Symbolic Exclusion in a Diverse Democracy: A Response
Last week, Reihan Salam responded to my piece on symbolic exclusion. He discussed how symbolic exclusion can be possibly used to understand where disagreements in diverse democracies are so hard to resolve.
Salam makes particular note of the idea that social exclusion is not a linear hierarchy but rather a set multiple of parallel hierarchies. I agree: social exclusion is no longer the straightforward class-oriented, cultural and social capital-based experience it once was, whether here United States or in other more overtly class-driven societies. Certainly, a set of divisions based on cultural and social capital remain. However, there are now different types of social exclusion hierarchies, and more importantly there are individuals and even groups with the agency to transcend boundaries.
Culture is no longer simply divided high or low. As Herbert Gans tells us, there are now five “taste cultures.” However, as much as we would like, in our more modern, more populist era, for anyone and everyone to be able to traverse cultural boundaries and consume at will, they can’t and don’t. People with PhDs have different access to culture and thus to cultural consumption than those who have never been to college. I’m not talking on an individual or an anecdotal basis - this is across groups, on the aggregate, as a whole. It’s tempting to think “I, Leah, have a PhD and like terrible trashy TV shows” or “Steve Jobs was a college dropout and knew more about history and culture than people with seven times the education” - or any number of examples in which someone came from a particular background that would belie their sophistication or lack thereof. Whether these are individual cases or even outliers is, as I love to say, an empirical question. The point is that while the “cultural elite” or the “social elite” may not look the same as the did or even be as immovable, object-wise, as they once were, they still exists and they still have effects on access to other resources.
But what of the argument regarding disagreements in a diverse democracy? Salam writes:
This helps explain why many disagreements in a diverse democracy end in an impasse. Disagreements flow from heterogeneity in tastes and preferences, e.g., basic disagreements regarding the meaning and implications of fairness. Recently, for example, I had an exchange with several friends on Twitter (which comes up a lot) over whether or not Harvard graduates who take lucrative jobs in the financial services industry should be the objects of moral condemnation. To me, the idea seems absurd, as it is premised on the notion that our lives aren’t our own, or that the relevant constellation of social and moral obligations isn’t family-centric but rather state-centric or polity-centric or, more ambitiously still, humanity-centric. My own view is that evaluating my choices as an individual in terms of what is best for “humanity” soon collapses into absurdity, as the range of human societies and value systems is irreducibly diverse and complex, e.g., urban individuals living in the metropolitan West will presumably value different practices and ways of life than hunter-gatherers. State-centric utilitarian moral architectures strike me as flawed because they overgeneralize from an American or French experience of stateness, in which the writ of the state is relatively complete. In other societies, as we’ve discussed, the writ of the state is incomplete; rather, the state is a vehicle for one or several ethnic or tribal mafias that compete with others in a constant series of negotiated settlements. This, and not paradigmatic Weberian stateness, is actually the historical norm, and it’s not obvious that it will be inevitably swept away through technological progress or the march to modernity.
Rather than position ourselves as operating only as independent operators or only as agents of the institution of the family, I argue that people are influenced by a wide range of institutions in any given society. In fact, I suggest this can be how we view the concept of “stateness” in the discussion of both social and symbolic exclusion. This provides a more nuanced perspective than two views of “stateness” that Salam offers: whether a “paradigmatic Weberian stateness” or an either/or existence of Western state completeness/non-Western tribal-based mafioso.
When I consider social institutions, I’m referring to a very core sociological concept that relates to what Salam discusses here: “a complex, integrated set of social norms organized around the preservation of a basic societal value.” Included in types of social institutions are family and marriage, education, religion, art and culture, military, medicine, and so forth. These exist in any state, regardless of how “complete” that state may or may not be.
When I work with institutions, I work with what Hallett and Ventresca call “inhabited institutionalism.” Institutions are not these monoliths or macro “logics” that inform us, the little institutional dupes/dopes, and tell us what to do and how to do it. Instead, there is a greater pattern of action and interaction between institutions and individuals. Take “the family,” for example. The institution of the family is not a towering monolith but is very much inhabited by the people who interact not only with each other but with the institution and its meanings. These interactions in turn affect how we come to understand and define “the family.” This is an iterative process, meaning it repeats itself in a cycle. The institution affects us, we affect it, and onward.
I argue then that we can view the state in terms of the institutions we value in the society within whatever our boundaries are at that time. This is one reason Bourdieu’s arguments are so powerful: French society is bound not simply by a utilitarian idea of “stateness” but broader institutions valued within “French” society and how those institutions are valued and interpreted. We can say the same with how we function here in America. What do we value? How do we value it? Why?
Certainly the range of individual choices in this society and across all societies is vast, so vast as to be “absurd.” But there are patterns of choices and behaviors, there are things that influence us and that we influence. To say we are family-centric versus other-centric is to miss the bigger picture. We can have individual preferences as well as be influenced by these institutions, to influence them and to function in society as both self-oriented and unselfish members.
