Democratic Authority (Mostly Small-Scale)

"We elected you, and we can diselect you." —

Member of Chicago Grammar School Club to

President of the Club (me,  mid-1950s)

“And this took place in the United States, a

culture that educates its children against

blind obedience.” — Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

on Milgram obedience experiments, in Ethology:

The Biology of Behavior(1970: p. 448; ch. 18)

Part of the lore of US warfare in Iraq is that the neoCons et al. who devised it didn't plan much for the aftermath in part because they firmly believed that the default setting — the universal ideal — for human government is what we in the US vaguely call "democracy." Get rid of oppressors like Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, and voilà! soon, very soon the society is moving toward becoming Denmark or even the greatness of America. Similarly for the disintegration of the USSR and Warsaw Pact — and, for a while, it indeed did look like a number of countries would “have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people” might actually expand. 

That Big Idea didn't hold up well, which did not surprise those who studied the development of actually-existing societies we call, still very loosely, democratic. That's mostly because the range of what we (loosely) call "democracy" does develop and has social and economic and cultural roots, roots that may not go down as deep as we believe — but it needs those roots.

I'm not going to deal much with Big Ideas, though there is an idea here: by age 20 I knew that democracy is far from natural and the general culture does not do a good job teaching it.

Back in high school Civics — and in grammar school before that — back in a time and place where one had to pass an exam on the US and State Constitutions and governments to get a grammar school or high school diploma — in Chicago in the mid-1950s, Mr. James Connelly taught us in Civics that the United States was a federal republic, where sovereignty rested in the People, who established a constitution giving authority to a government of elected and appointed officials, officials who then ran the government but served the People. That was our official ideology, our small "r" republican doctrine, and I believed it and figured most Americans believed ... except —

Except there was that memory from back with my grammar school club and the doctrinally ambiguous challenge to me, personally, "We elected you, and we can diselect you." Okay, "potestas in populo, auctoritas in senatu" in a formula I'd later learn from Hannah Arendt and have driven home in street demonstrations: as Mr. Connelly said, the People always retained sovereign power, from which they conferred authority  which they could take back. Except that my grammar-school classmate had questioned my authority precisely because it had been given to me by him and the other members of the club. The very limited authority of club officers was something he understood and figuratively owned and ... therefore, it seemed didn't see it as very binding.

Weird. We were taught and told and, well, indoctrinated that legitimate authority came from the People. The kid back in high school accepted — willingly and perhaps too eagerly — the authority of parents and teachers and others he had no say about, but resisted even highly limited peer authority over himself that he himself had granted.

The old “consent of the governed” bit wasn’t working out, and my fellow American youngster preferred authority over him to be built into the system and pretty much based in age and status and other criteria beyond his control. I saw that, felt it a bit as disrespect, and then did what most of us most of the time do when dealing with contradictions and what I much later learned to call cognitive dissonance: I mostly ignored it and moved on.

Mostly, but the experience stuck, and moving on included high school and college fraternities where I served a term as secretary of each and used the office to rewrite portions of our constitutions and make sure the guys debated the matter and voted on it. Get them to "buy in" as we would later say by exercising their power over our organizing documents, acknolwedge the authority and feel the worth of the group by participating in governing the group.

My college fraternity chapter in the 1960s, though, offered additional opportunities. At least back then, and on our campus, pledges lived in the house, which offered ... well, some pretty obvious opportunities. Our pledge-training (sic) policy was laisse-faire through the class of 1965: laisse-faire combined with occasional strong punishments for screwing up (“PT,” “sweat sessions”). The class of ’65 had problems, and it became clear we, the fraternithy Chapter, were doing things wrong.

So a few of us checked out how parts of the military handled training, and in my course work I was also studying some relevant anthropology. We went over to a system of “little things”: rules for minor behaviors, none of which individually worth rebelling against but all of which together were practice in accepting the Chapter’s authority.

It worked. 

Usually it worked, and in one case that impressed me, with a guy in the class of ’66 I’ll call Terry. 

Now, a couple of upperclassmen in the chapter were outright geniuses. Terry wasn’t, but he was brilliant, going on to Harvard Law after graduation and not long after that doing some pro bono work that established some important law. Me? Well, an eminent Medievalist, after a couple or more gin and tonics once corrected some self-deprecating remark I made with, more or less, “No, Rich; you’re bright. Not brilliant, but bright” — and that’s about right. I was also a house officer when Terry pledged, and he kind of almost sort of respected my intelligence. He was smarter than I was or am — and as ... let’s say as firm in his opinions as I — but I had more experience; and as ambiguous as we arranged for pledges to feel about their status, he could figure out I outranked him. And the one time he screwed up (under the rules we’d set up), I was the one who quietly, privately, but in some detail, clarified for him that he was less clever and generally estimable than he thought. He was furious while being chewed out, but he submitted to it. 

We became friends, and one night after he initiated, and we were talking in my room, I said I really had to get to sleep and said good night, and he responded, “Good night, Mr. Erlich” — and then proceeded to pound his fists into the walls, while I said, “We got you! We got into your head!” 

As we had: I was a house officer, and when Terry was a pledge he called me to my face “Mr. Erlich” and threw in the occasional “sir.” (We hadstudied the military and some ideas on child-rearing of the traditional, though non-abusive, sort.)

Little rules, fairly easy to remember, very easy to obey, none worthy of rebellion — but often just there, frequently, calling for obedience and functioning to instill, figurative drop by figurative drop, some acceptance of the authority of the chapter.

I helped set up the program, but with a condition for my participation, one necessary for my integrity as someone who had issues with authority, even when I was in authority.

Between the end of Informal Initiation (“Hell Week”) and formal, ritualistic initiation, the guys undergoing initiation cleaned themselves up and then had this especially liminal period — I saidwe’d looked at some anthropology — marked by time alone in a quiet room, sitting for their Pledge Test. The test covered the usual quasi-useful history of the fraternity and such, but had one and only one question they had to get right, and keep taking the damn test until (sometimes with coaching) they did get. I had insisted that they answer the question, “What is the rationale for the pledge rules such as?”, and here some were listed. 

To initiate they had to figure out that many of the rules were arbitrary and intentionally so. If they studied during study hours that was in part because we told them to study, but also in part common sense. If they ordinarily used the back door to the house and the back stairs — that was onlybecause we told them to do so.

Part of the goal with a fraternity (beside and along with more serious partying) is to control to a fair extent where we lived: at least being able to paint a room the color we wanted and set rules for behavior. For that we needed pledges to go from being trained to accept authority of those above them in a hierarchy to active brothers — full citizens, so to speak — who would accept consciously the authority of the constituted group as group, and of peers they’d elected. We needed them to sit in a circle of approximate equals as a chapter and accept the authority of rules they’d help make.

And there was nothing inevitable or all that natural about the process, and it didn’t always work even for a small fraternity chapter, with well-schooled if not necessarily educated guys, who lived in a Republic with an official policy of popular government and official democratic ideals and vocabulary.

Note the official. About the time Terry was learning to call me “Mr.” and throw in the occasional “sir,” Stanley Milgram was conducting his problematic experiments on Obedience to Authorityand demonstrating how easy it is to get obedience where there’s mystique, in the Milgram case the mystique of “Science” and an authoritarian acceptance of rank. And Milgram et al. did that even “in the United States, a culture” far less than Austrian Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt thought “that educates its children against blind obedience.” We are a culture that trainsmany in obedience, to those with real power over us — as in the ability to help or hurt us — but also to those with the right mystique.

Fraternity chapters are short on mystique. And the moral here, if you’re still with me, is that one of the obstacles to achieving democratic-republican ideals is that (statistically) normal humans are like that kid in my grammar school club with little respect for authority he understood and had granted — even if all too willing to obey people just there, over him in a hierarchy over which he has no power. N = 1, proves very little, and not more with N = 75 or so for my fraternity chapter over a couple of years; but these small experiences were enough to get me accept the possibility that even Americans really aren’t that big on democracy or republicanism but are susceptible to confident fanatics like the Taliban, or “strong-men” like Saddam Hussein or authoritative bullies like Donald Trump, even when those strong-men/bullies have only the most limited charisma. 

We need more teaching of Civics and teachers like Mr. Connelly. And we need more parents and teachers and administrators and coachesand other older folk more often stepping back and letting young people function in organizations of the kids, by the kids, and for the kids — even when the kids may seriously mess up. We need to provide training starting very young in choosing which authority and authorities to accept, and to prefer authority based in the ideal of republics with liberal-democratic aspirations. 

Waco: Cossacks v. Bandidos / Team America: Typical More than Exceptional

"Let 'em all go to hell, except Cave 76!"

                  Mel Brooks's 2000-Year Old Man

 

"[T]he battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton […]"

George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn  (1941),

alluding to a probably apocryphal quotation

 

"USA! USA!"

— US Fan Chant for US v. USSR Hockey, Winter Olympics, 1980

— US Fan Chant, Operation Desert Storm, 1991

            I tried to come up with a variation on "Hell hath no Fury like a woman scorned" that would make a similar statement about bores. Having just come from a meeting of my local Home Owners' Association, I'll try "The complainers klatch of an HOA has few bores as virulent as a sports fan disappointed." Not a great line, but it'll do to introduce a scene burned into my memory of getting cornered at a party by a drunk Cincinnati Reds fan who felt utterly betrayed that his team, against the laws of God, Nature, and probability was having so lousy a season. After listening to his complaints for, oh, let's say an eon or so, I finally said that I admired his concern for the team and his loyalty to its leadership, but clearly it was time for him to fire the manager and shake up the staff. "I can't do that," he said, sobering up a bit; "only Marge Schott can fire a manager." To which I replied, "Then the Cincy Reds is Marge Schott's team, not yours, and you needn't be so emotionally involved." And I slipped away.

            I understand, somewhat, the feelings of this fan. One time, when I was fourteen, I was at a football game with my (by God!) high school's team — the  Lake View High Wildcats — just three point behind or something like that in the last seconds of play, and our quarterback threw a secular, public school version of a Hail-Mary pass just when the cheerleaders and their boy friends were able to get our school pennant on a long pole and wave it in a great arc across our field of vision watching the field of play and we all jumped up and cheered and the ball game down … way short of the receiver and the goal line, and we lost the game.

            I felt a twinge of keen disappointment at the time, and obviously a memorable twinge — that time was nearly sixty years ago — but we loyal Lake View-ites left the stadium and bought pizza, and got on with our lives.

            A game's a game, and school was just school.

            And maybe also, Lake View High School in Chicago is in the Cubs' neighborhood, and most of our elders either became rabid fans or learned not to get too emotionally involved in games other people played.

            Well, and throw in the fact that I'd played grammar-school football but stopped growing at 5'2", and serious football (to say nothing of basketball) was definitely something other guys played.

            The Beach Boys hadn't sung "Be True to Your School" yet — that song came out in 1963, and I graduated high school in 1961 — but I was and remain pretty loyal to my high school, attending class reunions and having donated a media collection and all. But I wasn't into the idea of my high school, apparently, as much as most.

            Or at least that was the accusation of Mrs. Wilkinson, the permanent, immovable Senior Class Adviser, against me. And she had a point.

            My older sister had attended Senn High School before district boundaries were tightened up, and I was in a high school fraternity that had more members from Senn and some other North Side schools than from Lake View, so I understood that it was just where you lived that determined which school you went to, and that North Side Chicago public high schools weren't all that different.

            So "my high school" wasn't a major deal for me, and when challenged by Mrs. Wilkinson, I had to take somewhat seriously her hyperbolic, "You never participate in school functions!"

            I told her that the "never" was wrong — I was in Key Club and had done some school service stuff, especially back when I was in ROTC ("JROTC" to be exact) — but, okay, I certainly did far less than I might have.

            "I can never be elected high school Principal," I finally told her; "so I concentrate my efforts where I can be elected president and have some clout."

            More exactly, my philosophy of personal politics, as I later learned, was that of Creon in Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus: I wanted a situation where I could be elected president but preferred not to be; I liked being vice president of organizations. That way I had clout but could act quietly and, if necessary, pass the responsibility-buck up to the president. And if being VP meant doing occasional metaphorical hatchet-work so the president could keep his hands clean …, well, I could do that.

            My attitude was cemented in college when I joined a fraternity rather than live in the dorms. The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana was and remains a very large school and something of a "total" institution: we had our own power plant, police, and fire department. I didn't want to add having the Big U as my landlord.

            In the fraternity, eventually, I could have at least a bit of influence over my minute part of the campus. Fraternity life meant taking a bit of shit as a pledge and a shitload of shit as a "neophyte" going through Hell Week. But after that I was a member of the community and would work my way up in seniority and could get elected to office.

            The University of Illinois did not offer undergraduates those sorts of option ca. 1963: you had no vote and little voice until graduation — and after graduation you were sent on your way. As I was later to gently chide my faculty colleagues who bad-mouthed fraternities, "Fraternities are a hell of a lot more democratic than the rest of the Big U."

            In the old frat lodge, I could at least decide how to paint my room. As I once said to a candidate for the U of I Student Senate, "The day Senate can determine the size of the wastebasket in the Student Senate office without clearing the decision with three deans and a vice president is the day I'll vote in a Student Senate election.

            Several years later, I become a board member of the English Graduate Student Association and then the University Graduate Student Association, but the Student Associations aspired to be like a union, not a "toy government," and we would talk about ourselves as graduate student government only if we got authority to tax graduate students and legislate campus-life regulations (which, of course, did not happen).

            My undergraduate fraternity was my fraternity in part because I had some say in its running, and also in part for reasons I will get to. The University of Illinois was "alma mater" and all — competing a bit with Cornell, where I went for an MA — but it wasn't exactly my university.

            Indeed, when the Big U came up with the title of a publication stressing "Your University," I responded with, "Oh, good! Let's sell it."

            But I do identify with the U of I, and I'm typing this wearing my new "ILLIONOIS"™ sweatshirt; and I wear an "Illini" cap from time to time, one time significant for where this ramble is going.

            I was wearing my Illini cap and was asked about it and got vaguely worried I'd be called out for the Indian name — but the guy just wanted to know if I was an Illini Football fan; and I said, "No; I'm an Illini." And he said, "You played football for Illinois?!" — see above on my size — and I told him, "No" again and said I went to school there, two degrees worth, and didn't add I had damn well earned the right to wear the cap.

            The University of Illinois both is and isn't "my" University, and it's an interesting question to whom it belongs. For three weeks it technically belonged to the attorney David Stevens, in terms of legal esoterica, and at law the University — although not the sports teams when I was there — was the Trustees. I would ask rhetorically, however, whether the University was the Trustees to the extent that they might burn down the University Library if they liked or even — in those days before e-books — disperse the collections. The collections are a national and world treasure, and the Trustees don't own them but, as the word "Trustees" suggests, hold them in trust.

            So I identified a lot with my high school and college fraternities, and more so my year club, because I had a say in running them and because many of the people in them, if far from all, were my friends. I can see identifying strongly with a sports team if you played on it (and weren't liable to be dropped or traded casually), and I identified with my high school and universities — a bit for status and more because I'd invested a lot of effort in my studies there.

            But enough about me ….

            That people identify with and feel part of small groups is no mystery: bonding with sexual mates, family, clan, and friends is rooted deeply in figurative human social and cultural DNA and ultimately underpinned by traits encoded in our literal DNA. "One chimpanzee is no chimpanzee," as Robert M. Yerkes said, and a reliable-looking website adds to that a Greek saying, "One man [is] no man." Most humans feel increasingly uncomfortable if isolated for a long time; "solitary confinement" is a serious punishment, and it's about as close as one can come to simple facts about human nature to assert "No man is an island / Entire of itself" — "no, nor woman neither" — and that human beings are social animals.

            What gets complicated and somewhat weird is identification with groups larger than a military fire team, year club, or sorority, or a platoon or clan or village. Or, for some, identifying even with a small group where you don't like the members.

            It's a joke — though a bitter one — that there are American bigots who love American while loathing 90% of Americans, and we used to joke, though with wonder (and exaggeration) more than bitterness, about guys in the fraternity chapter who "Love the house, but hate the brothers."

            Most of us, though, need "the house," the group, and it's occasionally scary how arbitrary that identification become. In the Jewish expression, there's "My schul is better than your schul": one's local synagog, or congregation, but also just "school." Was Lake View any better than Senn, or vice versa? Is 

Cornell significantly better than the U of I? Or, from the outside looking in — and ignoring what ethologists call territory and movie Mafiosi call "business"— why would the Texas motorcycle gang that Bandidos be a group one might identify with and be willing to die for, fighting against the Cossacks?

            A small motorcycle gang can be your "Cave 76," and Neolithic or Paleolithic rules might apply. But gangs nowadays, even motorcycle gangs, can get very big, and identification and loyalty beyond "Cave 76," identification and loyalty sometimes unto death, require explanation.

            Such loyalty and dedication clearly require some (apparently) peculiarly human talents, plus some indoctrination and individual effort. Apparently, humans and only humans on our planet can deal with the world with such vigorous abstraction that we can identify with symbols and react as if those symbols were human beings to whom we are bonded.

            Consider attacks upon sacred or "sacralized" symbols. There are people who will respond to the stomping on a crucifix or urinating on a Torah or lampooning the image of Mohammed or the burning of a flag or appropriating the word "Texas" as the "bottom rocker" on a motorcycle jacket with the same sort of physiological and physical reactions that they would with an attack upon one of their children.

            That is mysterious behavior and perhaps central to the larger mystery of why we can use the word "love" seriously for all of the parts of "I love my spouse, my children, my parents, my dog, and my country." Okay, we can say also, "I love ice cream," but our listeners will be confident that we wouldn't risk our lives for ice cream, not in the sense of putting our bodies between a tub of ice cream and a blowtorch. And okay, also, indeed, in combat men don't often die for their country but for their comrades and friends; but in a fair number of cases guys dying for their country — and some gals as well — got to where they were likely to get shot because of patriotic love and devotion.

            And that sort of love and devotion is for a more abstract abstraction than even a flag: a paradoxical "concrete symbol"; such love and devotion is for one's country, and that sort of love and devotion doesn't just happen: it is inculcated, or, in a nice image, instilled, i.e., added drop by drop.

            It is also reinforced by social conditions. If you're living in a neighborhood where loners tend to get beaten up or shot, it's a good idea to get other guys to watch your back, and there's strong pressure to join a gang: when the Sharks might knife you, it's a good idea to run with the Jets. When the Crips might shoot, you it's a good idea to become a Blood, and a really pressing matter if the Crips might kill you if you don't join the Bloods — and the Bloods might kill you as well.

            But for privileged folk pressures are subtler and for larger groups inculcation/instillation is a long-term process. We pick up our identity and our folkways almost as unconsciously as we pick up language. We learn how to operate in our families and neighborhoods and communities and so on outward, and we learn initially not so much "this is how we do things" but "this is how things are done." We're socialized and acculturated and that includes loyalties.

            By the time we reach adolescence, and our world expands beyond the family and — if we're lucky enough to have one — the neighborhood, then things get more complex because there are competitions for our loyalties.

            And there are people out there looking to attract our loyalties.

            Frequently, the attraction is weak and the competition would be silly if so much money and emotion weren't involved: as when we're tempted into "brand loyalties" and the fandom for sports teams or movie genres or music.

            Beyond those, however, matters are thoroughly serious, and best seen when they're deadly serious and necessarily highly concentrated, as in military "basic training and indoctrination," where instillation is something of a deluge.

            Classically, there's Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island and the breaking down of a civilian and rebuilding a Marine. Part of this is the attraction of "The Few. The Proud." as the USMC slogan went — which is also said to have been picked up (or carried on) by the outlaw motorcycle gangs claiming to be "the [top] 1%" of badasses. More though is the following of traditional patterns of initiation.

            I'm confident of this assertion because I helped put together a new pledge training program for my fraternity, and we looked very carefully at child development, tribal rites of passage, and at the most basic parts of Basic Training in the US military.

            We decided that brutality was optional, and an option we rejected: we made sure pledging came with some pain — people value things in terms of the price they pay as much as for any intrinsic value — but stressing, "the little things." It's not so much Gunnery Sgt. Hartman and "I will P.T. you all until you fucking die! I'll P.T. you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk"; it's the "Sir" form of address and the saluting and the little arbitrary dip-shit rituals day in and day out, the routine drill and the drilled-in routines of the military in general and basic training strongly in particular.

            And in this way people — especially late-adolescent guy-type people — can be assimilated into a group and come to accept its authority.

            Which is not a bad thing, if, but only if, people incorporated into a group are eventually brought to consciousness of what has been done to their heads.

            Which is why I insisted that our fraternity "neophytes" had one question on their final exam before initiation that they had to answer correctly: Identifying the logic behind our more illogical rules for pledges. They had to figure out that the rules were arbitrary and that that was the point: we were requiring obedience — and the dumber the rule the purer the obedience — and thereby instilling acceptance of the authority of the group.

            Our group: that ol' frat lodge.

            Not their parents. Not the university. Not the State — or not only them; but we wanted our initiates to accept the authority of pretty much their peers before they went from a kind of mildly-indentured servant status (pledges) to part of the demos of what would probably be the most democratic institution they'd encounter. It's a pretty low bar, there, and "democracy" doesn't necessarily mean liberal democracy — note the status of ancient Athenian slaves or women or resident aliens about that issue — but we'd be more democratic than the university we were embedded in or the corporations Americans work for, or for most Americans, the government of the United States.

            We fail in America in not making enough people conscious of how their group identities get formed.

            The first national anthem, the 2000-Year Old Man, sang, was "Let 'em all go to hell / Except Cave 76!"; and that stance and way of dealing with the world is still with us, but dangerously expanded.

            The Battle of Waterloo was won in part on the playing fields of Eton because the young gentlemen of Eton were taught there and elsewhere at Eton to identify with their teams and with Eton and with the Empire. The quotation from Orwell goes on, however — war veteran, socialist, and iconoclast that he was: "Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there." That is, the British elite learned at Eton and the other "public" schools the chivalric code and snobbery that led the British officer corps in subsequent wars to make some really dumb and costly moves. Significant here is that the playing fields of Eton and American sports arenas and school stadiums are part of the system of instilling a habit of loyalty, so that a cheer of "USA! USA!" for a US hockey team can be transferred fairly easily to what Trey Parker and Matt Stone called TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE (2004).

            Group identity is inevitable, necessary, and usually a good thing. But we need to understand how it operates and how it can become highly dangerous.