[Peace-discuss] Coercive harmony at WEFT

[C. G. Estabrook]

But it's precisely disagreement/criticism/"the contentious"
that's at issue in AWARE, Ricky.  

First, the gentle criticism of Obama's show was described as
"rude" and "demonizing," on a principle (urged by Imani) that
was slow to surface: that we need to treat black politicians
differently from white politicians.  People were angry when it
emerged and slow to defend it (it had been "misinterpreted"),
because it's obviously embarrassing to defend it as principle
or tactic.

Second, the disagreement over these matters (namely, the
actions and the principle on which they were to be condemned)
was to be suppressed by an "objective" consideration at an
AWARE meeting, which indeed became contentious. 

Instead of their being debated directly, an effort has been
made to turn these matters into a discussion of "civility"
(with demands for punishments and apologies) but that seems
to me an example of exactly what Nader is talking about --
being "silenced for the sake of civility."  It is a civility
designed to shut people up (at politician's rallies, at
meetings, in flyers, etc.), which is presumably its purpose,
as Nader argues. 

It's a tendency so pervasive (and I think so long-standing) in
our society that we have to import two Brits (Galloway and
Hitchens) in order to have a debate on the war.  And remember
that the proudest boast of our two-term (soon to be three)
congressman is that he's the founder in the House of
Representatives -- along with Dem. Rep. Israel of NY -- of the
(wait for it) "Civility Caucus."  

But I think you're quite right about organization and
repression, and that's why we should do what we do.  I quoted
in this week's news notes, "Most of the population is strongly
opposed to [the administration's] policies, but is atomized,
demoralized, unorganized, and unable to respond
constructively. To change that is the task of activists who
care about the country and its future, and the world."

Of course the real reason we do it is so we can look at
ourselves in the mirror in the morning.  And that may require
some contention.

Regards, CGE


---- Original message ----
>Date: Wed, 21 Sep 2005 09:08:38 -0700 (PDT)
>From: Ricky Baldwin <baldwinricky at yahoo.com>  
>Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Coercive harmony at WEFT  
>To: peace discuss <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>
>I very much like the quote below: "pull no punches
>when you criticize, but [...] do so without jeering". 
>I believe it speaks directly to the controversy in
>AWARE, though much of what is below strays far afield:
>it is not disagreement or criticism or "the
>contentious" that is at issue in AWARE, it is jeering,
>shouting, etc., which is the opposite of open debate. 
>In fact, it shuts people up, which is presumably its
>purpose.
>
>True, Americans in general do not like to disagree. 
>But we often do it.  And it is certainly not the
>reason we do not have universal health care, etc.  Nor
>is it, by the way, the reason the AFL-CIO supported
>the Vietnam War or any such thing.  I think more
>likely the reason is that we ordinary folks are not so
>well organized as soem European countries, and that
>when we have been organized that organization has been
>brutally repressed.
>
>And I actually thought, as far as the WEFT meeting
>goes, people were extraordinarily well behaved under
>the tense circumstances and that this restraint was
>what allowed the debate to go on in a way that was as
>informative (at least in so far as people were willing
>to explain themselves), challenge the chair
>successfully on an issue that the majority felt was
>unjust in the proceedings, and ultimately vote not to
>recall Randall.  And if a few people expressed
>opinions that I think were wrong and maybe even in
>some cases ridiculous and fawning, well, isn't that,
>too, in the range of opinion that we allow?  What of
>it?  The debate was had, and I think Randall learned
>more about how others were reacting to his efforts --
>which will be invaluable to his future attempts to
>work with others at WEFT.
>
>My two cents, anyway,
>Ricky
> 
>
>--- "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>> 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     
>> 
>> ==============================
>> 
>> 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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