March 26, 2006
Culture Talk
Orlando Patterson, professor of sociology at Harvard, tackles the problem of young-black-male disconnection from society in today's New York Times:
SEVERAL recent studies have garnered wide attention for reconfirming the tragic disconnection of millions of black youths from the American mainstream. But they also highlighted another crisis: the failure of social scientists to adequately explain the problem, and their inability to come up with any effective strategy to deal with it.
Patterson criticizes the social sciences for failing to look at cultural explanations for this phenomenon, and blames a deep-seated anti-culture dogma within the social sciences for this oversight. He points to three misconceptions about culture that prevent social scientists from taking it seriously as a causal factor of behavior: that cultural explanations "blame the victim," that they are ultimately deterministic, and that culture is to a large extent immutable.
Having taken now taken a political science course last semester, allow me to explain the errors in the good professor from Harvard's argument.
First off, the charge of determinism is, I think, a red-herring. Any explanation of a social phenomenon is going to look overly deterministic if you try to apply it to an individual case. What causes one person to go into a life of crime is not necessarily a useful metric for what causes crime in general. Social science describes social phenomena, psychology describes individual phenomena. It's somewhat of a quantum-physics-vs.-Relativity style disconnect (or, better, systems theory); the rules that are used to explain phenomena at one level are not necessarily appropriate once you start aggregating up the ladder.
For the other two charges ("blaming the victim" and the immutability of culture) to the extent that social and political scientists believe cultural explanations suffer from these problems, it is generally because those promulgating such explanations have generally used them to come to those conclusions.
But the real problem is that, when a cultural explanation is trotted out, this is generally intended to mark the end of the discussion - "these people act this way because that's their culture," "this culture is a part of who these people (whomever you happen to be talking about) are," etc. It's the nature of the argument. If you try to dig beyond that and ask why it is that such-and-such culture arose amongst so-and-so people, well, then you're no longer looking at cultural explanations, but explanations of culture. So, black male youth are disconnected and failing because of the cultural forces surrounding them - idolization of drug and hip-hop culture over more practical pursuits. But that wasn't always the case - how did this state of affairs arise? And how do we change it? These are questions that cultural explanations are ill-equipped to address.
For instance, people often blame the social conservativism and authoritarianism of the Arab world on the "culture" of Islam, and certainly you can make a good case that Islam preaches these things. Yet Islam also preaches understanding and public consultation (Shura) in decision-making. Christianity has frequently been invoked in bloody conflicts, while it supposedly enjoins its adherents to turn the other cheek when struck. Culture, and cultural subcomponents such as religion, are extremely malleable and are often used to justify whatever it is people want to do. At heart, social scientists don't like cultural explanations because culture is too "squishy" a concept - it's far too malleable and vague and unmeasurable to be a good starting point for causal analysis.
Now, this is not to say that culture plays no causal role at all. I could easily believe that a cultural environment, once it arises, can have real effects on the individuals within it. Culture may be auto-catalytic, in that the underlying factors (socio-economic or otherwise) that give rise to behavior are then reinforced by the accompanying culture as well. This could intensify any social effects and make them more "sticky" or resistant to change - this may very well be the case with the "hip-hop culture" in question. Or, existing cultural pillars may shape the response to the underlying factors in particular ways. For example, the different methods of resistance to political oppression in East Asian ("Sinicised") vs. Arab vs. European societies. I'm very willing to believe that particular cultures more easily lend themselves to particular social responses than others.
Such second-order effects would still be largely unmeasurable, and I think this does present a real problem for social science. Social scientists do, I think, avoid addressing possible cultural explanations in part because they just aren't easily measured, not because they have no effect. This impoverishes any social analysis to a certain extent, but not, I would argue, to the extent that trying to graft an overly vague and malleable construct like culture into a rigorous causal analysis does.
Ultimately, cultural explanations of social phenomena are similar in many ways to fundamentalist attempts to use theological explanations for physical phenomena. (How did we get here? God put us here. Why do we act the way we do? God made us this way.) While they satisfy in that they give us an answer - and an easily understandable one at that - they don't really explain anything. To quote a wise man I once knew, they are, rather, a gentleman's agreement to stop seeking answers once the questions get too hard.
Posted by ben at March 26, 2006 12:32 PM
Comments
As I am, in fact, supposed to be a cultural theorist I feel like I should weigh in here.
First, of course, I'd like to defend Dr. Patterson's interest in culture, as it it after all, my field. And I think his justification for looking at culture is basically the correct one, Culture can be a site of struggle, a space for change, and looking for ways it can do this can be a valuble addition to other inquiries into the possibilies of social change related to the means of material production.
Here's where I think he goes wrong. He seems to be making the (victim blaming) assumption that there is something unique that the culture of African-American men is "doing wrong." His argument seems to be "If young Black Men were not all so addled on Hip-Hop and Street life they would do what they need to do to move themselves up in the world." This seems ridiculous for the very reasons you have so expertly outlined above.
In addition, it seems to have opened very little space for any sort of remedy of the situation other than some sort of "reform hip-hop movement." I would point Dr. Patterson to the historical examples of turn of the (20th) century moral reformers in the United States and mid-century government "culture agencies" in France and their attempts to "elevate" working-class cultures as demonstrations of the futility of this sort of paternalistic reform movement.
But could we look at culture and find more fruitful answers? I think we could. Here are some "back of the envelope" quick ideas I've had in the hour or so since I read this article.
For one, if we assume that there is some validity to Dr. Patterson's assertion that young black men are basically choosing to remain within street culture, despite its violence and limited prospects for material advance, even when they have a real chance at mainstream employment, what does that say about the attractiveness of our supposedly superior mainstream society? Could there be something so deeply lacking in the frighteningly alienated, massively commodified, tightly bounded world of the nine-to-five life of the postmodern bourgouis that street life, with its opportunities for expressive behavior and community provides? If folks are choosing not to assimilate to our culture, even when their culture is dangerous, are they "doing something wrong" or are we?
If one finds that idea overly romantic and unrealistic (and it is rather both, though I still like it) how about this one. One of the things culture serves to do is provide its users with rituals and other forms of expression that they can "deploy" in various symbolic contests for power. What Pierre Bourdieu called "cultural capital." Might members of other subordinate groups find the cultural capital of their childhood communities more useful in the workplace than young black men? In other words, can the poor white kid from the country still speak and act in a way similar to he is used to and gain respect, where the poor black kid from the inner city must learn entirely new forms of performance to get by. If this is so, wouldn't that be a pretty clear signal of still-functioning racial predjudice in our society?
Posted by: Andy at March 26, 2006 11:53 PM