavely, and we are disappointed when an obviously wealthy person doesn’t live up to our stereotypes and expectations.

 

Thorstein Veblen, an American economic historian and social philosopher who died in 1929 wrote a book called The Theory of the Leisure Class.  In this book he explains that we can relate to people just above and just below us on the social scale.  We are scared as hell of dropping down a notch and we’d sure like to catch up to the Joneses.  As regular people we can’t relate to people whose lives are so different from ours, that is, members of the leisure class, that class of very wealthy people who don’t need to work, at least not in the way most of us think of work.  They tinker with their stocks and bonds, or hire other people to even do that.  They invest.  They don’t collect wages or a salary.  They are the David Rockefellers of the world.   But let’s get back to basics.  Class, what is it?  Is it simply an attitude, a set of behaviours that we see as cool, calm and collected?

 

Well, class is different things to different people.  There’s a major difference in the way a structural functionalist or liberal sociologist and a conflict theorist or Marxist conceive of class.  And their conceptions have little in common with the common view of class in the sense of “classy” restaurant.  I’ve got a dictionary of sociology that defines class as a totality of persons having one or more common characteristics.  Class, according to the dictionary, may or may not signify the existence of a hierarchical scale of social power.  There are age, nativity, occupational, industrial, social, ideo-politico-economic, and income classes says the dictionary, but races and nationalities don’t qualify as classes although they divide the population.

 

In the “m” section of the same dictionary, we find the definition of middle class.  It says here that the concept of middle class used to really mean something in the 19th century, but that now most of us think of ourselves as middle class:  intellectual workers with moderate incomes, skilled artisans, prosperous farmers, white collar workers and salaried employees of large mercantile and financial establishments.   According to the dictionary, they have few common economic interests and whatever unity they possess lies in their standard of living and ideals of family life, their mores and recreational interests.  Well, this dictionary was first published in 1941 and it isn’t politically correct anymore (although my copy was printed in 1970).  The dictionary definition of class is basically a liberal definition whereby class is defined in subjective terms, by the way people think of themselves and describe themselves.  Not all sociologists are happy with that definition, however, and some think that the word class is too ambiguous or ideologically charged to be much good to use in a scientific study of society.  They want to be able to measure class objectively, recognizing that people don’t all have the same standard of living.  In doing so, they borrow a term from geology, stratification, which describes how the earth’s crust gets layered over millions of years via sedimentation and other processes.  Sociologically, the term refers exclusively to one’s relationship with the market…at the level of consumption.  If I can buy more than you, I’m higher class.  Class in this sense is separated from what is considered a person’s political and social status.  All three phases of life, class, status and political power constitute the context of the distribution of power in society.  This way of thinking also fits with the ideas that in our society, politics, business. education, law. etc., are all separate and independent spheres of activity and power in one is totally unrelated to power in another.  From this perspective, class can be measured objectively and people can be ranked on the basis of income, occupation and education.

 

A conflict theorist or Marxist would say that the concept of stratification is fine but it doesn’t explain much.  Sure, some people are rich and some aren’t, but just because a person is wealthy doesn’t mean that that person is powerful.  Win a lottery and get rich, sure, but do you have power? Depends on what you mean by power.  If we think that the ability to purchase things is power then we might think of the wealthy as powerful, no matter what the source of their wealth.  If we believe this, we are basically subscribing to a liberal view of the world.  The conflict theorist looks for the source of power elsewhere, at least initially…in the production and reproduction of wealth and ownership of the tools to recreate wealth…that is the factories, mines, mills, etc..  From this perspective, the basic class division is between the owners of the means of production (mines, mills, etc) and those who work for  the owners of the means of production and who are dependent on them for their livelihoods.  And the issue here is not relative individual power, Bill Gates versus you and I, but in the role that the owning and working classes play historically in the evolution of capitalism.  In this way of thinking, the affluent worker, who may hang out at the club and work in the highest offices in the highest sky scrappers downtown, is relatively wealthy, maybe, but is still dependent on the owning class.  And the determining factor for class analysis is not the worker’s affluence or poverty, but his or her dependence.  From a structural conflict perspective, its not the fact that there is social inequality based on relative wealth that’s important, but the problem of access to the opportunities to get that wealth.  That’s the difference between equality of condition and equality of opportunity, but that’s a topic for another day.