Depth Squad Distro writes:

AFTER 9/11: CONFORMISM, INSUBORDINATION, AND THE GOOD LIFE. AN INTERVIEW WITH PATRICK HOGAN

by Don LaCoss

DL: Your book, The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent (Duke UP), came out in May 2001. Since its publication, there have been a number of crucial incidents, both here in the US and around the world, which directly relate to some of the problems of “the new conformism” that your book explores. Do recent events change your thinking on “the new conformism,” or do you believe instead that they provide stronger support for your book’s arguments?

PH: In part, the book presents a general account of why people—all of us—consent to hegemonic or dominant practices, even when those practices clearly harm us or run against our interests. It develops that general account in terms of recent historical and cultural particulars. The particulars, obviously, vary. The basic principles, however, should be broadly valid. In other words, the scope of the book is not confined to the new conformism. Rather, the new conformism is a particularization of more widely applicable principles—a particularization that has pushed very strongly against the open rebelliousness that had developed in the 1960’s.        In short, the fundamental principles that guide conformism do not vary. In that respect, the basic analysis is not greatly affected by the developments you mention.

DL: Does that mean that nothing has really changed?

PH: No, not at all. Given the same general forms, the specific “contents” change, sometimes dramatically. Considered at this more particular level, there are several striking developments since September 11. Perhaps the most significant is the ratcheting up of coercion. This is particularly distressing because it is so pervasive. Both the potential and the actual use of violence have increased dramatically, and they have done so in virtually all areas. We tend to think of coercion simply in terms of the police and the military. However, the forms of coercion are more various than this. And it is important to recognize this variety when responding to the growth of coercion.

        To take an obvious case, the degree of coercive force at airports is very high. However reasonable, the insistence on strict cooperation with the security personnel, the constant announcements warning against jokes, the use of random searches—all this effectively makes travelers want to stand out as little as possible. Someone who is traveling today probably just wants to blend into the crowd. I imagine that even most radicals are unlikely to call attention to their politics by pins or stickers on their baggage. Moreover, the conformist effects of even this localized coercion almost certainly spill over to other contexts.

DL: Noam Chomsky wrote that, in The Culture of Conformism, you “provide tools for understanding that will be of practical value to those who struggle for justice and freedom.” How does your analysis offer practical help for future anti-authoritarian projects and actions?

PH: My hope is that readers will be able to think more clearly and rigorously about their social conditions due to the book’s detailed unfolding of the many and varied forces fostering consent. Consider, for example, some further post-9/11 developments. The administration has used the World Trade Center bombings to alter significant aspects of the state control of violence, not only in policing and military action, but in legal procedures, the treatment of prisoners, and so on. That isn’t all. Physically non-violent forms of coercion, such as official intimidation (e.g., questioning of ordinary citizens without any overt threat of violence), have expanded as well. I believe readers could go through every aspect of coercion listed in the first chapter of The Culture of Conformism and find that its range and intensity have increased over the past two years. This includes non-governmental forms of coercion as well, ranging from terroristic intimidation (e.g., against Middle Eastern and South Asian people) to ostracism, and even to a generally heightened fear of being conspicuous. If our understanding of coercion is too narrow, we won’t recognize its breadth and diversity in actual social practices and we won’t be able to respond to it effectively.

DL: Have all the changes since September 11 been in the area of coercion?

PH: I suspect there have been coordinated changes across the board, in all areas that bear on social consent. For example, there have certainly been great ideological changes, ranging from the enhancement and re-specification of in-group/out-group divisions (cf. Bush’s insistence that you are either with him or with the terrorists) to alteration of various problematics or socially acceptable alternatives on a number of key issues.

        Let me give one, in some ways very minor example of the former. Last year, I was on a flight with three people from the Middle East/South Asia. I noticed that they were all seated in the last row of the airplane, thus farthest from the cockpit. The next time I flew (same route, same airline), I noticed that the last row was again occupied by the only Middle Eastern/South Asian people on the flight. In May, my wife flew the same route. When she arrived at her destination, I asked her where they seated her, since she is South Asian. It was in the last row. This may seem trivial. But (assuming it is not a coincidence) it is the sort of subtle practice that both manifests and fosters in-group/out-group divisions. This is a distinctive change from what preceded September 11. Middle Easterners/South Asians have been constituted as an out-group against an in-group of “mainstream” Americans. By way of contrast, African-Americans and East Asians (groups certainly subjected to terrible white racism) were seated at other places in the plane with no evident pattern. This re-division of social groups--which in effect adds a category of discrimination without eliminating earlier biases—has consequences that extend far beyond seating on planes. Once such a division is formed in one context, we tend to carry it along to other contexts and unconsciously expand its consequences.

        As to the definition of problematics (i.e., the range of debate on particular issues), one obvious change has been in discussions of foreign military “intervention” (i.e., invasion). Now preventive war is one clear and almost uncontroversial option. Moreover, it is not confined to cases of clear and present danger (thus to “preemptive” actions, as these were commonly understood). It extends to quite distant and vague possibilities of potential danger. Of course, the actual reasons for invading other countries rarely have anything to do with defense. However, the government usually has to justify them on these grounds. The scope of “defense” has been considerably broadened in the last two years, thus making it easier for the government to justify “interventionist policies” (i.e., invasions).

DL: We were talking before about “practical . . . struggle for justice and freedom” (in Chomsky’s words). How do you see the possibilities for that sort of struggle, given this intensification of the forces promoting conformism?

PH: I suppose I’ve been painting a rather bleak picture. But not everything is bleak. The details of conformity are not the only things that change. The extent and nature of resistance change as well. In the context of the US’s growing brutality, at home and abroad, there has been an astonishing growth of resistance as well. There are a lot of ordinary people who have bravely stood up against this brutality. I am hardly the first to remark that the resistance to the war in Iraq was unprecedented. My guess is that the administration’s current embarrassment over the “missing” weapons of mass destruction is due directly to this resistance. The mainstream media—and even the alternative press—keep asking if the administration was deceived by its own propaganda. I don’t believe they were deceived at all. They knew they were lying from the outset. (Indeed, the absence of WMD’s was one reason they felt they could invade Iraq with impunity.) However, they never imagined anyone would care. In the past, the government has lied and only a few “wackos” on the “ultra-left” have paid any attention. I imagine the US and British governments just never thought anyone would be interested in the WMD’s after their forces crushed the Iraqi military. The movements of resistance to the war are what made this an issue. Without those movements, I have no doubt virtually everyone would simply have forgotten about the WMD’s.

DL: You mention the mainstream media here. Your examples of how the media’s coverage of the 1991 Gulf War erected regulating systems of belief were very informative. Any thoughts on how the “liberal” US news organizations represented this most recent invasion (and subsequent occupation)?

PH: To tell you the truth, I could hardly even look at mainstream publications. I have little more to say than that they were transformed into virtual propaganda organs. To a great extent, this was true for the usual reasons, ranging from corporate ownership to the nature of news sources (e.g., State Department papers), in this case enhanced by “embedding” (which fostered in-group identification of reporters with the U.S. military, limited the observation and interpretation of events, etc.). There are, in general, complex ways in which the media develop quite a strong bias in favor of the status quo, with its hierarchies of power. These operate independently of the views of individual reporters. (This is one reason why the surveys showing individual reporters to be somewhat liberal are irrelevant to the overall orientation of the mainstream news.)

        Since September 11, however, it seems that the media have been strongly affected by a broader range of conformist pressures than was typical in the recent past. These include an increase in just world thinking (roughly, the belief that people get what they deserve, that good wins out), various forms of moral mystification (forms of reasoning that mask the complexity and subtlety of our moral beliefs and feelings), the intensification of in-group/out-group divisions, and so forth. There have also been emotional factors, including forms of what psychoanalysts call “transference”—roughly, the shifting of one’s childhood attitudes about one’s parents onto some person in one’s adult life. For example, I recall Dan Rather speaking about George W. Bush on a talk show not long after September 11. In both the content and the tone of his remarks, he seemed to elevate Bush to the level of an ideally protective father—a transference triggered, presumably, by some genuine feeling of danger and helplessness requiring a protective father.

DL: Recently, I heard a campaign strategist for the US Republican Party theorize that the suburban “soccer moms” that Clinton had used for political support have been changed by 9/11 into “security moms.” It made me wonder about the phenomenon of “national security” and “homeland security.” Can we think about these issues in terms laid out in your chapter on rational acquiescence to police, law, and the marketplace, or are they something very different that requires new thinking?

PH: Certainly, the enforcement of security is largely a matter of the legal system and police. However, there is another aspect to the widespread mania over security, an emotional aspect that I now realize I didn’t treat fully in The Culture of Conformism. Most of my recent non-political work has been on emotion and it now strikes me that I need to discuss particular emotions in more detail in order to explain some aspects of consent. We tend to think of emotions as simple matters of subjective feeling. But they involve limitations on action and even changes in our modes of observation and inference. In other words, our cognition actually operates differently when, for example, we are fearful. It is a commonplace that the Bush administration has tried to keep the populace in a constant state of fear. That is true. But commentators discuss the point only in terms of folk beliefs about the nature of fear. In fact, we have a decent scientific knowledge of fear (its neurobiology, it “actional outcomes,” its cognitive consequences). This knowledge bears directly on the political uses of fear. Indeed, fear is probably the most important emotion in the fostering of consent. Moreover, consent-inducing fear goes well beyond straightforward concerns about state coercion. In many ways, it is most crucially directed at out-groups. In contrast, the much discussed emotion of hate seems to me of relatively little political consequence. Note that this makes a practical difference. We will not respond to a conflict the same way if we see it as a matter of hate and if we see it as a matter of fear organized by in-group/out-group divisions.

DL: Unlike too many of your academic colleagues, you directly discuss many of the authoritarian aspects of the classroom, the teaching profession, and the culture within US educational institutions. Can non-conformity and dissent be “taught,” or does the very structure of organized education make such a task impossible?

PH: You are right to mention structure here. I tend to think that the implicit effects of structure are more fundamental and more important than the explicit effects of teaching content. In an earlier book, The Politics of Interpretation (Oxford UP, 1990), I made an argument for what I called an “anarchist university.” Some of what I advocated was fairly commonplace on the left (e.g., free education). Some was more idiosyncratic (e.g., no grades). I don’t think one is likely to have much success in teaching anti-authoritarianism in a structure that is strictly hierarchical. I imagine that students would be more affected by the simple fact of studying in a free university, without grades, without professorial ranks, etc., than by any particular anti-authoritarian teaching.

        As to the content of teaching, that mostly depends on the course. I’m actually very strict about sticking to the course content as defined in the catalogue. After all, that is what students signed up for. But, within those constraints, one can make choices that at least encourage students to think about topics and issues more broadly. For example, in a course last semester on South Asian literature and culture, I did not mention the war in Iraq. However, we discussed in detail the ways in which Krsna manipulates the arguments for war in the Bhagavad Gita and we read Gandhi on non-violence. My hope was that this would help students to place mainstream discussions of war in a broader intellectual and humanitarian context and that they would be able to question standard ideas and come to their own decisions—without me, so to speak, telling them what to think on Iraq (which would probably just antagonize them anyway).

DL: One thing that bothered me about the book was your formulation of dissent, resistance, and rebellion as points on the continuum of conformity, a formulation that assumes that one can only discuss these things if they are framed and defined by the terms of consent. Aren’t you saying in effect, that liberty can only be considered as the refusal of control, as a negation rather than an affirmation? I believe that instincts for individual autonomy and independence have been classified by structures of authority as oppositional forces—as “dissent from,” for instance, or as “resistance to”—in order to legitimate conformity as the sole defining point of reference.

PH: I can see how a reader might get that idea, but I didn’t intend that. I simply didn’t set out to discuss positive issues of, say, personal fulfillment in the book. I touch on the topic when I distinguish what we need and even what we desire from what we try to get, and maybe at one or two other points. But it is not the focus of the work.

        In a very general way, I would say that there are broad, universal patterns to the sorts of things that make for a good life. In part, these involve the fulfillment of needs. In part they involve a range of emotionally and cognitively satisfying conditions and experiences. Societies may be organized in such a way as to foster a good life or not. Resistance is, first of all, opposition to those aspects of society that inhibit the development of a good life. Conformism is first of all acceptance of those aspects.

        To discuss the good life in fuller, positive terms, we should have two things. First, we should have solid empirical research on what factors affect our well-being. We do have some research of this sort. In certain cases, the results are commonsensical. For example, being healthy is better than being sick. But some results are unexpected. For example, social discrepancies in the distribution of wealth have a corrosive effect on well-being. Moreover, one’s absolute individual level of wealth stops being consequential after one reaches a certain level of need satisfaction. The second thing we have to have is not empirical, but creative. We need an imagination of ways in which a society could foster well-being, an imagination that goes beyond the alternatives offered in the current problematic.

DL: A crucial issue in this seems to be the active challenging of the status quo through insubordination. In conclusion, could you say something about the relation between non-conformity and insubordination?

PH: Insubordination is a type of non-conformism. It is an acute and overt refusal to conform to a particular, coercive social hierarchy. Specifically, it refuses a hierarchy in which the decisions of superiors must govern the actions of inferiors in relevant areas (e.g., regarding military actions in the army), with only certain, explicit qualifications (e.g., the Geneva Conventions qualify a soldier’s duty to follow the military orders of a commanding officer).

        Returning to your first question (about changes since September 11), it is interesting to note that there have been attempts to extend the areas deemed relevant to certain formal hierarchies and there has been a corresponding diminution of the qualifications placed on that authority. The latter has occurred mostly obviously in the administration’s attempt to evade the Geneva Conventions in its treatment of prisoners of war. At the same time, however, there has been at least some increase in resistance to these hierarchies. For example, as you may know, there has been growing dissatisfaction in the U.S. military as the troops find their time in Iraq repeatedly extended, and as they find the Iraqi people regularly viewing them as invaders. A number of soldiers have voiced this dissatisfaction in public fora. Unsurprisingly, these soldiers have been threatened with punishment for their insubordination. In the short term, any punishment would probably reduce complaints. But it is likely to increase dissatisfaction by exacerbating already widespread feelings of anxiety and frustration. In consequence, it could further politicize the relevant issues, unintentionally fostering in-group solidarity among ordinary soldiers against their own commanders (seen as an out-group). Some activists envision greater resistance and insubordination almost necessarily developing out of all this. In fact, this possibility is recognized by some officers as well, which is why some of them oppose a punitive response to the soldiers’ complaints.

        I refer to this case because it allows us to see once again an intensification in the forces that foster conformity, but also an increase in the forces of resistance, with the possibility of still further developments of dissent down the road. Here as elsewhere there is much in the current situation that is disheartening. But there is also much to inspire a renewed sense of hope, and renewed work of resistance to practices that are unjust and destructive, but are not inevitable.

September 10, 2003"