stimulant

Social reforms involving a minority¹ approach their task with a mixture of two strategies:

• Changing the way those in power perceive those whom you seek to help.
• Changing the way those whom you seek to help present themselves to those in power.

This is not as subtle a statement as I’ve made it seem² . There is the existing power structure and those who suffer within it. Myriad factors influence the minority’s situation; however, these factors penultimately terminate with how the empowered and disempowered relate. Deciding which tact to pursue is a process frequently fraught with unspoken judgments and assumptions about how self-reliant the minority is or could be. This builds into the foundation of many reform efforts a basic tension between the helpers and the helped.

Consider attempts to address racial inequality in the United States. Affirmative action attempts to force a dissonance between the way those in power see a minority and the way they are treated. Some contingents lash out at such efforts: Bill Cosby caught flak for his [in]famous “Pound Cake” speech, as well as plenty of accolades, split by exactly Rotter’s idea of a locus of control.

And with that, we skirt a linguistic quagmire: the way people differentiate blame, responsibility, guilt, and power. I’d like to sidestep the issue. What’s pertinent is not a careful analysis of causality³ , but an understanding of how people’s perception of the loci of control in a situation determine the character of suggested reforms.

Recent discussion about uncontacted tribes in the Amazon⁴ spurred the realization that deciding why we implement a reform is often a subtle value judgment wrapped up in facile rationalizations. It is taken for granted that the front lines of social reform are along the boundaries of basic, human rights: quality of life, equal representation, etc. But, consider the case of the uncontacted, Amazonian tribe: the rallying cry was to leave them be. Several people suggest that these uncontacted tribes should not be isolated, but at least offered the chance for integration. Ethnocentrism is far more frequently fingered as cause for concern, conflating many issues. For the purposes of this discussion, I just want to point out that if anyone in a city lived in the conditions under which these aborigines live, the call for aid and change would be unanimous. There is no discussion of winding industrialization back to preclude the need for isolation. So, when do we decide that it’s the majority that needs changing, and when do we decide that it’s the minority that needs to change?

The reasons offered supporting the isolation of the tribe range from complaints about the fundamentally toxic nature of the industrial world to claims of cultural terrorism. Underlying these judgments is the assumption that we have the power and right to make this decision for the people involved. And it is this thread that connects the discussion of uncontacted tribes in the Amazon to most attempts at social reform. While completely distributed social reform is nominally possible⁵ , historically reform has comprised the reformers, those on whose behalf reformers work, and everyone else. Even if the reformers and their beneficiaries are one and the same, there is rarely explicit approval of reform efforts⁶.

The fact that reform necessarily involves varying degrees of participation (and as such, varying degrees of control and power) means that those who are more active implicitly make decisions for those who are not. When society at large decides a reform is “necessary,” it is frequently cast in a disempowering light: the needy well, need us to help. And we know best how to do it. But history doesn’t bear that confidence out (from welfare to affirmative action, reforms begun at large scales, under the public eye, by an institution as a whole, founder more frequently than attempts at self-regulation).

Looking over historical reform efforts, it is clear that reformers’ decision to focus on the majority or the minority is consistently tinged by moral judgment. Deciding at whose feet to place blame is a different task than deciding who is best equipped to change the situation, but it is a conflation we often make. And it’s not clear to me that we can generalize the answer to that question: the “give a man a fish” line of thinking oversimplifies the situation. Figuring this out is at the core of many of my questions: while it is clear that empowerment is the long-term goal, can we say anything about the extent to which the ends can justify the means? Even this language is misleading — the effects of the means with which a group is empowered is coupled more strongly to the social norms surrounding those means than the means themselves. More concretely: the disempowering elements of welfare or affirmative action are not money or college admission, respectively. The set of social norms surrounding each are what we’re really interested in engineering. How can we think about how strongly means are coupled to the norms they evoke? What are tools for controlling social norms? Doesn’t this process have exactly those problems I’ve touched on already?

Confusion abounds. At the core of the various metrics we have used to decide reform’s necessity is the idea of progress. And I suspect that the complexity of resolving that definition (well-documented by Illich) is largely responsible for this confusion (even without considering the emotional and philosophical complexity of charity). There’s a lot more to say about this, but I’d like to do it in a different — less abstract — context, which will be provided by forthcoming posts. Stay tuned.

1. By minority I don’t mean minority in number, but in power. e.g. Women. Or students. [↩]
2. Despite this, I’ve found it increasingly helpful to think in these terms. It seems that I’m after a cause-agnostic language for thinking about reform. It’s not clear that generalization is helpful, but I’ve made unanticipated — and unfortunately, undocumented — progress in classifying mistakes made in social reform. And I remain convinced that successful social reform is less a matter of doing things well than a matter of not making predecessors’ mistakes. [↩]
3. What we even mean by that in social situations is unclear. [↩]
4. UPDATED 062408: They weren’t lost. [↩]
5. I have no good examples, and would be extremely interested in hearing about some. [↩]
6. Save highly structured efforts that occur in contexts like a union. [↩]