Violence; A few cheerful thoughts

In light of all the ongoing violence in the news, I thought I would finally get around to writing about a book by Randall Collins, Violence; A Microsociological Theory (hereafter VAMT). Collins, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, studies the face-to-face interactions that build up into what we call society. I wrote earlier about his book Interaction Ritual Chains.

To recap the foundation of his theory: We spend our lives engaged in interaction rituals, most of which Collins calls “status rituals,” these being involved in group membership and position. Much of what we do has a constant subtext that runs,

“We are members of the same group, right?”

“Yes, we are, and these are our relative status positions in that group.”

This happens every time we interact with another human being. Through this group solidarity we attempt to extract what Collins calls “emotional energy,” that positive, energizing, affirming sense of self. By the time we reach the end of childhood we are firmly patterned to seek this group solidarity with everyone we meet. This makes perfect evolutionary sense, as we are a species that has survived on the strength of our gregarious nature.

This is why Collins’s book VAMT tells us that everything we thought we knew about violence is wrong. Popular media (films, television, books, what passes for news) tell us that interpersonal violence is a constant threat, that it is easy for even ordinarily peaceful people to devolve into violence, that violence is contagious, and that humans are naturally predisposed to violence.

On the contrary, Collins proposes that this impression exists because of the demands of narrative drama and sampling bias. “Nothing happened” doesn’t make the headlines and peaceful cooperation never sold tickets.

Certainly, Syria, Iraq, Libya and eastern Ukraine are not vacation spots right now. However, even organized violence is affected by the problem of status ritual.

Collins observes a natural resistance to interpersonal violence. He observes two things. One, most personal confrontations devolve into bluster and display rather than overt physical violence. These verbal standoffs don’t make the news, of course. Compare “Man stabs roommate in argument over TV remote” vs. “Two men trash talk each other in dispute over TV remote, one finally hands it over.” Two, only a small percentage of people are both willing and competent to commit violence.

After watching hundreds of hours of film and video of mob violence, as well as studying photographs, police records and personal accounts, Collins finds that in a riot by 10,000 people, about 9,900 will be standing back watching, 75 will be close to the action shouting, and 25 will actually be fighting and breaking things.

The same goes for soldiers at war. Historically, large numbers of soldiers end up being essentially spectators, rarely using their weapons. A minority actually fire, and only a percentage of those actually fire effectively. When interviewed, soldiers in a platoon all agree on which of their comrades are the aggressive ones. An interesting fact that I will get into later is that soldiers firing crew served weapons, where a group of soldiers cooperates (heavy machine guns and mortars, for example) fire more consistently and competently than soldiers with individual weapons. The U.S. military has spent considerable time and effort on training individual soldiers to actually fire their weapons consistently in combat.

Bringing us into the news, police officers act in a similar way. Most officers rarely draw their sidearms, rarely fire them, and rarely, if ever, get a physical force complaint against them. A small percentage of officers draw their weapons often, get into physical confrontations regularly, and accumulate complaints of excessive force. Again, as with soldiers, everyone in their group can identify them as the aggressive minority. As with soldiers, the percentage of people in this group is in the low single digits.

On the other side of the law, street gangs have a few members who are the enforcers. The other members will fight if absolutely necessary, but there are always one or two violently charismatic individuals who are the go-to guys.

Collins describes the buildup to violence as one filled with confrontational tension. The tension is between the desire of an individual to win a conflict and that person’s lifelong practice of establishing group solidarity with others. To attack someone physically is the ultimate expression of rejection from one’s in-group. It goes against our social programming. In order to fight, individuals have to go through a set of rituals to break through this barrier. They also generally have to have an audience that supports the idea of fighting.

On a topical note: Having read VAMT, reading about a police officer in Ferguson calling black protestors “fucking animals” was both unsurprising and illuminating. It was an indication that the virtually all white police force had long since identified the black population as an absolute out group. No need to overcome confrontational tension before violence when there is no such tension to begin with.

In VAMT Professor Collins also introduces the concept of the “forward panic.” We are all familiar with a backward panic. It’s the disorganized rout of a group of people rendered weak by fear. The opposite effect happens when a group prepares itself emotionally for physical conflict and then encounters weak resistance or none at all. The group is all dressed up with nowhere to go. Two examples at the opposite ends of the scale: The “Rape of Nanking” by the Japanese army in 1937 and the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles in 1991.

In the case of Nanking, the Japanese were expecting the level of resistance justified by the defense of a major city and prepared for a major battle. When the Chinese army collapsed after token resistance, surrendering in large numbers, the Japanese broke through the barrier of confrontational tension with a huge amount of energy.  What resulted was what Collins calls a moral holiday. The slaughter and mistreatment of both soldiers and civilians was akin to mass insanity on the part of the Japanese and took weeks to run its course.

In the case of Rodney King, he had led the police on a high speed chase before offering token resistance to arrest by multiple officers. Keyed up and ready for a fight, perhaps even a gun fight, the officers unleashed hugely disproportionate force on King, several of them beating his prone body with nightsticks. A supportive audience of fellow officers stood around and witnessed the event.

Collins observes that when equal forces meet face to face, neither turning aside, both with equal emotional energy, what usually results is a non-violent standoff. In mob violence, physical attacks tend to involve isolated, retreating individuals attacked by small groups. He expands on this in a useful article on his blog, “Tank Man, and the limits of telephoto lenses; or, how much can individuals stop violence?” 

His advice is that in a confrontation, your face, your eyes, and your voice are your best defense. Never turn away from a confrontation, because that allows an aggressor to avoid engaging with you as a person.* He notes that when police are in full forward panic mode, people who turn away and run are more likely to be beaten than people who non-violently stand their ground and attempt to verbally engage the police. That can re-channel the interaction into a status ritual.

*(Why did the Storm Troopers in Star Wars wear that utterly useless all-covering white “armor”? To deny them faces so they could be slaughtered by the heroes without qualm.)

Back to the crew-served weapons: The reason that these weapons are used more effectively by soldiers is a function of two factors.  The group solidarity in the face of confrontational tension reinforces the soldiers in their actions. As important, it allows the soldiers to focus their attention on each other rather than the enemy. Firing becomes less of a confrontation and more of a group effort. The marching formations and coordinated pike and musket drill of centuries past were similar in their group enabling power. Simply moving in physical coordination with others is a powerful status ritual.

Amidst all the violence we see in the news, it is reassuring to think that interpersonal violence actually requires quite a bit of effort to initiate. More than that, it requires a specific series of events to precipitate, and can be derailed at a number of points. Or, for that matter, prevented at a number of points. One of the main points of VAMT is that violence is not the inevitable result of culture, poverty, or childhood abuse. It is situational, and we can plan and structure our society to trend towards some situations and away from others.

Just to bring this into the topical realm, in light of the police shooting Michael Brown in Ferguson Missouri, here’s a question: How many police officers do you know, and know well? If you aren’t a police officer or related to a police officer, the answer is probably zero. I wouldn’t be the first to observe that over the past few decades law enforcement officers have become an insular subculture. Cops socialize with cops; civilians –the rest of us – socialize with civilians. That goes a hundred-fold in communities such as Ferguson. I don’t have a glib answer for this problem, but I have an idea that it involves day to day social interactions. That’s what makes us see each other as allies rather than enemies.

Two Books About Rituals

The first is Slow Democracy, by Susan Clark and Woden Teachout. The second is Interaction Ritual Chains by Randall Collins. Slow Democracy is practical and specific in its focus, whereas IRC is academic and general.

Slow Democracy is an exploration and explanation of direct democracy. The most common example is the tradition of New England town meeting. By this I (and the authors) mean a real town meeting, with a printed warning mailed out to all residents, an agenda, Roberts Rules, real decisions made about planning and finances, and a supper afterwards. I (and they) definitely do not mean a staged media event where a hapless politician gets screamed at by a stacked crowd of mutual strangers with nothing invested in the process. Clark and Teachout are clear on this point: people at a real town meeting aren’t yelling at the government; they are the government.

Update and clarification: I should note that what the authors are discussing is direct deliberative democracy. Voting on a ballot initiative is direct democracy, but it lacks the vital components of discussion, education, and negotiation. Voting yes or no on Ballot Measure #12 lacks the nuance of deliberative democracy. It's like a car with its steering wheel replaced by a left/right switch.

More generally, Slow Democracy concerns itself with any political process that involves ordinary citizens in face-to-face meetings, exchanging information, deliberating, and coming to decisions about the policies that affect their lives. It’s a vital subject these days with the word “democracy”, as the authors point out, diluted to the point of meaninglessness. Part of their thesis is that there is wisdom available out there in the population if we create the structures to extract it, encourage it, and organize it. Part of their thesis is that aside from better political outcomes, participatory politics has a cascade of secondary outcomes that benefit a community.

Some of the academic language in Slow Democracy dragged a bit, but it truly shined in describing the successes and failures of real-world political processes all over the U.S. It follows the residents of a small town in Appalachia as they get conned with a public input process that is only window dressing. This makes one of Clark and Teachout’s main points: true democracy is not about giving advice from the back seat, it’s about driving. There is a tendency for conventional government entities to use public input as a political tranquilizer, something the true small-d democrat must watch for. The happy ending is that the townspeople persevere and get what they want. The authors follow the story of Portsmouth New Hampshire as it struggles with school consolidation. Different sections of the community start with mutual animosity and staked out positions. Through an inclusive and carefully planned process the opposing groups get to know each other and do some creative problem solving. It takes time, but the outcome has wide support. Portsmouth also sets itself up for the same sort of resolution of future conflicts.

The authors emphasize that real democracy is not a casual or accidental process. Organizers can’t just rely on a self-selected group for input. The beginning of a process is searching out and inviting a diverse group of citizens. It’s not about throwing people in a room and seeing what happens. That’s reality TV, not democratic process. Democracy needs an agenda, rules of discourse, and specified goals.

Slow Democracy is not a step by step manual, but a comprehensive overview of the principles and fundamental strategies of direct democracy. It gives the reader justifications, techniques, and real examples of real democracy. I’d call it a must-read for anyone interested in getting a better grip on local politics.

Warning: Interaction Ritual Chains is dense. PhD dense. Eye-crossingly dense at times. It was not written as popular non-fiction. The intended audience is other people with advanced degrees. You might want to prep by reading the works of Durkheim, Weber, and Goffman, all extensively referenced.

Thus warned, I must tell you that the book is fascinating. It is so jam-packed with ideas that it is virtually impossible to summarize with any justice, but I’ll offer the basics.

Randall Collins studies microsociology, the billions of person to person interactions that add up to what we call society. His theory involves interaction rituals (IR), which can be anything from the little moves we do to avoid bumping into each other on the street all the way up to formal religious ceremonies. The “chains” in the title refers to the fact that each ritual we experience leads into and influences the next. The mass of rituals we have experienced in our lives defines our possible responses to the next IR in line. Collins flips our general view of rules/morals and actions on its head. By his account, interaction rituals are the foundation of our values, and not the other way around.

Collins grades IRs by their level of mutual focus, physical and emotional intensity, and physical entrainment. By the latter, he means the actual physical coordination of our movements. Researchers have reviewed video recordings of people conversing and interacting with the tapes slowed to a crawl. What emerges is that we engage in a subtle dance that we don’t consciously register. A subtle movement by one member of a group is mimicked by another, and the movement ripples through the group.

A successful IR raises the emotional energy of the participants. It’s really all about dopamine in the pleasure centers of the brain, and our mirror neurons. We have parts of our brains that fire up when we watch someone else doing something as if we were actually performing that action ourselves. People involved in a successful IR feel a greater sense of belonging, optimism, power, and satisfaction. This can be a subtle lift in mood or something like life changing ecstasy. An unsuccessful IR (and there are many) leaves participants feeling more distressed, alienated, and drained of energy.

We take several things away from an IR:

An attraction or aversion to that particular type of interaction.

A gain or loss of emotional energy.

A symbol or set of symbols that we can later use to recreate what we experienced in the IR.

The symbol could be a word or phrase, an image, a piece of music, a gesture, or a physical object. Imagine the fan of a particular band coming home from a concert and listening to the same music while looking at pictures of that band. It is a faint facsimile of the experience of being in the swaying, roaring crowd, enveloped in high decibel sound.

Symbols are not evergreen. People need to engage in IRs to recharge symbols with their original vitality. Symbols often gain a meaning and importance equal to or greater than their origins. Thus we gain sacred objects. People value them intensely for their ability to recreate positive IR experiences.

Collins illustrates this in a roundabout way by discussing breaching experiments. Some researchers explored the breaching of ordinary and innocuous social standards and observed people’s reactions. One was called the “unexplainable do-gooder.” A person in formal business clothing was set to the task of cleaning up a section of a street. Inevitably a local resident would question the cleaner. Did he live there? No. Was he being paid to clean? No. Was he being forced to clean because of community service, or losing a bet? No. The street was dirty. People would get agitated, confused, even angry because they couldn’t find a socially normative explanation for the man in the business suit cleaning the street. He’s not doing anything truly wrong, but he’s doing something emotionally wrong by stepping outside the boundaries of an assumed social pattern.

It’s not in this book, but it reminds me of an experiment referenced in Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind. Researchers asked people to make moral judgments on hypotheticals, one of them being a woman who buys an American flag and secretly cleans her bathroom with it. The act is legal, it affects nobody and offends nobody, but people still reacted strongly to the concept. The hypothetical cleaning woman was manipulating a powerful emotional symbol in a way that struck at people’s arbitrary valuation of the object.

Collins writes about types of IRs, such as power IRs and status IRs. A power IR is one where one person demonstrates their social power over another. It is a one sided interaction, with the dominant participant walking away with the emotional energy and the other diminished. The other common type is a status ritual, where people demonstrate their belonging to a group. This is also rarely egalitarian, with some people ending up closer to the center of the group and others more towards the fringe, with the relative benefits one would expect. Nevertheless, it is this sort of IR towards which people gravitate. In a species that has made its fortune by being gregarious, belonging is a big deal. THE big deal. An individual’s relative status within a group is also a big deal, and we engage in subtle testing and observation of this ranking in every interaction.

As I wrote above, there is too much in this book to do it justice without actually rewriting it. I’ll give a few more highlights, though.

The more formal a ritual, the more it establishes categories of membership. Think of attending a Catholic mass and taking communion. It’s binary – you are either in or out.

The less formal a ritual, the more it establishes personal reputation. American society is ostensibly egalitarian. We have mostly given up on the formal class based social rituals of the past, and deference is unfashionable. Contrast today to the 1890s, when thousands of people turned out to watch the 400 richest people in New York City attend a grand party. Today our status elite are media celebrities. Minus the aura of deference they become human totems. People strive to get near them, touch them, or take away something significant from them. Note the periodic auctions of a celebrity’s personal items. People are trying to take away a symbolic fragment of the emotional energy accumulated by an IR lightning rod. Movie stars and rock stars have huge resources of social status from continually being at the epicenter of huge IR status rituals.

Collins has an interesting sidebar on tobacco rituals. They used to be status defining rituals. Taking snuff was a refined ritual of the upper classes – until it became more commonly available, at which time it became unacceptable for upper class women. Pipe smoking was originally a convivial activity among men in public places. This slowly evolved until in the mid 20^th century it was a solitary occupation for upper-middle class men. Chewing tobacco was exclusively male and exclusively working class, as it remains today. Cigar smoking was a male upper class phenomenon in the 19^th and early 20^th century, and a defined after dinner ritual. As cigars became cheaper it lost its cachet. Likewise, cigarettes were indicative of the upper class party animal through the first half of the 20^th century. People displayed stylish cigarette cases and elegant women gestured with cigarette holders. The movies of the 1930s epitomize this. As with many other things, mass production cheapened the ritual, and by the 1960s all forms of tobacco use had lost their high-status origins. Collins makes the point that anti-smoking campaigns would have failed before this time, not so much because of industry push back, but because tobacco still had a politically powerful constituency using it as a sign of class status.

There is much more here, but I’ll leave it at that. I find the book validating in that it reminds me of an essay I wrote recently, before I ever read it: The Real World It’s about what people call social capital, the sum total of all the little, seemingly pointless face-to-face interactions we have every day. It’s the glue that holds us together.