Culture and Social Theory

Aaron Wildavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781560002758
• eBook ISBN: 9781351292061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Aaron Wildavsky, along with Mary Douglas, identified what they called grid-group theory. Wildavsky began calling this "cultural theory," and applied it to an astounding array of subjects. The essays in this volume exemplify the theory's potential contributions to three seemingly disparate, but related, areas: the social construction of meaning, normative/analytic political philosophy, and a theory of rational choices. This book is the first in a series of Aaron Wildavsky's collected writings being published posthumously by Transaction. Wildavsky selected, sequenced, and grouped all but three of the essays included in Culture and Social Theory prior to his death. Some are presented here for the first time. Wildavsky's cultural theory provides ways to organize and interpret the world.

In the first section, he shows how social scientists, particularly economists and sociologists, apply the theory. Wildavsky argues that concepts such as externalities, public goods, altruism, and even risk and rape are tools of rival, ubiquitous cultures engaged in perpetual struggle with one another. The second section deals with cultural theory as a way to interpret the works of normative and analytic political philosophers, including Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, on competing human objectives. Wildavsky argues that particular types of interaction among a society's cultures are necessary for effective realization of basic concepts such as democracy. In the third section, Wildavsky applies cultural theory in conjunction with instrumental rationality, the former as a theory of preference formation, the latter as a device for realizing preferences efficiently. High-priority objectives, and thus the character of norms and rational action, shift across cultures. The world and its various elements comprise a complex, frequently changing, and thus ambiguous reality, nowhere more so than in the dynamic contours of the United States. For cultural theory, individualistic, hierarchical, and egalitarian interpretations of the world are the only ones capable of forming and sustaining institutions and related patterns of social relations that will support human social groups.

Wildavsky's central objective is to strip away the camouflage and to reveal varying domains of social life as fields of cultural competition. Culture and Social Theory will be a necessary addition to the libraries of political scientists, economists, and policymakers, not to mention all those who admire Aaron Wildavsky and his work.

Part I

Economists and the Social Construction of Distinctions

1

On the Social Construction of Distinctions: Risk, Rape, Public Goods, and Altruism

We are able to take for granted distinctions among objects and behaviors because by social consensus they are what we think they are. When consensus breaks down, when concepts (and hence the words that refer to them) become politicized, a struggle over meaning and morality takes place. When to classify is to decide, rival moral judgments contend for supremacy.

Most people, I observe, find the social construction of our concepts of the world hard to understand; after all, we are usually not aware of people engaged in building and tearing down such edifices. Since it takes place through repeated interactions at different places and times, among many different people, social construction is even harder to demonstrate. Exactly how this social decision making works its will is not often shown. Yet, without understanding how meanings are constructed, no social theory is possible.

In this chapter I take four well-known distinctions with powerful implications for public policy—the voluntary/involuntary dichotomy to explain the relative (un)acceptability of risks, consent versus coercion in sexual relations, the justification of governmental action based on the dichotomy between public and private goods, and the long-standing efforts to distinguish between selfishness and altruism as a moral basis for evaluating behavior. In each case I seek to show that meanings that seemed fixed are in fact movable boundaries subject to the pulling and hauling of cultural contention.

But how do they move? Who propels them? In what direction? Why? In conclusion, I seek to show how cultural theory helps account for both stability and change in what seems to be immutable. The illustrations are made vivid in the interest of jolting sensibilities to see with a cultural eye.

The Voluntary and Involuntary are Movable Boundaries¹

There is a prima facie plausibility in assuming that individuals make a strong distinction between risks they knowingly undertake and risks that are imposed on them. In particular, they accept damage they incur through their own fault or through choice of dangerous sports, drinks, foods. They know that if they want longevity, they should not overeat or drink too much liquor, but that is their affair (unless, of course, there is “prohibition”). What makes them angry is damage they feel they should have been warned against, which they might have avoided had they only known, or damage caused by other people, particularly people profiting from their innocence.

The distinction provides a plausible explanation of the shift in public attitudes to danger. If people are being increasingly deprived of control over their own lives, if people feel helpless, then their sense of outrage at involuntary risks will naturally grow more intense. However, this argument cannot be true, I believe, because the distinction between voluntary and involuntary exposure to danger is not objectively identifiable. Put another way, the people involved decided the risks were unacceptable so they perceived these risks to be involuntary.

If you and I want to go rock climbing, thus voluntarily exposing ourselves to risks, that is presumably our own business and would be all right. If the air contains coal dust or food contains carcinogens, however, that would be all wrong, because the risk to us is involuntary. At first, the distinction appears eminently reasonable; there are indeed risks additional to the standardized risk of daily living that individuals are allowed to assume voluntarily. There are also risks that are unknown or that may be known to some but bidden from others.

There are always unsuspected dangers: some inventions (asbestos, X-rays), introduced to make something safer, turn out to be dangerous and dangers that are present are ignored. Since anything and everything one does might prove risky (perhaps when we know more, an apple a day will prove unhealthy, exercise debilitating, breast-feeding poisonous, or showers enervating), we should ask why people differ in classifying risks as freely taken or coerced.² (That they do differ will be demonstrated.)

There are risks we would rather not run but that we undertake to gain other benefits. People do live in Los Angeles, for example, not for the privilege of breathing in smog, but to take advantage of its natural beauty, warm climate, job opportunities, and so on. Life’s choices, after all, come in bundles of goods and bads that have to be taken whole.³ Unwanted it may be, but the known risk that comes with the expected reward can hardly be called involuntary. The term would be appropriate only when there is some compulsion or deliberate obfuscation.

The arrow of causality could be reversed. Neighbors and neighborhoods are part of a person’s standard of living. The chances of being shot by rival gangs, of being run over by addicts, and much more, are affected by location. Should “undesirables” be kept out of our neighborhoods, then, on the grounds they add to our dangers against our will?

Even as new things add to hazards, they also reduce risks. Are these involuntary benefits to be disregarded? That would make a hash out of Adam Smith’s arguments in The Wealth of Nations that private exchange yields public benefits, not to say Mandeville’s dictum—private vices, public virtues.

There is practically nothing that individuals do in leisure time that does not affect their children or others who enter the home, or even those who provide or share their sports. The climbing instructor has to risk his life rescuing tyros stuck on the mountain; the swimming instructor tries to save a would-be suicide. Voluntary risks are likely to spread danger. Should the amateur climber, the suicidal swimmer, and the smoking drunk be prosecuted or forbidden by law to take risks?

Suppose that one person deliberately injures another. We do not ordinarily speak of this as “risk.” Robbers and murderers are called criminals. If a person gets hurt through the negligence of another or merely because a product is faulty, the law of torts enables such people to sue and possibly collect damages. Here I would observe only the enormous differences over time of what is considered negligence and even whether some fault must be proved. In the last few decades, the point is, many actions previously considered voluntary have now been deemed involuntary, that is, actionable in law⁴.

The distribution of life chances through any society is hardly equal. Some classes of people face greater risks than others. Poorer people, on average, are sicker, die earlier, and have more accidents than richer people. We cannot say that all classes of people who incur greater risk in the course of their lives incur them voluntarily. A person might prefer to risk an industrial accident, or accept a certain degree of pollution, to being unemployed; the risk incurred is involuntary in the special sense that people would rather things were otherwise. The risks they face may be unwelcome and against their will; they would not accept them if they were rich. Either involuntary risk is an empty logical category, or it has to be a complaint against the particular social system that gives some people a harder life, reflected in risks to which they are exposed.

Voluntary/involuntary is a movable boundary, capable of turning every constraint on choice into injustice, for a moral judgment of who is to be held accountable is enunciated by the boundary between voluntary and involuntary risks. If questions about how the boundary is drawn are raised, risk by risk, they will lead in only one direction: what was taken to be a natural boundary will be discovered to be a socially constructed one. Then political pressures will shift it back, ending with every choice being considered involuntary.

All individuals can in fairness be treated as involuntary visitors on this planet; every conceivable damage they sustain can be attributable to unwished-for destructive agencies. If the pattern of values changes in that direction, ultimately all the sick and unfortunate could be presented as involuntary inhabitants of their own bodies, totally withdrawn from any commitment to social life. Suicides would be owed redress by the implacable institutions that drove them to their undeserved end. All individuals could be shown to have an unlimited right to be compensated for all losses, however incurred, if only the anger against institutions is comprehensive enough.

In Science, sociologist Charles Perrow⁵ seeks to distinguish between active and passive risks, active risk being more voluntary and controllable by the individual and passive risk less voluntary and perhaps uncontrollable. This distinction is important because it is often made in justifying why certain risks are more and other risks less acceptable. But the distinction is misleading. One might imagine a static social system whose values, including its rules of accountability, were petrified. The people who conferred meaning on objects must have lived long ago, no one having come along since with any changes to make. Classification clearly labeled and immobile. Then, and only then, might one allocate dangers according to those that are active and voluntary and, therefore, acceptable, or passive and involuntary and, therefore, properly subject to governmental regulation or prohibition. Once social change enters the picture, however, the active-passive distinction, becomes a malleable boundary, constantly redrawn by social interaction.

People with different values, I have been arguing, would place a different interpretation on the same expectation of risk. There are people, sometimes called competitive individualists, who believe that risk is opportunity. Conversely, they claim that excessive concern with avoiding risks today is tomorrow’s greater danger. Moreover, these interpretations change over time. People on the egalitarian left, for example, consider the dangers stemming from technology (nuclear power or chemical carcinogens) as passive, while they perceive the dangers stemming from casual contact with those suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) as active. At the same time, people on the hierarchical right view the dangers of technology as actively chosen, a price worth paying for the benefits of progress, while they view the carriers of AIDS as bringing plague on people who are made their passive victims. Which of these dangers is voluntary? To say a danger is voluntary is tantamount to saying it is acceptable; involuntary dangers, imposed on passive people, by contrast, are unacceptable. Classification and decision are one and the same. Just as we-the-people are the ones who confer meaning on these distinctions, so we are also the ones who change these meanings.⁶

Who Determines When and How a Woman Gives Her Consent?

When I tell people that the distinction between voluntary and involuntary action is not graven in stone but is a social construct, subject to bargaining between affected interests, they are skeptical. The listener has no trouble understanding that objects do not come from nature with their names engraved on them or their value in neon lights. It is people who give names and negotiate values. But when everyone can think of examples of the voluntary and involuntary (say skiers or spelunkers versus the victims of Bhopal or hostages), they feel triumphant.

My next move is to agree with them (as far as I can) by seeking to determine why they feel so certain. The reason, they are quick to tell me, is that the differences are obvious to any intelligent and reasonable person (even going so far as to hint that I might have an ulterior motive or might be congenitally perverse). The distinction seems obvious to them, I counter, knowing from experience my words and reasons will seem like lame excuses, because of near-universal agreement on classification. The boundary separating the voluntary from the involuntary, I claim, is not and cannot be intuitively obvious; boundaries are socially constructed; when this social agreement evaporates or weakens, the “obvious” becomes converted into the politically contested.

Social construction, in my view, is just as real as physical and almost but not quite as easy to spot. A good way to begin is to ask whether there is a fixed distinction between rape and love making by mutual consent. Stipulate in advance that the observed facts are not in dispute. Surely anyone can tell whether and when a woman is forced or voluntarily consents to sexual intercourse. No, I say, not quite. For a time, most people mostly agree. But not all at any time nor most all the time, especially when the criteria for ascertaining rape, are contested, as they are now. These reflections were first spurred by reading accounts of the famous Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s visit to Stanford University. At one point a young man described an episode in which he and a young woman made advances to one another, disrobed, got into bed, and were about to consummate the sex act when she demurred.

What did sex therapist Dr. Ruth think of such goings on? Poorly, it appeared. The young woman, Dr. Ruth opined, was wrong in carrying things so far without expecting efforts at consummation.

The rights and wrongs ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content Page
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Political Cultures
• Part I: Economists and the Social Construction of Distinctions
• Part II: Philosophers, Political Theory, and Democracy
• Part III: Social Scientists, Self-interest, and Rational Choice
• Index