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 02:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 02:35 am (UTC)The teachers I work with agree that something has been lost in the current crop of kids. I think it goes well beyond the normal intergeneration misunderstanding.
incest is for the specialized
Date: 2006-01-28 02:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 02:45 am (UTC)I think you can see both attitudes, both directions, in this quote from Hisayo Takano (http://www.japantimes.com/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?fl20060124jk.htm), a Tokyo hostess interviewed by the Japan Times the other day:
"The bubble economy changed people. Japanese changed for the worst, especially women, because they got a lot of money without much effort. They became more calculating and demanding and a lot less gentle and delicate. Japanese are more emotional than logical. We used to have the concept of giri, the kind of touchy emotional feeling and sense of duty and obligation to return favors. When we still had our giri, we had good teamwork, but now both are gone."
I think America's "decline" into its cowboy-anomie corner is actually not setting a very attractive example to the rest of the world right now, and that's making people move away from those "American values" rather than towards them.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 02:46 am (UTC)And of course I hardly need to point out that Horie is currently in prison!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 02:57 am (UTC)horie's in prison for the illegal stuff, he was praised highly for all his just barely legal stuff. Selfishness is the hot ticket in japan.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 03:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 03:19 am (UTC)St. Mishima is frowning in heaven.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 03:31 am (UTC)The first comment is really answered well by today's entry: first of all, culture is extremely important as a component of politics. Secondly, self-expression is a major component of the American Environics schema, lying between, and linking, the Fulfillment and Individuality axes. (There might be some debate about whether Japanese snappy dressing is "Individuality", as in the Gwen Stefani version of "Harajuku Girls", or "Fulfillment", something Marxy might term a version of "orthopraxy", ie something more collectivist. And here, as so often, I'd agree with Marxy, though not agree that that was negative.)
In the end I think the difference between yesterday's entry and today's is not that one is non-political and the other political. It's that one is political campaigning and endorsement of a specific political lifestyle and worldview (yesterday's), whereas one is a more meta discussion about definitions (today's).
In short: politics is not restricted to the first couple of levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs). It covers the whole thing, from the bottom to the top (which is "Actualization", ie self-expression, ie, amongst other things, snappy dressing).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 03:33 am (UTC)And yes, Japan isn't violent. Takashi Miike is a comedian.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 04:47 am (UTC)but an "every man for himself" philosophy wouldn't be in favor of sending troops to other countries.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 04:53 am (UTC)For instance, if people see family structure breaking down around them, they vote for a party that says there ought to be strong family values... without really looking into whether the policies of that party are really going to strengthen families or further weaken them. Or they'll vote for a party that claims to be guided by Christian ideas, without looking at whether that party actually practises Christian doctrines. The aspiration, the discourse, seems to be enough.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 04:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 05:35 am (UTC)china may play the nerdy, money-grabbing gates to japan's slick jobs, but don't mistake that for civi apathy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 05:38 am (UTC)It isn't just that you are exhorting us to approach a gentler, fairer habitus; I mean that there is an uncomfortable ambiguity between the ethical sense of the world-- the ecological, the caring, the tender-- and a kind of aristocratic haughtiness, almost as if what was under discussion was the nouveau riche-- such that the position almost seems to be constituted in that latter sense, it almost seems to issue from the desire, for example, to not be nouveau riche. The 'survival' quadrant is a shorthand for the vulgar, for the developing world; and in being a shorthand it seems to me a rejection of a certain kind of moral responsibility (the destitution of the face of the Other, who calls me to ethics, etc.) Inasmuch as this is an ethics which asks for a compensatory function-- a certain style of bodily hexis, moving between the cafe and the gallery-- I am not sure how ethical, or how politically enactable, this position actually is. Judith Farquhar's materialist anthropological work on postsocialist China, and she is a lovely writer, with a lot of generosity of spirit, not a vulgar Marxist at all, would be an example of work which seems to me more politically crucial and less underhanded, and no easy task.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 09:01 am (UTC)'In the end I think the difference between yesterday's entry and today's is not that one is non-political and the other political. It's that one is political campaigning and endorsement of a specific political lifestyle and worldview (yesterday's), whereas one is a more meta discussion about definitions (today's).'
I think in a lot of cases people respond less to the 'design posts' (typically self-identified as such) because there's less to take specific issue with, or to point out that one agrees with, whereas overtly 'political' topics are more familiar territory with implications that affect our daily lives on a much wider, more universal, scale. For example, skull t-shirts in New York have a limited impact on global reality, while the U.S. refusing to sign on to Kyoto could arguably augur the destruction of the world. While I hate ugly t-shirts, I know which concerns me more.
Perhaps though, part of what you advocate is bringing these political considerations back into line with the way we choose our aesthetic preferences -- at the gut level (or are we still going to try and rationalize every pleasing graphic that flits in front of our eyes) -- and stop trying to make sense of causality altogether.
To me, you have to consider these isolated pockets of socialist utopia in context with the rest of their ecosystem. America's hegemony is a counter-balance that both enables and imperils these nation-sized temporary autonomous zones (or areas that function as such, for western travelers who need not integrate too fully into the local culture). I'm not convinced these utopias are self-created or self-sustaining, in the romantic sense so often put forward here. The imagined safety of these cultures (as expressed) seems more about reacting to the West than in actually experiencing and understanding them on their own merits.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 10:14 am (UTC)"In short: politics is not restricted to the first couple of levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It covers the whole thing, from the bottom to the top (which is "Actualization", ie self-expression, ie, amongst other things, snappy dressing)."
kamataki
Date: 2006-01-28 10:46 am (UTC)From a User comment:
"...he learns to see life in a very different, creative, harmonious way that unfortunately people in the West rarely learn."
I saw it for the first time today and it reminded me of several themes you have taken up in this blog.
- Lex
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 10:58 am (UTC)Geez, I am so confused here, because some say that Sweden is the Japan of Europe and now you suggest Japan being Sweden of Asia!?
I don't get it!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 12:30 pm (UTC)nailhead. hammer. whack!!!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 12:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 12:42 pm (UTC)(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 01:09 pm (UTC)I do like the idea of aesthetics and politics being seamlessly integrated, and I think they are, to some extent, although there are anomalies and contradictions. But that's not a way to "stop trying to make sense of causality altogether". There's still causality in aesthetics. We like things for good reasons.
Your point about the interdependence of these "utopias" is well taken, but I do think there's more subtlety to it than that; for instance, what's always interested me about post-war Japan is that, while the American system is "floating the whole thing" (as Takashi Murakami once put it, of the art world), there's a lot of subtle stubborness going on. Perhaps exactly the kind of sneaky resistance one would expect of a little boy (http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/116963.html). But from the little acorn of our childhood stubborness can grow the great oak tree of our adult character (as America, once Britain's stubborn "little boy") discovered.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-01-28 03:17 pm (UTC)