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THE MANY-SPLENDORED SOCIETY

by Hans L Zetterberg

To link a person's actions to those of others by means of language is an old art. There are several other recent books on common uses of language to shape life. One is by Jonathan Heid (2006) who searched for modern truth in ten ancient ideas of wisdom, and by Steven Pinter, who explored a larger number of them, all grounded in semantic research, in his book The Stuff of Thought (2007). Books like these illustrate that the philosopher John R. Searle (1995) who defined social reality as shaped by language was right in leaving the further investigation of this field to scientists who test hypotheses and systems against systematically collected evidence.

Again and again we will meet a difficulty for an untrained observer to analyze everyday vocabularies. Familiarity, unfortunately, does not breed analytical effort. It rather makes us skip analysis, as Bo Anderson (2007) reminded me during the writing of this book:

It has been pointed out repeatedly that we are often ignorant about very familiar things. A philosopher ... put it this way: “das Bekannte ist, darum weil es bekannt ist, nich erkannt”. The familiar is not known, because it is familiar. No, it was not Wittgenstein who said it, ... but the young Hegel. The “habitus” that governs our daily lives, is a set of perceptual, affective, cognitive and behavioral habits that we take for granted and do not much reflect over. (Anderson 2007).

In the following pages we are not going to take them for granted but be pedantic also about familiar everyday affairs.

Old-fashioned Marxists will have difficulties with this book. Their historical materialism holds that all causes are solidly material, but here we will show that society is shaped also, yes primarily, by mere vocabularies.

This presentation will also create difficulties for political scientists and political philosophers who are trapped in the idea that the state needs an overriding physical force to do its job. Above all, the state needs impelling vocabularies, as do the other realms of society.

We will first present justifying vocabularies (Chapter 10) and then go on to the larger topic of impelling vocabularies (Chapters 11-16). In Chapter 17 we will attempt a synthesis of justifying and impelling vocabularies and conclude that ordinary words in these vocabularies actually can arrest a society's disintegration into the chaos of everybody's war against everyone else. Every act of violence signals an existing inadequacy in our vocabularies of motives.

Chapter 10.

Vocabularies of Justification

Enter Justifications
Social Structure and Justifications
Clusters of Justifications
  Justifications by Cardinal Values and in Societal Realms
  Justifications in Organizations, Markets, and Media
  Justifications by Makers, Keepers, Brokers, and Takers
      Figure 10.1. The Most Congenial Ideologies for Major Societal Functions
    Pushing Ideologies in Contentious Contexts
 Justifications Expressed in Language about Non-Language Phenomena
  Justifications about Biological Spontaneities
  Justifications about Nature
      Figure 10.2. Four Justifications of Nature and Their Users
  Justifications in the Domestication of Animals
  Technological Justifications
  Justifications of Weapons and Wars
Revolutionary Vocabularies of Justification
Societal Creeds

Enter Justifications

The language used to motivate ourselves and others contains different expressions: some serving as fuels and some serving as lubricants. Both scholars and writers of fiction have distinguished between fuels and lubricants in using vocabularies of motives. The fuels appeal to strong human drives, self-survival or self-assertion of different kinds, for example, in the form of money, power, glory, but also sexual conquests and threats of violence. Lubricants are loftier, pleasing, humane, pious, or emotional arguments, often citing the benefits for everyone, not only for the specific persons whom we want to influence. Lubricants, more than fuels, are easily cited in public. However, a terminology borrowed from engineering of "fuels" and "lubricants" is misplaced in social science. In the human world we will need to deal with situations in which fuels and lubricants are in conversation with one another. (See chapter 17). In our terminology, lubricants are usually justifications, an essential part of social interactions.

When people act in their encounters, they simultaneously, if prompted, speak to justify their acts. The simplest justification is an appeal to tradition: “We have always done it this way.” It sometimes happens, of course, that they may have nothing to say and that the act is not traditional; then their act may be seen as arbitrary. The latter is rarely tolerated. "Arbitrary justice" is no justice. "Arbitrary killing" is worse than any other killing. “Arbitrary grading” in schools is random judgments worse than no grading.

Paul F Lazarsfeld found a social psychological goldmine in the justifying type of talk. He developed "the art of asking why," the asking for justifications, into what he called "reason analysis." In an early paper on consumers' choice among brands of soap and other products (1935) he found that in a purchase on the consumer market, influences from encounters are recalled, relevant attributes of the product are evaluated, and self-reported motives of the buyer can be recorded. At the core of this talk is the researcher's "accounting scheme" that listens to what the actor preferred, liked, and disliked about his previous choice or situation, what he preferred, liked and disliked about his prospective choice or situation, and, equally important, what kind of trigger event caused him to change his course to the latter alternative. Lazarsfeld could use the same scheme in a study with Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet  (1944) on political choice, e.g. a vote for candidates for president. His student Peter Rossi (1955) used it in a thesis on Why Families Move that rightly became appreciated.

In working with this type of analysis on interview data I have found it rewarding to incorporate our distinction between emotive and rational choice. All three elements, the previous, the prospective, and the trigger, have more or less of rational and emotive charges. In a political conversion from one party to another, the emotive charge of the trigger event, for example, a political scandal or "affair," may be decisive. In his mind, however, a convert could long have been aware, not only of the public views of his party but also the views of the opposition party. The two views change places in his mind, and the latter becomes his professed ones after the conversion released by the feelings aroused by the political scandal. The process is apparently the same in religious conversions (James 1936, p. 207, Zetterberg 1952).

Note. It is a sad commentary on education in social science that survey researchers, and pollsters in particular, keep thinking that the question "Why did you make this choice?" is one single question when it clearly is at least three separate questions: previous choice, prospective choice, and trigger event. If you also measure the emotive charges of each you will need more interview questions. End of note.

Social Structure and Justifications

In a fresh approach in French sociology, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot have revived and greatly expanded justifications as their focus:

Justifiable acts are our focus: we shall draw out all the possible consequences from the fact that people need to justify their actions. In other words, people do not ordinarily seek to invent false pretexts after the fact so as to cover up some secret motive, the way one comes up with an alibi; rather, they seek to carry out their actions in such a way that these can withstand the test of justification. (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006, p 38.)

They show that different parts of society promote different justifications. The various social worlds in which mankind moves have their specific justifications. We smile at justifications that are misplaced and ignore them. Here are three examples from Boltanski and Thévenot. They say that "it should be intuitively obvious that there is something incongruous or awkward about each one:"

1. at home, to get his children's attention, a father presents a glowing picture of his ability to direct a project at work;

2. at a meeting, a chapter secretary suddenly appears on the podium, takes the floor and speaks passionately; he lets his imagination run wild, bizarre wordplays, and finally confesses that he is unsure of his own thinking;

3. in a workshop, a machine operator offers a gift to the expert who has come to measure the production capacities of the machine for which the operator is responsible, and asks the expert to write a recommendation for his son, a well-mannered computer technician who is unemployed. (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006, p 227.)

The authors give these examples analytical explanations. We can repeat them using the slightly different terminology of previous chapters in this treatise.

The first example is an attempt of a father to use a justification from the Gesellschaft in a Gemeinschaft. A father in his family and household cannot justify his claim that his wife and children obey him by saying: "Pay attention to what I say because I made good deals on the market yesterday." This justification may work to support an argument with his co-workers on his job (Gesellschaft), but not in his domestic setting (Gemeinschaft). The second example is a scandal caused by using emotive language in a situation that calls for executive language. A rational executive process in a civic organization is interrupted by a kind of emotive behavior and personal confession that are justified in a sect. The third example shows confusion between justifications in an industrial organization and in a personal network of acquaintances. Gifts and requests for recommendations for a family member belong in the latter, not in the former.

Misplaced justifications occur also in public policy discussions. For example, some critics of the restrictive measures taken in the United States in the wake of the 9/11 terror — such as airport security, monitoring of the Internet, checking cell phone traffic — argue that the measures lack justification because only 3.000 persons were killed by the collapse of the Twin Towers while 40.000 Americans die each year in automobile accidents. The incongruence here is that the 3000 died in an attack on the American way of life, while the 40.000 die in practicing the American way of life.

Clusters of Justifications

Boltanski and Thévenot demonstrate with their book that a systematic study of justifications requires a conception of the broader society. They divide society into six worlds: The Inspired World, The Domestic World, The World of Fame, The Civic World, The Market World, and The Industrial World. Each one is shown to have its vocabulary of justifications.

We can start our own review of justification with the Periodic Table of Societal Realms presented in the previous chapter. People involved in each of the 119 cells of the Table do something different than people in all other cells. These differences require justifications. Thus, from each cell of the Table of Societal Realms you can hear distinct and different justifications for carrying out the tasks typical of the cell. The study of justifications can be extended from these language-based cells to the biological spontaneities and categories that also produce justifications. Clearly, the scope of the task to study justifications becomes huge.

Balzac, Tolstoy, Proust, Joyce and the other great novelists are ahead of anthropologists/sociologists in the endeavor to map justifications. The same is true of Shakespeare, Moliere, and the great dramatists. Sophocles’ drama Antigone presented the Athenians with a clear example of the clash between the justifications used in the family and those used by the state. Oedipus’ daughter Antigone follows the wishes of any family to give her brother Polyneikas, a fallen rebel, a worthy funeral. Athens’ ruler Creon follows the dictate of statecraft to strip the enemy of all honor and, based on this principle, he justifies his decision to throw the body to the dogs. The conflict cannot be resolved: the tragedy is built into a differentiated society in which different realms have different values and norms and use different justifications.

Needless to say, some justifications are untenable, and some are questionable. To "justify justifications" is a continuous chore of intellectuals. For example, the idea that older brothers are superior to younger brothers, and that all brothers are superior to their sisters requires justifications, available in old times, but not available to a modern Western intellectual in a civilization in which all essentials in society depend on language abilities that do not differ significantly between adult brothers of different ages, nor between brothers and sisters.

The ambition of the social scientist, as opposed to the writers of novels and dramas who need concreteness and detail, is to reduce the multitude of individual justifications to a small number of categories. We can do this by looking for summaries of justifications across rows or columns in the tables we have present in this work. The Proposition "Categories of Justifications" points at the central tables in this endeavor.

10:1 "Categories of Justifications"

Justifications emerge as common features within the rows and/or columns of the Periodic Table of Societal Realms, and in its counterpart of life areas with non-language activities. Outside these "home areas" justifications are as a rule not spontaneous and need support of impelling vocabularies.

Let us now turn to the Periodic Table of Societal Realms in the previous chapter and discuss the justifications that are hidden in its combinations of cells.

Justifications by Cardinal Values and in Societal Realms

Our proposition on Categories of Justifications delivers some well-known "ethos" and "ideologies."

The cardinal values — knowledge, riches, order, beauty, sacredness, and virtue — figure in mankind's justifications. There is a special quality to these values. It is generally accepted that wealth is preferable to poverty, that order is preferable to chaos, that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, that a life with transcendent or sacred meanings is preferable to a life devoid of meaning, that virtue is preferable to iniquity, that beauty is preferable to ugliness. In other words, to have more of a cardinal value is preferable to having less. 

For this reason cardinal values (row D in the Periodic Table of Societal Realms) figure prominently in vocabularies that people use to justify their actions. These justifications follow this model: "I (we) did it to get more of a cardinal value." Thus we often hear that to get money (cell D1) was the reason for our acts. Or, we acted to get a better order of things (D2), to get to know more about something (D3), to make it beautiful (D4), to come closer to the sacred (D5), to pursue virtue (cell D6).

The cardinal values, as we have learned in chapter 7, are specific to societal realms. In different realms we thus find different justifications. The vocabulary of justifications used and accepted in a specific societal realm or other form of life area is its 'ethos.' The ethos of science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality are distinct and different. A many-splendored society has not one ethos, but several.

Justifications with reference to the cardinal value and its related priorities in one societal realm cannot easily be used in alien realms. Consider, for example, the justifications that make reference to "equality" among citizens in the body politic. It has some obvious and smooth uses in a democratic society: everybody is ruled by the same laws, everybody is tried in the same court system, everybody of age has the right to vote. But when you move the language of equality outside the body politic and say that everybody has the right to the same standard of housing, the same level of wages, the same distance to a local store, then resistance piles up, as radical socialists can attest. A justification with reference to equality works well in the realm of body politic but meets resistance as unreasonable or inappropriate in the realm of the economy. It can survive in this new context only if supported by continuous compelling vocabularies, i.e. active persuasion and propaganda.

Justifications in Organizations, Networks, and Media

Organizations have by definition a minimum of two ranks, leaders and members, but most of them have a more elaborate hierarchy and division of labor. The members become concerned with hierarchic control, personal rank and honor, strong identification with the organization, be it a dynasty, nation, academy, church, or corporation.  Even organizations operating in a in a great modern market economy show some of these traits so typical of a pre-capitalist societies based on motivations of honor and goals reached by show of courage.

Turning to justifications in organizations (Row J in the Table of Societal Realms), we encounter organization men who "have left home, spiritually as well as physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions," to use the words by William H Whyte in a book from 1956. He sees the same trend in American organizations from every societal realm:

The [business] corporation man is the most conspicuous example, but he is only one, for the collectivization so visible in the corporation has affected almost every field of work. Blood brother to the business trainee off to join Du Pont is the seminary student who will end up in the church hierarchy, the doctor headed for the corporate clinic, the physics Ph.D. in a government laboratory, the intellectual on the foundation-sponsored team project, the engineering graduate in the huge drafting room at Lockheed, the young apprentice in a Wall Street law factory. — — — Whatever the differences in their organization ties, it is the common problems of collective work that dominate their attentions, and when the Du Pont man talks to the research chemist or the chemist to the army man, it is these problems that are uppermost. — — — They are wry about it, to be sure; they talk of the "treadmill," the "rat race," of the inability to control one's direction. But they have no great sense of plight; between themselves and organization they believe they see an ultimate harmony and, more than most elders recognize, they are building an ideology that will vouchsafe this trust. (Whyte 1956, p xx.)

"Our bosses wanted this done" is a typical justification in an organization. The rising business giant IBM in the post-World-War-II era came to symbolize the hierarchal home of organization men and their lifestyle.

We recall that organizations are staffed by both administrators and technicians. They have recourse to different justifications. In contrast to administrative bureaucrats, the professional technocrats justify their actions not only by referring to instructions from their superiors or the resolutions of congresses but also by pointing to facts and reason. A professional technocrat wants to be able to criticize that which he considers to be superstition, be it in regard to the dangers of the use of pesticides, the availability of investment capital, or the health risks of using prophylactics, etc. These technocrats are dependent on a certain kind of freedom of opinion, namely the freedom of appeal to rationality. With its help they can free themselves to some extent from the powers-that-be and from the administrative bureaucracy.

This freedom of technocrats has been pretty well established in modern states. In authoritarian or totalitarian states, however, the process has regularly been threatened by one of the characteristics of "Stalinism:" the subordination of the technocrats to administrative bureaucrats.

Whyte's basic observations are still generally valid. However, since he wrote The Organizational Man numerous women have joined their ranks in the labor force, and a new study would have to be renamed as The Organizational Human Being. Another major change is that the focus of many corporate organizations has changed from production to sales. Corporate headquarters are getting smaller, and more staff and authority has moved to those parts of the corporation that are close to the customers and more knowledgeable of their needs. Sales means market, and market means networks. The motivations are now less based on honor and more on self-interest, and goals are achieved less by courage and more by cooperativeness, tact, and politeness. The Networking Human of the Twenty-first Century competes successfully with the Organizational Man of the Twentieth Century. This seems true in all societal realms, not only in business.

The justifications common in networks (Row K in the Table of Societal Realms) reflect the fact that networks contain more peer-to-peer relations than do organizations. This facilitates social contacts, the lifeline of networks. "We have talked about it" is a common justification heard in a network.

A justification commonly heard in mass media (Row L in the Table of Social Realms) is "the public's right to know." This is not a justification to publish anything. It is generally agreed that a democracy depends on transparency of the state. The media in a democracy shall report all that the state does and all that the states neglect to do. Then you have an informed electorate capable of deciding whether a government shall get new mandate or be forced to leave office. But note that the reverse is not true. Citizens have the right to a private zone. A civilized government has no general right to enter the private zones and register the doings and conversations of citizens. The duty of the government is rather to uphold the right to such a private zone. We will return to this in our discussion of human rights.

Do media have a general right to spy on people under the umbrella of "the public's right to know?" when the state has no such right? No, that would make media a non-democratic agency in a democracy. Are media exempt from the general prohibition to invade personal privacy? No, of course, not. To plant a journalist as a mole or spy in an organization or network to be reported on cannot be a policy in a civilized editorial office. Such "walraffing" may be a case of civil disobedience by a professional author who is prepared to take full legal responsibility. In a civilized society, amateurs who find or explore wrongdoings can report them to professional journalists working in a serious news group, and expect that they remain anonymous. Laws on freedom of the news media shall protect journalist from having to reveal their sources to authorities, and laws shall prohibit authorities to investigate journalists' sources.

Also important to clarify: do mass-media (or bloggers) in a democracy have the rights to enter uninvited into non-political parts of society such as family life, scientific laboratories, artists' studios, business boardrooms, worshipping congregations, or voluntary associations with a moral agenda. In principle, the answer in a civilized society must be No; media, like all others, need an invitation to be allowed to enter such non-political realms and particularly non-political private spheres. When media in a democracy enter non-political realms, they do well to have familiarized themselves about the values of these realms of society, a topic sadly neglected in journalism training.

A case history from 1914 is worth a study. A Parisian socialite and wife of a politician, Henriette Caillaux, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro. The paper had published a letter with allegations, not only about her husband's politics, but with details about her own adultery. She admitted the killing, but was not held guilty of murder by the Court.

You may take photos and videos and make drawings of anybody who is in a public place. This is not illegal, but there may be something uncivilized about a rushing paparazzi crowd of photographers getting pictures of a celebrity who happens to be in a public place. (Some democratic countries impose restrictions on crowding that disturb the public; this could make some paparazzi behavior an offense.) Of course, if and when a celebrity poses for a photographer, the two can make a contract about the disposition of pictures and fees. In several countries there are mandatory requirements imposed on photographers to have permission to publish unsolicited photos of celebrities, most regularly when the pictures are used in marketing, even in promotions of the picture-based magazines. 

The strictures on mass media to respect privacy clash with the press lords' right to make money. Justifications often clash this way in a modern society.

Justifications by Makers, Keepers, Brokers, and Takers

The social bases of some important ideologies in the modern world are found where the Makers, Keepers, Brokers, or Takers appear, a topic we discussed in Chapter 8. Their ideological concerns are expressed as strong and consistent justifications. To be sure, with appropriate propaganda and support from the central zone, an ideology can spread over a whole society. But without such efforts each major societal function develops a congenial ideology appropriate to its own home turf. They are shown in Figure 10.2, which starts with a heading with some societal functions from Figure 8.1 in chapter 8. The bottom line presents the ideologies.

Figure 10.1. The Most Congenial Ideologies for Major Societal Functions

		Makers	Keepers	Brokers	Takers
		of cardinal values, i.e. knowledge, wealth, order, beauty, sacredness, and virtue. (Illustratrations.)
1	KNOW-LEDGE	Inventors Researchers	Experts Professionals	Technocrats Consultants Teachers	Clients
2	RICHES	Entre- preneurs	Bankers Insurers	Tradesmen Marketers Advertisers	Consumers Customers
3	ORDER	Politicians, Legislators, Civic leaders	Judges Prosecutors Lawyers Police	Officials Bureaucrats Civic workers	Subjects Citizens
4	BEAUTY	Creative Artists Poets, novelists, dramatists	Critics	Actors Entertainers Exhibitors	Fans of culture and enter-tainment
5	SACRED- NESS	Prophets	Clergy Monks Nuns	Preachers Missionaries Miracle workers	Believers Seekers
6	VIRTUE	Creators of high norms, charities etc	Ethicists	Carers of children, sick, elders, etc.  Moralists	Decent people Aspirants to ethical living
	Justifications and ideologies	Individualism: develop what is new & your own. Classic liberalism*	Orthodoxy: separate what is good from bad, high from low. Conservatism	Universalism: equal oppor-tunities and rights to all.   Liberalism	Egalitarianism: give equal or equivalent outcomes to all.   Socialism

*Originated in the 18th century in Manchester. Often called "neoliberalism" in the late 20th century in Europe.

The Makers generally take pride in their distinctiveness. They create new knowledge, new laws, new sources of wealth, new art, new morals, new forms of sacredness. Were everything old to be preserved, or were everyone to be or think alike, there would be little or no possibility of creating something new.

The need for individuality among the Makers can developed into a general social ideology that promotes the idea that all people shall always be permitted to be different rather than alike. In schools creative people reward creativity than memorization. Individualists want self-regulation rather than centralized steering. The often prefer networks to organizations, markets rather than bureaucracy. The minimum of central authority which they need should primarily protect ownership and copyright and uphold contracts. This ideology suits business and industry and is often promoted by their representatives as the best for society. The congenial ideologies of the Makers are varieties of individualism. This vocabulary of individual uniqueness, usually unafraid of novelty, and not without some egoism, is their main justification.

The Keepers are the guardians of the cardinal values, and thus they distinguish between knowledge and superstition, wealth and poverty, between that which is legal and that which is illegal, between the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, the ethical and unethical. Their most congenial ideologies are based on hierarchy and preserving the best i.e. conservatism. The Keepers’ desire for stability can develop their hierarchical view of work to a societal ideology that seeks to keep and stabilize differences in society. The conservatives see greater differences between men and woman, between young and older people, between those who are qualified and those who are unqualified. Proponents of this ideology usually prefer an organization with stable ranks rather than a market that can create disorder and troublesome new riche. In the schools they naturally want to see marks at all levels for pupils and a differentiation of classes. Conservatives who are teachers favor qualification standards and rankings set up by authorities.

The Brokers emphasize justice and fairness. A teacher should not have favorites, but treat all alike. A storekeeper should not have one price for locals and another for strangers. State functionaries should not discriminate between people, but treat all the same. Theaters, concerts, art exhibits, and museums should be open to all, not just to elites. Most major religions offer salvation to all, not just to a chosen people. The moralist allows no exception to ethical principles. The most congenial ideologies for the Brokers in the various realms of society are based on equal rights and opportunities. i.e. universalism. A universalistic ideology of work, when fully developed, strives to eliminate arbitrariness from life. Young and old, men and women, immigrants and native-born, shall all receive the same treatment. All should also have the same external conditions at the start of life. But afterwards, talent will decide one’s fate. He who invests more time and energy will also receive more when the results are distributed. This is “liberal justice.” Supporters of this ideology are amenable to interventions from a central authority that gives everyone a chance to achieve results, in rural as well as urban areas, in rich and poor neighborhoods. A school for all without tuition charges and with no separate schools for the privileged was introduced. The catchwords were "equal opportunity" and then "meritocracy." But this ideal of the Brokers did not last long.

During the 1900s, the ideology of the Takers made significant inroads and after 1968 they could for the first time on a large scale be a justification that could successfully compete with the ideologies of the Creative, the Keepers, and the Brokers. The Takers of the cardinal values of knowledge, riches, power, etc. usually insist that everyone can partake of them. They follow a common norm of a hunt that everyone share in the kill – the person who went along on the hunt as well as the person that brought down the game, those who participated in the hunt as well as those who stayed at home in the village. In the end, everyone should benefit from the hunt. Equality in respect life’s capriciousness brings up a special ideology. The most congenial justifications are now based on a radical egalitarianism that demands equal or equivalent outcomes, not only an equal start for everybody.  When equality in outcome becomes a common justification in society, one tries to minimize the differences due to fate. Solidarity means that the good and the bad turns in life be shared; this is “socialist justice.” There must be no class differences. This ideology primarily appeals to those who are the Takers of the cardinal values of society.

All the above ideologies are in opposition to the particularism or partiality that prevails when family members or clan members are viewed as more valuable than outsiders. Such partiality persists even in modern societies. Even a contemporary man values his family more than other men’s families. And contemporary nationalism and chauvinism are replete with elements of partiality: my country, right or wrong! A milder form of partiality can be found in the esprit de corps in certain professions, even those where universalism is dominant, for example, among doctors, lawyers, and teachers.

 According to the general retrospective judgment at the turn of the century, the 1900s was the “century of the ordinary man.” Others have called it “the century of democratic man,” and list the entitlements won as the principal testimonials to progress. Among them, the children’s convention of the United Nations is instructive. Here is a humanitarian catalogue over the rights children should enjoy just because they are children, irrespective of whether or not they want to learn or contribute something, be nasty or kind, stay at home or run away from home. The breakthrough of democracy, women’s liberation, the solidarity of the welfare state with the weakest members of society and aid to poor countries are usually given as clear examples. The Taker can be said to acquire a good deal of what Ortega called “the psychology of the spoiled child.” The child can say “Mommy, I don’t like mathematics,” and mother will answer, “Yes, dear, then you don’t need to learn mathematics in school.” And both believe in the magic that the child will nevertheless acquire all necessary understanding of nature, technology, and society, now as before.

During the second half of the twentieth century many democratically elected politicians were Takers and in Parliament they promoted typical justification of Takers. Some politicians are like parents who spoil their children, not because they love them more than anything else on earth, but because they so badly want to be loved themselves, especially on Election Day. Takers who are fixated on the issue of radical egalitarian rights and practices constitute a large segment of the personnel of schools, social agencies, correctional institutions, et cetera. They do not ask their clients to make an effort to mend their ways; they can betray their clients with eloquent words about justice and injustice without a bad conscience.

Remember that all the above ideologies are justifications with contextual roots in different parts of a society. To lift any one these ideologies to be a valid Weltanschauung for a total society is bound to be a difficult and imprecise endeavor.

Pushing Ideologies in Contentious Contexts

Let me us the case of Swedish schools to illustrate some justifications in use during "the century of the ordinary man." In Sweden radical egalitarianism was emblematic of the school reforms of 1962 and 1968, the progress of which I personally have been able to watch. As long as a Swede attended compulsory school, the outcome should be equal for all learners. Grades should be not be given except at the approach of graduation. Alternatives such as a school for girls were eliminated; the number of alternative courses was kept to a minimum, but workplace experience should be available to all students. In the reform of 1968, however, vocational instruction was eliminated from the last three years of elementary school (Hadenius 1990, pp. 182-213, 233-243). With time, universities, these citadels of meritocracy, were required to accept all students who had graduated from a gymnasium, irrespective of their area of specialization. Students who had studied car repairs, cooking, hair dressing and childcare had the same right to admittance as those who had studied mathematics, natural science, history and languages. And at last, in the year 2000, gymnasium studies were not all required for university and college admittance. In short, the educational system was to be a classless society for children and adolescents to prepare them for a classless adult society. Such was the thinking in the Swedish Government, first introduced when the minister of education was Olof Palme.

Few people seem to have understood what an enormous historical experiment is was to make the Swedish school system a classless society for children and youth. During the twentieth century, however, we have seen several larger experiments of this kind. The Lenin and leaders of the Soviet Union (in implicit polemics against Karl Marx) asserted that “socialism in one country” was possible even in a surrounding world of capitalism. We know how that experiment turned out. In Sweden the experiment tested whether egalitarian schools could exist even though the country as a whole was not egalitarian. How did it turn out?

 Sweden pursued egalitarianism in education, and forced gifted and backward children, compliant and obstinate children, poor and rich children, articulate and less articulate children to share classrooms, teachers, and schoolbooks. But outside the classroom the slow-changing, old-fashioned class society lived on. A good part of a pupil’s life takes place outside the school. Some of their time is spent on school holidays (including the teachers’ study days) and on sick leave. Weekends and national holidays mean many hours outside of the classroom, and vacations mean long period of freedom outside the school environment. During all this time, children live in parts of the society that differ from their egalitarian school. Moreover, the adult society the students met upon graduation remained a class society, albeit open to social mobility. Schools may be organized like egalitarian miniature societies, but when its children grow up they meet a typical class society with appreciable stratification in terms of competence, purchasing power, and also in artistic taste, religious belief, moral rectitude, and physical fitness. A grave mismatch between training for life in schools and the real course of life after the school years became the fate of a few generations of Swedish youth.

Justifications Expressed in Language about Non-Language Phenomena

Our main concerns in this book are the social justifications used in symbolic interactions between people that we have reviewed above. We may note that vocabularies of justifications are often loosely called "culture."  It is a good rule of thumb to look for language products, particularly vocabularies of justification, if you want to debunk the ominous concept of "culture" into something down-to-earth and easily recorded.

But culture contains also many references to non-language events and phenomena. Some of these references are justifications that occur in man's relations with his own biological spontaneities, with his relation to the nature in which he lives, with his domesticated animals, and his relation to the tools he uses to facilitate living and fighting. Let us briefly review some of them before we turn to impelling vocabularies. 

Justifications about Biological Spontaneities  BIO

There are many spontaneous bodily actions that are initiated by the pre-language brain and are elaborated with the help of the language brain (see Figure 1.2 in Chapter 1). Justifications may be part of such elaborations.  "I didn't come to the party because I had to sleep," is such a justification. A blanket use of bodily spontaneities as justification for anti-social behavior is rare or non-existent in all cultures we know. Cultures influenced by Islam and Christianity are apparently unusually strict in sexual matters. 

When bodily spontaneity becomes embedded in symbolic environments and meets impelling vocabularies, particularly those with many "Do's" and "Don'ts", the well-known traumas of childhood arise: the learning of toilet practices, table manners, the suppression of incestuous impulses, the control of tantrums, fighting and other forms of violence. They result in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, "civilization’s discontents" as Sigmund Freud (1930) taught us. We may well call the social norms used to control bodily spontaneities 'Unbehagen norms.' (In the more developed ethics found in chapter 23, they are part of a complex of 'norms of hygiene.') Some Unbehagen norms may be more necessary than others; each culture and each generation seem to have opinions about this. However, the freedom for the language brain that we have discovered (and celebrated) does not imply freedom for the pre-language brains. Outside the realm of modern art and its vie de bohème, justifications to explore the limits of Unbehagen norms are not generally received as self-evident. The justification "I could not resist the temptation," usually states states a truth, but is not always acceptable.

Justifications about Nature  NAT 

The immediate energy mankind requires is found in our bodies. Early, mankind learned to augment the energy of the human body by using animal energy from horses, camels, or other domesticated animals. Horses were utilized for transportation, to pull plows, to thresh wheat, saw wood and to crank other machines. Hunted animals on the ground and in water have been a major source of man's food. Domestication of animals such sheep, pigs and cows, have made meat available without the hunt. Meat provides a shortcut to mankind's need for protein, so that all humans do not have to be vegetarians. Furs and wool provide warm clothing for the naked race. You also find animals in medical research, in entertainment, and for companionship.

All usages of animals and all relations to animals by men have required justifications on part of the speaking animal. Broadly speaking domestic animals are of three kinds. Some are programmable like dogs, horses, camels, and donkeys that can be trained to assist men in difficult or heavy tasks. Others are bread to provide food such as cows or pigs. Still others are kept for social reasons such as canary birds, aquarium fishes, and city cats. The fact that cats also are useful to mankind by catching mice does not put them squarely in the programmable category, since their mice hunting is an instinct that does not require training by humans.

Domestic animals are owned by an individual, a family, or a collectivity has meant that justifications in terms of ownership have dominated man's relations to domestic animals. Ownership of domestic animals represents wealth to the owners as long as the creatures live; thus the owners furnish them with food and water, protection from the elements and from thieves and killers. Often the owners give their domestic animals individual names to establish them as discrete and separate identities, sometimes with their kinship recorded. Wild animals are not subject to ownership, but a hunting ground represents a major asset, and it is defended against strangers and competing hunters.

The ownership of animals has another side: the freedom to dispose of animals by using them yourself, or giving them or their offspring away, or lending them to others, or leasing them to others for breeding, or selling them for money, or disposing of them by slaughter and using the meat, skin and fur, horns, etc., as you please, just as you can do with a wild beast or a fish that you have caught. 

Justifications in terms of ownership of domestic animals with market values and in terms of ownership of catches from hunts and fishing have in recent decades been questioned. It has been shown and increasing acknowledged that animals are capable of feeling, not only hunger and thirst, but also of pain and fear. Also, domestic animals may feel confined and/or lonely.

These discoveries have resulted in two modern social movements. One advocates animal rights, and says in its more radical version that animals are not ours to eat, not ours to wear, not ours to experiment on, not ours to use for entertainment, not our slaves. Non-human animals are inviolate and shall not be ruled or exploited by humans. A minor correction: it is not strictly correct to call this "rights." We shall soon see that a right among humans is a language product, not readily available to creatures without a sophisticated language. What we have is rather a movement advocating integrity of animals, a modern version of the Buddhist idea of the sacrosanct animals.

More established and widespread at the time of this writing are animal welfare movements. On balance, they accept that it is morally acceptable for humans to use nonhuman animals in the above ways, provided unnecessary sufferings of animals — and they are many — are avoided. Their typical justification reads "we minimize sufferings when animals serve mankind."   
 

Technological Justifications TECH

Mankind's energy could also be augmented by harnessing pure physical energy from the flow of water, the blowing of the wind, the light and warmth of the sun, and the heat of fire.  At the time of Archimedes (287 BC-212 BC), the father of Western engineering, one talked about "the mighty five" technologies. They were the inclined plane, the wedge, the screw, the lever, and the wheel shaft. The great South American civilizations did not seem to have used wheels systematically, but otherwise these technologies were independently invented in all civilizations: in China they may have existed centuries before Archimedes. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) thought that the printing press, compass, and gunpowder were the most decisive technologies that shaped his times. They had also existed in China for centuries before their appearance in Europe.

A common justification for technology is that it saves human energy, or that it is more energy efficient than available alternatives. This is a major rationale for engineering, the impressive progress of which we shall deal with in our chapter on the creation of wealth.

Instrument technologies — eyeglasses, hearing aids, microscopes, telescopes, scales, stethoscopes, radars, etc — are justified as augmentation of our senses. Other instruments, Geiger counters, for one, let us know phenomena such as radiation for which we have no biological senses. Instruments will be discussed in our chapter on the creation of knowledge.

Musical instruments are special in that they can directly produce the cardinal value of beauty. Different technologies produce tunes: percussion, strings, brass, and woodwind. Their justifications are formulated as abilities to produce arousal, harmony, beauty and identity.

Justifications of Weapons and Wars TECH

The erect stature made humans more apt than other animals to throw things, an ability to hurt or kill used in hunt and war. David with the tool of a sling could, however, defeat the taller and stronger Goliath. Wars in the shape of man-to-man struggles, each represent a clan, ware typical in Old Middle and in Ancient Greece. In Homer's account of Trojan Wars we meet heroes in fights with other heroes. The victor showed no mercy. The tools of combat — arrows, spears, swords — were used to kill and cut up the defeated. Homer presents no justifications for the weapons used, but insists that that they should be the same on both sides. This fairness in weaponry leaves him to concentrate on the celebration of the courage of the combatants and the glory of the one who is victor.

War as organized violence by armies of city-states had been invented by Sumerians in the Third Millennium BC in ancient Mesopotamia. Two thousand years later, the Greek city states developed a version with phalanxes, groups of advancing shoulder-to-shoulder spearmen, a near-unconquerable formation in those days. Again, their justifications centered not on the weapons, but on the preparations such as drillings and discipline in combat. This was pure organized violence, and the victorious phalanx was the new hero to be publicly celebrated.

The Roman empire called their formations "legions." They had more mobility, better shields, shorter swords for stabbing, and they had equipment to throw stones and metal at the enemy. Their adversaries in Carthage, to take one example, had Greek roots and continued the practice of killing most everyone in the armies they had defeated. Some Roman generals, by contrast, began to retrain the defeated, and to enlist them in their own ranks with promise of pay. Roman adversaries, including the brilliant Hannibal in the Punic Wars, ended up with smaller forces than the victorious Romans. To a large extent the successful Roman legions of the Empire became manned by non-Romans. Justification of Roman victories rested not only on Roman weaponry and Roman virtues, but on organization, logistics, tactics, and politics.

New religions conveyed new rules and some chivalry into warfare with the Christian armed knights and the Muslim mameluks. They fought for their rulers like other armies, but they also fought for religious ideas and had religious justifications such as "fighting a holy war." Unlike Roman armies they were mounted on horses that had been equipped with stirrups, an Asian invention from the time of the first millennium, which freed horsemen to use both arms to handle weapons. An interesting parenthesis occurred when most Christian and Muslim powers, as well as the great civilization of China with all its skilled horsemen, succumbed briefly to more versatile ponies mounted by Mongol nomads united by Genghis Khan (1162-1227). Not until the US Air Force in the Cold War got squadrons of bombers and fighters that could reach any part of the globe by refueling in the air did the world see a comparable military mobility.

The contacts with China brought gunpowder to the Christian and Muslim parts of the world. Gunpowder was not seriously exploited by tradesmen and their guards, nor by those many bishops and some imams who held armed guards. Kings and sultans, i.e. what we call states, became the big users of gunpowder. From about 1400 AD it became a new foundation for their power over their subjects and for their many wars over honor, territories, taxation income, and custom duties. War now became a special occupation for princes and professional armies increasingly loaded with technical skills of destruction and killing by means of gunpowder and its successors among explosives.

Gunpowder technology developed from its use in canons manned by crews to use in firearms by individual soldiers. Killing and molesting at a distance now became routine, as was the sure destruction of any fortifications. A bayonet attached to the firearm was a less and less used reminder of old-style man-to-man combat. Superior fire power and its disciplined use nominated the victors of war. Natives of the Americas succumbed to invading fire-armed Europeans, even in such advanced civilizations as Aztecs and Incas.

Handguns became available also to civilians. In the Wild West the advent of the Colt revolvers were met by a justification that "the six-shooter made all men equal." In fighting it didn't matter as much anymore to be tall, strong, and young. What mattered were a fast draw, and some simple rules such as "Don't draw unless you are prepared to shoot!" and "When you draw come out shooting!" 

Writing in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Prussian military analyst Claus von Clausewitz observed that wars by overlords and officers from the aristocracy were no longer as effective as the wars with national and popular mobilization, and at least some generals who re recruited on the basis of skill rather than birth. The American Civil War was a modest beginning of the pursuits of total war, involving not only the military, but all parts of the body politic, and business and industry, the churches, hospitals, and charities as well. World War I and II were full-fledged total wars.

A keen British historian sees a reversal of the general trend toward total wars in Western Europe and the United States with the advent of atomic weapons: "War is now seen as being a matter for governments and not for peoples; an affair of mutual destruction inflicted at remote distances by technological specialists operating according to the arcane calculations of strategic analysts. Popular participation is considered neither necessary nor desirable" (Keegan 1999, p. 40). 

In the historical process of warfare between states some rational rules based on principles of chivalry have come into use. In the past century humanitarian principles have been added to the rules of warfare. Military personnel should refrain from employing any kind or degree of violence which is not actually necessary for military purposes. The protection of civilians and the wounded from combat, the proper treatment of prisoners of war, and restrictions on certain types of weapons became prescribed in the Geneva Convention and its later complements. The 1997 protocol (57:2:a:3) calls on warring parties to refrain from armed actions that may be reasonably expected to cause unintended losses of civilian lives and properties that would be exaggerated in relations to the military advantage of the action. All armed forces have, of course, their own rules of engagement. They may, for example, prescribe that soldiers cannot fire on suspected enemy positions without positive identification of the enemy — though being fired upon is by itself considered positive identification.

These rules are not always respected by guerilla units and never by terrorists. Only if we accept that human rights are fundamentalist (our position) rather than pragmatic in nature shall those who violate human rights enjoy human rights. We discuss this in next chapter under the heading “Bringing Human Rights into Law.“

The standard modern justification for wars is “self-defense.” However, as we have argued, lack of civility is not worth defending. Progress in conflicts, be they with weapons or with words, is when rulers who deny their people freedom are defeated by those who have enacted and live by freedom in all its forms: academic freedom, artistic freedom, freedom of trade, religious freedom, freedom of press and civic liberties, and freedom of conscience. 

Revolutionary Vocabularies of Justification

The justifying vocabularies in revolutions are a most fertile field of study. The American Revolution contributed straight legislative proposals such as "No taxation without representation" and also lofty formulations such as the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 by Thomas Jefferson. The latter states that the Creator has given all men "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". The latter phrase has some well-known antecedents. John Locke had, at the time of the English revolutions, put forth three rights: "life, liberty, and property," or, "life, liberty, and estate."  George Mason, Jefferson's fellow-statesman, had written in the Virginia Declaration of Rights about "the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Jefferson dropped all references to property. He wrote "pursuit of happiness" and added "among these" to the text, implying that there were others. He apparently took liberties in editing the rights he thought given by God. He respected Benjamin Franklin who believed that God helps those who help themselves.

In Jefferson's own life there is little doubt that the pursuit of happiness was an umbrella covering his pursuits of money, power, knowledge, and artistic beauty as well as his stately family home. His fortune included about 100 slaves who served his household, his farm, and a nail factory. He is particularly known for the statement that "the government governs best which governs least," leaving ample room for all non-political pursuits. He wanted to live in what we call a many-splendored society. Lincoln modified this into wiser words: the government should do for the people whatever the people cannot do for themselves.

Societal Creeds

The most comprehensive vocabularies of justification are the 'societal creeds.' Gunnar Myrdal made such a creed innermost to An American Dilemma, his study of race in the United States. The American creed is a cluster of ideals centered on liberty, equality of opportunity, and various specific rights such as freedom of speech and private property. They found their first expression in the revolutionary vocabularies among the elite of gentlemen who sought independence of the country from British rule. They were written into The Declaration of Independence, The Preamble to the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The political parties that later emerged in the United States could disagree on most anything, but not on the American Creed. The creed spread from the central zone to all parts of the country.

These principles of social ethics have been hammered into easily remembered formulas. All means of intellectual communication are utilized to stamp them into everybody's mind. The schools teach them, the churches preach them. The courts pronounce their judicial decisions in their terms. They permeate editorials with a pattern of idealism so ingrained that the writers could scarcely free themselves from it even if they tried. They have fixed a custom of indulging in high-sounding generalities in all written or spoken addresses to the American public, otherwise so splendidly gifted for the matter-of-fact approach to things and problems. (Myrdal 1944, p. 4)

The immigrants from various backgrounds learned the principles of the creed and accepted them. Even the descendants of the black slaves came to embrace them and talked about America as the land of the free, the land of opportunity, and the flag that symbolized the equality of all men. In the United States public support of the Constitution is generally higher than the public support for presidents and political parties. The Supreme Court is not only the ultimate arbiter of legal disputes; it is also the guardian of the Constitution.

No European country has a societal creed as explicit and extensive as the American Creed. Several European attempts at comprehensive creeds have been discredited by history, such as Mussolini's fascism based on the historical nation, Hitler's Nazism based on the Germanic race, or Lenin's communism based on the right to rule by a nomenclature from the presumably virtuous working class. These creeds of the 20th century were based on particularism, the belief in a special quality of some people and the inferiority of all others. The American creed, by contrast, is based on universalism.

Some more lasting minor creeds in Europe have found homes in small countries, such as the belief in "neutrality" in Switzerland, Sweden and Austria, at the time of this writing abandoned by the latter two nations. In these three countries any policy that was said to violate "neutrality" was ruled out, often prior to an analysis and a full public discussion. Societal creeds tend to be "sacred" and beyond debate. The public opinions they embody are 'untouchable opinions.'

We will return in Chapter 17 to vocabularies of justification and relate them to the impelling vocabularies to which we now turn.

Please send your comments by email to the author.

Chapter 11.

Vocabularies of Regulation

Vocabularies of Jurisprudence

Personal Likes and Dislikes

Xenophobia apparently contains a sediment of bodily spontaneity; we instinctively raise our guard when we encounter new people different from ourselves. People trust people like themselves more than they trust people unlike themselves. It is enough if people are perceived as alike or different for this rule of thumb to operate. Or, more formally:

12:1 "The proposition of likeness-liking and dissimilarity-dislike"

In general, in their encounters people have a more favorable evaluation of persons who are described as like themselves than they do of persons described as unlike, and vice versa.

This tendency is known in proverbs such as "birds of a feather flock together." Counteracting observations are also well known in sayings such as "opposites attract," The contradiction attests to the difficulty for the untrained to analyze everyday encounters, and also to the fact that the tendency is weak and has exceptions. In the 1930s and 40s the first systematic empirical evidence about these preferences came from the marriage markets in the American Middle West. Local studies there showed that ethnically homogenous partners in marriages expressed more love for one another than spouses in ethnically mixed marriages. Reuben Hill found this by exploring life histories (Becker & Hill 1948) and Harvey Locke (1951) confirmed the finding by interviews using questionnaires. In the new century, evidence from 30 000 interviews from across the United States collected by Robert D. Putnam, a high-profile social scientist, shows that diversity and solidarity are negatively correlated in virtually all aspects of American community life. In areas of greater diversity, his respondents demonstrate:

Lower confidence in local government, local leaders and the local news media.

Lower political efficacy — that is, confidence in their own influence.

Lower frequency of registering to vote, but more interest and knowledge about politics and more participation in protest marches and social reform groups.

Less expectation that others will cooperate to solve dilemmas of collective action (e.g., voluntary conservation to ease a water or energy shortage).

Less likelihood of working on a community project.

Lower likelihood of giving to charity or volunteering.

Fewer close friends and confidants.

Less happiness and lower perceived quality of life.

More time spent watching television and more agreement that ‘television is my most important form of entertainment’. (Putnam 2007).

Probably most of Putnam's readers — I for one — had wished for the opposite results of this research, or at least for zero-correlations when extraneous circumstances had been factored out.

Vocabularies of Racism  BIO 

A significant exploitation of the likeness-liking proposition has been made by means of what we called the Third Principle of Magic. It proclaims that what holds for the part also holds for the whole, and vice versa. Vocabularies of racism have developed on this ground. As we know, a great variety of stereotypes are linked to genetic markers such as differences in the slant of eyes, skin color, thickness of lips, the size and curvature of a nose,  etc. Viewed against the background of the entire human genome that has recently been mapped, these genetic differences are clearly trivial. By no means do they define biological man, nor do they tell us anything essential about social man. But we have been very good at magically assuming that they do. The social consequences of these beliefs and vocabularies are evident in a reinforcement of the tendency described in the likeness-liking proposition. Our third magical principle has simply entrapped mankind, and allowed the small genetic differences in human parts to make us believe in insurmountable racial differences.

Thus the differences between human races as conceived by earlier generations are not a profound but rather a superficial (“skin-deep”) division of mankind. The old thought that races are profoundly dissimilar is wrong. The entire genetic history of mankind, the great migrations, wars, and slave trade, which spread homo sapiens' basic characteristics to all corners of the globe, are now well documented (Wells 2002). This journey that mankind has made across the world is marked by great historical events, mostly wars and technical innovations, and by the emergence of realms such as administration and politics, economy, science, art, religion, and morality. In addition to these developments the journey is marked by some superficial changes in genes which can now be easily measured and for all biological purposes be ignored. But our penchant for magical thinking has made the latter the cause of the former. The story of "race" is a tragedy wrought by magic, an enormous illusion.

What has been called human races are not even different species. All people now alive are evidently variations of one, just one, biological species. They can mate and produce offspring, which qualifies them as a single species according to a standard Darwinian criterion. The Neanderthals, who had different DNA and one chromosome less than homo sapiens, belonged, however, to another species. They could not reproduce a line of children with homo sapiens; the offspring of such a coupling, if any, would probably be sterile, like the mule. A definitive history of their extinction remains to be written.

Now we know that Black and White, Jew and Gentile, Chinese and Indian, and any pair of homo sapiens you would care to mention share the same genetic structure, give or take a few recent and superficial aspects. Mankind's descriptions of fellow human beings could focus on the broad genetic similarities, and in a hundred years or two I think they might. But at present we are still more apt to focus on the superficial genetic differences, a remnant of magical thinking.

Vocabularies of Sexism  BIO 

We noted before, that there is no rationale for unequal status of men and women in our times in a society built on language brains. There are only small differences between the language brain of men and women; the female language capacity may be  superior to that of men. The reverse may hold for mathematical capacity. The present way of measuring intelligence components give men and women the same mean, but a slightly larger standard deviation around the mean for men than women. This would indicate that there are more stupid men than stupid women, and more brilliant men than brilliant women. I don't think one should be too sure of these small differences until we have measurements taken when several generations of men and women have lived as equals.

In evolutionary history when non-language brains were dominant, it is probable that the physically stronger and faster males could dominate females, and that the females in periods of childbirth and nursing needed and sought male help to gather food and to get support in cases of danger. Such a relation between females and males may have been in effect before the emergence of the language brain. No one can know for sure about such matters, and spuma and defensive bilge about sex differences always abound.

What we do know is that no immediate gender equalization occurred in societies where the language brain took over. Athens at the time of Socrates, exhibits an extreme subordination of women under men at the same time as language-based realms such as drama, philosophy and science had an unprecedented development. The rival Sparta, organized for wars, actually seems to have held their women in higher esteem than did Athens.

Broad-scale equality between men and women is a recent development with roots in Europe and North America.  A United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of  Discrimination Against Women was enacted in 1979. Twenty-eight years later 180 nations have ratified it. The Muslim countries have been late signers and Iran and Qatar had yet to sign. The convention does not meet Hohfeld's criteria for genuine rights. It does not specify who has the duty to deliver and enforce the rights of women.

It is easy to detect how unconscious an assumption of subordination of women to men is. When a man acts it out, he may not notice it until others remind him of the fact that he is engaged in discrimination that violates the modern norm in most countries of equality between the sexes.

Socially Designed Like-Dislikes

What will remain, however, when "race" is ignored are a number of other diversities. They produce a large number of implications of the likeness-liking proposition.

Persons who speak the same language tend to like each other more than they like persons with different languages. The first pillar of a nation is a common language. Vocabularies and pronunciations make a clear difference.

Persons who share the same myths of their origin and history tend to like each other more than they like persons with different myths about their origin and history. A second pillar of a nation is a common history. This history need not be accurate for the people involved to like each other more than other people, but it must be shared and believed to be the truth.

Persons in the same strata in society tend to like each other more than they like persons in other strata, be they higher or lower. In all class consciousness there is an element of preference for one's own class and a distrust of other classes. A related finding might be that in countries with small differences in income, citizens are generally happier with life than in countries with large income differences.

Persons who share the same lifestyle tend to like each other more than they like persons with other lifestyles. For example, the civil society is full of associations and networks where people enjoy meeting each other to sing, to sew, to garden, to collect stamps, play chess, et cetera.

Persons who are engaged in the same realm tend to like each other more than they like persons engaged in different life areas. In general they rate people in their own realm as more trustworthy that those in other life areas. For example, businessmen tend to like other businessmen more than they like priests, artists, politicians, and scientists.

Religion is one of the strongest sources of likes and dislikes, no matter how much some of them officially preach brotherly love. Here one cannot talk about the likeness-liking proposition as a weak tendency. This is probably due to the claim of each religion to definitely define the ultimate evaluation of a person's life, and they do not do it in the same way.

This list of germs of likes-dislikes could be made much longer. The Periodic Table of Grand Societal Realms at the end of Chapter 9 presented a fuller picture of differentiation of advanced societies. A member of any cell in this table can be said to have a small initial personal inclination to like other members of the same cell more than members of other cells.

The natural tendency to be initially alert for differences in those we encounter does not mean that mankind is born to be trapped in racism, nationalism, ageism, sexism, and the like. The generally weak tendency of the likeness-liking proposition is modified by a variety of human designs that make it stronger or weaker. 

The strengthening designs may be hate-mongering such as the old shibboleth that diversity brought by immigration is the root of all evil: neighborhood crime, family disintegration, political strife, degradation of the mother tongue, and what have you. The weakening designs, on the other hand, may be the newer multi-cultural shibboleth that flourished at the turn of the twentieth century and promulgated that ethnic diversity enriches our society; neighborhood, corporation, party, church, etc. The latter requires us to define people in terms of age, sex, race, ethnicity, and then to set quotas, formulate anti-discrimination laws, et cetera. The process maintains our attention to diversity in our encounters rather than our attention to similarity. There is an obvious risk that such a cure prolongs the disease. What a diversified mankind seems to need to do to stop personally disliking one another is to keep totally silent about irrelevant dissimilarities. Easier said than done. 

The personal like-dislike responses can be embedded in collective preferences. Likes and dislikes become part of social beliefs, public sentiments, and social norms. (These terms we may recall from the discussion on  "A Beginning of a Taxonomy: Habits and Customs.") When this happens the like or dislike you have toward some people is not only yours, "everybody" in your circles shares them with you. From there on, the social beliefs, public sentiments, and social norms become included in the language that shapes positions and roles that we learned about under the heading "Structuration into Positions" and "Structuration into Social Relations." Now the like-dislikes become part of an ascribed identity of some people, and they shape the way you are expected to treat these people. This is called 'structural discrimination.'

Said (1978) argued that "The Orient" is in large measure a Western construction. During the 19th and into the 20th century the Orientals were generally depicted by Europeans either as outright criminals, or as lazy, false, and sexually obsessed non-criminals. Said holds that the top authors and scholars of the West thought along these lines, but it was rather the pulp writers who did so. At any rate, this had nothing to do with reality. Said says it fitted the ambitions of British politicians when the Ottoman empire after centuries of rule lost its tight grip over the Orient. My impression is that it primarily suited the need of European media to create attention and large editions by focusing on negative emotive symbols more than on positive emotive symbols, giving readers an emotive choice rather than a rational analysis of news from the Orient. (See Proposition 4:4 "The Rules of Emotive and Rational Choice.")

Also newcomers into our encounters tend to accept what is structurally defined. In this way we arrive at the striking conclusion that a newcomer or someone from a new generation without a personal dislike of a people may nevertheless act as if they dislike them. People who have personally overcome any dislike of others nevertheless treat them inequitably because of the existing structural discrimination.

As individuals many modern males accept with all their heart that men and women shall be treated as equals. In a many-splendored society in which all essential activities are based on language this is the only reasonable position since women are equally or better skilled than men in the use of language. But in practice these modern men discriminate against women because of the inequities built into the prevailing definitions of women's positions and roles in family, work, and public life.

Structural discrimination of immigrants is common. As Schierup (1995) has argued, the "Negros" of Myrdal's An American Dilemma from 1944 is the the illegal immigrants and their likes in European city gettos. Myrdal's experience is repeated in Europe: the lion's share of discrimination cannot be explained by any number of psychological, cultural, and ethnographic studies of the minorities, nor by any normal degree of xenophobia in mankind. Only by studies of structures that are routinely maintained by society at large, i.e. among the majority, can lasting and blatant discrimination of minorities be understood. This is convincingly shown by Burns and his coworkers (2007) in Sweden.

The message of Swedish polls is that personal dislike of immigrants in Sweden is quite modest in the host population. But discrimination in practice is pervasive. Burns emphasizes immediately that the processes also works in the reverse. "A prejudiced person, even a racist, can act neutral and non-discriminatory in his occupational role" (p. 1). Work is a key to counteract structural discrimination of immigrants, work for the host population and work for the immigrants, and common workplaces for both. Countries like the Scandinavian ones take a lead from their strong labor unions that oppose immigrant labor and only admit a quota of refugees for humanitarian reasons. They become hotbeds of structural discrimination if they fail to quickly integrate the refugees into the labor force. Needless to say, it is easier to integrate foreigners who arrive in order to work than foreigners who come as refugees from persecution.

The linkage of occupation to a non-discriminatory reception of immigrants is particularly clear in the occupations we call bureaucratic, technocratic, or professional. They  have roles marked by high specialization, high impersonality, low or one-way contingency, low emotivity. (All these less than wonderful words were defined in the section on " Attributes of Social Relations." in chapter 5.) A judge in his courtroom or a physician in his practice may not be able to always keep out all his personal likes-dislikes, but at least they are trained to do so. Even the Muslim medics and paramedics in the British National Health Service who became linked to the bombing in July 2007 of Glasgow Airport and an attempted bombing of the London Underground had records as professionals in dealing with patients in accordance with individual medical needs regardless of the religion and race of the patients. Only in their role as amateur agents of jihad did they plan to randomly kill the infidels and other innocents. 

Decisions by some administrative bureaucrats that are informed by resolutions at party congresses, and thus involve no independent intellectual effort, may not necessarily be non-discriminatory. Professionalism is a better handle to use against discrimination. The decisions among technocrats or professionals are also informed by academic knowledge, a fact which should help them toward objectivity.

Is it true then that countries with a higher share of bureaucrats, technocrats and professionals have lower levels of discrimination? Data on this is available but lacks conclusive analysis. Some studies show that the opposite may occur. If there is racism or sexism in biomedical knowledge taught to medical students, the doctors become trapped in structural discrimination. If there is racism or sexism built into the legislation and procedures taught to law students, judges, prosecutors, and lawyers become trapped in structural discrimination.

Structural discrimination is not a hydra, the legendary creature that grew two new heads for each one you cut off. But it is insidious and requires vigilance.

Vocabularies of Ethnicity

The ethnic differences between man and fellow man are brought about by upbringing and living in different places. You can open any inquiry about someone's ethnicity by establishing his or her place of birth and upbringing. There are profound differences between growing up in, say Mexico and in the United States. Some are linguistic, economic, and educational, i.e. of a kind that can be erased by two or three generations by policies of integration. But some are more profound, as Paz (1985) has shown, and virtually built into life itself.

Technically speaking, survey researchers need two questions to establish ethnicity: "where were you born?" and "where did you grew up?" Usually give the same answer so questionnaires may be simplified to contain only one of them. Often researchers include the lingering ethnicity indicated by questioning "where were your father/mother born?" and "where did your father/mother grew up?" In some countries these are sensitive questions, in others they are answered routinely.

Ethnic dislikes surface in two ways: when persons with different ethnicity enter your encounters, and when you get into encounters dominated by other ethnicities. The former may be a result of emigration, the latter a result of immigration. Ethnic like-dislikes thus occurs as a result of mobility, and it becomes pervasive in any modern society. Ethnic bonds of liking override the anonymity of city life.

The ethnic dislike can result in neighborhood changes whereby one ethnic group succeeds another in a residential area. Short of strict legislation fanatically enforced, ethnic ghettos are seem impossible to avoid in world of a mobility. Sociologists living in Chicago in its peak years of immigration in the beginning of the twentieth century developed an elaborate theory of the zones of the city shaped by "invasion and succession" of ethnic (and racial) groups.

Ethnicity and Immigration in The United States

The North American colonies and the free country of the United States that they formed after the liberation from Britain became engaged in what nowadays is called "ethnic cleansing." Forced relocation of Native American peoples from their traditional areas to remoter reservations elsewhere in the country was official policy that cumulated in the Indian Removal legislation of the 1830s. The legendary Trail of Tears of Cherokees, and the Long Walk of the Navajo are examples of the effects. Genocide, that is extinction of American Indians, was never official policy. But General Philip Henry Sheridan’s word at Fort Cobb in 1869 — "the only good Indian ... is a dead Indian" sums up a minority sentiment of those days that opened for "overkill" in the Indian wars.

At the same time of the ethnic cleansing of Native Americans, Canada and the United States left the continent open to all comers, particularly from Europe, in a liberal immigration policy. As predicted by the likeness-liking proposition, the people in the American colonies and later the United States looked more favorably upon persons like themselves than upon the native Indians who were persons more unlike themselves.

In the nineteenth century the United States was the foremost representative of liberal immigration from abroad. The country had revolted against European traditionalism and hierarchy and had proclaimed that all men were created equal. The Statue of Liberty was raised in 1886 and greeted immigrants from the old world with the inspiring words of Emma Lazarus:

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shores.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me;
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

In the United States of 1900, with a population of 76 million, 10,3 million were foreign-born and 15,6 million were the offspring of foreign born. A total of 34 percent of the population was thus being assimilated. It was not possible to maintain these proportions. Immigrants from southern and eastern Europe did not fit into the American communities as easily as had immigrants from western and northern Europe. Again we see the operation of the likeness-liking proposition.

Liberal politicians did not want any authoritarian thinking of the Old World replanted in the New. But they were ill informed. In an early, and now classical, work on immigration, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America (1918-20), W. I. Thomas and F. Znaniecki showed that although the Polish peasants did shape an ethnic subculture that differed from the established American culture, it also diverged from the old Polish culture they had left behind, among other things, by being less patriarchal in family life and less autocratic in community life.

After World War I, American immigration laws became more conservative. Since World War I, the United States has thus been partial to immigration from countries that bear an ideological heritage from the French and English revolutions and thus can more readily accept America’s own heritage of freedom. In 1924 quotas were introduced that cut immigration from a spontaneous influx of over one million persons per year to a controlled entry of first 358,000 and finally 154,000 persons annually. The laws favored immigrants from Europe over those from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Within the European quota, immigrants from western and northern Europe were favored over those from southern and eastern Europe. At one point it was seriously proposed that the ethnic composition of the population be maintained as it was according to the somewhat dubious census in 1890.

The motives were partly racial and partly cultural. The racial argument for immigration restrictions eventually became invalidated. The individual differences within each race are so enormous that using racial criteria to decide whether an individual be allowed to immigrate or not would lead to egregious inequities. The cultural arguments, have, however, survived as an idea that every society has the right to preserve its distinctive character.

An immigration law introduced in 1990, set the annual quota at 700,000 — 0.3 percent of the population — plus extra quotas for refuges, which are determined each year. The law did not change the stance that permits immigration as long as it does not overwhelm America’s distinctive character. At this time most immigrants come to the United States from Latin America. They are Christians, the same religion as most Americans, a fact that facilitates integration. Their language is Spanish, a world language commanding pride among its speakers. They seem less motivated than many earlier immigrants to the United States to adopt English. It gives some southern parts of the country an unexpected situation of de facto having two parallel languages through several generations.

Ethnicity and Immigration in Europe

Europe cannot imitate the liberal history of immigration of the United States. Europe in historical times has never been a nearly empty continent, open to all comers as after the ethnic cleansing of the American Indians. Europe's major native ethnic groups have remained intact, and are historically rooted in different geographical regions. In Europe, ethnic groups cannot be quickly integrated into a melting-pot of the American kind. Only slowly will they take in a limited number of outsiders and allow a fusion of their cultural heritages.

Going back some centuries we observe the slow but powerful integration processes in several of regions of Europe. For example, in the north-eastern part of the present territory of France a natural center emerged in Île de France, where the land was fertile and many navigable rivers flow in different directions. There some clans of Franks, a Germanic tribe, managed to subjugate a very divergent lot of neighboring Romans, Celts, and Burgunds. When sufficiently united, they took on the Normans, Bretons, Basques, Corsicans, and some Catalans.

For a long time, the French language was not universal at the local level where other forms of Romance were spoken, such as Picard, Champenois, Bourguignon, Gascon, Provençal. It is said that the people of Marseilles, where Provençal lingered on, could not understand  La Marseillaise, the present national anthem, composed in 1792 as "War Song of the Army of the Rhine."  Only some solders from Marseilles in this army had learned enough French to sing it so energetically during the revolutionary march on Paris that the song became nicknamed "the Marseillaise." 

In medieval Spain the process of fusion of regional identities and languages was fired by the struggle between Muslims and Christians. A process similar to the one in France has since taken place, and is still under way — and still meeting resistance. In parts of Eastern Europe and particularly on the Balkans struggles between ethnic identities are the order of the day. On a larger scale, a process of integrating identities to a common one for all of Europe is noticeable; it may have been helped along in recent years by the pan-European media and pan-European institutions and projects. However, the latter seldom reach deep into peoples’ hearts. This is clearly the case of the European Union, a project of the political elites, not the broad masses.

In Europe, with possible exception of France, you may be seen as and called “foreigner” — not merely " foreign-born" as in the United States and Canada — even after you have acquired citizenship in your adopted country. European languages generally lack a common term such as the designation “American” enjoyed by all citizens of the United States irrespective of their ancestry or country of birth. Identities that people in the United States may take pride in, such as Afro-American or Italian-American have no counterparts in Europe. Designations such as Afro-German or Afro-European, Chinese-Italian or Chinese-European are unknown or odd in Europe, at least at the time of this writing.

In most countries in Europe around the year 2000, the balance between births and deaths means a decline in the population unless it is balanced by a higher rate of immigration than emigration. Most areas surrounding Europe are Muslim, a minority religion east of the Ural Mountains and north of the Mediterranean sea. Inside Europe Albania, Bosnia, Turkey, and Azerbaijan are predominantly Muslim. Immigrants from Muslim areas are not as secular as the native Europeans, in fact, they often become more religious in their new country than they were in the old, since this supports them in a novel and sometimes tough environment. Europe needs more immigrants than America does, but the ethnic gap between the newcomers to Europe and the resident Europeans seems greater than the gap between the predominantly Latin immigrants to the United States and resident Americans. To this circumstance must be added the huge differences in the historical conditions for immigration between North America and Europe.

Vocabularies of Nationalism

The word “nation” has the same root, “natio,” as “nativity,” and has traditionally represented the area where one is born and grows up. Thus it is an ethnic group. But the the term 'nation' has an additional attribute: it is an ethnic group that is or aspires to be a state. Poland is an example: in some  periods it has been a nation and a state, in other periods it has merely been a nation that is a part of another state. The vocabularies of nationalism may be full of spuma, myths, and magic. But European nationalism started as a rational pursuit.

Rational Nationalism

In the not so distant past, less than 250 years ago, Europeans lived in kingdoms. Their identities rested on their membership in a clan living in a hamlet or village, a city, or a region. The French Revolution made a people of the French, members of a French nation, not only of a local clan or community. They should henceforth be loyal to the new rational and revolutionary nation, not to a king. The revolutionaries applied the teachings of the Enlightenment, and particularly that of Jean Jacques Rousseau. The message was that sovereignty lies with the people, not with the royal families. Frenchmen were to be citizens, not subjects, and were to have universal rights.

The French Revolution promised help to all people who sought freedom from the strong power of their king. The Revolution was to be spread throughout the world. It would serve as a model for Europe's countries much as the court in Versailles had been the model for Europe's monarchies. In the beginning, the idea of nationalism was this French export.

After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, Europe’s greatest kingdoms were still intact: the Hapsburg in Austria, the Hohenzollern in Prussia, the Holstein-Gottorp-Romanov in Russia, and the Turkish sultans in the Ottoman Empire. The peace congress at Vienna in 1815, however, endorsed the creation of the German Confederation (Bund). Thus, they recognized that birds of a linguistic feather may flock together, if not in a federation, Bundesstaat, so at least in a Staatenbund, a confederation. Nationalism was about to be redefined.

Romantic Nationalism

The year 1848 in Europe has become known as the “year of nations.” It began with police actions against demonstrators in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. There were soon uprisings in Switzerland, Italy, and Poland. Even in far-away Stockholm crowds broke windows and were met with fire from soldiers. Throughout Europe people were clamoring for liberalism, for the right to vote and for citizens’ rights. At the time, nationalism was a part of the political left. People wanted a transfer of power from the privileged institutions of the monarchy to a parliament.

Opposition from the establishments was surprisingly weak. In 1848, liberalism was in the air. A German regent defended his inaction with the assertion: “One cannot mount a cavalry attack against ideas.” The Hapsburg Empire was under the pressure of the demands for independence among different groups: Slovaks, Serbs, Italians, Hungarians, Bohemians, Rumanians, and Croats. Metternich, the architect of the established order, fled from Vienna.

However, the various liberal and nationalist interests lacked unity and a common plan to break up the Holy Alliance, to decentralize the power that rested in Vienna, and to create a parliamentary Germany. No durable change was effected, and the lid was replaced. The terrorist shot in Sarajevo in 1914 that led to World War I was an expression of one of the unsolved national and ethnic conflicts that had surfaced already in 1848.

In the meantime, European nationalism had changed character from a revolutionary movement of the Enlightenment to a conservative movement of the Romantic Era. The intellectual father of the former had been Jean Jacques Rousseau. A Lithuanian social philosopher, Johann Gottfried von Herder, residing in Weimar, inspired romantic nationalism. For him, a nation was not a juridical unit based on mutual, general principles of protection and advantages of the kind envisioned in a social contract. Romantic nationalism stresses and further develops the unique sense of belonging that is nourished by a common language, a common history, a common geographic region of birth.

The peoples of Europe thus developed ethnic identities expressed in symbols and feats: flags, anthems, languages, church services, food, exploratory expeditions, historical accounts and historical falsification, school trips to the capitol, world fairs, parades, cultural and sports events, etc. In the name of "our people," not the people as Rousseau had put it. They have fought and bled for their kin, their birthplace, their beliefs, their historical perceptions of themselves. Their background and the history of the everyday lives of their forebears are contained in museums with so called ethnographic collections. The peoples of Europe became conscious 'ethnic' groupings.

It was symptomatic of romantic nationalism that its new generation of European intellectuals reacted against the dominance of French civilization around the middle of the nineteenth century. They unreservedly began to extol their own literature and culture. French, like Hebrew, Greek and Latin — the languages of educated Europeans — received stiff competition from other tongues, the mother tongues.

The cosmopolitan rationalism and liberal nationalism gave way to local and patriotic fervor. It is easy to find myths, and an abundance of mystical and flowery expressions in romantic nationalism. But its core cannot be dismissed as unfounded. Common experiences and myths that become common have consequences for a society. As we have repeatedly seen, man may be born as a biological creature, but he becomes a social creature when he is introduced into a symbolic environment and can use language, not only as a means of communication, but de facto to define reality for him, give him a personal identity, and social roots.

The cosmopolitan rationalism and liberal nationalism gave way to local beginning understanding of the dynamics inherent in nationalism. Nationalism fed on existing traditional symbolic environments and developed them: mother tongue, folklore, songs, flags, etc. The theories also understand the dislike, nay hatred, that follows repression of ethnic expressions. To prohibit people from using their own language in newspapers, in school, in contacts with authorities — sometimes even in public places — to deprive them both of their perceptions of reality and of their identity. The outcome of such repressions is that people want to be ruled by their own kind, not by strangers.

The cosmopolitan rationalism and liberal nationalism gave way to local Figure 6.2 shows the ethnic symbolic environments in Europe as they were in the second half of the nineteenth century up to World War I, and the political boundaries as they were in 1848. They fit rather badly, and this discrepancy is one of the most important keys to the following history of Europe. A nation-state is a territory that consists of only one integral ethnic-linguistic symbolic environment. Most of the European states that have been created during the past 200 years have approximated nation-states in this sense. The practices to draw boundaries with little due consideration of ethnic-linguistic symbolic environments has not ceased but greatly diminished.

Figure 12.3. Ethnic and National Borders in Europe in 1920

The map of Europe after World War I in Figure 12.3 contains new nation-states formed from the former Hapsburg Empire. But the war’s foremost loser, Europe’s largest nation, Germany, did not represent a closely knit state. Ethnic Germans were to be found, among other places, in the Saar, Austria, Böhmen-Mähren, Danzig. Hitler’s Germany incorporated them, one after another, in the period leading to World War II.

After the war, The German Democratic Republic, DDR, ("East Germany")  was not a nation-state, but a construction of the victorious powers intended to permanently weaken a vanquished Germany. During its short existence DDR did establish a certain identity as a nation of respected athletes and as window dressing for successful socialism. It had state ownership of industry, extensive state welfare measures for children, the sick, and elderly. It also paid heavy subsidies to food and housing, rationing such commodities by using queues rather than prices. The queuing system annoyed the broad masses more than the low prices pleased them. Compared with other countries in the Eastern Bloc, DDR fared relatively well, but it did not compare well in total wealth with the market economies in western Europe. By 1988 West Germany had attained an income per capita of GNP of 20,000 dollars, while East Germany had attained a corresponding income of only 5,340 dollars. This kind of inferior performance undermined communism as a system — particularly among the communist elite.

During the last few decades of the 20th century, a reawakened nationalism in Eastern Europe outside of DDR would sunder Yugoslavia, it would give Moscow massive difficulties in most of the republics of the Soviet Union, it would become a driving force in politics in Poland, Hungary, Rumania and other countries of Eastern Europe.

The believers in the rational nationalism of the Enlightenment regard ethnic conflicts as something primitive that belongs to a former era. They view the courage of the warrior in a romantic ethnic movement as abhorrent stupidity, their nationalism as a loser’s ideology. As long as the remnants of this rational nationalism from the Enlightenment survive, they open for relaxed solutions to ethnic conflicts. Thus Swedes surrendered Norway in 1905 without a fight; they also accepted the ruling of the international court in the Hague for independence of the island of Åland in 1919. On January 1, 1993 Czechs and Slovaks of Czechoslovakia parted ways peacefully. Unfortunately, this level of rational nationalism is in short supply. In the era of romantic nationalism the ultimate consequences of our Proposition of Likeness-liking and Dissimilarity-dislike are wars and uprisings to let people be ruled by their own kind, not by strangers. 

Ethnic Federations

Can states that contain ethnic and language divisions survive in modern Europe? The prospect provided by the past 150 years is bleak. Russia and former Yugoslavia have grave problems, and Belgium is just managing to keep together. But Switzerland does not have any serious problems.

Switzerland – a confederation that has turned into a federation – has not assimilated its ethnic groups as the U.S. has done. Germans, French, and Italians continue to live as separate groups. The Germans constitute approximately 70 percent of the Swiss population. If Switzerland had an ordinary system of majority rule, the Germans would govern the country; ethnic conflicts would be common, and, at least the French would proclaim independence and secede.

A federation, as we will discuss in Chapter 22, contains a built-in opposition between national majority rule and the aspirations of provinces. The solution to this antagonism is not to be sought in the minorities’ attitude toward the state but in the majority’s view of the state. Switzerland requires that a referendum be passed both of a majority of voters, and a majority of cantons. For a federation of unassimilated ethnic and linguistic minorities can exist if the minority feels that it is receiving more than its proportional due share of benefits from the federal state and that it has virtually as much influence on the federal state as the majority has.

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Chapter 13.

Vocabularies of Identities

  Individual Identity: Self-image

    The Looking-Glass Self

    Significant Others

    The Authentic Self

  Collective Identity

  Vocabularies of Inclusion and Exclusion

    Inclusion

   Exclusion

  Expressing Opinions as a Ticket to Inclusion or Exclusion