Tag: politics

Do Disintegrating Societies “Vomit Up” Disturbed and Demonic Leaders? Durkheim’s “Anomie”

The great American social critic Chris Hedges, who has seen a lot of disintegrating political systems in his travels as a foreign correspondent, offers a very resonant or thought-provoking concept when he says that disintegrating societies often “vomit up” criminal psychopathic leaders like the Serbs Mladić, Karadžić, Milošević, et al and Trump himself.

Hedges brings back the Émile Durkheim (one of the fathers of sociology who died in 1917) usage of “anomie” which Durkheim introduces in his masterful book Suicide from 1897. Anomie refers to a level of social bewilderment and lostness where a person or people opens the door to suicide or demonic demagogues who become cult figures rather like Trump to his supporters.

The real question becomes the social rot and dislocatedness that allowed for the rise of the devilish leaders (and secondarily the leaders themselves). The anomie is the problem, the leader a symptom of the problem.

The term anomie—“a reborrowing with French spelling of anomy”—comes from Greek: anomía (ἀνομία, ‘lawlessness’), namely the privative alpha prefix (a-, ‘without’), and nomos (νόμος, ‘law’). The Greeks distinguished between nomos, and arché (ἀρχή, ‘starting rule, axiom, principle’). For example, a monarch is a single ruler but he may still be subject to, and not exempt from, the prevailing laws (i.e., nomos). In the original city state democracy, the majority rule was an aspect of arché because it was a rule-based, customary system, which may or may not make laws (i.e., nomos). Thus, the original meaning of anomie defined anything or anyone against or outside the law, or a condition where the current laws were not applied resulting in a state of illegitimacy or lawlessness.

The contemporary English understanding of the word anomie can accept greater flexibility in the word “norm,” and some have used the idea of normlessness to reflect a similar situation to the idea of anarchy. However, as used by Émile Durkheim and later theorists, anomie is a reaction against or a retreat from the regulatory social controls of society, and is a completely separate concept from anarchy, which consists of the absence of the roles of rulers and submitted.

Nineteenth-century French pioneer sociologist Émile Durkheim borrowed the term anomie from French philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau. Durkheim used it in his influential book Suicide (1897) in order to outline the social (and not individual) causes of suicide, characterized by a rapid change of the standards or values of societies (often erroneously referred to as normlessness), and an associated feeling of alienation and purposelessness. He believed that anomie is common when the surrounding society has undergone significant changes in its economic fortunes, whether for better or for worse and, more generally, when there is a significant discrepancy between the ideological theories and values commonly professed and what was actually achievable in everyday life. This was contrary to previous theories on suicide which generally maintained that suicide was precipitated by negative events in a person’s life and their subsequent depression.

In Durkheim’s view, traditional religions often provided the basis for the shared values which the anomic individual lacks. Furthermore, he argued that the division of labor that had been prevalent in economic life since the Industrial Revolution led individuals to pursue egoistic ends rather than seeking the good of a larger community. Robert King Merton also adopted the idea of anomie to develop strain theory, defining it as the discrepancy between common social goals and the legitimate means to attain those goals. In other words, an individual suffering from anomie would strive to attain the common goals of a specific society yet would not be able to reach these goals legitimately because of the structural limitations in society. As a result, the individual would exhibit deviant behavior. Friedrich Hayek notably uses the word anomie with this meaning.

(Wikipedia’s entry for “Anomie”)

Chris Hedges’ point is intriguing because it offers an unusual “flashlight” on the problem of “destructive charisma” in leadership styles where the socially diseased state of the society itself calls forth (i.e., “vomits up”) such leaders from Hitler to Trump.

While not perhaps the whole story, it does get at something crucial, the “endogeneity problem” not in economics where it is usually discussed but in politics. Endogeneity comes from endogenous (i.e., generated from within). Exogenous is the opposite.

The German literary masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) shows a society where life and values are too topsy-turvy and dislocated to be sustainable and this creates an “ecosystem” of disorientation where Nazis begin to emerge or rather “crawl forth.” Thus the Hedges metaphor of “vomit up” is suggestive.

What We Mean by “Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

(MI slogan, motto or catchphrase)

Let’s be concrete and start with the title of the classic 1978 book by the Princeton professor and 1979 Nobel Prize winner, Sir Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (introduced in the previous essay on “Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time”).

Notice the following other dimensions that have to be included to “compositize” our understanding:

  1. The period 1870-1913/4 is called Globalization I by economic historians. Globalization in this view is not about Marco Polo, but the rise of world prices, such as for wheat.

  2. Paul Kennedy (Yale), who is known for his Rise and Fall of the Great Powers classic, wrote a tighter book called The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (1980), described as follows:

    “This book gives an account of the rivalry between Great Britain and Germany in the period leading to the First World War. It gives readers a thorough comparison of the two societies, their political cultures, economies, party politics, courts, the role of the press and pressure groups, and so on. …”

  3. The first treaty between a European power and an Asian country was signed in 1902, “The Anglo-Japanese Alliance.”

    “In this book, Professor Nish deals with one of the most important aspects of far eastern politics in the critical period between 1894 and 1907. His object is to demonstrate how Britain and Japan, at first separately and later jointly, reacted to Russian encroachments in China and east Asia; he is concerned also with the policies of the other European powers and of the U.S., to whose hostility towards the Anglo-Japanese alliance after 1905 Britain showed…”

  4. The first defeat of a European by an Asian nation (i.e., the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-5). The famous Indian writer Pankaj Mishra wrote a recent book on this, showing how this defeat of a European country sent shock waves through the world and especially through the anti-colonial movements of Asia and Africa…

  5. Partition of Africa:

    “Between 1870 and 1914 the whole of Africa, apart from one or two small areas, was partitioned by the European powers.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 203)

  6. Rise of Suburbia:

    “The 1890s saw the coming of the first electric trams, the first “tubes,” and the first motor-cars. By 1914, almost any provincial city of any size had its electric trams, mostly under municipal control, and London had its buses and underground (i.e., subway). “These changes in urban transport created suburbia.”

    (David Thomson, England in the Nineteenth Century, 1815-1914, 1978, Penguin Books, page 202)

In other words, the world itself is a crisscrossing composite of processes at different scales.

We have growth and fluctuations, the partition of Africa, suburbanization, Anglo-German tensions, techno-revolutions (including those in urban transport), interacting with Globalization I.

All of this culminated in the “guns of August” (i.e., World War I).

We are downstream from World War I, what the Germans call the “Urkatastrophe” (i.e., original calamity), and its reincarnation in World War II and its progeny, the Cold War.

The more you can “compositize” the elements of this “historical matrix,” the deeper your MetaIntelligence will be. Hence the catchphrase for the MI site:

“Towards a Composite Understanding of Education”

Reports of Rising Police-Society Conflict in China

Interview with Suzanne Scoggins (November 25, 2019)

China is facing a rising tide of conflict between the nation’s police officers and the public. While protest events receive considerable media attention, lower-profile conflicts between police officers and residents also make their way onto the internet, shaping perceptions of the police. The ubiquity of live events streamed on the internet helps illuminate the nature of state–society conflict in China and the challenges faced by local law enforcement.

Simone McGuinness spoke with Suzanne Scoggins, a fellow with the National Asia Research Program (NARP), about the reports of rising police–society conflict in China. Dr. Scoggins discusses how the Chinese Communist Party has responded to the upsurge, what channels Chinese citizens are utilizing to express their concerns, and what the implications are for the rest of the world.

What is the current state of police-society relations in China?

Reports of police violence have been on the rise, although this does not necessarily mean that violence is increasing. It does, however, mean that the media is more willing to report violence and that more incidents of violence are appearing on social media.

What we can now study is the nature of that violence—some are big events such as riots or attacks against the police, but there are also smaller events. For example, we see reports of passengers on trains who get into arguments with transit police. They may fight because one of the passengers is not in the right seat or is carrying something prohibited. Rather than complying with the officer, the passenger ends up getting into some sort of violent altercation. This kind of violence is typically being captured by cellphone cameras, and sometimes it makes the news.

The nature of the conflict matters. If somebody is on a train and sitting in a seat that they did not pay for, then it is usually obvious to the people reading about or watching the incident that the civilian is at fault. But if it is chengguan (城管, “city administration”) telling an elderly woman to stop selling her food on the street and the chengguan becomes violent, then public perceptions may be very different. It is that second type of violence that can be threatening to the state. The public’s response to the type of conflict can vary considerably.

What are the implications for China as a whole?

Regarding what this means for China, it’s not good for the regime to sustain this kind of conflict between street-level officers or state agents and the public. It lowers people’s trust in the agents of the government, and people may assume that the police cannot enforce public security. There are many state agents who might be involved in a conflict, such as the chengguan, the xiejing (auxiliary officer), or the official police. The type of agent almost doesn’t matter because the uniforms often look similar.

When information goes up online of state agents behaving poorly, it makes the state a little more vulnerable. Even people who were not at the event might see it on social media or in the news and think, “Oh, this is happening in my community, or in my province, or across the nation.” This violates public expectations about how the police or other state agents should act. People should be able to trust the police and go to them when they have problems.

How has the Chinese government responded to the increase in reporting violence?

There is a twofold approach. The first is through censorship. When negative videos go up online or when the media reports an incident, the government will go in and take it down. We see this over time. Even while collecting my research, some of the videos that were initially available online are no longer accessible simply because they have been censored. The government is removing many different types of content, not only violence. Censors are also interested in removing any sort of misinformation that might spread on social media.

If step one is to take the video or report down, step two is to counteract any negative opinion by using police propaganda. This is also referred to as “public relations,” and the goal is to present a better image of the police. Recently, the Ministry of Public Security put a lot of money and resources into their social media presence. Many police stations have a social media account on WeChat or Weibo (微博, “microblogging”) and aim to present a more positive, friendly image of the police. The ministry also teamed up with CCTV to produce television content. This has been going on for some time, but recently shows have become more sophisticated.

There is one program, for example, called Police Training Camp. It is a reality show where police officers are challenged with various tasks, and the production is very glossy. The ministry also produces other sorts of specials featuring police who are out in the field helping people. It shows the police officers working really long shifts, interacting positively with the public, and really making a difference in people’s lives. In this way, the government is counteracting negative opinions about police violence or misconduct.

In general, I will say that it is difficult for people in any society to get justice with police officers because of the way legal systems are structured and the power police hold in local government politics. In China, one of the things people are doing beyond reaching out to local governments or pursuing mediation is calling an official hotline.

This is a direct channel to the Ministry of Public Security, and all these calls are reviewed. There is not a whole lot that citizens can do about specific corruption claims. But if somebody has a particular goal, then the hotline is slightly more effective because it allows citizens to alert the ministry. However, many people do not know about the hotline, so the ministry is trying to increase awareness and also help staff the call center so that it can more effectively field calls.

As for how much relief people feel when they use these channels, this depends on what their goal is. If the goal is to get somebody fired, then the hotline may not work. But if someone is looking to air their grievances, then it may be helpful.

What are the implications of increased police-society conflict in China for the rest of the world? What can the United States or other countries do to improve the situation?

These are really sticky issues that are difficult to solve. When discussing police–society conflict, it is important to step back and think about who the police are—the enforcement agents of the state. So by their very nature, there will be conflict between police and society, and that is true in every country. In China, it really depends on where and what type of police climate we are talking about.

Xinjiang, for instance, has a very different police climate than other regions in China. There is a different type of policing and police presence. Chinese leaders certainly do not want any international intervention in Xinjiang. They see this as an internal issue. While some governments in Europe and the United States might want to intervene, that is going to be a nonstarter for China.

As for police problems more generally, I would say that if China is able to reduce some of the police–society conflict in other areas of the country, then this is good for the international community because it leads to a more stable government. We also know that there is a fair amount of international cooperation between police groups. China has police liaisons that travel and learn about practices and technology in different countries. The police in these groups attend conferences and take delegates abroad.

There are also police delegations from other nations that go to China to learn about and exchange best practices. But that work will not necessarily address the underlying issues that we see in a lot of the stations scattered throughout China outside the big cities like Beijing (北京) or Shanghai (上海). Those are the areas with insufficient training or manpower. Those issues must be addressed internally by the Ministry of Public Security.

How is the Chinese government improving its policing capabilities?

Recently, the ministry has tried to overcome manpower and other ground-level policing problems by using surveillance cameras and artificial intelligence. Networks of cameras are appearing all over the country, and police are using body cameras for recording interactions with the public. This type of surveillance is not just in large cities but also in smaller ones. Of course, it is not enough to just put the cameras up—you also need to train officers to use that technology properly. This process takes time, but it is one way that the ministry hopes to overcome on-the-ground problems such as the low number of police per capita.

How might the Hong Kong protests influence or change policing tactics in China?

The situation in Hong Kong is unlikely to change policing tactics in China, which are generally more aggressive in controlling protests than most of what we have seen thus far in Hong Kong. It is more likely that things will go in the other direction, with mainland tactics being used in Hong Kong, especially if we continue to observe increased pressure to bring the protestors in check.

Suzanne Scoggins is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Clark University. She is also a 2019 National Asia Research Program (NARP) Fellow. Dr. Scoggins holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and her book manuscript Policing in the Shadow of Protest is forthcoming from Cornell University Press. Her research has appeared in Comparative Politics, The China Quarterly, Asian Survey, PS: Political Science and Politics, and the China Law and Society Review.

This interview was conducted by Simone McGuinness, the Public Affairs Intern at NBR.

Novels as Another University: Joseph Conrad

One can say that the first wave of imperial “neocons” was not the group that got the U.S. into the Iraq War (2003) but the group described by Warren Zimmerman in his classic book on the rise of the American Empire from the 1890s onwards:

First Great Triumph

How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power.

By Warren Zimmermann.

Illustrated. 562 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

“Americans like to pretend that they have no imperial past,” Warren Zimmermann tells us in First Great Triumph: How Five Americans Made Their Country a World Power. But they do.

The United States had been expanding its borders from the moment of its birth, though its reach had been confined to the North American continent until 1898, when American soldiers and sailors joined Cuban and Filipino rebels in a successful war against Spain. When the war was won, the United States acquired a “protectorate” in Cuba and annexed Hawaii, the Philippine Islands, Guam, Puerto Rico and Hawaii. “In 15 weeks,” Zimmermann notes, “the United States had gained island possessions on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides of its continental mass. It had put under its protection and control more than 10 million people: whites, blacks, Hispanics, Indians, Polynesians, Chinese, Japanese and the polyethnic peoples of the Philippine archipelago.”

John Hay, at the time the American ambassador to Britain, writing to his friend Theodore Roosevelt in Cuba, referred to the war against Spain as “a splendid little war, begun with the highest motives, carried on with magnificent intelligence and spirit, favored by that Fortune which loves the brave.” He hoped that the war’s aftermath would be concluded “with that fine good nature, which is, after all, the distinguishing trait of the American character.” More than a century later, we are still asking ourselves just how splendid that little war and its consequences really were.

Zimmermann, a career diplomat and a former United States ambassador to Yugoslavia, begins his brilliantly readable book about the war and its aftermath with biographical sketches of the five men — Alfred T. Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Hay and Elihu Root — who played a leading role in making “their country a world power.”

Ironically, it turns out that any reader of Joseph Conrad’s (died in 1924) famous novel Nostromo from 1904 would have encountered the “manifesto” of the American Empire, very clearly enunciated by one of the characters in the novel:

“Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s universe. We shall be giving the word for everything; industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound (i.e., Canada/Greenland), and beyond too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth.

“We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not. The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess.”

Joseph Conrad, Nostromo, Penguin Books, 2007, pages 62/63

The political stances of Conrad which seem so denunciatory of imperialism here in Nostromo seem very disrespectful of Africans in his Heart of Darkness as Chinua Achebe (Nigerian novelist, author of Things Fall Apart) and other Africans have shown and decried. Thus one sees layer upon layer of contradiction both in American empire-mongering and Conrad’s anticipation of it in his novel Nostromo.

Economics—Apple Card’s Fintech Problem; Improving AI-Based Recommendations; IBM & Nazi Germany

from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge:

Gender Bias Complaints against Apple Card Signal a Dark Side to Fintech

The possibility that Apple Card applicants were subject to gender bias opens a new frontier for the financial services sector in which regulators are largely absent, argues Karen Mills.

It’s No Joke: AI Beats Humans at Making You Laugh

New research shows people don’t trust recommendations made by machines—and that’s a problem for marketers who increasingly rely on AI-based technology to persuade consumers. Michael H. Yeomans explains how businesses can overcome that bias.

Do TV Debates Sway Voters?

As Democratic presidential candidates prepare for another debate, Vincent Pons reports that TV forums don’t influence voters.

Lessons from IBM in Nazi Germany

Geoffrey Jones discusses his case study, “Thomas J. Watson, IBM and Nazi Germany,” exploring the options and responsibilities of multinationals with investments in politically reprehensible regimes.

For Better Ideas, Bring the Right People to the Brainstorm

Better ideas emerge when extroverts and people open to new experiences put their heads together, according to research by Rembrand M. Koning. But what about introverts?

Should Non-Compete Clauses Be Abolished?

Non-compete clauses prevent workers from bringing secrets with them to competitors. But increasingly NCCs are unnecessarily restricting job mobility for low-level employees. Should they be banned? asks James Heskett.

Design Rules, Volume 2: How Technology Shapes Organizations series

Working papers by Carliss Y. Baldwin and Kim B. Clark explain how and why different types of technology design pose different opportunities and challenges for organizations and can become vital forces of innovation.

Education and the Movies: The Issue of Political Irrationality

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a movie masterpiece that is enormously educational not for the particular details of the story but for the phenomenon of politics as an outlet for personal problems: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a 1969 British drama film, based on the novel of the same name by Muriel Spark. Directed by Ronald Neame, it stars Maggie Smith in the title role as an unrestrained teacher at a girls’ school in 1930s Edinburgh.

Maggie Smith (whom you know from Downton Abbey as the aggressive matriarch) plays a romantically naive schoolteacher at a girl’s school in Scotland, 1930s. She has a “big time” crush on a handsome gym teacher whom she discovers in bed with one of the young girls—“Sandy” and has a kind of nervous breakdown or better, “image of the whole correctness of the world” breakdown.

The teacher sees newsreels of Mussolini in Italy and begins to think of him as a “romantic savior and ‘world-cleaner’ who will clean up the illegitimate situation at her girls’s school in Edinburgh and salvage her dignity and place and prestige and sense of how the world should be. On the one hand Miss Brodie talks about the girls of the school as ‘la crème de la crème’ but how does that comport with ‘Sandy’ and the male gym teacher sharing their beds with each other? The ‘cognitive dissonance’ (incompatibility) in Miss Brodie’s mind is causing her to break down and flee into fantasy land (i.e., Mussolini will restore the romantic world to the way it’s supposed to be). She goes deeper and deeper into this nutty vision of salvation and romantic re-balancing and at the end of the movie, ‘Sandy’ senses that she’s coming unglued and is borderline bonkers. Thus the title ‘the prime of’ can be thought of as ironical or sardonic since the teacher Miss Brodie is flipping out and ‘maps’ her romantic frustrations” onto Mussolini. This is what makes politics so dangerous (i.e., it serves as a “Rorschach test” for people’s inner irrationalities and yearnings and they “see” what they need to see).

Harold Lasswell (died in 1978) spent his life exploring politics and people’s private lives, order, sense of things, grievances, in such books as Psychopathology and Politics.  If you watch the movie The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie you will see how people use politics as a “screen” on which they project their emotions, grievances, hurts, humiliations, hysteria, anger.

Harold Dwight Lasswell (February 13, 1902 – December 18, 1978) was a leading American political scientist and communications theorist. He was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and he was a professor of law at Yale University. He served as president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), of the American Society of International Law and of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS).

He has been described as a “one-man university” whose “competence in, and contributions to, anthropology, communications, economics, law, philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and sociology are enough to make him a political scientist in the model of classical Greece.”

Table of Contents for Lasswell’s Psychopathology and Politics Book

Introduction
Preface
I. Life-Histories and Political Science
II. The Psychopathological Approach
III. A New Technique of Thinking
IV. The Criteria of Political Types
V. Theories of Personality Development
VI. Political Agitators
VII. Political Agitators—Continued
VIII. Political Administrators
IX. Political Convictions
X. The Politics of Prevention
XI. The Prolonged Interview and Its Objectification
XII. The Personality System and Its Substitutive Reactions
XIII. The State as a Manifold of Events
Afterthoughts—Thirty Years Later
Appendix A. Select Bibliography
Appendix B. Question List on Political Practices
Index

(2016 reprint of 1930 edition. Full facsimile of the original edition.)

First published in 1930, this classic study of personality types remains vital for the understanding of contemporary public figures. Lasswell’s pioneering application of the concepts of clinical psychology to the understanding of power brokers in politics, business, and even the church offers insights into the careers of leaders as diverse as Adolf Hitler and, arguably to more recent figures such as Richard Nixon, Donald Trump and the Clintons.

Movies should be your off-campus alternate university. You should ask yourself does this movie and Lasswell’s notions of psychopathology in politics help me understand authoritarian leaders today and such bizarre phenomena as half-dead prisoners in Stalin’s gulags bursting into tears in March 1953 when they learned of his death. Why sob over the death of the man who’s murdering you and tormenting you and your family?