American Environics
Jan. 28th, 2006 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusRemapping the culture debate is a fascinating article in American Prospect magazine. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger set up the US branch of Environics, a Canadian market research firm which studies behaviour, attitudes and lifestyles. American Environics had a bigger ambition than mere market research, though. They wanted to look at mistaken assumptions in progressive political movements, and recommend new clusters of values environmentalists, liberals and Democrats in the US could move towards to improve their chances of connecting with basic attitudes amongst consumers citizens. After conducting extensive research, they came to the conclusion that culture was key; progressive politics should switch its emphasis from economic arguments to cultural ones.
Now, political polling (for instance, around the 2004 US election, which many commentators agreed was determined by cultural values) tends to restrict its interest in cultural values to a few hot-button social issues: abortion, gay marriage, religion. But, using market research methods rather than political pollsters' methods, Nordhaus and Shellenberger widened the net, including as "cultural values" subtler things: attitudes towards “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence”. "They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews," says American Prospect.
The prospect of America that emerged was a somewhat grim one, as the magazine reports:
"Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks."
The researchers devised a quadrant of basic attitudes -- a "values matrix" -- which drew clusters of values together:
"Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”
(I personally find this idea of "self-clustering" a very interesting one: it's precisely this which makes cultures or political affiliations visible, gives them a clear identity. There's a kind of magnetic effect, whereby certain values cohere even if they're logically inconsistent, like the right's embrace of freedom of choice and rejection of abortion. The logic is a cultural one: "to believe these contradictory things is our culture".)
In America, the magazine continues, "over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant."
In my diagram of the American Environics values quadrant, I've added approximately where I think China, Japan and Europe might be plotted on the attitude map. China and Japan's Confucian-collectivist cultures make them resemble the old-fashioned "Jimmy Stewart" conservative values America is currently moving away from (family structure, respect for your elders, emotional control and obedience). But as I see it, while China leans strongly to the "Survival" quadrant, Japan remains a notably tender-minded place where "Fulfillment" values are strongly in evidence. The Sweden of Asia, you might say.
Now, political polling (for instance, around the 2004 US election, which many commentators agreed was determined by cultural values) tends to restrict its interest in cultural values to a few hot-button social issues: abortion, gay marriage, religion. But, using market research methods rather than political pollsters' methods, Nordhaus and Shellenberger widened the net, including as "cultural values" subtler things: attitudes towards “time stress,” “joy of consumption,” and “acceptance of violence”. "They were, in short, trying to elucidate the measurable components of worldviews," says American Prospect.
The prospect of America that emerged was a somewhat grim one, as the magazine reports:"Looking at the data from 1992 to 2004, Shellenberger and Nordhaus found a country whose citizens are increasingly authoritarian while at the same time feeling evermore adrift, isolated, and nihilistic. They found a society at once more libertine and more puritanical than in the past, a society where solidarity among citizens was deteriorating, and, most worrisomely to them, a progressive clock that seemed to be unwinding backward on broad questions of social equity. Between 1992 and 2004, for example, the percentage of people who said they agree that “the father of the family must be the master in his own house” increased ten points, from 42 to 52 percent, in the 2,500-person Environics survey. The percentage agreeing that “men are naturally superior to women” increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the fraction that said they discussed local problems with people they knew plummeted from 66 percent to 39 percent. Survey respondents were also increasingly accepting of the value that “violence is a normal part of life” -- and that figure had doubled even before the al-Qaeda terrorist attacks."
The researchers devised a quadrant of basic attitudes -- a "values matrix" -- which drew clusters of values together:
"Lumping specific survey statements like these together into related groups, Nordhaus and Shellenberger arrived at what they call “social values trends,” such as “sexism,” “patriotism,” or “acceptance of flexible families.” But the real meaning of those trends was revealed only by plugging them into the “values matrix” -- a four-quadrant plot with plenty of curving arrows to show direction, which is then overlaid onto voting data. The quadrants represent different worldviews. On the top lies authority, an orientation that values traditional family, religiosity, emotional control, and obedience. On the bottom, the individuality orientation encompasses risk-taking, “anomie-aimlessness,” and the acceptance of flexible families and personal choice. On the right side of the scale are values that celebrate fulfillment, such as civic engagement, ecological concern, and empathy. On the left, there’s a cluster of values representing the sense that life is a struggle for survival: acceptance of violence, a conviction that people get what they deserve in life, and civic apathy. These quadrants are not random: Shellenberger and Nordaus developed them based on an assessment of how likely it was that holders of certain values also held other values, or “self-clustered.”
(I personally find this idea of "self-clustering" a very interesting one: it's precisely this which makes cultures or political affiliations visible, gives them a clear identity. There's a kind of magnetic effect, whereby certain values cohere even if they're logically inconsistent, like the right's embrace of freedom of choice and rejection of abortion. The logic is a cultural one: "to believe these contradictory things is our culture".)
In America, the magazine continues, "over the past dozen years, the arrows have started to point away from the fulfillment side of the scale, home to such values as gender parity and personal expression, to the survival quadrant, home to illiberal values such as sexism, fatalism, and a focus on “every man for himself.” Despite the increasing political power of the religious right, Environics found social values moving away from the authority end of the scale, with its emphasis on responsibility, duty, and tradition, to a more atomized, rage-filled outlook that values consumption, sexual permissiveness, and xenophobia. The trend was toward values in the individuality quadrant."In my diagram of the American Environics values quadrant, I've added approximately where I think China, Japan and Europe might be plotted on the attitude map. China and Japan's Confucian-collectivist cultures make them resemble the old-fashioned "Jimmy Stewart" conservative values America is currently moving away from (family structure, respect for your elders, emotional control and obedience). But as I see it, while China leans strongly to the "Survival" quadrant, Japan remains a notably tender-minded place where "Fulfillment" values are strongly in evidence. The Sweden of Asia, you might say.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 12:57 pm (UTC)Absolutely. I've mentioned him several times here. And yesterday (http://imomus.livejournal.com/168958.html) I made a comment using the word "distinction" (describing the fashion system) in the exact sense Bourdieu would have used it in his book of the same title.
Bourdieu would also have greatly disliked the idea of self-clustering as it tends to forget that this data does not as it were lie in wait to be collected, one constitutes a certain set of data as an object of scientific inquiry, and comes to conclusions which issue from a certain kind of methodology.
But there is human agency in this data, not just in the way it's constituted and construed by its collectors (sociologists, market researchers), but in the way it's constituted and construed by the respondents, the citizens being studied. The reason the data "self-clusters" is that people want to group themselves with other people, and want there to be a consistency in the beliefs they embrace. It may not be a logical consistency (as I described above in the example of freedom of choice and non-freedom to choose abortion both being part of the Republican ideas-cluster), but it's a cultural consistency. "This is the culture of Republicans, if I want to be a Republican I must embrace it." That's self-clustering. It's nothing to do with researchers cooking the books, or data having a mysterious will of its own.
I personally don't see a strong correlation between tender-mindedness and aristocrats. After all, Sade was an aristocrat. Prince Phillip is an aristocrat. Are these tender-minded people? You could as accurately say there's a "disturbing" link between my views and the Christian view of the meek inheriting the Earth.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 09:26 pm (UTC)Ah, but this may not be so cut and dried as it seems (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200601/culture-war).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 09:46 pm (UTC)But I still think that the position you're exhorting here is aristocratic, not necessarily that of an aristocrat and not as regards to the actual characteristics of aristocrats (tenderness or not) but as regards a certain social position. You'll recall in Bourdieu that the fact of aristocrats playing tennis and not football is completely inconsequential; that what matters is the position of tennis and of football in relative social space and the way in which those sports match up with the social position of their players. The argument I meant to make was that the disdain for China and the United States is part of a larger disdain in which China and the United States are more or less inconsequential, what matters is their (perceived-- since I don't think you can substantiate this necessarily) position in social space-- their levels of cultural and economic capital. Survival is, after all, about relative levels of capital. This is all Bourdieu's language of course. But can you see the way in which there might be an ambiguity between the position you're staking here and a far more conservative position?
More than even these small quibbles Bourdieu did an enormous amount of complicated ethnographic work in the provinces. His early work is concerned with the Kabyles of Algeria and Bearn, in the Pyrenees, and towards the end of his life he was engaging in debates over the banlieues, genetic structuralism, and education which have been filmed and released under the title La Sociologie est un sport de combat. Even though this kind of research draws on Bourdieu's (kind of ridiculous) graphs of people and practices in social space do you really think that it has inherited, I guess, the martial quality of his work, the way in which it actually is a confrontation? I mean that I think this is the type of opinion one could spew off without contest in any expensive restaraunt; it challenges very little which is why I think it's a kind of fake politics, in the same way that for Foucault, William Reich, for all of his bluster, is really the bluster of that which fails in every way to mark out a more fundamental critique.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-29 01:18 am (UTC)I think Reich is still social dynamite. And I personally think there's more radical potential in Freud (from whom Reich descends) than Nietzsche (from whom Foucault descends).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-30 04:21 am (UTC)But if you want to talk about radical potential, do you really think that there's radical potential in proclaiming what you have, about quadrants and certain countries? I mean do you really think that?