On the Run

I am a sociologist.  Moreover, as I have frequently stated, I love sociology.  Trying to figure out why societies operate as they do has proved a never-ending challenge.  There are so many fascinating puzzles to solve that I am seldom bored.

Unfortunately, today sociology is awash in identity politics.  Too many of my peers fancy themselves social activists.  They believe their primary duty is to save society’s victims from oppression.  Not science, but social reform, sits atop their personal agendas.

The latest example of this phenomenon is a book entitled “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.”  An ethnography of criminals attempting to evade capture, it presents their plight in a sympathetic light.  They, not the police, are the heroes of this tale.

The author, Dr. Alice Goffman, spent years living among her subjects.  Not only did she come to identify with them, but there is reason to believe she cooperated in some of their activities.  She may even have been the get-away driver in an attempted murder.

Now many of Professor Goffman’s most telling vignettes have come under critical scrutiny.  They appear never to have happened—or at least not in the way she describes. 

Thus in one case she depicts a twelve year old boy’s life as having been ruined merely by riding in a stolen car.  In another, she portrays the cops as waiting around a hospital maternity ward in order to capture felons with outstanding warrants.

The trouble is that neither the judicial system, nor the police, operates this way.  Hence once this was brought to Goffman’s attention, she backtracked.  Now she alleged that this is the way her subjects viewed the matter, not necessarily the way it was.

Most sociologists are aware of W.I. Thomas’s Dictum.  He argued that if people believe something is real, then it is real in its consequences.  What they think need not be true for it to influence how they behave.

The classic example is Columbus.  Had he believed the world was flat, he might never have set off across the Atlantic.  (Actually his mistaken assumption was that the globe was smaller than it is and therefore that the trip to Asia would have been shorter.)

Our beliefs obviously make a difference.  Even misguided ones, such as that the police revel in hunting down innocent black men, can initiate defensive behavior.  People may, for instance, refuse to cooperate with the cops based on the conviction that they are the enemy.

“Hands up, don’t shoot” didn’t have to be true to fuel multiple riots.  It only had to seem true.

Goffman’s error was presenting the rationalizations of criminals as actual facts.  Thus, were their allegations true, we might want to modify our judicial and police procedures.  But if they weren’t, we ought not credit them as substantiating the victimhood of the perpetrators.

The truth matters.  It must not be confused with self-serving justifications.  If sociologists cannot tell the difference, they should not advertise themselves as social scientists.  Scientists are supposed to be neutral.  Whatever their personal commitments, they must not allow these to contaminate their results.

Our politics have become so acrimonious that many people no longer care about the facts.  All they are concerned about is winning.  This attitude has crippled sociology, but also afflicts those partisans who employ tainted data to shore up their opinions.

We will never solve our social problems as long as this approach prevails.  An insistence that we are right, no matter what, is a prescription for disaster.  We may not like the truth, but to convert it into a moralistic narrative where the bad guys are redefined as good guys is unconscionable.

Amazingly, truth seems to have gone out of fashion—even among scientists.  How then are we to save ourselves?  We may not like reality, but it is what it is and will bite us in the derriere if we are not careful.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Black Rage

During the 1960’s, black rage was a serious topic of discussion.  The cities were burning, the Black Panthers threatened to take Mississippi out of the union, and ordinary blacks seethed with indignation.  African-Americans were no longer going to put up with the humiliations they had long suffered.

Today black rage has returned.  It is less virulent than previously, but it is still aimed at the alleged degradations inflicted by whites.  Nowadays the primary targets are the police who are said to murder young black men without any compunction.

Then as now, whites do not know how to handle this anger.  They see the riots and are aware of the protest marches, but are unsure how to respond.  Their guilt, especially among liberals, is so great that they are unable to think clearly about these issues.

The first reaction is usually appeasement.  When accused of oppressing blacks, they hasten to fulfill any demands made of them.  Because whites are aware of the injustices perpetrated against African-Americans, they attempt to buy the complaints off with reflexive compliance.

Unfortunately appeasement does not work.  Angry people seldom become less angry when others capitulate to their demands.  That is because what is insisted upon rarely alleviates the source of their anger.  It does not extinguish their rage because it does not eliminate their frustration.

People become angry when they are frustrated.  They become enraged when their frustration is profound and little is done to assuage it.  When I was a clinician, I often counseled abused clients.  This made it imperative to discover how they might be satisfied.

The same applies to African-Americans.  They will not become less angry until the cause of their exasperation is eliminated.  Taking out unwarranted vengeance against the police will not achieve this.  The cops are not the wellspring of what has gone wrong.

Slavery was a horrendous institution.  So was Jim Crow.  They visited grievous harm on their victims.  No wonder these barbarities instilled a rage that has been handed down from generation to generation.

Nonetheless, slavery is over.  The damage it did was meted out in the past and cannot be undone.  Just as my abused clients could not un-ring the bell of the mistreatment perpetrated upon them, neither can African-Americans.  It is thus time to move on.

The rioters believe insensitive policing causes their distress.  It, however, is a relatively minor irritant.  What really rankles is the comparative lack of economic and social success of African Americans.  Others are prospering, whereas, particularly in the inner city, they are unemployed and despised.

The answer?  The only viable answer!  It is success.  Only when blacks are able to enter the mainstream on a par with others will their rage dissipate.  Only then will they achieve the respect they crave.

The race-hustlers blame this lack of success on racism.  They are wrong.  True, racism has not disappeared.   Yet it has so atrophied that it cannot hold back minorities prepared to help themselves.  The path may be hard, but it is open.

What matters is developing the skills and temperament to participate in the complex jobs available in a techno-commercial society.  A strong back and calloused hands are no longer sufficient for economic advancement.

Today success requires a good education and a good education demands self-control and perseverance.  Nobody can supply African-Americans with these—but African-Americans.  However sympathetic whites may be, they cannot do what people can only do for themselves.

More transfer payments will not work.  They only create dependency.  Groveling white guilt will not do the trick.  It merely invites retaliation.  Castrating the police will surely not help.  It simply re-victimizes the victims by exposing them to additional crime.

There is no substitute for hard work and self-discipline.  Angry people may not understand this, but those who want to assist them must.  The wounded may not want to hear that they must save themselves.  Yet, there is no alternative.  Tolerating unruly behavior just makes a bad situation worse.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Gardens

Poor people have terrible nutrition.  They apparently prefer processed food to more healthful fare.  Part of the reason is that they supposedly live in “food desserts” where the few available groceries specialize in providing junk food.  The resultant diet impairs their health and that of their children.

This appalls Liberals.  They fear that this will prevent the less well off from competing with the more well off.  Inequality will thus be perpetuated because those at a financial disadvantage will also be at an intellectual and physiological disadvantage.

As it their wont, progressives rush to provide programs to overcome this dilemma.  In this case, they have sought to improve the diet of the poor.  More specifically, they have sought to enhance their nutrition by getting them to eat more fruits and vegetables.

Among the solutions attempted has been encouraging the poor to grow vegetable gardens.  This way they will have access to wholesome foods even if greedy merchants refuse to stock them.  Farmers have also been urged to bring their produce directly to their neighborhoods.

What has been the consequence?  Recent evaluation research in the Atlanta area indicates that the benefits are nil.  Why?  The answer is simple.  It is primarily residents who already have a healthy diet that participate in these projects.  The targets, the ill nourished, stay away.  They are happy with their junk food.

I was not surprised.  When I was involved with the War on Poverty about a half-century ago, similar plans had already been tried.  What was more, they worked no better then than they do now.

This put me in mind of a famous quote from Talleyrand.  After the Bourbon kings had been resorted to the throne upon the downfall of Napoleon, he opined that “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.”  The same seems to be true of liberals.

Liberals pride themselves on their intellectualism.  They believe they are smarter and better educated than their conservative adversaries.  Nonetheless, they clearly have a blind spot.  When it comes to their own agenda, they never profit from negative experience.

Virtually every article of the progressive program has been implemented and found wanting.  The latest example is compassionate policing.  When the Baltimore cops were ordered not to confront the rioters, this was expected to assuage the demonstrators’ wrath.  It did the opposite.

But anyone who paid attention to the results liberal police reforms in the 60’s and 70’s could have predicted the outcome.  Coddling wrongdoers had soon led to an explosion of crime that became unbearable by the 80’s.  Only then did politicians like Giuliani clamp down.  Criminality, of course, was quickly contained.

Or how about education.  Progressive ways of teaching, coupled with reduced class size, were going to vault our students into the front ranks of international instruction.  Except that they didn’t.  American students continued to fall behind.

So what was the liberal response?  They continued to throw money at the problem.  If smaller classes hadn’t worked, surely even smaller ones would.  It did not matter that sociological research proved resources were not correlated with results.  Evidently, if the reformers had read this research, they did not believe it.

As for international peace, when Ronald Reagan built up the military and called the USSR an Evil Empire, he was condemned as a muddle headed cowboy.  Even after communism went into retreat, progressives refused to credit him with having contributed to this conclusion.

Indeed, Barack Obama is so committed to the idea that if we play nice, our adversaries will also play nice, he refuses to call ISIS Islamic or Putin an unregenerate aggressor.

And where has this gotten us.  By virtually all accounts, except that of the Obama administration, international affairs are a mess.  The dangers keep rising, but our leaders keep their heads buried in the sand.

The gardens turn out to be symptomatic.   Liberals never learn from their mistakes.  As rigid ideologues, they never allow the facts to get in the way of their aspirations.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University

Sugar Addicts

Why are so many Americans devout liberals?  Why do so many good people—and make no mistake, lots of liberals are very good people—cling to failed social policies with a death-grip?  There are numerous reasons, but one of them may be surprising.

Liberals are like sugar addicts.  They must get their fix of sweetness and light or they go into a painful withdrawal.  Never mind that an excess of niceness is injuring them and those they hold dear.

Once upon a time, sugar was hard to come by.  When we were hunter-gatherers, our intake generally came from fruits and berries.  Occasionally we got lucky and happened upon a beehive filled with honey.  Nevertheless, extracting this treasure took guts and luck.

Eventually, however, we learned to refine sugar from sugar cane.  And once we did, the immediate impact was a surge in tooth decay.  In time, we also fell victim to an epidemic of diabetes.  Our collective pancreases were overwhelmed by a glut they could not handle.

Yet this did not stop people from craving sugar.  Nowadays it is even added to pre-packaged foods, crammed into ice cream, and disguised as candy.  We simply must have it or we go into paroxysms of distress.

It’s the same way with social niceness.  Once life was hard.  Most people literally earned a living by the sweat of their brows.  Nonetheless, the majority just scraped by.  They did not have the luxury of endlessly agonizing over the troubles of others.

Still, we are rich and so we worry about poverty, justice, and peace.  Happily, those of us who are comfortable also want others to be comfortable.  Liberals, unfortunately, over do.  They are so concerned with being nice that they cause irreparable damage.

Consider poverty.  By the 1950’s the United States had grown so wealthy John Kenneth Galbraith argued that an affluent society should share its bounty with the less well off.  Within a decade, the war on poverty was launched.  This was intended to eliminate destitution once and for all.

Yet what was the upshot?  It was in increase in social dependency.  People who received more than enough to meet their basic needs without having to work decided it was better to procure a government check than seek employment.  On one level this made sense, but on another it deprived them of self-respect.

Or reflect on crime.  Once, in the old West, horse thieves were hanged on the spot.  Settlers who depended on this mode of transportation for survival were in no mood to be understanding when deprived of it.

We, in contrast, and so well-off that when we are robbed, we do not feel existentially threatened.  And so we are merciful.  We allow thugs to rampage through Baltimore on the theory they need to vent.  That this would drive up the homicide rate was recognized only in retrospect.

Or contemplate our desire for peace.  Just as in the old Coke commercial, we want the people of the world to hold hands and sing in perfect harmony.  Except that they don’t.  For one thing, most of them are not as well heeled as we are.  They still have aspirations to fill.

And so when we go to war we impose rules of engagement designed to abolish collateral damage.  No one is supposed to get hurt—not even the bad guys.  After all, why should they die when we are living in such comfort?  This would be unfair.

And so we behave like spoiled children who want to consume all the candy on the table.  We—most often liberals—do not worry about getting a bellyache or, for that matter, contracting diabetes.  So what if more people are trapped in poverty, victimized by crime, or ruined by war.  At least we tried.

Sadly, a smug inability to recognize our limitations precipitates more harm than good.  Virtuous intentions are not enough when an excess of sweetness can be just as lethal as premeditated villainy.

Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.

Professor of Sociology

Kennesaw State University