I vaguely remember when I first encountered sociology and wondered, ‘what’s that about.’ I had taken an ‘aptitude test’ during my first year in college. It indicated that my highest strengths were in ‘science’ and ‘social.’ My first thought was, “What’s ‘social?” When I explored the social sciences, especially sociology and psychology, I encountered a great deal of talk about the relations between the “individual and society.’ Okay, so one category is made up of all the members of the other, but it is far more complex than that.
The discussions I read usually implied some conflict between the two. Is the person always in conflict with the group? Of course not, just some are, some of the time. But the literature implied that some tension always exists between the individual and society. The two always exist in some dynamic relation, which varies in time and place. It is rare that most of the individuals in a society are in conflict with the society as a whole. If that happens, a revolution of some sort is possible, even likely. But wait, there is so much more.
Hierarchy is Not an Aggregate, It is a Structure.
Societies are not simply made up of an aggregate of individuals. We all live in some set of relations with one another and with larger entities from family and community to state and national institutions. As I got into studying sociology in the mid-1960s amid the emerging ‘counter culture’ of civil rights and anti-war protests and youth rebellion against the consumer culture, it became clear that ‘mid-century American’ sociology had tended to leave differential power and its hierarchy out of its dominant theories and research. Today, Tim Walz’s Midwest admonition, “Mind your own business!” seems to value both individual independence and community responsibility.
C. Wright Mills called out his professional colleagues on that, and he was ostracized from Columbia University and shunned by the profession for his trouble. After all, the ‘professionalizers’ were trying to gain respectability for the relatively new academic discipline and were not interested in challenging the power elites Mills wrote about so effectively.
Only the next generation of students took Mills seriously and ultimately made him an icon of many students in sociology and among many civil rights and anti-war protestors in the 1960s. Mills was a voice of independent thinking in seeking to understand the role of hierarchy in society and the larger world. Yet, whatever their ideological position even today, most scholars and citizens continue to think about power (if they think about it at all) in linear terms. “Causal analysis” remains all the rage. However, societies, persons, and all other living systems are, in fact complex adaptive systems that are far too complex to be understood in mere linear terms.
We see this paradox of person and system arise quite frequently in attempts to understand the human response to the complex convergence of multiple system crises in the world today. Critical thinking about hierarchy in society is an inherent threat to the structure of power and to the power elites. Unfortunately, these matters are not mere academic ‘problems.’ We live directly within what some ‘lefties’ used to call “the belly of the beast”–actually a very old metaphor. We live within societal hierarchies that can work against us, but to what extent are we of them? More important, we live within the very Earth System that our culture of dissociation views as separate from ourselves and our society, something to exploit, while we ignore our intimate involvement as members of it.
We Are All In it, But Not Necessarily Of, the Global Empire.
One of the reasons our ‘leaders’ seem stuck and unable to face the facts of climate change and quite a number of other urgent crises in the world today, such as the economic and social injustices that abound, is that those leaders reside within the higher reaches of the power structure of the Global Empire of political-economic growth. The global empire has as its primary goal the continuation and expansion of itself.
These powerful people are not only in the Empire like the rest of us, but they are also very much of it, both economically and psychologically. Their own careers and perceived personal futures are all very wrapped up in the roles they play. They so actively perpetuate the system that Nature tells us clearly cannot grow or be sustained much longer, that they cannot see the forest for the trees.
It is so obvious from our extensive understanding of how the Earth System works, that a perpetually growing Empire of Extraction cannot continue much longer on this finite planet. Yet the majoritarian voice of reason, unity, caring, and strength against the MAGA Madness, insisted last night in the debate between humanity and incoherent delusion, almost proudly it seems, that she would not ban fracking, one of the most ecologically damaging processes of extraction.
Fracking, among many other damaging practices, is currently keeping carbon emissions higher than ever, pushing us ever closer to climate and ecological collapse. Well, Kamala Harris was speaking in Pennsylvania, where many jobs rely on fracking. The climate candidate is a politician first, but Mother Nature will not be messed with much more without catastrophic consequences. We desperately need leadership that can transcend ‘normal politics’ even as we overcome the politics of the autocratic attempt.
The presidential candidate of joy rose above being sucked into engaging with the dehumanizing antics of a narcissistic sociopath and offered a humanized vision of a political future. Nevertheless, she appeared to support sustaining a global extractive empire that must be radically transformed to conform to the Laws of Nature if we as a species are to survive in the coming decades. Only by minimizing the death and destruction that are sure to accompany our failure to re-harmonize with the currently destabilizing complex adaptive ecosystem that is our only home, Gaia, can we move forward toward an ecological civilization. As I commented on listening to Kamala’s fracking affirmation, we will have to fight that one after the election.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 