[Peace-discuss] Coercive harmony at WEFT

Wed Sep 21 10:05:26 CDT 2005

The attempt to recall Randall from the WEFT Board of Directors
(only part of the campaign against him at the sadly ingrown
local station) fell short of the required two-thirds majority,
but only by a few votes.  It was a disturbing display, from
pathetic faculty members demanding to know if they were going
to be sued to apparatchiks declaiming like Antony that
Randall's accusers "are all honorable men."  I came away
thinking as I have for a while that we were seeing an example
of a more general phenomenon, one not unknown to AWARE, that's
been given a name by Laura Nader.  It's a "movement against
the contentious in anything."  Here's a note about it that I
posted to a WEFT list.  --CGE     

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To: wefta at lists.chambana.net

[I thought the most interesting aspect of last night's meeting
was provided by those who, noticing for the first time that
someone being ridden out of town on a rail -- and observing
substantial citizens preparing the tar and feathers -- decide
to join the activity, because there's so much citizen
involvement.  In this case, a small group who seem to think
WEFT is theirs have mounted a campaign against Randall Cotton
on the sole charge that he tried to get things done at the
station -- and too many WEFTies were willing to go along with
them.  This is a bad sign for the health of WEFT and an
example of what anthropologist Laura Nader has called
"coercive harmony."  She describes it as "basically a movement
against the contentious in anything, and it has very strange
bedfellows, from people with various psychiatric therapy
movements, Christian fundamentalists, corporations sick of
paying lawyers, activists who believe we should love each
other ... coercive harmony [is] an ideology that says if you
disagree, you should really keep your mouth shut." Apparently
Randall didn't do that.  Here's a longer account of what
WEFT's playing into.  --CGE]

  July 13, 2001 
  Harmony Coerced Is Freedom Denied 
  By LAURA NADER 

We have heard a lot recently about the need for consensus,
social harmony, and civility. At the end of the presidential
election, for instance, both George W. Bush and Al Gore spoke
of the importance of unity. But Americans need to remember
that our country was founded by dissenters. We need to be
reminded periodically of all the good that has come from
outrage and indignation, and of what happens to democracy when
people don't speak out. 

In "Seduced by Civility," a 1996 article in The Nation,
Benjamin DeMott looks at the current state of political
manners and the crisis of democratic values. He points out
that in the 19th century, people who criticized abolitionists
for being uncivil were the ones who were willing to let
slavery continue. His conclusion is that we must recognize
today's incivility for what it is: a justified rejection of
the powers that be, who are more interested in civility than
in poverty. 

I believe that indignation can make Americans more-engaged
citizens -- and isn't that a basic purpose of most colleges
and universities? I am appalled to hear young people speak
positively about not being judgmental. (I'm sure that when a
student said, in an evaluation of my course, "Dr. Nader is a
pretty good professor, except she has opinions," the remark
wasn't intended to be a compliment; nonetheless, I took it as
one.) 

Many college students today were taught dispute resolution in
elementary and secondary school, at the cost of trading
justice for harmony. Often, what they remember is that they
were silenced for the sake of civility. As professors, we
ought to encourage our students to express their opinions --
with outrage, when it is justified, as it often is. It is our
duty to teach students the importance of protest when our
society makes the unthinkable appear normal -- when we dump
nuclear waste on American Indian reservations, broaden the gap
between the haves and the have-nots even during a time of
plenty, and give Ritalin to millions of American children. 

Social scientists are taught to notice patterns that regulate
speech or social life. Sometimes we follow such patterns
through time and space, to see if we have stumbled upon
something of social and cultural significance. In The History
of Manners, Norbert Elias examined the links between manners,
or etiquette, and social control. He was interested in how
"civilizing processes," as he called them, take place and how
they are interrelated with the organization of Western
societies into states. He believed that the standards for
human behavior gradually shift over the centuries toward
greater restrictions. For example, he found that people in
Western societies became less tolerant of spitting in public
when they learned that the practice was acceptable in the
non-Western societies they saw as less advanced. 

My interest in manners as a way of controlling behavior came
from my work on village law among the Zapotec Indians of
Oaxaca, Mexico. I found that the villagers I studied were
highly litigious, yet valued harmony and compromise in the
courtroom. I came to see their support of harmony as part of a
strategy to preserve their autonomy. As long as the village
kept its house in order, there was minimal interference from
the Mexican government. Five hundred years of colonization had
taught the villagers to use harmony for political purposes. 

When I looked at legal reform in the United States, I also
found harmony being used as a control, this time by the
powerful. In the 1970's, something called alternative dispute
resolution was born. It was a reform movement in response to
the new cases (proponents of the movement called them "garbage
cases") that were entering the courts after the social turmoil
of the 1960's -- cases about civil rights, environmental and
consumer rights, Native American and gender issues, and so
forth. The movement favored compromise over adversarial
procedures, harmony over social justice. Its mandatory
mediation and binding arbitration cost us our right to sue. It
was a war against the contentious. 

Since the 1970's, alternative dispute resolution has gone
beyond the law, creeping into our schools, places of work,
hospitals, and homes. Tracking the spread of such coercive
harmony is not easy. Because it has permeated society over
time, most people come to take it for granted or assume it is
benign. Conversely, conflicts and disagreement have come to
seem bad, to be avoided at all costs. I once received a note
from a lumber activist thanking me for coining the term
"coercive harmony." It had enabled her to recognize the
repression of environmental activism under the banner of
consensus and "win-win" solutions in the Clinton
administration's policy on logging. 

Coercive harmony has often accompanied large-scale social
movements, including Western colonialism, Christian missionary
work, and globalization. Historians like Jerold Auerbach, at
Wellesley College, postulate that in the United States, the
use of harmony as a form of social regulation by the
government occurs in cycles. Conflict -- for example, during
the Civil War and the protests of the 1960's -- gets out of
control, harmony is imposed, and after a time of calm, dissent
erupts again. 

Europeans today are less concerned about harmony than
Americans are. During last year's presidential campaign, many
Europeans wondered why the candidates did not seem to know how
to debate. One reason is that Americans consider it bad
manners to be contentious. In fact, the anthropologist Paul
Bohannan notes that Americans have two categories of behavior:
polite and rude. The British, he says, add a third: civil,
meaning that you pull no punches when you criticize, but that
you do so without jeering. As he puts it, an American has to
be your close friend before giving you anything but praise
when he reviews your manuscript. The British don't make that
kind of mistake; they understand that you really want to know
the weak points before publication. 

The use of coercive harmony in the United States has led us to
confuse all criticism with carping and being negative. We
don't share the Europeans' zest for controversy. As Robin
Lakoff, a linguist at the University of California at
Berkeley, says, we want to be perceived as nice. And we put up
with circumstances that Europeans would consider outrageous --
for example, the absence of universal health care, or the fact
that fewer than 52 percent of eligible voters cast ballots in
the last election. 

What should be unacceptable has come to strike us as so normal
that when we hear someone speaking frankly, we are startled.
Not long ago, in an appearance on The NewsHour With Jim
Lehrer, Frank Wolak, an economics professor at Stanford
University, whitewashed the role of the utilities in the
California energy crisis. Not surprising. What did seem
surprising was the comment that followed from Bruce Brugmann,
editor of The San Francisco Bay Guardian, who said that the
professor should be working for the utilities rather than
Stanford. 

Coercive harmony can stifle dissent for a while. But if
dissent is too tightly bottled up, it will explode -- as
happened in the 1960's riots in Watts, Newark, and other
places. And the explosions don't all come from members of
ethnic minorities: Witness the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. 

Academics should not be party to establishing an ideology of
consensus on our increasingly corporatized campuses. Instead,
we have a duty to investigate the dangers of coercive harmony,
and to expose repression when it poses as consensus. 

Laura Nader is a professor of anthropology at the University
of California at Berkeley. 

http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B13
Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
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