DOES CHARISMA WIN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS?

In a previous post ["Does Trump Have Charisma? What is Charisma Anyway?"],

I argued there are four kinds of charisma (frontstage charisma, backstage charisma, success-magic, and reputational charisma); the more kinds you have, the more charismatic you are; but there are other kinds of political leadership and charisma does not always or even typically win elections.

Of the four kinds of charisma, the most easily visible are front-stage charisma as an inspiring public speaker, recruiting followers dedicated to a mission; and being known for a string of successes.

As a measure of public appeal, look at the percentage of popular vote won by all major candidates for president from 1828 through 2012, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama. I will leave aside, for the moment, the earlier elections from 1788 to 1824,  since these were essentially indirect elections by state legislatures.

Home run records and popular vote records

If we followed the changing record for presidents winning the highest percentage of voters-- in the same way we can follow the record for home runs in a season-- it would look like this:

Andrew Jackson 1828           56.0% of the vote

(since Jackson’s record wasn’t broken until 1904, I will insert in parentheses some other players who had very good years: )

(Andrew Jackson 1832  54.2%)

(Abraham Lincoln 1864  55.0%)

(Ulysses S. Grant 1872  55.6%)

Teddy Roosevelt 1904  56.4%-- new record

Warren G. Harding 1920 60.3%  -- new record

(Calvin Coolidge 1924  54.0%)

(Herbert Hoover 1928  58.2%)

(Franklin D. Roosevelt 1932 57.4%)

Franklin D. Roosevelt 1936  60.8%  -- new record

(FDR 1940   54.7%)

(Dwight D. Eisenhower 1952   55.2%)

(Eisenhower 1956    57.4%)

Lyndon Johnson 1964  61.1%  -- new record

(Richard M. Nixon 1972  60.7%)

(Ronald Reagan 1984   58.8%)

Since Reagan, no one has come close to the record. The highest have been G.H.W. Bush 1988 (53.4%) and Obama 2008 (52.9%). In three recent elections, no one broke 50% (a return to the fragmented politics of the mid-1800s). [Update November 2016: make that four recent elections.]

There are some surprises. No matter how great you are, charismatic, victorious, or likeable, you never get as many as 2 out of 3 people to vote for you, at least not in the United States.  In the 47 elections from 1828 to 2012, only 4 times someone cracked the ceiling of 60%. In fact, getting 54% of the vote was done only 16 times (out of 112 major candidates); it is like hitting 50 home runs or batting .350.

Is getting a high vote percentage a mark of charisma?  Some of the undoubtedly charismatic presidents were record-holders-- Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR--- and a couple of other charismatic leaders are high on the list (Lincoln hitting 55%; Reagan hitting 58.8%).  But Lyndon Johnson, who holds the current record at 61.1%, was not charismatic. And the president who smashed Teddy Roosevelt’s record at 60.3% was Warren G. Harding in 1920-- an astounding surprise, since Harding went on to become one of the most scandal-ridden and ineffective presidents. (In his previous career, it is true, he was regarded as a great orator.)  If Andrew Jackson is the Babe Ruth of American presidential sluggers, Harding was the Roger Maris-- a record with an asterisk. We all breathed a sign of relief when the home run record was smashed by a real slugger like Mark McGwire or Barry Bonds-- in politics, it was FDR, who proved it was no fluke by beating the 54% mark 3 times. (Jackson and Eisenhower was the only other persons to do it twice.)

And there were up-and-down politicians like Richard Nixon, who had one great year-- 60.7% in 1972-- but who lost other elections and won in 1968 with 43.4%.  Calvin Coolidge was the opposite of charismatic, but he is on the list (barely at the cut-off point of 54.0%).  Herbert Hoover was briefly second highest all-time (58.2% in 1928), then went on to take one of the worst defeats in his match-up against FDR. (He also did exactly the wrong things in dealing with the Great Depression of 1929.)

Charisma can help win elections, but it isn’t essential even for winning big. Some charismatic politicians either were defeated repeatedly (Henry Clay, William Jennings Bryan, each three times), or scraped into office (JFK and Woodrow Wilson never cracked 50% of the popular vote). 

Other things are involved in winning elections, notably who your opponent is, and whether something dramatically good or bad happens near election time. Nixon’s nearly record-breaking victory in 1972 happened against a little-known anti-war candidate (George McGovern). How Warren G. Harding dominated in 1920 seems mysterious, but it was apparently a backlash against Woodrow Wilson taking the U.S. intoWorld War I after promising not to; and then campaigning for a League of Nations and a nation-state for every ethnic group, which made him a charismatic figure in Europe during 1918-19, but played badly at home. Some popularity happens on the rebound or as a continuation of somebody else. Eisenhower’s popularity in 1952 and 1956 came as he succeeded a very unpopular president (Truman’s ratings had fallen to a record-low 22% in 1952; and Ike went on to end the Korean War deadlock that brought Truman down).  LBJ’s record-setting victory in 1964 came as he stepped into Kennedy’s shoes after the emotion-grabbing assassination, and proceededin a wave of legislation in 1964 to do everything JFK had promised but didn’t carry out. LBJ’s popularity ratings started high but slid downhill continuously during the Vietnam War, enough so that this political pro recognized it was time to bail out on running for re-election.

Popularity ratings highs and lows

Since the 1940s, we have standardized popularity polls. Gallup polls ask the question of whether you approve of how the president is handling his job. This isn’t exactly a measure of charisma, since it doesn’t tap into that I’d-follow-him-anywhere quality of the symbolic leader.  Charisma is not a personality trait but an emotional relationship between a person who represents a principled ideal and a group of dedicated followers.

Presidential approval ratings respond to emotional events, but these peaks are very unstable. Here are the highest ratings:

90% approval for George W. Bush, mid-September 2001 (right after the 9/11 attack).

89% for George H.W. Bush, early March 1991 (right after victory in the 4-day Gulf War).

87% for Harry Truman, June 1945 (right after Victory in Europe -- V-E Day).

84% for Franklin Roosevelt, January 1942 (a month after Pearl Harbor and declaration of war against Japan).

83% for John F. Kennedy, May 1961 (just after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba).

These are called rally-round-the-flag ratings. The nation comes together around the presidential symbol immediately after a dramatic conflict event. It isn’t necessarily a victory; 3 of the top 5 ratings happened after we were attacked or defeated.

The peaks come from the emotional effect of outside events, not from the individual. George W. Bush’s rating was 51% in early September, just before the 9/11/01 attacks. Harry Truman’s rating dropped to the low 30s in 1946, bounced up and down in the mid-levels, and bottomed out at 22% in February 1952, during the bogged-down Korean War. George H.W. Bush’s ratings shot up from the mid-50s in late 1990 to 89% with the Gulf War, but dropped 60 points in the year-and-a-half that followed.  George W. Bush fell from 90% on a downward path to the low 30s in 2007 and 19% in the financial crash of October 2008.

FDR and JFK, on the other hand, maintained quite high ratings throughout their terms in office (JFK averaged 70%, FDR 63%). This is probably an effect of charisma, since these were charismatic speakers who inspired many idealistic followers.

Other peaks for non-crisis presidents were 79% for Lyndon Johnson, immediately after taking over for Kennedy-- an overflow of JFK adulation in the period of national mourning. Dwight Eisenhower had 79% in December 1956, just after he had won his second term. Since Eisenhower was not a charismatic speaker or personality, this shows more of a good feeling or likeability rating. Ike’s average ratings in office were 65%, next highest to JFK’s 70.1%.

Approval ratings are a mixed measure, a melange of sudden events, likeability, and charisma. Is there anything else we can do with these polls? It would be nice if we had a series of questions across all the presidents asking, does this person represent an ideal you are dedicated to? Are you an X-follower, equivalent to a follower of Jesus or Joan of Arc?

Look at popularity polls from the other direction: lowest popularity ratings. Including the ones we have already seen, the record lows are: George W. Bush 19% (October 2008),  Harry Truman, 22% (February 1952), Richard Nixon 24% (July-August 1974), Jimmy Carter 28% (June 1979), George H.W. Bush 29% (July 1992). Everybody had their ups and downs.

So who had the highest floor? JFK never dropped below 56%.  FDR’s floor, and Eisenhower’s, were next at 48%.  The only president whose floor never went below 50% was one of the three most charismatic presidents of modern times. (Since there were no polls of this sort before 1937, we don’t know about Teddy Roosevelt; but he did lose an election in 1912, coming in impressively second on a third party ticket.)

One conclusion is that charisma is never universal. Nearest to it are the momentary events that stir everyone into public rituals like putting out flags that proliferated during September-to-November 2001, but even these peaks never get above 83-90% of the population. Looking at it the other direction, even very unpopular moments for presidents leave about a quarter of the population supporting them. These are the hard core base that anyone successful on the national stage acquires. Charisma is what adds to that base and pulls one’s public reputation up to a solid majority, unshakeable even in bad times.

Politics is a process of conflict, a struggle between opposing factions. This is especially true in a democracy, where popular elections regularly mobilize people both to support and to reject. Democracy is a good breeding-grounds for charisma, but we should not expect it to produce unanimity.

And this is what we see in presidential elections. Getting 56% to 61% of the vote is as high as it gets.

All 44 U.S. presidents from 1788 to 2016

We can divide them in 3 groups:

I. the first 7 presidents from George Washington to Andrew Jackson: the founding network

II. the 18 presidents from 1837 to 1901: mostly mediocre except for Lincoln

III. the 19 presidents from 1901 to 2016, Teddy Roosevelt to Obama: intermittent charisma

I. The first 7 presidents are the famous names of American history: Washington-- Adams-- Jefferson-- Madison-- Monroe-- John Quincy Adams-- Jackson. But being famous is not the same as being charismatic. Of the 7, only 2 were charismatic: Jackson strongly so, Jefferson in a milder version.

George Washington was certainly revered.  He was elected twice, unopposed, by the electoral college that was not selected by popular vote. He did not have front-stage charisma: he was not famous for making speeches or stirring up emotional crowds. He had no success-magic; his record as a general was mainly a string of defeats and retreats; the key battles of the Revolutionary War were won by others. What Washington did was hold the Continental Army together through bad times until the British finally gave up their costly effort to hang onto the colonies. In the chaos of the loose Confederation, Washington led the movement for a Constitutional Convention, presided over it, and saw it through-- with the assistance of a strong team, most of whom also became presidents.

Personally, he was known for great dignity and dedication. Did this amount to back-stage charisma? He impressed people in personal contact, although he did not always get his way, as in asking the Continental Congress for money. His reputation grew in the period of constitution-making, and he became an icon, his picture in every patriotic home. Score Washington un-charismatic on most counts-- demonstrating that charisma is not the only way to become an icon.

John Adams was more of a political organizer, on the northern end of the Massachusetts/Virginia coalition that made the new nation. He negotiated peace with Britain in 1782 and served as a key diplomat. Un-charismatic, but an important coalition-maker rewarded as Washington’s vice president and successor.

Thomas Jefferson was the best-known of the Virginia politicians. He became known, not so much for speeches but for his writings criticizing British rule, which made him Virginia’s member on the Committee of Correspondence organizing the colonies into revolt. His eloquence got him chosen to write the Declaration of Independence. He was minister to France, America’s most important ally, and Washington’s secretary of state. Jefferson was among the first to see the new direction of politics, resigning from the cabinet to oppose Hamilton’s policies, then running against John Adams with a new Democratic-Republican party. Jefferson led the emergence of political parties, creating the first nation-wide network to campaign for electoral votes. This made him widely popular, not just as a hero of the Revolution, but by actively stirring up public support. He was famed as the spokesman for decentralized democracy and for the Louisiana Purchase, the first big territorial expansion of the U.S. and a result of his diplomatic experience. Jefferson’s charismatic reputation came less from swaying crowds than from circulating written ideology, from a new style of political organizing, and spectacular diplomatic successes.

James Madison was a political negotiator and coalition-builder. Agreeing with Washington on the need for a stronger union than the disastrous Articles of Confederation, Madison’s plan became the basis for discussion at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. He campaigned for it by writing pamphlets-- the main form of political communication at the time. The Federalist papers were an act of coalition, written by Madison together with Hamilton and John Jay, even though they would become political enemies in the new government. A member of Jefferson’s political team, he became his secretary of state and successor, winning re-election even though the War of 1812 was going badly at the time.

James Monroe was primarily a diplomat and loyal team member. An officer in Washington’s army, Monroe learned law as an aide to Jefferson, then followed him as minister to France, and negotiated the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. He became Madison’s secretary of state and secretary of war. After belated victory against the British in 1815, Monroe won the elections of 1816 and 1820 with virtually no opposition, the opposing Federalist party (which was anti-France and pro-British) having collapsed. His most famous achievement, the “Monroe Doctrine,” was actually formulated by his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams. It made a principle out of U.S. success in keeping European states out of the continent, extending the project to Latin America where a series of revolts against Spain were breaking out as the Napoleonic wars disrupted distant colonial rulers. (Monroe took advantage by purchasing Florida from Spain in 1819.) Jefferson and his successors, although militarily weak, played on the advantages of their French alliance to expand territorially; meanwhile settlers and Indian-fighters were moving west anyway. The whole team became cloaked in an aura of national success.

John Quincy Adams was a lifelong diplomat. He accompanied his father on European missions in the 1780s; and served every president as minister to European states. As Madison’s secretary of state, Adams purchased Florida and improved relations with Britain.  Following the usual succession, Adams ran for president in 1824, and was defeated by Andrew Jackson in the popular vote; but since no one had a majority of the electoral college, the election was thrown in the House of Representatives, where political deals made Adams president. Regarding himself as old-school gentleman above politics, Adams made no effort to deal with Congress or to dispense patronage, and was overwhelmingly defeated by Jackson in 1828. John Quincy Adams worked quietly behind the scenes and was uncharismatic in every respect. He considered himself a failure as president.

Andrew Jackson was the first really charismatic American politician. A long-time frontiersman and Indian fighter, he became famous by defeating the British in 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans. His new form of party politics was like Jefferson on steroids. He brought class conflict out into the open, campaigning as the people’s choice against the rich elites of the East. The 1828 election was the end of the founding network that had handed on the torch of office for 40 years. 

It also was a transition to a new style of campaigning. By 1840 it consisted of marches festooned with banners, wagons with brass bands (“bandwagons”), slogans endlessly repeated, the whole baby-kissing ritual that has endured down through the television era. Jackson had frontstage charisma that his predecessors lacked, in part because electioneering was becoming a big noisy public ritual. Combine this with a contentious ideology, and the ingredients were there for a president expected to turn things upside down. This Jackson did, above all by instituting an all-out spoils system for federal offices. This too enhanced political enthusiasm and Jackson’s reputation as a man of the people rather than the established elite.

Bottom line on the founding network: they were uncharismatic because they didn’t need to be. They got power by circulating writings among the high-literate class and building the country by skilled diplomacy. The new electioneering style came in with the prestige of wider democracy, which also set off a demand to manufacture charisma and hero-worship. With paradoxical results, as we shall see.

II. The 18 presidents from 1837 to 1901 are remarkable for lack of charisma.

From Van Buren to McKinley, there is only one strongly charismatic president, Abraham Lincoln. Only 3 ever won two consecutive terms (Lincoln, Grant, and McKinley--the latter two distinctly uncharismatic). Two died in office of natural causes; 3 were assassinated; 4 were not even renominated by their own party; another 2 were defeated for re-election; 4 declined to run again, declaring themselves exhausted or disillusioned with the office. In other words, 15 out of 18 could not generate enough popularity or success to keep on going.

Leaving Lincoln aside, few of the rest had any kind of charisma. Five presidents (William Henry Harrison, Taylor, Grant, Hayes, Garfield) were former generals, nominated as war heroes rising above divisive political issues; none did well in office. Grant’s administrations were full of corruption scandals, though he won reelection on the prestige of his Civil War victories; but even as a general, Grant was quietly persistent rather than charismatic.

Only 3 presidents had frontstage charisma, in the form of great speech-making. Lincoln, of course, but the rest of the list is surprising. James Polk was known as a star orator in Tennessee politics, an avid follower of Andrew Jackson, whose seat he occupied in Congress. He attempted to evade the increasingly divisive slavery issue by a platform of national expansion. Polk bluffed a war with Britain to settle claims to the Oregon territory, then invaded Mexico to acquire the rest of the continent all the way to California. Despite his success, the Mexican War was opposed by principled northerners, and a split among Polk’s own Democrats over slavery left him so exhausted that he died 3 months after leaving office at the age of 54.

Andrew Johnson has the historical reputation as one of the worst presidents, as the first to be impeached (although acquitted). In fact, Johnson was unusually courageous. He was the only one of 22 southern senators who refused to leave the Union, whereupon he was almost lynched by outraged Virginians. Lincoln gave him an administrative job and added him to the ticket in 1864, as a gesture of reconciliation towards the South. After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson attempted to continue Lincoln’s policy of leniency, but he was sharply attacked by the Republican majority in Congress who wanted a punitive reconstruction. Early in his career, Johnson had been another Jacksonian populist, known as a fiery stump speaker. Having both charisma and courage of his principles did not save him from ignominious failure; in fact his courage contributed to it, since he refused to maneuver politically, and he lacked the key requisite of charismatic leadership, an admiring audience.

Cleveland, who won two terms separated by a defeat (followed by winning the rematch), had the reputation as a reformer, taking on the corrupt Tammany Hall machine in New York, then pushing for civil service reform at the Federal level. This was obviously a political opportunity, since so many administrations had gone through scandal, and presidents found themselves besieged by office-seekers who sometimes shot them when disappointed. He was one of the few presidents to ride out a sex scandal, admitting to fathering an illegitimate child, and then beating the opponent who made the charge-- Blaine, equally tarred with the reputation as a corrupt machine politician. Defeated for office in the 1888 election, Cleveland declared there was “no happier man in the United States.”

The most charismatic speaker of the entire period ran for president three times and lost all of them: William Jennings Bryan. Known as the silver-tongued orator of the prairie, Bryan was defeated twice by McKinley over banking interests versus cheap money for farmers. McKinley had strong establishment and machine politics backing, and projected an image of dignified respectability that prevailed over the tub-thumping of Bryan’s raucous campaigns.

Putting it all together, frontstage charisma paid off in political success for only two: Lincoln and Polk. Both paid the price; Polk retired exhausted from political infighting; Lincoln was assassinated.

What brought them down is emblematic of the entire period. There were too many contentious issues and deep-rooted factions: class conflict, banking issues, slavery, territorial expansion, the spoils system. That is why so many presidential candidates were compromise candidates nominated after lengthy convention balloting, or were disowned by their own party. A charismatic speaker on matters of principle might seize the public imagination of one segment, but could rarely win the presidency or carry out his program when in office. Inability to generate really sweeping charisma was built into the divisive structure.

Lincoln, who had great skills as a negotiator and coalition-builder, to go along with his oratory, was alone in coming out of it with a towering reputation. His martyrdom helped. In fact, we can date the moment when Lincoln became adulated by huge numbers of people: late April 1865. His body was taken home from Washington to be buried in Springfield, Illinois. It was a distance of 700 miles, but the train route covered 1700, snaking back and forth so that millions of people could stand by the tracks to witness the procession. It took 13 days. It was probably the biggest funeral ritual ever, and had all the successful ingredients: people assembled, united in focusing their attention on one thing, welling up with one common emotion intensified by each other. The result was turning a man into a symbol, a sacred object representing the solidarity of the nation.

III. The 19 presidents from 1901 to 2016. This is the era of statistics and surveys, and we have already seen its high and low points.

Three presidents were charismatic speakers and public heroes (Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Kennedy), although only two had a record of successes; JFK’s program was largely carried out by his uncharismatic successor, Lyndon Johnson. Eisenhower, although uncharismatic, was unusually popular. Reagan, quite successful in his program (though correspondingly disliked by the ideological opposition), also was near the peak in voter support, although his popularity floor was lower than the others. Obama, known as a charismatic speaker, was an ineffective politician. His peak popularity rating (not unusually high at 69%) was just after his inauguration in 2009. His floor was a mediocre 37%, and his average approval 47% (a figure beaten by 10 of the last 13 presidents).

Overall, 6 of 29 modern elections were won by strongly charismatic leaders (Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, JFK); another 4 elections were won by well-liked but uncharismatic figures, Eisenhower and Reagan.  About 80% of the time, an uncharismatic person wins the presidency.

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Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy
Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

In addition to the standard sources, see:

On the struggle to expand the voting franchise in the U.S. from the 1780s to the 1840s:

Chilton Williamson, 1960. American Suffrage from Property to Democracy.

On the creation of political parties in the Jefferson era:

John Levi Martin, 2008. Social Structures. Chapter 8, “From pyramid to party.”

On the dynamics of political scandals:

Ari Adut, 2008. On Scandal.

On flags and other rituals of public support after the 9/11/01 attack:

Randall Collins, 2004. “Rituals of solidarity and security in the wake of terrorist attack.” Sociological Theory 22: 53-87.

CAN THE WAR BETWEEN COPS AND BLACKS BE DE-ESCALATED?

The phrase “war on cops” is partly correct. There also has been a war of police against black people. Both have been going on for a long time, and each reacts to the other.

The recent argument is that violence is encouraged by black protests, mainstream supporters and officials who have caused police to withdraw from active policing, putting them in a defensive position with black criminals on the offensive. This is a part of the causal pattern, but it is embedded in a much larger process: counter-escalation of each side against the other. Both political mobilization and violence play a part in the escalation process, and this happens on both sides. A key mechanism is the emotions that pervade both camps: sometimesrighteous anger, sometimes jittery tension that blows up little incidents and feeds the fire with atrocities.

Only a small fraction of each side engage in violence; but for their opponents they become emblematic of the entire enemy camp. The emotions of the most volatile fringes drive the back-and-forth process.

The micro-sociology of emotions shows there is something practical we can all do to de-escalate the conflict. I will discuss this at the end.

Counter-Escalation Theory

Conflict escalates when whatever one side does gives rise to a counter-attack. This doesn’t always happen. Some conflicts come to an end. The ones that go on longest are where conflict with an outside group increases solidarity; we feel a stronger identity, resolve to fight back harder. The other side does the same. The most dangerous feedback loop is when the two groups become morally polarized. The other side is seen as more and more evil; therefore whatever we do against them is morally right; it is righteous vengeance, it is street justice, it is doing whatever it takes to beat back the menace.

Individuals disappear from view; the cop you are ambushing may be one of the good guys who sincerely believes in community outreach; the black man whose car you are stopping may be a middle-class citizen. But at the moment of confrontation they all fade into the category of the stereotyped enemy.

Since whatever the other side does is seen in the worst possible light, we are quick to see atrocities in whatever they do to us. Whether their attacks come from racism, bureaucratic policy, emotions, or sheer accidents of mistaken identity and poor shooting aim, they are lumped together as atrocities. In our own eyes we are the good guys, so whatever we do is good; our own mistakes are minimized and our violence is viewed as proper, righteous and heroic. Since the psychology of both sides is the same, conflict at a high level of polarization becomes a war of competing atrocities.

Communities which are already isolated are particularly prone to escalation. Police tend to be a closed community, who socialize mainly with each other, and avoid contacts with ordinary citizens when they are off duty. They have strong solidarity, and put up a front to outsiders. The result is that police generally refuse to criticize each other in public, and regard the rest of the society as not understanding them. Somewhat similar processes occur in the black lower-class ghetto, except that there is much more internal conflict.

Escalation does not go on forever, although it may take a long time to run its course. The level of conflict goes up and down depending on other factors, including each side’s logistics and its degree of organization. I will weave in these factors as we survey the sequence of racial violence in the United States.

Gangs and Cops from 1940s to 2010s

The modern history of gangs began in the late 1940s when the first youth gangs were formed, initially by Puerto Rican teens in New York City. Criminal gangs existed before, but those were adults; often they were connected to political factions in the machine politics of big cities, and their members were usually white immigrants. The new youth gangs are best described as fighting gangs, since their main purpose was to project a tough image and to fight against nearby rival gangs. While 1950s news sensationalism publicized them as “juvenile delinquents”,  youth gangs were generally not involved in crime for making a living. They were drug consumers but not yet drug dealers, heroin then being monopolized by adult syndicates. Gangs were more like neighborhood social clubs for working-class teens, now pushed out of the labor force by high school attendance requirements. They evolved an alienated ideology and spearheaded the newly created teen culture of rock-’n-roll music, blue jeans, T-shirts and attitude. These styles were regarded as outrageous by white middle-class traditionalists, but the alienated youth culture soon spread into the mainstream as well. Despite its racial anchoring, a rebellious counter-culture acquired a large sympathy population among white youth and urban adults after they grew up, underpinning a on-going conflict between law-and-order and hipness.

In the 1950s, youth gangs spread in urban black and Hispanic ghettos, and mushroomed in the 1960s and 70s. In cities like Chicago, large corporate-style gangs formed; in Los Angeles and elsewhere, horizontal loyalties to “color” gangs. Some cities, like Philadelphia and much of the East Coast, continued to have little street gangs-- which produce high rates of violence because their rivals are so close by, and they lack bigger organization to restrain them.

Although youth gangs are almost always ethnic and very racially conscious, on the whole their violence is aimed not at dominant white society, but at each other. This has always seemed paradoxical, but is explainable by how violence is organized. In the 1950s, gang ideology was anti- “squares”-- i.e. middle-class white people with their respectability and support of the police. In the 60s, gang ideology aligned themselves with the civil rights movement against white dominance, but scorned the tactics of non-violence and political reform. On the other side, Irish youth gangs made a point of representing whites and acted as a violent militia to resist school integration. Nevertheless, the vast proportion of gang violence was against other gangs of their same race. Andrew Papachristos shows that virtually all gang killings in Chicago have been black-on-black, Hispanic-on-Hispanic, or white-on-white.

Why so much black-on-black violence?

Similarly among the most militant groups on the violent fringe of the 1960s civil rights movement. The Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, held an ideology that the devil is a white man and that the world is heading for a final war of black against white. Nevertheless, Black Muslims did virtually all their fighting between rival factions, invading each other’s mosques and assassinating leaders like Malcolm X. Their angry anti-white rhetoric upset the mainstream but there were virtually no attacks on whites. Why not? In the segregated society of the time, blacks rarely appeared in white spaces except in the role of service workers; it was a lot easier to carry out attacks on one’s on turf. Black Muslim temples were heavily guarded by a elite members called the Fruit of Islam, on the lookout for attacks; in this atmosphere of suspicion, confrontations escalated and mosques found themselves in local wars with each other. Similarly, the first “color” gang, the Crips, was formed in L.A. in the early 1970s during the height of the civil rights period as a movement to stop violence among black gangs, and channel it into war against whites; in practice, this meant Hispanic gangs.  Within two years, the Crips alliance split, with the Bloods breaking off into a rival color gang (red emblems vs. blue or black); henceforward, the main concern of gangs in these two alliances has been to fight against the other. (There have been more sub-splits and alliances, but the pattern remains the same.) The parallel between youth gangs and religious militants shows something deeper going on: ideological hatred of a strong distant enemy turns the weaker side to violence against more accessible local targets-- against rivals similar to themselves rather than enemies who operate on a different scale of organization.

This is in keeping with general theory of violence. Despite rhetoric of bravery, dedication to fighting the enemy, and self-sacrifice for the cause, most violence is successful when it attacks a target weaker than oneself. In street violence, bigger groups attack smaller ones they happen to encounter; in riots, it is mainly isolates who get beaten up by larger clusters. The preferred tactics of violence on all scales are to catch the enemy off guard, to establish surprise and momentum; to beat the enemy psychologically before beating them physically. Thus burglars prefer to break into houses in their own neighborhood, even if there is better loot to be taken in richer places; but burglars from the ghetto feel uneasy about being in the suburbs, and more psychologically empowered on their home turf. Armed robbers tend to stay close to home, too, but will venture out to no-man’s-lands like semi-deserted commercial districts, or look for isolated victims in interstitial areas with little street traffic. Having a gun is not sufficient to feel strong; feeling dominant in the setting is even more important.

This is one reason why black street gangs virtually never take part in mass shootings in schools; this is a phenomenon among alienated white youth in all-white schools. Black gang violence almost always takes place on their own turf-- on their street, or the streets adjacent to it, the turf of a familiar rival. On the whole, more distant parts of the city are a mystery to local gangs, since they rarely venture there. Although they may have an anti-white ideology, it rarely comes into play as a practical opportunity for violence.

So far, this has been about small group violence, usually armed with no more than handguns. In the world of better organized violence, military and police forces can range more widely; so do insurgent groups like terrorists. Fighting further away from your home base requires more organization. It needs more logistics, ammunition, transportation; better planning and intelligence; more organizational backup to call in for help or to extricate you. And it requires more organizational solidarity-- groups which continually motivate each other to adhere to an ideology and to commit themselves to the emotionally difficult task of confronting the enemy, especially when taking the attack to their turf. Big organizations like armies and police usually undertake such ventures when they have overwhelming numbers and weaponry. Small terrorist groups need the support of closed-off cells, living clandestinely, obsessively planning their moves. Casual street gangs have none of these resources and little of their tight, dedicated organization. Hence their rhetorical commitment to toughness and violence can only come out against easy targets, like themselves.

An escalated war against the police needs more social resources to go on the attack.

Race riots and politicization

Riots are an opportunity for mass participation. Although gangs may take part in them, a much larger proportion of the local population is involved: In the biggest race riots of the 1960s, 10-15% of black men took part, and another 30-40% were spectators and sympathizers .(Collins, Violence: 520)  As usual in most kinds of violence, a small percentage of the crowd does most of the violence, but the part of the crowd that merely acts as spectators adds to the emotional atmosphere of breakdown of ordinary law. This is what creates a “free space” or “liberated zone” where the police, for a time, do not intervene. In fact, violence between authorities and rioters takes up a relatively small amount of the time during a riot; looting and burning give the crowd something to do, prolonging the dramatic atmosphere that would otherwise disappear if there were nothing to do but go home.

A paradoxical result is that American race riots always take place in the minority ghetto, usually on its borders and main commercial streets where there are stores operated by non-black ethnics. The 1992L.A. riot after the Rodney King verdict was largely property attacks on Korean and other Asian store-owners; photos show widespread participation by black and Hispanic crowds. The Crips and Bloods called a truce in their normal hostility so that they could take part in the riot.

Riots publicize ideologies of protest. But whatever the slogans and the statements of spokespersons who are quoted in the news, at the line of confrontation mainstream society is always represented by the police. The police are often the onlyvisible presence of white society in what Elijah Anderson calls “black spaces.” Much of the time they are regarded as an occupying force. A riot not only brings about a confrontation of masses of local people against masses of police, but it is one of those rare moments when locals have enough numbers and enough emotional dominance to be able to defy the police.

The precipitation point for riots has usually been a confrontation with the police. The Detroit riot of July 1967, which lasted 5 days and resulted in 43 killed, 2000 injured, and 7000 arrested, began when police raided an after-hours bar on a hot summer night; in the atmosphere of the civil rights struggle, bar patrons fought back and the small police party retreated. When they returned several hours later with reinforcements, locals pelted police cars with bricks, again causing them to withdraw. The June 1967 Newark riot (26 killed) began when a taxi driver was arrested and rumors of police atrocities spread among taxi drivers. Although the issues of a riot may be framed as white vs. black, or mainstream society vs. criminals and radicals, on the ground the main conflict is between police and locals; and this sets the pattern for polarization within those groups as they perceive each other. *

* Sometimes also the Army is called out to end a riot. But in the US the army is a national institution with a lot of legitimacy; occasional killings by the army (such as Kent State in 1970) do not give rise to anti-army ideologies. Things are different in this respect in Mexico, and in many Latin American, African, and South Asian states, where the army is widely regarded as a political instrument or a corrupt organization. In the US, however, most collective resentment is acted out against the police.

Rioters always lose in the end, but riots give memories of pride and defiance. Their residue over time is to escalate long ground-swells of rebellions, in whatever form they come out.

Riots are better able to make a political statement than gangs. Although they almost never invade white territory, riots attract universal public attention; and although their threat of “the fire next time” is just rhetoric whose reality consists in burning their own neighborhood, the city and usually the nation has to at least temporarily pay attention to the racial divide. This is also an opening for political movements and non-violent demonstrations; the radical-flank effect of riots is to give the moderates more claim to make reforms, lest the violent fringe grow stronger. Liberal politicians and even some conservatives reacted by making reforms in the 1960s, dismantling the legal institutions of segregation. The movement for racial integration also improved the situation of black and other minorities in the middle class.

It left a lower-class black population that continued to be segregated and in an increasingly dead end economic situation. Poverty itself does not mobilize well-organized rebellion, since mobilization needs resources. The inner-city ghetto devolved into the land of the gangs, creating an underground economy of the drug trade, and in some places like Chicago, big corporate gangs taxing the off-the-books economy of the poor. For several decades, riots and demonstrations declined, while the crime rate surged, above all in black neighborhoods.

In the relatively peaceful period without riots to mobilize political concern, the black-vs.-mainstream divide deepened and entrenched. Civil rights reforms on the legal level mainly benefited a minority middle class. The worst part of the ghetto has remained black-- that is to say, African-Americans, descendants on the historic slave population; newer dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean on the whole have done better at acquiring middle-class jobs. This class-race-ethnic combination is the core identity for the contemporary race war. Although many black people are middle class and most are not gang members or criminals, * thepolice widely perceive themselves as facing a hostile enclave in the midst of the larger society. The cops are not even necessarily white European ethnics; many are Hispanic, some are Asian and a few are black. But on the whole these ethnic groups identify with mainstream society and historically have conflicted with blacks. Cops (whether they are seen as heroes or racists, and whether or not they are white) and black men (whether as dangerous criminals or innocent victims) have become the two counterpart symbols of everyday conflict in America. The African-American lower-class gang culture is the image that outsiders have of where the trouble comes from, and the atmosphere of polarization generalizes this image to all ambiguous encounters with blacks.

* The proportion of the black male population of teens and young adults who belong to gangs is about 10-12%.  Calculated in Collins, Violence: p. 372.

Escalation of police tactics

Police tactics against crime in the ghetto have gone through a series of developments. Traditional policing in the era of official segregation in the South meant white police would arbitrarily enter any black dwelling looking for suspects. But on the whole, crime of blacks against each other was not regarded as very important. In the North and especially in the era of the civil rights movement, police tended to abandon the ghetto. Elijah Anderson reports that in the 1980s and 90s the ghetto was largely unpoliced; both in the sense that police did not patrol there often and that they were slow to answer complaints; moreover when police did arrive at a scene of robbery or violence, they were peremptory towards everyone. In scenes with a good deal of angry talk, the victim or complainant could easily find oneself being arrested. Accordingly, ghetto residents were wary of calling the police. In this atmosphere, residents attempted to provide their own protection, what Anderson calls “the code of the street.” The stance was for everyone to appear tough, especially men but also women, dramatizing by voice and gesture they were ready to use violence. Anderson emphasizes that for the majority of people, the street code is a front, an effort to head off violence; only a minority within the ghetto would actually “go for street,” carrying weapons and living as predatory criminals. As noted, only a fraction, about one-tenth of black male youth belong to gangs, but the “decent” citizens (Anderson describes this as a folk term in some northern cities) also give off a protective veneer, that could impress outsiders that they are dangerous. Thus the street code, meant to act as a show to fend off being a victim, in the eyes of the mainstream and the police, made most ghetto residents appear indistinguishable from violent criminals.

Another tactic, largely by white politicians, was to create severe penalties for drugs. These laws were increasingly enforced, both for sale and for possession, leading the huge growth of incarceration of blacks and Hispanics by the 1990s. Since the drug laws fell on both the criminal segment and many of the “decent” segment of the ghetto, they added to racial polarization. Prisons became the center for spreading the antinomian culture. Severe sentences did not much affect the drug business itself, since those most likely to be caught were low-level dealers, who could easily replaced since they were one of the few prestigious career paths in the ghetto.

The high volume of drug arrests also had an effect on the police. As Peter Moskos shows in his ethnography of the Baltimore police force, and Philippe Bourgois in his research on north Philadelphia drug markets, police know the justice system is overcrowded, and that prosecutors and judges let many suspects off. Police become cynical about the revolving-door process, as well as exasperated by the defiant attitude it fosters among those they arrest. Police respond with their own informal punishment. This includes the tactic known in the culture of Eastern police forces as “a rough ride”-- leaving a prisoner shackled but not secured to a seat in the police wagon while they are roughed up by wild driving. This is apparently the scenario in April 2015 by which Freddie Gray-- a black man who been in and out of court multiple times for minor offenses and parole violations-- ended up dying from a broken spine after being arrested by Baltimore police.

Around the year 2000 came a reversal in police tactics. Previously they tended to neglect ghetto crime except for easy busts for drugs. Now computerization added new weapons. One version was COMSTAT, a centralized system put in place by the New York Police Department, that compiles crime reports not in old fashioned monthly or yearly statistics, but in real time; now police commanders could see where crime was surging in the city and flood that area with cops. COMSTAT is credited with having reduced the crime rate in New York City from one of the higher to one of the lowest big cities; it resembles the “surge” that General Petraeus used in Iraq to secure areas from insurgent forces. The main limitation of COMSTAT is that it is expensive to implement. The NYPD is unique in the size of its police force (35,000), and its ability to move forces around; most smaller police departments lack the manpower for local surges.

Computerized record-keeping has been put to a different use in other cities. Patrol cars now have on-board computers, which officers can use-- not only at any arrest or encounter with a suspect, but at any contact with a civilian. Infractions as minor as driving with a broken tail-light or selling cigarettes on the sidewalk now routinely result in a records check. Many minorities living in the gray economy have past infractions; and these are often compounded by failing to appear for court appearances, or failing to pay fines. As Alice Goffman shows in her ethnography of a small Philadelphia street gang, the court system tends to nickel-and-dime poor people to death-- metaphorically, of course, since these are generally fines in the hundred-dollar range that poor people have a hard time paying. The fines mount up since failure to appear or failure to pay results in yet another fine. Everything compounds each other in this system of city administration, policing, and antinomian street culture. Any innocuous police stop can result in arrest on outstanding warrants; it is still a revolving door but the police now are a constant, annoying presence in people’s lives, spreading the feeling that everyone is a suspect. The court system supports itself with fines, encouraged by city administrations under the pressure of mainstream resistance to raising taxes.  And not only big city courts and police forces use this strategy of controlling the poor by collecting fines on them. Towns like Ferguson, Missouri use a version of old-fashioned speeding traps on passing motorists, now updated with computerized records to fine the poorer citizens of their own town for minor offenses and accumulated penalties.

The result is escalation on both sides. The police are now more actively harassing the poor, and the poor are exasperated and defiant like the man in Ferguson who walked away from an officer and was shot in the back.

Middle-class tax revolt, revenue-strapped city administrations, and the predatory use of police as a cash-collecting machine blend together into a Kafka-esque system of feedback loops. Legitimation was given to the process by the “broken windows” theory of crime control, which encourages police to crack down on small offenses like urinating in public in order to eliminate signs of being places where laws are not enforced. Modern day computerization and so-called “best practices” have their worst effect on the street where the two most exasperated components of the system come together: cops and poor black people. *

* Other kinds of escalation in police tactics have happened, such as the militarization of police equipment since the late 1990s. But helicopters, armored vehicles, and body armor are used mainly for crowd control and riots, and probably have little effect on the tensions of everyday policing. Demonstrations and riots, as noted, are occasions where the anti-police constituency gets better organized and more politically effective; so the threatening face of heavy military equipment probably is no more than false comfort for the police.

Escalation of gang weapons and insurgent resources

On the other side, escalation of weapons and tactics has also gone on. In the 1950s, gangs mostly fought with handmade “zip guns” firing single shots. Their most dramatic weapon was the switch-blade knife, which made a sinister motion as the blade whipped out-- but was not itself particularly deadly, since knife fights are mostly for show and usually inconclusive. Gangs became more deadly, and the murder rate picked up in the 1970s and 80s as more guns came on the scene.

Nevertheless, for the most part gang weapons do not producemuch firepower. The accuracy of pistols is poor beyond a few dozen yards; while at very close range, the adrenaline surge tends to produce wild firing. Urban gang members rarely practice on a shooting range; and most patrons of gun ranges are white. There is great admiration for guns in the gang culture, but most gang members are not gun experts. The guns available in the illegal market are often of low quality-- here too the poor tend to get shoddy products. In the gang milieu, these defects don’t matter so much, since most of the time what happens consists of blustering and showing off. Close ethnographic observers of the gang scene find they display their guns, even gesture with them, far more than they fire them. Shoot-outs with rival gangs usually are brief , and getting hit is mostly a matter of chance. Not surprisingly, when shots are fired they often hit bystanders, including children; this is particularly likely in drive-bys where members of one gang fire at a gathering in a park or street that includes members of a rival gang. Hitting innocent victims is sometimes welcomed by gang members since it enhances their reputation for being ruthless.

The low quality and low competence of gang firepower is one reason they use it mainly against each other. Rarely do they attempt to shoot it out with the police, since they are almost always outgunned, not to mention the capacity of police to call in reinforcements to almost any level necessary to prevail. *

* The most organized violence against the police was by the Black Panther Party during 1967-70, in ambushes, gunfights, traffic stops and police raids. A total of 1 officer was killed and 4 wounded, while the Panthers lost 10 killed. By 1969-71, the Black Panthers were mainly involved in internal violence against splits and rival groups, with another 10 killed.  The Panthers began as a group to monitor police violence by armed patrols, but turned into a combination of political movement and gang, financing themselves by a tax on robberies and extortions carried out by members. 

In recent years, there are occasional postings of cell-phone photos of gang members carrying heavier weapons such as AK-47s. Nevertheless, this looks like the usual blustering, since one rarely hears of such weapons being used in gang fighting, or against the police. Long guns are more accurate than pistols, and can deliver a higher volume of fire. On the whole, they have been used in overt race war only when the local situation gave temporary emotional dominance to insurgents.  In the 1967 Newark and Detroit riots, snipers with rifles fired at police and National Guard troops from their home base in the ghetto. The July 2016 Dallas sniper represents an exceptional level of escalation of firepower, producing a total of 12 casualties. He came from a suburban area and never participated in the gang lifestyle-- which as we have seen, is very poorly adapted for fighting with the police. In this respect, the Dallas sniper more resembles the isolated school rampage shooter, amassing weapons in secret; the difference being both his target-- police rather than school children-- and his military training and his practicing weapons tactics. The Dallas sniper, in effect, was more assimilated into white society, and he used white weapons and followed a white scenario of mass killing.

The strongest similarity is to the so-called “Beltway sniper” in October 2002, who fired on white people from a car, killing 10 over a period of weeks.  This turned out to be a black military veteran, who (unlike gang members) trained for sniper skills, including with his 17 year-old protégé, who did the firing from a peep-hole in the trunk of their car. The motives and tactics of gangs, armed robbers, and grudge-obsessed rampage killers are different. But such tactics propagate by imitation, especially when they are highly publicized in the media. In a situation of emotional escalation of black-vs.-police conflict, one can expect cross-overs as the most militant individuals pick up the most lethal tactics.

The most effective escalation: communications and multi-pronged mobilization

The biggest weapon in escalating black insurgency has been, not weaponry, but publicity and politics.  During the civil rights period of the 1960s, victories were won because different styles of organization fought on different fronts. Non-violent protests by Freedom Riders, church-led alliances, and direct-action organizations like CORE, created a certain amount of attention, especially when they became well-publicized martyrs to segregationist violence. Riots engaged more of the black population, and created an unavoidable sense of national emergency. A fringe of individuals and organizations (SNCC, Black Panthers, Black Muslims) emerged that openly advocated violence. Most of the actual gains, however, were won by the most conventional part of the movement, the NAACP and the Urban League, whose lawyers challenged segregated arrangements in the courts. It was more of a tacit coalition than an explicit one, since most of these organizations disavowed at least some of the others. But their combination created the sense of national crisis that eventually moved the balance point of American politics and the judiciary towards integration.

The same pattern is reemerging in the current war of cops and blacks. The side against police violence includes legal organizations, some politicians, organizations of non-violent demonstrations, as well as a violent fringe of militants. We should also count the gang violence of the black community as part of the larger movement or atmosphere of resistance, along with the antinomian thrust of the youth culture. The big difference from the 1950s and 60s is now there is a national mobilization on the other side as well. The civil rights movement was opposed by a mainly Southern segregationist bloc. Today there is a widespread national constituency for cracking down on what is seen as out-of-control lawlessness.  Escalation and counter-escalation have been occurring on both sides. Both sides have gotten more sophisticated in recognizing each other’s tactics. The pro-police side sees that the black insurgency operates in tandem with political and media fronts, and has tried to counter them as abettors of violence.

The major new weapon on the side of the anti-police insurgency is in the realm of communication: the cell-phone camera. This had its analogy in the 1950s and 60s, when on-the-spot television news was just appearing, and police attacks on civil rights marches made sensational coverage, especially when reporters were also attacked in the mêlée. The new phase of mobilization against the police began in 1991 when Rodney King’s beating by a group of police was filmed by a resident with a new product, the video camcorder. The cell phone camera has made videos recording ubiquitous, and the decentralized social media of the Internet has made it hard for authorities to crack down on it.

Mobile videos of the police in action are not the whole story; they only work in tandem with the range of other tactics and organizations-- demonstrations, riots, political movements, law suits. The police recognize videos as an escalation against themselves. Confiscating cameras becomes a new side-issue and flashpoint for further conflict. There is some validity in arguments that videos capture only a part of the encounter and miss the verbal lead-up to the confrontation; the solution to this, however, could be more recordings, including voice, of police encounters with citizens. It is also true that police body cameras can be dysfunctional or deliberately turned off. All such recording devices become an expanding battleground. One can anticipate there will be more things to fight about in the future.

Counter-escalation on both sides spins off from the same technical innovations. Cell phone cameras and the social media come from the same IT revolution that brought squad-car computers and police tactics of running the record on everyone they stop. Both police and citizens use their electronic networks to call for backup; the police in a more organized way, with greater weaponry and authority; the street people in a more sensationalist way, seeking backup in the form ofcollective emotions, demonstrations, and politics.

Are there any paths to de-escalation?

After every highly publicized incident, whether the casualties are among the people or the police, mainstream figures call for calm and reconciliation. These calls have little effect on de-escalating the overall situation. Most violence and conflict in all forms is carried out by small fractions of the population. There is always an array from the most militant fringe, through the seriously committed partisans, to those who are less involved. Between the two sides of a conflict, those nearer the center are the ones most willing to listen to a message of reconciliation.  But it is the extremes who carry on the fight, and drive the level of escalation.

The flashpoint is the police on the streets.  Cops are under tension every time they stop a suspect. Tension is higher if conflict has escalated recently by previous incidents; higher if it is a neighborhood with a high crime rate; higher if there has been a chase, or alarming reports over police radio links.

Tension rises sharply when the citizen isn’t cooperative or is defiant. Richard Rubenstein, a sociologist who worked in the Philadelphia police force, reported that the first thing an officer wants in any encounter are signs that the person will not make trouble. He insists on taking the initiative, and controlling the situation in little details, since these are the warning signs for bigger trouble. Donald Black, who pioneered ride-along observations in patrol cars, calculated that the chances someone would be arrested did not depend on race per se, but on whether the person was defiant-- and in the 1960s black persons were more defiant to the police (not surprisingly, since this was the era of the civil rights movement). Car chases and running away increase officers' tension even more, since these are also acts of defiance. Citizens who turn their backs and refuse to stop are acting defiantly, even if the initial order was something trivial like “move to the sidewalk” (the first step in the 2014 Ferguson shooting).

Adding together any or all of these factors increases tension. Bodily this is experienced as adrenaline rush, the flight-or-fight arousal. The biggest danger with an adrenaline spike is the loss of perception and fine motor control. When heart rate races to 150 beat per minute or more, fine motor control is lost. An officer may reach for a gun when he thinks he is reaching for handcuffs or a taser. Trigger fingers produce wild or uncontrollable firing. Officers in shootouts report time distortions like going into a bubble, vision turning into a blur or tunnel vision on only one part of the scene. Hearing often goes out so that they don’t hear their own gunshots; voices become incomprehensible. It is a situation ripe for miscommunication and misperception.

Adrenaline-produced distortions explain why shooting incidents happen where it turns out the suspect did not have a gun, or was reaching for an ID; situations where stops for trivial reasons blow up into killings. Since adrenaline takes time to subside, the cop may empty the magazine of his gun, even after the suspect is motionless on the ground. Catching these details on video certainly looks like an atrocity.

Teaching awareness of body signs and emotional control

What can be done? The key is training cops to keep their bodily tension under control.  Sociologist Geoffrey Alpert found that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of force have a more deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both sides. More attention to such micro-details should train more police officers up to a high level of competence.

Individual officers vary widely in their use of force. About 10% of police account for the bulk of all force reports; and less then 1% fire their guns in multiple incidents. (Collins, Violence: 371) The polarized viewpoint see cops in general as being out of control; but the real issue is to make better officers out of the fraction that cannot control their emotions and physiology.

Adrenaline can be lowered, for instance by breathing exercises described by Army psychologist David Grossman. Police training should incorporate more explicit awareness of the distortions caused by tense confrontations. Weapons training tends to go in the opposite direction, stressing quick reaction, and training for automatic “muscle memory” in the default scenario that saving lives depends on rapid action. Police tend to be trained for extreme situations rather than clear assessment and self-control.

In the field, police dispatching and radio calls tend to turn situations into scenarios where the suspect is regarded as extremely dangerous.  Citizen calls to the police may say, someone might have a gun; or that someone might be engaged in a burglary. The dispatcher tends to turn this into a simpler form, there is a gun or a burglar. When messages are transmitted from one patrol car to another, the process by which rumors are propagated takes over. As psychological experiments have shown, each link in a chain of oral reports tends to simplify the message, leaving out any special qualifications and turning it into the most obvious cliché.  In the case of police transmissions, the more cars called to a scene, the more likely the message is to turn into an extreme threat; weapons are definitely asserted to be present; hostages tend to mentioned whether they exist or not and the suspect becomes reported as saying he will won’t die alone.

The combination of these processes explains events like the incident in Cleveland in November 2014. The officer who shot an adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground had raced to the scene and fired within 2 seconds after jumping from his car. Better trained officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone of perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear view of the situation.

Such events are preventable. The answer is not so much after-the-fact criminal charges and court trials-- these rarely result in conviction, and focus on punishing individuals rather than on the improvements that can be made in police procedures. Better training can be undertaken at local initiative by police forces willing to do so. This should include techniques for becoming aware of one’s own adrenaline level and heart rate-- body signs monitors like those used in physical exercise would help here. And techniques should be emphasized for getting adrenaline under control.  There also should be better training of police dispatchers, to make them aware of the distortions they introduce into messages; and making patrol officers aware of the rumor-like exaggeration in their own chains of messages to each other. A useful role of Federal and State governments would be to review police training programs, to assess whether they are sufficiently teaching bodily and perceptual awareness of the distortions of adrenaline rush. Emphasis needs to be upon best methods for calmly and accurately assessing the situation before escalating it.

What about the other side of the counter-escalation, the anger, hostility, and defiance in the black community? I have focused on what can be done by police to control their use of force, because this is where public policy might be implemented. But escalated conflict is driven by the extremes at both ends of the distribution, and the tough guys of black and Hispanic communities would be harder to reach.  Nevertheless, the message is much the same.  Be aware of one’s own adrenaline, one’s rush of emotions, the situational blurring of attention to everything but the impulse to dominate. And be aware of the same processes going on inside the person on the other side-- awareness of how to calm police down rather than rile them up. A glimmer of optimism comes from group psychology programs in California prisons, where convicted murderers learn to re-experience the events that led to their imprisonment, and to focus on better control of their emotions. Prisoners who completed the program and were released on parole had a re-arrest rate much lower than usual. It is not impossible that in the future self-training in micro-situational awareness could spread even in the most violent part of the population.

Framing the issue as racism doesn’t solve it. Cops without racist attitudes, under these kinds of tense situations, and with their adrenaline out of control, can trigger off violent atrocities. The answer isn’t in the attitudes; it is in the micro-techniques of how to behave in confrontations. There is a workable solution. Whether we will implement it or not is another question.

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now

REFERENCES

Randall Collins. 2008.  Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.

Randall Collins. 2012: “C-Escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict.” American Sociological Review

Eric C. Schneider. 1999. Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York.

Martín Sánchez-Jankowski.  1991. Islands in the Street.

Scott Decker and Barrik van Winkle. 1996. Life in the Gang.

Richard T. Wright and Scott Decker. 1994.  Burglars on the Job.

Richard T. Wright and Scott Decker. 1997.  Armed Robbers in Action.

Elijah Anderson.. 1999.  Code of the Street.

Elijah Anderson. 2012. The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life.

Deanna L. Wilkinson.  2003.  Guns, Violence and Identity among African American and Latino Youth.

Sudhir Venkatesh. 2006.  Off the Books. The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor.

Sudhir Venkatesh. 2008.  Gang Leader for a Day.

Randol Contreras. 2012. The Stickup Kids.

Andrew Papachristos. 2009. “Murder by Structure: Dominance Relations and The Social Structure of Gang Homicide,” American Journal of Sociology.

Joseph Krupnick and Christopher Winship. 2015.   "Keeping Up the Front: How Black Youth Avoid Street Violence in the Inner  City"  in Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse (Eds.),  The Culture Matrix: Understanding Black Youth.

Alice Goffman. 2014. On the Run.

David Skarbeck. 2014.  The Social Order of the Underworld. How Prisons Gangs Govern the American Penal System.

C. Eric Lincoln. 1994.  The Black Muslims in America.

Jonathan Rubinstein, 1973. City Police.

Donald Black. 1980. The Manners and Customs of the Police.

Peter Moskos. 2009. Cop in the Hood.

Dave Grossman. 2004.  On Combat. The psychology and physiology of deadly combat in war and peace.

David Klinger. 2004.  Into the Kill Zone. A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force.

Geoffrey P. Alpert and Roger G. Dunham. 2004. Understanding Police Use of Force.

DOES TRUMP HAVE CHARISMA? WHAT IS CHARISMA ANYWAY?

The term charisma is thrown around a lot these days, applied to everyone from pop stars to the merely well-dressed. Sure, words can mean whatever you want them to mean, but they lose their power to explain what is going on. In sociology, charisma is a theory about a particular kind of power, contrasted with bureaucratic power and mere traditional authority. For Max Weber, who originated this analysis, charisma is a main source of historical change, but it is unstable and doesn’t last. It doesn’t mean just fashionable or popular; it means leadership that accomplishes big things.

We can improve Weber’s theory. When we closely examine charismatic people, we find four kinds of charisma-- i.e. there are four different ways that people get charisma. A few people have most or all of them; some get it from only one source.

1. Front-stage charisma

2. Back-stage charisma

3. Success-magic charisma

4. Reputational charisma

1. Front-stage charisma

Front-stage and back-stage are Goffman’s terms for regions of everyday life: whether you are putting on a public performance and doing official things, or when you are in private with your intimates. Back-stage is informal, and it includes both hanging out with your buddies and confidantes, and planning how to handle your front-stage performances. The glib term “transparency” so widely demanded today implies there should be no backstages; no one ever gets to plan anything or to say what they really believe; it all has to be goody-goody front-stage clichés.

Front-stage charisma means putting on overpoweringly impressive performances in front of an audience. The crowd is not just convinced; they are swept off their feet. It is more than just an entertaining moment; after such an experience, we will follow them anywhere. Charisma seizes people’s emotions and shapes their will. A charismatic leader is a great speech-maker. Their speeches recruit a movement.

Jesus is the archetype of front-stage charisma. His sermon on the mount spills over into miracles among the audience. Throughout his career he has mastery of crowds. Even with hostile crowds, he breaks their momentum, seizes the initiative, and ends up emotionally dominating.

Other speech-makers with charismatic power include Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Julius Caesar, and on the dark side of the force, Adolf Hitler. The entire Nazi movement was built on mass-participation performances, including their sinister marches, swastikas, Heil Hitler! salutes, and loud-speakers. A charismatic leader is master of the mass media of the day, whatever they may be.

2. Back-stage charisma

Having front-stage charisma does not mean you are charismatic in the informal situations of everyday life. Winston Churchill was regarded as rather an ill-mannered drunk at dinner parties. Alexander the Great was inspirational at the head of his troops in battle, but he palled around with his buddies and sometimes got into fights with them.

An example of purely backstage charisma is T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia). When recruiting an Arab army against the Turks in WWI, Lawrence did not try to dominate meetings or give orders. He let the warrior equality of the desert take its course as they discussed at leisure whether to follow the British or not; when the timing felt right, he would quietly announce that he was going to attack such-and-such, whoever felt like coming was welcome. Lawrence also had weapons, money, camels, and a string of military successes, so he soon was being greeted with enthusiastic shouts by warriors rushing to join him. Back on the British side of the lines, Lawrence was quiet but welcome because he brought good news. After the war, he hated publicity and disguised himself as much as possible.

Others with back-stage charisma included Napoleon and Steve Jobs. I will comment on their interactional techniques in a further post.

3. Success-magic charisma

Weber’s main criterion is that charismatic leaders are credited with supernatural powers. Jesus, Muhammad, and Moses are associated with miracles and direct contact with the divine. On the secular level, charisma comes from a string of successes, especially against the odds. Such a leader becomes regarded as unbeatable.

Napoleon acquired such reputation for a long string of battle victories that enemy generals said his presence on the battlefield was worth 40,000 troops, and advised the strategy of going up against other French generals rather than Napoleon himself. Hitler’s reputation in Germany took off with a series of diplomatic and military victories from the mid-1930s through 1941, backing up his earlier boast to make Germany great again.

In the business world, Steve Jobs already had a reputation for backstage charisma when he first developed Apple Computer Co, but his public image changed from eccentric to unbeatable after his return to Apple in 1997 and a ten year string of soaring product roll-outs. He artfully combined success charisma with frontstage charisma, organizing dramatic product launches and making Apple stores scenes for enthusiastic crowd participation.

Unbroken success is hard to come by, and virtually all charismatic leaders have to deal with failure at some point. But charisma requires at least an aura of success. One way this happens is that belonging to a growing movement of enthusiastic followers gives confidence the leader’s promises will pay off. In the stock market, a cascade of followers is a financial success in itself.

4. Reputational charisma

If you have charisma, you get a reputation for it. The fourth type of charisma is a result of the other three. There is also some feedback effect; the more widespread your reputation for charisma, the more it pumps up your appeal as a frontstage performer and as a miracle-worker. But this brings us onto tricky grounds. People who want to be charismatic can try to manipulate it, by working the public relations machine. How successful is this?

One limitation is that the competition can get crowded. There is a limit on how many charismatic people can exist at the same time, especially when they go up against each other. * It would be like having too many prima donnas at a party.

*  In examining the networks of philosophers across history, I found a pattern of “the law of small numbers”-- the number of famously creative persons in one generation was almost always between 3 and 6. Whether a similar law of small numbers operates for politics or business has not yet been found.

The struggle for fame will shoot down many contenders, especially in an era dominated by easy access to mass media. This implies that you need a foundation in one of the other three forms of charisma, to have a chance at reputational charisma.

Television and video images convey not just reports of what people did and said, but what they looked like saying it, as if they were face-to-face with the viewer. That turns the most basic test of charisma more into the second type. Back-stage charisma depends on the kinds of emotions conveyed by facial expressions and body rhythms; people are good at picking up genuine emotions and feel uneasy about emotions which are forced. **

** Soon after the 1980 campaign, I attended a meeting with Paul Ekman, the psychologist who pioneered research on the facial expression of emotions. Ekman commented that Jimmy Carter had a forced smile, whereas Ronald Reagan’s smile was genuine. Similarly fateful were the disastrous attempts at false impressions in the 1988 campaign, with Michael Dukakis shown in a political ad riding in a tank, and the 2004 campaign with John Kerry shown duck hunting.

Subtypes of merely reputational charisma include:

-- ephemeral pseudo-charisma:

You get a big reputation; enthusiastic crowds flock to see you; everybody wants to get near you, touch you, get your autograph or a selfie with you. This is pretty much the definition of being an entertainment star. It tends to be ephemeral, all the more so as the competition for attention goes on.

It also happens in politics. An example is Gorbachev, who was treated like a rock star, especially in Europe during the mid-1980s. He held out a new future, ending the Cold War, negotiating nuclear weapons reductions, and democratizing the Soviet Union. By 1989-91, these reforms overtook Gorbachev himself; he was not only deposed, but lost his charisma.  It comes and goes; until the early 1980s, Gorbachev was just another Communist apparatchik, protégé of the KGB chief Andropov who came to power after Brezhnev’s death. Gorbachev had a period of genuine successes, but his reputation at its height was a bubble that burst when public attention turned elsewhere.

-- historically retrospective charisma:

Some individuals’ charisma is created after their death. An example is Queen Elizabeth the First, whose name is attached to the Elizabethan age. She was not a speech-maker, and she did not direct the policy of England to any great extent during her reign. Major decisions, like executing Mary Queen of Scots and thereby setting off the Spanish Armada, were made behind her back. She had no great skill in winning people over backstage. The impression of her supreme greatness comes from two things: first, her court made a big deal out of flattering her, surrounding her with elaborate courtesy and ostentatious display. She wore magnificent costumes and jewels and was the center of impressive entertainments and ceremonies. In this respect, she was quite a lot like a Chinese Emperor, surrounded by protocol in the Forbidden Palace, while the secretaries ran the country.

Second: the Elizabethan period (and its continuation into the reign of her successor, James I) was a time of great successes for England: the end of the Protestant/Catholic struggles; the growth of English sea power to world class; the historic outpouring of English literature, a good deal of which was dedicated to Elizabeth or performed in her presence. Truth be told, Elizabeth was a magnificent symbol, but a charismatic leader only by historical courtesy.

One of the loosest ways of getting called “charismatic” is merely to be a famous name at a time when important things happened. If we use all four criteria, we can check empirically whether this person was charismatic or not, and in what way. We can look at whether they were good at swaying crowds and recruiting followers; and if they could make disciples out of their intimate acquaintances. Every famous person can be assessed this way, if we have the records. For ancient people this is not always clear. We know too little about the life of Gautama, who became the Buddha. Confucius was not a public success although he did recruit the first generation of followers who later burgeoned into a dominant movement in the history of China.

At any rate, we have four ways people become charismatic, and these can be used to examine any particular case.

Does Donald Trump have charisma?

[1] Front-stage charisma is his strength.  He dominates public meetings, making the crowd enthusiastic and intensely loyal on his behalf. In that sense he is a great speech-maker, although not at all in the style of traditional oratory. His sentences are short and often repetitive, his vocabulary limited. This brings out an important point: effective speech-making does not depend on its formal qualities. Front-stage charisma is generated by connecting with the audience, building emotion, and riding with it. 

Trump stands out from other politicians by constantly doing something surprising. From the point of view of his opponents, this means saying things which are shocking; but it also leaves them spending most of their time responding to him, expressing outrage, and rebutting his claims. Trump thus always seizes the initiative, and refuses to give it up. Whereas most people lose emotional energy when they are attacked by a barrage of criticism, Trump does not back down, but renews the attack. Media scandals usually destroy people’s careers, but Trump is unfazed by them, and uses them to focus even more attention upon himself.

Trump uses the media to monopolize the focus of attention of the wider public; he uses his rallies as a stronghold to protect himself from fallout. The way he stands firm and plunges even further ahead in his pathway makes him a beacon for his followers. He becomes an emotional energy hero: no one can top him or push him off his trajectory. *

* In contrast, in the 2000 campaign, Pat Buchanan, a candidate with a similar anti-immigration message, was confronted at a rally in Arizona by a young man, who said, I am one of the Mexican border-crossers you are talking about. What about me? Buchanan was shaken, replying apologetically, I didn’t mean you in particular. Trump is not shaken by pressure to behave according to conventional good manners; in similar situations he attacks. Early in his campaign, he rejected persistent questioning by television journalist Megyn Kelly, shifting the focus to her effort to control the topic. This is where his notorious “blood oozing out of her...” remarks came from. Feminists found this scandalous; but it also alerted the audience that this was someone who would not be pushed around by reporters, even in the smallest details of questioning.

Always doing something surprising; never letting the other side set the agenda; seizing the initiative and never giving it up: these are key characteristics of highly charismatic persons. I have documented these same traits in the face-to-face encounters of Jesus. Obviously I am not saying that Trump resembles Jesus in other respects; yet both illustrate a high degree of front-stage charisma.

Emotional energy is confidence, enthusiasm, initiative, and persistence. In Interaction Ritual (IR) theory, emotional energy is the result of successful encounters. That requires getting everyone’s attention focused on the same thing; generating a shared emotion; and building up rhythmic entrainment so that the group feels themselves unified and strengthened. Successful IRs do not have to start with positive emotions; negative emotions like fear or anger also work because they attract so much attention. The key to a successful IR is to transform the initial emotion into a feeling of collective solidarity in the group. We may be angry but we are angry together, and that makes us strong; fearful or frustrated but fearful and frustrated together. Trump is a master of this dynamic in public events. Pushback from the outside does not faze him, since it is what keeps his rallies intense; and his followers, who might otherwise be emotionally intimidated by that pushback in the general population, find Trump a pillar of strength. He is the unusual person who not only rides out scandals, but flourishes on them.

[2] Back-stage charisma.  Trump is much less charismatic here. By all reports, when he interacts with people one-on-one, his attention wanders. He gets along with persons who are extremely deferential to him. He is more domineering than inspiring. Hence his preference for big rallies; small meetings with one-on-one interaction are not his forte, not where he gets his emotional energy.

[3] Success-magic charisma. This is part of the image that Trump claims for himself, that unlike others he is always the winner. Nevertheless, many of his business ventures have been failures, with numerous bankruptcies. Clearly Trump is not in a league with Caesar or Napoleon with their string of victories, or with Bill Gates or Warren Buffett in business success.

A number of mitigating points need to be made. Virtually no one has an unbroken string of successes (see Napoleon, Caesar..). A reputation for success-magic can be upheld by springing back from failures. This is what Trump does with his bankruptcies, especially since he dumps the loss on his investors. Michel Villette, in his study of great fortunes made in Europe and the US during mid-20th century, found that most of them went through bankruptcies and legal fights, which they emerged from successfully by hard-balling everyone else. Trump fits that pattern.

In his business career, Trump uses his claims to making great investments as a way of snowing financiers into investing. When the enterprise fails, they are in so deep that they have to bail him out. In his personal business, Trump has played explicitly on the theme, too big to be allowed to fail.

Is this success-magic charisma? At best, a manipulative form of it, characteristic of the world of skyrocketing finances from the 1990s through the present.

[4] Reputational charisma. This kind of charisma is derivative of the other three. There is a multiplier effect, once the reputation machine get rolling. Thus far (mid-October 2016 at time of writing) it remains to be seen whether Trump will turn out to be another instance of ephemeral pop-star reputation.

In sum, Trump has front-stage charisma, and not a lot of the other three kinds.

Does charisma win elections?

Politics is a competition. Being charismatic for one group of people does not make you charismatic for everyone; and that is true for any historic figure we can think of. So having opponents who deny your charisma does not mean you don’t have it.

Modern media-oriented political campaigns give a premium to charisma or what looks like it. Are elections determined by who has more charisma?

In the primary campaigns, the only other person who built up a charismatic profile was Bernie Sanders. Clearly this was all front-stage charisma. Sanders is not imposing as a personality. Throughout his career in Congress, he was an isolated figure whose vote was rarely sought out by anyone. He has no record or reputation for success. What he did find, in the 2015-16 campaign, was a constituency who wanted somebody radical, who could voice their criticism of the establishment. Bernie Sanders epitomizes Weber’s point that charisma comes from the audience more than from the individual himself. This helps explain Bernie’s reluctance to shut down his campaign, even after he had clearly lost and his continued criticism was damaging Hillary Clinton’s general election. He went from nobody to charismatic leader-- as long as he stayed in the magic spotlight of his enthusiastic rallies. In this last respect, the Sanders and Trump campaigns are similar.

Hillary Clinton is not charismatic. She has had to learn how to make political stump speeches. She has mastered the rhetoric, the gestures, the facial expressions. It still doesn’t look spontaneous.* Over the years, Hillary was known as a get-down-to-business, get-things-done person, the opposite of warm and fuzzy. Her campaign smile, in particular, is what Ekman would call a forced smile. I suggest that her front-stage demeanor, more than anything else, is what gives many people the feeling she is not trustworthy. The scandal-politics of issues about emails and Monday morning quarterbacking over terrorist attacks are less telling than the emotional resonance that many people feel is missing in her public face. By all accounts, she is a capable person backstage. She has a mixed record of success, no reputation for magic. Like most politicians at the height of a campaign, she does generate enthusiasm from her hard-core supporters; that comes less from her own charisma than from the audience projecting their emotions onto her.

* Senator Ted Cruz in the Republican primaries displayed a speaking style that also looked artificial: rhetorical statements, followed by pause for effect, accompanied by sweeping arm gestures. It went on too long and looked like it was coached, without getting the rhythm right. Trump beat everyone to the punch with his spontaneity. The other politicians made him look good.

Strong charisma is rare. In most elections, in the US and elsewhere, there has been no charismatic figure. If we drop down to a looser criterion-- how did the candidates compare in whatever lesser degrees of charisma they had?-- it still would not be clear that the person who looked more charismatic won. Sometimes clearly charismatic persons lose: Churchill’s party lost the election of 1945 even though Churchill personally was at the height of his war-time reputation.

This is an open field for research: examine elections by rating the candidates on the four kinds of charisma. There are instances where the most charismatic figure rolled to victory (FDR’s string of four terms), others where the charismatic leader lost (Teddy Roosevelt in 1912), plenty of elections where nobody was charismatic or their charisma did not come until later (Lincoln during the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson at the end of WWI). Charisma is just one ingredient in political success, and we haven’t yet measured how it stacks up against other conditions.

Charisma is not the only form of leadership

There are other kinds of successful organization leaders.

-- The harmonious team manager,  who gets everyone working together and focused on goals. Eisenhower was an example; never a battlefield leader, he kept the war effort going by managing difficult personalities like De Gaulle and Churchill, Patton and Montgomery. Another person, well known to myself, is a woman who wherever she goes is always elected to lead the organization or chair the committee. She gets along with all factions, keeps things moving, and is appreciated for winding up meetings without wasting time. (She is my wife.)

-- The smart decision-maker and strategist. There is a lot of hype about this, especially in business, so we need to keep a careful scorecard.  In politics, an example is 19th century German chancellor Bismarck, who engineered the unification of the German Reich, and out-maneuvered the left by introducing a welfare state. Today, the nearest example may be California Governor Jerry Brown (in his later career): he plans ahead for political crises and budget shortfalls, using the ballot initiative to change legislative rules so that his bills can get through. Brown avoids charisma and minimizes public campaigning. Backstage, he skips chit-chat and plunges immediately into goals and how to reach them. Unlike charismatic leaders, strategists of this sort tend to be undogmatic, and are willing to buck their own party and borrow policies from the opposition. Bill Gates’ career at Microsoft is a business example.

-- The coalition-builder.  Lyndon Johnson, never charismatic in public, was a power-house at lining up votes for legislation, with a mixture of schmoozing, horse-trading, and putting on pressure. Abraham Lincoln, who was a good orator, also had this skill. Coming into the presidency in a very divided political situation, he put as many of his opponents as possible into his cabinet, then played them against each other so as to get the most effective financial and logistical effort for the war. His non-charismatic side was just as important as his public charisma, which grew towards the end of the Civil War.

Bottom line: Charisma is one way to mobilize people into action. In elections, charisma does not always win. In running an organization, charismatic leadership works best in combination with a details-oriented team, as seen in the second incarnation of Steve Jobs at Apple. In running a government, the non-charismatic styles are an indispensable ingredient.

Charisma shakes things up. Other leadership styles are needed to get things done.

---

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  
 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies. 1998.

Paul Ekman, Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. 2009.

Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1959.

Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot, From Predators to Ikons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero. 2009.

On Jesus’s interactional style:

“Jesus in Interaction: the Micro-sociology of Charisma”

On Steve Jobs, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great:

Randall Collins and Maren McConnell, Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Emotional Energy.  2016. Maren Ink.

On T.E. Lawrence:

“How to Become Famous: the Networks of T.E. Lawrence”

On Queen Elizabeth the First:

Susan Doran, The Tudor Chronicles 1485-1603.  2009. N.Y.: Metro Books.

Garrett Mattingly, The Armada.  1959.  Houghton Mifflin.

COOL-HEADED COPS NEEDED: HEART RATE MONITORS CAN HELP

Virtually all controversial police shootings arise from misperception and over-reaction to the situation. These are results of bodily tension and high adrenaline levels, which in turn cause perceptual distortions and out-of-control shooting. The good news is that adrenaline levels can be recognized and monitored on the spot. And methods now exist for reducing one's adrenaline to a manageable level.

From studies of violent situations, we have learned the following.  Face-to-face conflict raises bodily tension. At high levels, opponents become clumsy and inaccurate. This happens through a sudden rise in levels of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone. These are triggered by the primitive fight-or-flight center of the lower brain, an undifferentiated arousal for rapid action that can go either way.

Heart rate is an easily accessible measure of adrenaline arousal. Ordinary resting heart rate is about 60 BPM (beats per minute) in adults, about 100 BPM in moderate exercise. Optimal athletic and physical performance is around 115-145 BPM.  As heart rate goes up, the big muscle groups are energized, while fine muscle coordination is progressively lost. You can see this for yourself at the gym on a machine that monitors heart rate: trying writing with a pen when your heart rate is 145 or more. The effect of emotional tension and fear are stronger than vigorous exercise alone.

At levels around 150-175 BPM, perceptual distortions tend to happen. These experiences are typically reported by combat troops and police who have been in shoot-outs. Time becomes distorted-- both speeded up or seemly slowed down to dreamlike walking under water. Vision becomes blurred, surroundings are lost, tunnel vision narrows in. Hearing tends to shut down-- a cocoon-like experience in which one can't hear the sounds of one's own gun, or the voices of people around you.

Virtually all controversial police shootings show signs of these perceptual distortions. A traffic stop in which the officer misperceives the driver reaching for his wallet as reaching for a weapon. In the Tulsa, Oklahoma shooting of Terence Crutcher in September 2016, the officer said she temporarily lost her hearing just before she fired-- even though there were sounds of sirens and a police helicopter overhead. I am not addressing the point here of whether this makes her legally culpable or not, but noting that it fits the pattern: perceptual distortions are the immediate flashpoint for out-of-control shootings.

Having more police on the scene increases the chances of uncontrolled shooting. Tension is contagious. Cops who are tense tend to make officers around them tense.

On New Years night 2009 in Oakland, California, a white police officer put a gun to the back of the head of a young black man who was lying of the ground being arrested, and killed him with one shot. The incident began with reports that groups of young black men were fighting on the train; at the station, four police began making arrests. There was much loud shouting on both sides, about who was or was not involved in the fighting. The young men argued and struggled with police officers; one of the four cops, not the officer who did the shooting, was particularly aggressive, throwing black youths against the walls, pushing them down, and yelling the word ‘nigger’ at them. The officer who eventually shot his pistol was relatively restrained, trying to calm both the excited cop and the men being arrested; one photo of him, a minute before the shooting, shows a perplexed expression on his face. The officer said afterwards he thought he was reaching for his Taser but pulled his pistol by mistake. In a state of high adrenaline arousal, this is entirely plausible. If the most out-of-control cop in the group had been calmer, the killing most likely would not have happened.

Some officers get impatient about what they feel as indecisiveness or confusion, and act to resolve the situation by opening fire. This is apparently what happened in the Charlotte, N.C. September 2016 shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, a black man who was apparently high on drugs, possibly displaying a gun, and ignoring police orders.  The shooting officer had initially been calm, waiting until other police business had been taken care of. Several officers first watched their suspect before finally attempting to get him out of his car. As the situation became more stalemated, it also became louder. More officers arrived, as well as the suspect's wife who kept telling the officers he was harmless and also on medication. One officer (a plain-clothes black cop) who had been there since the outset apparently grew exasperated to the point where he couldn't control himself.

To these kinds of distractions, add the effect of adrenaline arousal on hearing. In the cocoon of high tension, voices disappear. The more persons who are present-- cops, suspects, friends and family members, vocal bystanders-- the more likely sounds blur into a babble of raised voices. Clear communications break down.

With more people on the scene, the higher the tension of the police officers, and the higher the chance that one of them will begin firing. This can set others off as well: the sound of firing may be misperceived as coming from the suspect, or directly by emotional contagion. In the Charlotte incident, the standoff comes to a climax just after another officer (who has arrived to support) tries to break the windshield of the suspect's vehicle with his baton-- a loud crashing noise.  The officer who has been on the scene the longest now fires a burst from his pistol, even though the suspect has made no sudden move.

Such circumstances are also dangerous for the police themselves. When a suspect is surrounded by large numbers of police in different directions, police sometimes shoot each other, especially when they are in plain clothes. About 10% of police killed or wounded on duty are victims of friendly fire.

A sign that the shooting is caused by out-of-control adrenaline is overkill: when an officer fires many more shots that necessary to disable the apparently threatening suspect. In New York City, February 1999, four undercover police looking for a rapist saw a man duck back into a hallway, then reach for what turned out to be his identification. The four cops rushed from the car and fired 41 shots at a range of 3 meters; 19 of those shots missed. Both the poor aim and the overkill are results of adrenaline rush, amplified by contagion among the four officers (case of Amadou Diallo).

Overkill usually brings public outrage, and tends to be interpreted as evidence of police racism and malice. Such controversies are hard to settle. Whatever else it is, overkill is a sign of adrenaline rush.

What can be done?

First, recognize the danger of perceptual distortions in high-tension situations. Recognize the danger of getting confusing non-verbal messages and emotional contagion from fellow officers on the scene, and from other people present.

Second, check your adrenaline level and bring it down to the level of effective performance and clear perception.

A method for reducing heart rate is via breathing. (The following is from US Army psychologist Dave Grossman.) 

            breathe in four counts;

            hold your breath four counts;

            breathe out four counts;

            hold your breath four counts;

            repeat until heart rate comes down.

This does not mean simply "take a deep breath." The key is to repeat the entire sequence until a slower bodily rhythm is established, with feedback to bring down the adrenaline level. The periods of holding your breath between breathing-in and breathing-out are crucial.

Practical steps for more cool-headed cops

Wear a heart rate monitor. These are easily available now, on wrist devices used for exercise.

Practice observing one's own heart rate in various situations. You can train yourself to recognize high adrenaline levels by the feeling in your body--- especially the feeling of one's heart pounding and the quality of one's breathing.

Practice the four-part breathing exercise to reduce heart rate.

In a tense situation, check your heart rate, and bring it down if necessary.

But what if there is no time for this? What if it is an immediate, kill-or-be-killed situation? In police work, sometimes this may be the case.  But such situations do not arise very often. Many instances of police shootings-- and especially those which turn out to be based on misperceptions-- take time to develop.  The Charlotte N.C. confrontation built up over an hour, and could have been resolved peacefully with better management of emotions.

Some officers speed up the situation unnecessarily. In Cleveland November 2014, the officer who shot an adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground had raced to the scene and fired within 2 seconds after jumping from his car. Better trained officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone of perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear view of the situation.

Checking your heart rate and controlling it by a breathing exercise may not be possible in some fast-moving situations. And some victims collude in their own death, in suicide-by-cop, by pretending to aim a weapon at officers in order to be shot. Some such events may be inevitable. But even here, very situationally-aware officers may be able to sort some of them out.

The large majority of the police do not shoot anyone. Among those who do, some are unlucky in being in a bad place at the wrong time; some are the workaholics of the force; some are tough guys looking for action; some have poor control over their tension levels. Research by sociologist Geoffrey Alpert on escalated police encounters found that cops who handle situations better have a better sense of timing.  Many cool-headed cops exist, who have better situational awareness, better control over their tension levels and adrenaline arousal. Our aim should be to increase the proportion of cool-headed cops.

Police shootings of unarmed or unresisting persons have brought huge controversy. Most proposed solutions focus on more body cameras, more release of video data to the public, and more criminal prosecution of officers. These proposals have spiraled into more conflict, in the form of demonstrations, riots, and angry politics on both sides. In the balance of political forces today, none of these has been successful in reducing police shootings.

Another route can be tried. Rather than reacting after police shootings happen, and concentrating on ways to pin the blame in court, we can take steps so that out-of-control behavior in police encounters does not happen in the first place. We do not have to solve huge problems like racism or political gridlock to achieve this.

It is in the interest of all police officers to ensure that their tension-control skills are high. Individuals cops do not have to wait until a government agency, or their own police chief, orders them to wear a heart-beat monitor. Everyone can get it yourself easily enough; and do your own training in controlling heart rate and adrenaline level.

Thinking outside the box is often advocated. But most policy people automatically think in terms of top-down solutions. It is at the bottom level-- each moment people encounter each other on the street-- that the problem arises. Better emotional awareness can help to head it off, on the spot.

 Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  
 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Geoffrey P. Alpert and Roger G. Dunham. 2004. Understanding Police Use of Force.

Randall Collins. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.

Dave Grossman. 2004.  On Combat. The psychology and physiology of deadly combat in war and peace.

Jennifer C. Hunt. 2010. Seven Shots.

David Klinger. 2004.  Into the Kill Zone. A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force.

Note: Research by Min-seok Pang and Paul Pavlov ("Armed with Technology: The Impact on Fatal Shootings by Police", 2016) has shown, paradoxically, that police wearing body cameras act more aggressively than those without, because they believe the video will back up their perception of the situation. In other words, their emotions tend to overrule their perceptions here too.

WHAT HAS MICRO-SOCIOLOGY ACCOMPLISHED?

When Erving Goffman arrived at University of Chicago in the late 1940s, he was an ardent Freudian. A few years later he devised a new way to study mental illness: he got himself into the schizophrenic ward of a mental hospital, incognito, for two years. Instead of the retrospective method of psychoanalysis, probing for the meaning of symptoms deep in past childhood, Goffman directly observed what mental illness is in the present, as disturbed social interaction

Goffman is an emblem of the take-off of micro-sociology. No one creates an intellectual movement by oneself. In the background were not only the Freudians, seeking unconscious meanings in everyday life; also what Blumer named Symbolic Interactionism, emphasizing the social construction of the self and everything else.  At Berkeley in 1964, after a student sit-in for civil rights shut down the university, Blumer commented to us in class: a social institution exists only as long as it is enacted; when we collectively stop enacting it, it stops existing.

Another movement was springing up, the ethnomethodologists, insisting that sociology does not even exist, but only the study of folk methods for making sense of what is taken for reality. This was the phenomenology of everyday life, in the sense of Husserl and Schutz, but Garfinkel and his followers changed it from philosophical introspection into micro-situational observation. Especially important was the invention of conversation analysis by tape-recording real-life conversation. This shifted the emphasis from the cognitive and rather individualistic focus of phenomenology onto the details of social interaction; and transcribing the tape-recordings made it possible for other researchers to examine the empirical findings and to point out new patterns in them. When Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson in 1974 laid out the turn-taking rule as the fundamental process of talk, it became possible to reinterpret it later as the socially ideal form: no gap, no overlap between speakers is talk in maximally attuned rhythm, and it exemplifies high solidarity in that little temporary group. Violating the no gap rule gives embarrassing pauses, micro-indications of what Goffman called alienation from interaction. Violating the no-overlap rule is people trying to talk over each other; this is the most characteristic form of incipient conflict and struggle for dominance, as became clearer in micro-studies of violence. By reinterpreting the data I assimilated the empirical findings of conversation analysis to a Durkheim-Goffman synthesis eventually called interaction ritual chains. I can’t say my ethnomethodological acquaintances were happy with this Gestalt shift; but theoretical reinterpretation of good evidence is how research fields build new knowledge.

Feedback between innovation in research methods and theoretical concepts has driven the advance of micro-sociology. New research techniques spin off from each other. By the 1990s came portable video recorders, followed by even more ubiquitous mobile phone cameras and CCTV. Knowing what to look for theoretically makes photos key evidence, because we can read photos in tandem with new understanding of the emotions in facial expressions, body postures and rhythms (research by Paul Ekman and others). We are seeing what causes what in the micro-dynamics of situations, both conflict and domination, alienation and solidarity. The deepening spiral between research technology and theory also improves traditional methods of observation and interviewing; it sharpens our ethnographic eye as to what to look for and what kinds of detail to probe for in our questions. Today’s ethnographer can say, I am a camera, echoing Christopher Isherwood describing Berlin in the 1930s.

Goffman exemplifies how traditional methods of participant observation yielded theoretical results that assimilate other strands. In the 1950s Goffman deserted Freud for Durkheim, reinvigorating the social anthropology that he learned from his British Commonwealth teachers. Like Lloyd Warner and Mary Douglas, he brought ritual home from the colonies and applied it to our own natives, ourselves. Durkheim’s theory of religious and political rituals takes us beyond the cognitive emphasis of both symbolic interaction and phenomenology; it gives us a mechanism that generates solidarity, morality and cognition simultaneously by pumping up symbols with shared emotion. Although the macro-sociological version of Durkheimian theory was functionalist equilibrium, Durkheim down-sized to the interacting group becomes dynamic. It makes a great addition to the study of historical and even revolutionary changes when religions, regimes, and manners are delegitimated and replaced by more engrossing ones. The ingredients that produce successful rituals are variable; when assembly, mutual focus, shared emotion and rhythmic synchronization are absent or disrupted, sacred objects are desacralized, cultural beliefs fade, and moralities become outdated. Far from being a idealization of perpetual solidarity, neo-Durkheimian micro-sociology is a tool for dissecting social change and conflict. When Lloyd Warner shifted from Australian clans to American cities, he found more than one tribe: social classes, stacked up like a totem pole. What Marx and Engels called the means of mental production and Gramsci called hegemony is determined by the micro-sociology of interaction rituals; but we don’t have to wait for macro crises in the system to bring changes, since the ingredients for stability and change are here at the micro level.

Followers of Goffman, Blumer and Garfinkel have proliferated in the last 40 years, producing many strands of micro-sociological research. I will single out a few areas of recent discovery. As a link between mid-20th century and today, consider some theoretical developments in the sociology of emotions.

There is the pioneering work by Theodore Kemper; by Tom Scheff on the shame-rage cycle; and by Norbert Wiley, whose 1994 book The Semiotic Self is probably the greatest contribution to symbolic interactionist theory since Mead. Here I will concentrate on a particular pathway.

Arlie Hochschild’sethnography of flight attendants uncovered emotion work, Goffmanian efforts to control the emotional frontstage of the situation, as part of the job. This led to a large body of research on workers’ emotional presentations. Perhaps Jack Katz’s title,  How Emotions Work, is a riff on “emotion work”,  while he shifts to radically situational methods, visual and auditory recordings, and a more embodied theorization. Katz dissects the major emotions by examining in micro-detail interactional situations where they happen. Laughter, the happy solidarity emotion par excellence, he finds in the fun house of mirrors. But seeing the distorting image of one’s body in the mirror is not enough to produce laughter; instead the child runs to bring father or mother; they all focus together on the image, and then they laugh. The emotion is spontaneous and bodily self-entraining in the physical rhythms of laughter, but it is body-to-body entrainment channeled by a sharpened mutual focus of attention. The physiological process is social physiology, and it works from the outside in. Katz starts from phenomenology but what he finds is deeply social and embodied.

And emotions are moments in a sequence through time. Road rage comes from disrupted rhythms and frustration over the lack of communication channels with the other driver, other than using the car itself to make embodied gestures like cutting the other car off. Time-dynamics are also crucial for the various kinds of crying that Katz records, such as resistance by a small child to her pre-school teacher, producing a rising-and-falling whine along with each exercise she is being forced to do, while retreating into the fortress of resonance inside her own whining body. Whining is truly a weapon of the weak, and in a child-centered age, sometimes a local source of power. This is a long way from Freud, but deepening what he was trying to do.

Another important theorization of emotions comes from Jonathan Turner, by reconceptualizing evidence of human evolution. Humans diverged from other primates, not at first by larger brains but by increased neural wiring between emotional and cognitive centers. Humans thus have a much more differentiated range of emotions they can express and recognize in others, in face, voice, and gesture. This enables more flexible kinds of solidarity and social coordination; it enables religious and other rituals, marking both group membership and moral obligation, and boundaries to outsiders; and it enables ways of manufacturing new memberships. The Durkheimian mechanism was there at the origins of human society. The entwining of emotion, cognition and their embodied communication are what made possible speech and memory codified into symbols, which is to say culture as well as personal habitus. What one thinks comes from the symbols and gestures that spring most spontaneously to one’s consciousness, because those have been marked by strong emotions, positive or negative, deriving from the most successful interaction rituals, or from the searing memories of dramatically broken rituals.

In recent years neuro-physiological research has caught up with the Durkheimian point, recognizing that strong memories are emotionally marked; the rational emotionless calculator assumed by many non-sociologists as the epitome of human behavior does not fit everyday cognition. It is nice to have some legitimacy conferred by the so-called hard sciences. But micro-sociology still leads the way, since mirror neurons do not work automatically across all situations; the human brain is programmed from the outside in, by the success or failure of social interactions to generate emotions focused on shared experiences in the chains of everyday life.

Interaction ritual theory has been applied in the sociology of religion, not surprisingly since this is where Durkheim originated it. But there are many different kinds of religions in today’s religious marketplace. Scott Draper, using survey methods but asking the right questions about religious practice, shows how churches generate different amounts and kinds of spiritual experience by different mixes ofingredients. Sociology of prayer examines the micro-details of what is said, done, and experienced. Michal Pagis’s research on group meditation shows that even in a retreat where persons are not supposed to talk or even communicate by gestures, nevertheless they orient bodily to each other and follow the lead of more experienced meditators in falling into a harmonious rhythm. That this rhythm is shared comes out by the contrast to meditating at home alone; individuals find it much more difficult to maintain concentration, and feel a need to return to the silent meditation group to keep up their spiritual experience.

I will add a parallel that is perhaps surprising. Those who know Loic Wacquant would not expect to find silent harmony. Nevertheless, Wacquant’s study of a boxing gym finds a similar pattern: there is little that boxers do in the gym that they could not do at home alone, except sparring; but in the gym they perform exercises like skipping, hitting the bags, strengthening stomach muscles, all in 3-minute segments to the ring of the bell that governs rounds in the ring. When everyone in the gym is in the same rhythm, they are animated by a collective feeling; they become boxers dedicated to their craft, not so much through minds but as an embodied project. Although Wacquant does not conceptualize this in Durkheimian terms, nevertheless his research contributes via the theoretical reframing of good data.

Now some applications of micro-sociological methods and theory to mainstream sociological topics: especially our concern with stratification, inequality, power, conflict and resistance.

I began to study violence when I realized that conflict theory in the Weberian sense had very little action in it, but was comparative statics. Micro-methods brought new discoveries. Originally our data were police statistics, bureaucratic artifacts remote from the scene of action. Closer data came from interviewers armed with symbolic interactionism, talking to prisoners or doing gang ethnographies. A different slant emerges when we look directly at violent confrontations. The first inkling came in World War II, when S.L.A. Marshall interviewed combat soldiers immediately after battle, and found only a small proportion actually fired their weapons at the enemy. Later the Army psychologist Dave Grossman found evidence they are held back not by fear of being hurt (since persons in some situations ignore very high danger, including medics, and officers who are not using weapons); they are inhibited by a deep-seated fear of killing someone. This sounds paradoxical but I have connected it with several wide-spread patterns.

A large proportion of violent confrontations of all kinds-- street fights, riots, etc.-- quickly abort; and most persons in those situationsact like Marshall’s soldiers-- they let a small minority of the group do all the violence. Now that we have photos and videos of violent situations, we see that at the moment of action the expression on the faces of the most violent participants is fear.  Our folk belief is that anger is the emotion of violence, but anger appears mostly before any violence happens, and in controlled situations where individuals bluster at a distant enemy. I have called this confrontational tension/fear; it is the confrontation itself that generates the tension, more than fear of what will happen to oneself. Confrontational tension is debilitating; phenomenologically we know (mainly from police debriefings after shootings) that it produces perceptual distortions; physiologically it generates racing heart beat, an adrenaline rush which at high levels results in loss of bodily control.

This explains another, as yet little recognized pattern: when violence actually happens, it is usually incompetent. Most of the times people fire a gun at ahuman target, they miss; their shots go wide, they hit the wrong person, sometimes a bystander, sometimes friendly fire on their own side. This is a product of the situation, the confrontation.  We know this because the accuracy of soldiers and police on firing ranges is much higher than when firing at a human target. We can pin this down further; inhibition in live firing declines with greater distance; artillery troops are more reliable than infantry with small arms, so are fighter and bomber crews and navy crews; it is not the statistical chances of being killed or injured by the enemy that makes close-range fighters incompetent. At the other end of the spectrum, very close face-to-face confrontation makes firing even more inaccurate; shootings at a distance of less than 2 meters are extremely inaccurate. Is this paradoxical?  It is facing the other person at a normal distance for social interaction that is so difficult. Seeing the other person’s face, and being seen by him or her seeing your seeing, is what creates the most tension. Snipers with telescopic lenses can be extremely accurate, even when they see their target’s face; what they do not see is the target looking back; there is no mutual attention, no intersubjectivity. Mafia hit men strike unexpectedly and preferably from behind, relying on deception and normal appearances so that there is no face confrontation. This is also why executioners used to wear hoods; and why persons wearing face masks commit more violence than those with bare faces.

NOTE THE POLICY IMPLICATION:  The fashion in recent years among elite police units to wear balaclava-style face masks during their raids should be eliminated. It operates as a status marker for such units, and in some countries as a deliberate effort to intimidate people; but in democracies like the United States it ought to be recognized by police authorities that wearing masks increases the likelihood of out-of-control violence by these forces.

Confrontational tension/fear is a corollary to interaction ritual theory. Mutual focus of attention-- awareness of each other’s awareness-- is an ingredient of high mutual entrainment; normally, with a shared emotion building up, the result is collective effervescence and solidarity.  But conflict is action at cross purposes. Face-to-face confrontation simultaneously invokes our hard-wired propensities to get into a shared rhythm, and contradicts it because one is trying to impose dominance on the other. No wonder face confrontations are so tense. It is not being afraid of being hurt that generates the most tension; nor is it exactly right to say it is fear of hurting the other; it is above all tension specific to tightly focused mutual action at cross purposes. Perhaps I shouldn’t have called in confrontational tension/fear, except that the facial and bodily expressions look like fear.

Face-to-face confrontation is what pumps adrenaline and cortisol, and creates the tension we see on faces and bodies. Asheart beat rises over 140 beats per minute or BPM, fine motor coordination declines, such as aiming a gun; over 170 beats per minute experience becomes a blur; over 200 BPM paralysis can set in. Face confrontations, especially when combined with other sources of tension and arousal such as running, car chases, an angry argument or an emergency call, result in several patterns that we see in violent situations.

NOTE ON POLICY IMPLICATION:  Training of police officers should emphasize explicit awareness of the consequences of very high heartbeat and other bodily signs of extreme tension. The officer who shot an adolescent carrying a toy gun on a playground(Nov. 2014 in Cleveland) had raced to the scene and fired within 2 seconds after jumping from his car, within the acute confrontational distance of less than 3 meters. Better trained officers would be aware of their own body signs and the danger zone for perceptual distortion, and would not attempt to fire until they had a clear view of the situation. Geoffrey Alpert has shown that officers who are better at controlling the escalation of force have a more deliberate and refined sense of timing in the moves of both sides. More attention to such micro-details should train more officers up to this high level of competence.

If both sides get into the zone of high tension and physiological arousal, the fight will abort; if they do fight (given further situational conditions I will come to shortly), the fight will be incompetent. The same pattern is true for other weapons besides guns, such as knives, swords and clubs, and for fist fights. Since these weapons need very close confrontation, their competence in doing damage is generally low, contrary to what one might think from sword-fighting movies, including those with samurai or magical super-heroes.

How does violence sometimes succeed in doing damage? The key is asymmetrical  confrontation tension. One side will win if they can get their victim in the zone of high arousal and high incompetence, while keeping their own arousal down to a zone of greater bodily control. Violence is not so much physical as emotional struggle; whoever achieves emotional domination, can then impose physical domination. That is why most real fights look very nasty; one sides beats up on an opponent at the time they are incapable of resisting. At the extreme, this happens in the big victories of military combat, where the troops on one side become paralyzed in the zone of 200 heartbeats per minute, massacred by victors in the 140 heartbeat range. This kind of asymmetry is especially dangerous, when the dominant side is also in the middle ranges of arousal; at 160 BPM or so, they are acting with only semi-conscious bodily control. Adrenaline is the flight-or-fight hormone; when the opponent signals weakness, shows fear, paralysis, or turns their back, this can turn into what I have called a forward panic, and the French officer Ardant du Picq called “flight to the front.” Here the attackers rush forward towards an unresisting enemy, firing uncontrollably. It has the pattern of hot rush, piling on, and overkill. Most outrageous incidents of police violence against unarmed or unresisting targets are forward panics, now publicized in our era of bullet counts and ubiquitous videos.

Can we predict which pattern will happen? The barrier of confrontational tension can be circumvented if one or more conditions are present:

One is attacking the weak. Successful attackers seek out a weak enemy; sometimes this is someone physically weaker, but situational weakness is far more important.  Armed robbers seek isolated victims and avoideven unarmed groups, and try for surprise, catching their victim off guard, in order to seize the interactional momentum. Attacking weakness also comes fromimbalance of numbers; in photos of riots, almost all the violence happens when clusters of 5 or 6 persons attack an isolated opponent, who is usually knocked to the ground and has their face turned from the attackers. This is more of a social than a physical advantage, because when two or three are attacked, they often succeed in fighting off a much bigger group of attackers; that is, the little group generates enough mutual support so that they are not emotionally dominated.

Another condition, then, is social support from a highly coordinated group of violent actors; an army squad, a SWAT team, a historical phalanx of warriors in close formation: these are drilled to act together, and as long as they focus on their own rhythm, confrontational tension with the enemy is a lesser part of their experience.

Another pathway is where the fight is surrounded by an audience; people who gather to watch, especially in festive crowds looking for entertainment; historical photos of crowds watching duels; and of course the commercial/ sporting version of staged fights. This configuration produces the longest and most competent fights; confrontational tension is lowered because the fighters are concerned for their performance in the eyes of the crowd, while focusing on their opponent has an element of tacit coordination since they are a situational elite jointly performing for the audience. Even the loser in a heroic staged fight gets social support. We could test this by comparing emotional micro-behavior in a boxing match or a baseball game without any spectators.

Finally, there are a set of techniques for carrying out violence without face confrontation. Striking at a distance: the modern military pathway. Becoming immersed in technical details of one’s weapons rather than on the human confrontation. And a currently popular technique: the clandestine attack such as a suicide bombing, which eliminates confrontational tension because it avoids showing any confrontation until the very moment the bomb is exploded. Traditional assassinations, and the modern mafia version, also rely on the cool-headedness that comes from pretending there is no confrontation, hiding in Goffmanian normal appearances until the moment to strike.

All this sounds rather grisly, but nevertheless confrontational theory of violence has an optimistic side. First, there is good news: most threatening confrontations do not result in violence. (This is shown also in Robert Emerson’s new book on quarrels among roommates and neighbours.) We missed this because, until recently, most evidence about violence came from sampling on the dependent variable. There is a deep interactional reason why face-to-face violence is hard, not easy.  Most of the time both sides stay symmetrical. Both get angry and bluster in the same way. These confrontations abort, since they can’t get around the barrier of confrontational tension. Empirically, on our micro-evidence, this zero pathway is the most common. Either the quarrel ends in mutual gestures of contempt; or the fight quickly ends when opponents discover their mutual incompetence. Curtis Jackson-Jacobs’ video analysis shows fist-fighters moving away from each other after missing with a few out-of-rhythm punches. If no emotional domination happens, they soon sense it.

Micro-sociology of violence is much more optimistic than conventional macro-theories of class or racial inequality, or cultures such as masculine hegemony and honor. These long-term factors are hard to change. But immediate situational conditions are always the bottleneck through which macro-conditions must pass if conflict is to turn into violence. Micro-interactional theory points out situational conditionsto avoid. And it offers micro-practices for each of us to deal with threatening situations in your own life. Keep any confrontation emotionally symmetrical; make confrontational tension work for you by maintaining face contact; avoid micro-escalations; let the situation calm down out of boredom, which is what happens when an interaction becomes locked into repetition. In the violent sociology of emotions, boredom is your friend.

A long-standing criticism of ethnomethodology and other micro-sociology has been that it tells us nothing except tedious details that are really determined at the macro level. The sociology of violence shows this is not true; there is crucial causality at the micro level. And we are extending this to other areas.

Anne Nassauer, assembling videos and other evidence from many angles on demonstrations, finds the turning points at which a demo goes violent or stays peaceful. And she shows that these are situational turning points, irrespective of ideologies, avowed intent of demonstrators or policing methods. Stefan Klusemann, using video evidence, shows that ethnic massacres are triggered off in situations of emotional domination and emotional passivity; that is, local conditions, apart from whatever orders are given by remote authorities.  Another pioneering turning-point study is David Sorge’s analysis of the phone recording of a school shooter exchanging shots with the police, who nevertheless is calmed down by an office clerk; she starts out terrified but eventually shifts into an us-together mood that ends in a peaceful surrender. Meredith Rossner shows that restorative justice conferences succeed or fail according to the processes of interaction rituals; and that emotionally successful RJ conferences result in conversion experiences that last for several years, at least. Counter-intuitively, she finds that RJ conferences are especially likely be successful when they concerns not minor offenses but serious violence;  the intensity of the ritual depends on the intensity of emotions it evokes.

Erika Summers-Effler shows the diversity of emotional practices that sustain social movements whose goals are so difficult that they are permanently failing. Cathartic laughter tinged with mysticism emotionally reboots Catholic Workers among the self-destructively poor; harnessing righteous anger keeps an anti-death-penalty group going although its leader gets most of the energy. Interaction Ritual works very widely as a mechanism, but it can use different emotional ingredients; the landscape of emotion-marked group idiocultures (to borrow Gary Alan Fine’s term) remains to be mapped.

High authorities are hard to study with micro methods, since organizational high rank is shielded behind very strong Goffmanian frontstages. David Gibson, however, analyzing audio tapes of Kennedy’s crisis group in the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, penetrated the micro-reality of power in a situation in which all the rationally expectable scenarios led toward nuclear war. Neither JFK nor anyone else emerges as a charismatic or even a decisive leader. The group eventually muddled their way through sending signals that postponed a decision to use force, by tacitly ignoring scenarios that were too troubling to deal with. This fits the pattern that conversation analysts call the preference for agreement over disagreement, at whatever cost to rationality and consistency. Stefan Fuchs, in his micro-sociologically informed theory book Against Essentialism, says that organizational authority looks most rational and decisive when communicating to outsiders; the closer one gets to the inside, the more activities look ad hoc. Authority is a performance for the distance; up close, it dissolves into particularistic idiosyncrasies; perhaps a better way to put this is that it becomes the micro-details of situational interaction.

We have a long way to go to generalize these leads into a picture of how high authority really operates. Does it operate the same way in business corporations? The management literature tells us how executives have implemented well thought-out programs; but our information comes chiefly from retrospective interviews that collapse time and omit the situational process itself. Lauren Rivera cracks the veneer of elite Wall Street firms and finds that hiring decisions are made by a sense of emotional resonance between interviewer and interviewee, the solidarity of successful interaction rituals. Our best evidence of the micro details of this process comes from another arena, where Dan McFarland and colleagues analyze recorded data on speed dating, and find that conversational micro-rhythms determine who felt they “clicked” with whom.

Finally, I will mention my most recent book, Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy. Among others, it analyzes how a famous organization-builder like Steve Jobs used anstyle that generated a tremendous amount of emotional energy focused on cutting edge innovation.  Jobs’ interactional style was to evoke extreme emotions, including very negative ones, but unlike authoritarian leaders who bark out critiques and orders and then slam the door behind them, Jobs stayed to argue at great length until the group emotion became transformed into a shared trajectory of action. His insults and obscenities were only the opening move that revved up group emotion; successful IRs transmute the initiating emotions-- whatever they are-- into solidarity, and Jobs kept the group focused throughout the argument until this happened. And it increased everyone's emotional energy; by the end, if it meant staying up 48 hours to fix it, let's get to it.

(Note: The 2015 film Steve Jobs inaccurately portrays how he dealt with his high-tech team, assimilating him to the management cliché of motivating workers by threatening to fire them.)

Such interactional techniques are rare, since they require constantly recycling emotional energy between leader and group; whereas most hierarchic authorities become cut off from those doing the work. Interaction ritual processes suggest a way to make network analysis more dynamic rather than comparative statics; for instance we observe Jobs’ techniques for recruiting the most desirable people and thereby building a productive network.  More generally, we see how entrepreneurs flourish by playing in ambiguous or dangerous networks, interacting with potential rivals and enemies who can steal key information and key opportunities, or band together temporarily to exploit them jointly. Dangerous networks expand by a timely application of emotional domination, in contrast to inner circles of allies (like Jobs' high-tech work group) which are built by cascades of EE.

I will end this scattered survey with someresearch that falls into the rubric of Weberian status groups, i.e. social rankings by lifestyle.  David Grazian has produced a sequence of books, Blue Chicago and On the Make, that deal with night life. This could be considered a follow-up to Goffman’s analysis of what constitutes “fun in games” as well as “where the action is.” For Grazian, night-life is a performance of one’s “nocturnal self,” characterized by role-distance from one’s mundane day-time identity. By a combination of his own interviewing behind the scenes and collective ethnographies of students describing their evening on the town, from pre-party preparation to post-party story-telling, Grazian shows how the boys and the girls, acting as separate teams, play at sexual flirtation which for the most part is vastly over-hyped in its real results. It is the buzz of collective effervescence that some of these teams generate that is the real attraction of night life. And this may be an appropriate place to wind up. Freud, perhaps the original micro-sociologist, theorized that sexual drive is the underlying mover behind the scenes. Grazian, looking at how those scenes are enacted, finds libido as socially constructed performance. As is almost everything else.

In conclusion.  Will interaction ritual, or for that matter micro-sociology as we know it, become outdated in the high-tech future?  This isn’t futuristic any more, since we have been living in the era of widely dispersed information technology for at least 30 years, and we are used to its pace and direction of change. A key point for interaction ritual is that bodily co-presence is one of itsingredients. Is face contact needed? Rich Ling analyzed the everyday use of mobile phones and found that the same persons who spoke by phone a lot also met personally a lot. Cell phones do not substitute for bodily co-presence, but facilitate it. Among the most frequent back-and-forth, reciprocated connections are people coordinating where they are.  Ling concluded that solidarity rituals were possible over the phone, but that they were weaker than face-to-face rituals; one was a teaser for the other.

There is a theoretical reason why full-body co-presence makes for more successful IRs. Full-body presence is multi-channel; it is much easier to catch the other’s emotions, gestures, body posture and rhythm than from voice alone, or even voice-plus-image of the sort that Skype provides.  Bodily co-presence is an important ingredient not in itself, but because it enhances mutual focus-- meta-awareness that the other is focused on what you are focused on; or for that matter, that you are not so fully focused; alienation from interaction is also easier to detect face to face. Full channel bodily co-presence also enhances the other main ingredients of an IR, building a shared emotional mood to a high intensity via a continuous feedback loop; for instance that is why people laugh more when there are more people present.  We could test this by measuring the intensity of laughter among remote users reading on-screen emoticons or expressions like LOL, compared to laughter during physical presence. And bodily co-presence helps build rhythmic coordination; not to say there are no rhythms in exchanging text messages etc, but those rhythms are almost certainly not as fine-tuned as those found in voice recordings of persons who are clicking with each other.

Also there is touching another person, something that can only be done when bodily present. Such expressions of affectionate or sexual contact are generally reserved for a few relationships (although there are formal versions like handshakes, air-kisses and forearm bumps enacting more limited bits of solidarity). Conceivably future electronic devices might wire up each other’s genitals, but what happens would likely depend on the micro-sociological theory of sex (chapter 6 in Interaction Ritual Chains): the strongest sexual attraction is not pleasure in one’s genitals per se, but getting the other person’s body to respond in mutually entraining erotic rhythms: getting turned on by getting the other person turned on. If you don’t believe me, try theorizing the attractions of performing oral sex. This is an historically increasing practice, and one of the things that drives the solidarity of homosexual movements. Gay movements are built around effervescent scenes, not around social media.

Voice conversations require co-presence in time if not in space, whereas this limitation does not hold for other electronic media, allowing them to reach far larger networks. It still appears that the greatest amount of back-and-forth messages happen among a relatively small proportion of social media “friends” who also meet physically. Big media-only networks numbering in the hundreds or more-- other than for celebrities who use them essentially as broadcast media-- are built either by assembling old schoolmate networks, or among professionals in a specialty. Yet the one type of professional network I have studied, philosophers and other intellectuals, has the pattern that those who have the most network connections to eminent persons, themselves are more likely to become eminent; and these connections involve a crucial period of face contact. In other words, having a far-flung network does not do very much good for one’s intellectual career unless you meet these people personally.  Meeting to do what?  To carry out intense intellectual IRs, getting the emotional emphasis that comes from being at the forefront of research and argument. In the absence of systematic research it is dangerous to extrapolate from one type of arena to another; but my impression is that although top financiers and business executives have very large social networks-- they had these already in the era before the social media-- their crucial deal-making happens by face meetings. Emotional domination and persuasion happen most subtly and effectively in full-body presence. It seems likely that persons who rely exclusively on distant electronic networks are stratifying themselves into a lower tier beneath the elite.

Of course the media of communication change; but the stratified patterns of intellectual networks have remained across a very long history of media inventions, including writing, book publishing, printing, letters delivered by postal service, newspapers and journals, and the first electronic media, the telegraph and telephone. In recent years I get communications from distant scholars by email; but those in areas of strong mutual interest soon travel to discuss things personally; and these personal contacts are what accelerate the process of creative research.

It would be foolish to postulate that electronic or other media technologies will never be invented that mimic the key aspects of bodily IRs:  that is to say, that can enhance sense of mutual attention, strengthen shared emotions, and get people electronically entrained in interpersonal rhythms. Given the existence of micro-sociological understanding, it is more than likely that media technologists will try to mimic real-life IRs. Crude advances in social Artificial Intelligence are already pointing the way, as are efforts at virtual reality. It may become possible to electronically stimulate the emotional and rhythmic parts of the brain; the result might well be a high-tech version of heroin addiction. But I doubt that the real social interactional world will go away; people who become electronic junkies will be dominated by people who use a wide spectrum of successful IRs, and at the core of those networks will be real people who meet bodily.

I am not a fan of science fiction, which always struck me as mostly recycling mythologies of the pre-modern past. In this talk I have been tracing the history of micro-sociology over the past half-century or so, and we can see the direction things are going. Micro-sociology grew up with a sequence of inventions that might be called information technologies: tape recorders, videos, photos of facial expressions of emotions, long-distance photography, computer-stored messages, and now portable monitors of physiological body signs being used in sports training and the military. Better to call these micro-interactional technologies, or micro-interactional recording technologies, because they give us new kinds of data we can pore over in detail and thereby discover new patterns.

Thus, two projections for the immediate future of micro-sociology, let us say the next two decades, by which time I will probably be dead. First, micro-sociology is going to get even better data, and the key things we will learn will be about mechanisms of mutual awareness, the causes and consequences of a variety of shared emotions, and the patterns of rhythmic entrainment that together determine levels of solidarity and emotional energy. What Durkheim and Goffman formulated are among the most important discoveries of sociology; they will be modified but they will not go away.

Second, micro-sociological technologies are going to spin off new combinations and advances from themselves, in the usual cascade of technological innovation.  But technologies develop in tandem with theories, and the theory that knows the most about how humans do interaction is micro-sociology.  We are going to be part of that technological cascade, whether we like it or not.

As we said in the 1960s, it’s been quite a trip. And it's not over yet.

 Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  
 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

REFERENCES

Alpert, Geoffrey P., and Roger G. Dunham. 2004. Understanding Police Use of Force.  Cambridge Univ. Press.

Ardant du Picq, Charles. 1921.  Battle Studies.  New York: Macmillan.

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Collins, Randall, and Maren McConnell. 2016. Napoleon Never Slept. How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy.  Published as an E-book by Maren Ink

Draper, Scott. 2014. "Effervescence and Solidarity in Religious Organizations." Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion53: 229–248.

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Ekman, Paul. 2009.  Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage.  New York: Norton.

Emerson, Robert M. 2015. Everyday Troubles: The Micro-politics of Interpersonal Conflict. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Garfinkel, Harold.  1967. Studies in Ethnomethodology.  Prentice-Hall.

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STAR WARS IS NO MATCH FOR TODAY'S MILITARY FORCE

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is set in the distant future, but militarily it is far out of date.

The "smart" weapons of the 1990s and the computerization of the battlefield make gun-fights with the First Order's storm troopers as anachronistic as a cowboy movie. The aerial sequences are closer to World War I dogfights than they are to modern air power.

A battalion of U.S. Marines has the fire-power to beat all the Evil Empires put together.

[1] The storm troopers carry complicated-looking weapons, but the resemblance to modern automatic weapons ends there. They fire single shots with pauses in between, and their shots rarely hit anybody. OK, this is a Hollywood convention, because the main characters in your story can't get killed (at least until the end when one can be sacrificed in an emotional scene). And yes, it is true that soldiers pumped up with adrenaline in real combat miss their targets a lot. After the Korean War the U.S. Army figured this out, and shifted over to automatic weapons for combat infantry. Since their aim isn't that good, the emphasis is on laying down an overwhelming amount of fire, coordinated to blanket enemy positions. Today's infantry rifles fire at a rate of hundreds of bullets per minute; some hit their targets and the rest help keep the enemy's heads down so that our own troops can maneuver.

Unfortunately for the movies, this does not make very picturesque action; the battlefield is mostly empty and distant. So instead we get close-range shot-by-shot exchanges with both sides' soldiers clear and distinct on the screen. Star Wars storm troopers just make a large flash and a bang, more or less equivalent to the blunderbusses fired by Spanish conquistadors back in the 1500s, which had most of their effect by scaring the enemy into running away. Of course our movie good guys stand their ground; and they look maximally heroic by firing back with pistols that they hardly need to aim, making perfect one-hand shots although real-life technique is to steady the pistol with both arms.  In the adrenaline rush of real violence, handgun shots can go anywhere and often hit the wrong person (as police shootings so often show).

If your want a palatable-looking, cleaned-up gun battle, the Star Wars staging is the way to do it. In real combat, such forces would be beaten by today's small infantry units armed with automatic weapons. And that doesn't even count hand-carried explosives such as RPGs, or distance weapons such as artillery, rockets and missiles. Modern military tactics emphasizes combined arms, coordinating different weapons systems to support each other. But that would give a bureaucratic picture that does not translate well to the screen.

[2]  The most futuristic-seeming part of Star Wars are the flying machines: space ships that look like flying saucers or entire planets, fighter jets with fanciful X-wing configurations or things that look like box kites. But the aerial combat is distinctly early-twentieth century. For one thing,  Star Wars pilots fly their planes on their own; gunners choose their targets, aim and fire, hit or miss. All this became out-dated by the 1990s.

Now the most important part of an aerial battlefield is what looks like a commercial airliner circling 200 miles away. It is full of computers that keep track of all the hostile aircraft, and guide friendly aircraft on their flight paths (including keeping them from running into each other), while sending targeting information directly to their on-board weapons. Pilots in air-to-air combat and in ground attack planes that serve as flying rocket launchers are mainly along for the ride. The control computers can fly the planes on their own; the humans are backups in case something goes wrong.

The dozens of aircraft in a battle are just pieces of a computerized network, like every other weapon whatever platform it is fired from: rockets launched by ships, ground artillery, armor, or foot soldiers on the ground. There are technological eyes and ears stacked up in the sky and at vantage points on the ground, all sending back information to the computers, and receiving messages controlling what they do. GPS coordinates, laser tags marking targets, electronically enhanced optical images identified by matching images stored in archives, infra-red heat sensors-- together these make up an electronic octopus whose tentacles look at everything and command everything in the war machine. Even the enemy's electronics are turned against them: anti-radiation missiles home in on anything that emits radar, so that as soon as they start to fire they become targets for precision-guided munitions that lock onto them. The focus of the battlefield is no longer the warriors but the all-encompassing network that guides them.

The dogfights in Star Wars resemble nothing so much as the early flying days of World War I, where planes really did chase each other through the skies, hid in clouds, and tried to attack from a blind spot by flying out of the sun. World War II had the most ace pilots-- those who racked up large numbers of aerial kills-- because it was a war when bombers were used to attack enemy infrastructure, fighter planes escorted the bombers, and fought off enemy fighters who attacked the bombers. The number of aces has declined ever since; by the time of the first Gulf War most enemy aircraft were destroyed on the ground by precision long-distance munitions.

Stars Wars has remained a lot like Flash Gordon-- the future as seen from the 1930s. Even the shapes of the aircraft or spacecraft have a pre-1918 look: the box-kite fighters of the First Order echo the double-winged hollow crates of the early days of flying.  Its enormous flying globes, although depicted on the inside like skyscrapers with cavernous elevator shafts, from the outside resemble Zeppelins and other gas-filled balloons with spacious passenger lounges slung beneath them.

Bottom line: the flying craft of both the First Order and the Resistance would be swiftly located, tracked, locked-onto, and destroyed by the smart weapons of today's Air Force and the other services, with no more trouble than the first days of Gulf War One and Two.

[3]  Leading actors fight each other with light sabers. OK, it's bright and colourful, and it's good for merchandizing, as well as dramatic climaxes. Obviously it goes against the real-life trend to distant battle mediated by computers.  Dueling with swords was the honorable way of fighting from the Middle Ages up through the early 20th century in places like France and Italy. It was honorable because only gentlemen could duel; if you weren't elite enough, a gentleman would refuse to fight you, and might have his servants throw you out in the street. So the duel with light sabers is quite literally a showdown between heroes, with a bit of futuristic magic so that the blades appear out of thin air and glow in the dark. And, oh yes, they are good for repelling bullets, like Wonder Woman's magic bracelets.

Let's pin down the light saber duel a little more sharply. To be picky, it's not really a saber.  A "sabre" (as originally spelled) is a curved blade, sharp only on one edge, used for slashing rather than thrusting. It was mainly a cavalry weapon, used to slash down at the enemy.  German dueling fraternities in the 19th century used it, because their aim was to limit damage to superficial slashes, rather than deadly piercing through the body. The Star Wars light saber is really an epée,  as the French would call it-- straight, double-edged, with a big cross-shaped handle. And yes, a more deadly weapon.

In  The Force Awakens, the light saber duels aren't even really fencing. Mainly they are battering at each other's blade, with gains made by sheer strength of throwing the opponent backwards or pushing them to the ground. This looks like a form of fighting that goes back even before the time of sword duels, fighting with wooden staves, like Robin Hood fighting with Friar Tuck. (Long staves were carried by wanderers chiefly to fend off attacking dogs.) It is more like Greco-Roman wrestling with long poles. Why did the latest Star Wars chose to depict light saber fights in this way? It makes the duel less deadly. And it keeps up the modern liberal belief, that we don't fight unless necessary, and even then we do as little damage as possible once we've won. This is a nice ideal, even though it doesn't fit today's world very well.

[4]  What about the robots?  This is undoubtedly the way of the future, although it was more visionary in 1977 when the first Star Wars appeared.  Robots are self-propelled machines whose skills come from on-board computers, and are autonomous to the degree they get input from their own sensors.  The most important war robots that exist today are smart missiles, that sense their own position relative to a target and guide itself in to destroy it.  This kind of war robot is conspicuously absent from The Force Awakens. It would undermine the heroism of pilots, as well as their close encounters with enemies. And it would make robots menacing.  Instead, all the Star Wars robots have been human-like, virtually harmless, cute as pets; they provide comic relief and a sentimental touch by mimicking sympathetic emotions. On the whole they are like loyal dogs who love their masters.

What we don't see are the massive computers that run today's war organization, compiling information, calculating plans, issuing orders to far-flung war machines and to the humans attached to them. The possibility that this will be the dark side of the future is never invoked.  Even the forces of Evil are not depicted as very computerized; both sides use the same kind of technology, and the only differences are moral, how humane they are.

A future Star Wars installment could take the route where the Evil side is a war machine ruthlessly controlled by a centralized computer.  In fact, it would look something like our military organization today. One problem with this plot line is that the more computerized side would probably win, especially if the Resistance confined itself to low-tech pilots, pistols, and light sabers.

One more place where The Force Awakens  is behind the times is in surveillance and base security. The heroine Rey and her rescuers scurry around the corridors of the enemy base, evading guards and climbing walls. Today there would be CCTV cameras all over the place, and desks monitoring all the feed; intruders would be located almost immediately. Of course there are good dramatic reasons to omit this; sneaking around inside the enemy's castle has been a staple of adventure and suspense ever since The Wizard of Oz.  On defense, too, today's military and security apparatus is far more powerful than Star Wars.

[5] Symmetrical and asymmetrical war. The fights between the Resistance and the First Order are essentially symmetrical. They are set-piece battles between infantries, or between air forces, with the same kinds of weapons on both sides. In this sense Star Wars hankers back to World War I and II. This is another respect in which Star Wars depicts relatively cleaned-up war.

The term "Resistance" against a huge empire suggests the opposite kind of war, which is what the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and most other places has been in recent years. Asymmetrical war is especially nasty because the weaker side cannot match up with the stronger on a battle front, so they resort to guerrilla tactics: hit-and-run, ambushes, clandestine bombings. Since there are no front lines, fighting takes place in the midst of civilian populations. Guerrillas hit undefended targets, especially civilians because they are the easiest. And since guerrillas disguise themselves as civilians and hide in the civilian population before and after their attacks, efforts to ferret them out kill more civilians.  Vietnam set the pattern of this kind of war, a war we would like to forget since it was intrinsically a war of competing atrocities, like all guerrilla wars.

Today we call it terrorism. And this is one more reason why the Star Wars franchise can't depict war as it really is in the era of high-tech weaponry. If the Resistance really were weaker, they would have to become terrorists.

Yes, Star Wars is entertainment, and that means escape from reality. But one thing it proves is that we can't escape into the future.  The majority of sci-fi adventure shows ever since Flash Gordon have been trips not so much to the future as to the Middle Ages, land of sword-and-sorcery. The trend towards bureaucracy-reinforced-by-technology doesn't give the kinds of adventure drama we enjoy. Star Wars is a lot more fun than Orwell's 1984, where everyone's TV set spies on you. Sure, the Middle Ages wasn't really that nice either, but it had one thing we miss: it had better mythology.   It's the magic that can pop up all around us-- magic weapons, magic spells, magic Forces that still carry a tinge of religion and moral choice. And that's a relief from the technological labyrinth that is becoming our future.

 Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  
 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs
E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

REFERENCES

Biddle, Stephen.   2004.  Military Power.  Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton University Press.

Collins, Randall. 2008. Violence:  A Micro-Sociological Theory.  Princeton University Press.

Collins, Randall. 2010.  “A Dynamic Theory of Battle Victory and Defeat.” Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History  1: 3-25.  http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5mv6v0r1

Gordon, Michael R. and Bernard E. Trainor. 2007.  Cobra II. The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq.   Random House.

King, Anthony.  2011. The Transformation of Europe’s Armed Forces.  Cambridge University Press.

McIvor, Anthony D. (ed.)  2005. Rethinking the Principles of War. Annapolis MD: Naval Institute Press.

EVEN WITHOUT GUN CONTROL, WARNING SIGNS CAN HELP STOP MASS KILLINGS

Oh no, not again! is what we keep saying to ourselves, every time there is another mass killing.  Now it is a student at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon who kills 9 students and teachers, and when the police arrive, kills himself (October 1, 2015).

Almost everything about this is familiar, including the ensuing debate.  For one side, the obvious solution is more stringent gun control; ideally this would turn the U.S. into a low gun-ownership country like others where mass killings are rare. On the other side, the immediate reaction is keep our guns:  it's our Second Amendment right; banning guns would criminalize many law-abiding people; and in fact more guns on the ground would be the way to hold off these killers.

Neither of these positions would be such an easy solution as envisioned.

Most importantly, the current political reality is that no sweeping shift in gun control is likely to happen very soon.

Is the only thing we can do to stop mass killings, is to keep struggling over gun control? Is there nothing else we can do, right now?

We tend to assume that in public issues, state agencies should take care of it for us; we just have to mobilize ourselves to demand that the government do what we want. But is there nothing that people themselves, on the spot, can do about heading offpotential violence?

In fact, research in the micro-sociology of violence suggests things that people can do in the immediate situation. There are turning points that swing either towards violence or away from it; and the right action at these turning points has proven successful in heading off things like fights, rapes, and riots. I have summarized some of these actions in the Practical Conclusions at the end of my book, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, and in my June 2014 Sociological Eye blog post, "Tank Man and the Limits of Telephoto Lenses: Or, How much Can Individuals Stop Violence?"

In two other posts I have pointed out key features that distinguish mass killings from other kinds of violence:

SANDY HOOK SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: LESSONS FOR GUN-OWNING PARENTS

CLUES TO MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT

One of these clues is that potential killers' pattern of amassing guns is different from ordinary gun-owners.  They don't look like ordinary American gun-owners, and this difference is important as a clue as to who is dangerous and who is not.

If this difference were better known, it could help overcome one of the worst political aspects of our polarized reaction to mass shootings. As it stands now, gun-control advocates tend to treat gun-owners in general as the problem; and gun-owners-- a large segment of the American population-- feel themselves as the object of attack, virtually as if they themselves were responsible for another mass-rampage shooting.

If we can all focus on the significant clues, both sides-- gun-control advocates and gun-owners-- can both help head off mass shootings. In fact, gun-owners are in a position to do more about this in the settings where mass shootings are most common.

The most distinctive clues

-- A long period of clandestine preparation.  Most other kinds of violence happen rather abruptly. Quarrels which escalate into fights; domestic disputes that boil over into hot rage with whatever weapons are at hand; street-crimes and robberies that hinge on sudden opportunities; rapes at carousing parties: most of these violent events would be unexpected a few hours in advance. Mass killings of the kind that happen in schools, work-places, and more recently in theatres, gyms and churches, are planned much further back, typically over a period of weeks or months.

This period of clandestine preparation is not just a time of getting the logistics together and working out a rational plan of attack. The mood is not matter-of-fact but a kind of private ecstasy, a fantasy-land of smothering oneselfin the details of revenge for felt social slights.  Everything about the imagined revenge scenario is something to brood over and to savor -- researching past rampage killings, fixing a target, imagining the scenario, acquiring an arsenal complete with costumes and side-equipment.

-- An arsenal of symbolic overkill.  Mass rampage killers almost always amass far more weapons and ammunition that they need in their attack. They carry more guns, magazines and bombs than they actually use, and when they are shot, captured or commit suicide, they still have plenty more they could have used to continue the fight. Another sizeable portion of the arsenal is left behind, at home or in their car. Clearly they have an obsession with weapons-- the more guns the better, a 14-year old school killer in Kentucky said-- but most of it is superfluous power in a practical sense; it is part of their psychological preparation. Symbolic overkill is what gives them the emotional strength to carry out this horrific action that cuts them off irreparably from the human community.

-- Clandestine excitement.  From previous case studies, we have seen that this period of working in one's private underground-- either alone or with a small number of conspirators-- is the high point of their lives. "It was the only adventure I've ever had," the 14-year old Paducah, Kentucky school killer said.  Life has been a downer of social isolation or shame; now the tables are turned, and I-- the future killer-in-preparation-- am doing something far more significant, far more powerful than the people I am going to kill.  What needs to be emphasized here is that this high point is in the period of clandestine preparation; what the actual moments of the mass shooting are like is hard to tell, since few perpetrators survive, but motivation is in the present of on-going time, and it is clear that they are enjoying the build-up to the mass shooting.  The very fact that it is hidden away from other people, that there is a danger in being found out, makes it an adventure. This clandestine excitement gives purpose to their lives. And it gives them emotional energy, the forward-moving confidence and momentum that propels them down the emotional slope that leads to mass killing.

The difference from ordinary gun-owners

Ordinary gun-owners are not like this.  They don't spend long periods working out a a scenario of using their guns. They don't spend months obsessively planning the details of when and where the shooting is going to take place. It is not difficult to distinguish an ordinary gun-owner from someone who is preparing a mass shooting; the pattern of their daily life and state of mind are quite distinct.

Ordinary gun-owners are not involved in symbolic overkill. On the whole, they do not amass arsenals so huge that they never could be of any use.  True, there is some symbolism in having guns and historic weapons; it says something about one's self-image. But the key difference is that ordinary gun-owners are not so intensely focused on their weapons-collection as potential mass-killers are. It is not the center of their self-image, the most important thing in their lives; it is not tied to an obsessive plan for action that is building up in the middle-range future.

Ordinary gun-owners are not full of clandestine excitement.  Their guns are clearly on display; or if they are locked away in gun cabinets, their existence is not a secret; there is no excitement about hiding them while looking forward to the day they will be used. The emotional atmosphere is different.

Seen up close, there is little danger of mistaking an ordinary gun-owner for a rampage killer.

Gun-owning adults are the best observers who can head off mass killings

Once a mass killing has taken place, public scrutiny soon zeroes in on the lead-up to it. Retrospectively we learn about the killer, his (almost always a male) sense of social grievances, his obsessive revenge planning and arsenal-collecting.  What we need it for someone to see the warning signs, while it is still in the stage of fantasy killing, before it turns into real killing.

The persons who are in best position to do this are those close to the potential killer, members of his family, neighbors, andacquaintances. This is especially important when the people nearby in his network are gun-owners. For one thing, gun-owners are usually the ones who have introduced the potential killers to guns, have given them knowledge about them; often they have been the source of guns (as in the case of the Sandy Hook mother who bought guns for her son), or because their guns were stolen by the perpetrator.

Gun-owners bear a special responsibility for those in their immediate social network who might get access to guns. And this goes beyond conventional gun-safety training. It is not just a matter of trying to ensure that guns are not fired accidentally or in the wrong direction;  it becomes a matter of making sure someone with an alienated world-view doesn't fire guns at all at their chosen target.

Gun-owners need to become alert to the warning signs: social alienation, mental illness, and above all their combination with a young man's clandestine obsession with guns over a long period of time, accumulating symbolic arsenals, and centering one's life around the clandestine excitement of a scenario of violent revenge. Discerning this isn't easy; there are plenty of alienated youths, and today's entertainment culture is full of fantasy violence. It isn't playing the violent video games that is the problem; it is the accumulation of a real arsenal with all the paraphernalia of a mass murder scenario.  When this goes on for months, in one's own home, a concerned family member should get a sense of it.  Gun-owning parents need to encourage each other to look for the warning signs, and to take action when they see them.

The Roseburg, Oregon killings and its predecessors

In previous posts, I have analyzed the details of the December 2012 Sandy HookElementary School shooting in Connecticut; theJuly 2012 Aurora, Colorado theatre massacre; the July 2011 mass shooting at a Norway youth camp; the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. I have drawn especially on the psychological dynamics of the would-be killer assembling a clandestine arsenal leading up to the mass shooting at a high school in Paducah, Kentucky in 1997.

All these cases show the long pattern of obsessive preparation of a clandestine scenario, centered on collecting an weapons arsenal. Like the rest of them, the Roseburg, Oregon shooter had assembled far more weapons than he actually used.  He carried six guns with him to Umpqua Community College, along with five magazines of ammunition and a flak jacket. At home in his mother's apartment, he had seven more guns and large amounts of ammo. Itlooks like the same symbolic overkill. It seems likely that as further details come out, we will find the pattern of obsessive clandestine preparation over a period of months.

There are already a number of parallels to the Sandy Hook shooter. In both cases, the shooter lived alone with his mother, who was devoted to caring for him. Both shooters had Asperger's syndrome, and both mothers strongly indulged their strange behavior. Both mothers were themselves enthusiastic gun-owners. Both took their sons shooting at gun ranges; the Sandy Hook mother regarded it as one of the few successful things they could do together. The Sandy Hook mother bought all five of the guns that her son used (including the gun with which he killed her), as well as his other paraphernalia of weapons, and his massive supply of ammunition. Everything her son did, she interpreted as a manifestation of his illness. The windows in his room taped shut with black plastic were to her just a sign of sensitiveness to light-- even though he could go outdoors when he wanted to. The possibility that he was hiding something in the rooms she was forbidden to enter was masked in her own mind by the feeling that she must do everything possible for her son.

At Sandy Hook, we find all the worst ingredients combined. Some of them are already visible in the Roseburg case. The socially isolated son; the single care-giving mother; the diagnosis of mental illness that she is trying so hard to counteract. The young man becoming obsessed with the pattern of previous mass shootings, building up an arsenal, even imitating some previous features such as asking victims if they are Christian.

Could these mass killings have been stopped before they started?  Yes, clearly the care-giving mother was in a position to read the warning signs.

That they did not is a pointer to the direction we need to go: much greater awareness of warning signs, especially among ordinary gun-owners.

What follows is a slightly modified re-posting of my September 2012 analysis.

CLUES TO MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT

What can the micro-sociology of violence contribute to understanding the mass killings in Aurora, Colorado, and similar incidents? In the immediate shock of public attention, there is an imperative to give policy answers.  I could join the chorus advocating a ban on weapons in the USA.  This is a hope; it is not a guarantee.  Mass shootings are very rare events.  There are about 15,000 homicides per year in the USA; the great majority are single-victim killings. Less than 1% are mass killings (4 or more victims in the same incident). Spectacular mass shootings, where many persons are killed or wounded, have been happening at a rate of about 1 or 2 per year, in the 30 years since 1980, for the most common type, school shootings; shootings in other venues, apparently imitating school shootings, are on the rise, especially in the last two years. It is their rarity that attracts so much attention, and their out-of-the-blue, seemingly random relationship between killer and victims, that makes them so dramatically alarming. 

This rarity means that very distinctive circumstances are needed to explain mass killings, and that widely available conditions cannot be very accurate predictors.  There are approximately 270 million firearms in the civilian population in America, in a population of about 310 million.  The vast majority of these guns are not used to kill people.  Even if we focus on the total number of yearly homicides by gun (about 12,000), the percentage of guns that kill someone is about 12,000 / 270,000,000, or 1 in 23,000.  Another way to put it: of approximately 44 million gun owners in the US, 99.97% of them do not murder anyone. It is not surprising that their owners resist being accused of abetting murder.           

My aim here is not to enter the political controversy over banning guns. Many people who own guns are gun-cultists, for whom guns are symbolic objects, connected with their identity and lifestyle (analyzed in Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains). The political argument over banning or retaining guns has strong emotional overtones on both sides. Anti-gun-cultists dislike not only guns but the lifestyle and the values of the people who have them; this is evident in the case of anti-hunting movements, including the recently successful anti-foxhunting movement in England. (US surveys indicate the favorite TV shows of liberal Democrats are comedians satirizing conservatives. Experian, 2012) Both sides blur the gun issue with symbolic politics.  What can be said analytically is that banning guns is trying to manipulate a variable that is a very weak predictor of mass homicides. It resembles TSA procedures of searching everyone who enters an airport gate area; airplane terrorists are also extremely rare, and thus the vast majority of the persons who are searched are innocent.   More successful ways of heading off terrorists have focused on their organizations and networks (Sageman 2004).

In the case of mass homicides, micro-sociology can help by examining the details that make this kind of murder distinctive.        

Mass murders are mostly committed by a solo individual, almost never by more than two. Typically their target is a public gathering of 10 to several hundred persons. Not everyone is killed; usually the number of wounded is larger than the number killed; and many escape injury, since mass murderers resemble other violent persons in this respect: they often miss their targets.       

In mass rampage killings, the killers are not aiming at particular individuals at all. The victims are anonymous, representatives of a collective identity that is being attacked. Hence mass attacks generally take place in institutional settings: mainly in schools, or work places, although recently also in exercise gyms and in churches.  The Aurora, Colorado attack in July 2012 was unusual (or the harbinger of new settings), in a movie theatre; the Norway shooting attack of July 2011 was on a youth camp of a political party. The number actually killed is misleading; the attack is an effort to destroy an institution through the people who belong to it. In that sense it is a symbolic attack-- a deadly symbolic attack. The motivation and tactics of the mass killer are very different from most homicides; here it is not a matter of a personal grudge coming from ongoing conflict with a particular individual, as in the nearly halfof all homicides which are among personal acquaintances; nor the targeted killing between gangs; nor the instrumental or accidental killings which take place in the course of another crime such as a robbery or rape.  Most other types of homicides are impulsive or emerge from escalated situations; mass rampage killings are elaborately planned in advance.           

Rampage killers tend to attack not only a place but an event. The ritualized gathering has a symbolic meaning-- it is where the group celebrates itself through communion with its sacred objects.  Thus Holmes, the recently failed graduate student who shot 70 people (12 killed, 58 wounded) at a movie theatre in Aurora, chose the night of the premiere of an eagerly awaited Batman movie.  From a sociological point of view, being an entertainment fan is a major identity in contemporary youth culture.  Holmes, by imitating the costumes of characters in the Batman series, was entering deeply into a popular cult. His apartment was decorated with Batman paraphernalia. Without having the details of Holmes' life experiences and personal thoughts, it can still be said that the killer was simultaneously participating in a ritual of popular youth culture, and attacking the members of that cult. (Of the 12 killed, 10 were in the age range 18 to 32; 7 of them within 3 years of his own age, 24.)  The movie-theatre mass rampage killing resembles school shootings, where the killer is attacking his own institution and its members-- the scenario of the rejected member.       

Not very usable clues are the patterns that rampage killers are low status isolates, or recent academic or career failures, or introverts.  Like availability of guns, here again the explanatory variable is too common;  there are a tiny number of rampage killers, but incidents of career failures are widespread; the number of introverts in the population is probably around 40 percent; victims of school bullying comprise 5 - 15% of students; since there are about 13 million secondary school students in the US, bully victims would total around 650,000 to 2 million. About two-thirds of school shooters are bully victims, but there are other ways to be low status in the youth culture, so the number would be higher. The correlation of these predictors with rampage killings must be extremely low.

Better clues come from considering the micro-sociology of this kind of violence. Any kind of violent confrontation is emotionally difficult; the situation of facing another person whom one wants to harm produces confrontational tension/fear (ct/f ); and its effect most of the time is to make violence abort, or to become inaccurate and ineffective. The usual micro-sociological patterns that allow violence to succeed are not present in a rampage killing; group support does not exist, because one or two killers confront a much larger crowd:  in contrast, most violence in riots takes place in little clumps where the attackers have an advantage of around 6-to-1. 

 Another major pathway around ct/f  is attacking a weak victim. But in almost all violence, the weakness is emotional rather than physical-- even an armed attacker has to establish emotional dominance, before he can carry out effective violence.  One might think this is simply a matter of using a gun or displaying a weapon, which automatically puts the armed person in the position of strength, the others in a position of weakness. Nevertheless, detailed analysis of incidents and photos of armed confrontations show thatgroups without guns can emotionally paralyze an armed opponent, preventing him from using his weapon.           

Guns provide emotional dominance when an armed individual threatens a peaceful group and they try to hide or run away.  This depends on the style of the victims. When rival street gangs clash, they do not turn their backs; they are used to gesturing, with and without guns, and most such face-to-face confrontations wind down. Running away has the effect of confirming emotional dominance; it is easier to shoot a person in the back than in the front; and turning away or attempting to hide one's face has the effect of removing one's greatest deterrent-- eye-contact with the opponent. Thus the hundreds who piled on the floor in the theatre at Aurora, or who ran from the attacker on the Norwegian island, may have saved some percentage of themselves; but they collectively could have saved more than ended up being killed or wounded, if they had used their superior numbers to confront the attacker.  I don't mean just the possibility of physically overcoming him, but taking advantage of the fact that groups are always emotionally stronger than individuals, if they can keep themselves together and put up an emotionally united front: they could probably have made him stop shooting.           

If this sounds implausible, consider how rampage shootings usually end: in a 1997 school shooting at Paducah, Kentucky, the solo killer, a 14-year-old boy who opened fire on a prayer group in the school hall, allowed a teacher and the prayer leader to come up to him and take his gun away as soon as he had shot 8 girls and boys (who were facing away from him). I will discuss this case in detail below.  The Aurora theatre killer gave himself up to the police without resistance after he left the theatre. Even Breivik, the Norwegian killer, who stated a strong ideological motive for his killings, gave himself up without a fight once armed authorities arrived on the island, although he had plenty of ammunition left.  The key point here is not simply that the Norwegian police were armed, and the teenage campers were not; but rather that the police confronted him, while the teens ran away and turned their backs. Rampage killers almost always give themselves up peacefully, or else commit suicide. A rare exception is the Columbine duo, who exchanged fire several times with the police, at long distance and ineffectually, before killing themselves in a lull in the action. This is another respect in which rampage killers differ from other types of violent persons.

Why Rampage Killers are Not Suicide Bombers       

Rampage killers do not approach their victims in an angry or threatening mode; they give no warning until they start firing.  In this respect their pathway into violence are not at all like disputes that escalate into violence; nor like confrontations among gangs or other ostentatious tough guys, who often do more blustering than actual violence. Rampage shooters are more similar to suicide bombers, whose tactical advantage is pretending that the attacker is just an ordinary, innocuous person until the last moment when the bomb is set off.  Political organizations that use suicide bombers do not select belligerent persons, but the most mild-mannered, self-controlled individuals. Rampage killers are even farther at the end of this continuum.           

But rampage killers differ from suicide bombers in ways that reveal what is central to their motivation. The suicide bomber kills him/herself at the same moment as the victims; this has the advantage of not seeing the carnage one has made. Suicide bombers are usually idealistic individuals who believe in a cause, and have never engaged in violence before; so the tactic is ideal for keeping any notion of violence out of their mind-- the most successful pathway is to keep one's mind focused on the normal details of routine activity, or on one's ideological message (see Collins, Violence,  for analysis of the last dialogue of suicide bombers, including a recording in the cockpit of the airline downed on 9/11).  But rampage killers are obsessed with their attack; they want to see the token representations of the hated institution die. A minority of rampage killers commit suicide, but only after they have experienced the process of killing that they have fantasized about for so long.           

Motives and rituals of confrontation also affect the weapons they use.  A remote bombing attack-- where the attacker places a bomb at the target and detonates it later from a safe distance-- does not fit the psychological scenario the rampage killer seeks. Disgruntled students often fantasize about blowing up the school, and this is perhaps their most common form of rebellious rhetoric; but it is entirely verbal ritualism (and circulation of a cultural cliché), since virtually all mass killings in schools have been carried out by shooting rather than bombs. And this is so even though many of the killers collect an arsenal which includes bombs; for instance the two killers at Columbine High School in 1999 brought nearly 100 explosive devices, and managed to explode 8-to-10 of them, but caused all their casualties by shooting. It appears that bombing is not sufficiently confrontational for the psychological scenario that a mass institutional killer seeks.           

Suicide bombers belong to an organized group, a movement with a long-term goal that they hope to advance, beyond the deaths of individual contributors; whereas rampage killers engage in purely personal revenge.  Why this should affect the scenarios they choose?  Suicide bombers have an abstract agenda; rampage killers are persons who have been personally humiliated.  What they want is to reverse the scenario that has dominated their lives-- being looked down upon by others in that institution; the habitually dominated seek a moment of dominating others. This fills their horizon; the rampage killer rarely plans what happens next. In all his elaborate planning, he has made no plans for escape. The mass killing is the final, overwhelming symbolic event of his life.

Insulating Oneself from Direct Face-to-Face Contact with Victims           

Even when an armed individual threatens a large unarmed group, he needs to circumvent ct/f -- the debilitating tension that makes violence so hard. He needs a technique for insulating himself from the persons he is going to kill. There are several ways to do this, and recent massacres show some of the techniques.           

The Aurora killer wore an elaborate black costume, assembled from military and police supply businesses, including helmet, gas mask, throat guard, assault vest, leggings and gloves.  This somewhat resembled Batman-- also an ordinary person with a secret identity-- who goes into violent action transformed into a bulked-up dark costume and head covering.  Holmes's costume also let him fit in with the crowd of fantasy fans, as the style of dressing as comic-story characters has become popular at youth-culture gatherings (e.g. Comic-Con in San Diego-- his home town-- which took place just a week before the Aurora shooting). Before donning his helmet and gas mask, Holmes displayed his flamboyant shock of hair dyed bright red; this attracted attention but eased him into the role, as he told people he was the Joker-- thus imitating both the arch-villain and the super-hero. He waited until the action of the film was under way before tossing smoke bombs into the theatre and starting to shoot. A witness described the atmosphere: "smoke, explosions-- bats flying across the screen because the movie's still playing-- it's dark." When the lights came on, Holmes stopped firing and left the theatre.           

Psychologically, his bulky costume put a layer of insulation between himself and the world, and his bizarre-looking gas mask gave him an artificial face. The normal tendency of a focused interaction between persons is to reflect emotional signals back and forth, so each becomes entrained in the other person's emotions; mutual eye contact and full face-to-face concentration brings a strong sense of the other person's humanity, and makes it difficult to carry out violence. The would-be rampage killer needs to distance his social emotions from his own awareness; masking or disguising one's own face is one way to do this.  In general, masks or hoods either on the faces of the aggressor or the victims increase the amount of violence, by destroying the normal human link in face-to-face eye contact.  Later I will describe a case where the killer, just before opening fire in a school, puts on shooting-range ear-plugs; these have no practical value but insulate him from the sounds and sensations of normal social interaction.           

Breivik, the Oslo killer, followed an even more sophisticated pathway. He likewise took on an alien role, wearing a police uniform with a helmet and face shield that obscured his face. In preparation, he practiced meditation techniques, to keep himself detached from the human reactions of the persons he was preparing to shoot. He also extensively practiced violent video games; of course, tens of millions of other youth did too. But Breivik incorporated it as preparation for a real-world attack; unlike the usual frame in which game-players recognize what they are doing as unreal, he consciously connected it with the need to steel himself from any pangs of human sympathy; in effect, he recognized ct/f  as an obstacle he would train himself to overcome.

Deep Backstage          

Almost everyone has a backstage, a region of privacy (the bathroom, your own bedroom etc.) where you prepare for and recuperate from the frontstage social interaction that is typically the center of your life. Some individuals-- introverts, isolates, the socially excluded-- spend much of their time in the backstage.  Many persons build elaborate fantasy backstage lives that becomes a substitute for successful interaction rituals on the frontstage, especially in today's world of the Internet and electronic games.  This is particularly common among young males, the upper age rising from teens through 30s in recent decades with the postponement of adult careers, inflation of educational requirements, and underemployment. The demographic is the same as most rampage killers, although only a tiny proportion becomes violent. Information-technology-obsessed "gamers" have become a recognized category among teenagers-- a low status at the far end of the spectrum from the extroverts and athletes who dominate school and leisure activities.         

Mass rampage killers-- and an unknown penumbra of wannabes-- go even further. Their obsessive backstages have two distinctive features. First, their private obsessions concentrate on their vision of a personally inimical world: not the standardized war and fighting fantasies of mass-marketed games, but their own real-world hatreds and institutions.  They become increasingly drawn into preparing their counter-attack.           

A second feature is that a rampage killer makes his backstage into a super-successful ritual, while also keeping it ultra-private.  It resembles a personal religious cult, with its own ceremonies, sacred objects, and moral standards. Of course, many innocuous pursuits can also be built up in private into a quasi-religious obsession.  The would-be rampager's success, in building an emotionally compelling world that is completely antagonistic to other people's,  is so extreme because he has found a unique source of emotional energy: clandestine excitement.          

Ordinarily, motivations are generated socially, by successful interaction rituals; mutual focus and emotional entrainment with other people build up collective effervescence; an individual's emotional energy (EE) is tied to an arena of successful social membership, and to its collective symbols and moral standards which guide action. Spin-off rituals exist, such as solitary prayer or artistic creation, but such practices are first learned in a group that fills them with sacred significance, so that individuals can take them further in privacy.  But clandestine solitary rituals are not like this; they are never shared with a group, and collective ritual can't give them a jump-start.   So how can a totally solo ritual generate enough emotional energy to outshine every other motivation?          

The answer is clandestine excitement: the energy that comes from successfully keeping other people out of one's backstage.  The backstage of the would-be mass killer is illicit; he knows it cannot be revealed to others without provoking severe condemnation.  This distinguishes it from other kinds of obsessive backstages; boys caught up in video games and electronic cultsdo not generally hide what they are interested in, and multi-player games and on-line contacts subject them to a degree of social control, reinforcing a standardized construction of social reality. The would-be rampager is playing a much more exciting game, hiding from others his horrendous plans; and this excitement feeds the emotional input that drive his private ritual. His backstage ritual is in a deepening spiral, a unique source of emotional excitement: as the prospective rampager gets into increasingly serious preparations, the excitement level rises.  It is not just the excitement of what he is going to do, in the great showdown event-- this may actually be frightening to contemplate. The positive energy comes from the ongoing adventure of doing something illicit, collecting weapons and hiding them, making specific plans-- the excitement is that of carrying out a secret mission.  From an alienated life, the future rampager now has many moments of excitement, every time he has to fool someone who might notice what he is doing.  On the whole, these are easy tasks, risks that he can handle. His daily life of clandestine planning now gives a feeling of confidence, initiative, enthusiasm-- the very definition of EE.  The preparing rampager gets a buzz from successfully duping persons around him while going through the motions of everyday life. He is playing a higher-order game of social attunement-- pretending to be attuned to them so he can control their perceptions of what he is really doing.

The Backstage of a Young Teen Killer

We can follow the construction of a deep backstage in a high school shooting in Paducah, Kentucky in December 1997 (investigated in detail by Katherine Newman, Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shooting; quotes from pp. 25-6).  A 14-year old boy, Michael Carneal, opened fire in the school lobby on a Christian prayer circle just at the beginning of the school day, killing 3 and wounding 5.           

The sequence of events begins with struggle over low rank in the social hierarchy of the school.  In all known school shootings, the perpetrators were outside the popular group; many of them had been manhandled, punched, trapped in a locker or thrown in a garbage can, taunted and jeered at. For Michael, the worst was when a gossip column in the school paper implied that he was homosexual, precipitating a further barrage of taunts. Like most school shooters, Michael was unathletic, unattractive, and easily dominated: a clear counter-ideal by which the teenage status hierarchy could remind itself of what is and is not, and an easy target for attacking the weak. He did not fight back when attacked.           

Rampage shooters are not only humiliated by the school hierarchy, they hide their humiliation.  They try to go on faking it on the outside, not admitting that the bullying and put-downs are getting to them. This gives an additional significance to the pattern that they rarely confide in teachers or parents, much less their compatriots, about their feelings of humiliation. This is not just an instrumental issue of failing to get help; being unwilling to confideis in fact a realistic assessment, if the problem is regaining status in the student hierarchy, which is lost by enlisting adults as allies against students.  But this cuts off an avenue of expressing shame which could have turned the emotional dynamics away from the cycle of bypassed shame and humiliated rage (emphasized by Scheff 1991).           

Bullied rampage shooters are not entirely passive nor entirely isolated; generally they have some friends, rather outside of school than in it.  Although they do not fight back against being attacked, or meet taunts with counter-taunts, they may attempt of their own. Michael, who was repeatedly hazed by the school band members -- the one organization he did belong to -- also carried out pranks to annoy the teachers and other students, episodes of clowning, ostentatious noise-making and mild physical intrusions like slapping other’s heads as he walked by their seats.  He responds to victimhood by taking on the role of the clown, simultaneously staging the impression that they are not humiliated but take it all in fun, while also attempting to get the group’s attention. This is Goffmanian frontstaging, leaving the humiliation hidden on the backstage.  And it is a strategy that fails; higher-status students find it annoying, and retaliate by increasing their level of harassment.  Hence a build-up of taunting, physical attacks, and character assassination, as the dominants defend what they feel is their legitimate status hierarchy.          

A deep backstage gets constructed from a spiral of backstage activities.  In middle school, Michael was already involved in a number of personal backstages:  the fact that he did not fight back against bullying nor express his feelings about it, kept these feelings reserved for a private backstage. He was also adept at presenting himself to adults as normal and well-adjusted, including covering up for his own pranks.           

His backstage manipulation of frontstage impressions took a further turn when he moved to high school, and tried to gain admission to an alternative counter-culture group.  These were the Goths, ostentatiously dressing in black, displaying pagan religious symbols, and rhetorically challenging the dominant school status hierarchy. Michael as an awkward freshman received little status in the Goth circle either. He tried to bribe his way into the circle, stealing money and a fax machine to give to them. So far he was stepping into the criminal pathway. But in fact he did not go far in this direction; his backstaging took another twist when he began to pretend to steal CDs (alternative music being the central interest of the Goth subculture) to give to them, but in fact taking them from his own collection.  Michael was now trying to impress the Goths with his criminality, itself a pretence; he was not even a straightforward thief.         

Around this time Michael became acutely conscious that other people had hidden backstages. He was impressed with the Goths’ charges that the Christian prayer group which met in the school lobby every morning was itself just a show.  Behind the facade of pious purity, the Goths said, they were just as sexually dissolute as anyone else. This was just the most obvious form of hypocrisy.  The ostensibly altruistic Christians upheld the school status hierarchy of athletes and popular sociables which mercilessly put down nerdy kids like Michael. Around the same time, Michael wrote a short story in which he declared “there is a secret in my family that my parents and my sister know... I am always excluded from things... I overheard my parents debating whether they should tell me or not.”  His perception was not entirely fantasy. The school status hierarchy is omnipotent in its time and place; children who have friends in their neighbourhood or through family networks nevertheless may be ignored by the same friends at school because of their different ranks in the school status hierarchy (Milner, Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids). Michael’s older sister, who belonged to one of the popular groups, treated him very differently at home and at school.           

Michael was becoming obsessed with backstages, recognizing that others had a backstage just as he did. Now he was formulating layers of his own backstages, deep backstages on which he contrived to pretend to belong on more conventionally alienated backstages like the Goths; he was descending into an inner world in which he was suspicious of the layers of staging everywhere.          

His final round of backstage activity was to develop a plot around guns.  During Thanksgiving holiday, after taking part in the ritual dinner with his family, he visited the home of a neighbourhood buddy at a time when he knew the family would be away having dinner with their relatives, using his insider knowledge of their doings to find an opportune time to break in. He must have been secretly observing details of the layout for some time beforehand, since he was able to find the hidden key to the gun case, and take several weapons, which he hid in a duffle bag and carried home on his bike.           

“Affecting a nonchalant air when he arrived at home, Michael parked the duffle bag by some pine trees outside his bedroom window, and went in to greet his parents. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, when they asked about his day.  Once upstairs, he locked his door, climbed out the window, and retrieved the bag, stashing it under his bed.   Michael carefully screened the weapons from view by moving Lego boxes in front of the bag. He went downstairs to watch TV for a while but was too excited to sit still for long." He returned to lie on his bed.           

This is a significant detail. In previous months, Michael had developed a phobia about sleeping in his bedroom, believing that a monster was under his bed who would drag him under while he was alone; instead he slept on the living room couch.  But he used his bedroom to store his possessions, and now it hid his cache of guns. The monster no longer threatens him; it has merged with himself, or rather with his weapons, which are stored in just the place where he imagined the monster to be.          

"Lying awake on his bed later that evening, Michael felt a satisfaction that had eluded him for a long time.          

'I was feeling proud, strong, good, and more respected. I had accomplished something. I’m not the kind of kid who accomplishes anything.  This was the only adventure I’ve ever had,’” Michael later told a psychiatrist.           

This is an extension of his earlier backstage activity of stealing, or pretending to steal, gifts for the Goths. The plotting, breaking and entering, disguising the guns to transport them on the street, sneaking them into a hiding place in his room, interspersing these moves with normal appearances before his parents to avoid suspicion -- all this was an antinomian adventure.  He is excited by the backstage action; it is the same kind of appeal that exists whenever someone has a clandestine backstage and a secret hiding place, whether it is drugs, pornography, stolen property, or weapons; Jack Katz (Seductions of Crime) shows that the allure of shop-lifting is chiefly in the staging excitement, not in the intrinsic value of the items stolen. Carrying out backstage activity in front of unsuspecting audiences is itself a thrill. Michael seems to have deliberately repeated the thrill during the weekend, sneaking the guns out of his house again, carrying them hidden in the duffle bag on his bike to another friend’s house, where he displayed them, and even took turns shooting in their backyard. On Sunday afternoon of the vacation weekend (the night before school would begin Monday morning), Michael displayed his cool by playing chess with his father; at night he took two more guns from his father’s closet and added them to his cache under the bed.           

Monday morning there was more clandestine action. “Michael came downstairs with the rifles bound together with duct tape, covered by blankets. On top of the blankets he piled the sheets from his bed and, when asked, told his mother that the cat had thrown up on them and that he taking them to the laundry room.  Michael went into the laundry room and deposited the sheets, but then went directly outside and put the bundle of guns in the trunk of [his sister’s] car.  The pistol and ammunition were stuffed into his backpack.  He got into the car with his sister and rode off to Heath High, eager with anticipation.”           

Michael is full of clandestine excitement.  This is no ordinary backstage.  He is evading detection while under the gaze of those who might detect him; he is taking advantage of his usual condition of low status and remoteness from the center of attention to build a threat that only he knows about.  He is enjoying his backstage, no longer furtively withdrawn into it, but purposively and agentfully.  More emotional than the ordinary backstage, we might call it a deep backstage; it is the thrill of carrying off on the backstage what would be a difficult confrontation on the frontstage.  Michael’s confrontational tension and fear is ordinarily so high that he cannot respond to ordinary bullying and taunting; now he has turned that tension into a clandestine energy.  His months of activity on various fronts have made him an expert at backstages.  In this arena at least, he has some emotional energy: the confidence to carry outhis fantasy of overcoming confrontationaltension/fear.           

Is there a precipitating moment? Michael has planned and fantasized about guns for months. But it is not clear when he is riding in the car to school that he will shoot anybody.  Even if he has fantasized about it, there is still the barrier of ct/f  to overcome.  Many violent confrontations abort at the last minute; it may well happen that he will change his mind.           

Michael arrives at the school and carries his bundle of guns into the lobby. To a teacher, he says that it contains his English project.  He is not yet ready to confront.  He heads for the group of Goths, 5 or 6 boys standing in a circle on one side of the lobby.  Nearby the Christian prayer group is forming.  Michael isbetween the two groups: both of them ritual groups, indeed performing counter-rituals to each other.  After a contingent moment he will turn from the first to the second and fire at them. He is making a choice between ritual loyalties.  As he drops his guns to the floor, making a metallic clank, the Goths pay him scant attention. The leader of the group says, apparently sardonically, “Sounds like guns to me.”  Do they actually know Michael has guns?  In the past they have engaged in plenty of violent talk, which Michael has attempted, without much success, to join.  They are primed to interpret more talk about guns from Michael as a ritual; even bringing guns into the school, in itself a serious violation, an antinomian act of rebellion, is probably perceived by them as an act of bluster, an attempt to raise his status in the counterculture group. Two sides of the Goths’ perceptions converge here: on one side they might well interpret Michael’s presentation as indeed bringing guns into their presence, since they fantasize about it rather openly themselves; on the other side are a series of reasons not to treat him seriously: that he is a young nerd trying once against to raise his status in their group; that their own talk about guns is bluster and no more; that to go any farther with the guns would get themselves in trouble, whereas their bluster is end enough in itself. They turn their backs on Michael and proceed to talk about punk music CDs.           

This is the situational turning point.  Michael has now been doubly humiliated: by the mainstream status system of the school, epitomized before his eyes by the prayer group a few yards away; by the counter-culture group, who put him at the bottom of their own status hierarchy, reject his best efforts to live up to their antinomian standards, and now literally turn their backs on him at what he had intended as his moment of greatest impressiveness.  No one looks at him as he reaches into his backpack and puts on a pair of bright orange ear plugs which he has pilfered along with the guns and ammunition. This is the paraphernalia shooters wear on firing ranges to protect their ears from the blast of the shot.  No one in either group looks at him as he takes out the pistol, loads a clip, and raises it into firing position, following the posture of the shooting range. Probably all these moments are on the cusp of the turning point; but still no one gives him any attention.  He waits until the last words of the prayer are finished, and pulls the trigger, first in a quick burst of three, then deliberately finishing the rest of the clip.           

Why does he stop shooting?  Students watching the scene describe it as a mixture of shock and unreality as the bodies fall. The pistol in the enclosed space sounds to one of them like little popping noises of firecrackers.  This is in keeping with the experience of soldiers and police, for whom the situation of firing, the apex of confrontation, is dissociated from their normal senses; a large majority of these shooters report the sound of their own guns, or of guns fired at them, sound tiny and far away, perhaps not even heard at all (Artwohl 1977). The earplugs are not really necessary, since Michael probably would not hear the shots anyway.  The chief effect of the earplugs is to heighten the sense of unreality, cutting out normal sounds that make other bodies in the vicinity seem active and real, not just pictures on a screen.  He has reached the point of isolation from all social feedback.  Of course he had been heading that way for months, with his succession of backstages; now he has reached the bottom of the tunnel.           

As soon as he finishes his clip, he starts to come back into the social world.  Although he has plenty of guns and ammunition, he makes no effort to reload.  He takes off the earplugs and turns passive as authority figures -- the big senior male who leads the prayer group, the school principal -- confront him. Now his backstage has turned into frontstage, his emotional energy has disappeared; the confrontational barrier becomes real again, and he freezes, unable to shoot any more.

The Strongest Clue: a Ritualized Hidden Arsenal

Most of the characteristics of mass killers-- low status isolates, bully victims, school failures, gun owners, players of violent games, even persons who talk or write about fantasies of revenge-- are far too widespread in the population to accurately predict who will actually perpetrate a massacre. A much stronger clue, I suggest, is amassing an arsenal of weapons, which become the center of an obsessive ritual; the arsenal is not just a practical step towards the massacre, but has a motivating effect that deepens the spiral of clandestine plotting into a private world impervious to normal social restraints and moral feelings.           

School shooters and other rampage killers generally amass an arsenal of weapons, bringing far more to the shooting site than they actually use or need.  Michael Carneal brought a total of 8 guns, wrapped up in a unwieldy bundle as well as in his backpack: a 30-30 rifle, four .22 caliber rifles, 2 shotguns, and a pistol, and a many boxes of ammunition; but he used only the pistol. The pair of 11- and 13-year old boyswho killed 5 and wounded 10 on a school playground in Jonesboro, Arkansas in 1998 carried 7 pistols, 3 rifles, and a large amount of ammunition, of which they fired 30 shots.          

The two shooters at Columbine HS carried a semi-automatic handgun, a carbine, two sawed-off shotguns, and almost 100 home-made bombs; they fired 96 shots from the carbine, 55 from the handgun, and 25 from one of the shotguns; their magazines held 240 rounds, of which they still had about 100 rounds, plus 90 of the bombs, when they committed suicide. In the first 20 minutes of their rampage, they killed 13 students and teachers and wounded 21. Then their emotional energy seemed to run out-- they even laughed sardonically that the thrill of killing was gone. They left 34 students unharmed out of 56 who were hiding under desks in the school library, and merely taunted other students while they wandered the halls firing aimless shots, before shooting themselves 25 minutes later, synchronizing their last action with a chant: "One, two, three!"           

Holmes, the Aurora killer, carried a shotgun, an automated assault rifle, and 2 handguns; previously he spent 4 months amassing equipment in his apartment, including multiple ammunition magazines and 6000 rounds, of which he used only a small part. He also constructed 30 explosives out of aerial fireworks, refilling them with chemicals, a task that must have taken many days.           

Brievik had 4 guns, 2 of which he took to the island.  He spent two years acquiring the weapons, since guns are hard to get in Europe, and Norwegian regulations are strict. Nevertheless he persevered through the official steps for a hunting license and undergoing training at a police-approved shooting club to get a pistol permit.  To create a massive car bomb (which he used in the first phase of his attack, at a government building in Oslo), he spent several years acquiring a remote farm as a front for buying fertilizer and chemicals.  He was busy in his hidden backstage, video-game training, writing propaganda, and making a fake police uniform and identification.  On the island, he used his police persona to assemble the youths, ostensibly to announce precautions, before starting to shoot them at close range. He brought over 400 rounds with him, fired 186, and still had over half remaining after fatally shooting 67 persons and wounding 33. He too seemed to waver towards the end of his 70-minute shooting spree, making several phone calls offering to give himself up (at 40 minutes and 60 minutes), but then resuming shooting until the police finally arrived.            

The stockpile of weapons is symbolic overkill. These guns are for showing off -- both to intimidate others, but mainly to impress oneself. They are the sacred objects of the private backstage cult that builds up the rampager's obsessive motivation to the massacre.  Once at the sticking point their emotional energy never seems to carry them far enough to use all their weapons. Whether they bring all their weapons to the massacre or not, their primary significance has been during the build-up; i.e. the guns they bring are from the focus of their cult activities-- they are a kind of security blanket.           

To be clear about the diagnosis: I am not saying that anyone who collects guns is a potential mass killer. The crucial signs are: first, the guns are kept secret, part of a deep backstage. In contrast, most gun owners are quite open about them; they may be involved in a cult of guns but it is a public cult, visible as a political stance, or a well-advertized pastime such as hunting or target shooting.  (Abigail Kohn, Shooters. Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures.)  It is the hidden arsenal that is dangerous-- psychologically dangerous. Second, the rampage killer amasses a large, unrealistic collection of weapons as far as their actual use is concerned. This symbolic aspect sets them off from other kinds of criminal users of guns.           

The symbolic aspects of weapons go beyond their sheer physical availability.  Hand-guns are widely available through illegal channels in lower-class urban areas; butthey are not used for mass school shootings, but typically in street crime or gang vendettas.  Up to 22% of inner-city students say they could get their hands on a gun; and between 4 and 12% report they have brought them to school; overwhelmingly their stated reason is protection against other students -- i.e. in the gang milieu of these communities (Klewin 2003). Many of these claims maybe exaggeration and bluster for the sake of the local status system; andsome of the gun-carrying students use them not for defense but to intimidate or retaliate against others; but in fact they rarely use them in the school itself,  and virtually never in mass institutional shootings but only in targeting specific individuals. (From 1992 through 2000, 234 students were killed at US schools and 24,406 away from school, a ratio of less than 1 percent (DeVoe 2004).  The school is not their turf; their violence has a different symbolic focus and ritual location:  their rival streets. In contrast, virtually all the institutional mass murderers have been middle-class whites, and recently, high-achieving Asians.           

Guns in the hands of gang members and their youth cohort counterparts are potential murder weapons. But these young men are not potential mass murderers, nor institutional rampage killers. They do not stockpile weapons in hidden caches, secretively protecting them with fake-normal behavior; on the contrary, they show them off to each other at every occasion.  They don't have a clandestine backstage the way a nerdy rampager does. They don't need it, because their emotional attractions to violence, or at least ritualized bluster, are part of their public interaction rituals. By the same token, their interaction rituals push them towards intermittent individually-targeted killings, but not impersonal mass rampages against unarmed members of hated institutions.

Why split hairs?  Why not say, all guns are potentially dangerous; the solution is to get rid of all of them.  I will not repeat the practical arguments made at the outset; and Breivik shows that even very strict regulations can be evaded by a sufficiently obsessed perpetrator. If we are looking for ways to actually prevent violence, in the sequence of events and emotions that make up people's lives, we need to be aware of the pathways leading to particular kinds of violence.

What We Can Do About Mass Killings

There is a very strong clue that a massacre is being prepared: an isolated individual (or possibly a duo) engaged in an obsessive clandestine ritual around a hidden arsenal of weapons.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me repeat: It is not the possession of guns that is the warning sign; it is hiding an arsenal, and clandestine obsession with scenarios of violence. When clues like this appear in one’s own home, the gun-owning parent should be in the best position to recognize it.

What is needed, above all, is a commitment by gun-owners to keep their own guns completely secure, and not to let them fall into the hands of alienated young people, including one’s own children or their friends.

My recommendation is to gun-owners themselves. The issue of gun control in the United States has been mainly treated as a matter of government legislation. That pathway has led to political gridlock. That does not mean that we can do nothing about heading off school shootings. Simply put: keep alienated youths from building a clandestine arsenal where they nurture fantasies of revenge on the school status system, or whatever problems they have with their personal world. Gun-owning parents are closest to where this is most likely to happen. We need a movement of gun-owning parents who will encourage each other to make sure it doesn’t start in their own home.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  

 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

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“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

Sources:  news reports; Wikipedia; U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics;

"Sandy Hook School Shootings: Lessons For Gun-Owning Parents"

"Clues to Mass Rampage Killers: Deep Backstage, Hidden Arsenal, Clandestine Excitement."

Collins, Randall. 2004.  Interaction Ritual Chains.  Princeton Univ. Press.

Collins, Randall. 2008.  Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.  Princeton Univ. Press.

Kohn, Abigail. 2004. Shooters. Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures. Oxford Univ. Press.

Lankford, Adam. 2015. “Mass Shooters, Firearms, and Social Strains: A Global Analysis of an Exceptionally American Problem.” paper delivered at Annual Meeting of American Sociological Association.

Newman, Katherine S., Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth.  2004.  Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings.  NY:  Basic Books.

Artwohl, Alexis, and Loren W. Christensen. 1997.  Deadly Force Encounters.  Boulder CO: Paladin Press.

DeVoe,  Jill, et al. 2004.  “Indicators ofSchool Crime and Safety.”  U.S. Dept. ofEducation.

Experian Simmons. 2012.  "Top TV Programs Among Voter Segments."  Reported in Los Angeles Times, August 30, B3. 

Katz, Jack.  1988.  Seductions of Crime. Moral and Sensual Attractions of Doing Evil. NY: Basic Books.

Klewin, Gabriele, et al.  2003.  "Violence in school."  in Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (eds.), International Handbook of Violence Research.  London: Kluwer. 

Milner, Murray, Jr. 2004.  Freaks, Geeks and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools and the Culture of Consumption. NY: Routledge.

Sageman, Marc.  2004. Understanding Terror Networks. Univ. of Pennsylvania Press.

Scheff, Thomas J. and Suzanne Retzinger. 1991. Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

MONA LISA IS NO MYSTERY FOR MICRO-SOCIOLOGY

The Mona Lisa is considered the world’s most famous painting, chiefly because of its mysterious smile.  What is so mysterious about it? Art critics have projected all sorts of interpretations onto it, and these are endless. There is a more objective way to analyze the Mona Lisa smile, using the social psychology (or micro-sociology) of facial expressions.

As the psychologist Paul Ekman has found, analyzing emotions in photos all over the world, emotions are shown on three zones of the face: the mouth and lower face; the eyes; and the forehead. Our folk knowledge about emotions concerns only the mouth: the smiley face with lips curled up, the frowning face with lips turned down. These intuitions  also make possible fake expressions. The mouth is the easiest part of the face to control. You can easily turn up the corners of your mouth, and this is what we do on social occasions where the expected thing is happiness or geniality. Arlie Hochschild, in The Managed Heart, calls this emotion work. In the contemporary fashion of political campaigning, politicians are required to be professional producers of fake smiles.

The muscles around the eyes and eyelids are much more difficult to control, and along with the forehead these are usually outside one’s conscious awareness. So a fake smile—or any other fake emotional expression—is easy for viewers to catch, because we are unconsciously attuned to the entire emotional signal all over the face. One reason we like photos of small children is that they haven’t yet learned how to fake emotional expressions.

If we examine the Mona Lisa face, zone by zone, the reason for its mysteriousness becomes clear: there are different emotions expressed in different facial zones.

Her mouth, as everyone has noticed, has a slight smile.

Her eyes are a little sad.

Her forehead is blank and unexpressive.

We will see further peculiarities as we examine each in detail.

Mouth and lower face.

 Smiles come in different degrees. As Ekman shows, stronger smiles—stronger happiness—pull the corners of the mouth further back (from the front of the face). Corners of the mouth may tilt up but they don’t have to; very strong smiles, which pull the mouth open and expose the teeth, often have the line of the upper lip more or less horizontal. What makes the smiley mouth is more the rounded-bow shape of the lower lip, and especially the wrinkle (naso-labial fold) that runs from the corners of the nose diagonally down to the beyond the corners of the lips. In very strong smiles, these triangle-looking folds become deeper, and are matched by a flipped-over triangle of skin folds from the chin to the outer corners of the lips, giving the lower face a diamond-shaped look.

Compare the Mona Lisa. This is a pretty pallid smile. Yes, she does turn up the lip corners a bit, but this is more of a conventional sign than what we see in a real smile. More importantly, there are no naso-labial folds running downward from her nose, nor any mirroring triangle up from the chin. Real smiles raise the cheeks (as we will see in a moment, this affects the eyes in a smile), but Mona Lisa hardly has any cheek features at all.

Eyes and eyelids.

 Smiles, especially stronger smiles, make wrinkles below the eyes, more or less horizontal, slightly curved across the bottom of the eye socket (deeper wrinkles the more the cheeks are raised). This has the effect of narrowing the slit of the eyes, as the lower eyelid is raised.  This is a tell-tale detail, since narrowing eyes can also happen in other emotions; in happiness, the lower eyelid may be puffed-out looking but not tense. (By contrast, angry eyes have very hard-clenched muscles around them; fearful eyes are wide-open and staring; sad eyes we are coming to).  For the happy face, all these muscle movements cause crows-feet wrinkles to spread out from the corners of the eyes.

Mona Lisa’s eyes? The lower lids do look a little puffy, but there are no wrinkles below them; her cheeks if anything are flaccid. And no crows-feet.

Sad eyes.

  Sad eyes are passive. The lower eyelid is weak, and there is no horizontal wrinkle below it, since the cheek is not pushing up. Whereas in a smile the upper eyelid is open, so the eyes brightly look out, the sad upper eyelid droops a bit. Even more noticeable is the brow, which tends to collapse and sag downwards; this makes the skin of the upper eye socket droop almost like a veil slanting over the outer corner of the eyes. This is particularly noticeable in the picture of the Middle-Eastern woman below right; next to it is a photo of a woman at her lover’s funeral. The photo on upper left is a composite, with sad eyes at the top, and neutral lower face.

Mona Lisa’s eyes.

They are not brightly exposed and wide-open as in the happiness photos above, where the upper eye-lid is generally narrow as can be. Mona Lisa’s upper eyelids are partly closed, so are her lower lids; and the skin at the outer edges of her eye sockets droops a bit.  These are sad eyes, although only mildly so.

Mona Lisa is a combination of sad eyes and a slight smile, but the way she is painted makes her even more mysterious. As already noted, she lacks the naso-labial folds and chin folds characteristics of happy smiles. Leonardo da Vinci did very little with the cheeks, but concentrated a great deal on the corners of the lips and eyes. This was his famous sfumato technique—a smoky look producing deliberate ambiguity. This also has the effect of obscuring just the places where important clues to genuine smiles are found; there are no crows-feet around her eyes, but then there are no expressive wrinkles in this painted skin anywhere.

Was this the actual expression Lisa Gherardini, La Gioconda, had on her face when Leonardo painted her? Probably not.  Leonardo worked over all his paintings a long time; the Mona Lisa took him four years, and was still unfinished in his estimation. He kept experimenting with the portrait, quite likely upon just these features. The idea that Leonardo was trying to portray a specially mysterious lady was a favorite with romanticist 19th century art critics, as was the very unlikely idea that he was having an affair with her (he was apparently a homosexual, once charged with sodomy, and was never known to have a relationship with a woman).  He was an artist in an era when artists were rivals over the super-star status of their time, and technical innovations made for fame. What we are viewing is less a real emotional expression at a moment in time, as a virtuouso experiment at the frontier of what could be pictured.

No eyebrows.

Another reason the Mona Lisa seems strange to us is that she has no eyebrows. For many emotions, the brows are important points of expression; as we have seen, somewhat subtly in sadness; in happiness, mainly by contrast with other emotions—unmoved eyebrows are generally part of the happy face, unless it is really over the top:

For anger, the position of the eyebrows is the strongest clue—the vertical lines between them as the facial muscles clench make even a stripped-bare cartoon emblem of anger.

So eyebrow-less Mona Lisa gives us less clues than usual to emotions; all we see are the bare ridges of her upper eye sockets through the haze of Leonardo’s sfumato, making even the sad expression less clear to us. There was nothing intentional about this; in the late 15th century shaved eyebrows were a fashion for European ladies, as we see from the Fouquet madonna (painted 1452) and the Piero della Francesca portrait (1465; the Mona Lisa was painted 1503-6).

This may be one reason why the Mona Lisa was not particularly well known in its day, nor was it considered mysterious, nor was there much comment on her smile. Leonardo da Vinci was famous but less so than his contemporaries Michelangelo and Raphael, and his most celebrated painting was The Last Supper. The Mona Lisa was a minor work until the 1850s-60s in France, and the 1870s in England, when it became the object of gushy writings by ultra-aesthete art critics, led by Théophile Gautier and Walter Pater. (The history of how this happened is told by Donald Sassoon, 2001.) Mona Lisa and her smile became mysterious, in fact the mysterious Feminine, an Eternal Spirit with all the Capital Letters. And not just the benevolent Earth Mother but a Cleopatra-Jezebel-Salomé temptress. This sounds like fantasies of mid-Victorian males—perhaps understandable in an era when women wore bustles and men hardly ever saw much more than their faces. As Sassoon notes, women were always much less taken with Mona Lisa than were men.

Is there any truth in the interpretation, that Mona Lisa was a subtly flirtatious sexpot?  Again we can call on some objective evidence, how erotic emotion is expressed on the face.

Sexual turn-on, at least for female faces, has a standard look (as can be seen by thousands of examples on the web): eyes closed or nearly so, mouth fallen open. The woman’s face is otherwise slack, no fold lines like other emotions; it may be happiness but the expressions are quite distinct.

Marilyn Monroe made the eyes-half-closed expression virtually her trademark.  The sex idol of a less explicit era than today was also a great actress in her line.

Mona Lisa? If there is any sex in her face, only a repressed Victorian could see it.

So this is micro-sociology?

 The purpose of micro-sociology is not to be an art critic. I only make the venture because so many popular interpretations of the Mona Lisa blunder into social psychology.  But reading the expressions on photos is good training for other pursuits. Paul Ekman holds that knowledge of the facial and bodily expressions of emotions is a practical skill in everyday life, giving some applications in his book Telling Lies. And it is not just a matter of looking for deceptions. We would be better at dealing with other people if we paid more attention to reading their emotional expressions—not to call them on it, but so that we can see better what they are feeling. Persons in abusive relationships—especially the abuser—could use training in recognizing how their own emotional expressions are affecting their victims; and greater such sensitivity could head off violent escalations.

Facial expressions, like all emotions, are not just individual psychology but micro-sociology, because these are signs people send to each other. The age we live in, when images from real-life situations are readily available in photos and videos, has opened a new research tool. I have used it (in Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory) to show that at the moment of face-to-face violence, expressions of anger on the part of the attacker turn into tension and fear; and this discovery leads to a new theory of what makes violence happen, or not.  On the positive side, micro-interactions that build mutual attunement among persons’ emotions are the key to group solidarity, and their lack is what produces indifference or antipathy. And we can read the emotions—a lot more plainly than the smile on Mona Lisa’s face.

PRAISE FOR CIVIL WAR TWO
“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City
CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Ekman, Paul. 1992. Telling Lies. Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage. NY: Norton.

Ekman, Paul, and Wallace V. Friesen, 1984. Unmasking the Face. Prentice-Hall.

Hochschild, Arlie. 1983. The Managed Heart. University of California Press.

Sassoon, Donald. 2001. Mona Lisa. The History of the World’s Most Famous Painting.  London: Harper-Collins.

FOUR REQUISITES FOR SUCCESS OR FAILURE IN ANYTHING

Everything in the human world has four aspects. They are easy to remember by putting them in four boxes:

The ECONOMIC box: This is a short-hand for the ways in which things are material, practical, or economic.

The POLITICAL box: Again a short-hand, for everything that involves power and conflict.

The SOCIAL box: the ways that people interact with each other, especially their emotions, rituals, and networks.

The CULTURAL box: people’s ideas and ideals about what they are doing.

Everything human has these four requisites.

If one or more is missing, the thing will fail.

Success requires all four in the right amounts. What are the right amounts? We shall see.

Analyze anything: some examples

The four boxes can be applied to anything.

Using the four-box scheme is like playing a game of tic-tac-toe or Sudoku.

But it is completely serious: a way to analyze anything that people are concerned about, from high politics to low entertainment.

To show what you can do with it, consider the kinds of kids that everyone who has gone to an American high school knows about.

Politics has the same sub-divisions:

Now to put the 4 REQS to work. Filling in the four boxes for any activity shows what it needs for success and where are its dangers of failing.

Success and failure in medicine

The CULTURE box:

The ideals of medicine are to provide health and cure sickness. Medical professionals swear to uphold ideals of service and altruism. The culture of medicine includes doctrines about what causes illness and the scientific methods for dealing with it. This is the textbook definition of medicine.

How large does the ideology of medicine loom in the experience of a patient, or a medical doctor, nurse, or hospital employee? How important is for whether medicine succeeds or fails?

The ECONOMICS OF MEDICINE box:

The material and practical aspect of medicine starts from the fact that human bodies are handled by medical workers. A hospital is a lot like a factory. As in an assembly line, patients are interviewed, tested for body signs, have specimens drawn, sent to labs, seen by various specialists, have medicines hooked up or ingested, and are subjected to various body-intrusive procedures. In the mean time they are wheeled around from one place to another, moved into rooms when available, parked in hallways, and sometimes fed and cleaned. The more bodies there are moving through the medical factory, the more the fate of any one patient is affected by the sheer quantity of things in the assembly line.

Even the minor experience of how long you wait between the time you show up for your appointment and the time you actually see a doctor is determined by how many patients are scheduled and how long each one takes. The doctor may in fact be quite personable and try to treat each patient as an individual; but this has the effect that patients later in the queue end up waiting even longer. The large-scale bureaucratic side of the organization runs against the ideology of caring, so that many patients’ experience of a hospital visit is about as people-friendly as a Kafka novel.

Where patients undergo more extensive hospital procedures, one’s body rolling around on the gurney is not very different from an automobile part in a car factory, except that in factories the supply parts can’t complain about where they are stored; and hospitals can’t use the just-in-time delivery systems that factories use for off-site storage.

In short, the human experience of being in a hospital comes from being treated like a part in a not very efficient factory assembly line-- inefficient because humans are more unpredictable, especially in how long they will take to respond to treatments. The result is a lot of unaccountable waiting around.

Notice the contrast: the ideology of scientific/altruistic medicine describes it as its best; one of the things it omits is what the experience of being one of the bodies moved around in a hospital is actually like.

There is also the economics of medicine in the narrower sense: the costs of medical care, billing and insurance systems, doctors’ payments, administrative and staff costs, the hospital plant.

Many of these run in vicious feedback loops. Insurance companies’ efforts to keep costs down leads to an accelerating back-and-forth between hospital staffs and insurers disputing payments, with a good deal of fanciful accounting on both sides. It exemplifies the sociological process of escalation and counter-escalation of conflict. The result of this administrative warfare is that both sides expand their billing staffs, making administrative costs endlessly rise.

Another vicious feedback loop comes from the scientific culture of medicine:

scientific discoveries lead to new and improved treatments, especially with the expensive diagnostic equipment of recent decades (CAT scans, MRIs, etc.); the standard of treatment constantly rises and new levels of expense become normalised, putting more pressure on hospital administrators to add equipment and simultaneously to find creative ways to pass the cost along to someone else.

Here again the ideology of medicine runs against the economics of medicine. In the perfect world of economists, patients would be informed consumers who could compare prices and the values they get from various treatments and make their own decisions. In the real world of medical practice, patients are rarely informed of such things; typically the hospital or clinic takes the patient’s arrival at the door as an agreement to pay for whatever treatment the professionals decide to give, at whatever price they want to charge. The ideology of caring for patients does not extend to caring for them financially, nor paying attention to what medical costs can do to their lives.

The POLITICS OF MEDICINE divides into an external and an internal aspect. External politics involves government policies and debates, and political movements for and against particular ways of legislating about medicine. The ideological stridency reached by such debates today is obvious. Since the politics box includes any kind of conflict, it also includes law suits over medical malpractice, damages, and religious and cultural claims: all of which add to the economic and organizational burdens of medical professionals.

The internal politics of medicine is more local; it consists in alliances and power struggles over who runs a hospital; relations between outside doctors or privately owned clinics and hospitals they staff; and the financial politics of hospital chains, take-overs, and the usual maneuvers of the corporate world. Here the link between the pure ideology of medicine as altrustic service and realities of medical politics becomes so remote as to have virtually nothing to do with each other.

Finally, the SOCIAL RELATIONS OF MEDICINE:

How do people interact with each other? Patients and staff may try to keep up a pleasant, humane relationship; but the bureaucratic factory setting of medical organization makes it likely that most interactions are faked. Talking with a doctor or nurse is the Goffmanian front-stage, since the organizational and economic realities that the patient is caught up in are rarely even acknowledged. Since patients have so little power in the system, they try to put up a hopeful front, fearing that protest will only leave them more neglected in the bureaucratic queue. The ideology of the helpful, altruistic medical staff and the grateful patient is constantly strained. Most of their interactions would be considered mediocre Interaction Rituals, producing little real solidarity.

From the point of view of the bureaucratic organization, it doesn’t matter what the patients feel, since they are just the raw material running through the machinery.

Hospitals and clinics have developed a long-standing culture over the years of how to keep patients superficially quiescent; it used to be called “bedside manner” although now it includes advertising campaigns and manipulating the decor of waiting rooms. Strictly as an organization (i.e. the economics box), medicine doesn’t depend on solidarity with patients.

Lack of solidarity is more of a threat to relationships within the staff. The biggest problem tends to be the behavior of the most powerful professionals, the medical doctors. As a strong profession, they are well-networked among themselves; they can control each other’s careers by referrals, partnerships, and by word-of-mouth reputation. These advantages also are useful for economic interests as well, whether steering patients to expensive procedures from private groups of practitioners, or manipulating billing practices. Observational studies of hospitals show doctors who chase gurneys down the hall, briefly asking the patient how they are doing, then billing it as a full-scale consultation for the insurance coverage.

These kinds of practices undermine solidarity in the hospital work force as a whole.

How then do we rate medical success or failure?

The four boxes have quite different criteria. From the economic angle, success of a hospital or a medical practice is how much money it makes; failure would be medical bankruptcy. From the political angle, success would be a favourable political environment; failure would be a political swing that crushes the existing medical elite. Most of reality is in the middle ground of seemingly endless political contention. From the social angle, the criterion would be patient satisfaction; empirically this seems to be in the mediocre range.

Finally, there is the lofty ideal of health and altruistic service. This altruistic side of this seems badly compromised; what about health? The problem here is that it is a moving standard. Some diseases have declined; focus on other diseases has risen in their place. Objectively there is now more scrutiny of medical error (not unrelated to lawsuits over medical malpractice). Medicine as a whole has been successful in keeping people alive longer; it also keeps people under medical treatment longer, not necessarily making them healthier but living more years when they aren’t healthy.

It has often been cited that any individual will charge up more in medical costs in the last 6 months before dying than in the rest of their life. It is the same pattern with automobile repairs: an old car becomes progressively more expensive to maintain, until the owner finally decides to get rid of it. These are material realities; the political, social, and ideological aspects get piled on top and obscure the reality.

Can’t the success of medicine be measured objectively, by rating systems? Certainly one sees billboards in every city across America touting how highly rated a particular local hospital is.

Compared to what? and by what standard?

The naive way to read a rating system is just to accept the numbers.

The more intelligent way-- which takes more work-- is to look at how the rating was done. By opinion polling among doctors or hospital administrators? This relies on their gossip network. By objective measures: OK, which ones? do they measure how satisfied patients are, how favorable their medical outcomes, how serious their conditions were? The most common objective measure is of the extremes of failure-- mortality, infection rates, and complications from medical procedures. This is still only a small part of the picture.

The overarching problem is there are four dimensions to the medical system; and they are all unavoidable. Setting up a rating system for success or failure is itself a matter of politics, making choices over what to pay attention to and what to ignore. We are a long way from getting a reliable rating system that tells you which hospitals give you the best treatment at the best price, with the most pleasant human interactions.

Looking at the total picture for all four boxes, it appears that medical systems rarely fail completely, but the different components undermine each other so much that they rarely work at a high rate of success. Marshall Meyer and Lynn Zucker referred to these kinds of organizations as “permanently failing organizations.”

How can they go on failing, instead of going out of business and being replaced by more efficient organizations, as economic theory on its most abstract level would imagine? In part because medicine is in such high demand; even permanently failing organizations are better than none at all.

The best practical advance that sociology can offer is to pull back from the macro level where the four boxes clash, and focus on the social interaction box. Here are two important findings by medical sociologists such as Charles Bosk: First, the strongest predictor of medical failure is whether the patient feels the doctor doesn’t like him or her. In other words: a genuinely successful interaction ritual between doctor and patient is the best way to ensure the treatment will be successful. If there are bad vibes, find another doctor.

Second, medical error is much lower in Japanese hospitals than in American ones: Why? because in Japan it is customary for a close relative to always be present in the patient’s room. Someone who cares personally can monitor whether staff are attentive, and accidents and oversights are avoided.

Hospitals are like factories, and even the most altruistic medical personnel are worn down by the sheer amount of things they have to do, with rotating shifts and a constantly changing cast of characters. The bureaucracy of the hospital can’t be changed; but it can be counter-acted, by adding people into the situation who have a personal concern for the individual patient.

Success or failure: having a party

The 4 REQS can be applied to anything. On a lighter note, what does it take to give a successful party?

The ideal is for a bunch of people to assemble, put all their cares aside, and have a good time. This is the CULTURE box, taken full strength since a party is supposed to be a happy time-out from everything else. Nevertheless the other three boxes have to be taken care of or the party will fail.

The ECONOMICS of a party is its material and practical side, as every party-giver well knows. Where to have the party; getting your house or venue fixed up; the food, the drinks, the music or entertainment if any, etc. That is not to say there is much correlation between how much money and effort is put into the party and how enjoyable it is.

There is little research on this comparison, but there are plenty of instances where very expensive parties fall flat. One kind of bring-down is where the hosts are too obsessed with the material side; another is where the guests are too self-conscious about it and spend their time comparing how lavish things are (or criticizing where they are not) rather than enjoying themselves.

The POLITICS of a party is where it overlaps with conflicts and alliances. Putting a collection of people who don’t like each other in front of a spread of food and drinks will not necessarily produce a happy occasion. That is why traditional hostesses (as in the British upper classes) elaborately strategized their dinner parties, deciding not only who to invite but who to seat next to whom. The shift towards greater casualness and informality since the latter part of the 20th century probably has not raised the level of success of social occasions, because this kind of deliberate concern for whether people will strike it off with each other has largely disappeared. David Grazian’s research on nightlife shows that most of the solidarity is confined to little groups of companions who go out together and make a game out of making any contact at all, however ephemeral, with the opposite sex.

Stressing the ECONOMICS box can’t determine whether a party will be successful, although too little attention to the material input will make it fail.

The POLITICS box works the opposite way, where paying a lot of attention to the right political mix contributes strongly to its success. Invitations which are too automatic run the likelihood of failure. One familiar version is the extended-family holiday gathering where the different relatives may not actually like each other; such gatherings can lead more to conflict than to collective effervescence.

A techno-solution has become widespread in modern times: instead of talking, people who have little to say to each other can all sit and watch TV. Similarly in night clubs extremely loud music not only sets the atmosphere but is a substitute for conversation.

There is a real historical break here, since before around 1950, parties and other festive gatherings did not rely much on conversations. There were traditional ways for getting people participating together: One was dancing in groups. The last remnant, line-dancing, goes back to the dance forms prevalent before the mid-1800s, where men and women maneuvered ceremoniously around the floor in set formations. Then couples dancing separated people into duos, and introduced a new element of political status and conflict over who danced with whom and who was left out. Another participation technique at traditional parties was playing games; the livelier ones had a lot of physical action, such as hurrying for chairs that diminished in number when the music stopped. There were also pretend-games like costume parties; in the 1700s and earlier, the mark of participating in a festive mood was wearing masks, underscoring the time-out from ordinary reality of the event.

Not all party games had this level of collective excitement.

Playing card games was popular since the 1700s. It provided a certain amount of shared attention, but it reduced the collective effervescence the more seriously it was treated, as in upper-middle class people playing bridge after dinner, or masculine gatherings playing poker. The obsessions and conflicts that go along with gambling can turn the fun-party occasion into a fantasy version of the POLITICS box.

Finally, the SOCIAL box. This is the home-ground of a successful party, a state of joyful collective effervescence, shared by (pretty much) everyone present. The key ingredients, as in any interaction ritual, are getting everyone focused on the same thing (something they are all doing together at the party), building up a shared mood (energy, exuberance, excitement), so that it bubbles over into a shared rhythm. Individuals at a good party get each other increasingly into the mood.

The other three boxes-- the ideal of having a party; the material provisions that are consumed; the politics of how people get along with each other-- all these succeed, or fail, because of how they affect the collective effervescence. None of the other boxes will guarantee it;

material inputs like alcohol or other psychotropic substances can affect the energy level, but drunken people can be boring, sad, or contentious rather than happy.

There is a formula for a truly successful collective effervescence. New Year’s celebration in Las Vegas is an example, when people don’t try to say anything significant, just blow your horns, throw streamers at people, hug people you don’t know. This works where everyone knows the tradition and throw themselves into it. This contravenes most of the customs of ordinary life. Everyday life is not like a party because everyday micro-politics runs counter to what is necessary for widely shared collective effervescence. That is one reason why successful parties are a time-out from everyday life. They need special conditions, which can’t be present all the time. If you insist on making your life one endless party, there are sure to be times when the party isn’t a very good one.

Try it yourself

You can analyze anything with the four-requisites model. Religion, education, or family; sports or literature; sex in any of its varieties; going on vacation. You name it. What is its ideal of success? What does it need to succeed, and what happens in the other 3 boxes that makes it fail, or keeps it in a state of conflict? Fill in the boxes:

How much of each requisite is needed?  e.g. business start-ups

From the examples given we can see that different kinds of things have different balances among the requisites. Any activity needs a minimum in all four boxes, but beyond that which boxes require the most emphasis depends on what arena you are playing in. It also depends on timing. For some enterprises, the early period needs a different mixture of inputs than later periods.

As a sketch, let us consider a business, during the early period of start-up; when it is established as a full-blown player; and the late mature phase when the rest of the world has caught up with it.

CULTURE box: the business’s product, identity, brand, skills and knowledge, and reputation.

ECONOMICS box: its plant, equipment, offices, markets, finances, and organizational structure.

POLITICAL box: on the external side, the state with its political and legal environment, whether supportive or threatening; on the internal side, the alliances and conflicts that make up its power structure.

SOCIAL box: Includes both external and internal networks and how well they are working on the personal level.

External networks connect to supply chain, customers, and recruiting employees. Because the people you do business with are also potential rivals, and everyone could jump ship in either direction, whether these networks work successfully or not depends on emotional flows ranging from mutual enthusiasm to domination to distrust. The same goes for internal relationships, among fellow employees and in the hierarchy of control.

All this depends on how successful interaction rituals are.

Which boxes are most important at which phase of the business’s life-time?

Early start-up stage: The most important factor is in the CULTURE box, since the new business has to establish its identity and name reputation. Economic resources are going to be needed, but if the owners don’t already have a lot of money, the key here lies in the SOCIAL box.

Economic resources are first built up, not from economic performance, but from leveraging social networks; above all, that happens by propagating emotions, so that other people feel a wave of enthusiasm about the new venture.

Compared to this social outburst, the economic aspect isn’t that important at the beginning. The POLITICAL box isn’t crucial at the outset either, as long as the start-up stays out of conflicts, since isn’t big enough to handle them yet.

Established stage: Your reputation, economic position, organization, supply chains are all established. You know where you fit in the field of rivals and competitors, and they know it too. All the boxes are active. The CULTURE box gets less attention, and routine sets in on the SOCIAL side, especially in the internal organization. The ECONOMIC box tends to get the most attention. Successful businesses may develop trouble at this stage-- this is what happened to Apple in the early 1980s, after it had mushroomed into a major corporation, took on managers who made it more similar to the rest of the field, and eventually brought about big internal conflicts that led to Steve Jobs’ departure. Failures in the internal POLITICAL box brought them down.

Over-mature stage: Now the rest of the field has caught up with what you are doing right. Rival firms are all encroaching on each other’s market niches; global competition over cheaper supply chains is intense. The most important box becomes the POLITICAL one, including the financial world as a political realm where coalitions are made and unmade. Pressure comes from financial markets, and the maneuvers of powerful financiers in raids, buyouts, campaigns over share-holder value alternatively forcing spin-offs or acquisitions.

The successful organization at this stage becomes more concerned with external politics than anything else; even organizations which are highly successful in the other three boxes can disappear because of the POLITICAL box.

One-sided theories

Most theories in the social sciences are one-sided, placing all the emphasis on one box.

Since all the boxes are important, this will usually yield some insight. But it leaves the theory with blind spots.

Marxian theory-- once known as “historical materialism”-- places the prime mover in the economics box. Marxists recognize other boxes exist but regard them as outcomes or screens for economic interests.

Ideology is a set of false beliefs, covering up for the dominant economic interests; ideas themselves are never autonomous, since they are produced by whoever controls the means of mental production (churches, schools, the media, etc.) Politics is an arena where classes struggle for control of the state and the legal system to favor their own interests. All this has a good deal of reality, and materialists have discovered some important causal links. Marxian theory is weak especially in the SOCIAL box. Key processes such as mobilizing political movements, fighting wars, and the success or failure of revolutions cannot be explained in a purely Marxian framework, but need theories about interaction rituals, emotions, and networks.

Economics as a discipline today has the same location as Marxism. (A rival form, institutional economics, argues that what happens in markets is shaped by the political and legal environment, and hence would be located in two boxes.) Rational choice theory in political science, sociology, and psychology attempts more abstractly to reduce everything to the dynamics of the economics box.

Here again its big flaw is obliviousness to emotional processes, to the influence of ideas, and to networks that do not resemble competitive markets.

Structuralist anthropology, and a related movement of the late 20th century, cultural studies, claims that the prime mover is the CULTURE box.

This claim gains some respectability from theories in cognitive science that schemas and categories are fundamental in structuring both brains and computers. For structuralists, the culture/cognitive map lays down the blue-print on which societies and social institutions are patterned. The weaknesses of giving primacy to the ideology box are: ignoring the importance of emotions-- an error that cognitive psychologists have begun to rectify, since emotions are key markers of what cognitions are paid attention to. There is also a theoretical dilemma between trapping oneself in a static universe where culture always repeats itself, and recognizing cultural change but being unable to explain it except as a mysterious “rupture,” as theorists like Foucault called it.

To explain changes in culture, the other boxes are needed.

Durkheimian sociology solves these problems by locating primacy in the SOCIAL box. And it spells out the mechanism by which social solidarity, energy, and action is generated (and conversely when solidarity, emotion, and action fail). Interaction ritual (IR) theory reverses the priority between the SOCIAL and the CULTURAL boxes; it is where successful interaction rituals are carried out that the ideas people focus on and talk about become sacred objects, thus making them dominant ideas. (Here Durkheim outflanks Marx.) Why ideologies change is no mystery from this point of view; when the carriers of ideas stop having successful IRs, those ideas fade away.

Durkheimian theory is one of the big pieces for solving the whole puzzle, but it can’t stand alone. To carry out successful IRs, material conditions are needed; so it is subject to inputs from the ECONOMICS box, both in the form of the material resources Marxists are good at analyzing, and the market processes seen by conventional economists. In the past, Durkheimian theorists have tended to downplay conflict, and to regard the POLITICAL box as little more than a place where the norms and ideals of society are enacted. We need all four boxes.

There are other important but one-sided theories in the SOCIAL INTERACTION box. Freud and his followers were especially imperialistic, applying the theoretical dynamics of early family life to remote fields like art and politics. To his credit, Goffman said that he was dealing with only one part of the puzzle.

The nearest to recognizing the pervasiveness of multiple causality was Max Weber. In his theory of stratification, he argued against Marx that there are not only economic classes, but divisions by cultural life-style groups (status groups), and by power groups or parties fighting over control of the field of state power. Weberians have elaborated this into a 3-dimensional scheme, in which everything has an economic, social/cultural, and political aspect. Weber merges the social and ideological boxes, since he argues (especially in the history of religions) that every kind of ideal has a social group that is its carrier.

The most important new development of Weber’s 3-dimensional theory is Michael Mann, who elaborates it to four dimensions in The Sources of Social Power. Mann does this by splitting the POLITICAL box into political power (the internal dynamics and penetration of the state), and military power.

Mann thus analyzes world history as a series of shifts in the four sources of power: Ideological, Economic, Political, and Military. (The Social Interaction box gets downplayed.) In Mann's theory, a major revolution must include changes in at least three of these.

Origin of the Four-Requisites model

Sociologists who know the history of our field will recognize that what I am saying is not original, but was stated by Talcott Parsons.

Since Parsons was my undergraduate teacher at Harvard in the early 1960s, there is no mystery about where I have gotten the four-requisites model.

I have made two changes, one minor and one major. Parsons had a much more abstract way of labeling the four boxes (he called them Adaptation, Goal-attainment, Interaction, and Latent pattern maintenance-- hence Parsonian students used to refer to them as the AGIL scheme); and he referred to the four boxes as “pattern variables.”

It is a lot easier to see what we are talking about if we call them ECONOMIC, POLITICAL, SOCIAL INTERACTION, and CULTURE boxes.

The major change is getting away from functionalism. Parsons regarded society as like a biological organism, in which all the parts are like organs that function harmoniously together to keep the organism healthy. Functionalists have trouble dealing with conflict, since there is no analogy in the physiological world. And their theoretical bias is to see everything as contributing to the success of the social organism. I have changed the model to four requisites for a social unit to succeed, without assuming that the requisites will be met. As we have seen in examining medicine, parties, and businesses, they often fail. And they are full of internal dilemmas, so that one box works against the success of another.

The key is to treat everything as a variable: how much and what kinds of material/economic resources, political alliances and conflicts, networks and emotional solidarity, and ideas are there? Our aim is to make the theory explain quantitative differences rather than merely checking off a set of conceptual boxes. As I have suggested, different kinds of social projects have different emphases among the four requisites; and these requisites can change over its life-history.

One-sided theories are popular. They have the practical advantage of making our cognitive world more manageable; and they appeal to feelings of membership in some ideological movement striving to dominate the intellectual world. Their disadvantage is that one-sided theories always fail through their blind spots.

The four-requisites model is a convenient way of dealing with the multi-causal processes that make up the real world. Combining the best theories in each of the four boxes is our most realistic way of explaining what will make anything succeed or fail.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

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“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

REFERENCES:

Among the huge literature on medical sociology, see:

Adam Reich. 2014.

Selling Our Souls: The Commodification of Hospital Care in the United States.

Daniel Chambliss. 1996.

Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses, and the Social Organization of Ethics.

Charles Bosk. 2003.

Forgive and Remember: Managing Medical Failure.

Marshall Meyer and Lynn Zucker. 1989.

Permanently Failing Organizations.

parties:

David Grazian. 2008.

On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.

Cas Wouters. 2007.

Informalization: Manners and Emotions since 1890.

David Riesman. 1960. “The Disappearing Host.”

Human Organization

19: 17-27.

business:

For an analysis in terms of networks and Interaction Ritual theory, see

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Randall Collins and Maren McConnell, 2015.

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THE NETWORKS OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA

Lawrence of Arabia is probably the most famous name to come out of the First World War. It was a long grinding, muddy war in the trenches that ended more with exhaustion than victory, leaving nobody covered with glory. T. E. Lawrence was the exception, the lone individual who made a difference, an Englishman riding a camel out of the golden desert sands of the Middle East. Everywhere else, the generals are hard to remember, and the politicians ended up with reputations of blame rather than accomplishment. Other than Lawrence of Arabia, the only name of a WWI hero that is remembered is the Red Baron-- the top German flying ace. He wasn’t one of the good guys, but he was the heavyweight champion everyone else tried to beat. And like Lawrence, he was away from the dirty trenches, flying solo in the open sky, dog-fighting at a few thousand feet where everyone could watch his exploits from the ground.

Lawrence is remembered for organizing the Arab revolt in the desert that drove the Turks out of Palestine and Syria, bringing down the Ottoman Empire and putting in its place the Middle East that we know today: the arbitrary partitions that became Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Israel. Anyone who has seen the Academy Award-winning film (seven Oscars in 1962) Lawrence of Arabia, will know that Lawrence was full of good intentions for the Arabs, but was frustrated by the diplomats, especially the dirty deals between the French and the British. Although Lawrence did his best, the politicians always mess things up and the result was the endless series of illegitimate regimes whose resentments and infighting have lasted down to today. Peter O’Toole, the tall handsome actor who plays Lawrence, drives off sadly in a car (leaving his camel behind) after his last victory at Damascus, while Alec Guinness, who plays King Faisal (who in real life became the first ruler of Iraq) folds his hands and smiles cynically about these Western people who lack the simple honour of the desert.

We need to keep reminding ourselves that movies aren’t reality, and that just because you see it on the screen doesn’t mean that is the way it happened. Movies pick out a few exemplary scenes, chosen for their dramatic qualities, and fold years into a few hours. Add the film ethic of show-don’t-tell, and the result is that what we see on the screen sticks in our memory, but what gets lost is the tangled web of motives and the thousands of players that determined what went on. For the reality, there is no substitute for reading long books.

So how did we get to the towering Peter O’Toole image from the original T. E. Lawrence?

The real Lawrence, as of 1916 when he went off on his mission into the desert, was not only barely five feet six inches tall, but was just one of the British officers who could speak Arabic, went out on missions, rode camels, wore desert robes, and led guerrillas behind enemy lines. How did he get to be the famous one?

The problem is universal. There are many more capable people than the small number who get into the narrow spot-light of fame; and that is true in the intellectual world, in Hollywood, and in most other things. Most big enterprises take teamwork, with dozens of prime movers and thousands who contribute; no single hero accomplishes anything without all those other people. The spot-light on some necessarily puts many others in the shadows. So how does a particular individual get the chance to be the one in the spot-light? The career of T. E. Lawrence tells how.

Myths: Lawrence as isolate and rebel

The film image of Lawrence gives the impression that he was a loner. He didn’t like people, and the British military establishment didn’t like him. He is the true existentialist hero, who answers to himself alone. Lawrence tells the visiting American journalist that he likes the desert because it is clean-- while most of the world isn’t. And Lawrence feels uneasy about the dirty politics he has to get involved with; he feels uneasy about all sorts of things, whether he is coming to enjoy killing, whether he is homosexual and likes being flagellated (homosexuality barely peeping out of the closet in 1962). Lawrence is just plain uneasy because he is the last honest man in a world full of people who aren’t.

All of this is not exactly false; and the way he behaved in the 1920s after he became famous, up until his mysterious death in 1935, certainly shows he was a complicated person. But the impression that he was a loner, that he went off and did things by himself and against all authority, is extremely misleading. Lawrence was an agent of British policy. He was very familiar with political factions inside the army and the government, and he strongly agreed with some policies and opposed others. Lawrence was quick to devise plans for achieving goals that high-ranking people were glad to hear. He kept getting his chances because he was the bringer of good news in a war that was full of disasters, and he offered practical ways to carry out policies that sincere British imperialists also believed were right-- and cheap at that, since they could use native Arab troops without putting British boots on the ground. Lawrence was known for speaking his mind, but the way he spoke to key people went with the flow, not against the grain.

Throughout his life, Lawrence had extremely good networks. He started out as a protégé of the most important British archeologists, and excavating with them is how he became fluent in Arabic. He quickly moved into the center of British intelligence-gathering for the Middle Eastern Theatre, and soon had the ear not only of the local High Commissioner and the military Commander-in-Chief, but of top cabinet officials in London, the Foreign Office, and the Secretary of War. He became a confidant of Winston Churchill. It was not a case of who-you-know rather than what-you-know; that stupid cliché misses the key point that you have to know how to talk to important people, and that means having something important to say. Lawrence built his networks by leveraging the importance of what he could say to them. And vice versa.

Lawrence avoids Emotional Energy-draining scenes

Charismatic persons, as I have shown elsewhere* are highly energetic. They are dynamos at getting things done, and they get other people energized around them. But they are also good at picking their spots. Charismatic leaders don’t waste their time and energy on encounters that lead nowhere and only cost them emotional energy (EE).

Jesus, the most charismatic of all, told his disciples “shake the dust from your shoes” and leave a village behind once you see that they aren’t going to receive you.

*Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy. http://maren.ink

From quite early in his career, Lawrence avoided energy-draining social scenes. As a student at Oxford, he saw no point in trying to get into the aristocratic circles with their luncheons and drinking parties, or even dining in college. The posh social life depicted in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited fitted neither Lawrence’s personality nor his middle-class background. He knew where he wasn’t wanted. That doesn’t mean he was simply a grind or a timid person. He liked excavating Roman ruins in the countryside and bicycling in foreign countries. He would carry a pistol on the streets of Oxford in solitary wanderings late at night and fire it off in the underground sewers to alarm passersby above, and outside friends’ room to announce his arrival. There was a long-standing tradition of drunken carousers climbing into their colleges over the roofs after the gates were locked; Lawrence was not one of these, as he lived at home, but he had his own way of raising a little hell breaking rules. Unlike many a college toff, Lawrence never got caught and was never reprimanded by the college authorities.

Stationed in Cairo during the war, Lawrence stayed away from the stilted social life of the British community. Cairo was the headquarters for the High Commissioner, the center of the British Empire in the Middle East. The round of formal dinners and receptions presided over by wives of high officials continued unabated after 1914. Lawrence had invitations, too, as his reputation grew and his intelligence work made him friends among fellow Arabists. But he turned down opportunities when his friends entertained the so-called smart set. The pecking order of titles and social precedent would be condescending to him at best, and the rigid protocol and bright chatter in platitudes and subtle put-downs would only bring down his EE. Later in his life, after his return to England in the 1920s as a famous man, he attended such events sometimes but had nothing but scorn for vapid sociability. On such an occasion, an aristocratic lady seated next to him at dinner said, after a series of conversational sallies, “I’m afraid I don’t interest you very much.” Lawrence replied: “You don’t interest me at all.”

Formality for its own sake Lawrence avoided. It gave a taste of social membership and rank, but he was determined not to play that game. He disliked the rituals of dressing for dinner and other polite occasions, with their panoply of white-tie, black-tie, sashes and decorations, and he disliked army protocol of saluting, marching and donning the prescribed uniform for the different events of military routine. Regular army “spit and polish” referred to the amount of time soldiers were required to do things like polishing their boots with their own spit preparing for inspections. Lawrence would have none of it. Regular army officers were offended by his sloppy appearance and neglect of military ceremony.

It seems ironic that he made his fame as a soldier, and a British officer. In fact, he became an officer by coming in through a side door. He never underwent officer training, much less graduated from any of the famous military academies. His training consisted of weekend exercises at Oxford with the student Signal Corps, something like an advanced version of Boy Scouts. But he was an outdoorsman, and even more to the point, a Middle-Eastern explorer, and his Arabic skills got him into the Intelligence Section at Cairo, first as a civilian, then with an army rank as lieutenant. When he was sent to advise Faisal in the desert, with every success he got a more impressive title, and ended as Colonel Lawrence by the time his Arab levies entered Damascus.

Military rituals and formalities of self-presentation-- saluting and being saluted to demonstrate respect for rank, holding one’s posture rigidly for hours, officers shouting peremptory orders and expecting prompt submission-- were for Lawrence both superfluous and energy-killing. As he learned from experience, they were the opposite of effective in motivating Arab warriors in the desert. But even before then, Lawrence thought military formalities were useless. Certainly for his own career they were. He became a competent combat soldier, but he learned it by first-hand observation, a self-directed apprenticeship rather than basic training in a Western-style army, where formalities were primary. Every drill sergeant repeats the tradition that automatic obedience to orders is the essence of being a soldier, and marching in step and being shouted at by NCOs is the way to learn it. For Lawrence, war was about the realities of dealing with the enemy and motivating one’s own side; formalities got in the way.

For Lawrence, military formalities were like aristocratic ladies’ receptions: a lot of showing off of rank, while deadening one’s perceptions and lowering one’s energy. One reason he became a charismatic leader was that he avoided energy-draining situations as much as possible. What remained was to find stimulating encounters that pumped up his energy.

He already was beginning to find them, among the intellectual leaders at Oxford, and among his fellow Arab experts in Cairo.

From Oxford outsider to archeological insider

Lawrence came from an economically comfortable middle-class family, but they were far from wealthy.

One advantage was that they lived in Oxford, and all the brothers won Oxford scholarships; they could not have afforded to attend the University otherwise. Lawrence did not go to a “public school” (i.e. the private boarding schools where the English elite acquired their networks), and instead attended Oxford city high school. In other words, Lawrence was just the kind of day-boy that aristocratic students wouldn’t bother to notice. But he did have a head start on his career. Already as a teen-ager he was an amateur archeologist, digging up pottery fragments and other artifacts from the ancient Roman period of Britain. Lawrence would take these to the Ashmolean Museum at the University, and became known to the curators. By the time he was an undergraduate, he was accompanying famous archeologists on digs in the Middle East. When he graduated in 1910 he was granted funds to carry out his own excavations.

The period before WWI, and continuing again in the 1920s, was a Golden Age of archeology.

Research teams from universities in England, France, Germany and the United States competed to dig up remains of the ancient Biblical civilizations, and made sensational finds like Pharaohs’ untouched tombs. Like rival Great Powers, archeologists divided up sites from Egypt to Mesopotamia. Lawrence had a good four years in the field, eventually heading his own expedition on the upper Euphrates River at the border of what is now Syria and Iraq. (The same territory became the stronghold of the Islamic State militants in 2014, a little more than 100 years later.) Lawrence encountered French and German archeologists, consuls and railroad-builders, the whole face of contemporary imperialism. It was good for his self-esteem and his emotional energy.

Foreign archeologists and other important visitors traveled under official permission from the Ottoman Empire, which was severely in debt to the Western powers. Lawrence, like others, got an escort of Turkish soldiers to guard against robbers and local troubles. He carried a pistol and showed off.

Lawrence also found that he could get along well with the natives. He was in daily contact, hiring and firing, giving orders for the grunt work of digging and excavating. He became fluent in colloquial Arabic, learning from the ground up rather than in school. He had found a place where he could be a leader.

Learning to go semi-native

Lawrence became expert in Arabic manners. He observed the differences among urban townsmen (who he didn’t like), rural peasants, and the nomadic Bedouin of the desert. When the war broke out, Lawrence as an intelligence officer had great success interrogating prisoners. He didn’t threaten them, but guessed where they came from by their dialect, and chatted about local personalities and gossip. This quickly earned their trust, and he heard all sorts of information from the point of view of low-level soldiers in the Turkish army. Lawrence got to be good at small talk with the natives, just the kind of sociable chit-chat that he avoided with his British compatriots. The difference was that chatting with the natives had a purpose-- it brought information, and it gave him an important status both among the people he talked to, and his colleagues in Intelligence. Chatting at polite English dinner just underlined his own marginal position.

Among the Arabs, chatting was energy-gaining; in English society, it was an energy-drainer.

What Lawrence was doing was going semi-native. No one ever mistook him for a native, except for unperceptive European outsiders. His accent and his facial complexion would label him immediately. But being able to deal with Arabs of all ranks on a daily basis gave him a special status as a go-between, the advantages of which were recognized on both sides. Above all, he acquired the manners for it. Lawrence avoided the style of the arrogant colonial official shouting orders at the natives. He once commented about such an officer that any self-respecting servant would murder him. (Later, he was.) By the time he was leading Arab troops in the desert, visiting British officers noticed that Lawrence preferred to spend his spare time with the Arabs. Riding with Arab soldiers in the desert, Lawrence would spend endless hours as they did, repeating family genealogies, gossiping about old feuds, reciting Arab poems and songs.

Lawrence was not the only European to go semi-native. It was fairly common for officers in the hot Middle East to don at least part Arab dress, sometimes full robes, but often the head covering against the sun. A British officer in the Gallipoli campaign had extricated himself and his troops from being overrun in the trenches by calling out commands to attacking Turkish troops in their own language, successfully pretending to be a Turkish officer. A German consul at a diplomatic post in Iran acquired the reputation of “a German Lawrence” by recruiting an army of tribesmen to fight the British.

In short, not all European officers were arrogant colonialists cut off in their aloof superiority and their cocoon of upper-class manners. Lawrence worked with officers like Colonel Stewart Newcomb, who accompanied him into the desert to meet Faisal, and who later commanded his own guerrilla forces behind enemy lines.

British officers in Arab garb, 1917

The Arabist circle at Cairo GHQ

Lawrence was acquiring networks. When war broke out in 1914, he was soon recruited by his archeologist connections into intelligence work. There was already a circle of scholars and diplomats, skilled in Arabic language and affairs, attached to the headquarters of the High Commissioner in Egypt. Lawrence, 26 years old, was low in rank but well-positioned to be noticed for his skills as an Arabist.

The Arab Bureau became his support group and an important part of his identity.

They shared the view that the Arabs’ perspective must be taken into account. The Ottoman Empire was multi-ethnic, and the Young Turk reformers then in charge had a tricky ideological problem. On the one hand, they were trying to reform Turkey into a modern, European-style power, including a military alliance with Germany.

On the other hand, they posed as defenders of the Islamic world from Christian Europe, painting the English as imperialists. The Turks attempted to leverage the fact that the holy cities of Mecca and Medina were part of their territory, and maneuvered to have their war against England declared a jihad. To counter this, the Arab Bureau favored recruiting Arab tribes to rise against their Turkish overlords, the British supplying them with arms and support. On the ideological front, the Islamic message had to be countered by stirring up Arab national identity.

The trick was to offer some Arab leader a kingdom, under benevolent English tutelage: in short, to get them to opt for the liberal British Empire against the oppressive Turkish one.

Lawrence did not create the idea of an independence movement for the Arabs. He picked it up from his colleagues at the Arab Bureau, and did everything he could to further the plan. His own skills at getting along with the Arabs meshed with the grand strategy of his team.

The career accelerator: advantages of staff expert over line authority

Although Lawrence was an inexperienced civilian with a temporary rank in the Army, his connections through the Intelligence Section and the Arab Bureau led closely to the top. His boss in Intelligence, Clayton, became the Chief of Staff to Wingate, the Army chief confronting Turkish forces threatening Egypt from Palestine. His own Oxford professor Hogarth became head of the Arab Bureau. The Minister of War, Kitchener, was an army hero, famed for his victories in the Sudan, who had made Egypt his base before being promoted to London. The Turkish war was a side-show to the Western front, but the war in France was a costly stalemate, with little hope for a decisive victory. If a breakthrough was going to happen, it might well come through the weaker flank, Germany’s Turkish ally. Winston Churchill thought so, and as Lord of the Admiralty had pushed the Gallipoli campaign to take Istanbul from behind. It proved another costly failure. Still, something might be started by an Arab revolt, that would roll up the Turkish empire and shift the balance in Europe. At any rate, higher-ups were primed to listen and give support.

By early 1916, with everything going wrong in France and the Gallipoli campaign a disaster, Lawrence was given an important mission. Troops had mutinied in the Turkish army in Iraq. The British had sent an army to support them, but it advanced too far inland and was cut off.

The Turks counter-attacked and now there was a danger that the British force itself would be lost. From the Cairo point of view, the problem was made more intricate by inter-agency rivalry.

The British government in India-- which had its own semi-autonomous standing and its own Minister in the Cabinet-- regarded Iraq as part of their expanding sphere of influence; and most of the 10,000 soldiers surrounded there were from the Indian army, led by British officers. The Cairo and India offices did not trust each other, but now India was looking for Cairo to bail them out. Lawrence was sent with two other officers to investigate the situation and see what could be done. Lawrence sent confidential messages to his chief that the India staff in Iraq were incompetent and that the force could not be extricated before supplies and ammunition ran out. Indian army officers tried to evade blame for the disaster, which was being compared to the surrender at Yorktown that concluded the American revolution.

Lawrence, as an outsider, was given authority to negotiate whatever terms could be reached with the Turkish commander. This was a strange situation: a young lieutenant sent on an intelligence-gathering mission from the British Middle Eastern GHQ was put in charge of negotiating the surrender terms of an Anglo-Indian army under the Government of India.

But Lawrence was a linguist and the agent-on-the-ground, while the India Office was content to let someone else take the disagreeable duty off their hands. The situation at the battlefield was hopeless, and Lawrence was unable to get more than assurances from the Turks that the British prisoners of war would receive decent treatment. He had been given dirty work to do, but his superiors knew where the blame lay. On his return to Cairo, he was promoted to captain, with a reputation as a clever agent who could make good decisions in the field, however eccentric he might be.

It was an advantage that Lawrence was a staff officer. He had no command over anything.

If that were the case, he would have been in a chain of command, controlling a small number of troops below him, while carrying out orders from a series of officers above. But as a staff officer, he was attached to a collegial group of intelligence experts and strategists, where his ideas could go directly to the top. A military officer holds two different statuses: one is the rank (until recently, lieutenant), the other the position of command.

Lawrence had none of the latter, but it also meant he was not tied down to a specific position in the hierarchy. His working network trumped his rank, and made it an unimportant formality.

Already in the previous year (September 1915) Lawrence’s ideas had reached the top levels. With Gallipoli a disaster, Lawrence and his Intelligence Section boss Clayton worked out a plan to hit the Turks in a more vulnerable place: a naval attack to seize the port of Alexandretta in northern Syria. This would take advantage of Britain’s naval superiority and could be linked to a national uprising of Arabs against Turkey. The plan was approved by Kitchener and the top generals and admirals, and was favorably received by the War Cabinet. But the French Commander-in-Chief angrily rejected it; we are pouring out our blood against the Germans, and you English want to take the land of Syria that should be France’s reward for her sacrifice! French-English rivalries over their respective empires, as well as their respective battlefronts, would continuously strain the Arab Bureau’s plans. For Lawrence and his colleagues, it was always a multi-sided struggle, and the Turks were not the only enemy.

Go-between opportunities: native revolts and indirect rule

Lawrence’s opportunity to act as go-between was ideal for increasing his freedom of action. We have already seen how distrust between the India and Cairo branches of the British Empire put Lawrence in the position to negotiate the end of the Iraq campaign with the enemy. Another opportunity was built into the British structure of indirect rule.

The technique was to find a figurehead ruler who would keep up native traditions while being directed behind the scenes by a British advisor controlling the military, treasury, and administration.

Lawrence in Arabia was sent to set up just such an arrangement. If he improvised and exceeded his authority, he would not be the first.

Much of the Empire had been created by British agents in far-away places who took the initiative, made ad hoc alliances, and led natives troops in conquests that the British government would accept as fait accompli; Clive in India during the 1740s and 1750s was the pattern for many others.

The power of negotiating agents was highest in multi-sided situations with many players, and especially where alliances were volatile, and fortunes of the players rose or fell depending on whether the coalition they joined did well or badly. This was the situation of the Ottoman Empire. But native revolts were inherently ambiguous; a local leader might just as well be playing for a better title, or for his tribe, his family, or just plain money. The plan of the Cairo Arabists was to detach the Arabs from the Turks and ally them with the British Empire.

But all sides could play that game; just who comes out on top is still to be decided.

In Persia when the war broke out, a German consul with good language skills, Wilhelm Wassmuss on his own initiative recruited 3000 native tribesmen to revolt against the Persian puppet government, leading them in guerrilla warfare and wrecking havoc with the British sphere of influence.

In Arabia, all eyes were on Hussain, Sharif of Mecca, who refused to call a jihad against the British and took the holy city into revolt against the Turks.

But that was hardly the end of it. The Germans believed Hussain could be bribed back into loyalty. Hussain was in the favorable bargaining position of getting offers on all sides, and could sit back and consider among them while the bidding mounted. Sit there he did, satisfied to wait and see what developed, frustrating the British who hoped he would raise an army to drive the Turks out of the entire Arab-speaking crescent.

On top of everything, there were the French. Since the British seemed to be accomplishing nothing, and the French didn’t trust them when it came to empire-building,

they decided to steer their own Arab revolt with a pro-French figurehead. The French already had an enclave in Lebanon, and sent forces down the Red Sea to Jeddah, the port nearest to Mecca.

The French leader Colonel Cadi, was even ahead of Lawrence at this point, wearing Arab robes and carrying a gold dagger, although he also annoyed the British by raising the French flag over Jeddah. He offered arms and money to Hussain, and to bring in more troops to beef up Hussain’s forces (and keep their loyalty with the French). The Arabist faction in Cairo had to act. They sent a mission to Jeddah, including their best field agent, Lawrence.

Lawrence chooses the network bridge and shapes the Arab Revolt

Sociological theory of networks says that the best position to be in is where networks are separated, and you get to be the only bridge between them. Two different networks cut off from each other are distinct pools of information. If you can make the unique connection from your own network to the other, you can use information that no one else has. You are a step ahead of the competition; you can get the job, make the investment, publish the big news story, put together the invention and announce the discovery first. Ron Burt calls this the theory of structural holes; his research on business careers shows that the advantage goes to the person who becomes the bridge across the hole.

But in the volatile situation of multiple possible alliances that Lawrence found himself in, it wasn’t just a matter of establishing a bridge to the other network.

In this fluid situation, it wasn’t clear who was the key person to contact on the other side. Most people thought it was Hussain. But when Lawrence arrived in Jeddah, he quickly concluded that Hussain was the wrong person to lead a revolution. * Hussain’s son Abdulluh was in Jeddah to meet the British emissaries. But Lawrence sized him up too: Abdulluh was too timid, wouldn’t make a move without his father, as Lawrence observed that he held up negotiations repeatedly to call his father. Lawrence heard there was another son (Hussain had plenty of wives and children), camped with his forces in the desert. Lawrence got permission to go inland to visit this son, Faisal, and soon decided he was the man.

* Lawrence was right. Even after the Ottomans were defeated, Hussain did not end up as ruler of Arabia. A rival tribe led by Ibn Saud, which had been hanging in the background all the time, stepped in and took over the new state, now called Saudi Arabia.

Faisal was impressively fierce looking, a warrior, with the prestige and ambition to lead the revolt the British were looking for. His main problem was his father. Lawrence’s job was to insinuate that a connection with the British would be better than relying on Hussain.

Faisal may not have been convinced; like other Arab leaders, he thought that the British might lose (they were doing poorly in the World War up to this point), and there had been feelers from the other side. Lawrence’s task was to buck him up, to build a strong tie between themselves personally that would carry them along together in the joint enterprise. Of course there was a lot in it for Faisal; he had the promise of being set up as King of all the Arab-speaking people, from Arabia around to Iraq. But he had to have confidence in the British that it would really happen. And that meant having confidence in Lawrence, who was the point of contact.

Lawrence was building a bridge, all right, but it was more than just seeing where there was a hole in the network and making a connection across it. He had to choose who to connect with; and he had to make the connection strong enough so that it worked.

It wasn’t just a conduit of information but an alliance for joint action. Advantageous network ties are sometimes referred to as “weak ties,” because it is easier to get new information from someone you don’t know well, someone in a different social circle than your immediate friends who all know the same things. But Lawrence had to build the connection with Faisal into something that was emotionally strong. This is often referred to as “trust” or “social capital,” but the terms are too pallid. What Lawrence had to do was generate emotional energy: to energize his new contact, Faisal, with feelings of confidence, aggressiveness, initiative, to pick up the ball and run with it. And the mechanism of emotional energy, as I have explained elsewhere, is the art of energizing other people while simultaneously energizing yourself.

Lawrence building up Faisal was also building up himself. He couldn’t do one without the other. His networking skills put him on the path to becoming Lawrence of Arabia.

Once Lawrence became Faisal’s advisor, the process repeated itself. He didn’t rest on a static network.

Faisal had to become the leader of a movement, the symbolic point around which the Arabs would rally. Concretely, this meant recruiting tribes to join his army. Lawrence himself became the recruiting agent. Now besides being a network link between Cairo and Faisal, Lawrence becomes the network link between Faisal and one tribe after another. The tribes were wary, waiting to see which way the shoe would fall. Lawrence had to convince them. He did this in the name of Faisal. But he was the one who improvised, concocted schemes, found military targets they could handle, promised them spoils. He made promises for the future. To build confidence in the uprising, Lawrence had to invent a good deal as he went along.

And this was the way Lawrence operated with his British superiors as well. The further he got into the desert, and the more tribes he assembled, the more balls he had to keep in the air. What Lawrence and the Arab Revolt were doing was always a matter of propaganda and myth. This was not a trait of Lawrence, although his detractors later said he was a mendacious personality.

That wasn’t the way he came across early in his career, as an archeologist and as an intelligence expert at Cairo, where his reports were regarded as the most reliable information. It was the structural position as network bridge, out in the blowing sands of Arab politics, that made him blow with the winds. Better said: that made the winds appear to blow the way Lawrence told it. The bridge who builds networks out of shifting alliances has to become a whirlwind of emotional energy. Lawrence was on his way to becoming a charismatic leader.

Flows of network resources-- to the Arabs: money, weapons, information, impressiveness

What did Lawrence have to offer? First of all, money. His government knew that Arab loyalty wouldn’t be cheap, and they were ready to provide what was needed. Since the Arabs did not trust paper money, Lawrence carried gold coins from the British treasury in Cairo.

On campaign, he rode with gold in bags of a thousand pounds sterling. As his success in recruiting Bedouin tribes grew, his subsidy from the Foreign Office grew to 200,000 pounds per month-- about $10 million today. [Fromkin 223]

The money translated into the weapons and accoutrements of war. Lawrence could deliver thousands of camels in full harness, a sign of great wealth and power in the desert. Guns and ammunition were also provided; as the war progressed, machine guns, artillery and armored vehicles also arrived, with British military crews to operate them.

The British empire was wealthiest state in the world at the time; they could afford the expense.

Between 1914 and 1918 Britain spent as much on the war as all the other Allies combined. It was their pattern to use money rather than their own troops, where possible.

As Lawrence’s ad hoc army moved north towards the Turkish strongholds, he had complete authority to distribute gold to whichever tribes he chose. Ceremonially it was Faisal’s army, but it was Lawrence who built up network connections and kept them operative with his monthly deliveries of gold. Network theorists take note: what was passing through this bridge was not primarily information, but money. The most effective networks provide a flow of material payoffs, where the paymaster keeps his partners on the hook because they rely on him repeatedly.

The same principle operates in high finance.

True enough, Lawrence also had information to provide. The Arabs were amazed at the details Lawrence could tell them about the disposition of the Turkish army.

Lawrence was relying on the British intelligence service back in Cairo, with its far-flung agents, its electronic communications, and its success in breaking Turkish codes. But he didn’t explain this; his own support network was all the more impressive because invisible. In fact, Lawrence’s information was of little practical use to the Arab tribes, except as he organized them, paid them, armed them, and led them to fight. In that sense, his information was more theatrical display than a real exchange of advantages.

Remarkably, although Lawrence was carrying huge sums of gold coins in the desert, he was never robbed. This shows in how much respect he was held, even by tribes outside the alliance. His reputation preceded him, and when he arrived, his charisma did the rest.

Lawrence wore white robes, with a gold dagger and gold headpiece, given to him by Faisal. It was the costume of a sharif, although of course the Arabs recognized he was a European and not a Muslim religious leader. Faisal did not like Lawrence to appear among them wearing his British army khaki; as his deputy, he provided Lawrence with the outward signs by which Arabs would immediately recognize him as a man of wealth and power. When Lawrence reported back to Cairo, however, he generally resumed his army uniform.

The film shows a famous scene when Lawrence arrives from the desert with news of his military triumph, shocking British officers by entering headquarters in his desert robes. But on the whole Lawrence played both ends of his network in the locally appropriate way; one could see immediately by his outfit which role he was playing.

Lawrence (left) reports in Cairo, March 1918

Flows of network resources -- to the British High Command: good news in bad times; cheap victories; support for the Arabist faction against French imperialism

Lawrence was not shy about approaching the highest British authorities with his reports of success among the Arabs. As soon as he reemerged from the desert in November 1916 after fingering Faisal as the leader of the Arab revolt, Lawrence went immediately to visit all the top British officials in theatre. Without specific orders, he went to Khartoum in the Sudan to confer with the pro-consul, then back to Cairo to inform the commanding general that an Arab army could be raised. He crafted his message to what they wanted to hear. No British troops would be needed; it wasn’t even desirable to send them into the Muslim holy land. All it would take was money, some weapons, and above all Lawrence’s connections in the desert. Almost immediately he was sent back as liaison to Faisal, carrying everything he asked for.

The time was auspicious for an enterprise like this. War on the Turkish front had been an expensive disaster; 250,000 troops lost at Gallipoli. War on the Western Front was even worse; a million casualties in the bloody stalemates at Verdun and the Somme during 1916 had convinced many top leaders that the war could not be won, that a peace would have to be negotiated. The British cabinet was in crisis; the Prime Minister was about to thrown out. The Germans were winning in the East, and the Russians were soon in revolution and withdrawing from their Western alliance. Through this dark period-- from the British war-aims of view-- Lawrence’s successes in the desert were the one bright spot.

In reality, for many months his successes were hazy and exaggerated. Not until June 1917 when his Arab forces took the port of Aqaba did Lawrence have something palpable to show. But he was his own best promoter, and for the British, the sole source of information about what was going on with this Arab army forming in the desert.

And of course Lawrence’s home base of supporters was cheered and energized. It was their program he was carrying out. The Arabists knew what the French were demanding in the Middle East; knew that a secret protocol had been signed in January 1916 between ministers, the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the Ottoman lands. Like Lawrence, the Arabists in Cairo GHQ were playing a double game. In Cairo, they pushed to make the promises to the French null and void. In the desert, Lawrence had to convince Faisal and the Arabs that the agreement with the French was nothing but Turkish propaganda: that the British really were going to carry through what Lawrence was promising them: an Arab kingdom of their own. Double game though it might be, Lawrence had a firm hold. His own networks, in Cairo and in the desert, believed in him; and he told them what to believe.

Lawrence’s interactional Style

Lawrence made an unusual kind of charismatic leader. To his British colleagues, he was quiet, efficient, and to the point. His informality and lack of military manners marked him as eccentric, but his reports and advice were always welcome. He never threw his weight around: how could he? He was a relatively low-ranking officer. Everything depended on his off-the-books success as go-between.

Charisma in the desert: quiet, undomineering, steering the indecisive

With the Arabs, Lawrence adopted another style. He was a uniquely important person, the sole conduit to British gold, weapons, and promises of future rule. But although Lawrence was always in the center, he played it low-key. In Faisal’s presence, Lawrence treated him as the revered leader, giving him all expected deference and flattery. Faisal was actually a rather poor military strategist, and politically he was still wavering as to whether to ally with the British or let the Turks and Germans buy him out. Lawrence knew Faisal, like the rest of the Arabs, would only become enthusiastic for the British war effort when the bandwagon was growing and victory looked inevitable.

Lawrence’s first task was to strengthen Faisal’s prestige. Lawrence never disagreed with Faisal, never pointed out weaknesses in his ill-considered plans. An observer noted that Lawrence in conference with Faisal always spoke softly, “carefully choosing his words and then lapsing into long silences” [James 183]. No need to stand on ego; everyone knew who he was, and his magnificent clothes marked him out as someone they would have to listen to sooner or later. He made himself indispensable, Faisal’s halo shining ever brighter as Lawrence expanded the war-coalition in his name.

Away from Faisal, with the tribal leaders and with his own soldiers in the desert, Lawrence followed much the same style. He never gave orders; in a memo to his British colleagues, he told them that the European mind-set of a drill sergeant would backfire.

The very fact that Faisal had no skills at military tactics left a vacuum for Lawrence to step into. But he stepped quietly and indirectly. Meetings were free-flowing discussions. Arab tribes were rather egalitarian, inchoate democracies in the sense that it was hard for anyone to give orders; the chief got flattery and deference but rarely obedience. Lawrence would patiently let them talk, starting divergent plans, flaring with momentary enthusiasms and denials. In the end, when everyone had had their say and indecision remained floating in the air like smoke, Lawrence would make his suggestion for action and the meeting would end. Usually they rode with him.

It was the charisma of action more than the charisma of authority.

Like other charismatic leaders, Lawrence was a good micro-observer of individuals. He carefully studied the Arab leaders and soldiers, discerning which way they were tending. A master of timing, he sensed the moment when they would move.

Lawrence’s mastery at indirect control came under test in his final battles, when the Turkish front was collapsing in the north, and his Arab soldiers were capturing large numbers of prisoners. Flushed with victory over an emotionally dominated enemy, Arabs often plundered and killed their prisoners. At times, Lawrence himself was able to put a stop to it. On one occasion, he prevented a massacre by calling the warriors to debate over what to do with 200 prisoners. Another British officer accompanying Lawrence made a speech, in Parliamentary style, that the Arabs thought was hilarious. The meeting broke up in good humor, the passion for killing having passed.

In violence, as in most situations of exerting power, emotional momentum is of the essence. Lawrence interrupted the timing and broke the emotional tone. Again, it was quiet charisma. Quiet, but not mysterious for a micro-sociologist. Charisma is mastery of the micro-interactional details.

Network speed: Lawrence as modernist

To many people, Lawrence was a romanticist, harking back to the past. He was anti-bureaucratic and disliked cities and crowds. He seemed like a wandering knight escaping the modern world in the desert. But Lawrence was ultra-modern in one respect: he liked modern technology, and especially the technology of speed.

Assigned to Faisal in the desert, Lawrence took a wireless apparatus with him, and a crew to operate it. He could communicate directly with headquarters, above all to guarantee the smooth flow of money and weapons. And he controlled the communications link; when he was off with his troops on camels in the desert, he alone could decide when to call in. Similarly with airplanes. As his Arab army grew larger and engaged the Turks more directly in Palestine and Trans-Jordan, Lawrence recognized the value of air strikes to hit fortified Turkish positions, and to give a psychological lift to his troops. Airplanes could land at improvised airstrips in the desert, bringing him ammunition and money. Lawrence made friends with the pilots, got them to carry out impromptu raids for him, and used planes to ferry him in and out of the desert. Lawrence could be an isolate, but only when he wanted to be. As his influence and reputation grew, he frequently made flying visits to Cairo. He worked his networks actively for maximal resources and support.

Lawrence as anti-modernist modernist?

It wasn’t such an unusual combination in the 1920s, when literary and political alienation from modernity became a prominent theme, indeed a hallmark of “the lost generation” after the war. Lawrence just had it a little earlier.

Aircraft were still quite new, and WWI greatly expanded their prominence. Lone pilots were heroes, both as fighters and as explorers. This was part of the attraction for Lawrence, but above all they gave him network speed.

Similarly with motor vehicles. Camels had their advantages, especially their ability to cover hundreds of miles without roads,

go several days without water, and of course without motor fuel. Where camels were the speedy way to move, Lawrence used them. But he also added automobiles and armored cars to his repertoire. When he entered Damascus triumphantly in October 1918, he was wearing his Arab robes, but riding in an armored car.

Lawrence’s career shows two crucial ingredients of becoming a charismatic leader: the micro-interactional techniques that made him impressive to the people he dealt with, and enabled him to recruit and expand his networks. But also, he rose above all potential rivals by his network speed. He found the crucial bridge-position in the networks, and exploited it to the full. As he grew more powerful, he moved faster and faster, keeping connected with all the different parts of his far-flung networks: Arab politicians like Faisal, the multifarious tribal warriors that made up his army, the British army that supported him; his connections with the High Command in Cairo and increasingly on the far-flung battlefields of the Middle East; his connections with the Arab Bureau and through them to top politicians in London. At the height of his career, Lawrence became a demon of network speed. He was visible everywhere: here and then gone, reappearing unexpectedly. How fast the network operated was up to him.

The facade of Arab guerrilla war

The truth of the matter is that Lawrence’s Arab army was not very important. The main action in the Middle Eastern Theatre was a regular-style war near the coast, where the British army had 150,000 men guarding the Suez Canal against a Turkish army threatening Egypt. In 1916-17, Lawrence had a few hundred Arab warriors intermittently raiding the Turkish railroad connection down into the Arabian peninsula. These raids occupied the attention of a few thousand Turkish troops, but in fact the railroad was never broken. Turkish railroad troops were quick to repair the line, and they had plenty of materials stockpiled from pre-war plans to build more railway lines. Nevertheless British GHQ were happy with Lawrence’s periodic reports, and assured the War Office they were getting good returns on all the gold they were pouring into Arabia.

Although it was a military side-show, it was becoming a political snowball. Lawrence had seized his informal role as Faisal’s free-lance recruiting officer and was beginning a gathering avalanche of emotional energy, energizing the desert tribes and himself at the center of it. Lawrence’s Arab raiders largely confined themselves to destroying trains and railroads. Lawrence himself carried the dynamite and set off the fuses. The desert tribes regarded these explosions as a great show, and enthusiastically rushed to the scene. Lawrence himself commented that whatever its military effect, “the noise of dynamite explosions we find everywhere the most effective propaganda measure possible.” [James 212]

The Arab troops were not effective in conventional warfare. Their style of fighting was that of tribal forces everywhere, ambushes and raids upon unsuspecting enemies. Faced with determined resistance, their traditional tactic was to retreat, using mobility of their horses or camels to get away. Lawrence quickly understood this. Desert warriors would “attack like fiends,” shouting and firing in the air, especially when they spied booty like a derailed railroad car. [James 180] When the emotional momentum shifted, they would fade away just as quickly. The Turks had a disciplined modern army, accustomed to holding ranks and taking orders, and the Arab raiders were no match for them when it came to sustained firepower. Lawrence soon acquired the Arabs’ attitude about taking casualties; even a few men killed in a raid was considered too high a price, and a battle of attrition was out of the question.

Lawrence eventually saw that he needed propaganda victories more than anything else.

He began to shift his recruiting campaign among the desert tribes further and further north. Raiding the railroad to Medina, 500 miles down the Arabian peninsula, was becoming repetitious, and too far from the grand objective, which was to liberate the entire Arab-speaking crescent in Palestine and Syria.

The plan of the Arab Bureau had been to foment an Arab revolt behind enemy lines, but this never happened; local populations were too cautious, awaiting military events before they changed overt allegiance. Lawrence decided to push his recruitment campaign as Faisal’s agent northward out of Arabia.

The target became Aqaba. On today’s map, it is the bottom-most outpost of Israel, at the head of a narrow gulf forming the eastern side of the triangle of the Sinai desert-- the western side of the triangle being the Red Sea, with the Suez canal at the top. In 1917, there was no state of Israel, just a large British army east of Suez, facing off against a large Turkish army in Palestine. 

GHQ agreed that taking Aqaba would give the British an alternative line of advance, a back door into Palestine, Trans-Jordan, and Syria. But a naval assault would be costly. The Turks had big guns covering the water approaches. Troops could be landed on the beaches to take the guns; but this looked like a repeat of the Gallipoli campaign to take out the guns on the straits of the Dardanelles, that had ended in a disaster of trench warfare. While the planners wavered, Lawrence took matters into his own hands. Leading a small column of 36 men, he recruited among tribes in the northern desert, with his usual gold and his growing reputation. A 14-day circuitous journey through remote deserts brought his little army into Aqaba from the land side, where the Turks had no defenses, never expecting anyone would attack from that direction.

The Arab army took 600 prisoners and Lawrence immediately set off across the Sinai by camel to bring the news to Cairo. Four days later the British navy was in Aqaba with supplies and weapons.

It would become Lawrence’s new base of operations-- and not incidentally, for the flow of gold that he would use to recruit a far larger army, as many as 4000 tribesmen, for the advance into Syria.

Lawrence at maximal freedom of action

Lawrence’s arrival in Cairo in July 1917 with news of the conquest of Aqaba created a sensation. The Arabs were advancing out of Arabia, and now it was “Lawrence’s Arabs.” Full of his own emotional energy, Lawrence presented a new plan to the C-in-C of British forces in Egypt, General Allenby.

The regular army would advance along the coast; the Arab army would operate inland, distracting the Turks; the two armies would converge on the major objects of attack, Jerusalem, and then Damascus. Allenby agreed.

In reality, it always remained unclear just what the Arab army contributed. The size of its forces fluctuated from week to week, depending on local fortunes and Lawrence’s on-going recruitment. Nominally the chain of command was from Faisal, but Lawrence as liaison to Faisal had all the initiative. Lawrence was placed directly under Allenby’s command, but everything depended on when Lawrence would show up from the desert and what he would report.

Now that Lawrence was operating in closer conjunction with the main British army, the character of his own army began to change. It became a pseudo-Arab army, in part high-tech weapons and troops to operate them, in part camel warriors from the desert. Through the port at Aqaba came a stream of equipment, British officers, even regular army troops. “Lawrence’s Arab Army” acquired supporting forces in signals, supply, transport, armored cars, mobile artillery. Lawrence’s raiders were not just hitting railroads and isolated Turkish outposts, but confronting well-armed garrisons. It was not the kind of warfare the Arabs were good at; and the brunt of the serious fighting was carried out by the non-Arab forces and their heavy weapons.

Lawrence, although not a trained military officer, learned on the fly; soon he was a reasonably competent battlefield commander, who knew the limits of his Arab troops, managed forces held in reserve, called in artillery support and RAF air strikes. Even so it was touch and go. The Arab army made slow going in the latter half of 1917 and into 1918 up the backside of the Palestine front, attacking Turkish bases in what is now Jordan.

There were more British officers with Lawrence now, and they saw the weaknesses of the Arabs, calling them “fickle and feckless,” [James 290] and noting their inability to fight disciplined Turkish troops. At best, it was becoming a war of attrition against the Turks, a war where regular army forces were carrying most of the load.

Nevertheless, even as the character of the war was becoming less romantic, Lawrence’s legend was growing. Access through Aqaba and by plane allowed a considerable number of British officers and even civilians to visit him in the desert.

One of his friends, an aristocratic Member of Parliament, rode 300 miles with him on camels. The officers assigned to desert duty came to adopt Lawrence’s ways, dispensing with army regulations, growing beards and dressing in make-shift uniforms or even in Arab robes They were charmed by Lawrence’s non-directive, egalitarian style and the aura of success that swirled around him as he disappeared and reappeared. In reality, there were many military failures on remote battle sites, but “a few famous successes made up for many unspectacular failures.” [290]

The British field staff with the Arab Army nicknamed themselves “Hedgehog” (from a complicated military acronym) and acquired the camaraderie of an exciting adventure. Like the retinue of a charismatic leader, those who had personally been around Lawrence became disciples propagating his legend.

Ordinary British enlisted men (what the Brits call “other ranks”) called him a “wizard” and were astounded by his informality with them.

Among the Arabs, Lawrence always made a dramatic appearance. He would ride up with 20 bodyguards, mounted on the best thoroughbred camels and splendid in coats of many colours, his approach greeted by excited shouts. It was the gold, of course, and the growing tide of victories; but more than that, Lawrence rode among them in an aura of charisma. Stories about him were circulating as more and more tribes joined in: his reputation for courage, his exploits behind enemy lines, the exciting things that were always happening around him.

Lawrence with Arab troops, 1917

It was during this period that an enterprising American newsman, Lowell Thomas, flew in to interview him. Thomas’s film would make Lawrence a transatlantic hero.

Lawrence’s Emotional Energy struggles and his quest for dangerous adventures

Lawrence’s time was becoming increasingly taken up with administration, as de facto commander of Faisal’s army with a large and crucial contingent of modern British forces. He often traveled by car or lorry rather than by camel, for greater speed and to keep up with the far-flung claims on his attention. He reported to headquarters by plane and boat. Nevertheless, at this very time, Lawrence became even more adventurous, going off on missions on his own.

Although he could have stayed back in his role as commander-- given his rank and responsibilities, should have stayed back-- Lawrence led train attacks in person. He still set dynamite fuses himself, was grazed by bullets, and on occasion was knocked unconscious. He reconnoitered and raided with small groups far behind enemy lines, around the expected line of advance towards Damascus. Alone except for his Arab servant boy, disguised in robes borrowed from gypsy prostitutes, Lawrence followed a group of prostitutes into Amman (now capital of Jordan) to look around; stopped by Turkish soldiers, he was barely able to escape.

On the way back, his servant was badly wounded by a Turkish patrol, and Lawrence finished him off with a pistol so that he wouldn’t fall into Turkish hands.

What was going on? First of all, how was he able to do it? Lawrence was in the extremely unusual position of being able to free-lance anywhere he wanted. He still had no official position or command responsibilities; it was all in his informal network, and he could go anywhere in it at any time. And he had all the resources he needed to move anywhere. He could travel by camel, with his magnificent escort, or by himself in disguise. It was his reputation to pop up anywhere, and he did. He could travel by car, order a plane, or hitch a ride with a pilot who happened to land nearby. At the British end, this was what they were used to. His visits were always welcome, upbeat; although he played his role more quietly there (and switched back into his khaki uniform), he had an aura with the British too, of military advances out beyond the horizon towards their common goal. Then he was off again.

Second question: why did he risk himself so much? Just at the time when he was becoming more successful, when most careers settle into greater responsibility and organizational routine, Lawrence was becoming reckless.

One reason was that in fact things were not going well everywhere in his war zone.

During the period from his triumph at Aqaba in July 1917, until the great offensive launched by Allenby to break through the Turkish lines in September 1918, results with the Arab Army in the desert were spotty. This was covered up by his aura, but Lawrence himself, as a careful observer, certainly knew that his Arab troops often failed against the Turks, especially when he wasn’t there to lead them personally. So he took advantage of his enhanced mobility and moved rapidly from one place to another, always initiating something, always generating some action.

Why would he push the envelope, disappearing for weeks at a time, making huge journeys in the desert, scouting out Turkish strongholds as if he were a low level native lookout?

A clue is in conversations he had with a British companion on one of his desert rides.

“... as he told me last night, each time he starts out on these stunts, he simply hates it for two or three days until movement, action and the glory of scenery and nature catch hold of him and make him well again.” [James 198]

His emotional energy was not always high; it fluctuated. The down times came when he had to think about the political web he was in; the strain of keeping up his enthusiasm with Arab leaders like Faisal, hiding his doubts about what the outcome of the war eventually would be, hiding his doubts about the equivocal role he was playing in it. As the end came more closely in view, the strain grew stronger.

Lawrence always had an escape: action. Out at the forward edge, his Arab followers pumped him up with charisma.

It was his emotional-energy magnet.

The down times came in the moments of transition, when he had to move from his British connections back to his Arab network. As he related, there would be a bad two or three days, feeling the strain of his double life, then the flow of being the cutting edge of action got him energized again.

Lawrence became an action junkie, hooked on danger. It was his way of avoiding the fate of successful leaders, of being trapped upstairs in the formality and the hypocrisy of power.

It fed his personal charisma even more.

The height of ambition, the height of ambiguity

Lawrence by now was acting contrary to official British policy, and misrepresenting that policy to Faisal and the Arabs. Why didn’t the British rein him in? Because the policy that embarrassed the British with their Arab allies was their agreement to divide up the Middle East with the French. Lawrence as liaison to Faisal had to keep assuring him that the Arabs would get the independent kingdom promised them.

Presumably Lawrence knew better, but the only way he could keep operating with the Arabs was to deny that an agreement with the French existed. One might call this the dirty world of foreign agents and secret deals; the British needed to have an agent whom they could let go at arms length. The British probably knew that Lawrence was out of their control, but this was in their best interest. Whatever Lawrence said or promised could be denied; just as, out in the desert, whatever the British diplomats had said could be denied. The arms-length structure was needed by both links in the chain.

Whoever plays the bridge between far-flung-- and dynamic-- networks has vast freedom of action; but also, if there are strong feelings of loyalty, much psychological strain.

The regular British army along the coast advanced in slow phases. In December 1917, Allenby pushed back the Turks in southern Palestine and took Jerusalem.

In September 1918, a long-awaited offensive routed the Turks and sent them retreating in disorder across the northern hills and into Damascus. The Arab Army’s part of the plan was to cut off Turkish railroad links, and trap the Turkish army in a bottleneck. Lawrence’s troops accomplished their part well enough, although the deciding factor was the massive artillery and aerial bombing Allenby had assembled.

The Turks fell back in disarray, just the kind of target the Arabs were good at attacking, and there was a great deal of looting and massacring wounded and retreating troops.

Damascus, according to diplomatic agreement, was slated for the French. They had a small battlefield contingent, and a colonial base in Lebanon, on the coast west of Damascus. Nevertheless, Lawrence sensed an opportunity for an Arab coup. He sent for Faisal to hurry to the front. As Allenby’s liaison, Lawrence was in a position to know exactly what was happening. He had hoped the Arabs would get to Damascus first, and get the credit for liberating it; and this would be the prelude to setting up Faisal as King. But Australian troops from the British command got to Damascus first; finding the city empty of enemy forces, they continued on through chasing the fleeing Turks.

Next morning, Lawrence showed up at the Australian division headquarters and heard that Damascus was undefended. He immediately got an armored car and had himself driven into Damascus. At the town hall, there was pandemonium as rival factions argued over who was the legitimate local government now that the Ottomans had gone. Using all his charisma, backed up by armed force, Lawrence threw his choice behind a local supporter of Faisal’s father. When British and French forces arrived, Lawrence presented them with a fait accompli: a governor in favor of the Arab Bureau’s plan, whom he represented as having been elected by the will of the citizens. For a moment at least, the plan had succeeded.

Game’s up

Next day Allenby arrived and official reality set in. The diplomatic agreement still held. Faisal would not get what he had been promised. As a symbolic token, Arab troops could lead the parade into Damascus, but the Arab governor would be under French command. Lawrence as liaison to Faisal would henceforth report to the French. Lawrence immediately asked for leave to go back to England. It was accepted and his war was over.

His network bridge was broken.

Reputational networks and the travails of celebrity

Although Lawrence was on the losing side of the diplomatic struggle, his reputation was made. If fame was what he was seeking, he had it. His superiors in Egypt and in the Army never held anything against him, and lauded his performance (which implies that they applauded his role as ambiguous go-between). Back in England, the British elite treated Lawrence as a man to know. His pro-Arab and anti-French stance had much sympathy at home, but what could be done? Lawrence attended the Versailles peace conference, continuing to act as Faisal’s advocate and joining in his entourage. To no avail. Lawrence was not the only sophisticated participant at the Versailles treaty conference (others included Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes) who thought its results disastrous. To get an idea of the tone of the conference, consider that the French Prime Minister, Clemenceau, proposed to fight a duel with the British PM, Lloyd George, over the Arab/Syria issue. [Fromkin 289] The Arabs lost again. Lawrence was photographed again, wearing his Arab robes in Versailles.

In 1922 Lawrence was at another disastrous treaty conference, the Middle Eastern settlement made in Cairo, which drew the boundaries of the modern Middle East that have been objects of contention ever since. Lawrence now attended as a confidant of Winston Churchill. They had their picture taken in front of the Great Pyramid, just two camels away from each other, along with Gertrude Bell, another friend of Lawrence from the Arabist circle. Lawrence is back in civilian clothes, disguised in the black suit of a minor civil servant.

from left: Churchill, Gertrude Bell, Lawrence 1922

From the time he had arrived back in England in late 1918, Lawrence was a popular media hero.

The American newsman Lowell Thomas had been sent to Europe to stir up enthusiasm when the US entered the war in April 1917.

Finding nothing encouraging on the Western front, he went on to the Middle East and heard about Lawrence’s exploits. In early 1918, Thomas filmed interviews with Lawrence in his Arab robes.

Movie theatres showing full-length features were just coming into popularity; newsreels were being invented. Film of Lawrence were shown in the US and Britain in spring 1918.

Next year, Thomas launched a two-hour spectacular in a New York theatre, including film of the Palestine campaign accompanied by a symphony orchestra (it was the time of silent movies). Thomas himself gave the narration, playing up his discovery of Lawrence in the desert. It was the launch of his own career as well; Lowell Thomas went on to become the first of the new impresarios, like the TV anchors and interview hosts from that time until today.

Thomas took his show to London, where it ran for six months in 1919-1920.

Lawrence, Lowell Thomas,  1918

All this was just prior to the frenzy for all things Arab, reaching its height with Valentino’s 1921 film, The Sheik. For years during the 1920s, American college boys at dances referred to themselves as “sheiks.” 

Rudolph Valentino, The Sheik, 1921

Modern-style publicity was creating a new phenomenon, the celebrity: not merely someone in public life, or the old-fashioned nobility taking deference as a matter of course. The celebrity attracted the attention of crowds and fans, not because s/he was doing anything, but because of the self-reinforcing effects of media attention.

Lawrence was one of the first celebrities in the modern sense; and he quickly found he didn’t like it. Fame and recognition among the Arabs in the desert was one thing; there he wasn’t a passive recipient of curiosity, but a leader of action. The Arabs who shouted when he approached surrounded by his bodyguard on camels energized him. But being recognized on the street, asked for autographs and invited to dinner parties didn’t energize him; he was just a passive object for others’ curiosity.

He began to take disguises, seeking shelter in country hide-outs, using assumed names.

Being a recluse wasn't what he wanted, but success on his own terms. He had always had literary ambitions, and now he had an epic topic to write about. His personal memoir of the desert campaign, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was privately circulated in 1922, and published in a large edition in 1927. It is a beautifully written book, capturing the sight and feel of the desert, the personalities of the people. It tells Lawrence’s adventures with self-deprecating modesty, and concludes on the ironic note of the prize of Arab freedom taken away from them at the end. There is no bragging and no rhetoric, but Lawrence is always at the center. What is omitted is crucial for the actual pattern of success: there is no mention of the gold Lawrence used to buy loyalties in the desert; little mention of the high-tech weapons Lawrence increasingly relied upon. The narrative is about his movements with his Arab army, so that an uninformed reader would scarcely know that Allenby’s regular army carried most of the fighting and broke open the way to Damascus.

It was another network triumph for Lawrence as his manuscript circulated among the literary elite. He became friends with its aging patriarch, George Bernard Shaw, whose name Lawrence used as one of his pseudonyms, T.E. Shaw. To gather material for another book, as well as to

escape public attention, Lawrence enlisted in the RAF in 1922 under an assumed name. In effect, he was seeking further adventures in a foreign land; but now it was in the underclass of ordinary British soldiers, who almost never came into intimate contact with the officer class in which Lawrence moved. The book drawing on his experiences, called The Mint, is an account of the rough, authoritarian military training camp. Lawrence himself thought it was a better book than Seven Pillars of Wisdom, but it was never popular. Because it was virtually the first book to record the obscene language of ordinary working men, it was regarded as offensive and never published in his lifetime. His adventure in the social class underground could not keep up the level of his adventure as network bridge and charismatic leader in Arabia.

Of course. The moving structures that supported his charisma were not replaced.

Not surprisingly, in the years after the war Lawrence continued his quest for the latest technologies of speed. He became enamoured of high-speed motor boats, which he tested for the navy. He joined the RAF to see the world of planes from the mechanic’s point of view. He liked fast motorcycles. He was riding one of them in 1935 when he was killed in an accident. He was 46 years old, recently discharged from the RAF, his action network behind him.

Charisma without speech-making

We generally think of charismatic leaders as great speech-makers: Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Churchill, and even on the dark side of the force, Adolf Hitler.

For most of them, what is best-remembered are the speeches they made.

But if the key to charisma is generating high emotional energy in masses of people and rallying them around oneself, Lawrence shows there is another way to do it.

A charismatic leader energizes other people, and thereby energizes oneself. Lawrence did this by talking quietly, observing silently, never giving orders, waiting his time and then making suggestions that others accepted. Of course there were other reasons why he was in a position to get attention even with his quiet style: his unique network bridge, where both ends depended on him alone to give them something they really wanted; his success in delivering things: gold, hope for future plans, a growing coalition, victory. His network made Lawrence.

But also vice versa.

One lesson of Lawrence’s career is that networks are most powerful when they are dynamic. Static networks don’t make careers; they certainly don’t generate charisma. Networks build and contract; and the attracting force that unites them best is emotional energy. Lawrence had the micro-interactional style to generate EE; and thus to grow his networks with enthusiasm. He always had the sense to avoid networks where he lost EE.

Perhaps we should say, he had that sense most of the time, until the moment he left Damascus in political defeat.

After that, he kept looking for new networks, but the flashier ones did little to energize him further; and the more adventurous ones he tried to substitute just brought him down.

His life was like an experiment demonstrating the power of networks, high and low.

How charismatic leaders build their careers in war, politics, or business:

Randall Collins and Maren McConnell. 2015.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

published as an E-book at

Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

T. E. Lawrence. 1926. The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

T. E. Lawrence. (posthumously published 1973) The Mint.

David Fromkin. 1989. A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

Lawrence James. 2008. The Golden Warrior. The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia.

Max Boot. 2013. Invisible Armies. A History of Guerrilla Warfare from Ancient Times to the Present.

Bruce Kuklick. 1996. Puritans in Babylon. The Ancient Near East and American Intellectuals, 1880-1930.

[on the golden age of archeological exploration]

on advantages in networks:

Ronald Burt. 1992. Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition.

John Levi Martin. 2009. Social Structures.

Randall Collins and Mauro Guillèn. 2012. “Mutual halo effects in cultural production networks.” Theory and Society 41.

WHY DOES SEXUAL REPRESSION EXIST?

Freud’s classic argument is that sex is a strong human drive, active from earliest childhood, but it becomes repressed by an internal mechanism. You repress yourself, eliminating consciousness of desire, driving it from your thoughts as well as your behavior. But it comes out anyway, in dreams, in symptoms, in displacements. For Freud, the world is pervasively sexualized, but in symbolic form, via transformations of sexual drive onto targets seemingly far removed from its original erotic objects.

Freud wrote at a turning point now 100 years behind us. He psychoanalyzed his patients at the end of the Victorian era, making his discoveries between the 1890s (“the gay 90s” in the original sense of the time, which meant heterosexual) and World War I. Sex was coming out of the closet-- better said, out of the corset-- and Vienna was the leading center of the action. It was the first period of the modern sexual revolution. Official prudery was being challenged; the heavy layers of clothing were starting to come off, and people were not only starting to talk about sex (and to paint it) but to act on it more overtly.

Egon Schiele, 1917

It is ironic that Freud should formulate a theory of sexual repression at just this time. In fact his patients were caught in the gap, repressed persons in a world where heightened sense of sexuality was rising around them.

Freud’s first patient cured,

Anna O.

Since then have been a series of sexual revolutions. The “roaring twenties”-- the “Jazz age” which in its original slang meant the verb to have sex (“he tried to jazz me” a young woman says in a Faulkner novel). The sixties counterculture, famous for sexual communes-- in fact not very many and all of them short-lived; the counterculture had more long-lasting effects in the shift to cohabiting without getting married, a shock wave around 1968-71 about what used to be called “shacking up” or “living in sin,” and then quickly becoming accepted almost everywhere. Cohabitation was soon followed by acceptance of what used to be called “illegitimacy," which soon changed to "out-of-wedlock childbirth,” and now is completely normalized.

The outburst of pornographic magazines and films in the 1970s, going mainstream and eventually becoming the early cutting edge of video and the Internet. The homosexual liberation movement that achieved public legitimacy in the scandal of the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, and transformed proper terminology into the elaborations of LGBT. Battles still take place, most recently over gay marriage. The configuration has repeatedly replayed since Freud’s time-- a struggle between one form or another of sexual repression and victorious movements of sexual liberation.

Can we say sexual repression still exists?

That is, exists in the large part of society which is liberated, outside of a few backward enclaves who have lost every battle and appear likely to lose the rest of them?

What Would Totally Liberated Sex Look Like?

Let us define complete sexual liberation as a condition where anyone can say or do anything sexual that they want.

Would there be any limitations?

Consider our own sexually liberated times. Can you go up to any person at all and say, I’d like to have sex with you?

Circumstances where one cannot say this are limitations on sexual speech. As for sexual action, consider its least intrusive form, touching. Can you touch any person you feel attracted to?

The quick answer to both questions is: no. There are very definite limitations and circumstances in which sexual speech and action is allowed.

The phrase is widely used, “between consenting adults.” But this implies a lot more sexual liberty than actually exists, even among the most liberated. “Consenting adults” applies more to action than to words; and many forms of sexual speech are strongly sanctioned-- so that even approaching the topic is socially prohibited in most situations. This doesn’t mean talking philosophically about consent.

What is prohibited is requesting personal, particular consent.

The title, “Why Does Sexual Repression Exist?” is not a rhetorical question. It is not a way of saying “Isn’t it absurd for us not to express our sexual desires any time we want to?”

It is a real question, a sociological question that asks what causes people to limit expression of sexual desire and sexual behavior.

It is a very answerable question. Sexual behavior and talk have varied a great deal historically, across societies and within any particular one. There is ample evidence for showing what determines what sex is and is not allowed.

There may be a tendency to think that the answers are obvious, at least for our own enlightened times. Obviously, certain categories of persons have to be protected; certain situations are just not appropriate.

Why do we think this? It is more revealing to distance ourselves from our contemporary point of view. Not very far in the past, people assumed different standards. It is safe to predict that in the future, people will look back at us-- including the most liberated-- with scorn and moral condemnation, just as we look backwards at our own predecessors. The power of comparative sociology is to rise above our historical self-centeredness, and to show what makes people feel

this

is right and

that

is wrong about sex.

Does “Consenting Adults” explain the contemporary sexual standard?

Social rules are embedded in tacit understandings as to when a rule is to be invoked. Freud would have called this unconscious; Durkheim called it pre-contractual solidarity. There are many persons and many situations where one cannot ask for consent, or even bring up the topic.

By way of generating some sense of the social conditions, ask yourself: how many people can you ask to have sex with you? Think of the variations of how to say it to particular persons: politely, indirectly, blatantly, using slang, using obscenity: “Excuse me ma’am (or sir), would you like to fuck?” What would happen if you said this? In some situations today one would be accused of using inappropriate language, in others, of sexual harassment. In the era before WWII, you could get your face slapped.

I have appealed to your imagination of real-life occasions because in the vast number of situations where someone has a sexual interest in someone else, it does not get expressed at all. David Grazian’s book,

On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife,

shows what happens when young adults are out in the scenes where they are most explicitly looking for sex. Although both the boys and the girls* talk about what they are aiming for and what happened, they do this among themselves before they go out and after they come back. When they are on the front lines in the night club, virtually no one ever says anything like, let’s hook up. They are playing a game of pickup, but at a very distant level. Most of the excitement is in the tease and innuendo, and sexual scores are so rare that the boys end up bragging about getting a girl’s phone number, and the girls laugh about giving out fake numbers. Like most ethnographies, Grazian cuts through the ideal and shows the social realities of how the atmosphere of sexual excitement is constructed, like putting on a performance in a theatre.

*

“girls” is how they refer to themselves. [See also Armstrong and Hamilton.]

Why doesn’t this scene, about as blatantly sexual as they come, have more real sex or at least more sexual talk? This means asking about the sociological processes that repress sex. We will come to the list of causes shortly; here they have little to do with the kind of sexual repression which concerned Freud.

Compare the few places where expressing one’s sexual desire face-to-face with its target is actually done. One is in front of fraternity houses, on heightened occasions like party-night afternoons, or at the beginning of term when new student cohorts arrive. There can be a lot of raucous hooting at passing women, commenting both positively and negatively on their sexual desirability. Notice two things: This is sexual expression, but without a serious aim to get consent from any particular woman; in fact, the impersonal and collective nature of the hooting makes this impossible. Secondly, even the frat boys’ tactic of strength-in-numbers-and-anonymity does not necessarily shield them from the negative reaction they would likely get if one of them said the same things to an individual woman.

As social movements and administrative organization have mobilized, fraternities hooting at women are sometimes sanctioned or even closed down (as happened for instance at San Diego State University in 2014). The sociological pattern holds:

expressing sexual desire is limited even in the most liberated society; it can be gotten away with more if it is ostensibly not really serious, or is carried out at a safe distance. Today, the most blatant sexual talk is telephone sex [Flowers 1998]. Sexual expression also gives rise to counter-movements. The sociological pattern is not sexual expression alone, but sexual conflict.

Inside the fraternity house, the situation is not too dissimilar from Grazian’s description of downtown nightclubs. [Sanday,

Fraternity Gang Rape

; Armstrong and Hamilton,

Paying for the Party

] There is a lot of bragging talk about sex within the male-bonded group; but only a small sexual elite actually gets very much action. At parties, disguised by loud music, semi-darkness, and plentiful alcohol, the reality is that most of the frat boys are on the sidelines watching their sexual heroes. So, are they the ones who boldly ask for sex? Even here, the conversations are more tacit and oblique than blatant; the most successful approach is by sheer body language, dancing in high sync, laughing together. The less formal and coherent the talk, the more likely it is to build the mutual mood that may lead to sex. Uninhibited extroversion is favored by the scene, not the rational-legal language of discussion and consent.

The prevailing social pattern when talking person-to-person about possible sex is that explicit sexual desire is never directly expressed, until the situation has evolved non-verbally to the proper point; any violation of this tacit rule gets a negative reaction.

The main exception is in commercial sex work, talk between prostitutes and prospective clients (Elizabeth Bernstein,

Temporarily Yours

). But even here, the initial steps of negotiation are surprisingly round-about. Sex work illustrates a pattern found more generally in social stratification: low-class street prostitutes are most blatant in verbally offering sex; high-class prostitutes or “escorts” play out the girlfriend experience (GFE in advertisements) minimizing explicit negotiations in order to set a non-commercial atmosphere.

The most explicit sexual talk is in scenes dominated by males, not only because they control violence but because they are at the center of the carousing, “where the action is.”

This is the pattern in unpoliced

lower-class black inner city ghettos, where groups of dominant males-- both teenage gang members, and some adult men-- fling sexual banter at girls and attractive women, and humiliate those who object. [Jody Miller,

Getting Played

]

This fits the sociological pattern of more blatant sexual talk lower in the class hierarchy. But it isn't the whole explanation, since upper-middle class fraternities resemble lower-class gangs, except that they have the money for their own club house, and do not need to engage in street crime for income. Whether in tribal societies or enclaves in modern ones, a hyper-sexualized pattern of blatantly exploiting women occurs where the power center is a "men's house" that is also the ceremonial center of the community.

In the gender-integrated middle and upper classes, much sexual talk is tabooed even when it has nothing to do with consent.

Circumstances are rare in which persons can say directly to another: “How big is your penis?” or “You’ve got really great tits.” In the talk regime of liberal late 20th/ early 21st century, such talk would be considered over the top, if not called “politically incorrect,” “sexist,” or actually resulting in formal charges.

Socially constructed age limits

The other part of “consenting adults” is the age limitation. We take this for granted, as all customs generally are. But it is palpably constructed by social regimes, as we can easily see by comparing laws and customs in different historical periods. In this area, instead of a post-Freudian trend of increasing sexual liberation, sexual repressiveness has historically increased.

The strongest contrast is sex in tribal societies. One of the most detailed is Malinowski’s ethnography of the Trobriand Islands north of Australia. The Trobrianders have almost the opposite of the official American position (that adults are sexual and children are sexless, unless adults impose sex upon them). In this tribe, childhood is the time for unrestrained sex; whereas adults are expected to settle down and devote themselves to work.

Both girls and boys flaunt their sexual activity; both sexes go off on group sex-seeking expeditions; both show off marks of love-bites and scratches on the skin as proud tokens of sexual passion. This happens almost exclusively among what modern Americans legally define as children.

Among the Sambia tribe of Papua New Guinea, there is a homosexual version (Herdt,

Guardians of the Flutes

). The normal life-course pattern is for an adolescent boy to become the sexual partner of a young man, the older initiating the younger into sex simultaneously with the mysteries of the warrior men’s house. It is not lifetime homosexuality but a stage of age-graded promotion. The boy is shown the sacred flutes and also taught to suck the man’s penis and swallow the sperm, religiously interpreted as giving manhood. As William Graham Sumner said, the social mores can make anything legitimate.

A similar pattern existed in ancient Greece. Young men of the upper classes, in the long wait for marriage to upper class women (who were snapped up very young by older men), had love affairs with boys of their same social class-- preferably adolescents before the beard and pubic hair had grown. These were genuinely passionate love-affairs that would be recognizable today, except that young males rather than females set the ideal of bodily beauty. The ideal eventually became transferred to the female body, once Greek and Roman women became more emancipated. [Dover,

Greek Homosexuality;

Keuls,

Reign of the Phallus

]

This is a striking reversal of modern homosexuality, which is legitimate among adults but harshly penalized across age lines. For the ancient Greeks, homosexual relations among adult men was considered ludicrous; and anal sex-- the predominant form of modern male homosexual practice [Laumann et al. 1994]-- was regarded only as a humiliating punishment.

What can we get out of these comparisons other than that societies change and can decree anything is right and wrong?

Sex between adults and “children”-- generally defined by the cutting point of age 18-- is now labeled child sexual abuse. It is the most stigmatized of contemporary crimes. The rationalized argument is that the child has no power of consent, and that any adult must automatically be considered as taking advantage of them. This is a legal judgment, not a sociological one.

Where sociological evidence does exist is for the pattern that children who have had sex with adults-- victims of child abuse-- have many more life problems. [Finkelhor 1986] They have more drug use and alcohol excess; more unstable marriages and sexual partnerships; they are more likely to become victims of spousal abuse and violence; to have more trouble with education and jobs. The data analyses do not always control very well for confounding factors, such as lower social class and broken family structure; but on the whole, one can make out a sociological case why child sexual abuse is a very bad thing in its consequences.

Social shame causes the damage

There is one major problem: what is the causal mechanism? One might assume that a child who has sex with an adult feels traumatized; but this is not always the case. Sometimes the adult uses force, but in many cases the adult is a parent or close relative, often when the opposite-sex spouse is absent, and the child gets an early sense of intimacy and initiation into adult sexual privileges.

The mechanism that causes the trauma, most typically, is

shame

.

Shame produced by the reaction of the larger society, shame transmitted to the child by having to keep the sexual relationship secret. Shame and humiliation when the case comes to official notice; even bureaucratic policies to keep such cases secret (as far as the child’s identity is concerned) have the effect of segregating the child in an atmosphere where the secrecy is itself a mark of shame. This is shown in studies of juvenile facilities where children in such cases are segregated; and where a culture of precocious sexuality is further enhanced, since the one thing these kids have over others is more sexual experience, and they share it among their peers.

Social labeling theory has been applied to explaining mental illness, retardation, and numerous other things. The theory has not always held up when controls are applied to the data. But in the case of the life-long effects of being labeled a victim of child abuse, the labeling process is by far the strongest explanation of the debilitating consequences.

As social psychologist/family therapists Thomas Scheff and Suzanne Retzinger have shown, shame is the master motive of social control. Even tiny episodes of shame from broken attunement in a conversation bring hurt reactions; and if the shame is not overtly expressed and resolved, but hidden away (by embarrassment, by shame about being ashamed) it comes out in long-term destructive rage, against self and others. In my own theory of successful and unsuccessful Interaction Rituals [Collins 2004], disattunement and its concomitant shame lead to difficult social relationships; to loss of emotional energy, and instead to a cycle of depression, passiveness, and interactional failure.

Via the shame mechanism, it is possible to explain why many sexual relationships between adults and children result in very negative life consequences for the children as they grow up.

Many sexual relationships, not all of them. We know that because of societies like tribal New Guinea and ancient Greece, where adult-child sex was honorable and celebrated, not regarded as shameful at all. In those societies, it had no negative consequences.

The purpose of this discussion is not to make sexual policy; but here is a point where sociological theory suggests what is being done wrong, and what could be done to solve it. The negative consequences of adult/child sex could be eliminated if society stopped treating it as shameful.

Who Can Touch Who When?

The formula “between consenting adults” has similar limitations in explaining the tacit social norms about touching another person.

Consider the range of touches that exist in our society, whether commonplace, restricted, or forbidden:

-- shaking hands

-- patting on the shoulder (usually clothed)

-- kisses of all varieties: air kisses, cheek kisses, gentleman-kissing-lady’s-hand, kissing the Pope’s ring, lip kisses, tongue kisses, tongue-to-genital kisses

Notice, apropos of consenting adults, hardly anyone ever asks, “Can I kiss you?”

(although social consent is explicit in the traditional wedding ceremony, with its climax “You may now kiss.”) When persons kiss, and what kind of kiss it is, is a tacit, unspoken part of a particular kind of social relationship. If it is the wrong social relationship, or the wrong kiss, there are repercussions. This is a sociological rule for all forms of touching.

Similarly with hugs. The style has palpably changed in American society, with a big shift in the 1970s towards much more hugging-- not necessarily spontaneous, because it has become so strongly expected in particular situations. Take a look at the polite hugs which are now de rigueur in social gatherings of the higher classes-- hugs around the shoulders, leaning forward, avoiding full body contact. In the 1940s, an enthusiastic hug consisted in grasping the other person’s arms with both hands, above the elbows-- more enthusiasm shown by more body contact, within the limitations of the time. The ritual of sports celebrations (victories; home-runs crossing the plate) has shifted from merely verbal, to hand-shaking, to the now-required full-body pile-on.

It is notable that body contact among American men is more extensive the more violent it is; swinging high-fives, forearm smashes, chest bumps, pile-ons are more favored than gentle contact, probably because the violence sends the message that it isn’t sexual.

Historical comparison helps explain the meanings of body contact vary. In traditional societies such as Arabs, it was common for groups of men in public to walk along holding hands or linking arms. Similarly, women in traditional societies linked arms in public.

It was an explicit show of group tie-signs. It had nothing sexual about it; it expressed the politics of the situation when kin-groups and other close solidarities were all-important. As modern societies have become more individualized, tie-signs such as hand-holding or linking arms have narrowed in meaning, explicitly confined to sexual ties. It is the same with the decay of old kissing rituals like the French official who kisses the recipient on both cheeks after pinning on a medal.

In our sexually liberated age, many bodily gestures are restricted, because the default setting is to take them as sexual.

Four causal mechanisms that control sex

[1] Sexual property regimes

[2] Sexual markets

[3] Sexual domination and counter-mobilization

[4] Sexual distraction and sexual ugliness

These mechanisms, in one degree or another, have existed in every society.

What varies is the strength of the ingredients that go into each mechanism.

[1]

Sexual property regimes

Sexual property is present wherever there is jealousy. It is analogous to property over a thing, or more exactly, property over behavior-- like a professional athlete signing a contract that requires certain kinds of performance on the field and prohibits other behavior in the off season.

Sexual property is the right to touch someone else’s body sexually. Like other forms of legal property, it takes many forms: sometimes the rules are elaborate and restrictive, sometimes not; sometimes it is a permanent, life-time contract, sometimes breakable (e.g. by divorce), sometimes very short-term indeed (e.g. a half hour deal with a prostitute or an overnight with an escort).

The forms of sexual property have changed historically. But despite movements of sexual liberation, it has not gone away.

The gay liberation movement has coincided with a great deal of private fighting over sexual jealousies-- more commonly among male homosexuals than females [Blumstein and Schwartz 1983].

Legitimating a particular form of sex does not mean turning it into open access.

What determines the forms sexual property has taken? Most important are changes in the political power of the family.

The most blatant and restrictive forms of sexual property existed in patrimonial households-- roughly speaking, the medieval pattern where big households with their own warriors were the backbone of the state.

Important households were tied together by marriage politics. Women were treated as tokens to exchange with other important families, so they had no choice in their own sexuality. Any incursion into the sexual property of the household was regarded as a combination of rape and treason, with both parties punishable, sometimes by spectacularly violent death. This is the background for Romeo-and-Juliet romances, and for real-life versions in places like Saudi Arabia, Kurdistan, and Pakistan. A royal princess can be assassinated, and brothers can stone a sister to death for sex or mere flirtation with an outsider to the clan. [Cooney 2014]

The era of the patrimonial household upheld a double standard, technically unilateral sexual property: males controlled females as sexual property to be used for political alliance-making, but not vice versa. The big historical changes in sexual property go in either direction from this medieval pattern-- backwards towards tribal societies, and forward to the modern state.

Tribal societies like those described by Malinowski and Margaret Mead, and that greeted sailors in Polynesia during the 19th century, seemed like sexual paradises to people from the modern West. The reason was that their politics were extremely rudimentary. Where there were no strong military coalitions, and nothing like a warrior class living in castles or big households, marriage alliances were not very important. In very simple societies without class differences in wealth, divorces were extremely easy. Sex was not politicized and therefore left up to individual discretion. Jealousies were personal and not backed up by group forces. Sexual property was ephemeral.

Coming forward historically from the Romeo-and-Juliet world toward our own is the rise of the bureaucratic state. Governments acquired their own armies and tax-collecting machinery. Households became more private and their sexual affairs depoliticized. This set the stage for the shift to the private marriage market.

[2]

Sexual markets

A market exists whenever there are numbers of actors who want something and have to find someone else to trade with to get it. Markets can range from many competitors to virtually none; the more competition, the more each individual must be concerned about the “price” for what they are buying or offering. This structure exists whether its participants recognize it consciously or not. The price can be in money, but it can be in other things too-- sexual attractiveness, subservience, social status, even love. In fact a bundle of all these things has become the preferred way that people find sexual partners in the modern era of the private sexual marketplace.

The ideal of marrying for love came into existence in European societies around the turn of the 1800s. It was called the “Romantic” era because so many writers made a theme out of love affairs defying social convention and expressing the individual’s wild, uncontrolled passions. The literary ideal reflected a real change. Parents gradually stopped controlling their children’s choice of partners. In one respect this felt like an era of freedom, but it also meant that young people were thrown into a marriage market they had to negotiate for themselves.

A market is freedom but it is also constraint. The freedom is to make choices. The constraint of a market is that you do not necessarily get what you want, at the price you would like to

offer. The romantic image is that love happens like magic, a meeting of two persons with perfectly matched desires; it scorns social differences and mere material things like inheritance and money. In reality, the love ideal came along with the market of who can offer what. Many persons may desire a very beautiful, sexually arousing partner, but s/he may not find you sufficiently attractive in return. Other things get thrown into the mix: today not so much inheritance, but a good job and earning capacity.

Material things become part of

romancing, in the form of treating, paying for dinners and entertainment, gifts, not to mention the degree of attractiveness one can muster by one’s clothing and grooming.

Viviana Zelizer has shown there is no clear gulf between purely sentimental considerations and material offerings; even if the latter are ignored in the ideology of love and sexual passion, they exist in a semi-conscious underground of bargaining, an almost Freudian repression of the sexual market itself from polite consciousness.

We don’t care about somebody’s social background, and assert that all that matters is whether we really like each other. We can take this attitude with a fair degree of success because in fact what we like about another person is their cultural tastes and their social personality, and liking consists of fitting together people who find their manners match. It is not surprising to sociologists that the prevailing pattern is homophily-- personal ties with someone similar to oneself on as many dimensions as possible. And this applies to ties of all degrees of permanence: from long-term marriage down to passing affairs. In fact, the closer the homophily, the longer the relationship is likely to last.

Affairs across big social gaps do happen, but they are also more likely to break up. The shift during the last century from divorce-proof lifetime marriage, to serial monogamy, to cohabitation without getting married, to hookups, has not affected the dynamics of sexual markets. In none of these long-term or short-term relationships is it irrelevant who are the competitors, and competition always affects what one needs to offer in order to find a partner.

Sexual repression inside a sexual market

The idea of a sexual market makes it sound like everything is very blatant, but on the whole modern sexual markets repress the overt expression of sexual desires. The more people who are actively out there on the market looking for partners, whether for the evening or for a lifetime, the more likely it is that any particular person will encounter rejections. Experienced individuals in such markets-- those who often go to nightclubs, or to parties, mixers, conferences, dances, dating services, you name it-- generally get to know their own value from the way they are treated by others. Very attractive individuals become very picky-- in part because they can afford to be, in part because they are overwhelmed by advances, most of which they scorn.

A very beautiful young woman of my acquaintance complains that she is constantly being stared at by strangers, who she regards as completely boring.

Of course: by her standards, she can do much better. Interview data show the same thing [Gardner,

Passing By

]. This is a main reason why persons at the top of the sexual market tend to pair off with each other.

Homophily is everywhere. Systematic observations of persons who are together on streets and public places (my own research), shows that pairs and small groups tend to be similar on every dimension, including clothing style, physical size, and attractiveness-- i.e. they have sorted themselves by cultural capital and social class, but also by their positions in sexual markets.

Women tend to be friends with women of similar attractiveness, because they have similar backstage issues.

An open sexual market represses overt expression of sexual desire for several reasons. One reason why people very rarely say something like “I’d like to have sex with you,” is that most of the time they will be rejected. The target of the advance may not at all be a prude, but simply someone higher in the sexual market. And rejection is not only a downer in its own right, but it also tends to publicize one’s own level of sexual un-attractiveness. Paradoxically, the more open the sexual market, the more individual-level psychological pressure exists to avoid exposing one’s own sexual desires. The expression of desire risks a negative judgment about one’s market position.

Thus the persons who are most open in expressing their sexuality tend to be among those who are most sexually attractive.

The expression of sexual desire itself becomes stratified in a time of sexual openness.

sexual ranking at IMF meeting

[3]

Sexual domination and counter-mobilization

Sex is a potential site for conflict and domination. Some feminist theorists have asserted that sex is always a form of domination, or at least heterosexuality always is. In social science, “always” is a dangerous term, since variations spread across the spectrum, and it is more useful to look for the causal conditions rather than an alleged constant. In some arenas (such as prisons), homosexual sex is more frequently the target of coercive practices. [O'Donnell 2004]

Since the aim of this article is causal explanation rather than protest and policy, let us ask the question: what settings produce the most sexual domination, both coercive and indirect? And what conditions mobilize social action against sexual domination?

Indirect sexual domination is implicit in some kinds of sexual property, especially in the patrimonial household politics already discussed. In those settings, sexual violence mostly comes out when the informal controls are challenged.* Modern sexual markets have probably increased the historical incidence of some kinds of sexual coercion, since date rape could hardly exist in societies where there was no dating, and fraternity party rapes could not exist before the era of co-ed schooling.

* This doesn’t inevitably happen.

Cooney [2014] shows that the weaker the clan’s political control and the more the family lives in modern urban conditions, the more likely they are to let off the culprits from their tribal code. When they can keep the sexual defection of a daughter or son secret, it is often indulged; but when it comes out in the ethnic community, the family may be goaded to act violently to protect their reputation.

There are at least five distinct causal pathways of rape (date rape; serial stranger rape; carousing zone rape; political rape; rape in the course of another crime.)

I will put aside the topic of the causes of rape for fuller treatment in another post.

Here I will concentrate on two arenas where opportunities for sexual domination have changed, and where counter-movements have mobilized against them. My analysis focuses on the theme we have been pursuing, what causes sexual repression.

The two arenas are age restrictions on sexual contact, and restrictions at work.

We have already seen that age limits on sexuality have grown historically. They were virtually non-existent in most tribal societies. In patrimonial household politics, child sexuality was promoted when political marriages were arranged at a young age. The category of childhood is a modern construction, at least in the sense of a social category backed up by law. Of course medieval people recognized that children were sometimes too small for adult activities, but there were no rigid dividing lines; what children did was determined by their particular capacities and the political maneuvers that took place around them. For centuries in Japan, children were put on the throne so that they could be manipulated by regents, often from the family of the child-Emperor’s wife; and child sexuality was encouraged precisely because political influentials wanted an heir from their line.

What created the sharp dividing lines that separate childhood from adulthood, legally as well as moralistically, was the rise of modern bureaucracy. The power of the household was reduced by the bureaucratic state. The state began to impose requirements for children to be educated in a bureaucratic school system; labor laws were created, under a variety of influences including both labor and humanitarian movements, which restricted or prohibited employment under particular ages. States have increasingly penetrated households; at first (starting in Europe in the 1700s and 1800s) this was done to enroll the population for military conscription, and for taxation; approaching our own times, for the purposes of social welfare, public health, equal opportunity, prevention of child abuse, and a growing list of causes.

Bureaucratization means setting out formal rules and keeping records. The rules are designed to disregard individual circumstances and lump everyone into abstract and easily measurable categories. The growth of mass education has placed increasing emphasis on age-appropriate activities, as

laws have mandated education for lengthening stretches of everyone’s lifetime.

Schools in medieval times, and up through the 19th century (as in rural schools in America), generally lumped together children of very different ages; they all learned in the same classroom, with the abler ones moving through faster at their own pace. (For instance, Sir Francis Bacon went to Cambridge University from age 12

to 14, tagging along with his older brother; he entered law school at age 15, but soon went off on an informal apprenticeship as secretary to an ambassador. This cursory formal education did not prevent Bacon from becoming the most learned man in early 17th century England.) By the early 20th century, schools were moving students through rigidly according to age-graded classes; skipping grades was allowed as an exceptional policy, but both formal and informal pressures were against it.

It was in this context that laws controlling the sexual behavior of children-- now a strictly age-graded category, with no concern for individual variation-- became formalized in law. Children are now defined by their age, not by their capabilities. Social movements have been mobilized, since the mid-19th century, to protect children, as seen through eyes and social values of the reformers. Some of these movements were notorious for imposing the values of puritanical Protestants upon immigrant families in American cities; others have dropped the religious themes, and put themselves forward in the name of humanitarian, scientific, or medical ideals. Because resources for mobilizing social movements have continuously expanded in the 20th and 21st centuries, movements to control the lives of age-defined persons (“children”) have become increasingly influential.

There is no natural, culture-free reason why persons above the age of 18 should be regarded as sexual predators against those below 18. Since boyfriend-girlfriend relationships are typically between males a year or two older than females, there comes a life-passage when what was acceptable at least informally in these age-segregated enclaves becomes illegal. Increasing pressures on courts to impose uniform penalties, has combined with the successful efforts of social movements to punish all sexual offenders not only with prison but by labeling and segregating them for the rest of their lives. The results include instances where the sexual activities of boyfriends with girlfriends end up in the public roster of sex offenders as indistinguishable from the most violent rapist. Young female teachers in their 20s who have affairs with teenage boys (probably the most sexually mature ones) are treated as if they were raping little children. The spread of surveillance cameras, where videos are routinely monitored by bureaucratic authorities and handed over to prosecutors bent on increasing their conviction rate, is one more feature of today’s impersonal organization intruding on private lives to enforce laws that are oblivious to individual differences.

Genuinely humane persons might recognize that the category of statutory rape should be replaced by more flexible consideration of circumstances.

But it is characteristic of a bureaucratic society that once rules are written into laws and standard organizational practices, unintended consequences merely become normal. Peeling back such laws and procedures is more difficult than the flurries of scandal and melodrama that first enacted them.

From the high ground of sociological analysis, we can summarize: the combination of modern age-graded bureaucracy and the ease of mobilizing social movements is a new source of sexual repression, rolling back waves of post-Freudian liberalization.

The other arena of new sexual controls is work.

Gender integration of women into formerly male occupations increased opportunities for sexual contact. The result has been two kinds of controversies. One is that men can take advantage of women working with them, either by superior force or by rank. Counter-movements have mobilized, and rules to prevent such victimization have grown, both within organizations and under government legal pressure. Since sexual advances are also made in an indirect manner, rules to control sexual domination have expanded to a wide variety of activities under the category of “sexual harassment.” One result has been that the loosening of sexual talk that happened from the 1930s through the 1980s, has been reversed. Whether this is good or bad from the point of view of men and women in the world of work, is no doubt mixed. One conclusion is clear: post-Freudian sexual liberation-- although still strong in popular culture and in the high arts-- has been turned back to a Neo-Victorian standard of official prudishness.

[4]

Sexual distraction and sexual ugliness

This is a topic rarely discussed. It is more universal than our current movements for and against particular kinds of sexuality. Even if sexual domination were eliminated, this issue would remain.

Sexual arousal can be overwhelming, obsessive, shutting everything else out. This leads to practical norms to limit sexual arousal.

Why is there a taboo against sex in public? Even in the most liberated arenas and sexual scenes of modern society, it is rare for people to actually engage in sexual intercourse in public, as well as other sexual acts. Anthropologists and sociologists [Ford and Beach 1951; Reiss 1986] have noted that with all the variety of sexual regimes around the world, there is one constant:

sexual intercourse almost always takes place in privacy.

The exceptions help pin down the sociological rule. Even in the most liberated circles, there are restrictions. Swingers groups (AKA wife-swapping), popular in the 60s and 70s, developed a rule: couples only, no unaccompanied singles [Gilmartin 1978].

The exchange had to be complete; everyone had to take part. Swinging was breaking the rule of monogamous sexual property; but it had to be equal-- both man and woman got the same license as their partner. Another rule: no meeting illicitly on the outside. What happens in swinging, stays in swinging!

If they were all going to have sex together, it was going to be in one place: group privacy, no public allowed, no side-involvements.

Studies of communes in the 1960s and 70s (Zablocki 1980; Martin and Fuller 2004)

found that the longevity of the commune was inversely related to its sexual openness.

Communes that strictly banned sex (especially religious communes) or communes composed of married or monogamous cohabiting partners lasted longest. Communes that had a policy of free love-- anyone can have sex with anyone, no questions asked-- were the most volatile. Why? In part, because their idealistic rule overlooked the sexual market and sexual attractiveness.

On one side, the men vied to have sex with the best-looking women, hence squeezed each other out. * On the other side, women sex stars were overwhelmed, and played their favorites.

And there was the snake in the garden, social rank:

a charismatic commune leader hogged most of the sex; and swingers groups among businessmen tended to fall into the pattern of the younger men with good-looking wives swapping with older men and fading wives, a trade-off of rank for sex, or sex for promotion.

*The same was observed in the bathhouse scene of gay sex in the 1980s and 90s, when the overt rule was anything goes, but in fact bathhouse participants queued up in order of personal attractiveness to get the most attractive men.

Although there is a fantasy ideal of orgiastic sex, it is structurally difficult, if not impossible. Orgies are depicted on ancient Greek drinking-bowls; but what we know about these scenes is that the group of upper-class men hired professional prostitutes for the orgy. [Keuls 1985]

Even with this commercial dominance, the border seemed to be enforced: everyone present took part in the orgy, closed to the world outside.

To repeat the question: why the taboo against public sex? The answer is that sexual arousal is distracting, it is contagious. There are rapes on record where men wandering around come upon a couple making love on a deserted beach, and

intrude themselves into the sex. Gang rapes often get started in the same way, without plan, sheer arousal-driven piling on.

The answer is a sociological transmutation of Freud. Sex is too strong a drive for people to let it go untrammeled-- which is to say, to let it go outside of privacy that limits it to just two people, or in rare circumstances, a larger but equally circumscribed group. This continues to be the pattern of Vegas-style all-girl junkets for sexual adventure. Pictures posted on Internet sites typically show a group of women of which one is having sex with a well-built man while the others watch; the partying atmosphere is displayed in their fancy clothes and their drinking. It remains a private group enclave, where everyone present is a potential sexual participant.

Sexual distraction helps explain the proliferation of sexually-inhibiting rules in the contemporary work place. In addition to the threats of sexual dominance, there is also the possibility that sexual arousals may take over and pull people from their work. It is hard to estimate realistically the strength of this threat, given that most organizations are not working at full capacity, and ideal efficiency is always hard to estimate.

A hint is that sexual relationships at work are tolerated when they do not upset the organizational hierarchy or blur its chain of command.

On the Eastern front of World War II, it was common for Soviet commanders to take “combat wives”-- secretaries or telephone operators pressed into service in the manpower shortage, who became the sexual property of the highest-ranking officer for the duration. There was little push-back about the system. There are indications similar things happened on the Western front, at least among the Americans (such as the C-in-C Eisenhower having an affair with his chauffeur). *

But organizational sex only functioned when women did not upset the hierarchy. As women started making careers of their own, even vying for CEO in their own right, the stories that circulated in the 1970s of fast-track young women having affairs with CEOs gave way to the current standard of sexual restraint.

*

It is striking that the three most famous Presidents of mid-20th century-- FDR, Ike, and JFK-- all had illicit affairs, well-known to insiders and journalists, but no scandals were launched against them. Ari Adut

(On Scandal)

notes that in a more puritanical culture of polite discussion ("all the news that is fit to print," in the New York Times' now-outdated slogan) scandals don't happen because it is improper to talk about them in public. Bill Clinton's blow-job affair with a White House intern happened in the late 1990s when the public culture of sex was at its most blatant. Sex scandals have become part of the normal political repertoire for bringing down politicians and government officials.

A notorious example of what happens when sexual partying gets into organizational duties is the Abu Ghraib scandal. [Mestrovic 2006] The American guards carried out their torturing of prisoners with forced nudity and sexual humiliation, and in an emotional tone of joking and laughter. The presence of young women guards in the gender-integrated US Army-- one of whom got pregnant by a leader of the revels-- was a major ingredient in the partying atmosphere. Politicians supporting the guards argued it was nothing more than the fun of a fraternity initiation.

It was so much fun that they couldn't help sending out the photos that implicated them.

Bottom line:

sexual arousal upsets organizational hierarchies. The solution has been to keep it rigidly under control.

The hypothesis this gives rise to is the opposite of post-Freudian liberation:

the more gender equality in the future, the more Neo-Victorian repression in the realm of work and politics.

Sexual ugliness

There is another dimension of how sex disrupts everyday life. Since almost all depictions of sex are tittilating, this one runs against the ideological grain:

Sex is often ugly.

Freud himself said, the sight of the genitals is not beautiful, although it is exciting. This is confirmed by photographic evidence. There are exceptions, but these help tell the sociological story.

The history of pornographic magazines in the 20th century provides evidence on how sexuality is depicted in styles varying from idealized to ugly. The first successful magazines (

Playboy,

founded 1953;

Penthouse

, founded 1965) projected an upper-class image, a fantasy of sexual luxury.

Playboy

reached a peak monthly circulation in 1972, at 7 million copies-- for a time it had the second biggest circulation of any magazine of any kind except

TV Guide

.

Penthouse

peaked in 1984 at 5 million.

Put this in context of the so-called Pubic Wars:

Playboy

had pioneered in showing beautiful nudes and semi-nudes, including stars like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, featuring bare breasts and pin-up leg shots. Under competition from

Penthouse

, by the early 1970s

Playboy

was showing similar women, in luxurious lingerie and decorator interiors, with a hint of pubic hair. Peak circulation in 1972 was early on in this process of genital strip-tease. By 1973-75,

Penthouse

was showing the same kind of luxurious bedroom scenes with women’s legs starting to come apart, revealing the interior of the crotch-- through a drawn-out sequence of disguising through shadows, fingers, and semi-revealing panties.

Penthouse

soft porn photography was famous for the heavy use of flowers, sometimes to set the atmosphere, sometimes to lend cover or suggest shape to the genitals.

Playboy

followed suit for a while at a discrete distance.

But as

Penthouse

in the late 1970s and early 80s printed increasingly clear pictures of genitals with outer labia parted and then inner labia aroused,

Playboy

began to pull back

to its older pubic-tease standard of its greatest success. [

Wikipedia articles; Venusobservations.blogspot.co.uk/pubic-wars

]

Although

Penthouse

followed the pathway of increasingly edgy photos, this was not the formula for greatest market success. By the 1990s,

Penthouse

had lost much of its circulation, as well as virtually all of its mainstream advertisers. Like most sex magazines of the time, its advertising revenue shrank to telephone sex services. It continued to push the edge as a glossier version of hard-core smaller-circulation magazines, now showing

vaginal penetration as well as oral sex on both male and female genitals.

Penthouse

with its money could still present explicit porn with better looking models, high-quality photographers, and luxury settings.

In contrast,

Playboy

in the 90s held to its stronger market niche of extremely beautiful, clean-cut models in slightly provocative nude poses. This was the luxury-sex market, on the conventional edge of respectability, where

Playboy

could get the most beautiful models by offering fees as high as $10,000 in the late 1970s (equivalent to $45,000 today)

for the monthly centerfold. Competing

magazines like

Gallery

in the 1990s offered $2,500 for the monthly winner of amateur nude photo contests featured in the magazine, $25,000 for the yearly winner. But it all went down hill. By 2003,

Penthouse

went bankrupt, then re-emerged with a modest circulation of 300,000.

Playboy

too was down, but held on at a respectable 3 million circulation as of 2006. The 40-year sequence is an experiment showing the greater attractiveness of idealized sex over blatant sex.

Another rendition of this history just says the porn magazine business was destroyed by sex on the Internet. This is a factor, but it doesn’t alter the point that blatant sex doesn’t sell so well.

Playboy

, the most conservative sex magazine, survived in reasonable shape, and was joined by new magazines like

Maxim

, playing for the niche of idealizing a respectably sexy life-style of successful men. Hugh Hefner’s celebrity-laden Hollywood partying style was the biggest attraction, not the amount of explicit sexual display. The most blatant sex magazines were already declining before the Internet

became dominant. A further peculiarity of Internet porn is that most of it is posted for free, by amateurs showing themselves off to each other. This resembles a private enclave of sex cultists, like swingers in a previous generation.

Compare now the sex mags that deliberately aimed at a non-elite, real-life, working-class view of sex.

Hustler

, founded in 1974, rocketed to a circulation of 3 million by the end of the 70s. It never rose above third place, but it did open a market for more blatant sexual display: what publisher Larry Flynt bragged about as “showing pink,”

i.e. fully lighted photos of open labia and vaginas. It should be noted, though, that

Hustler

during its early high-circulation years stayed closer to the

Playboy/Penthouse

style of luxurious settings, often with quite beautiful models. It parted company most blatantly in its cartoon features, rather juvenile satire of the scatological kind, toilet-bowl humor in pictures, with scuzzy-looking derelict characters. This was in sharp contrast to

Playboy

’s cartoons, which tended to feature stereotypical old roué millionaires with willing bimbos and trophy brides. The social class ambience is explainable in the trajectories of the publishers: Hefner started in the sophisticated literary men’s magazine

Esquire

, Flynt as promoter of a string of roadside strip clubs.

As

Hustler

got more blatant, more working-class in appearance, and lost its idealized

settings for pornographic displays, it lost ground in the market faster than its rivals. By the early 2000s, it was hanging on below 500,000 circulation, and offered $1500 for the monthly amateur photo winner.

Even cheaper-style presentations of sex were on the market by the late 1980s and 90s, pioneering photos of actual sexual intercourse (rather than the genital-hiding couples features in classic soft-porn

Penthouse

that resembled body-double sex scenes in Hollywood movies). A useful comparison is

Lips

, which imitated a popular feature in

Hustler

and

Gallery

: amateur nude photo contests, with cash prizes for the winners.

Lips

appeared to print more or less all comers, pushing the edge by concentrating on close-up photos of female genitals in their opened and aroused state. There are no luxurious backgrounds, in fact usually no backgrounds at all (although

Hustler

and

Gallery

amateur photos show that most of them are taken in cheaply furnished working-class homes or rural outdoors). Such magazines are relatively limited circulation, sold primarily in non-corporate, independent liquor stores and mom-and-pop markets-- lower class all the way around. This is sheer un-idealized genital sex, and one effect is to show how often genitals are rather ugly.

By what standard can one make such a judgment? Beautiful depictions of human bodies are very symmetrical, with clear simple geometry; long graceful curves, proportions that have been calculated as a “golden mean,” inflections of curves that gracefully change direction and convey a geometry of three dimensional solids. Art instruction books tell how to draw a beautiful woman by staying very closely in form; especially drawing the face with as few lines as possible, highlighting the curves of jaw, cheekbones, lips, eyes. Superfluous and complicated lines (not only wrinkles, but contorted body lines) are avoided. Obviously this is not the standards of abstract and expressionist art, but it is the standard of success in erotic art from the pin-up era through the peak of

Playboy/ Penthouse/ Gallery

market sales.

As one can see in close-up depictions of genitals, and especially labia in an aroused state, they do not often fit the criteria of graceful curves. Aroused genitals are often asymmetrical, full of bulges and pockets; colors when engorged with blood range through purple, brown and grey. This is not universally true, but classically beautiful genitals are probably rare, judging from the array of commercial porn. The 1970s era of the Pubic Wars, when photos at most showed inner labia peeking through the dark hair of outer labia, were piquant, but close-ups of hairy crotches themselves generally are more of an jumble than as aesthetic pattern. This is so even in photos of women chosen for their overall beauty.

In collections of amateur photos of ordinary working-class women, frequently what can be seen of the rest of the woman’s body is flabby, wrinkled, boney, or sometimes with skin eruptions. (This last is completely excluded in magazine porn with professional models, who are selected for their good skin, indeed as the sine qua non of every kind of modeling.) Surprisingly often the fingers and nails shown in crotch shots are unmanicured, even cracked, bandaged, or dirty. One conclusion is that the people submitting these photos (usually the husband or sexual partner of the model) find this an object of desire that outweighs any aesthetic considerations. True enough; these photos come from the lower end of the sexual marketplace, but individuals match up by desire as best they can at that level too. This underscores the point that successful porn depicts a fantasy

of the upper end of the sexual marketplace, where a fantasy of wealth matches a fantasy of perfectly sexy bodies.

And even under those conditions, female genitals are not on the whole highly aesthetic.

The same is true of male genitals. Not to say that male genitals are incapable of being idealized, like Michelangelo’s statue of David; and porn photos sometime show classically beautiful male bodies and even penises with classic proportions. The bigger circulation sex magazines started showing male genitals relatively late, in the 1990s when female genitals had been shown for about 20 years. Why this is the case has not been sociologically explained. Even the most blatant of the sex mags,

Hustler

, instructed amateur photographers that it would not accept photos of erections, although occasionally it printed frontal photos of “well-hung studs”

in the amateur section. When photos of erections and intercourse started appearing in the 1990s, it became apparent that an erect penis is often bulging with veins, trails off into loose skin, sometimes distended testicles; altogether quite far from the aesthetic criteria of a few smoothly inflected curves. (Depictions of erect penises in ancient pottery and statuary, included ritual door-marking

herms

, clearly idealized penises to an aesthetic standard, since modern porn photos rarely look so pure.)

Bottom line: comparison of un-idealized, naturalistic photos of both male and female genitals indicates that genitals per se are not the most beautiful part of the body; they rarely fit the criteria of symmetry and graceful geometry that many people display in their legs, hips, breasts, arms and faces. To underline the point: genitals are not usually attractive aesthetically, but of course they can be a powerful center of attraction as the target for sexual action.

Comparing the techniques of idealized and un-idealized pornography shows that erotic attractiveness is constructed through the total effect of the body in its setting. Professional photographers at the high point of soft porn popularity in the 1970s showed genitals in the midst of photos posed and manipulated for maximal aesthetic effect and social prestige in the non-genital features of the photo. Luxurious upper-class and fantasy settings. Women with curvy legs, firmly rounded breasts; long beautiful hair, stylishly coiffed; beautiful faces with high cheekbones and full cupid’s bow lips.

Body postures carefully posed to get at the best angles to display the curve of a thigh or a calf, the hang of a breast; awkward poses eliminated in the pile of rushes. In the midst of the picture, increasingly the peep-hole widening on the crotch. But since close-ups of pubic hair and crotch hair are not in themselves aesthetic, photographers position them as accent marks in the total picture; something like beauty-marks, actually skin blemishes that set off the rest of the face. Of course the genitals are the object of erotic interest, in the fantasy of consummating with oral touch or real penetration, but the photo is frozen in the visual moment. Dark pubic hair was especially dramatic for the total aesthetic project; that nuance disappeared with the shaved style that came in the late 90s.

An analogy is depictions of breast nipples and areolas. During the pin-up era of the 1930s through the 50s, both in drawing and photos, artists worried over the question, to nipple or not to nipple, and if so, how distinctly. Large, dark areolas can have a strong effect as an accent mark, making breasts look spectacular when they echo larger curves with concentric ones. But close-ups of breasts tend to zoom in beyond optimal aesthetic distance. Close-up, nipples and areolas are often lumpy and unsymmetrical; this appears to be especially common for women with very large breasts. Since big-breasted women display the strongest distant marker of female form, they tend to be the favorite for lower-class pornography. Here again we see a contradiction between the object of erotic action and optimum aesthetic presentation.

Finally, we should note that erotic photographs are often manipulated post-production. I am not referring here to censoring features like pubic hair by old-fashioned airbrushing, but the opposite-- making bare bodies look sexier. Photos in sex magazines are often printed in enhanced colors, especially a golden light that makes the skin look honey-blonde or coppery. (One sees this in non-erotic photography as well, especially in tourist magazine photos of hotel lobbies.) Comparison with amateur photos shows what needs to be touched up: natural skin color (even of Caucasians) is often a dull white, yellowish or brownish; the vivid hues are added by professionals. Some magazines print pictures both of the amateur photo submission and the results of the professional photo shoot; the same woman generally looks transformed, not only better coiffed and made up, but her whole body comes across as more vivid.

For all these reasons, the more blatant or hard-core the pornography, the less likely it is to be attractive aesthetically. Sexual ugliness is a fact that is widely covered up for most people in everyday life.

Social repression of sexual ugliness

Thus we have another facet of why totally out-front sex is controlled-- by most people themselves. Concern about sexual ugliness is not unconscious Freudian repression, but Goffmanian strategy of self-presentation.

Not to overlook all the changes that have happened historically in how much of their bodies people have displayed publicly. The bedrock limitation I am pointing to here is about people displaying their genitals. This is very rare throughout all societies, except in privacy with a person one is about to have sex with. It has often been noted that what someone looks like does not match very well with how their body feels up close, and that the quality of intercourse diverges widely from how beautiful or not the partner is. The point remains, that the

visual

repression of genital display has been widespread, and will likely continue to be so.

What has varied is displaying the rest of the body. Bodily ugliness has changed a great deal in recent centuries. In the Middle Ages, most of the population were ill-nourished, largely unwashed, often afflicted by skin diseases and other illnesses. Medieval aristocrats regarded the peasants who worked their land as dirty animals, hardly sexual objects. The sexual status of non-elite classes improved as indoor servants became better treated. In the early 20th century, working-class people started becoming much better fed, healthier, and better looking. Upper class persons, especially women, started getting more exercise and developed fitter bodies. This is one reason why shorter clothing became popular, especially in the series of economic booms since WWII. More people can wear things like bikinis (invented in 1946), because more people look better in them. The sexual revolutions of the 20th century have a lot to do with these kinds of improvements in general physical health and bodily attractiveness. If the trend continues, some forms of bodily display will further increase in the future-- but we can expect it will be confined to showing the more attractive parts of the body.

Future Limits of Sexual Repression

Further sexual revolutions in the future are certainly possible. In fact, we have been running at the rate of one sexual revolution every 15 or 20 years, since at least the beginning of the 20th century. Gay marriage is only the latest of the series. What else can happen? Sociological predictions take more than imaginative speculation, and are best made when we have a theory of what causes what.

Sexual property regimes have shifted historically depending upon the political uses of sex for family alliances; male and female incomes and wealth-holding; and the bundling of shared household property with sex and love.

All these generate possessiveness, in the form of jealousy and anger when the existing form of sexual property is violated. Whatever else is bundled with sex may well change in the future, but it seems likely bundling of sex with some kind of property will continue.

Sexual markets exist whenever people have choices of partners; this means competition, rejection, and psychological defenses against rejection. In a sexually liberated era, this is a major reason why most people are not very blatant about offering and asking for sex.

Sexual domination, in an era when it is easy to mobilize social protest movements, typically gives rise to counter-movements that restrict sexuality in arenas like work and government. Ironically, sex becomes more scandalous in an era of gender integration.

A similar process in the future may create new arenas for scandals as discrimination against homosexuality declines. Another possible future is that as social class inequality widens-- and we are rushing down that slope-- the advantages of the wealthier occupations will give more sexual leverage to the upper classes. A version of this exists already in the black lower classes of urban ghettos, where men who have jobs or even just substantial illegal incomes have many women seeking them, and can play the sex market in a cavalier fashion. (See the forthcoming ethnography by Waverly Duck,

No Way Out

.)

Sexual arousal is disruptive of normal routines, and will continue to be confined to enclaves where everyone takes part and outsiders are excluded (the prototype “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas” junket).

The contemporary world is thus a patchwork of different arenas, some of them rigidly policed by political correctness, others blatantly displaying idealized images of sex. But sexual display is safest when it happens at a distance, not in personal relationships but for a mass audience; and when it is wrapped in aesthetic and class markers of eliteness and luxury. In the early years of the 21st century, advertisements in women’s fashion magazines-- especially those depicting the fantasy of a non-existent world of total sophistication-- show models in poses that mimic the soft porn of men’s magazines around the early 1970s.

jewelry ad, 2006

luggage ad, 2006

And the future of sexual ugliness? Further advances in electronic technology might produce virtual reality sex-- not just today’s pictures for masturbation but stimulating brain centers so as to convey the actual feelings of sexual intercourse, combined with idealized images of a beautiful body. Ordinary sexual ugliness would be side-stepped, the sexual market of person-to-person barter turned into a completely commercial market for non-human surrogate experiences. And then what? Social processes don’t go away just because of technology. Counter-movements would probably mobilize, treating virtual-reality brain-stimulation sex as dangerous as heroin. Since people generally enjoy sex most with someone they like, love and family will probably not disappear, although they would have to compete in the market with virtual sex.

In short, there will likely always be some social controls on sex. The Oedipus complex may be far behind us, along with the jealous father internalized as the Superego of the child who has to give up sexual desires for the mother. For reasons Freud could not have foreseen, there will always be some mechanisms of sexual repression.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at

Maren.ink

and

Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

REFERENCES

Adut, Ari. 2008. On Scandal.

Armstrong, Elizabeth A. and Laura T. Hamilton. 2013. Paying for the Party.

Bernstein, Elizabeth. 2007. Temporarily Yours. Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex.

Blumstein, Philip, and Pepper Schwartz. 1983. American Couples.

Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains.

Cooney, Mark. 2014. "Death by family: Honor violence as punishment." Punishment and Society 16. http://pun.sagepub.com/content/16/4/406

Dover, K.J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality.

Finkelhor, David. 1986. A Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse.

Flowers, Amy, 1998. The Fantasy Factory. An Insider’s View of the Phone Sex Industry.

Ford, Clellan and Frank Beach. 1951. Patterns of Sexual Behavior.

Freud, Sigmund. 1916. Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis.

Gardner, Carol Brooks. 1995. Passing By: Gender and Public Harassment.

Gilmartin, Brian. 1978. The Gilmartin Report.

Grazian, David. 2008. On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.

Herdt, Gilbert H. 1994. Guardians of the Flutes.

Keuls, Eva C. 1985. The Reign of the Phallus. Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens.

Laumann, Edward O., John H. Gagnon, Robert T. Michael, and Stuart Michals. 1994. The Social Organization of Sexuality. Sexual Practices in the United States.

Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1929. The Sexual Lives of Savages.

Martin, John Levi and Sylvia Fuller. 2004. "Gendered power dynamics in intentional communities." Social Psychology Quarterly 67: 269-284.

Mestrovic, S. G. 2006. The Trials of Abu Ghraib.

Miller, Jody. 2008. Getting Played: African American Girls, Urban Inequality and Gendered Violence.

O'Donnell, Ian. 2004. "Prison rape in context." British Journal of Criminology 44: 241-255.

Reiss, Ira. 1986. Journey Into Sexuality.

Sanday, Peggy Reeves. 2007. Fraternity Gang Rape.

Scheff, Thomas and Suzanne Retzinger. 1991. Emotions and Violence: Shame and Rage in Destructive Conflicts.

Zablocki, Benjamin. 1980. Alienation and Charisma. A Study of Contemporary American Communes.

Zelizer, Viviana. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy.

TANK MAN AND THE LIMITS OF TELEPHOTO LENSES: OR, HOW MUCH CAN INDIVIDUALS STOP VIOLENCE?

The tank man photo is the most famous image of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement in Beijing. Indeed it is considered one of the most famous photos of the 20th century.

It has become a symbol of human resistance, a lone individual stopping a whole column of tanks. 

What the photo claims to symbolize, however, is only very partially true.

It is not a photo of Tiananmen Square, but of a boulevard nearby.

It was not taken during the crackdown on demonstrators, which took place on June 3 and the following night, but on the quiet morning of June 5, after Tiananmen Square had been cleared and government control had been reestablished in Beijing. And it was not a successful protest. The tanks stopped briefly; two men came into the street and took the protestor away.

The photo was taken by an American newsman, from a hotel balcony 800 meters distant--about half a mile. It was shot through a telephoto lens, like so many news photos of recent decades. This is one of the marvels of modern technology, and a hidden one: how seldom do we stop to think of how the photographer got so close, so near the action where history is made? Compare the equally famous, infinitely shocking photo from South Vietnam 1972 of children running from napalm—where did we think the photographer was standing? 

Telephoto lenses allow us to intrude closely into events that the participants would probably like to keep hidden. It is one of the sharpest differences between our images of the world before about 1960 and the present. The Vietnam War was the first war in history where we could see what it actually looked like. Before then, we had to be content with what officials allowed for patriotic publication, plus (as of World War II) candid shots of soldiers, generally far behind the front lines. And not just for violence in war, but violence in all its peacetime forms, telephoto lenses have brought us first-hand records of how violence really looks. And other forms of conflict, too—the expressions on faces and bodies that give us clues to how conflict plays out, and enable us to cut through the rhetoric and the mythology that have obscured it since humans first began to tell lies about violence.

I would go so far as to say that the telephoto lens, even more than the advent of television, has changed our access to reality. Even more than the camcorder which in 1991 first showed the police beating Rodney King; even more than the ubiquitous mobile phone cameras that now flood the Internet-connected world with images. The reason I make this exorbitant claim is that all the other devices depend on being up close; the telephoto lens zooms in from a great distance. It can go where it is too dangerous or too private for other devices to go. Unlike TV, it gives us photos that are not posed, since no one knows there is a camera to pose for. And it can give photos of great detail—the emotional expressions on faces, the exact postures of bodies, that are so important for a micro-sociologist’s explanation.

The purpose of my writing, however, is not to pick a fight as to which visual technology is best; they all work together to make our times the golden age of visual sociology.

Having extolled telephoto images, I want to raise a caveat about their limits. Taken out of context, they carry the danger of modern myth-making. To see what is distorted and what can be salvaged, let us examine the tank man photo in greater depth.

The Surrounding Context of the Tank Man Photo

The Beijing democracy demonstrations began on April 17, 1989, and went on for 50 days until they were crushed. The tank man photo was taken on day 51. Here I will summarize only the very last days. (More detail on the entire sequence is given in my post, Tipping Point Revolutions and State Breakdown Revolutions: Why Revolutions Succeed or Fail, The Sociological Eye, June 2013.)

Over the 50 days, the size of the crowds at Tiananmen Square rose and fell. After most of the initial enthusiasm had fallen off, on day 28 (May 13), the remaining few hundred militants launched a hunger strike, which recaptured public attention, and brought hundreds of thousands of supporters to Tiananmen. On day 34 (May 19), the Communist elite purged its dissidents and declared martial law, and began to bring troops into Beijing.

The next four days were a showdown in the streets; crowds of residents blocked the army convoys; soldiers rode in open trucks, unarmed-- the regime still trying to use as little force as possible, and also distrustful of giving out ammunition-- and often were overwhelmed by residents. Crowds used a mixture of persuasion and food offerings, and sometimes force, stoning and beating isolated soldiers. On May 24 (day 39), the regime pulled back the troops to bases outside the city. The most reliable army units were moved to the front, some tasked with watching for defections among less reliable units. In another week strong forces had been assembled in the center of Beijing.

Momentum was swinging back the other way. Student protestors in the Square increasingly divided between moderates and militants; by the time the order to clear the Square was given for June 3 (day 49), the number occupying was down to 4000. There was one last surge of violence-- not in Tiananmen Square itself, although the name became so famous that most outsiders think there was a massacre there-- but in the neighborhoods as residents attempted to block the army's movement once again. Crowds fought using stones and gasoline bombs, burning army vehicles and, by some reports, the soldiers inside. In this emotional atmosphere, as both sides spread stories of the other’s atrocities, something on the order of 50 soldiers and police were killed, and 400-800 civilians (estimates varying widely). Some soldiers took revenge for prior attacks by firing at fleeing opponents and beating those they caught. In Tiananmen Square, the early morning of June 4, the dwindling militants were allowed to march out through the encircling troops.

The Tank Man Photo and What It Shows

The Tank Man photo was taken the following morning. The revolutionary crowds had been beaten. Massive arrests were being made, especially of workers, whom the government regarded as far more dangerous than students. Hundreds of thousands of security agents were beginning to spread across the country, picking off suspects one by one, ultimately arresting tens of thousands in the following months. The tipping point had passed, and the regime had clearly won.

What then was the point of the tank man protest?

By his white shirt and dark trousers, we can surmise that he was a government bureaucrat, a class of people whose sympathies were strongly on the side of the protestors. But it is also a category of persons, numerous in all demonstrations, who offer support but do not take part in the actual confrontations with authority.

In virtually all photos of demonstrations and riots everywhere in the world, a small portion of crowd is at the front doing the violence, while most stand at a distance and watch. Very likely tank man had seen or heard about the previous days’ violence, and came forward in the quiet atmosphere to do something to demonstrate his own commitment.

As we can see in the photo, the streets are virtually empty. He has no visible supporters, although a small audience gathered on the sidewalk to watch from a distance. On the other hand, the tank troops too are anonymous, hidden inside their armored stations. The tanks are moving slowly, making a show of force, not an actual military operation.

– One can know this, because the tanks are in column, a parade-like movement; deployed into combat they would go into line. I would surmise that the soldiers are calm; their action has been over for 24 hours or more.

Thus it is a symbolic confrontation: the lone man, respectably dressed in the garb of the urban apparatchik, stepping in front of the column of slow-moving tanks. In that atmosphere, there is little danger of being run over. The lead tank swerved to avoid him, but he kept in its path until it stopped. Very likely the troops had returned to the orders that prevailed during days 34-38, when unarmed troops were sent to assemble in the city as quietly as possible, and had given no resistance when crowds forced them back. On the whole, the regime had used a mixture of appeasing the crowds, waiting for them to dwindle away, and sporadic application of military force. On day 51, they were back into the mode of calm normality. The government machinery was operating again; bureaucratically organized investigations and individual arrests were the regime’s weapon now. The rebellious crowd has its best chance when it is assembled in huge numbers, in an atmosphere of emotional support that flows outward, dangerously lapping at the solidarity of the government apparatus. Now the crowd has dispersed; and it is in this configuration that bureaucratic authority can exercise its unrelenting and comparatively unemotional control.

And that is what happens. Tank man steps in front of the tank column; the lead driver stops; the tank drivers behind him stop because the tank in front stops. Two men in dark suits come and take tank man away.

The column grinds slowly on.

When Does Local Resistance Succeed?

It would have been an unknown incident except for the newsmen in the hotel with the telephoto lenses. Pictures of violence on the previous days were just making their way into Western newspaper and television, so little attention was paid to the exact sequence when things happened. A famous photo showed bicycles crushed in a street where fighting had taken place—and in the absence of photos of actual bodies, these were taken as emblems of how the revolution had been crushed. It was easy to conjure up a scenario of tanks rolling over a crowd of demonstrators. And then, in the midst of this—the heroic image of the man who stopped the tank column. All was not lost: the human individual still prevails.

We are living in the realm of symbolism here, not in the realm of history. Never mind that no one stopped the tanks, or more likely the trucks that rolled over the bicycles and carried troops into the streets where fighting had taken place 36 hours earlier.

It carries a nice message, although only through the more careful retrospect of micro-sociology do we actually see what it is: the violent confrontations between crowds and army on June 3 and the early hours of June 4—confrontations in which violence was used on both sides—did not stop the army. But at the right moment, approached with the tools of non-violence, the army was stopped.

Micro-sociology, above all, attempts to be realistic.

Violence cannot be stopped everywhere. Sometimes force rolls on and crushes everything in its path. But—sometimes violence is stopped. It happens locally, and by persons acting in local conditions.

This is something to build on. What are those conditions?

Comparisons: Pockets of Successful Non-violent Peace-making in Riots

Turn now to the work of Dr. Anne Nassauer, of the Free University, Berlin. Using videos posted on-line from mobile phone cameras, plus GPS maps of streets, charting time-lines from police radio traffic, in short with the whole array of tools now available, she reconstructs protest demonstrations in Germany and the US.

With this cutting-edge media high-tech, she is able to reconstruct the micro-history of protests and to pin-point just when and where a demonstration will turn violent.

On the whole, I should mention, Nassauer finds that most demos stay peaceful, and their peacefulness can prevail even when militant protestors announce in advance that they will use force; or indeed, when police announce a tough crack-down-on-everything policy.

That is to say, whether a protest turns violent or not depends on local and emergent conditions; violence-threatening events can end up peaceful, and peaceful demos can turn violent.

I will not try to summarize here Nassauer’s findings of the several pathways that lead to violence. Let us concentrate on a single point: if violence has already broken out, nevertheless all is not lost. It is not too late to stop the violence—not everywhere, but locally, at the place where human individuals use the right techniques.

What are those techniques?

When the police surge forward and the crowd starts running and ducking, people are likely to be beaten.

Photos often show clusters of police or soldiers, attacking anyone in their path—swinging clubs at women, old people, news reporters, anyone.

Minsk demonstration 2006

Katmandu 2006

This is an emotional rush by the police, that I have called Forward Panic.

It is like the crowd contagion of running away, except in this case forces that have been pent up by confrontational tension, run forward into the vacuum left by a sudden weakness on the other side. It is an adrenaline surge that has been kept in suspense, suddenly released into action. That is why the police go out of control, swinging at anything in their path. It is important to see that this is a reciprocal emotion—the crowd running away is the counterpart of the police running forward, the display of emotional weakness feeding the surge of dominance of the attackers. In Nassauer’s data, she often finds that when one cop at the front swings at a target—it may be a person who has stumbled and fallen to the ground—the cops just behind will also swing at the same target. One policeman’s attack leads others to repeat the attack.

But—and here is the good news—Nassauer also finds that these attacks can be stopped locally.

When an individual stands still, directly facing the police, and calls out in a strong, clear voice:

“We are peaceful. What about you?” – or words to that effect, the attack almost always stops.

This does not mean that the riot as a whole can be stopped in this way.

There can be hundreds or thousands of persons spread out over a considerable space. Violence in a riot is not like one huge rugby scrum, not like huge battle-lines of ancient phalanxes, but a series of little clusters of violence here and there.

Each one of these clusters may be checked, could be rendered no longer violent, by the right local action.

To repeat: the details are important. The peace-making person must stand still, no longer moving. When almost everyone’s back is turned, he or she stands in direct eye contact with the on-coming forces. And one’s voice must be clear and steady, neither threatening nor fearful.

Especially important is not to scream.

Someone in the crowd, in the fear or rage of being attacked, can cry out the identical words:

“WE ARE PEACEFUL!! WHAT ABOUT YOU!!” but in this case it will not work.

The police perceive and feel the crowd as being out of control. To scream at the police does not correct this impression, but reinforces it.

Screaming is an expression of being out of control; and that is precisely the problem with the interactional situation. Tension and fear pervades everything, and the violence is coming out of the situation of one-sided emotional dominance by the police. The victim who screams does nothing to change the emotional field. It is the strong, calm tone that changes it, back towards local equilibrium, where the violence stops.

A similar technique can work when it is not a confrontation of police (or soldiers) versus a protesting crowd, but a violent attack by one crowd upon another. David Sorge, in research at University of Pennsylvania (2014), shows that in an incident of communal violence in India, the technique was used that stopped violence in a specific location.

The individual under attack was a peace-maker, a citizen who had stood up in a town meeting the day before, to urge the Hindu populace not to pay attention to rumours and not to attack the local Muslims.

As often happens in the early phases of communal violence, the peace-maker became targeted as a traitor. A crowd gathered in front of his house and pelted it with stones, the usual preliminary to an attack. But the peace-maker came out of the front of his house carrying a chair. Before anyone could attack him—there is usually a time-lag of shouting before someone starts the personal assault—he stood up on the chair and started to make a speech in a loud voice. The crowd quieted down and eventually dispersed.

Notice the details. He stood up above the crowd, where he could be seen. He met them face to face. For the members of a violent crowd, usually the target is someone anonymous up there behind all the surging bodies; for the few in the front with clearer visibility, someone cringing, showing weakness and fear, usually cowering, hiding their face, or knocked to the ground where all we can see is their side and back. Standing up in a prominent position, in this instance the peace-maker remained a human individual. He spoke in a loud, strong voice, not in anger, but resolutely.

He spoke to them as individuals, and took apart the collective emotion of the crowd, where each relies on the others to carry out acts of violence that ordinarily would outrage our moral sensibilities.

Again, we must recognize, it was a local solution only.

The riot as a whole was not stopped. The crowd moved elsewhere, where emotional dominance was easier to establish. Nevertheless, this is a hopeful sign. The whole pattern of a riot consists in all its local parts; and the more of these parts that can be stopped, the less damage it does.

Practical Advice in Violent Crowd Situations

--Don't turn your back.

--In a situation of violent threat, don't hide your face.

--Don't run away in panic.

--Above all, don't fall down.

That is to say: your eyes and your face are your strongest weapon of defense.

--Keep up a clear confrontation with a potential attacker. But don't raise the level of tension; don't scream; don't make further threats; just keep it steady as you can.

--Don't get isolated as a single individual surrounded by a cluster of about half a dozen attackers. This is the configuration in photos where persons are badly beaten. Try to stay with at least a small cluster of your own side, but not in the panicky flight mode.

I should add that this advice is for non-violent participants. It is unclear that they will work if you are throwing rocks, fire-bombs, or engaging in other kinds of violence.

This advice is drawn from research on the micro-sociology of riots. Does it work in other kinds of threatening situations, both more organized or macro-structured violence such as massacres and war, and in more individualized confrontations like street fights?

Our field of research has much more to do in examining all these types. But so far, the results are optimistic. The desk clerk in the Atlanta school on August 20, 2013 [http://edition.cnn.com/2013/08/21/us/georgia-school-gunshots/] who calmed down an armed man threatening a rampage shooting shows that even the most dangerous situations may be defused. Research colleagues have told me they have walked safely through a violent riot in Tehran, by keeping in mind what emotional tone they were projecting in their body language, playing neither attacker nor victim.

Stefan Klusemann's research (2010, 2012), on the tipping-points to genocidal ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, and in Rwanda, shows that even in the midst of a mass-murder campaign, there are micro-situational stumbling blocks, and threatened victims sometimes escape by a timely show of emotional resoluteness.

Lowering the Tension: Putting the Situation Back in Emotional Equilibrium

When the confrontation is one-on-one, the prospects are especially optimistic that violence can be avoided.

We are accumulating a significant amount of data on such situations, and two patterns stand out.

First: The audience has an important effect.

Public fights rarely get very far without audience support.

Most angry arguments stay at the level of bluster and insult, unless the audience shows that it wants them to fight. The audience that cheers and urges them on will almost always get a prolonged fight. A neutral or uneasy audience, standing at a distance, usually results in a brief fight without much damage. And when an audience (or part of it) tries to intervene, it is almost always successful in stopping a fight. This pattern is shown in my comparison of fight incidents with different audience reactions (Collins 2008); in British research using CCTV videos of fights in pubs (Levine et al. 2011); and studies of what network relationships result in successful third-party interventions (Phillips and Cooney 2005).

There are limits to this pattern. It applies to arguments and fights in public, but not to domestic violence, which often takes place without much of an audience. (But there is ongoing research here, too, investigating the effects of indoor audiences that may be present.)

Since domestic violence is a considerable portion of small-scale violence, that is a serious limitation on our optimistic news. On the other hand, the following point applies both to domestic and public violence:

Second: Small-scale conflict and violence peters out when the emotional field is in equilibrium.

That means: when both sides are showing the same amount of emotional energy, the same degree of bodily agitation, the same emotional intensity.

This equilibrating effect can take place at any level of intensity, as long as both sides are evenly matched.

Research on mobile phone videos of street fights (Jackson-Jacobs) shows that even in the case of fights that have already started (and where the audience is distant and neutral) tend to wind down after both sides have thrown a few blows. On the whole, evenly matched fights do not do very much damage; the high level of adrenaline arousal makes fighters sloppy and incompetent, and Jackson-Jacobs’s videos show the fighters who have thrown a few wild punches tend to let their swings carry themselves out of range, where the fight devolves into threats, and eventually into mutual disengagement.

After all, in an honor fight, it is showing one’s willingness to fight that counts, not the result.

Let me conclude with a favorite photograph.

It was taken in Jerusalem during the height of the second Intifada, and it shows an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian political leader locked in angry conflict.

Jerusalem stalemate 2000

The news story tells there was no violence at this flash point of sacred territories that day. The angry confrontation wound down and ended. How?

The photo shows the two men exactly mirroring each other. Reading the facial expression of emotions using Ekman’s methods, we see them displaying anger, and in an identical manner: both have the hard, staring eyes, the clenched eyebrows with the vertical line between them, the square, shouting mouth. As is characteristic of angry talk, both are vocalizing at the same time, not listening to what the other has to say. Their faces, like their bodies, are tensed like muscles about to strike. But they do not strike.

They are in equilibrium at a high level of intensity.

From similar incidents observed over a few moments of time, we can surmise that they eventually become tired of the situation. No one else in the crowd is taking up their level of intensity; they are doing all the audience’s work for it. It is boring to say the same thing over and over again, getting no intelligible response. They will deescalate, going down the scale of emotional intensity simultaneously, keeping in equilibrium step by step.

They will become bored. And in situations of conflict, boredom is the pathway to peace.

The Tank and the Human Face

Micro-sociology delivers some good news. Some kinds of violence we are able to mitigate. This is on the micro-level, face-to-face with a potential attacker.

Another level is harder to handle, or at least it will take another approach. This is violence at the level of the organization or bureaucracy.

If we take the column of tanks as a symbol of the hundreds of military vehicles and thousands of soldiers in Beijing, we are seeing the public face of an organizational network stretching far off into the distance. Orders to advance are given somewhere else, by a face we never see, a voice we never hear. Techniques of human face-to-face confrontation will not work here.

This is not to claim that the distant strategists are purely rational and coolly calculating. Their decisions are made in an atmosphere of emotions pervading the network of organized power, in counterpoint to the waves of emotions among the crowds who come into the streets over a period of weeks. It may be a long-distance chess game, but one played in shifting moods of anger or fear, confidence or deflation, righteousness and revenge-- and occasionally magnanimity.

The macro-level pattern is one of counter-escalation and de-escalation, and it has its time-dynamics that spread over weeks and months (Collins 2012).

There may be grounds for optimism about what sorts of processes can head off violence on the macro level too, although in some phases there is a kind of steam-roller momentum that is extremely dangerous once it gets rolling. We are learning about these kinds of time-dynamics, hopefully adding more tactics to the toolbox for peace.

In the meantime, as individuals in threatening situations, we can do our bit.

Appendix: How to regain calm when your heart is pounding

It's all very well to say, turn and face your attacker, call out in a firm strong voice, don't run and don't panic. But how do you manage to do this if your adrenaline is pumping and your heart is going 160 beats per minute?

There is a technique that will bring your heartbeat down, and with it, the panicky effects of adrenaline and the inability to control your voice. A useful version is described by Dave Grossman, a psychologist formerly with the US Army:

Repeat the following sequence of breathing:

-- breathe in slowly, counting 4 seconds (one-alligator, two alligator, three-alligator, four-alligator)

-- hold your breath for 4 seconds (counting...)

-- breathe out slowly, counting 4 seconds

-- hold your breath out (lungs empty), counting 4 seconds

do it again:

-- breathe in slowly, 4 seconds

-- etc.

as many times as you need until your get your breathing and heart rate under control.

Remember the details. This is not the simple cliché, take a deep breath. It is the rhythm you are after, the timing of how long each breath and holding period is. Your goal is to change your body rhythm. And after you accomplish that, to change the rhythm of the person confronting you.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

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“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Randall Collins. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.

Randall Collins. 2012. “C-Escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Conflict.” American Sociological Review 77: 1-20.

Paul Ekman, 1985. Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage.

Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, 1975. Unmasking the Face.

Dave Grossman. 2004. On Combat. The psychology and physiology of deadly combat in war and peace.

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs. 2011. "Social Organization in Violence." Research in progress, UCLA.

Stefan Klusemann. 2010. “Micro-situational antecedents of violent atrocity.” Sociological Forum 25:272-295.

Stefan Klusemann. 2012. "Massacres as process: A micro-sociological theory of internal patterns of mass atrocities." European Journal of Criminology 9: 438-480.

Mark Levine, Paul J. Taylor, and Rachel Best. 2011. “Third Parties, Violence, and Conflict Resolution.” Psychological Science 22 (3) 406–412.

Anne Nassauer. 2013. Violence in demonstrations. PhD dissertation, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Scott Phillips and Mark Cooney. 2005. "Aiding Peace, Abetting Violence: Third Parties and the Management of Conflict." American Sociological Review 70: 334-354.

JESUS IN INTERACTION: THE MICRO-SOCIOLOGY OF CHARISMA

What is charisma when you see it? Charismatic leaders are among the most famous persons of past history and today. What was it like to meet a charismatic leader? You fell under their spell. How did they do it?

One of the best-described of all charismatic leaders is Jesus. About 90 face-to-face encounters with Jesus are described in the four gospels of the New Testament.

Notice what happens: Jesus is sitting on the ground, teaching to a crowd in the outer courtyard of the temple at Jerusalem. The Pharisees, righteous upholders of traditional ritual and law, haul before him a woman taken in adultery. They make her stand in front of the crowd and say to Jesus: “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery. The Law commands us to stone her to death. What do you say?”

The text goes on that Jesus does not look up at them, but continues to write in the dirt with his finger. This would not be unusual; Archimedes wrote geometric figures in the dust, and in the absence of ready writing materials the ground would serve as a chalkboard. The point is that Jesus does not reply right away; he lets them stew in their uneasiness.

Finally he looks up and says: “Let whoever is without sin cast the first stone.” And he looks down and continues writing in the dust.

Minutes go by. One by one, the crowd starts to slip away, the older ones first-- the young hotheads being the ones who do the stoning, as in the most primitive parts of the Middle East today.

Finally Jesus is left with the woman standing before him. Jesus straightens up and asks her: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

She answers: “No one.” “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus says. “Go now and sin no more.” (John 8: 1-11)

Jesus is a master of timing. He does not allow people to force him into their rhythm, their definition of the situation. He perceives what they are attempting to do, the intention beyond the words. And he makes them shift their ground.

Hence the two periods of tension-filled silence; first when he will not directly answer; second when he looks down again at his writing after telling them who should cast the first stone. He does not allow the encounter to focus on himself against the Pharisees. He knows they are testing him, trying to make him say something in violation of the law; or else back down in front of his followers. Instead Jesus throws it back on their own consciences, their inner reflections about the woman they are going to kill. He individualizes the crowd, making them drift off one by one, breaking up the mob mentality.

The Micro-sociology of Charisma

Jesus is a charismatic leader, indeed the archetype of charisma.

Although sociologists tend to treat charisma as an abstraction, it is observable in everyday life. We are viewing the elements of it, in the encounters of Jesus with the people around him.

I will focus on encounters that are realistic in every respect, that do not involve miracles-- about two-thirds of all the incidents reported. Since miracles are one of the things that made Jesus famous, and that caused controversies right from the outset, some miracles will be analyzed. I will do this mostly at the end.

(1) Jesus always wins an encounter

(2)Jesus is quick and absolutely decisive

(3) Jesus always does something unexpected

(4) Jesus knows what the other is intending

(5) Jesus is master of the crowd

(6) Jesus’ down moments

(7) Victory through suffering, transformation through altruism

(Appendix) The interactional context of miracles

(1) Jesus always wins an encounter

When Jesus was teaching in the temple courts, the chief priests and elders came to him. “By what authority are you doing these things?” they asked. “And who gave you this authority?”

Jesus replied: “I will also ask you a question. If you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things. John’s baptism-- where did it come from? Was it from heaven, or of human origin?”

They discussed it among themselves and said, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will ask, ‘Then why don’t you believe him?’ But if we say, ‘Of human origin,’ the people will stone us, because they are persuaded that John was a prophet.”

So they answered, “We don’t know where it was from.”

Jesus said, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.” (Matthew 21: 23-27; Luke 20: 1-8) He proceeded to tell the crowd a parable comparing two sons who were true or false to their father. Jesus holds the floor, and his enemies did not dare to have him arrested, though they knew the parable was about themselves.

Jesus never lets anyone determine the conversational sequence. He answers questions with questions, putting the interlocutor on the defensive. An example, from early in his career of preaching around Galilee:

Jesus has been invited to dinner at the house of a Pharisee. A prostitute comes in and falls at his feet, wets his feet with her tears, kisses them and pours perfume on them. The Pharisee said to himself, “If this man is a prophet, he would know what kind of woman is touching him-- that she is a sinner.”

Jesus, reading his thoughts, said to him: “I have something to tell you.” “Tell me,” he said. Jesus proceeded to tell a story about two men who owed money, neither of whom could repay the moneylender. He forgives them both, the one who owes 500 and the one who owes 50. Jesus asked: “Which of the two will love him more?” “The one who had the bigger debt forgiven,” the Pharisee replied. “You are correct,” Jesus said. “Do you see this woman? You did not give me water for my feet, but this woman wet them with her tears and dried them with her hair... Therefore her many sins have been forgiven-- as her great love has shown.”

The other guests began to say among themselves, “Who is this who even forgives sins?” Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Luke 7: 36-50)

Silencing the opposition

Jesus always gets the last word. Not just that he is good at repartee, topping everyone else; he doesn’t play verbal games, but converses on the most serious level. What it means to win the argument is evident to all, for audience and interlocutor are amazed, astounded, astonished: they cannot say another word.

He takes control of the conversational rhythm. For a micro-sociologist, this is no minor thing; it is in the rhythms of conversation that solidarity is manifested, or alienation, or anger. Conversations with Jesus end in full stop: wordless submission.

His debate with the Sadducees, another religious sect, ends when “no one dared ask him any more questions.” (Luke 20: 40)

When a teacher of the Law asks him which is the most important commandment, Jesus answers, and the teacher repeats: “Well said, teacher, you are right in saying, to love God with all your heart, and to love your neighbour as yourself is more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” Jesus said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” And from then on, no one dared ask him any more questions. (Mark 12: 28-34)

A famous argument ends the same way: The priests send spies, hoping to catch Jesus in saying something so that they might hand him over to the Roman governor. So they asked: “Is it right for us to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

Jesus knowing their evil intent, said to them, “Show me the coin used to pay taxes.” When they brought it, he said, “Whose image is on it?” “Caesar’s,” they replied. “Then give to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

And they were astonished by his answer, and were silent. (Luke 20: 19-26; Matthew 22: 15-22)

As with the woman taken in adultery, again there is an attempted trap; a turning of attention while everyone waits; and a question-and-reply sequence that silences everyone. Jesus does not just preach. It is at moments like this, drawing the interlocutor into his rhythm, that he takes charge.

(2) Jesus is quick and absolutely decisive

As his mission is taking off in Galilee, followers flock to hear him. Some he invites to come with him. It is a life-changing decision.

A man said to him: “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus replied: “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead.”

It is a shocking demand. In a ritually pious society, there is nothing more important that burying your father. Jesus demands a complete break with existing social forms; those who follow them, he implies, are dead in spirit.

To another would-be recruit he underlines it: “No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.” (Luke 9: 57-62; Mark 8: 19-22)

Charisma is total dedication, having it and imparting it to others. There is nothing else by which to value it. Either do it now, or don’t bother.

This is how Jesus recruits his inner circle of disciples. He is walking beside the Sea of Galilee, and sees Simon and Andrew casting their net into the lake. “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will make you fishers of men.” At once they left their nets and followed him. A little further on, he sees James and his brother John preparing their nets. Without delay he called them, and they left their father in the boat and followed him. (Mark 1: 16-20; Matthew 4: 8-22. Luke 5: 1-11 gives a longer story about crowds pressing so closely that Jesus preaches from a boat, but it ends with the same abrupt conversion; here the influence of the crowd is more visible than in the truncated versions.)

Jesus recruits not from the eminent, but from the humble and the disreputable. Among the latter are the tax collectors, hated agents of the Roman overlord. There is the same abrupt conversion: As Jesus is passing along the lake with a large crowd following, he sees a man sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said, and the man got up, left everything, and followed him.

They have a banquet at his house (Luke 5: 27-32; Mark 1: 13-17; Matthew 9: 9-13), with many tax collectors and others eating with the disciples. The Pharisees complained, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus replied, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”

Jesus perceives who will make a good recruit, and who will not.

(3) Jesus always does something unexpected

Being with Jesus is exciting and energizing, among other reasons because he is always surprising. He does not do or say just what other people expect; even when they regard him as a prophet and a miracle-worker, there is always something else.

Pharisees and teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled. They asked Jesus, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? They don’t wash their hands before they eat!”

Jesus replied, “You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside you are full of greed and wickedness. You foolish people! Did not the one who made the outside make the inside also? But as to what is inside you-- be generous to the poor, and everything will be clean for you.”

He goes on with further admonitions, and his opponents accuse Jesus of insulting them. Jesus called the crowd to him to hear. The disciples came to him privately and asked, “Do you know that the Pharisees were offended when they heard this?” Jesus replied: “Leave them; they are blind guides. If the blind lead the blind, both will fall into a pit.”

Peter said, “Explain the parable to us.” “Are you still so dull?” Jesus asked them. “Don’t you see that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and then out of the body? ... But out of the heart come evil thoughts-- murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander. These are what defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile them.” (Matthew 15: 1-20; Mark 7: 1-23; Luke 11: 37-54)

Ritual purification is what concerns the pious and respectable of the time; Jesus meets an accusation with a stronger one. Even his closest disciples do not escape the jolt. “Are you still so dull? Don’t you see?” Everyone has to be on their toes when they are around this man.

How does Jesus generate an unending stream of jolts? He has a program: mere ritual and the righteous superiority that goes with it is to be brought down and replaced by humane altruism, and by spiritual dedication. When his encounters involve miracles, or rather people’s reaction to them, the program bursts expectations: On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in a synagogue, and a women was there who was crippled for 18 years, bent over and unable to straighten up. Jesus called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

Indignant that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not of the Sabbath.”

Jesus answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham... be set free on the Sabbath from what bound her?” When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted. (Luke 13: 10-17. Similar conflicts about healing on the Sabbath are in Luke 6: 6-11; Matthew 12: 1-14; and Luke 14: 1-6, which ends by silencing the opposition.)

It is not the miracle that is at issue; what makes the greater impression on the crowd is Jesus’ triumph over the ritualists. It is also what leads to the escalating conflict with religious authorities, and ultimately to his crucifixion.

Nearer the climax, Jesus enters Jerusalem with a crowd of his followers who have traveled with him from Galilee in the north, picking up enthusiastic converts along the way. He enters Jerusalem in a triumphant procession, greeted by crowds waving palm fronds. Next morning he goes to the temple.

In the temple courts he found people selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money. So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, “Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!” (Another text quotes him:) “Is it not written, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations’? But you have made it ‘a den of thieves.’”

The chief priests and teachers of the law heard this and began looking for a way to kill him, for they feared him, because the whole crowd was amazed at his teaching. (John 2: 13-16; Mark 11: 15-19)

One text gives a tell-tale detail: Immediately after entering Jerusalem in the palm-waving crowd, Jesus went into the temple courts.

He looked around at everything, but since it was already late, he went out to the nearby village of Bethany with the Twelve. (Mark 11: 11)

Jesus clearly intends to make a big scene; he is going to do it at the height of the business day, not in the slack time of late afternoon when the stalls are almost empty. Jesus always shows strategic sense.

Why are the animals and the money changers in the temple in the first place? Because of ritualism; the animals are there to be bought as burnt sacrifices, and the money changers are to facilitate the crowd of distant visitors. But also it was the case, throughout the ancient world and in the medieval as well, that temples and churches were primary places of business, open spaces for crowds, idlers, speculators, merchants of all sorts. In Babylon and elsewhere the temples themselves acted as merchants and bankers (and may have originated such enterprises); in Phoenicia and the coastal cities of sin anathema to the Old Testament prophets, temples rented out prostitutes to travelers; Greek temples collected treasure in the form of bronze offerings and subsequently became stores of gold. Jesus no doubt had all this in mind when he set out to cleanse the temple of secular transactions corrupting its pure religious purpose.

Jesus is not just shocking on the large public scene; he also continues to upend his own disciples’ expectations. In seclusion at Bethany, he is reclining at the dinner table when a woman came with an alabaster jar of expensive perfume. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.

Some of the disciples said indignantly to each other, “Why this waste of perfume? It could have been sold for more than a year’s wages and the money given to the poor.” And they rebuked her harshly.

“Leave her alone,” Jesus said. “She has done a beautiful thing to me. The poor you will always have with you, and you can help them any time you want.

But you will not always have me. She did what she could. She poured perfume on my body beforehand to prepare me for my funeral.” (Mark 14: 1-10; Matthew 26: 6-13)

A double jolt. His disciples by now have understood the message about the selfishness of the rich and charity to the poor. But there are circumstances and momentous occasions that transcend even the great doctrine of love thy neighbour. Jesus is zen-like in his unexpectedness. There is a second jolt, and his disciples do not quite get it. Jesus knows he is going to be crucified. He has the political sense to see where the confrontation is headed; in this he is ahead of his followers, who only see his power.

(4) Jesus knows what the other is intending

Jesus is an intelligent observer of the people around him. He does not have to be a magical mind-reader. He is highly focused on everyone’s moral and social stance, and sees it in the immediate moment. Charismatic people are generally like that; Jesus does it to a superlative degree.

He perceives not just what people are saying, but how they are saying it; a socio-linguist might say, speech actions speak louder than words.

So it is not surprising that Jesus can say to his disciples at the last supper, one of you will betray me, no doubt noting the furtive and forced looks of Judas Iscariot. Or that he can say to Peter, his most stalwart follower, before the cock crows you will have denied me three times-- knowing how strong blustering men also can be swayed when the mood of the crowd goes against them in the atmosphere of a lynch mob. (Mark 14: 17-31; Matthew 26: 20-35; John 13: 20-38)

Most of these examples have an element of Jesus reading the intentions of his questioners, as when they craftily try to trap him into something he can be held liable for. Consider some cases where the situation is not so fraught but he knows what is going on: Invited to the house of a prominent Pharisee, Jesus noticed how the guests vied for the places of honor at the table.

He told them a parable: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast, do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than yourself may have been invited... and, humiliated, you will have to move to the least important place. But when you are invited, take the lowest place, so that when your host comes, he will say to you, ‘Friend, move up to a better place.’ Then you will be honored in the presence of all the other guests. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.” Then Jesus said to the host, “...When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you-- as your relatives and rich friends would by inviting you back-- you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.” (Luke 14: 7-16)

It is an occasion to deliver a sermon, but Jesus starts it with the situation they are in, the unspoken but none-too-subtle scramble for best seats at the table. And he makes a sociological point about the status reciprocity involved in the etiquette of exchanging invitations.

Jesus sees what matters to people. A rich young man, inquiring sincerely about his religious duties, ran up to Jesus and fell on his knees. “Good teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

“Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked, as usual answering a question with a question.

“No one is good-- except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not murder, nor commit adultery, nor steal, nor give false testimony, nor defraud; honor your father and mother.’”

“Teacher,” he declared, “all these I have kept since I was a boy.” Jesus looked at him. “One thing you lack,” he said. “Go, and sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come and follow me.”

At this the man’s face fell. He went away sad, because he had great riches. (Mark 10: 17-22; Luke 18: 18-30; Matthew 19: 16-26)

Jesus knows who to recruit, who is ready for instantaneous commitment, by watching them. As his crowd of followers passed through Jericho, a chief tax collector wanted to see Jesus, but because he was short he could not see over the heads of the crowd. So he ran ahead and climbed a tree. When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” People began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a sinner.” But Zacchaeus said to Jesus, “Here and now I give half my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anyone, I will pay him back four times the amount.” (Luke 19: 1-10)

This is the theme again, recruiting among sinners. But Jesus is a practical leader as well as an inspirational one. He normally sends out forerunners to line up volunteers to lodge and feed his traveling followers (Luke 10: 1-16; Matthew 26: 17-19;); in this case, he has picked out a rich man (class distinctions would have been very visible), and someone who is notably eager to see him. No doubt Jesus’ perceptiveness enables him to pick out early disciples like Peter and the other fishermen.

Jesus’ perceptiveness helps explain why he dominates his encounters. He surprises interlocutors by unexpectedly jumping from their words, not to what conventionally follows verbally, but instead speaking to what they are really about, skipping the intermediate stages.

(5) Jesus is master of the crowd

The important events of Jesus’ life mainly take place in crowds. Of 93 distinct incidents of Jesus’ adult life described in the gospels, there are at most 5 occasions when he is with three or fewer other people.*

When he is outdoors, he is almost entirely surrounded by crowds; in the early part of his mission in Galilee he periodically escapes the crowds by going out on boats and climbing remote mountainsides in order to pray in solitude. The crowds increase and follow him wherever he goes. Indoors, 6 incidents take place at banquets, including an overflow wedding party; 3 in synagogues; 2 are hearings before public authorities. There are also 9 occasions when he is backstage with his disciples, although often there is a crowd outside and people get in to see him.

Altogether, for Jesus a relatively intimate gathering was somewhat more than a dozen people, and most of his famous interactions took place with twenties up through hundreds or even several thousands of people amidst whom he was the center of attention.

*John 1: 35-42; two of John the Baptist’s disciples seek out Jesus after John has pointed him out in the crowd of the Baptist’s own followers, and the two spend the afternoon visiting Jesus where he stays. This is before Jesus is baptized and starts his own mission.

Luke 9: 28-30; Matthew 17: 1-13; Mark 9: 2-13; Jesus with three disciples go up on a mountain to pray, where they see him transfigured.

John 4: 31-42; Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well while his disciples have gone into town for provisions; they have a one-on-one conversation, and many in her village become believers that he is the Savior of the world, among other reasons because he has broken the taboo on Jews associating with Samaritans.

John 3: 1-21; Jesus is visited at night by a Pharisee who is a member of the ruling council; no one else is mentioned as present, although the conversation leads to some of the most famous Bible passages, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” Presumably someone heard this and wrote it down; not unlikely since Jesus always stayed in a house full of his disciples. Mark 14: 32-42; Matthew 26: 36-46; Jesus goes with his disciples (the Twelve minus Judas) plus at least some others to pray at Gethsemane. He then takes three close followers, goes a little further into the garden, and prays in anguish while the others fall asleep. This is the one important place in the narration where Jesus is alone, and the one time that he shows anxiety. I do not count the 40 days he spent praying in the wilderness before beginning his ministry; the only incidents described for this period are not pinned down in time and circumstance and all involve talking with the devil. I will discuss these below in the section on apparitions.

Crowds are a major source of Jesus’ power. There is a constant refrain: “The crowds were amazed at his teaching, because he taught as one who had authority, and not as their teachers of the law.” (Matthew 7: 29) His enemies the high priests are afraid of what his crowd of followers will do if they attack Jesus. As the challenge mounts in Jerusalem on the last and greatest day of the Passover festival, Jesus preaches in the temple courts in a loud voice, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink.” The crowds are divided on whether he is the Messiah. The temple guards retreat to the chief priests, who ask them, “Why don’t you arrest him?” “No one ever spoke the way this man does,” the guards reply.

“The mob knows nothing of the law,” the Pharisees retort, “there is a curse on them.” (John 7: 37-49)

Judas’ betrayal of Jesus consists in telling the priests when and where Jesus will be alone, so that he can be arrested. Alone, relatively speaking; there are at least a dozen of his followers with him at Gethsemane, but it is for arranging the absence of the crowd that Judas receives his 30 pieces of silver. (Luke 22: 2-6) The signal is to mark Jesus with a kiss, so the guards will know whom to seize in the dark.

Charismatic leaders live on crowds. There is no such thing as a charismatic leader who is not good at inspiring crowds; and the micro-sociologist adds, being super-energized by them in turn. Crowd and leader are parts of a circuit, emotional intensity and rhythmic coordination flowing from one to the other: charisma as high-amp electric current. It is what the Bible, especially in the Book of Acts, calls the holy spirit.

Jesus as archetype of the charismatic leader also shows how a charismatic movement is organized. His life moves in three spheres: crowds; the inner circle of his twelve disciples; and withdrawing into solitude. The third of these, as noted, does not figure much in the narration of important events; but we can surmise, from sociological research on prayer, that he reflects in inner dialogue on what is happening in the outer circles, and forms his resolve as to what he will do next.

The inner circle has a practical aspect and a personal aspect. Jesus recruits his inner disciples, the Twelve, because he wants truly dedicated followers who will accompany him everywhere. That means giving up all outside commitment, leaving occupation, family, home town. It means leaving behind all property, and trusting that supporters will bring them the means of sustenance, day after day. In effect, they are monks, although they are not called that yet. Thus the inner circle depends on the outer circle, the crowds of supporters who not only give their emotion, but also food, lodging, whatever is needed. Jesus is the organizer of a movement, and he directs his lieutenants and delegates tasks to them. Early in his mission, when the crowds are burgeoning, he recognizes that “the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few” and sends out the Twelve to preach and work miracles on their own, accelerating the cascade of still more followers and supporters. (Luke 9: 1-6; Mark 6: 7-13; Matthew 9: 35-38; 10: 1-20.)

When Jesus travels, it is not just with the Twelve, but with a larger crowd (who are also called disciples), somewhere between casual supporters and his inner circle. These include some wealthy women-- an ex-prostitute Mary Magdalene, women who have been cured by Jesus, the wife of a manager of King Herod’s household-- and they help defray expenses with their money. (Luke 8: 1-3) Even the Twelve have a treasurer: Judas Iscariot, pointing up the ambiguity of money for a movement of self-chosen poverty.

With big crowds to take care of, Jesus expands his logistics staff to 70. (Luke 10:1-16) He concerns himself about whose house they will eat in. Jesus accepts all invitations, even from his enemies the Pharisees; he especially seems to choose tax collectors, since they are both rich and hospitable and recognize their own need of salvation. It is the size of his peripatetic crowds that bring about the need for multiplying loaves and fishes and turning water into wine. Jesus’ crowds are not static, but growing, and this is part of their energy and excitement.

The inner circle is not just his trusted staff.

It is also his backstage, where he can speak more intimately and discuss his concerns and plans.

“Who do people say I am?” Jesus asks the Twelve, when the movement is taking off. They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”

“But what do you say?” Jesus asked. “Who do you say I am?” Peter answered, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus warned them not to tell anyone. Jesus goes on to tell them that the Son of Man will be rejected by the chief priests, that he must be killed and rise again in three days. Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. Jesus turned and looked at the rest of the disciples. “Get thee behind me, Satan!” he said. “Your mind is not on the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.” (Mark 8: 27-33; Matthew 16: 13-23)

There is a certain amount of jostling over who are the greatest of the disciples, the ones closest to Jesus. Jesus always rebukes this; there is to be no intimate backstage behind the privacy shared by the Twelve. Jesus’ charisma is not a show put on for the crowds with the help of his staff; he is charismatic all the time, in the backstage as well. Jesus loves and is loved, but he has no special friends. No one understands what he is really doing until after he is dead.

Jesus is famous for speaking in parables. Especially when referring to himself, he uses figurative expressions, such as "the bread of life," "the light of the world," "the shepherd and his sheep." The parables mark a clear dividing line.

He uses parables when he is speaking to the crowds, and especially to potential enemies such as the Pharisees. Their meaning, apparently, did not easily come through; but audiences are generally impressed by them-- amazed and struck speechless, among other reasons because they exemplify the clever style of talking that deflects questions in unexpected directions. “Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear!” Jesus proclaims. (Mark 4: 9)

His Twelve disciples are not much better at deciphering parables, at least in the earlier part of his mission; but Jesus treats them differently. It is in private among the Twelve that he explains the meaning of parables in ordinary language, telling “the secret of the kingdom of God” (Mark 4: 10-34; Matthew 13: 34-52; Luke 8: 4-18) They are the privileged in-group, and they know it. Jesus admonishes them from time to time about their pride; but he needs them, too. It is another reason why living with Jesus is bracing. There is an additional circuit of charismatic energy in the inner circle.

But it is the crowds that feed the core of the mission, the preaching and the miraculous signs. As his movement marches on Jerusalem, opposition mobilizes. Now Jesus begins to face crowds that are divided or hostile.

The crowd begins to accuse him: “You are demon-possessed.” Jesus shoots back: “Stop judging by appearances, but instead judge correctly.” Some of the people of Jerusalem began to ask each other, “Isn’t this the man they are trying to kill? Here he is speaking publically, and they are not saying a word to him. Have the authorities really concluded he is the Messiah? But we know where this man is from; when the Messiah comes no one will know where he is from.” Jesus cried out, “Yes, you know me, and you know where I am from. I am not here on my own authority, but he who sent me is true. You do not know him, but I know him because I am from him and he sent me.”

At this they tried to seize him, but no one laid a hand on him... Still, many in the crowd believed in him. (John 7: 14-31)

Another encounter: Those who heard his words were again divided. Many of them said, “He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?” But others said: “These are not the sayings of a man possessed by a demon. Can a demon open the eyes of the blind?” (John 10: 19-21)

The struggle shifts to new ground. The festival crowd gathered around him, saying, “How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.”

Jesus answered, “I did tell you, but you did not believe. The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me, but you do not believe because you are not my sheep. My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish... My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all; no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand. I and the Father are one.”

Again his opponents picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus said to them, “I have shown you many good works from the Father. For which of these do you stone me?” “We are not stoning you for any good work,” they replied, “but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God.” Jesus answered them, “...Why do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, ‘I am God’s Son’? Do not believe me unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, that you may understand that the Father is in me, and I in the Father.” Again they tried to seize him, but he escaped their grasp. (John 10: 24-42)

Jesus can still arouse this crowd, but he cannot silence it. He does not back off, but becomes increasingly explicit. The metaphors he does use are not effective. His sheep that he refers to means his own crowd of loyal followers, and Jesus declares he has given them eternal life-- but not to this hostile crowd of unbelievers. Words no longer convince; the sides declaim stridently against each other. The eloquent phrases of earlier preaching have fallen into cacophony. Nevertheless Jesus still escapes violence. The crowd is never strong enough to dominate him. Only the organized authorities can take him, and that he does not evade.

(6) Jesus’ down moments

Most of the challenges to Jesus’ charisma happen during the showdown in Jerusalem. A revealing occasion happens early, when Jesus visits his hometown Nazareth and preaches in the synagogue. First the crowd is amazed, but then they start to question: Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Aren’t his mother and brothers and sisters among us? Where did he get these powers he has been displaying in neighbouring towns? When Jesus reads the scroll and says, “Today the scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” they begin to argue. Jesus retorts: “No prophet is honored in his home town,” and quotes examples of how historic prophets were rejected. The people in the synagogue are furious.

They take him to the edge of town and try to throw him off the brow of a cliff. “But he walked right through the crowd and went his way.” (Luke 4: 14-30; Matthew 13: 53-58) Even here, Jesus can handle hostile crowds.

Including this incident of failure gives confidence in the narrative.

Another personal challenge comes when he performs one of his most famous miracles, bringing back Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus' relationship with Lazarus is described as especially close. He is the brother of the two sisters, Mary and Martha, whose house Jesus liked to stay in; and Lazarus is referred to as "the one you (Jesus) love." Jesus had been staying at their house a few miles outside Jerusalem, a haven at the time when his conflict with the high priests at the temple was escalating. When the message came that Lazarus was sick, Jesus was traveling away from trouble; although his disciples reminded him that the Jerusalem crowd had tried to stone him, he decided to go back. Yet he delayed two days before returning-- apparently planning to wait until Lazarus dies and then perform the miracle of resurrecting him. First he says to his disciples, "Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going to wake him up." When this figure of speech is taken literally, he tells them plainly, "Lazarus is dead, and for your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe."

When he arrives back in Bethany, Lazarus had been dead for four days.

A crowd has come to comfort the sisters. Why were they so popular? No doubt their house was strongly identified with the Jesus movement; and thus there is a big crowd present, as always, when Jesus performs a healing miracle.

But this is the public aspect. For the personal aspect: Each of the two sisters separately comes to meet Jesus, and each says, "If you had been here, my brother would not have died." After Mary, the second sister, says this, Jesus sees her weeping and the crowd who had come with her also weeping, he is deeply moved. (The King James translation says, "groaning in himself.") "Where have you laid him?" Jesus says. "Come and see," she answers. Then Jesus wept.

They come to the tomb; Jesus has them roll away the stone from the entrance. Again deeply moved, Jesus calls out in a loud voice, "Lazarus, come out!"

For some time afterwards, people come to Bethany to see Lazarus, the man who had been raised from the dead. (John 11: 1-46)

Leaving aside the miracle itself and its symbolism, one thing we see in this episode is Jesus conflicted between his mission-- to demonstrate the power of resurrection-- and his personal feelings for Lazarus and his sisters. Jesus let Lazarus die, by staying away during his sickness, in order to make this demonstration, but in doing so he caused grief to those he loved. The moment when he confronts their pain (amplified by the weeping of the crowd), Jesus himself weeps. It is the only time in the texts when he weeps. It is a glimpse of himself as a human being, as well as a man on a mission.

Jesus’ next moment of human weakness comes in the garden at Gethsemane.

“Being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.” Though he left his disciples nearby with instructions to “pray that you will not fall into temptation,” they all fell asleep, exhausted from sorrow. Jesus complains to Peter, “Couldn’t you keep watch with me for one hour?” But he adds, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” But their eyes were heavy, and they did not know what to say to him. (Luke 22: 39-46; Mark 14: 32-42; Matthew 26: 36-46) Everybody’s emotional energy is down.

Particularly personal is the passage when Jesus on the cross sees his mother standing below, “and the disciple whom he loved standing near by. Jesus said to her: ‘Woman, here is your son,” and to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’ From that time on, the disciple took her into his house.” (John 19: 25-27)

What is so telling about this is the contrast to an event during Jesus’ early preaching in Galilee, when his mother and siblings try to make their way to him through a crowd of followers. Someone announces, “Your mother and your brothers are outside waiting to see you.” Jesus looks at those seated in a circle around him and says: “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.” (Luke 8: 19-21; Mark 3: 31-35) But on the cross he is not only thinking of fulfilling scripture, but of his own lifetime relationships.

Pierced by pain, he cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” “And with a loud cry, Jesus breathed his last.” (Mark 15: 21-41; Matthew 27: 30-55)

Ancient myths of dying and annually resurrecting nature-gods are not described like this-- i.e. humanly; nor are the heroic deaths of Plutarch’s noble Greeks and Romans.

Other than in the anxious hours of waiting at Gethsemane, and the torture of the crucifixion, Jesus confronting his accusers is in form and on message.

When the high priests and temple guards approach to arrest him, Jesus calmly asks who they want. “Jesus of Nazareth,” they reply. When he says, “I am he,” they shrink back. Jesus takes the initiative: “If you are looking for me, let these men go.” When they seize Jesus, one of his followers draws a sword and cuts off the ear of a priest’s servant. “Put away your sword!” Jesus says to him, “for all who live by the sword will die by the sword.” To the hostile crowd, he says, “Am I leading a rebellion, that you have come with swords and clubs to capture me? Every day I sat in the temple courts teaching, and you did not dare to arrest me. But this is your hour.” (Matthew 26: 47-56; Luke 22: 47-55; John 18: 1-12)

Then all his disciples deserted him and fled. Peter, the boldest of them, followed at a distance to the outer courtyards when Jesus was being interrogated within.

But Peter too is intimidated when servants question whether he isn’t one of Jesus’ followers. Peter denying Jesus shows how Jesus’ own crowd has been dispersed, broken up and unable to assemble, and in the face of a hostile crowd lose their faith.

Strength is in the crowd, and now the opposing crowd holds the attention space.

But indoors, in a smaller setting of rival authorities, Jesus holds his own. Before the assembly of the high priests, Jesus wins the verbal sparring, if not the verdict. Many hostile witnesses testify, but their statements do not agree. The priests try to get Jesus to implicate himself, but he keeps a long silence, and then says: “I said nothing secret. Why question me? Ask those who heard me.”

When Jesus said this, an official slapped him in the face. “Is this the way you answer the high priest?” Jesus replied, “If what I said is wrong, testify as to what is wrong. If I spoke the truth, why do you strike me?” The chief priest asks him bluntly: “Tell us if you are the Messiah, the Son of God.” “You have said so,” Jesus replies. (Mark 14: 53-65; Matthew 26: 57-63; John 18: 19-24)

Finally Jesus is taken before Pilate, the Roman governor. Jesus gives his usual sharp replies, and indeed wins him over. “Are you the King of the Jews?” Pilate asks. “Is that your own idea,” Jesus asks in return, “or did others talk to you about me?” Pilate: “Your own people and chief priests have handed you over to me. What is it you have done?” Jesus said: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would prevent my arrest.” “You are a king, then!” said Pilate. Jesus answered: “You say I am a king. In fact, I came into the world to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

“What is truth?” Pilate replied, and breaks off before an answer. (Mark 15: 1-5; Matthew 27: 11-26; John 18: 24-40)

And he goes to the crowd gathered outside the palace to say he has found no basis for a charge against Jesus. Pilate tries to set him free on a legal loophole but gives in to the crowd demanding crucifixion. After Jesus dies, Pilate gives permission for a sympathizer to take the body away instead of leaving it for ignominious disposal. Pilate’s style of behavior, too, comes across the centuries as real.

In the crises, Jesus’ interactional style remains much the same as always; but the speaking in parables and figurative language has given way to blunt explanations. Parables are for audiences who want to understand. Facing open adversaries, Jesus turns to plain arguments.

Charisma, above all, is the power to make crowds resonate with oneself. Does that mean charisma vanishes when the power over crowds goes away?*

But that would mean charisma would not be a force in drawn-out conflicts; more useful to say that charisma has its home base, its center in enthusiastic crowds, even when the charismatic leader is sometimes cut off from base.

*Historical examples include the public popularity of Gorbachev rocketing like fireworks in the middle of the 1980s in a movement for Soviet reform, but dissipating rapidly in 1991 when he is overtaken by political events and shunted aside. Jesus is a stronger version of charisma that survives adversity.

More on this in a future Sociological Eye post on theory of charisma.

Charisma is a fragile mode of organization because it depends on enthusiastic crowds repeatedly assembling. Its nemesis is more permanent organization, whether based on family and patronage networks, or on bureaucracy. Jesus loses the political showdown because the authorities intimidate his followers from assembling, and then strike at him with a combination of their organized power of temple and state, bolstered by mobilizing an excited crowd of their own chanting for Jesus’ execution. But even at his crucifixion, Jesus wins over some individual Roman soldiers (Luke 23: 47; Matthew 27: 54), although that is not enough to buck the military chain of command. This tells us that the charismatic leader relates to the crowd by personally communicating with individuals in the crowd, a multiplication of one-to-one relationships from the center to many audience-members. But charismatic communication cannot overcome a formal, hierarchic organization where individuals follow orders irrespective of how they personally feel.**

**The “cast the first stone” incident shows, in contrast, how a charismatic leader takes apart a hostile crowd by forcing its members to consult their own consciences.

As we have seen, Jesus can handle hostile questioning from crowds in the temple courts, even if opponents have been planted there by an enemy hierarchy. It is not the crowd calling for crucifixion that overpowers Jesus, but the persistent opposition of the priestly administration. Sociologically, the difference is between charismatic experience in the here-and-now of the crowd, and the long-distance coordination of an organization that operates beyond the immediate situation.

(7) Victory through suffering, transformation through altruism

When Jesus is arrested in the garden at Gethsemane, he tells his militant defenders not to resist. “Do you think I cannot call my Father, who will send twelve legions of angels? But how would the scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?” (Matthew 26: 47-56) Jesus does not aim to be just a miracle worker; he is out to transform religion entirely.

Miracles, acts of faith and power in the emotionally galvanized crowd, are ephemeral episodes. As Jesus goes along, his miracles become parables of his mission. He heals the sick, gives the disabled new life, stills the demonic howling of people in anguish. He lives in a world that is both highly stratified and callous. The rich are arrogant and righteous in their ritual correctness-- a Durkheimian elite at the center of prestigious ceremonials. They observe the taboos, and view the penurious (and therefore dirty) underclass not just with contempt but as sources of pollution. Jesus leads a revolution, not in politics, but in morals. From the beginning, he preaches among the poor and disabled, and stirs them with a new source of emotional energy. Towards the rich and ritually dominant, he directs the main thrust of his call for repentance-- it is their attitude towards the wretched of the earth that needs to be reformed. The Jesus movement is the awakening of altruistic conscience.*

*It does not start with Jesus. John the Baptist also preaches the main points, concern for the poor, against the arrogance of the rich. Earlier, Jewish prophets like Isaiah and Amos had railed against injustice to the poor. Around Jesus' time, there may have been inklings of altruism in the Mediterranean world but if so they had little publicity or organization. Greek and Roman religious cults and public largesse were directed to the elite, or at most to the politically active class, and do not strike a note of altruism towards the truly needy. Ritual sacrifices of children for military victory carried out by the Carthaginians took place in a moral universe unimaginable to modern people. Middle-Eastern kingship was even more rank-conscious and ostentatiously cruel. See my post, “Really Bad Family Values” The Sociological Eye, March 2014.

The moral revolution has three dimensions: altruism; monastic austerity; and martyrdom.

Altruism becomes an end in itself, and the highest value. Giving up riches and helping the poor and disabled is not just aimed at improving material conditions for everyone. It is not a worldly revolution, not a populist uprising, but making human sympathy the moral ideal. Blessed are the poor, the mourning, the humble, Jesus preaches, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (Luke 6: 17-23) Altruism comes on the scene historically as the pathway to otherworldly salvation. ** What is important for human lives is the change in the moral ideal: it not only gives hope to the suffering but calls the elite to judge themselves by their altruism and not by their arrogance.

**The mystery cults of the Hellenistic world (Orphics, Hermeticists, Neo-Pythagoreans and Neo-Platonists, various kinds of Gnostics etc.) had the idea of otherworldly salvation, but not the morality of altruism. Their salvation was purely selfish and their pathways merely secret rituals and symbols. They were still on the ancient side of the revolution of conscience.

The movement is under way at least a little before Jesus launches his mission at age 30.

John the Baptist preached repentance before the coming wrath. “What should we do?” the crowd asked. John answered, “Anyone who has two shirts should share with one who has none, and anyone who has food should do the same.” Even tax collectors came to be baptized. “Teacher,” they said, “what should we do?” John replied, “Don’t collect any more than you are required to.” Soldiers asked him, “And what should we do?”

He replied, “Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely-- be content with your pay.” (Luke 3: 1-14) Repentant sinners were baptized in the river.

To the Pharisees and Sadducees-- who will not repent and be baptized-- John thunders, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath?”

Later, when John’s disciples come to visit Jesus’ disciples, Jesus speaks to the crowd about John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? ... A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, and more than a prophet.” Jesus goes on to compare his mission to John’s.

“John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners. But wisdom is proved right by all her children.” (Luke 7: 18-35)

Jesus not only amplifies John’s mission, he also moves into another niche: not the extreme asceticism of the desert, but among the lower and middle classes of the towns and villages.

Monastic austerity.

Jesus’ disciples give up all property, becoming (as John the Baptist did *) the poorest of the poor. But they are not as the ordinary poor and disabled. They retain their health, and have an abundance of the richness of spirit, what they call faith-- i.e. emotional energy.

Committed disciples who have left family, home and occupation, rely on the enthusiasm of a growing social movement to provide them with daily sustenance. They live at the core of the movement. Since this location is the prime source of emotional energy, there is an additional sense in which living by faith alone is powerful.

*Matthew 3: 1-8 stresses John’s asceticism, a wild man living in the wilderness on locusts and honey, dressed in clothes of camel’s hair.

Later this arrangement became institutionalized as the relationship between monks and lay people.** During the missionary expansion of Christianity, monks were the pioneers, winning converts and patrons on the pagan frontiers through personal impressiveness-- their institutionalized charisma, which is to say Christian techniques of disciplined austerity generating emotional strength. Still later, movements like the Franciscans, deliberately giving up monastic seclusion to wander in the ordinary world among the poor and disabled, combine austerity with a renewed spirit of altruism and thereby create the idealistic social movement. Altruistic movements first used modern political tactics for influencing the state in the late 1700s anti-slavery movement, but the lineage builds on the moral consciousness and social techniques that are first visible with the Jesus movement.

**There were precedents of monasticism in the 300s BC such as the Cynics, who lived in ostentatious austerity--- such as Diogenes living in a barrel. Cynics denounced the pitfalls and hypocrisy of seeking riches and power, but they lacked any concern for the poor and did not advocate altruism.

Martyrdom.

The crucifixion of Jesus becomes, not the end of the movement, but its rallying point. The cross becomes the symbol of its members, and a source of personal inspiration for individuals in times of suffering and defeat. We are so used to this symbol that the enormity of the shift is lost on us. Crucifixion, which existed for several hundred years previously in the authoritarian kingdoms of the Middle East before spreading to Rome, was an instrument of death by slow torture, a visible threat of state terrorism. When the Sparticist revolt of gladiators was put down in 71 BC, the Romans crucified captured gladiators for hundred of miles along the roads of southern Italy. To turn the cross into a symbol of a movement, and of its triumph, was a blatant in-your-face gesture of the moral revolution: we cannot be beaten by physical coercion, by pain and suffering, it says; we have transformed them into our strength. Martyrs succeed when they generate movements; and are energized by the emotional solidarity of standing together in a conflict, even in defeats.

That is why ancient cultural precedents of fertility gods who die by dismemberment but are resurrected like the coming of the crops in the following year do not contain the social innovation of Christianity.

Fertility gods may be depicted as suffering but their message is not moral strength, and their cult concerns recurring events in the material world, not otherworldly salvation.**

**Euripides is the nearest to an altruistic liberal in the Greek world; but his play The Bacchae-- depicting an actual contemporary movement of frenzied dancers that challenged older Greek religious cults-- breathes an atmosphere of ferocious violence and revenge, the polar opposite of the Christian message of forgiveness and charity. Euripides’ plays focus the audience’s sympathy on the sufferings of individual characters, but these are members of elite families who suffer in from shifting fortunes of the upper classes. There is not even a glance at the poor.

Martyrdom also becomes institutionalized in the repertoire of religious movements. In its early centuries, Christianity grows above all by spectacular and well-publicized martyrdom of its hero-leaders. (There is also a quieter form of conversion through networks attracted to its moral style, its care for the sick, and its organizational strength. Stark, The Rise of Christianity).

Martyrdom becomes a technique for protest movements, and movement-building.

“What does not kill me, makes me stronger,” Nietzsche was to write. Ironically: for all his attacks on the moral revolution of Christianity, this is a Christian discovery he is citing. Religious techniques set precedents for modern secular politics. Protest movements win by attracting widespread sympathy for their public sufferings, turning the moral tables on those who use superior force against them. This too is world-changing. It is little exaggeration to say that the moral forces of the modern world were first visible in the Jesus movement.

Appendix.

The Social Context of Miracles.

Some modern people think that Jesus never existed, or that the stories about him are myths. The details of how Jesus interacted with people in the situations of everyday life consistently show a distinctive personality. All texts about the ancient past are subject to distortion and mythologizing tendencies; but an objective scholar, with no axe to grind one way or the other, would conclude that what we read of Jesus is as valid as what Plutarch summarizes from prior sources about Alexander or Pericles, or what other classical writers reported about exemplary heroes. The gospels have an advantage of being written closer to the lifetime of their subject, and possibly by several of Jesus’ close associates.

What about the miracles? I will focus on what a micro-sociologist can see in the details of social interaction, especially what happens before and after a miracle. I will examine only those miracles that are described as happening in a specific situation, a time and place with particular people present. Summaries of miracles by Jesus and his disciples do not give enough detail to analyze them, although they give a sense of what kinds of miracles were most frequent.

Let us go back to a question that has been hanging since I have discussed the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus attracts big crowds, by his preaching and by his miracles. He preaches an overthrow of the old ritualism; an ethic of humility and altruism for the poor and disabled; and the coming of the true kingdom of God, so different from this rank-conscious world. He also performs miracles, chiefly medical cures through faith-healing; casting out demons from persons who are possessed; and bringing back a few people from the cusp of death. There are also some nature miracles and some apparitions, although these should be considered separately because they almost never occur among crowds.

The roster of miracles described in detail include:

22 healing miracles, all happening in big crowds;

3 logistics miracles, where Jesus provides food or drink for big crowds;

5 nature miracles, all happening when Jesus is alone with his inner Twelve disciples, or some of them;

2 apparitions: 1 with 3 close disciples; 1 in a crowd.

So is Jesus chiefly a magician? And as such, are we in the realm of wonders, or superstition, or sleight of hand tricks? I will confine the discussion to some sociological observations.

Which comes first, the preaching or the miracles? The gospels are not strictly chronological, and sequences vary among them, but clearly there are a lot of miracles early on, and this is one of the things that attracts excited crowds to Jesus. People bring with them the sick, the lame, blind, and others of the helpless and pathetic. This is itself is a sign of incipient altruism, since on the whole ancient people were quite callous, engaging in deliberately cruel punishments, routinely violent atrocities, and a propensity to shun the unfortunate rather than help them. Jesus’ emphasis upon the lowly of the earth meshes with his medical miracles; they are living signs of what he is preaching in a more ethical sense.

Jesus’ healing miracles always happen in the presence of crowds. If that is so, how did the first miracles happen? What brought the first crowds together must have been Jesus’ preaching. This is particularly likely since John the Baptist was attracting large crowds, and had his own movement of followers. John did not perform medical miracles or any other kind, and he preached the same kind of themes as Jesus at the outset: humility and the poor; repentance; the coming kingdom of God, except that John explicitly said someone else was coming to lead it.

The plausible sequence is that Jesus attracted crowds by his preaching, and it was in the midst of the crowds’ enthusiasm-- their faith-- that the healing miracles take place.* That miracles depend on faith of the crowd is underscored by Jesus’ failure in Nazareth, his home town. “And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.” (Luke 4: 14-30; Matthew 13: 53-58)

*Origins of the word enthusiasm are from Greek enthous, possessed by a god, theos.

Jesus’ healing miracles divide into: 4 cures of fever and other unspecified sickness; 9 events where he cures long-term disabilities (3 with palsy/paralysis, crippled, or shriveled hand; 2 blind, 1 deaf/mute; 1 with abnormal swelling; 1 leper, and later a group of 10 lepers); 6 persons possessed with demons; 3 persons brought back from death. The various types may overlap.

The 3 who are brought back from death include the 12-year-old daughter a rich man whom he thinks is dead, but Jesus tells him she is not dead, but asleep (Luke 8: 41-42,49-56); a widow’s son who is on his funeral bier, i.e. recently pronounced dead (Luke 7: 11-17); and finally Lazarus (John 11: 1-46).

Their illnesses are not described, but could have been like the cases of fever in Jesus' other miracles.

The disabilities that Jesus cured also overlap with the persons described as possessed by demons: one is “robbed of speech” and foams at the mouth (Mark 9: 14-29; Matthew 17: 14-21; Luke 9: 37-43); another has a mute demon and is also blind (Luke 11: 14-28; Mark 9: 32-34; Matthew 12: 22-37); another is vaguely described as a woman’s daughter possessed by an unclean spirit (Mark 7: 24-30; Matthew 14: 21-28).

At least one of these appears to have epileptic fits.

Another is a naked man who sleeps in tombs, and has been chained up but breaks his chains (Luke 8: 26-39; Mark 5: 1-20; Matthew 8: 28-34). Casting out demons appears to be one of the most frequent things Jesus does, mentioned several times in summaries of his travels “preaching in synagogues and casting out demons” (Mark 1: 39) “many who were demon-possessed were brought to him” (Matthew 8: 16). This is a spiritual power that can be delegated; when his disciples are sent out on their own they come back and report “even the demons submit to us in your name.” (Luke 10: 17; Matthew 10: 1).**

One of his most fervent followers, Mary Magdalene, is described of having 7 demons cast out (Luke 8: 2); possibly this means she went through the process 7 times. She is also described as a prostitute, one of the outcasts Jesus saves; we might think of her as having gone through several relapses, or seeking the experience repeatedly (much like many Americans who undergo the “born again” experience more than once).

**Sometimes the disciples fail in casting out a demon. In one case, the boy’s father says the spirit throws him to the ground, where he becomes rigid and foams at the mouth. When Jesus approaches, the boy goes into convulsions. The father says to Jesus, “If you can, take pity on us and help us.” Jesus replies: " 'If you can’? All things are possible for one who believes." Immediately the boy’s father exclaimed: “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.” When Jesus saw a crowd running to the scene, he commanded the spirit to leave the boy and never enter again. The spirit shrieked and convulsed him violently. the boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, “He is dead.” But Jesus took his hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up. (Similar to raising from the dead.) After Jesus had gone indoors, his disciples asked him privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” Jesus replied, “This kind can come out only by prayer.” (Mark 9: 14-29) Jesus recognizes different kinds of cases and has more subtle techniques than his disciples.

What does it mean to be possessed by a demon? A common denominator is some serious defect in the social act of speaking: either persons who shout uncontrollably and in inappropriate situations (like the man who shouts at Jesus in a synagogue, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are-- the Holy One of God!” (Mark 1: 21-28); or who are silent and will not speak at all.

We could diagnose them today as having a physiological defect, or as mentally ill, psychotic, possibly schizophrenic.

But in ancient society, there was no sharp distinction between sickness and mental illness. There were virtually no medical cures for sicknesses, and religious traditions regarded them as punishments from God or the pagan gods; seriously ill persons were left in temples and shrines, or shunted onto the margins of habitation. Left without care, without human sympathy, virtually without means of staying alive, they were true outcastes of society.

Here we can apply modern sociology of mental illness, and of physical sickness. As Talcott Parsons pointed out, there is a sick role that patients are expected to play; it is one’s duty to submit oneself to treatment, to put up with hospitals, follow the authority of medical personnel, all premised on a social compact that this is done to make one well. But ancient society had no such sick role; it was a passive and largely hopeless position. Goffman, by doing fieldwork inside a mental hospital, concluded that the authoritarian and dehumanizing aspects of this total institution destroys what sense of personal autonomy the mental patient has left. Hence acting out-- shouting, defecating in the wrong places, showing no modesty with one’s clothes, breaking the taboos of ordinary social life-- are ways of rebelling against the system. They are so deprived of normal social respect that the only things they can do to command attention are acts that degrade them still further. Demon-possessed persons in the Bible act like Goffman’s mental patients, shouting or staying mute, and disrupting normal social scenes.*

*This research was in the 1950s and 1960s, before mental patients were controlled by mood-altering drugs. The further back we go in the history of mental illness, the more treatments resemble ancient practices of chaining, jailing or expelling persons who break taboos.

One gets the impression of a remarkable number of such demon-possessed-- i.e. acting-out persons-- in ancient Palestine.** They are found in almost every village and social gathering. Many of them are curable, by someone with Jesus’ charismatic techniques of interaction. He pays attention to them, focusing on them wholly and steadily until they change their behavior and come back into normal human interaction; in every case that is described, Jesus is the first person in normal society with whom the bond is established. Each acknowledges him as their savior and want to stay with him; but Jesus almost always sends them back, presumably into the community of Christian followers who will now take such cured persons as emblems of the miracles performed.

**A psychiatric survey of people living in New York City in the 1950s found that over 20% of the population had severe mental illness. (Srole 1962) It is likely that in ancient times, when stresses were greater, rates were even higher.

Notice that no one denies the existence of demons, or denies that Jesus casts them out. When Jesus meets opposition (John 10: 19-21; Luke 11: 14-20) the language of demons is turned against him. Jesus himself, like those who speak in an unfamiliar or unwelcome voice, is accused of being demon-possessed. The same charge was made against John the Baptist, who resembled some demon-possessed persons by living almost as a wild man in the wilderness. The difference, of course, is that John and Jesus can surround themselves by supportive crowds, instead of being shunned by them.

Similarly, no one denies Jesus’ medical miracles. The worst that his enemies, the religious law teachers and high priests, can accuse him of is the ritual violation of performing his cures on the Sabbath. This leads to Jesus’ early confrontations with authority; he can point to his miracles to forcefully attack the elite as hypocrites, concerned only with their own ritually proper status but devoid of human sympathy.

Jesus’ miracles are not unprecedented, in the view of the people around him; similar wonders are believed to have taken place in the past; and other textual sources on Hellenistic society refer to persons known as curers and magicians. Jesus works in this cultural idiom. But he transforms it. He says repeatedly that it is not his power as a magician that causes the miracle, but the power of faith that people have in him and what he represents.

A Roman centurion pleads with Jesus to save his servant, sick and near death. The centurion calls him Lord and says he himself is not worthy that Jesus should come under his roof. But as a man of authority, who can order soldiers what to do, he recognizes Jesus can say the word and his servant will be healed. Jesus says to the crowd, “I have not found such great faith even in Israel.” Whereupon the servant is found cured. (Luke 7: 1-10; Mark 8: 5-13)

In the midst of a thick crowd pressing to see Jesus, he feels someone touch him-- not casually, but deliberately, seeking a cure. It is a woman who has been bleeding for 12 years.

Jesus says “I know that power has gone out from me.” The woman came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of the crowd, she told why she had touched him and that she was healed. Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” (Luke 8: 43-48; Mark 5: 21-43; Matthew 9: 20-22.)

While passing through Jericho, a blind man in the crowd calls out repeatedly to Jesus, although the crowd tells him to be quiet. Jesus stopped and had the man brought to him, and asked what he wanted from him. “Lord, I want to see,” he replied. Jesus said, “Receive your sight, for your faith has healed you.” (Luke 18: 35-43; Mark 10: 46-52; Matthew 20: 29-34)

Failure to produce a miracle is explained as a failure of sufficient faith. In another version of the demon-possessed boy, the disciples ask privately, “Why couldn’t we drive it out?” Jesus replied, “Because you have so little faith. If you have faith, you can move mountains. Nothing is impossible for you.” (Matthew 17: 19-20) The message is in the figurative language Jesus habitually uses, the mastery of word-play which makes him so dominant in interaction.

The faith must be provided by his followers. When asked to perform a miracle-- not because someone needs it, but as a proof of his power, a challenge to display a sign-- Jesus refuses to do it. (Luke 11: 29-32; Matthew 12: 38-39; 16: 1-4)

As Jesus’ career progresses, he becomes increasingly explicit that faith is the great end in itself. The goal of performing miracles is not to end physical pain, or to turn it into worldly success. Jesus is not a magician, or conjurer.

Magic, viewed by comparative sociology, is the use of spiritual power for worldly ends. For Jesus it is the other way around.

Healing miracles have an element of worldly altruism, since they are carried out for persons who need them; but above all those who need to be brought back into the bonds of human sympathy. Miracles are a way of constituting the community, both in the specific sense of building the movement of his followers, and in the more general sense of introducing a spirit of human sympathy throughout the world. Miracles happen in the enthusiasm of faith in the crowd, and that combination of moral and emotional experience is a foreshadowing of the kingdom of heaven, as Jesus presents it.

Jesus’ logistics miracles consisted in taking a small amount of food and multiplying it so that crowds of 5,000 and 4,000 respectively have enough to eat and many scraps left over (Luke 9: 10-17; Matthew 14: 13-21; Mark 6: 30-44; Mark 8: 1-10). It has been suggested that the initial few fishes and loaves of bread were what the crowd first volunteered for the collective pot; but when Jesus started dividing them up into equal pieces and passing them around, more and more people contributed from their private stocks. (Zeitlin) The miracle was an outpouring of public sharing. Jesus does something similar at a wedding party so crowded with guests that the wine bottles are empty. He orders them to be filled with water, whereupon the crowd becomes even more intoxicated, commenting that unlike most feasts, the best wine was saved for last (John 2: 1-11). Possibly the dregs of wine still in the casks gave some flavour, and the enthusiasm of the crowd did the rest. Party-goers will know it is better to be drunk with the spirit of the occasion than sodden with too much alcohol.

Miracles show the power of the spirit, which is the power of faith that individuals have in the charismatic leader and his intensely focused community. Such experiences is to be valued over anything in the world; it transcends the ordinary life, in the same way that religion in the full sense transcends magic.

The significance of miracles is not in a particular person who is cured, but a visible lesson in raising the wretched of the earth, and awakening altruistic conscience. After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, Jesus says to a crowd that is following him eagerly, “You are looking for me, not because you saw the signs I performed but because you ate the loaves and had your fill. Do not work for food that spoils, but for food that endures to eternal life.”

They ask him, “What sign will you give that we may see it and believe you?” Jesus answered: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.” He goes on to talk about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, speaking in veiled language about the coming crucifixion. It causes a crisis in his movement: “From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6: 22-52) Those who wanted to take miracles literally were disappointed.

Jesus’ nature miracles differ from the others in not taking place in crowds, but among his intimate disciples. Here the role of faith is highlighted but in a different sequence. Instead of faith displayed by followers in the crowd, bringing about a healing miracle, now Jesus produces miracles that have the effect of reassuring his followers.

A storm comes up while the twelve disciples are on a boat in the weather-wracked Sea of Galilee. They are afraid of drowning, but Jesus is sleeping soundly. “Oh ye of little faith, why are you so afraid?” he admonishes them, after they wake him up and the storm stills. (Matthew 8: 23-27; Mark 4: 35-41; Luke 8: 22-25)

Jesus is imperturbable, displaying a level of faith his disciples do not yet have.

In another instance, he sends his disciples out in a boat while he stays to dismiss the crowd and then to pray in solitude on the mountainside. They are dismayed while Jesus is away and the water grows rough and they cannot make headway with their oars. After a night of this, just before dawn they are frightened when they perceive him walking across the water, and some think he is a ghost.

Jesus calms them by saying, “It is I; don’t be afraid.” He enters the boat and the wind dies down, allowing them finally to make it to shore. (Mark 6: 45-52; John 6: 16-21) In one account, Peter says, “Lord if it is truly you, let me come to you on the water.” Jesus says, “Come,” and Peter begins to walk. But he becomes afraid and begins to sink. Jesus immediately catches him with his hand: “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14: 22-33)

The pattern is: for his disciples, who are supposed to show a higher level of faith, Jesus performs miracles when they feel in trouble without him.*

*Other miracles on the Sea of Galilee: when Jesus recruits Simon and Andrew, first by preaching from their boat, then pushing off from shore, whereupon they make a huge catch of fish. (Luke 5: 1-11); and when Jesus responds to a tax demand by telling Peter to fish in the lake, where he will catch a fish with a coin in its mouth to pay their taxes. (Matthew 17: 24-27)

At the end of the miracle of curing a demon-possessed man, Jesus sends the demons into a nearby herd of swine (presumably polluted under Jewish law), whereupon they rush madly off a cliff and drown themselves in the lake. (Luke 8: 26-39; Mark 5: 1-20; Matthew 8: 28-34) One nature miracle happens on dry land: on his way into Jerusalem to cleanse the temple he curses a fig tree which has no fruit for him and his followers; and when he returns in the evening, it has withered. (Mark 11: 15-19; Matthew 21: 18-21) The miracle is a living parable on the withered-up ritualists whom Jesus is attacking.

Apparitions, finally, are subjective experiences that particular people have at definite times and places. There is nothing sociological to question about their having such experiences, but we can notice who is present and what they did. The event called the Transfiguration happens when Jesus takes three close disciples up a mountain to pray-- a special occasion since he usually went alone. They see his face and clothes shining with light, see historic persons talking to Jesus and hear a voice from a cloud. The disciples fall on the ground terrified, until Jesus touches them and tells them not to be afraid, whereupon they see that Jesus is alone.

Jesus admonished them not to tell anyone about what they had seen. (Luke 9: 28-30; Matthew 17: 1-13; Mark 9: 2-13)

When Jesus' mission in Jerusalem is building up towards the final confrontation between his own followers and increasingly hostile authorities and their crowds. Jesus announces “the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” A voice from heaven says “I have glorified it.” Some in the crowd said that it thundered, others that an angel spoke. Jesus tells them that the vision is for their benefit, not his; and that “you will have the light only a little while longer.” When he finished speaking, he hid from them. (John 12: 20-36) The crowd was not of one mind; they disagree about whether Jesus is the Messiah who will rule and remain forever, while Jesus sees the political wind blowing towards his execution. The subjective feeling of a thunderous voice in the crowd, but variously interpreted, reflects what was going on at this dramatic moment.

Finally I will venture an interpretation of what happened when Jesus was tempted by the devil in the wilderness. (Matthew 4: 1-11; Luke 4: 1-13) This happens after hearing John the Baptist preaching about the coming Son of God, and Jesus must have decided he was the one. The next thing he does is to imitate John the Baptist by going to live alone in the desert. Here he has apparitions of the devil (which we read about because presumably he later told his disciples). Living in the desert for 40 days is a life-threatening ordeal, and at some point he considers that he has the power to turn stones into food. He rejects this as a thought coming from the devil, since his aim is not to be a magician; the internal dialogue ends with the kind of aphorism that Jesus would pronounce throughout his mission: "Man shall not live by bread alone." Up on the mountain cliffs, he considers whether he should jump down and fly, and rejects that too; another devil-temptation to use magic for trivial marvels like entertaining stories in the Arabian Nights. He envisions the devil showing him the whole world spread out below, and giving him the evil thought that the Kingdom of God would make him the mightiest of worldly kings. 

Mt. Temptation, traditionally where Jesus spent 40 days in wilderness

Modern research shows that internal dialogue takes place not only through talk but also visual images taking their turn in the argument. (Wiley 1994; Collins 2004) Through these apparitions, Jesus is thinking out what kind of power he has and what he will do with it. It is the power to inspire crowds, to recruit followers, to work a moral revolution, and reveal a life-goal that is not of the world as people hitherto knew it. It is, in short, the power of charisma.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at

Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Randall Collins. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies. (chapter 3 on ancient religious and philosophical movements)

Randall Collins. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. (chapter 5 on internal dialogue)

Randall Collins. 2010. “The Micro-sociology of Religion.” (research on prayer) http://www.thearda.com/rrh/papers/guidingpapers/Collins.asp

Emile Durkheim. 1912. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

Michel Foucault. 1965. Madness and Civilization.

Erving Goffman. 1961. Asylums; 1971 “The Insanity of Place,” in Relations in Public: Microstudies of the Public Order.

Paolo Parigi. 2012. The Rationalization of Miracles. (16th century Catholic Church focus on medical miracles when nominating saints)

Leo Srole. 1962. Mental Health in the Metropolis.

Rodney Stark. 1996. The Rise of Christianity.

Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. 1983. Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.

Norbert Wiley. 1994. The Semiotic Self. (research on internal dialogue)

Charles Tilly. 2004. Social Movements 1768-2004.

Irving Zeitlin. 1984. Ancient Judaism. Biblical Studies from Max Weber to the Present.

Lindsay Olesberg. 2012. The Bible Study Handbook. (very contemporary methods)

WHAT MADE ALEXANDER GREAT?

A previous post considered Napoleon as CEO. It focused on how he led organizations and structures in transition, and how networks intersected for a moment in time to pump up a central individual with huge emotional energy. It takes apart the genius/ talent/ ability cliché and shows what makes such careers happen. Alexander the Great is a good comparison: a chief contender to Napoleon, with an even better record of military victories, and similar historical fame. So: what made Alexander great?

Here is a preliminary checklist:

[1] His father’s army and geopolitical position

[2] Tiger Woods training

[3] The target for takeover

[4] Greek population explosion and mercenaries

[5] Alexander’s victory formula

We will also consider:

Was Alexander’s success because of or despite his personality?

Did Alexander really achieve anything?

Why did Alexander sleep well, but Napoleon never slept?

[1] His Father

That is to say, his father’s army and favorable geopolitical position. Alexander is famous for having conquered the Persian Empire. It was the greatest empire in the world at that time, covering 3000 miles from west to east, 1500 miles north/south. The expedition was planned and prepared by his father, Philip II of Macedon, and was ready to go when Philip was assassinated at the farewell party. The 20-year-old son took command, waited two more years to make sure the Macedonians and the Greeks were behind him, and then carried out the epic campaign of conquest in 10 years.

Instead of kicking the causal can down the road, we need to ask: how did Philip come to build this invincible army? The answer is in the organization and the opposition.

The Macedonian army was an organizational improvement on the Greek hoplite army. The Greeks had developed the practice of fighting in solid ranks, forming a combat block of shields, armor, and spears. The whole aim of battle was to keep one’s troops together in a rectangular mass; with their heavy armor, they could not be hurt by arrows, stones or javelins-- a Roman version was called a Tortoise because it was impervious to anything.

The Greek phalanx, developed in the 600s and 500s BC, was a huge shift from the traditional mode of fighting depicted in the Iliad (around 750 BC). The traditional form could be called the hero/berserker style.

An army consisted of noisy crowds of soldiers clustered behind their leaders, who didn’t really give orders but led by example. Heroes like Achilles, Hector, and Ajax would work themselves into a frenzy, roaring out onto the battlefield between the armies, sometimes fighting a hero from the other side, but more often going on a rampage through the lesser troops, cowing them into a losing posture and mowing them down with sheer momentum, i.e. emotional domination. This berserker style remained the way “barbarian” armies fought-- that is to say, armies that did not have disciplined phalanxes. The hero-berserker could never beat a Greek or Roman phalanx that stood its ground; the Greeks were always victorious over the barbarians to the north and east of them, and so were the Romans over their respective hinterlands.

On the other hand, when one Greek phalanx met another, the result was a shoving match. Unless one side broke ranks and ran away, few soldiers were killed. Most battles were stalemates, and city-states could avoid combat if they wished, sheltering behind their walls. The main purpose of cities all over the ancient Middle East, many of them just fortified towns, were these defensive walls, impervious to berserkers. Phalanxes only fought by arrangement, when both sides assembled on chosen ground for a set-piece battle.

Greek hoplite battle

The main weakness of the hoplite phalanx was that it was slow-moving. Hoplites were heavy troops, quite literally from the weight of armor they carried. An enemy that hit and ran away could harass a Greek phalanx but would be beaten if it stayed to fight head-to-head. This was brought home to the Greeks when Xenophon returned from a campaign in Persia during 401-399 BC, writing up their experiences in his famous Expedition of the Ten Thousand. A contender for the Persian throne had hired them as mercenaries; but once they reached the Mesopotamian heartland, the Persian leader was killed in battle, and the Ten Thousand had to fight their way back, first against the Persian army and then against primitive hill tribes on their path to the Black Sea.

The Persians troops were somewhere between the berserker style and the disciplined Greeks. They relied on large masses to impress their enemy into submission; typically these were grouped by ethnicity, each with their own type of weapons. Among these weapons of terror were rows of chariots with scythes attached to their axles; sometimes there were war-elephants. Troops recruited from tribal regions were used on the flanks, as clusters of stone-slingers, archers, and javelin-throwers; these were light troops, without armor since they fought from a distance. The Persian armies that Alexander fought had the same shape.

None of these troops could beat a disciplined phalanx that held its ground; the chariots could get close only if they ran onto the phalanx’s spears, which horses are unwilling to do; elephants, too, are hard to control and shy away from spears. The Greeks soon recognized they could beat armies of almost any size if they stuck together. A bigger problem was that enemy light troops, and attacks by tribal forces with arrows and slings, could be repelled by their armor and discipline, but hoplites were too heavy to chase them down and keep them from repeating the attack.

The solution was to add specialized units around the phalanx; hiring their own barbarian archers and slingers, and adding cavalry, mainly for the purpose of finishing off the enemy when they are running away. But in the Greek homeland, most battles were simply phalanx-on-phalanx; in the democratic city-states, this was as much a display of egalitarian citizenship as a military formation.

Philip’s Macedonian army, which he put together between 360 and 336 BC, incorporated all the most advanced improvements. Most importantly, he added heavy cavalry, operating on both flanks with the phalanx in the center. Philip’s cavalry were not just for chasing-down after the enemy broke ranks, but for breaking the enemy formation itself. Philip was one of the first to perfect a combined-arms battle tactic: the phalanx would engage and stymie the enemy’s massed formation, whereupon the cavalry would break it open on the flanks or rear.

This was one of the advantages of Macedonia’s marchland location; having only recently transitioned from tribal pastoralists to settled agriculture, it could combine military styles. Philip’s phalanx was recruited from the peasant farmers, his cavalry from the aristocracy, used to spending their time riding and hunting. Philip’s-- and thus Alexander’s-- cavalry were called the Companions; they were the elite, the carousing drinking-buddies of their leader. The Companion cavalry, usually on the right wing of battle, was complemented by another cavalry on the left wing, recruited from the Thessalian plains people, but commanded by Macedonian officers.

In addition to improving on the best-of-the-barbarians, Philip also borrowed from the most scientifically advanced Greeks, the colonies in Sicily, for techniques of attacking fortresses. These included catapults and engines, underground mining (to undermine walls), siege ladders and protected roofing to cover the de-construction engineers as they worked on the fortress.

The third of Philip’s innovations was to travel light. Greek city-state armies, if they went very far from home, traveled with huge baggage trains: servants carrying armor and supplies, personal slaves, women, camp followers, often doubling the size of the mass. Philip made every soldier carry his own equipment; he prohibited carts, since they are slow moving and clog the primitive roads; he kept pack animals to a minimum, since they add to the number of attendants. When an army has to engage in long-distance expeditions, overcoming the logistics problem becomes the number-one issue. As we shall see, Alexander followed his father exactly in this regard.

The Geopolitical Position, as Philip Left It

Macedonia was a late developer, a peripheral area north of the zone of city-states.

Moreover, it was essentially an inland state, not a maritime power; its strength was its extensive agricultural lands, and its access to the plains with their horses and pastoralists.

To the south was the Greek peninsula, broken by mountains and inlets of the sea, a land of walled city-states. Rarely able to expand their land frontiers, they engaged in maritime expeditions, lived by trade and booty, and by sending out colonies around the Mediterranean littoral. The same pattern held on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea. The result was that Greek city-states could rarely conquer each other. Some did become more prestigious than others, and forced the others into coalitions. This Athens did when it became the center for the massed fleet that repelled the Persian invasions, subsequently becoming a quasi-empire in their own right collecting duties to support the fleet.*

But as land powers, the city-states were essentially deadlocked.

*The cultural prestige of Athens starts at this time. Before 460 BC, Greek poets, philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were spread all over; they concentrate in Athens when it becomes the biggest, richest, and most powerful city. The cultural fame of Athens is a result of its geopolitical rise. It became the place where all the culture-producing networks came together, and remained the place for centuries as the leading networks reproduced themselves.

Simultaneously, the Persian empire had reached the limits of its logistics and its administrative capacity for holding itself together. There was no longer any real danger of Persian expansion into Greece; it was just another player in the multi-player situation. The Persian invasions were in 490 and 480-79 BC; both failed because the Persians could not sustain an army across the water against navies equal to what they could raise. The last Persian forces on the European side of the straits were thrown out by 465 BC. The Athenians played up the Persian threat as the basis of their own power, down to about 400, when they lost a long domestic war of coalitions.**

**The defeat of Athens by Sparta was not the end of democracy, or anything of the sort. Greek history is dominated by Athenian propaganda, because the great historians of this period-- Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon-- were all Athenians or sympathizers. It helped that Socrates and Plato were Athenians, and their dialogues make the Athenian scene come alive, as do the comedies of Aristophanes. That is why we moderns, styling ourselves inheritors to Greek democracy and science, have such a narrow Athenian peep-hole view into the history of Greece.

The period from the 390s BC down to the rise of Macedonia in the 340s, is one where numerous powers and coalitions vie with each other. Sparta, Athens, Thebes, the Boeotian league, the Phocians, all have a try at becoming hegemon. The term itself is revealing: it means, not conqueror or overlord, but leader, preponderant influence. The situation has settled into a multi-sided, unstably ongoing set of conflicts.

Outside the deadlocked heartland, there was opportunity for a marchland state to grow. Since the major players had their attention locked in, a peripheral actor could grow in its own environment, becoming dominant through a local elimination contest. This is what the Macedonian kingdom did. First its settled agricultural zone expanded inland to incorporate nearby hill tribes, recruiting them into a victoriously expanding army; then growing north and east into Thrace (what is now Bulgaria and European Turkey) by beating barbarian kings and weak tribal coalitions. Philip, who grew up as a hostage in one of the civilized city-states, had an eye for what counted there; after returning to Macedon, he made a point of conquering barbarian land that had gold mines, as well as seaports as far as the straits, where the grain trade passed upon which Athens and the other Greek city-states depended. In short, he started by becoming the big frog in a small pond, while learning the military and cultural techniques of his more civilized neighbours, and combining them with the advantages he could see on the periphery. 

At a point reached around 340 BC, the city-states woke up to find that their biggest threat was not Persia, nor one of their own civilized powers, but a semi-barbarian upstart, whose armies and resources were now bigger and better than their own.

[2] Tiger Woods Training

Alexander was born in 356 BC, a time when his father was reforming the Macedonian army and beginning his conquests. Obviously Philip was away from home a lot and would not have taken a small child with him to the wars. But it is apparent that from an early age, he trained Alexander by informal apprenticeship, having him around him when he could. The famous incident with the horse Bucephalas happened when Alexander was 10 years old, and his father was buying warhorses. One magnificent horse was too shy and unruly to be ridden, and Philip was going to send it back until Alexander begged to have a try at taming it. The story goes on to say he had noticed the horse was frightened by its moving shadow, so he turned the horse’s face into the sun, soothed it by stroking, and finally jumped on its back and galloped off. Leaving aside the usual hero-foreshadowing and prophetic comments that went along with the story, we can note that Alexander was already a careful observer who figured out how to manage those around him; that he was both impetuous and calculating, biding his time for the moment to act. This was not just a colorful story of a boy and his horse; it shows a remarkably mature 10-year-old; and the qualities Alexander shows are much the same as his father’s.

Though father and son butted heads and engaged in mutual jealousy, it was clear that Philip regarded Alexander from an early age as the kind of officer he wanted to follow him. At age 16, when Philip was away on campaign, he left Alexander as regent, and he jumped right in, putting down revolts by leading the army in person. Thereafter, Alexander accompanied him on campaigns, commanding the key unit in battle, the Companion cavalry.

Philip had other sons he could have groomed for this role. Alexander’s mother was Philip’s fourth wife out of an eventual total of eight, and Alexander had a number of step-brothers (most of whom came to a bad end, since infighting over succession was common and bloody). We can infer Alexander had opportunities to show his aptitude early; which is to say, he picked up his father’s military art quickly and thus was given still further opportunities, in a self-reinforcing virtuous circle. He was already distancing himself from all rivals.

Famously, Alexander was taught by Aristotle, in a private school lavishly endowed by Philip. This happened between age 13 and 16. Alexander enjoyed the learning, largely in literature like Homer, rather than technical philosophy. But it could not have been too cloistered a period, since at its end, Philip gives the 16-year-old his own army command; and Alexander’s school-mates, sons of the Macedonian aristocracy, come along with him as companions and generals in his future exploits.

What is it that Alexander learned during his apprenticeship? Obviously, Philip’s tactics for leading an army in battle; also how to recruit and train it, since during Alexander’s 10-year expedition he replenished his army several times over. He must have learned how to travel with a light baggage train, since this is what Alexander did on his Persian campaign. Perhaps this was the province of his father’s generals, notably Parmenio, an older man of his father’s generation who gave cautious advice on some famous occasions. (“If I were Alexander, I would accept the offer...” to divide the Persian empire with the defeated Persian King. “And so would I,” Alexander retorted, “if I were Parmenio.”)

Parmenio was delegated ticklish problems like commanding non-Macedonian troops, arranging logistics and baggage trains; and it may well be that in the early part of Alexander’s campaign, officers like Parmenio took care of the essential grunt-work.

Even so, it would be an extended apprenticeship for the 22-year-old. What Alexander showed he had learned, when he left Parmenio and the old advisors behind for the Eastern part of his conquests, was the crucial combination of logistics and diplomacy.

Why do these two go together? We have already discussed the problem of baggage trains slowing down an army’s movement. On long-distance expeditions, the question is whether an army can get there at all. The basic problem, as modern researchers have figured out, is that the people and animals that carry food and water use them up as they go along, and the more mouths in the supply train, the less gets through to the army.*

*This had to have been understood by professional soldiers like Alexander, but ancient historians never wrote about it, since they concentrated on heroic personalities and dramatic incidents and ignored banal realities. They also exaggerated enormously the size of enemy armies, part of the hero narrative, claiming impossible numbers like 1,700,000 Persians invading Greece in 480 BC; and 1,000,000 on the battlefield at Gaugamela. These numbers are impossible because such troops would need huge empty spaces just to stand on; and stretched out marching on narrow roads they would have covered 300 miles, making it impossible to feed them.

Using animals to do the carrying doesn’t solve anything. A horse can carry three times as much as a man, but it consumes three times the weight in food and water; camels can go four days without water, but then they have to drink four times as much.

Solution: live off the land. But there are two problems. One, it only works in good agricultural land. But ancient agriculture was mostly around the cities-- to put it the other way around, ancient cities had to be adjacent to agricultural land or to water transport, or they would starve. Inland, cities and good agriculture were like oases, with poor land in between supporting at best a sparse population. So traveling across poor land, or worse yet, deserts like those in Iran or Egypt, posed a life-or-death problem for an army. The bigger the army, the more deadly it was to itself.

The second problem is that a big army would have to keep moving, because even in fertile places, food and fodder would be exhausted in a steadily widening circle. And agriculture gets exhausted as the army passes through. The bigger the army, the more it creates a path of no return, since if it comes back (or a rival army, or a reinforcing one tries to use the same route), it will find nothing to eat. At best, it must wait til next year, next harvest season-- assuming the army has not killed off the farmers by eating up all their food so that they starve.

How did Alexander’s army solve this problem? Essentially, by diplomacy. It would send scouts or messengers ahead, seeking out availability of food and water.* Local chieftans or government officials presented themselves at the camp as word got around about an approaching army. Typically they would surrender to the conqueror, whereupon he would usually confirm them in their positions, enlisting them as allies. This meant they were obligated to help his army pass through their territory. Diplomacy on the whole meant generosity and persuasion. Alexander didn’t have to conquer everybody; leveling one resisting city and selling the population into slavery would be enough to bring the others around. In places where there was distrust, the invaders would leave a garrison, or demand hostages. It was a mild form of conquest, which left everything locally as it had been.

*We see the same thing in the Bible, when Jesus and a growing crowd of followers travel from Galilee in northern Israel to Jerusalem, a distance of 100 miles. Jesus sends out 70 forerunners to find towns to host them. It is not a military expedition, but Jesus calls down religious sanctions on the villages that refuse to receive them. “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! ... And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to heaven? No, you will go down to Hades.” [Luke 10: 1-16] Logistical issues recur throughout Jesus’ career, since big crowds overstress local resources: hence the need for miracles of multiplying loaves and fishes, and turning water into wine.

The essential thing was that new allies or friendly natives were obligated to provide stores of food and fodder along the route; pack animals to replace those lost by malnourishment, or to marshal their own local pack trains.

For Alexander’s army, the method worked well. It also explains why it took 10 years to conquer the empire. Conquering the eastern part meant more marches through deserts and mountains, careful planning of when harvests were available, and more advance diplomacy.

Alexander fought relatively few battles. After each one, he would stay in a well-provided location, receive visits of capitulation, and arrange logistics for the way ahead. His father, building a mini-empire on the barbarian fringes of Greece, was ruthless when he needed to be, but on the whole Philip expanded by diplomacy. It all meshed together: his fast-moving army, his combined-arms victories, and his diplomatic agreements that solved problems of logistics. His son operated the same way.

Philip, too, had been a keen-eyed youth. His adolescent years were spent as a hostage in Thebes in the 360s. At the time, its famous general Epaminondas was dominating Greece by building a full-time professional army, inventing combined-arms tactics and the strategy of holding forces in reserve; instead of the one-shot shoving match between hoplite phalanxes, Epaminondas created a two-stage battle where after the intial melée had tied up the enemy, his fresh troops would hit them on the flank. Philip developed a version of this tactic, using heavy cavalry.

Philip took over as King at age 24, not much older than Alexander at 20. Both learned their craft young, from the best of the previous generation. Both hit the ground running.

[3] The Target for Takeover

Alexander's expedition 334-324 BC

Most importantly, Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire was there for the taking.

Let us unpack this. The Empire was already an organized entity. Cyrus, Darius I, and their successors had created a unified administrative structure out of what previously had been several major kingdoms (Media, Babylon, Egypt), plus lesser kingdoms, plus a vast area that never before had been a state in the strong sense of the term. Back in the time of Cyrus in the 500s BC, Mesopotamia and Egypt, the two great fertile river valleys of the Middle-East, had already gone through their elimination contests and winnowed down to a few strong states based on big populations held together by water transport. But Iran, the uplands of Asia Minor and Armenia, and the adjacent plains of Central Asia, were still areas inhabited by sparse populations. Some were moving pastoralists, who formed at most shifting tribal coalitions. Others lived in pockets and valleys where agriculture could support a mid-size population and therefore petty kingdoms; but they lacked the logistics to supply an army big enough to conquer anybody, by carrying enough food and water to get across the infertile areas between them.

Cross-section of mountain barriers to Iranian plateau

What Cyrus did was essentially what Alexander did later: starting from the major pockets of population and agriculture, he would win a few exemplary victories, then use his prestige to invite or overawe the outlying areas, with their lower level of production, to enlist as friends and allies. We could call this a system of tribute; the Great King, as Cyrus and his successors were known, was more than just an ordinary King, but overlord of lords.

He did not change much locally; the same chiefs and petty kings remained in place, but they had to pay tribute. Above all, they had to provide goods in kind, especially the animals and foodstuff so that royal armies could pass that way.*

*In this respect, the expansive emperors, Darius and Xerxes, regarded the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and the other side of the Aegean sea as just so many more candidates for incorporation into the system of overlordship. Greek historians, and some contemporary politicians, saw this as a life-or-death struggle between democracy or despotism, but this was an exaggeration. From the Persian point of view, the Greek city-states were a version of small remote kingdoms, too much trouble to be directly controlled. The city-states of Ionia under Persian overlordship were left to run their own internal affairs; some continued to be democracies, others were oligarchies but this was the same spectrum as the Greek mainland. On the whole tribute was light, in fact generally less than what the Athenians demanded to maintain the anti-Persian fleet.

This was a thin administrative system.

In some places, a tributary empire could be turned into a thicker, more intrusive system. Cyrus, Darius, and their stronger successors put their own administrators in place: high-level satraps, intermediate level governors, local garrisons. In richer places, older city-kingdoms like Babylon, taxes could be collected in money for the royal treasury. Paved roads were built, facilitating the faster movement ofarmies to keep things under control; messengers connected administrators and sent policy edicts throughout the Empire. With only moderate success, to be sure; satraps were often near-autonomous; and since they ruled over layers of locals most of whose traditional leaders were kept in place, they often had little effect except keeping the taxes or tribute coming in.

Under the stronger Persian regimes, regional power was divided among a civilian head of government, counterbalanced by a chief treasury officer, and a military commander. There also was a service called “Eyes and Ears of the King,” roving inspectors with their own military escorts.

To repeat: Alexander’s success depended on the fact that the Persian Empire was there for the taking.

Now for the second part.

That it was for the taking was a common observation in Greece from the 390s onwards. The success of the Ten Thousand in fighting their way back from the heart of the Empire convinced them that Greek forces (and Greek democratic spirit) could always beat the servile Asians.

Spartan generals and other military stars of following decades put themselves forward as prospective leaders of such a conquest. Such names were popular in the panhellenic movement, what was left of the Athenian anti-Persian crusade. The famous Athenian orator Isocrates proposed that the solution of Greece’s problems was just such an expedition: not because Persia was still a menace, but because it was an easy target.

Greece’s problem was there were too many poor men wandering around joining armies. In the past Greece had taken care of its excess population by founding colonies around the Mediterranean. But that area was getting politically filled up, with menacing states in the west like Carthage and Rome. The solution was to expand eastward, conquering land from the Persians. The most recent of these prospective saviours was named: Philip of Macedon. Left unsaid was the fact that Philip was becoming a threat to the Greeks; better get him off to Asia and out of the way. After Philip’s assassination, Alexander made a foray into Greece with his army, and got himself confirmed as commander in chief (hegemon) of the panhellenic army, which now really would set out on this task.

Why an easy target? The Greeks could see clearly enough that their military forces were tactically better than the Persians. Moreover, Persia had long since stopped expanding. It had become a familiar player in Greek geopolitics, much like any other contender, taking part in one coalition, then another. Most striking of all must have been the way the Empire was periodically roiled whenever a King died. The satraps would revolt, and several years went into getting them back under control.

And Persian succession crises were filled with betrayals and assassinations, decimating the royal families several times over. It last had just happened in 338 BC, and had not yet settled down when Philip was ready to launch his invasion two years later.

All this was true. Alexander was able to pick apart the Persian Empire in Asia Minor with ease. Beating one Persian army at Granicus soon after he landed, and besieging one holdout city (a Greek city, by the way, Miletus) was enough to make the rest of the polities, Greek cities, semi-Greek kings, and Persian satraps alike, all come over to his diplomacy, and to supply his logistics.

It wasn’t until next year that the newly installed Great King could muster troops to meet Alexander in Syria, already in reach of the Mesopotamian heartland. Darius III was a survivor, not a particularly vigorous ruler, who got the crown mainly because he was almost the last of the lineage still alive.

That Alexander’s takeover of the Persian Empire went off without a single defeat was less a result of his singular qualities as a general, than of the weakness of Persian administrative and military structure. Alexander spent 10 years on the takeover, not because it was difficult, but because it was so large. Logistically, he needed that much time to make a grand tour of his Iranian and Eastern possessions after, in the 4th year, he had occupied the major cities, defeated Darius, and assumed his crown.

But also, the Persian Empire had enough structure so that is could be taken over-- as opposed to crumbling to pieces. Even in the wars among Alexander’s successors, the central part remained intact, while the Macedonia/ Asian Minor segment and the Egyptian segment broke off, leaving the big state outlines more or less where they were.

The Persian Empire, under whatever name, had coherence as a network, and it didn’t matter who headed it. In this perspective, the bloody, protracted and treacherous 20-year fight among Alexander’s successors continued the pattern of succession crises whenever the Persian Great King died. And this is what Alexander, in title, had become.

Sheer military force cannot take over a territory before it has developed to an economic level at which the conquering forces can be sustained. At the cusp of civilization, large armies couldn’t even traverse such places if economic organization isn’t complex enough.

Conversely, a state with a strong enough infrastructure to support its military rulers also can support a conquering army.

No Greek general, like Alexander or anyone else, could have conquered an empire spreading into the Iranian plateau and beyond into Central Asia, in the 500s BC when those places were still isolated agricultural oases amidst tribes and pastoralists. It required the intermediate step such as Cyrus took, to build the logistics networks. 

A person-centered way of saying this would be: no Cyrus, no Alexander. I have already said something similar about Philip’s relationship to his son. But to focus on names is to miss the point about how structures change.

Alexander made no changes to the Persian administration. His methods of conquest were the same as those of Cyrus: he accepted surrenders, then usually reconfirmed the former official in office-- sometimes even after they had opposed him in battle. Perhaps he did this out of gallantry; or recognizing competence where he saw it. Also it was the easiest thing to do, much easier than trying to create an administration of his own. In some places he left garrisons, and in the heartland regions he installed his own officials as satraps, and tried to reinstitute the 3-official system (administrator, treasurer, military commander) where it had fallen into disuse. But the end result was essentially to put the organization of the Persian Empire back in working order.

The panhellenic prognosticators were right. The Persian Empire was ready for a takeover. But the end result was no different. Alexander was not great enough to make a structural change.

[4] Greek Population Explosion and Mercenaries

Greece had been in a population explosion from the 600s BC (when it had about half a million people) until 400 BC (when it reached 3 million). The city-states sponsored colonies in southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa, and around the Black Sea, without slowing down the population surge, so the overall growth must have been even larger. One big result of Alexander’s conquest was to open the Asian Middle-East and Egypt to colonization. This time it worked; Greece’s population started falling, down to 2 million by 1 AD, a loss of about one-third. During this same period, the Persian Empire and its successors (the Macedonian and Hellenistic successor states in Asia and Egypt), grew from about 14 million total in 400 BC to 17 million in 1 AD, with most of the growth in the Greek-dominated areas of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt.

One could say Alexander’s conquest solved the problem of Greek overpopulation relative to its resources, which Greek observers had seen as the result of growing concentration of wealth, dispossession of poorer farmers from their land, and the creation of a dangerous class of rootless warriors.

Reversing the gestalt, it was not so much Alexander who made possible the migration of the Greeks, as the other way around: the mobile Greek surplus population, already employed as warriors, made up the armies that carried Alexander to success. We see this in the growth of mercenaries, starting at least 100 years before Alexander.

Already at the time of Darius the Great, the Persian king was employing Greeks to command a fleet surveying the coast from India to Arabia, and even to survey the coast of Greece preliminary to invasion. Around 450 BC, Greek mercenaries were employed by Persia to put down an internal revolt by a satrap in Asia Minor. The famous Ten Thousand hired by the pretender Cyrus to overthrow his brother Artaxerxes in 401 BC were the first time Greek hoplites were seen on the plain of Mesopotamia. By the 350s, Artaxerxes III was hiring his own Greek mercenaries to regain Egypt. Thus it was no surprise when Alexander, in his first battle of conquest, at Granicus in Asia Minor 334 BC, fought an army made up of Persian cavalry, local infantry, plus a force of Greek mercenaries who fought longer and harder than anyone else, and were massacred by Alexander after the end of the battle. At the climactic battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, King Darius III surrounded his personal bodyguard with Greek mercenaries.

In part this was the professionalization of warfare. Most fighters in the Greek wars of the 400s BC were part-time citizen-soldiers; the following century turned increasingly to full-time professionals. Greek hoplites acquired the reputation as the best brand, and their services were bought ever farther away in the international market. Greek generals offered to hire out to any city, tribe or kingdom that needed them. Political loyalty and nationalist ideology were nowhere near as important as the Athenian panhellenists made them out to be. Some soldiers were ideological, many were not. Already in Xerxes’ invasion of 480 BC, Arcadians (Greek soldiers from the interior) offered their services to the Persians, out of poverty. In the city-states, mercenaries were regarded with suspicion for precisely this reason; they were apolitical roughnecks, ready to fight for whoever had money to pay them; hence when the Ten Thousand completed their great escape from Persia, the Greek cities viewed them with distrust and refused to admit them. But even in ideological wars mercenaries were used; the Athenians for instance used them for the dirty work of massacreing enemy cities during the Peloponnesian war.

Eventually everybody used them; Alexander too had mercenaries in his army, although he preferred to rely on his native Macedonians, and reserved officer positions for them.

The panhellenic ideology of Greeks vs. Persians was never a widespread reality. Already at the time of Cyrus the Great, most of the Greek cities of Asia Minor were brought into his empire by subsidies, bribes, and treachery. Even Athens and Sparta wavered between pro- and anti-Persian positions; it was generally the democratic faction who favored Persian protection and peace, the conservatives who favored war. After the invasions were thrown back, there was a Sparta-Persia alliance during most of the 400s BC; Persian tribute in Ionia was less than the Athenian exactions, and some cities preferred Persian to Athenian imperialism; and Persian subsidies-- Persian gold-- financed Sparta to victory in the Peloponnesian war.

During the 300s, the fluctuating Greek powers were all willing, at one time or another, to make Persian alliances.

One thing that connected mercenaries with Persian foreign policy was money. Mercenaries, by definition, fought for pay; and they flourished in the same milieu where subsidies/ aid/ bribery were a weapon of statecraft. The entire Middle-East, and its peripheral zones like Greece, were becoming better organized: in infrastructure of roads, shipping and ports; in administration, travel and communications; in agricultural production to support larger populations, in trade, tribute, and taxation. Coinage and a layer of monetary economy above the subsistence sector existed by the 500s, and was widespread by the 300s. In that sense, the argument about the spread of mercenaries is the same as the argument that the advanced organization of the Persian Empire made it a candidate for conquest. Not only was there a population explosion in Greece, but also a market flowing towards the better-organized East, where there was money to buy the thing that Greeks were best at producing: top-flight military labor. From a higher level of analysis, the growth of mercenaries, the shift of Greek population to the East, and Alexander’s conquest were all the same process.

[5] Alexander’s Victory Formula

Besides diplomacy and advance logistics, how did he actually conduct a battle? Not quite what you’d think: not just a headlong attack, but a mixture of caution and impulsiveness.

A better word would be patience. Alexander took risks once battle began, but his strategy of when and where to give battle was the opposite of risk-taking.

Alexander recognized that a big Persian army could not stay in one place very long. The bigger it is, the less it can live off the land; and bringing in supplies generates the vanishing-point mathematics of pack animals and humans eating up the supplies they are carrying, not to mention clogging the available roads.

Facing huge armies, Alexander delayed accepting battle. Before Issus, Darius assembled several hundred thousands on a plain near the Syrian Gates, where the Macedonians would be expected to come out of the mountains of Asia Minor. The plain gave unrestricted maneuverability for a large army, and there had been time to stockpile ample supplies. Alexander, crossing them up, went on a 7-day campaign westward against the mountain tribes. Then he returned to a city where he was well supplied by sea, made elaborate sacrifices to the gods; held a review of the army; athletic and literary contests; even a relay race with torches. Finally Darius had to move, and went seeking Alexander in the narrow region of mountains and swamps, throwing away his advantage of open ground. After two weeks inland, no doubt hurting for supplies, Darius finally met Alexander at the Issus River, where the Persian army-- now down to about 150,000-- was packed in and unable to use superior numbers to outflank or surround him.

At Gaugamela 3 years later, Darius had an even bigger army, on a wide plain supplied by the main roads of Mesopotamia. They even cleared away bushes so that their scythe-bearing chariot wheels had room to roll.

Alexander brought his army, now grown to 45,000, to a hill overlooking the plain, where at night the torches seemed to go on forever. Since the Persians were not going to move, Alexander gave his army four days rest. Alexander was also playing psychological warfare, not letting the Persians fight in their first flush of enthusiasm (the adrenaline rush, we would say).

Their suspense grew even worse, since they began to expect a night attack, so after several sleep-depriving nights of this, Alexander chose to attack in the daylight.

Alexander always started the battle. His formula was to seize the initiative, establish emotional domination as quickly as possible. His open-field battles all became walkovers. The units of the Macedonian army—infantry phalanx, light troops, heavy cavalry on both wings—advanced at different times, but the key was always Alexander’s assault.

Once the Companion cavalry broke the Persian ranks in an intense but usually short fight, the Persians' advantage in numbers was turned against themselves.

At Issus, the Persians had large numbers of troops, realistically perhaps four times the size of Alexander’s, lined up along a river bank. But most of those tens or hundreds of thousands could never engage the Macedonians, because they couldn’t get close to them. Once their defense crumbled on the right, Alexander turned obliquely against the center; this threw the Persian army into a stampede, particularly disabling when so many men trample each other in a traffic jam. In every major battle, the Persians lost 50 percent or more, the Macedonians a small fraction, perhaps 1 percent or less. The disparity in casualties seems unbelievable, but it is commensurate with complete organizational breakdown of one side, making them helpless victims. In violence on all size-scales, emotional domination precedes most physical damage.

At Granicus, Alexander positioned himself opposite where the Persian commander was surrounded by bodyguards. He waited for the moment when he saw a wavering in the Persian line, and charged his cavalry at that point. Alexander led 2000 or so cavalry splashing through the water and up a steep bank. This might seem a risky thing to do. But psychologically, relying on favorable geography for defense is a weakness; once the advantage of terrain turns out to be ineffective, the defending side has set itself up to be emotionally dominated.

In every respect, Alexander aimed at the point of emotional weakness-- a point in time and space, visible to a good observer.

Alexander did not have to fight the entire Persian army; he picked a unit about his own size, and counted on the superior quality of his troops-- the superiority they created by generating emotional domination.

All three of Alexander’s fateful victories-- Granicus, Issus, Gaugamela-- ended the same way, with the enemy commander (in the last two, the King himself) running away in his chariot, setting off a general panic retreat.

At Gaugamela, the Persian forces were so large and spread out that Parmenio, commanding on the left, had a stiff fight with Greek mercenaries and other Persian forces who did not know the rest of their army was routed. It took longer but Parmenio, too-- the other cavalry commander-- emerged victorious without Alexander’s help. This shows that the Macedonian style was not personal to Alexander alone.

There is another respect in which Alexander attacked the weakness of the Persian army. It was an army of an empire, a polyglot of 50 different ethnic groups, with their own languages, each fighting in their own formation. The army that invaded Greece under Xerxes had 30 generals, all Persian aristocrats; the armies of Darius III were probably similar. We can surmise that central control of the army, once battle began, was minimal. We can also infer that morale and loyalty of each ethnic unit was shakey; they had been recruited by going over to the victor, and they were aware of the possibility of going over to the other side if things did not go well. * There was also the rigid hierarchy of the Persian army-- something all the Greeks commented on.

*This was the pattern of warfare in India before the arrival of European officers. Battlefields were displays of ferocious weapons-- chariots, elephants and so on-- but outcomes were decided mostly by side-switching in the midst of battle but arranged beforehand. (Philip Mason. 1976. The Indian Army.)

Why this would make a difference is illuminated by observations by Western troops serving in today’s Middle-Eastern wars. American and British forces in Afghanistan, for instance, have commented that local troops can be ferocious in combat, and like the action of getting into a fight. (I have this from personal accounts, and military publications.) Their main weakness is in their officers, especially the NCOs. Whereas American NCOs are trained to take initiative, especially when higher organization gets disrupted during the fog of battle, Middle-Eastern officers are wary of doing anything they might be criticized for.** Success as an officer is not necessarily a good thing. Outstanding success makes one a political threat; it also could be interpreted as showing up one’s superiors. Extrapolating backwards to Alexander’s time, there are numerous reasons why ethnic troops and their lower officers would not fight vigorously for their Persian commanders, if the battle started going against them. Generals who failed risked being executed; but generals who succeeded were potential rebels, and many of them got executed or assassinated in a few years anyway, in the distrustful politics of the Empire.

**In this respect, the Roman army was more like the contemporary American one. Centurions-- leaders of a company of 100-- were widely regarded as the backbone of the army, and treated as such by successful generals. Also similar were the widespread opportunities for upward mobility in the revolutionary French army at the time of Napoleon.

A puzzle: by the time of Alexander’s invasion, the Persian army had its own Greek hoplite mercenaries. At Gaugamela, King Darius deployed 15,000. Since the tactical quality of the troops was the same, why didn’t the Persians’ Greeks stymie Alexander’s? Most likely because of the organizational atmosphere of the Persian army. The Greek mercenaries were hemmed in by the status-conscious Persian command structure. Proof by comparison is in the wars that took place, in the same region, among the Hellenistic successor states after Alexander’s death. When the composition of the armies became the same on both sides, outcomes went back to pretty much even.

For Alexander, a few big battles were enough to make the loyalty structure crumble, setting in motion the massive side-switching and the diplomatic offensive at which Alexander was adept.

We should add a number of sieges, first on the Ionian coast, and then in the Levant, above all the sieges of Tyre, the harbor stronghold of Phoenician naval power, and Gaza, on the road to Egypt. Alexander’s sieges were no different than anyone else’s. It took patience, and he spent 7 months at Tyre, determined to break through its strong-walled defenses. His eventual victory came by employing the most advanced Greek engineering methods of the time; but also through a strategic move. The Phoenicians could not be starved out, since they were supplied by sea. Alexander found a way around this by making diplomatic deals with other seaport cities, to bring their fleets to attack Tyre from the water. This worked; a combined land and sea attack breached the city. When he got to Egypt (which simply surrendered), he founded his most important colonial city, Alexandria, as a new naval center. This had the effect of giving him secure sea routes at his back, and quicker resupply lines for reinforcements from Greece. In military perspective, it was a fine combination of strategic and tactical plans.

Finally, there are the stories about Alexander’s clever strategems where his advance was blocked by an extremely strong position, like a fort in a mountain pass. As always in such stories, someone discovers a little-used pathway over the dangerous mountainside, leading around to the rear of the enemy. Alexander leads a body of intrepid troops on this action-adventure, and all is well in the end. Using bad weather as a cover also helps take the enemy by surprise. I don’t doubt the truth of these stories; but they are commonplaces about generals throughout history (there are similar stories in Xenophon). Most of these battles were minor; none of them broke the back of the enemy organization.

Was Alexander’s Success Because of or Despite His Personality?

“Personality” is a noun, but that is merely how it operates in our grammar. What we mean by personality, what the word points to, is not a thing at all but a series of actions. Personality is the sum total of someone’s personal interactions.

Some incidents of Alexander’s personal dealings with others were scandalously famous. In the seventh year of his campaign, his army was in Samarkand, far away in what is now Uzbekistan. At one of their frequent drinking-parties, Alexander got into a dispute with one of the Companions of the elite cavalry. It was his oldest friend, Cleitus-- his foster-brother, since Cleitus’ mother had nursed and brought up the two of them together. Both were drinking heavily. Cleitus began badgering Alexander about introducing Persian customs, especially making everyone who approached him prostrate themselves on the ground, treating him as a god on earth. Cleitus said it was offensive to his old friends, that an army wins as a group but he was taking all the credit for himself, that he is forgetting who-- Cleitus-- saved Alexander’s life at Granicus.

Alexander grew angrier and angrier. Cleitus’ friends tried to pull him out of the room, but he barged back in through another entrance, shouting another insult. (This is the typical escalation of a bar-room quarrel; it is usually when one of the partisans in a face contest has been ejected and makes a return, that somebody gets killed.) What happens next is revealing in the way Alexander was treated by his personal companions and servants. Alexander called on his guards to sound the alarm-- the signal that would have roused the entire camp to arms. None of the guards obeyed the order; they must have been used to such quarrels, and defied their god-playing King to keep the situation from getting out of hand. Since no one obeyed him, Alexander grabbed a spear and hurled it at Cleitus, killing him.

Immediately he calmed down. He tried to kill himself with the same spear but his guards prevented it. He retired to his room, and stayed there berating himself for days. Finally his advisors prevailed on him to put the incident behind him. He resumed acting like a Persian king-god, at least in public. About this time began a series of plots, rumoured assassinations and real executions. Two of his favorite Companions had drawn swords on each other; Alexander settled the matter by telling them he would execute them both if they quarreled again. He also delegated them separate tasks, one to convey orders to the Greek-speakers, the other to the Persians and foreigners in his army.

A flashback reveals something deeper in the interactional style of Alexander, and the Macedonian court where he grew up. When Alexander was 18, his father had taken a new wife, and at the wedding party the girl’s uncle-- one of Philip’s generals--- gave a toast to a new heir. Alexander threw his drinking cup at the man’s head and shouted: “What do you take me for, a bastard?” Philip drew his sword to cut down his son, but failed because he was too drunk to stand up. Alexander and his mother had to go into exile, but eventually he was recalled. Not long after, Philip was assassinated by another intimate with a dagger, Alexander’s mother had the new wife and her baby killed, and Alexander became the new King.

Heavy drinking, brawls, plots and assassinations were common at the Macedonian court (as the latter were in Persia too, although it is not clear that drinking was involved.)

There are striking similarities between Alexander killing Cleitus, and Philip trying to kill Alexander. Philip was a tough, brawling fighter, years of violence having left him with one eye, a crippled hand, and numerous wounds. Alexander was wrecking his own body the same way. Both did heavy drinking with the aristocratic heart of their army. Both relied on the same battle tactics, leading the charge, inspiring the cavalry attack. There was no way Alexander could avoid keeping up these drinking bouts; he continued them until he died from one of them.

Drinking was the ritual of bonding among the group that won his victories. Alexander’s carousing seems to contradict his patience in arranging logistics and awaiting the proper moment for marching or battle. But these were parts of the same thing: having to wait around so much gave occasion for carousing, a way of keeping up morale during dead time.

Now Alexander is in a structural bind. As Persian King, and in constant diplomacy playing King of Kings to the chieftans around him, he is caught in the ceremonial that exalts him. As leader of the world’s best military, he needs to keep up the solidarity of his Companions. The ambiguity of that name-- more apparent to us than it would have been at the time-- displays the two dimensions that were gradually coming apart: his companion buddies, a fraternity of fellow-carousers, fighters who have each other’s back; and the purely formal designation, members of the elite with privileged access to the King.*

*Compare the protocol of King Xerxes (reigned 485-465 BC) described in the Old Testament Book of Esther. She is a beautiful Jewish woman who has become Queen, top rank in the harem. But she risks her life in leaving her house to enter the King’s presence uninvited. Fortunately for Esther, and for her people, the King is happy to see her, and she is able to countermand an order sent out by royal messengers that would have killed all the Jews in the Empire. The storyline in Esther hinges repeatedly on who is allowed into the royal presence; at the outset, the previous Queen is deposed because she refuses to come when the King wants to show her off at one of his all-male drinking parties. Which way the royal scepter pointed meant favor, or death. Similar protocol at Babylon is described in the Book of Daniel. Alexander was moving towards being that kind of Oriental potentate-- and the Greeks were the first to formulate the ideas of Orientalism.

Thus it is striking how much freedom from deference, how much equality existed in Alexander’s drinking parties. It is astounding that his guards refused to obey his orders, and even laid hands on him forcefully to prevent his suicide. They too were part of the team.

Philip and Alexander have the same double personalities.** Philip, though a bad-tempered brawler and ferocious battle leader, also is the master of diplomacy. We have seen that Alexander’s conquest would not have been possible without having learned to solve logistics problems by diplomacy. After some battles he could massacre the defeated; but also he could be magnanimous. With some conquered kings and other high aristocrats, Alexander not only would restore them to their position, but treat them with great courtesy.

Such magnanimity would also have been good for his diplomatic reputation, encouraging side-switchers to approach him. I am not suggesting it was simply a strategy Alexander played. Personality is made from the outside in; habitual styles of interacting with people become part of the way one is. Since Alexander’s daily life fluctuates among different kinds of situations, he has many personality facets-- to fall back on talking in nouns, an unavoidable but misleading feature of our language. His life consisted of situations when he played the hard-drinking fraternity boy, and when he played the diplomat; increasingly as he took over Persian organization, he took on the side of arrogant ruler, paranoid about plots.

**One respect in which they differ is that Alexander was not very interested in sex. He joshes his friends for their love affairs, but seems to have been a virgin until age 23, when Parmenio gave him a captive Persian woman. Plutarch records that the captive wife and daughters of the King and women of the court were “tall and beautiful”, but Alexander would say sardonically “What eyesores these Persian women are!” Nor does it appear that he was homosexual-- although that would have been normal in Greece-- since he forcefully rejected a present of two beautiful boys.

Alexander was a monomaniac about the army and dangerous physical action-- he preferred hunting lions. Very likely he regarded women as dangerous entanglements, sources of strife and assassination. Observing not just his father, but his mother, would have taught him that.

Here are some other facets, or episodes:

The Impetuous Leader

The only route from the royal city of Persepolis in southern Iran to Ecbatana, the old Median capital in the northwest mountains, led over a 8000 foot pass, often blocked from winter until April. But in March 330 BC, Alexander was eager to get through. The ancient historian Curtius describes it with a touch of melodrama: “They had come to a pass blocked with perpetual snows, bound in ice by the violence of the cold. The desolation of the landscape and the pathless solitudes terrified the exhausted soldiers, who believed they were at the end of the world, and demanded to return before even daylight and sky should fail them.” Alexander reacted by leaping from his horse, seizing a mattock from a soldier and furiously attacking the ice, chopping a path through. It was the same way he led the cavalry charge in combat, pulling his troops behind him.

In summer they are marching through a desert, suffering from heat and lack of water. One day, an advance party found a gulley stream, and were bringing water up on pack animals as Alexander marched by on foot with his soldiers, sharing their misery. A soldier filled a helmet with water and held it out to Alexander. As he was raising it to drink, he saw his cavalry soldiers looking at him thirstily. Alexander shook his head and dashed the water to the ground-- his cavalry shouted they could all go another day without water and they galloped off together. One wasted helmet of water, Plutarch comments, invigorated the whole army.

Flashforward four years. Alexander’s army is preparing to leave Bactria, in far-off Central Asia. The campaign has been successful; they are laden with booty, rugs, silks, luxuries, probably a throng of camp followers. Alexander looks at the loaded supply train, just the kind of thing that would drag them down. Burn it all! And he starts in with his own wagons and pack animals, tearing off the bundles and throwing them into a fire. There is a shocked moment: then his soldiers join in, one after another; soon they are yelling in contagious joy, throwing things into the fire.

It is a combination potlatch and display of military dedication, waking up from the soporific dreams of peace.

Why does he act so much better on campaign than he does in court or in camp? He is an action junkie; the soft life repels him. But it is part of being a great King, and that has been his life’s goal. As long as there is another battle to fight, another danger to brave, he in in tune with his men, his buddies, his Companions.

Two Mutinies

Eastward into India, crossing one tentacle of the upper Indus River after another, the army penetrates the exotic tropics. They win a great battle against a huge host, armed with elephants; Alexander receives the Indian King’s surrender, then returns his kingdom to him with an exchange of royal compliments. The war-plus-diplomacy formula is still working. Then: his troops refuse to go on. Not just the men; his officers come to explain what the soldiers are saying, they agree with it too. Alexander is devastated. He retires into his tent, refuses to talk with anyone. He announces the rest can go back; he will go on with whoever will accompany him. No one offers. It is like the days after he had murdered Cleitus. But Alexander is harder now, older too; he gets over it, reluctantly agrees to lead his army down the river to the sea, starting their return to the West.

But his mood has changed. Already, since the murders and suspicions and executions in Central Asia, Alexander had grown more personally violent. He shot with an arrow a barbarian chief brought to him for rebelling.** Later, reprimanding his administrators for corruption in his absence, he killed one with his own hand by the stroke of a javelin. When Parmenio’s son is implicated in one of the alleged plots, Alexander not only killed the son but sent orders to assassinate the father.

**Millenia later, in the same part of the world, this was still a style of the super-toughguy leader; in the Russian civil war around 1920 the chief of the partisans/bandits would personally execute a captive in front of a crowd, this time with a pistol. (Felix Schnell. 2012. Räume des Schreckens. Gewalt und Gruppenmilitanz in der Ukraine 1905-1933.)

Thus we should not be surprised at the following incident: Beginning the march home in the Indus valley, Alexander fought all the tribes that would not submit. In one city, the citadel held out. Growing impatient with the siege, Alexander himself mounted one of the ladders, fending off a shower of missiles from above with his shield. He reached the top with three others when the ladders broke. His friends called Alexander to jump down; instead he jumped into the fortress. His tiny group fought ferociously, but were almost overwhelmed in the midst of the enemy by the time the Macedonians had frantically driven pegs into the earthen wall to make the ascent. One companion was dead; Alexander had been pierced by an arrow in the chest and fainted from loss of blood. His infuriated troops killed everyone in the place down to the women and children.

Alexander was always heedless of himself in battle, but now one wonders if he cared whether he lived or died. His soldiers had betrayed him; if they wouldn’t follow him now, they would see!

There must have been some satisfaction as his litter passed by boat along the camp shore, the army shouting as he raised a hand to show he was still alive.

After a long and devastating march, the following year they were back in Mesopotamia.**

**The big obstacle was the Gedrosian desert, the dryest part of Iran. Alexander could have come back the way he had gone out, looping across the northern, more fertile edge of the Iranian plateau; but Alexander sent a subordinate with part of his troops that way-- he wanted to try something new, maybe something especially dangerous. Usually careful of logistics, he planned for his admiral Nearchus to sail parallel to his route along the coast of the Indian ocean, to supply him with food and water. It was a rare miscalculation: they did not know the monsoon winds blew the wrong direction that time of year, and Nearchus’ fleet was stuck in port while Alexander’s 150,000 were marching west. Three-quarters of them died in the desert. It was the worst loss of Alexander’s career, more men than all his battles put together. It was like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.

Then came a second mutiny. He called an assembly of his Macedonian veterans, by now down to a fraction of his troops. He formally discharged those who were too old or wounded for further action, sending them home with ample rewards. The army’s mood was sullen. The cry went up: Discharge us all! And some yelled taunting insults about the Asian gods in whose name he would fight his further conquests. Alexander leaped down from the platform and pointed out the ringleaders to his guards, to seize them and put them to death.

In the silence that followed, Alexander remounted the platform and bitterly discharged the whole army. From now on Persian nobles would fill the high posts; names of Macedonian regiments would be transferred to the new army. For three days the Macedonian soldiers lingered, uncertain what to do; finally they laid down their weapons and begged to be admitted into Alexander’s presence. What followed was a tearful reconciliation. The quarrel was patched up, in the usual ritual, by massive drunken feasting.

Partying to Death

The triumphant return to the center of the Empire was one carousing celebration after another. There was a drinking contest with a prize; the winner drank 12 quarts of wine and died in three days; another 40 guests died because they were too drunk to cover themselves in a sudden storm of cold weather. At another great feast, featuring 3000 entertainers imported from Greece, Alexander’s closest friend Hephaestion fell ill after swallowing an entire flagon. When he died, Alexander went into a veritable potlatch of grief; he had the battlements of nearby cities pulled down, and massacred the entire population of a nearby tribe who had been causing trouble; the physician who failed to cure his friend was crucified. Hephaestion was more than a friend; he was his fellow Persianizer, the one who like himself wore Persian robes, the one who had fought the leader of the pro-Greek faction after the murder of Cleitus. Now Alexander was alone, the Persian King of Kings, without a friend. Someone stepped forward, one of the original Macedonian Companions, inviting him on an all-night drinking binge. They did it again the next night. Alexander woke up with a fever, steadily worsened, and died.

It was alcohol poisoning, of course-- literally drinking himself to death, like his companions.

Copy of a statue of Alexander regarded as good likeness

Are we surprised at how he looks? The statue made by his favorite sculptor is certainly not of a youth; probably from the last years of his life when he was back from campaigning. He stood out from his bearded contemporaries because he kept himself clean-shaven. Alexander was short but stocky, with something twisted looking in his face and neck. He was thirty-two years old when he died. Is this dying young? Think of him as an aging athlete, engaged in the roughest action for 16 years; about the time professional athletes start to retire, beat up from injuries. Alexander had been wounded in almost every battle, sometimes severely; wounded in the leg, bludgeoned in the head and neck, arrows that shattered bones and had to be painfully removed from shoulder, thigh and chest. It accumulates; and there were no steroids to prolong an athletic career.

Alexander did not die of disappointment, or for want of places yet to conquer. His fatal drinking binge took place days before another expedition was to be launched, the conquest of Arabia, preliminary to Carthage and the western Mediterranean. But the atmosphere was different. The court was swarming with priests and soothsayers, making all manner of sacrifices and oracles for the upcoming expedition. Alexander was conventionally religious for his time-- i.e. giving ample display of rituals before and after battle, no doubt enjoying the Durkheimian center of attention. But there is no indication he ever let the oracles tell him what to do. Flashback one last time, to Alexander in Greece, 21 years old, getting ready for his Persian expedition. Following good form, he visits the oracle of Delphi. But the oracle is closed; it is not a propitious day. Alexander forcefully drags the priestess to her shrine. “My son, you are invincible,” she protests. It is all he wants to hear.

Did Alexander Really Achieve Anything?

He took over the Persian Empire. He did not change its structure or even its extent. The mutiny in India happened when his army passed the Persian frontier; it was just too far, by everyone’s sense of what the Empire could hold. I take this to mean a logistics sense. There is a silly conjecture that if Alexander had not died, he would have conquered Carthage and Rome, and created a true world empire. This is hero-rhetoric of historians. As if anyone had the administrative capacity at the time: Italy had still not gone through the elimination contest that would have made it the kind of target Persia had become. Even 500 years later, when the Romans shifted from a thin tributary overlordship to a degree of bureaucratic penetration, they never could get beyond the western edge of Iran.

Could anyone else have done as much as Alexander did? Very likely. His father Philip was all set to do it; and he probably could have carried it out, if he didn’t get killed at some other drinking party along the way. They used the same army, the same tactics, the same diplomacy of rule. Perhaps the only difference was that Alexander was somewhat better, after all, at holding his liquor at drinking parties.

The main structural innovation that Alexander attempted was to promote mutual assimilation between Greeks and Persians.* The god-king protocol was what his Greeks objected to; but it was a necessary form of rule in the tributary overlord structure of the Persian Empire, depending on impressiveness and ceremonial obeisance that left local potentates in place. Greek city-state democracy (and even the version of egalitarian equals inside the Macedonian aristocracy) was structurally incompatible with the vertical hierarchy of an oriental empire. What Alexander’s innovation came down to specifically was an academy to train Persian noble youths, by making them, in effect, into Persian-speaking Macedonian officers.

This is what the second mutiny was about. He couldn’t integrate the Empire; the best he could try was integrate the office corps. Even this didn’t take.

*Alexander was not so “Greek” as Greek-centered historians have assumed. Certainly he was not a panhellenic anti-Persian. When he left Macedon, he gave away all his property, acting like he expected never to come home. His heroes were the Persian empire-builders, Cyrus and Darius I, even though the latter invaded Greece. In fact, Macedon became a client state of Persia at the time. Macedon was a buffer zone between two culture areas, and such locations can go either way.

The biggest consequence of the Macedonian conquest was creating a zone on the eastern and southern edges of the Mediterranean in which the dominant language and culture were Greek; and thus a zone where travel was facilitated, and social movements could spread. The main results were two: when the Romans started being drawn into Greek coalition-wars, starting with Epirus (on the Adriatic side of Greece-- near present-day Albania, and the place where Alexander’s mother came from), they were drawn onwards until they were interfering in the alliance system of the Greek-speaking states, all the way around to Syria and Egypt. And when Rome interfered, it never withdrew.

The second result can be seen in where Christianity spread: exactly these Greek-speaking places. Paul the great missionary to the Gentiles is a native of Tarsus in Asia Minor, near where Alexander fought the battle of Issus. The letters that make up the New Testament (itself written in Greek) are almost entirely to Christian congregations in Asia Minor and Greece. The subsequent great centers of the church, and of the monastic movements, were Greek-speaking Antioch and Alexandria. The inadvertent consequence of Alexander’s conquest was to create the conditions for the linguistically unified networks that became the great universalistic religion of the West. The panhellenic Greek spokesmen who in the 300s BC advocated colonizing land won from the Persian Empire thought they were exporting Greek democracy.

This did not happen. What got created, instead, was a cosmopolitan network structure, with Greek as its lingua franca. In it the very idea of universalism-- of a religion free from worldly entanglements and local loyalties-- could take hold.

Why did Alexander Sleep Well, but Napoleon Never Slept?

The preceding blog observed that Napoleon was so energized that he worked 20 hours a day, and on campaign never slept for more than 15 minutes at a time. Alexander was not at all like this. Alexander bragged that he never slept better than the night before a battle; that Parmenio had to shake him three times to wake him up before they went out to fight at Gaugamela. This is entirely plausible. Alexander was much more physical than Napoleon, a muscle man who tired himself out with vigorous exercise.

They both had high emotional energy, pumped up with confidence and pumping up others around them. But they did it by different means. Napoleon got his energy in center-of-the-network rounds of meetings, taking care of all the many branches of administration and moving around the pieces that had to assemble for battle. Things were simpler in Alexander’s day; administration was a thin ceremonial hierarchy; battle preparations were simple, and he did not so much direct his forces as launch the attack and create a bolt of energy that would stream behind him into the heart of the enemy army.

Who was the greater general? Consider this a way of seeing how much had changed from ancient organizational structures to incipient modern ones. If we imagine Napoleon going up against Alexander, it would have to be either in one time or the other. On an ancient battlefield, Napoleon would have been too small to play much part. On a modern battlefield, Alexander would have been one of the wild barbarians whose cavalry charge got mowed down by Napoleon’s artillery. Maybe he was, in the form of one of the native armies Napoleon annihilated in Egypt or Syria. Alexander won all his battles, Napoleon lost at least one big one. But Alexander fought perhaps a third as many battles, all of them one-sided, the most advanced military organization of its day against inferior ones. Napoleon fought armies much like his own, and towards the latter part of his career, his enemies caught up with his best techniques. It is foolish to attribute their respective records to such transcendental impossibility as sheer decontextualized talent.

Bottom line: Heroic leaders, if we unpack the designation of what we are talking about, have to be energy stars. They are persons in the center of gatherings, where they recycle emotions into group action. It can be done in different ways. Napoleon did it mainly by turning enthusiasm into speed; Alexander by spreading a reputation mixed of domineering, sudden anger, and magnanimous generosity.

They lived on opposite sides of a moral divide. Alexander was far more personally cruel than Napoleon, or other modern people, could be. Getting into Alexander’s world makes us realize how different are human beings under different social circumstances. Today someone like Alexander would be on death row. Napoleon one could have liked. As Durkheim explained, morality, as well as emotional energy, are products of social morphology.

Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Arrian. History of Alexander.

Plutarch. Life of Alexander.

Xenophon. Anabasis.

Old Testament Bible. Book of Esther; Book of Daniel.

J. B. Bury. 1951. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great. chapters XVI- XVII.

Donald W. Engels. 1978. Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army.

Peter Green. 1970. Alexander of Macedon, 356-323 BC.

R. Ghirshman. 1954. Iran: From the Earliest Times to the Islamic Conquest.

Colin McEvedy and Richard Jones. 1978. Atlas of World Population History.

H.W. Parke. 1933. Greek Mercenary Soldiers.

Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. 1983. Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World.

Randall Collins. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies. chapter 3.

Randall Collins. 2008. Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory.

NAPOLEON AS CEO: A CAREER OF EMOTIONAL ENERGY

 Napoleon Never Slept:

How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  

 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

SANDY HOOK SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: LESSONS FOR GUN-OWNING PARENTS

The aftermath of the school shootings at Newtown Connecticut has focused on searching for a motive. Why did 20-year-old Adam Lanza kill 20 children and 6 adults at the school, after shooting his mother in her bed? The report of the State’s Attorney, released in November 2013, concluded the motive will never be known. Searching for a motive is misguided; what we want to know are causes. Whatever went through the head of Adam Lanza in the hours or years leading up to the shooting on December 14, 2012 is less important than what were the conditions that made this happen. Above all, what was the chief cause, or causes, that if it had been different, the shootings could have been avoided?

Clandestine Back-stage Cult of Weapons

In a previous post [Clues to Mass Rampage Killers: Deep Backstage, Hidden Arsenal, Clandestine Excitement; posted Sept. 1, 2012], I argued that the most distinctive clue that someone is planning a rampage killing is that they lead a secret life of amassing weapons and scripting the massacre. The point is not that they acquire a lot of guns; many people do that. But mass killers keep them secret; their life becomes obsessed with plans and fantasies of the attack, and energized with the excitement of being able to dupe other people about their secret life. Foremost among those who are duped is their family.

The Sandy Hook shooting had all these traits, with a few additional twists. The would-be shooter kept the bedroom windows of his room taped over with black trash bags; so were the windows of the nearby computer room where he spent most of his time. No one was allowed into his room, not even to clean, not even his mother. In fact, no one was allowed into the house; all workers and deliveries had to meet the mother outside in the yard or at the end of the driveway.

What did he keep hidden in there? A semi-automatic rifle; two semi-automatic pistols; a semi-automatic shotgun; another rifle;  a large amount of ammunition.  Also, many weapons such as knives, swords, and spears. He also had books and newspaper photocopies about shootings of school children and university students;  a spreadsheet of mass murders; a large amount of information especially about the Columbine shootings; Hollywood movies about mass shootings; a video dramatization of children being shot; and a computer game “School Shooting” in which the player enters a school and shoots students.

He also had in his secret chambers: photos of a dead person covered in blood and wrapped in plastic; images of himself with rifle, shotgun, and pockets stuffed with ammunition magazines; images of himself holding a pistol or rifle to his head; videos of suicide by gun. His fantasy life apparently centered not only on a large number of violent video games which he played at home-- like millions of other boys-- but on famous school shootings of the past, on killing children, on portraying himself armed to the teeth, and on a scenario that we can infer was to end in suicide.

Violent video games are so ubiquitous that he did not have to keep them hidden. But for this young man they had a special meaning, private enough that he played shooting games only at home; at local theatre he played video games 4 to 10 hours a day, but only non-violent ones in the presence of other people. His clandestine excitement would have come from his ultra-private fantasies and preparations, never spoken about to anyone including his game playing compatriots at the arcade. Even things that he innocently could have talked about--  such as different kinds of weapons, or shooting at gun ranges-- were never mentioned, although he was obsessed with them in his closely-guarded rooms at home. He was very guarded about his on-line activities too, frequently reformatting his computer hard drive to minimize his Internet trace.  As I argued in the earlier post, it is this kind of secret life centered on weapons that indicates the pathway to mass killing, where more normal gun-owners keep their weapons above-board.

The Killings: Superfluous Arsenal and Emotional Domination

When Adam Lanza shot his way into the Sandy Hook Elementary School by breaking through the locked glass entry doors, he was wearing a black shirt over a black T-shirt, black cargo pocket pants, black socks, black sneakers, black fingerless gloves.  This all-black costume-- probably depicting a fantasy-culture image of the outlaw or avenger-- was supplemented by some practical items: a green pocket vest to carry ammo; a combat camouflage holster; and yellow earplugs of the kind used on shooting ranges. As I pointed out in other mass shootings, covering oneself with layers of gear and shutting out sounds of firing has the effect of insulating the shooter from ordinary human contact, letting him descend into the deep emotional tunnel of self-propelled violence.

Like other rampage shooters, he brought far more weapons thanhe actually used. He had four of his five guns-- only lacking was the rifle he used to kill his mother, which he left on the floor by her bed, three bullets still loaded. (Why did he leave it?  Was it specific to that particular fantasy scenario, the gun he had planned to kill her with?) Altogether, the shooter carried over 30 pounds of guns and ammunition-- a significant weight for a bean-pole of a young man, six feet tall and weighing 112 pounds. After he committed suicide, police found he still had over 250 live rounds on his body, with more in his car. He had used up about 150 rounds in breaking in and killing 26 people.  He could have kept on firing, but he stopped. He could have fought it out with the police, but he did not-- rampage shooters virtually never do, either killing themselves or giving up when real opposition arrives.

Two implications:  Much of the weaponry he carried was not for practical purposes. It was his symbolic accoutrement, like his black costume and his earplugs, his fantasy surrounding him in the real material world, his comfort zone hugging his own body-- even the weight of the ammo he didn’t need. It was a continuation of the clandestine playacting that had filled his life for the months leading up to the attack. Ordinary street fighters don't wear this kind of gear, and they don't wear earplugs-- they have other kinds of social support for their violence. Loners need more symbolic support.

And secondly: He fired only when he had emotional domination over the people around him. We are revolted at someone killing small children. He choose them as victims precisely because they are defenseless, because they would be afraid of him, because they were the only people he could emotionally dominate. The adults-- the teachers and aides, the principal who tried to stop him in the hallway-- were shot because they were in the way.  His fantasy materials hidden at home were all about shooting children.

He had no fantasies, it appears, about shooting it out with the cops. After his 11-minute rampage, and within one minute of the police arriving, he shot himself. He was dead before the police reached the classroom; he never had to confront them.

Jack Katz, in a conference presentation at University of Giessen (October 2013), pointed out that rampage shooters never have an escape plan. This is very unlike most other criminal plans-- armed robberies, revenge murders, hit-man assassinations, guerrilla attacks-- where getting away is a major part of the prepared scenario. Nor can the rampage killer use anonymous weapons, like bombs or poison; his problem is a spoiled self, and he can only correct his social image by appearing in person, confronting the scene of his humiliation, and make others see him as the powerful figure he has now transformed himself into. And that is the whole aim of the project. Getting away, escaping-- back into ordinary life?  As what?  As a fugitive, a clandestine shadow-- would be to fall back into the spoiled self he wants to transform. That is why the rampage shooting is a dramatic climax, end of story.

Katz’s analysis is correct, as far as it goes. I would add there is always the interactional problem of all violence: confrontational tension. Straight-on face-to-face confrontations threatening violence are hard for everybody. Professional criminals, hardened tough guys and military combat experts are a minority who learn how to master their adrenaline and keep down their heartbeat to the level where they can actually shoot straight (at least some of the time-- Adam Lanza, who fired about 140 shots at persons in close range, missed with about half of them). It is easier to carry out violence at a distant target, especially one that is never seen personally; but a rampage shooter has to confront, because his aim is to get a social acknowledgement of his new self. The solution is to find a weak target. And the weakness is not just physical: in violence of all kinds, a close micro-analysis of the event in time shows that emotional dominance is what precedes and allows physical violence to happen.

For Adam Lanza, targeting small children was the only way he could gain emotional dominance. He was described, by everyone who knew him, as timid, compliant, never aggressive, never threatening. The only persons he could converse with were other computer nerds and video gamers.

Is there a puzzle about why he chose Sandy Hook Elementary School?  He had attended grades 1-5 there; reportedly he wasn’t bullied or teased, and he is said to have liked the school. It was in middle school and high school that he had more trouble, becoming more withdrawn; he developed an aversion to sports-- the popularity-setting and attention-dominating collective ritual of those age groups-- and to noisy crowd activities in general.  So if his self-image problem was with the higher schools, why didn’t he take out his revenge there? The answer seems clear enough if we try to imagine Adam Lanza going into a school basketball game-- which presumably he would have hated-- and shooting up the cheerleaders and players.  In fact, turn-the-tables shooters never confront their opposition on its territory of greatest emotional strength; they always seek to catch their enemies in a down moment.  This is what Adam Lanza did by attacking elementary school children-- and in fact the weakest of them, the first graders. It was the only target he could manage.

Mental Illness

Of all the cases of rampage killings, the Sandy Hook case is most clearly characterized by mental illness. Does that settle it? Hardly.

Adam Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger’s Disorder at age 13, with social impairment, lack of empathy, rigid thought processes, literal interpretation of communications, and extreme anxiety about noises and physical contact with others. At age 14, the diagnosis added Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  His mother adopted this characterization of her son, and collected books on Asperger’s syndrome. She said he was “unable to make eye contact, was sensitive to light, and couldn’t stand to be touched...” He wouldn’t touch door knobs and had somebody else open doors for him, or else pulled his sleeves over his hands to touch objects. He repeatedly washed his hands and changed his clothes during the day-- although at school and in the video parlor he always wore the same clothes, so it wasn’t style he was concerned about.

But these features of mental illness were not directly connected to the shooting. Asperger’s syndrome is considered a mild form of autism, and is not related to violence. The report mentionsthat in preschool(before the family moved to Connecticut from New Hampshire) “his conduct included repetitive behaviors, temper tantrums, smelling things that were not there, excessive hand washing and eating idiosyncracies.” That is to say, obsessive compulsive behaviors were allegedly seen early, although this is something different from autism; and obsessive compulsives are typically not violent.

His social behavior was not constant over time. Some remembered him in elementary school as participating in play groups and parties, enjoying music and playing saxophone (not yet sensitive to noise, touching, etc.) In middle school (i.e. the years when he was diagnosed with Asperger’s), he became more of a loner, began to dislike sports; although for a while he performed in concerts, he dropped out of the school band and stopped playing soccer. In high school (10th grade) he went to meetings of a “Tech club” and even hosted a party for it at his house. (He wasn’t yet hyper-secretive.) This looks like the typical adolescent status system split between jocks and nerds.

He did not like the noise and confusion of having to walk through school halls to change classes-- exactly the occasions when the sociable kids are greeting each other, jokes and snubs are made, and the non-regulated teen status system is in full display. The noise he disliked was the chatter of the other students; he could sit through a teacher’s lecture. In 9th and 10th grades, he stopped riding his bicycle and climbing trees and mountains, and began to shut himself in his bedroom and play video games all day long. At school he was excused from physical education. He was labeled a Special Education Student (in teen culture, the lowest of the low). His mother began to home school him, and combined with individual tutoring at the high school, and classes at a local college, he was able to graduate at age 17, and escaped from the teen status system.

It was at the time of transition from the relative comfort of elementary school to the competitive world of adolescent status ranking that his school writing became obsessed with the topic of violence.

So what does the mental illness analysis help explain? Nothing about violence. At most, it adds to the difficulty of negotiating passage through the social system of adolescence.

Mental illness, although it is a noun, is not a thing; it is a behavior pattern that is seen when persons interact. Some of these patterns may have a physiological component. But interaction is a two-way, indeed multi-sided process; it isn’t just ruled by something in one person’s physiology.

This comes out most clearly in Adam Lanza’s way of interacting with his mother.  She regarded him as mentally ill, and had said she did not work because she needed to care for her son, and worried about what would become of him without her.  In his school years, she drove him everywhere. Only after he had been out of school for a year, ostensibly doing nothing but playing video games, that he finally began to drive (did she put her foot down on this, for once?) At home, he ruled her life. Because of his obsessive changing of his clothes, she had to do the laundry for him every day.  No help was allowed into their home; she had to meet all deliveries outside. Although he could cook for himself, he demanded his mother make very specific combinations of food, which had to be served in just the right position on the plate, and certain dishes were prohibited for certain foods. One could call this obsessive compulsive; you could also see it as using mental illness as a form of control. He made her get rid of her cat because he did not want it in the house. He vetoed celebrating birthdays and holidays, and would not allow her to buy a Christmas tree. Since these are festive family occasions, he was attacking any effort she might make to celebrate their family.

Freud referred to taking advantage of the effects of neurotic behavior on other people as “secondary gain.” Goffman goes more deeply into the process by which something happens in people’s lives, the particular kind of trouble that can’t be resolved and wrecks everyone’s life until it ends up by labeling someone “mentally ill.”

“Mental symptoms... are neither something in themselves nor whatever is so labeled; mental symptoms are acts by an individual which openly proclaim to others that he must have assumptions about himself which the relevant bit of social organization can neither allow him nor do much about... Havoc will occur even when all the members are convinced that the troublemaker is quite mad, for this definition does not in itself free them from living in a social system in which he plays a disruptive part.”  (Erving Goffman, “The Insanity of Place,” in Relations in Public, 1971, p. 356.)

Mental illness in the home, then, is a conflict, a struggle over control; and the strongest weapon on the side of the wrecker of conventional amenities is that the others love him or her, or at least want to keep the peace.

The Mother as Facilitator: Folie à Deux

Adam Lanza not only ordered his mother around in all sorts of trivial but insistent ways.  He also got her to buy into his violent fantasy.  All five guns that he possessed were bought by her, along with the large supply of ammunition. She also bought him all the weapons in his cult collection of swords and such. She was the perfect buyer, a respectable citizen, no criminal record, possessor of a pistol permit. She kept on buying him guns up to the very end. Even though tension had been building up, in December 2012, just before he shot her, she wrote a check for him to buy a pistol as a Christmas present. Was this her way of trying to get around his prohibition of Christmas? If so, it was clever in a delusional sort of way, since she obviously knew how much he liked guns.

Police investigators in the aftermath of the murders spent much time looking for an accomplice, anyone who hadaided Adam Lanza in his plan. They missed the main accomplice, perhaps out of respect for the dead, the long-suffering devoted mother.

How could she be so blind? Everything her son did, she interpreted as a manifestation of his illness. The windows taped shut with black plastic were to her just a sign of sensitiveness to light-- even though he could go outdoors when he wanted to. The possibility that he was hiding something in the rooms she was forbidden to enter was masked in her own mind by the feeling that she must do everything possible for her son. He had drawn her into his mental illness, building up a family system where he was in complete control. She may have felt something was wrong, wronger even than having an mentally ill son she loved. Though it seems unlikely that they quarreled in an overt way, some signs of tension came through. According to the report, “a person who knew the shooter in 2011 and 2012 said the shooter described his relationship with his mother as strained” and said that “her behavior was not rational.” He told another that he would not care if his mother died. As usual, when one person loves the other much more than is reciprocated, the power is all on the side of the less loving.

The mother entered into and supported his obsession with weapons, while carefully staying out of his clandestine world. In this, as in the rest of their arrangements, they tacitly cooperated.  The mother lost her capacity to make independent judgments. This is very close to the classic model of the mental illness shared among intimates, the folie à deux.

Shooting Together: the Only Family Ritual that Worked

One feature of the mother’s background accidentally facilitated her complicity with her son’s violent plot. She had grown up in rural New Hampshire, in a culture where hunting and shooting were popular pastimes. For her, an interest in guns was normal, and the fact that her son began collecting them was a good thing. It appears that his gun collecting developed after age 14, when he had already been diagnosed as mentally ill, and started becoming obsessed with violent fantasies. His mother saw his guns as a healthy sign, since it was something the family could do together.

During the time when his older brother was living at home (i.e. up until 2006 when he went off to college, when the Adam Lanza was 14), the three of them would go to a shooting range, the mother and her two sons. The father, who had been separated and divorced when Adam was around age 9-11, would come and visit him until he was age 18; besides hiking together, they sometimes went shooting.

Altogether, it appears that as family relationships deteriorated and Adam withdrew more into video games and seclusion, guns were the one thing that mother and son positively had in common. It was the one interaction ritual that worked, where they focused on something they both liked. For her, it must have been the last remaining marker of mother-son solidarity.

The Precipitating Process

Why did it all come to a head on December 14, 2012? Most of the surrounding social relationships for Adam were disappearing-- whether to call them supporting relationships may be questionable, but his world was shrinking down to little more than video games and his violent fantasies. His brother, 4 years older than himself, went away to college when Adam was 14.  When his brother first left for college, Adam began to think about joining the military, but this never happened.  After college (Adam was now 18), the brother moved out of state; though he tried a few times to maintain contact with Adam, they had not spoken for 2 years at the time of the shooting. At the time of their break, Adam was out of high school already for a year, but had no plans to go to college or get a job. The gap between his brother’s status and his own was widening; his brother was no longer a role model for his own future, if he ever was.

Adam’s father had visited regularly since the separation, but he remarried in 2011. Adam apparently reacted negatively, and they never saw each other again after the end of 2010; though the father tried to reach him by email and proposed places they could meet, Adam stopped responding.

His sole remaining link was his mother. Relationships were strained in fall 2012. She worried because he had not left the house for 3 months. He was treating her worse and worse; he would no longer talk to her directly, and communicated with her only by Email. In November she notified him she planned to sell her house and move to another state, where Adam could go to a special school or get a computer job. Adam at least overtly agreed to the move. But there were conditions; he refused to sleep in a hotel during the move, so the mother planned to buy an RV where he could sleep.  The issue came up in October 2012, when Connecticut was hit by Hurricane Sandy, but Adam refused to leave the house even when electricity was out. Now his familiar place of refuge, his backstage guarded against all comers, the place where he kept his plots and weapons, was being taken away from him.

On December 10, the mother went on a 3-day trip to New Hampshire. She arrived home late in the evening of December 13, and went to bed without seeing her son, who was still incommunicado.  He had had 3 days to finish his plan. Apparently she was part of it. Next morning, before 9 a.m., he went into her bedroom and while she slept killed her with 4 shots to the head. Now he was on a roll, emotionally taking the initiative, starting with the easiest target of all, the one person he could dominate. At 9.30 a.m. he was shooting in the front door of Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Can We Learn Anything That Will Head off Mass Shootings?

The single outstanding cause of the murders that took place in Newtown, Connecticut that day-- the condition without which the murders would not have happened-- was the behavior of Adam Lanza’s mother. He had neither the contacts nor the interactional competence to acquire the guns and ammunition on his own. Without her complicity, he would have been just another alienated nerd, sunk in the world of computer games and violent fantasies. None of the other conditions-- his mental illnesses, the problems of adolescent transition, the ubiquitous entertainment culture of fantasy violence-- in itself is strongly correlated with mass killings; the latter two conditions in particular affect tens of millions of youths, but only a miniscule fraction of them turn it into a program of murder.

As Katherine Newman and colleagues have pointed out, in virtually all rampage killings the plot leaks out somewhere; clues are evident, although missed at the time. Newman et al. are particularly concerned with clues missed by teachers, and hushed up by the teen peer culture. What we have here are clues that are strongly visible in the home. Anyone without this mother’s particular way of relating to her son could have seen that something was being concealed, and that it had something to do with stockpiling firepower.

Given that most school shootings are perpetrated by students or recent ex-students, the home is where most clandestine preparations are made. And this is no sudden episode; in every case we know, there was a long period of build-up. The deep tunnel of self-enhancing motivation is dug for months at least.  And that means that parents and other members of the household are in the best position to read the cues for what is going on.

The lesson should be taken to heart above all by parents who own guns. Almost all school shootings happen in communities where gun ownership is widespread, where guns are part of the local culture. The vast majority of gun owners in such communities are respectable and non-criminal (for the statistics, see my Sept. 2012 post). Nevertheless, teens on the path of alienation, with the underground culture of prior mass killings to guide them, find it easiest to get guns when their parents and neighbors have them.

To avoid misunderstanding, let me repeat my previous conclusion. It is not the possession of guns that is the warning sign; it is hiding an arsenal, and clandestine obsession with scenarios of violence. When clues like this appear in one’s own home, the gun-owning parent should be in the best position to recognize it.

It is not simply a matter of teaching one’s children proper gun safety. One can be well trained in an official gun-safety course-- as Adam Lanza was, along with his mother-- and still use the gun to deliberately shoot other people.

What is needed, above all, is a commitment by gun-owners to keep their own guns completely secure, and not to let them fall into the hands of alienated young people, including one’s own children or their friends.

My recommendation is to gun-owners themselves. The issue of gun control in the United States has been mainly treated as a matter of government legislation. That pathway has led to political gridlock. That does not mean that we can do nothing about heading off school shootings. Simply put: keep alienated youths from building a clandestine arsenal where they nurture fantasies of revenge on the school status system, or whatever problems they have with their personal world. Gun-owning parents are closest to where this is most likely to happen. We need a movement of gun-owning parents who will encourage each other to make sure it doesn’t start in our home.

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

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References:

Report of the State’s Attorney on the Shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown Connecticut, December 14, 2012

http://cbsnewyork.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/sandy_hook_final_report.pdf

Katherine S. Newman, Cybelle Fox, David Harding, Jal Mehta, and Wendy Roth. 2004. Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings. Basic Books.

Jack Katz. 1988.  Seductions of Crime. Basic Books.

Jason Manning.  2013.   "Suicide and Social Time."  [unpublished, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, West Virginia University]

Randall Collins, "Clues to Mass Rampage Killers: Deep Backstage, Hidden Arsenal, Clandestine Excitement."

GOFFMAN AND GARFINKEL IN THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF THE 20th CENTURY

PART 1.   DOWNSTREAM FROM GOFFMAN: SOME RESEARCH TRENDS

Erving Goffman pioneered numerous intellectual trends in the close analysis of everyday life. Of course he didn't do it all by himself.  Intellectual life is prone to retrospective hero-worship; yet this can be defended, practically speaking, as a convenient simplification whereby a particular person becomes an emblem for a broad front of intellectual advance.  In talking about Goffman and his following, we are talking about an extended family, and a somewhat quarrelsome one at that. Goffman happens to be the most memorable representative of this family; his work abounds in crisp formulations: frontstage and backstage, facework, total institutions, interaction rituals, frames, and more. I will sketch a select few of the downstream channels opened up by Goffman's students and successors.

Micro and macro 

           

The terms were not used by Goffman and others of his generation. * But the theme was in the air. Already in the 1950s, George Homans was declaring-- against Talcott Parsons-- that society is no more than the actions of individual persons; ergo sociology reduces to the explanations of behaviorist psychology. Herbert Blumer was spearheading a militant version of symbolic interactionism: attacking  statistics and "the variable" because they do not actually do anything.  In class at Berkeley, he used to say things like: where is social class? Where do you see it? In another part of the battlefield,  Garfinkel developed his position (not yet called ethnomethodology) in the 1950s, but he was a shadowy figure until the mid-1960s, when he acquired creative followers such as Harvey Sacks, Emmanuel Schegloff, David Sudnow and others. But they were at Berkeley, not UCLA; Harold was notoriously difficult to work with, and the young radical ethnomethodologists were Goffman's PhD students, even though Goffman was teaching a different line.

* At any rate, not until the last year of Goffman's life.  I was among the first to use this pair of terms (in the sociological sense) in a 1981 article in Amer. J. Sociol. "The micro-foundations of macro-sociology." This has nothing to do with the economists' sense; micro-economics studies the behavior of the firm in a market; macro-economics studies the movement of entire economies over time. From a sociological point of view, both of these are macro. As Greg Smith pointed out (at the Cardiff University symposium, 2013) Goffman's comment in his 1982 ASA presidential address was a rejection of my claim about the micro-foundation of macro-sociology, published a year before. "...some... argue reductively that all macrosociological features of society, along with society itself, are an intermittently existing composite of what can be traced back to the reality of encounters-- a question of aggregating and extrapolating interactional effects. This position is sometimes reinforced by the argument that whatever we do know about social structures can be traced back to highly edited summaries of what was originally a stream of experience in social situations.... I find these claims uncongenial." [Goffman, 1983. "The Interaction Order." Amer. Sociol. Rev. 48: 9]

The common denominator of these figures is that all pointed to everyday life, where the action is. Having said this does not settle what the research program would be.  Homans and his followers said it's the actor's calculus of maximizing rewards over costs; at the time it was called exchange theory, later renamed rational choice, after economists got on board. Blumer's symbolic interactionism emphasized actors' definition of their situation, stressing the possibility of reinterpreting the situation, and thus giving volatility to social life. This line of analysis was brilliantly developed by Norbert Wiley in his 1994 book, The Semiotic Self, with its empirical elaboration of the process of internal dialogue (AKA verbal thinking) and internal rituals inside the mind.  Garfinkel's ethnomethodology locates the key in commonsense everyday reasoning. The model is conservative in just the opposite of the sense in which Blumer is radical; Garfinkel's famous breaching experiments show that persons do not like to have their taken-for-granted assumptions upset, and they try to restore order as quickly as possible.

Garfinkel raised a lot of hackles by declaring sociology does not exist, and should be replaced by ethnomethodology. A more acceptable development came from Sacks and Schegloff, who invented a new research method and field-- Conversation Analysis-- using tape recorders to capture exactly what people say to each other in real situations, getting at the local production of everything. And since the data are recorded and minutely inspectable, this led to discoveries such as the importance of rhythms in talk-- points not necessarily brought out by CA theorists themselves, but by the broader movement of micro-sociologists-- which show the micro-mechanisms by which solidarity is manifested, as well as alienation and conflict. This is the pattern no gap, no overlap (originally stated as a fundamental rule of conversation, by Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson, 1974); and the ways this can be violated: no gap/no overlap generates a strong rhythm which is the ultra-micro mechanism establishing solidarity; long gaps evince alienation; persistent overlap is conflict.

In this array of theoretical possibilities, Goffman took an ostensibly modest position. Society exists and is primary, he said; I'm just studying the social in everyday life, sideshow though it may be. What kind of intellectual impression management was this? In one his few explicit references to his own intellectual ancestry, in an early paper Goffman cited Durkheim on the point that society constructs the individual self and makes it a sacred object; hence minor rituals like saying hello, goodbye, handshakes and kisses, mirror the grand rituals of religion, but in this case they give obeisance to the self. More precisely, they give ritual respect to the other's self, in return for reciprocity in upholding one's own. Moreover, these everyday rituals are obeisance to the collective definition of the situation-- adding a touch of symbolic interaction, even though Goffman was generally critical of that theory.

Although Goffman said society is primary, he never studied it in the large. He shifted the center of gravity to the situation itself; social life becomes a string of situations. This is not an ontological claim: it is a research strategy. If you want to understand mental illness, go into the schizophrenic ward and see how people so labeled interact with each other and with their guards and medics. If you want to see social class, go in and out the kitchen doors of a resort hotel and see how the waiters put on a face for their upper-middle class clientele; and then see how these proper Brits dress for dinner in their own private backstage regions, putting on costume and manner to act out their frontstage identities. Goffman had such a powerful influence because he led by dramatic example; he provided both a research strategy and a theoretical mechanism for what causes what and with what consequences.

What is the value of reframing all this as micro and macro?  In my 1981 article, I argued it is not a matter of what kind of research people should do, or be prohibited from doing; if you want to study revolutions à la Marx and Skocpol, or world-systems à la Wallerstein, go ahead and do it; by their fruits you shall know them and if they come up with something important let's learn it. By the same token, the followers of Goffman, Garfinkel et al. were making discoveries and opening up frontiers. Pragmatically it is pointless to demand that we should all do this instead of that.  But many sociologists at the time said exactly that, the positivist methodologists on one side putting down researchers on everyday life as either unscientific or trivial; and Garfinkel at the other extreme saying society is nothing but a gloss on commonsense reasoning. Calling the choices of what to study micro-and-macro was a way of saying that all sociologists occupy the same empirical universe; some of us are looking at it up close, through ever-more-sharply-focused micro-scopes; others were widening the vision, to larger swaths of time and space.

Ontologically micro and macro are not distinct realms. The macro can be zoomed in on everywhere. A young ethnomethodologist at San Diego (Ken Jennings) once convinced me of this by saying: since you want to do historical sociology, if you could get in a time machine, exactly what would you want to see when you got there? This made me realize not only that you always enter the macro at some micro point; but that what macro-historical sociologists are doing is grappling with a scale where stretching out beyond every micro situation are other situations in the past and future; other situations spread out horizontally, contemporaneously populated by other interactions, as far out to the horizon as we have the methods to see. Macro is not different from micro, it is just more micro-situations, viewed as they are clumped together in larger slices of time, space, and number. 

Pragmatically there are always going to be different kinds of sociologists doing research at different scale, not to mention anthropologists, linguists, historians etc. So what is the point of saying that micro is the foundation of macro, while at the same time saying let everyone approach the micro-macro continuum from their own angle?   I proposed a bet on the micro-researchers: because macro-sociologists deal with things that they refer to by nouns-- states, world-systems, societies, organizations, classes-- they can be led astray when they write as if these are entities that don't depend on the people whose actions make them up. The more positivistic act as if statistics are more real than the actions that they summarize. In this respect, micro-sociologists have made a dent in how macro-sociology is now perceived. There has been a shift from looking at societies as entities, to viewing them as networks-- and networks of varied and changing shape and extent, with ties of differing strengths.*  It is not accidental that the era during which network sociology has risen in importance has also been the era of militant micro-sociology.

* Two representative works are Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 1986-2013, demonstrating across world-history there are no such things as unitary societies, especially as conventionally glossed by the names of states or ethnicities, but a shifting and overlapping mesh of networks of economic, political, military, and cultural exchange and power; and John Levi Martin, Social Structures, 2009, which derives social change as well as dead-ends from the transformative possibilities of various kinds of networks. For a summary of the latter, see my June 2011 post, "Why Networks Change their Shape, or Not."

Macro-words such as "the government of France," or "the Wall Street stock exchange", may be convenient terms for referring to networks that tend to hang together and reproduce themselves from year to year; but if macro is really composed of the linkages of micro-situations in time and space, the dynamics of macro should be found in the micro. And this means, when government rise and fall, or markets go into booms and busts, we should zero in, get into the streets and palaces of Paris on February 23rd 1848, or the streets of Cairo on a sequence of notable days between 2011 and the present, and look for the mechanisms by which micro processes drive macro events.

Sociology of emotions

This becomes clearer with the theory of emotion work, developed by Arlie Hochschild, one of Goffman's students at Berkeley in the mid-60s. Emotions are often performed rather than simply experienced, Hochschild notes (The Managed Heart, 1983). There are professions whose chief skill is putting on a particular emotional tone; she studied airline flight attendants and bill-collectors; her students studied lawyers and strip-tease dancers. If one wants to take on the core dynamics of macro political and economic power, one could focus on those professional mood-spinners, politicians and investment counselors. Hochschild's inspiration is Goffmanian; people work on themselves to project emotions that fit the situation, or that serve to control other people in a situation. In short, emotions are performed on a frontstage, they are impression management, dramaturgy.

Hochschild has been criticized for ignoring emotions which are spontaneous, but not so; persons have to do emotion work precisely in situations where their spontaneous emotions don't fit what is expected of them. There is an emotional backstage, but here emotions are not just spontaneous, but scrutinized, strategized as to how they can be transformed into frontstage emotions. Arlie has a wonderful argument that, contrary to stereotype, men are more emotional then women. At least in their relations towards each other, where men are more powerful, they can express what they feel or at least what they lust, while women have more to lose if they let their romantic emotions carry them away. Women do more emotion work than men, precisely because they talk more about their emotions-- especially in backstage privacy with their girlfriends, trying to talk each other into calculating which man is a good choice to let one's emotions roam free with. Thus women are considered to be more emotional than men but this really means women talk about emotions more, in backstage situations; men talk less about their emotions, but simply act on them. The evidence is that men are more likely than women to fall in love at first sight. The whole question of who is more emotional is simplistic, unless one considers the front and backstage dimensions of emotion work.

From Hochschild and other contemporary researchers there developed the field of emotion research-- Tom Scheff  (another of Goffman's former protégés), Theodore Kemper, Jonathan Turner, Jack Barbalet and many others. What makes this more than just another subspecialty?  It has a driving theoretical significance because emotions are the glue of the social order, and the energy of social change. Perhaps the social change aspect is more visible, with the anger, enthusiasm, and exalted self-sacrifice found in political and religious movements; but there are also the quiet emotions that sustain the social structure when it does not change, i.e. when it repeats itself day after day and year after year. Garfinkel and the ethnomethodologists had a blind spot for emotions, but they are apparent in the breaching experiments: when commonsense assumptions are breached, the reaction is bewilderment, shock, even outrage. One can reformulate Garfinkel as holding that the merest glimmer of these negative emotions-- these breaching emotions-- cause people to recoil and put back normal social order as fast as they can.  Tony Giddens picked this up and turned it into the existentialist formulation, that ontological anxiety is what holds the social order together. How far can we go with this? Recall, Garfinkel has a conservative view of social institutions, where other micro-sociologists are more inclined to a volatile view.  Garfinkel's world, in my summary exposition, rests on a crude exaggeration, since people don't always succeed in putting social routine back together; and "as fast as they can" refers to just the temporal magnitude of the breaching experiments, more or less a few minutes or an hour at most. A frontier area of research now is time-dynamics, how long emotional sequences take, and what happens to the emotions after a few days, a few weeks, a few months. The shifting moods in Tahrir Square over 30 months give some indication of the kind of pattern we are trying to capture.

Here again a path looks more promising that comes via Goffman (and behind him, from a combination of Durkheim and Blumer)-- more promising in giving us the mechanism, the switch that shifts social situations between reproduction and change. This brings me to my third point, the micro-sociology of stratification.

Interaction Rituals as the mechanism of stratification

           

Let us go back to 1967.  Goffman had just published his book Interaction Rituals, composed of papers which he had published in the 1950s in relatively offbeat places. Goffman was the subject of much discussion and gossip among Berkeley graduate students; and not just for his quirky personality, such as why his wife committed suicide by jumping off the San Rafael Bridge.  Interaction rituals opened our eyes to what we now could see all around us: everything that people were doing, minute by minute, was not natural but socially constructed; it was all social rituals, and they all operated (more or less unconsciously) to enact a certain kind of social order. And that social order was power, it was class, it was organization and authority.  (This was a few years before it occurred to us that it was also gender and sexuality.) And we jumped to the conclusion-- not necessarily shared by Goffman himself-- that if social order was constructed it could also be de-constructed  (not that we used that term), it could be challenged, it could be torn down.  Whether something else would be put in its place was an open question, since this was the age of the cultural revolution, AKA the psychedelic revolution, and some in the counter-culture proclaimed that artificially constructed social order would be blown open just by turning in on how it is done, and dropping out from it. The utopian phase of this revelation was relatively short-lived.

Goffman and Garfinkel became intellectual heroes of a generation that had experience challenging the taken-for-granted institutions of macro-power. Some of us had taken part in campaigns against racial discrimination in the South, and in the North as well, and had found that institutions of deference and demeanor that supported white dominance could be broken. At Berkeley, and many other places, students found that the traditional authority of university administration could be successfully challenged, by collectively bringing the organization to a halt.  In the student movement of the 1960s, sociologists were prominent-- not because they were the most alienated, but because they had the intellectual tools to see what they were facing. Herbert Blumer took no part in the university demonstrations, but in his classes he would refer to students taking over the administration building as an example of his point: an organization does not exist just because it is a thing-like noun, but exists only to the extent that people act it out; when they stop interpreting it as existing it stops existing.  This is not idealist solipsism-- it's all in your mind-- but rather it is situationally real or not depending on how a group of persons act together to change a collective definition of a situation.

In the event, universities did pull themselves back together, although in ways that incorporated some of the newer definitions of what they should be doing. My purpose is not to trace the activist counter-culture politics of the 1960s and its permutations in following decades; but to note that many then-young sociologists saw Goffman and Garfinkel as having apocalyptic implications. Its political fate is not the crucial point for this intellectual development; the New Left did not win in the end; there were swings to the New Right, the Neo-Liberalism of the 1990s, the revival of religious activism, and so on. The fact that the counter-culture did not win in the long run is no disproof of Blumer's radical symbolic interactionism; the social order of any given time is the result of all the various groups of people who mobilize themselves to define what social institutions are.  The student Left had no monopoly on mobilization; religious mobilization shifted techniques for stirring up collective effervescence from Left to Right; political movements were mobilized not just in the name of oppressed races, ethnicities and sexual preferences but also in tax revolts by self-defined economically oppressed middle-class; Western techniques of revolt spread to the Soviet bloc and many other places, with results that may seem paradoxical in macro perspective but which show the power of micro-techniques to transform so-called big structures.

The story I am telling is about Goffman's downstream; the main point is that Goffman's theory of interaction rituals became radicalized, used in the service of stripping existing practices of their legitimation. And then, when politics settled down and it became apparent radical definitions were not going to go unchallenged by opposing definitions, Goffman's micro-analysis came to be seen as a tool for seeing how the dominant order makes itself dominant.

My take on it was as follows. What makes classes strong or weak happens in micro-situations. Some people get more out of their micro-interactions than others. Why? Goffman had already given some clues: polite rituals like introducing oneself, leaving calling cards, gentlemen taking off their hats to ladies, were means by which stratified groups constitute themselves; persons who didn't carry out these rituals properly were left outside their boundaries. Goffman's own examples were historically rather backward-looking, and it seemed ironic that he was taking them from old etiquette books at the time when a massive shift towards informalization was going on-- at the time I used to think of it as the "Goffmanian revolution". I attempted to generalize the model by expanding on its Durkheimian basis, the theory of religious rituals which constitute religious communities. I emphasized that rituals succeed or fail; some gods are deserted because their worshipers no longer find their ritual attractive, or because a rival ritual draws them away. The ingredients that go into rituals must be seen as varying in strength: bodily assembly (i.e. opportunities to mobilize as a group); techniques for generating a mutual focus of attention, and for stirring up a shared emotion; when these ingredients are favorable, they accelerate through mutual feedback, generating collective effervescence, which seen through a micro-sociological lens, is visible in rhythmic entrainment of people's bodies. Goffman helps us see that little micro-rituals are going on all the time, varying in strength.  Where these interaction rituals are strong, they generate feelings of group membership-- in this case, membership in a social class; feelings of moral solidarity-- the belief that their group is right, what Weber would call legitimate, and should be defended against rival ways of life. On the individual level, a successful interaction ritual gives what I called, modifying Durkheim, emotional energy: feelings of confidence, initiative, enthusiasm; conversely, failed rituals are emotionally depressing.

All these are elements in what makes some social classes dominate others. Dominant classes are better at rituals, or monopolize the successful rituals; dominated classes are weak in ritual resources, because they have no opportunity to assemble for rituals of their own. This fitted well Goffman's analysis of the British resort hotel (in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1959), where servants are underlings in higher class rituals. But ritual resources can shift; sometimes subordinated groups get more ingredients for themselves to mobilize; in the 50s and 60s there were vivid examples  before our eyes in the black mobilization for civil rights, turning themselves into a committed, energized, self-sacrificing group that gathered supporters by staging massive public rituals which swung legitimation to themselves and away from the segregationists.

One could go on with a histoire raisonnée of dramatic social movements,  analyzing their micro-techniques for successful interaction rituals; as well as the decline of movements as they are undercut by other ritual mobilizations  (e.g. the proliferation of gang rituals after the 1950s, which made black people appear threatening, at just the time the civil rights movement was making them respectable).  To drop to the level of spare analytical abstraction, let me list a number of ways in which researchers in Goffman's wake have explained who situationally dominates whom:

-- One version is that higher classes are frontstage personalities, while lower classes are backstage personalities.  Higher classes appear in the center of attention, on the stage of big organizations and networks, where they get to formulate the topics and set the emotional tone.  The lower classes are audiences for the higher. It does not necessarily follow that lower classes are taken in by upper class rituals; insofar as lower classes have enough privacy to gather on their own backstages, they can carry out little interaction rituals among themselves, complaining and satirizing their bosses. The result is a difference in class cultures: the higher classes portray themselves in lofty ideals, the lower classes are cynical.

-- Another version is higher classes have more refined manners, and spend more time policing their boundaries. They generate refined rankings, some persons being judged more polite or sophisticated than others; persons who might challenge class domination become drawn into elite tournaments of micro-interactional skill. Goffman wrote incisively about techniques like the aggressive use of face-work, coolly insulting others in ways that those of lesser sophistication cannot respond to except by losing emotional control and damning themselves by their own outbursts. Such techniques, Jennifer Pierce (Gender Trials: Emotional Lives in Contemporary Law Firms, 1995) has shown, are part of the interactional skill that make a successful courtroom lawyer.

--- A related argument is in research by Lauren Rivera (Northwestern University) on how some candidates become successfully chosen in job interviews for elite financial and consulting firms; the key is not so much how the interviewer rates the candidate's technical background or skills, but whether they have emotional resonance.  Manners, an easy flow of topics to talk about, all serve as ingredients that make for successful interaction rituals, which act as gatekeepers to the elite.

-- Another argument is that the higher classes have more emotional energy-- they have gone through a sequential chain of interaction rituals where they have been successful; this gives them a store of confidence and enthusiasm that enables them to dominate the next interactions in the chain. Conversely, the lower classes have less emotional energy; they are less confident of themselves, take less initiative, are poorer at impressing others with their emotional tone. Successful entrepreneurs and financial manipulators are not just cold calculators but energy centers with investors chasing at their heels. Careers of  successful politicians, seen through the microscope of interaction rituals, shows them developing the techniques that make others into followers; but the trajectory of the chain can shift; rising politicians can become overmatched, undergoing crises where they can no longer control the emotional tone of situations, and lose their charisma. (Instances to ponder include the rise and fall of Gorbachev, and the ongoing vicissitudes of Obama.)

These mechanisms of class domination are not mutually exclusive; together they may give an overwhelming impression that class domination is impregnable. Nevertheless, class orders do shift historically; individuals do move up and down in their lifetime; and in the very short run of daily situations, interactional dominance can fluctuate. I have referred to the latter as situational stratification. Without trying to summarize all the ways micro-mechanisms can change stratification, let me move to my fourth and last point, violent conflict.

Violence and conflict as impression management

Conflict is the main way the caked-on sediment of custom is broken; not that the challengers always win, but conflict is volatile, and can rearrange the resources that make stratification, if it is renewed in the aftermath, different than it was before. I will concentrate on violence, which is both the most extreme and perhaps the best studied form of conflict. To say that violence hinges on impression management is to say that the success or failure of violence is based on micro-mechanisms.

Elijah Anderson in Code of the Street (1999) gives an ethnography of the most violent zone of the inner-city black ghetto, in such cities as Philadelphia and Chicago. His most striking argument is that most people are faking it. The code of the street is a style of presenting oneself: tough, threatening, quick to take offense. But Anderson shows, by years of careful observation, that most people in the ghetto consider themselves to be "decent"-- pursuing normal middle-class goals of a job, education, family; but under conditions of the ghetto, where policing is non-existent or distrusted, decent people-- this is a folk term in Philadelphia--  have to be ready to defend themselves.  "I can go for street, too," they would say, referring to a different category of people who are called "street"-- people who are committed to violence and crime as a way of life.  These are two different styles of presenting oneself, and most people can code-switch. The switch is micro and patently visible: a young man walking on an empty street at the edge of the ghetto appears relaxed and happy, but at the sight of another male drops into a hard demeanour, muscles tensed, shoulders swinging and torso dancing with a nonverbal message emphasizing ownership of his personal space. 

This is situational impression management. Anderson developed his analysis under the influence of Goffman, who was his colleague at University of Pennsylvania. It is putting on a public face, don't mess with me.  Anderson goes on to argue that performing the street code is an attempt to avoid violence, and in two different ways. One is to protect oneself from being a victim by looking tough.  But this can backfire on occasion, since two men (or two women) can become locked into a contest of escalating face-work that leads to violence.*  Anderson gives a second technique: when both persons show that they know the street code, they can establish membership, and both can pass through the situation with honor without violence. 

* Shown also by research on homicides arising from escalated face contests. Luckenbill, David F. 1977. "Criminal Homicide as a Situated Transaction." Social Problems 25, pp. 176-186.

More detailed field observations on this point are given by Joe Krupnick's research on the streets of Chicago.** When gun-carrying gang members approach each other, their concern is generally to avoid violence, since they are experienced enough to know its cost. They use a micro-interactional technique when getting into hailing distance-- brief visual recognition, no prolonged stares, studied nonchalance, brief formulaic greeting, moving on past without looking back. Failing to play this particular interaction ritual can result in getting rolled on, with indignant charges-- "who he think he is, act like he rule the street!"  The proper performance of interaction rituals is fateful in the most violent neighbourhood.  Similarly detailed participant observation of Philadelphia street gangs has been done by Alice Goffman, Erving's daughter, in a dissertation rich with all the ways that performing the impression of violence is more important than the violence itself.

Krupnick, Joe, and Chris Winship. 2013.  "Keeping Up the Front: How Young Black Men Avoid Street Violence in the Inner City." In Orlando Patterson (ed.) Bringing Culture Back In: New Approaches to the Problems of Disadvantaged Black Youth.

In Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, I argued that violence is difficult, not easy; the micro-details of a threatening confrontation show that persons come up against a barrier of confrontational tension and fear that makes them hesitant and incompetent even if they consciously want to commit violence. This shared emotion will inhibit violence from happening, unless one side or the other finds a way to get around the emotional barrier. Violence is successfully carried out when one side establishes emotional dominance over the other. And this is done chiefly by a dramatic performance; emotional dominance precedes physical dominance. A typical way to seek dominance is bluster: threatening, angry gestures, loud voice, an attempt to dominate the communicative space. If the two sides are in equilibrium, violence does not usually come off. The crucial technique of violent persons, then, is violent impression-management: subtle micro-moves in gesture and timing to get the other side into a passive, de-energized stance, thereby allowing them to be subjected to violent force. Violence is a learned skill, rather than merely a lack of self-control or an outburst of past resentments; and what is learned is a specific way to manage the micro-cues of self and other in violence-threatening situations.

Violence is an area where we can palpably demonstrate that the micro makes a difference. This is a counter to the position often taken in the micro-macro debate that micro merely reflects macro-- that micro behavior just reproduces the macro structure.  Several versions of the argument have been recently popular: the Bourdieu version is that habitus is the individual's disposition to act in accordance with their sense of position in the structural field. Another version is that people act out cultural scripts, that they know what to do in any particular micro-situation because they follow a cognitive script or schema. The trouble with both these types of argument is that they are static; nothing ever changes because the same habitus, the same script constantly operates; social structure simply reproduces itself. Against this is the dynamism of symbolic interactionism, bolstered by Goffman's tools for looking at the micro-details that determine what happens in interactional situations. It is not a matter of looking inside the individual for what habitus or script each happens to carry, but the interaction between those individuals in the emotions and rhythms of the situation itself.  We see this most clearly in the micro-contingencies that determine whether violence will break out or not.  And violence so often is a cutting point, spreading through escalations and reactions, a micro-point that gets dramatic attention and permeates the macro-space, sometimes setting off major structural changes.  At such times, micro really does causally determine the form of the macro.

Goffman, by Goffman

In conclusion, a few words about Goffman himself. I said at the outset that Goffman is an emblem, a figurehead for the moving front of researchers who explored the micro-sociology of everyday life. Can we turn a Goffman lens on Goffman himself? I once asked him what he thought would be the micro-sociology of the intellectual world, but he brushed it aside with a characteristically sarcastic remark.  Perhaps he did think about it, in his own backstage. He did seem to operate with a strategy as if designed to make himself the leader and emblem. He rarely cited any predecessors; he did not put himself in the lineage of those who went before-- whereas we ourselves rule out the possibility of claiming to be emblems, precisely because we talk so much about our predecessors. Goffman occasionally criticized his rivals, but only in dismissive footnotes: trashing Schutz and his followers (which is to say Garfinkel's movement, which Goffman never mentions) in a few lines appended to Frame Analysis; occasional lines about taking the role of the other that only the cognoscenti would recognize as a putdown of Blumer and Mead. Goffman never gave his rivals even the attention that comes from direct attack.  Some prominent micro researchers have complained that Goffman never cited them when it would have been appropriate, citing instead more obscure sources. No other intellectual loomed up on Goffman's pages.

To be sure, he himself did not loom up overtly; he affected a modest manner (in his writing, that is-- his behavior in everyday life is legendary for his aggressive face-work), but with an artfulness, indeed archness to his words. Goffman is difficult to connect from book to book because he never used the same terminology over again, nor explained how newer concepts might have improved from the older ones-- how frontstages related to rituals and then to frames. This may be part of the impression management that Goffman engaged in about his own intellectual career. He was always reincarnating himself as an innovator, covering his own tracks. As sociologists downstream from Goffman, we have learned to see some of the tricks. He rested more on a larger movement than he himself ever admitted. In that sense, he was an ordinary intellectual, closer to ourselves. But as a personality-- his life was a masterpiece of singularity.

Then again-- can't we say the same about Harold Garfinkel?

PART  2.  GARFINKEL:  RIDING TWO WAVES OF INTELLECTUAL REALIGNMENT 

Harold Garfinkel’s work can be located in the two great waves of realignment that took place during the 20th century, the first in the 1920s and 30s, the second in the 1960s and 70s. Garfinkel, I am going to argue, was one of a very few sociologists who centered oneself on the realignment in philosophy in the 1920s-30s, when he was growing up. But his reputation did not take off until the 1960s and 70s, when a school-- indeed a cult-- formed of ethnomethodologists who made up the radical wing, in the Anglophone world, of the second big realignment to hit the human sciences.

The First Realignment: From Neo-Kantians and Idealists to Phenomenologists and Logical Positivists

Let us start with the realignment that took place in philosophy when the dominant positions at the turn of the 20th century gave way to a new set of oppositions in the 1920s and 30s. At the beginning of the century the major schools were the Neo-Kantians, along with vitalists and evolutionists (the latter two sometimes combined, as in Bergson). In the Anglophone world, the center of attention remained the Idealists:  the most famous philosopher in Britain was F.H. Bradley—who performed a dialectical dissolution of all concepts as incapable of grasping Absolute reality, with a capital A. Idealists included Bertrand Russell’s teacher McTaggart, and Whitehead, who published an Idealist system as late as the 1920s. In the US, Idealism as even more dominant, and was part of the worldview of persons we otherwise think of as pragmatists: William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, the early John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead on down to his death in 1931.  Earlier, the most famous Idealist was Josiah Royce, whose name is on Royce Hall next door to the sociology building at UCLA.  Idealism was partly a defense of religion in rationalized form--  one reason why Idealism was so important in the transition of American higher education from Bible schools to research universities. Idealism was also a sophisticated epistemology that holds that no one ever sees the so-called real world, but only through the eyeglasses of one’s categories. The only sure reality is the mind.

Neo-Kantianism dominated on the European Continent, led by such figures as Dilthey, Windelband, and Cassirer. Unlike the older Idealists, it was no longer concerned with defending religion and no longer built metaphysical systems, and had made its peace with natural science. Neo-Kantians took their topics from investigating the constitutive logics of the various disciplines; Dilthey distinguished Geisteswissenschaft from Naturwissenschaft, each valid in their own sphere, but using distinctive methods of hermeneutic interpretation or seeking causality. In Windelband’s view, they wore different eyeglasses, idiographic or nomothetic, seeing particulars or general laws.  The newly organized social sciences were especially good territory for Neo-Kantian meta-theorizing. Economics might seem naturally to be in the Naturwissenschaft camp, but in Germany, economics had been historical, not mathematical, and the so-called Methodenstreit-- the battle of methods that Max Weber took part in the early 1900s-- concerned what approach should govern economists’ work. Weber’s ideal types were a Neo-Kantian solution, designed to allow bifocal eyeglasses, so to speak. Psychology was a favorite Neo-Kantian hunting ground; sociology and anthropology also became targets. In the founding generation of sociologists, Weber, Simmel, and to a degree Durkheim were all Neo-Kantians.

Vienna Circle positivists of the following generation rejected the Neo-Kantian way of drawing borders, and launched an imperialist campaign for unification of all the sciences, including the social sciences. But for the moment we need to focus on the earlier positivists, figures like Ernst Mach in the late 19th century. In our own day, positivism has become a term of abuse, for number-crunchers, dogmatic materialists and naive objectivists who regard natural science as the only true reality. But positivism at the time of Mach meant almost the opposite. Mach held that scientists do not observe reality, but only construct it out of readings of laboratory instruments; hence the reality of science might as well be abolished, replaced by instrument readings, which are always provisional. Machian positivism was close to Neo-Kantianism, and a popular expression of the position was published by Vaihinger in 1911 as The Philosophy of As-If.   

The 1920s and 30s swept away the dominance of the Neo-Kantians and their allies, and replaced them with a new opposition: phenomenology, and the much more radical logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. At first glance, phenomenologists like Husserl and Scheler seem similar to Neo-Kantians: the same search for the conceptual eye-glasses through which we see the world. One difference is that the Neo-Kantians were much more concerned with academic disciplines, whereas the phenomenologists shifted towards everyday life. Was phenomenology, then, the stream of consciousness, just then in the early 1920s breaching the literary world in the novels of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf? An interesting question, which I will pass by, with the remark that only Proust had much philosophical input, and that was from Bergson. Phenomenology seems closer to psychology, and one might be tempted to link it with the Freudian movement, or with the Gestalt psychology that was being developed in Germany in the teens and twenties. But no, phenomenology was militantly anti-psychological; psychology was merely the phenomenal level of experience, governed by causal laws on the level of the natural sciences; phenomenology was deeper-- in Husserl’s famous epochê, bracketing the phenomenal contents of consciousness in order to seek the deep structures, the forms in which consciousness necessarily presents itself.

The roots of phenomenology in the foundations of mathematics

The pathway into the phenomenology movement was not from psychology, but from elsewhere: its predecessors in the previous generation were in the foundational crisis in mathematics. (There is an echo of this in Husserl’s 1936 title  The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.) Issues had arisen in late 19^th century because the new highly abstract mathematics had invented concepts with no counterpart in ordinary 3-dimensional reality, concepts impossible to grasp intuitively: imaginary numbers, non-Euclidean geometries and alternative algebras, higher orders of infinities called transfinite numbers, etc. Some mathematicians declared these monstrosities, products of illegitimate operations and lack of rigor; others held that higher mathematicians had broken into a Platonic paradise where they could create new objects at will. The dispute eventually would become organized, around 1900, into the camps of formalists and intuitionists, each with a program for how to logically carry through the foundations of all mathematics. The most important moves were made around the 1880s  and 90s by Gottlob Frege, a German mathematician who distinguished between sense and reference in the manipulation of symbols. In the verbal expression, “The morning star is the same as the evening star,” this is a mere tautology because the two stars are both the planet Venus; but the statement is not meaningless [Venus is Venus], because the two star-names are being used differently in the syntax of the sentence. Frege was concerned above all with mathematical symbolism, for instance the meaning of the equals sign [=] at the center of a mathematical equation, or the plus sign [+] used in addition, which is not simply the word “and” used in ordinary language. The various mathematical symbols are not on the same level, but are different kinds of operations, place-holders, and pointers. In short, mathematics is a multi-level enterprise; things we had thought were clear, such as numbers, have to be reanalyzed into a much more meticulous system of formal logic.

Husserl was in the network of Frege’s allies, and simultaneously connected with its most hostile critics; he eventually left mathematics for philosophy and generated the phenomenological program with an aim to provide secure foundations not only for mathematics and science but for all knowledge. This proved to be an endlessly receding finish line, as Husserl launched one program after another down to the 1930s; its chief results, as far as we are concerned, were offshoots such as Schutz and Heidegger. But for a moment, let us pursue Frege’s connections in a different direction. In 1903, Bertrand Russell, who had been working on a program deriving basic mathematics from a small number of concepts and axioms of symbolic logic, began to correspond with Frege over a paradox in his attempt to build a system of numbers out of the logic of sets. The conundrum is the set of all sets that are not members of themselves; is it a member of itself? If yes, no; if no, yes. The point is not trivial, on the turf of set theory, since this was Frege’s way of defining zero and beginning the ordered number series which is the basis of all mathematics. Frege threw up his hands, 20 years of work down the drain! -- but Russell worked out a solution, in the spirit of Frege’s distinctions between levels of operations, and what is allowable on each level.  Russell’s theory of types led to further controversy; and at this point, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a young German engineer who had interested himself in Frege’s work, arrived at Cambridge and took up Russell’s problem. Published in 1921 as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s argument hinges on the distinction between what is sayable  and what is unsayable, which we can see as a widening of the kind of distinction among incommensurable operations such as Frege’s sense vs. reference, or later what linguistics would call use  vs. mention, and echoed still later in ethnomethodology as resource  vs. topic.

Within the realm of the sayable, however, Wittgenstein’s approach is like that of the mathematical formalists, building a system on a logically perfect language, starting with simple elements (proper names with purely internal properties, logical atoms unaffected by external connections), out of which all meaningful elementary sentences can be constructed, and so on until giving complete knowledge of the world. By the late 1920s, the Vienna Circle  logical positivists were welcoming Wittgenstein’s methods as a means of unifying all science on a secure basis. Not that the Vienna Circle’s leaders were followers of Wittgenstein; Schlick, Neurath and others were already well-launched, with their own networks coming from physicists like Planck and Einstein, from leading mathematicians of both the formalist and intutionist schools, from neo-Kantians like Dilthey, and late pupils of Frege such as Carnap. I will skip over the internal struggles of the Vienna Circle, including such explosive developments as Gödel’s undecidability proof and Popper’s falsifiability criterion, and only note that the outcome of the Vienna Circle for social science, above all in America, was a kind of militant positivism that declares meaningless anything that cannot be put into the strict methodology of empirical measurement, statistics, and derivation of testable observation statements from covering laws. (Carnap, the most militantly reductionist of the old-line logical positivists, become a professor at UCLA in the 1954 [and died at Santa Monica in 1970]—apparently he and Harold had nothing to do with each other.) The people who wrote sociology methods textbooks around 1950, like Hempel, laid it down that what sociology needed to become a true science was the guidance of Vienna Circle positivism.

Wittgenstein and Ordinary Language

This sounds like the triumph of the Evil Empire. But I can only expound one side of things at a time. The intellectual world operates by rivalries and conflicts; and I should mention here the movement in England of ordinary language philosophy. By the 1930s G.E. Moore was reacting against the tendency of mathematically-inspired philosophers to move further and further from the world of ordinary experience, into a realm of abstract sets and meta-rules about what is permissible or impermissible in operations upon them. Moore began to argue for simple statements of ordinary language as incontestable truths (“Here is one hand, and here is another...” 1939)-- and therefore as a better standard of epistemology than convoluted systems of logical axioms. Wittgenstein, distancing himself from his Vienna Circle admirers, switched over to the anti-formalist side, repudiating much of what he had written in the Tractatus-- but retaining the key distinction of sayable  vs. unsayable. His own later comments describe mathematics as an everyday practice that one can observe in detail, stressing that the key to all the foundational disputes are to by found by this method (that we now would call micro-observations of situated practices), rather than elaborating long hierarchical derivations from concepts of sets. This emphasis on the ordinary practice of language was made into an organized program by John Austin, whose 1956 book  How to Do Things with Words, resonates with Frege’s use vs. mention, now elaborated as speech acts and illocutionary forces. (And in fact Austin had begun by publishing, in 1950, a translation of Frege’s Foundations of Arithmetic.)

Husserl's followers branch into everyday life

I need to fill in one more pathway, and we will have arrived at Garfinkel. This is the pathway of Husserl’s followers. I will single out two: Alfred Schutz and Martin Heidegger. Schutz set out to examine Max Weber’s notions of verstehen, and the ideal types of rational and non-rational action that Weber proposed as tools for the analyzing the social bases of modern capitalism. But Weber had operated as a typical Neo-Kantian, more or less inventing these ideal types out of his own head; whereas Schutz applied the more rigorous phenomenology of Husserl. The result was Schutz’s 1932 book, The Phenomenology of the Social World, which attempts to lay out some basic rules of the everyday construction of reality, such as the reciprocity of perspectives. Garfinkel encountered Schutz teaching at the New School for Social Research around 1950.

Heidegger was a pupil of Hussserl who had been given the task of making a phenomenological analysis of the experience of time. His Sein und Zeit, in 1927, is the first famous statement of what became existentialism. What is striking about Heidegger is the religious dimension, perhaps not surprising for a former Catholic seminary student, but one who had thrown off religion. In effect, Heidegger propounds a theology for atheists, where God is dead and there is no afterlife and no transcendence of the world. Nevertheless, the human individual is Dasein,  being-there, thrown into the world at a particular time and place, with no fundamental reason for the arbitrariness of why we are here; more broadly, in the background, no reason why anything should exist at all rather than nothing. This is like the sheer arbitrariness of why God created the world in the first place, a question that is no more answerable if one translates it into the naturalistic language of the Big Bang or some other scientific cosmology. Dasein is being-towards-death, the conscious being that projects itself towards the future but knows it is going to die. Hence the underlying motive, or at least deepest human experience, is existential angst.  Heidegger resonates with the most sophisticated positions of philosophical rivals: with the paradoxes plaguing the foundations of mathematical logic, with Gödel’s soon-to-be-discovered incompleteness theorem; with Wittgenstein’s unsayability and the inability of language to encompass practice. Heidegger well dramatizes the philosophical realignment: a long way from the comfortable world of the Neo-Kantians, as well as making the strongest possible opponent to the science-is-all viewpoint of the Vienna Circle positivists. Above all, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology holds that meaningfulness does not exist in any objective sense; it has to be created and posited, at every step of the way. He doesn’t say, created collectively, as an interactional accomplishment; Heidegger was not yet a sociologist. But the step was there to be taken.

Garfinkel as existentialist micro-sociological researcher

Garfinkel, in my view, is largely a combination of Schutz and existential phenomenology. Of course there are other strands: Garfinkel at Harvard was impressed with his teacher Talcott Parsons’ argument [in The Structure of Social Action, 1937] that the basic problem of sociology is how is society possible in the first place, given the Hobbesian problem of order, and Durkheim’s argument that society is held together not by conscious, rational contracts but by pre-contractual solidarity. But what is this tacit level and how does it operate? Garfinkel set out to discover this by phenomenological methods, just as Schutz had done for Weber’s categories of action. Moreover, by the 1950s, Garfinkel was operating in a milieu in which studies of everyday life were growing, with or without philosophical impetus: in France, Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist philosopher who published in 1947 a Critique of Everyday Life; Fernand Braudel and the Annales  School grounding history in the details of ordinary activities and things; Jean-Paul Sartre, doing phenomenology of everyday life with the eye of a naturalistic novelist; in America, Goffman’s early ethnographies, and those of Howie Becker and other symbolic interactionists; George Homans and others abjuring grand abstractions in favor of studying behavior in small groups. Some of this incipient micro-sociology was done in the laboratory, but so were a number of Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, under grants from the US Air Force office of research. One might say Garfinkel exploded the American research establishment from within, breaching the walls of the laboratory and making the entire world of everyday life a laboratory for experiment on the order-making and meaning-constructing methods of folk actors.

I was struck, visiting Harold’s home library in the 1980s, by how few sociology books he kept there-- mainly a few of Durkheim, but shelves full of the philosophy and literature of phenomenology and existentialism. Here I want to suggest how much Garfinkel resonated with Heidegger, even translating existentialist concepts into findings of ethnomethodology. All action is situational, arbitrarily thrown into a context. The human reality constructor projects towards the future, assuming that ambiguities will eventually be resolved in retrospect. But ambiguity lurks everywhere, as key aspects of communicative action, with others and with oneself, are indexical, not capable of translation into an objective system of references; Dasein is by definition indexical, inhabiting the thus-ness of the world in those exemplary indexicals, here and now. But actors avoid questioning what they tacitly feel, hiding from the unsayable. Human practical actors assume meaning, take it for granted, and interpret even the most contrived or accidental events as if they had meaning.

In Heidegger’s terms, persons strongly prefer to inhabit the world of the inauthentic, what Sartre called ‘bad faith’; the primary ethnomethods are all about keeping up comfortable appearances, a gloss of normalcy. Why? Breaches are highly uncomfortable; we rush to restore order, especially cognitive order, first by socially acceptable accounts, and if these fail, by labeling, exclusion, and attack. The most striking detail for me, reading Harold’s breaching experiments, is the reaction of the victims of the breach: bewilderment, shock, outrage. And not just because of momentary embarrassment, but because the arbitrary foundations of the social construction of reality have been temporarily revealed. What breaching reveals is Heidegger’s world of Dasein, thrown-ness, Being-towards-death, existential anxiety. Ethnomethods for finding and restoring order look like a way of pasting over Heidegger’s world lurking just below the surface.

If you want more evidence for the crucial important of Heidegger in opening the way for Garfinkel, bear in mind that Heidegger overturned the primacy given to mind by both Idealists and phenomenologists. Existential phenomenology is embodied, inhabiting the material world in the sense of the here-and-now Umwelt; this means physicality not as a theory or philosophy about matter—which Neo-Kantians could easily dissect as a dogmatically asserted Ding-an-sich—but as the primary existential experience of Dasein. This conception is central in Garfinkel’s repeated admonitions on how to do ethnomethodology, always focusing on “incarnate, embodied”  activity—not the primacy of mind (the mistake of superficial critics who called ethnomethodology mere subjectivity) but the mind/body doing something practical in the lived bodily world. And “incarnate” also has a religious resonance, since Jesus is incarnated, not transcendental; and mystics—especially in many lines of Zen—emphasize that Enlightenment is not elsewhere but in grasping the here and now as such.

I am aware that my existentialist reading of Garfinkel is not the only one. There is also a Wittgensteinian reading, rather more optimistic in tone, which marvels at the ongoing creativity of human actors in creating order out of situations, again and again, “for another first time.” Here, the tacit, unsayable processes are all to the good. This has been ably argued by John Heritage, and may be more characteristic of the Conversation Analysis branch. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think an existentialist theme is more central to Harold himself, in his own intellectual biography, in the distinctive emotional quality of his work. This aspect of his personality struck those who encountered him personally, and made up an important part of his charisma.

The second realignment: from existentialism to language-centered structuralism and deconstruction

           

I am near the end of my account, and so far have arrived only at the doorstep of the second “great turn” in the human sciences, that of the 1960s and 70s. Harold, born in 1917, and spending a number of years in World War Two, is an intellectual product of the post-war years, beginning graduate work at Harvard in 1946.  The early 60s found him still crying in the wilderness.  What made Garfinkel famous was not merely the publication of Studies in Ethnomethodology  in 1967, and the emergence of a network of former students with a program of ethnomethodological research, but another great realignment in the larger intellectual world.

The shift of the 1960s and 70s is still too close to us for unpolemical analysis. It has no generally agreed-upon name. Most famously, it was the rise of the counter-culture, attacking the academic and every other Establishment, throwing off traditional manners, politics, and the hegemony of science. It was a time of political radicalism, spearheaded this time by student movements rather than workers or peasants. But although radicalism penetrated the intellectual world in a revival of Marxism and in other politically engagé stances, these had little direct influence on ethnomethodology, with its resolutely high-intellectual outlook. A major component of the reception of ethnomethodology comes from winds blowing from a very different direction. Above all was the rise of linguistics, as a formal discipline, harking back to earlier mathematical formalisms.

In America, the new-found prestige of linguistics centered on the program of Chomsky [1955 Univ. of Pennsylvania PhD; 1957 Syntactic Structures].  This had started by the late 1950s  (and got its first fame in polemical opposition to the behaviorist-reductionism program of B.F. Skinner), but the Chomskyian movement became a beacon for other disciplines only in the 60s and 70s. Anthropological linguists, of course, had long been cataloguing languages, but the field was dispersed and lacked widespread interest, until the Chomskyian program of generative grammar, proposing to unify all language studies around layers of deep structures and transformative rules. This resonated with the burgeoning of cognitive psychology and the incipient field of cognitive science fed by the computer revolution, and gave new prestige to anthropologists who took a linguistic-theory approach to their materials.

In Europe, above all in France, American developments were paralleled by movements that even more strongly gave the linguistic model a kind of hegemony over the human sciences. Structuralist linguistics had existed since the 1910s in Saussure’s work, although not recognized as widely important for another half-century. In 1949, Lévi-Strauss produced The Elementary Structures of Kinship, a formalist comparison of kinship structures as systems of rules that might be combined in various ways and result in distinctive sequences; an appendix by the mathematician André Weil tied this to mathematical theory of groups. In the 50s and 60s, Lévi-Strauss rose to fame as figurehead of a structuralist program; his method was to compare tribal myths for their underlying combinations, oppositions and sequences of formal elements, thereby proclaiming a universal code of the human mind.

The structuralist movement was widened by the influx of Russian Formalism into France in the 1950s. The origins of the Russian Formalists goes back to the early 1900s, among literary critics and folklorists; their accomplishments included Vladimir Propp showing the basic elements from which folk tales are produced, and Viktor Shklovsky’s analysis of literary texts as a combination of devices that migrate from one text to another. One result was to radically downplay the author: if Cervantes had not lived, nevertheless Don Quixote would have been written. This alliance of literary theorists and folklorists combined into a distinctive school of linguistics, migrated to Prague with Roman Jakobson, and eventually to Paris. By the 1960s, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes and others were using Formalist methods to decode texts of all kinds, focusing on the textuality of the entire world, and declaring the death of the author, now seen as mere conduit for a stream of intertextual rearrangements.

On the whole, the structuralists were rivals of the existentialists, attacking their subjectivism and focus upon the individual consciousness. But a tie-in with phenomenology was made by Derrida, whose earliest book, Edmund Husserl’s Origins of Geometry, in 1962, brought textually oriented structuralism into connection with the deep roots of the early 20th century intellectual transformation, the mathematical foundations crisis and the grappling between formalist and intuitionist programs. Derrida thus became the philosophical heavyweight of the late structuralist, or deconstructionist movement.  Derrida’s own texts are famously multi-leveled and self-ironicizing, but one could also say this is in keeping with the whole tendency of philosophy from Frege to Wittgenstein: having emphasized what is unsayable, then going on if not to say it, at least finding devices for talking around it.

The anti-positivist wars in America and the fame of ethnomethodology

Back in the USA, Garfinkel’s ship was finally floating on the crest of a flood tide.  A more adequate metaphor might be, a multiplicity of raging rivers overflowing their banks:  The relatively quiet stream from Husserl to Schutz, and the more dramatic one from Heidegger and the existentialists; the purely academic growth of Chomskyian linguistics, and the growing community of anthropologists and cognitive scientists who became the best audience for ethnomethodologically-inspired work in conversation analysis. Then also the raging flood of the academic political revolts, and the anti-establishment psychedelic revolution, with its slogans “It’s all in your mind” and “Blow their minds.” Back inside the serious work of scholarship, came a growing academic stream of micro-sociologists and ethnographers of daily life-- it is not coincidental that the first round of young ethnomethodological stars-- Sacks, Schegloff, Sudnow-- were Goffman’s protégés at Berkeley. (According to Manny Schegloff, they were all brought there by Philip Selznick to staff his new Institute for Law and Society, but quickly rebelled.) And finally, by the 1970s, all this was enveloped in the European tide, the prestige of structuralist/deconstructionist literary theory, although in America  largely confined to departments of literature and anthropology, and the institutionalized insurgencies of feminist theory and ethnic studies.

I have tried to contain this whirlwind tour of the 20th century in two metaphorical bags, a sequence of two big realignments in philosophy and the human sciences. It would be misleading to think of this as a shift from one gestalt to another, a simple Kuhnian paradigm revolution. One way this is inadequate is that there is never a single dominant Zeitgeist  or “turn”, but always rival positions; and each of these big camps is always a mixture and jockeying among various campaigns. The first big realignment, in the 1920s and 30s, replaced Neo-Kantians with the opposition between phenomenologists and logical positivists, plus an ordinary language movement revolting against both. Garfinkel combined much of the impetus in phenomenology, coming from the foundational crisis in mathematics and therefore in theory of symbolism and symbol-use, with an increasing micro-focus of research on the details of everyday life. The second big realignment, the 1960s and 70s, was in some respects an advance by a later generation of phenomenologists, with further support from literary formalists and code-seeking structuralists, in a fairly successful attack on the logical positivists. But of course other versions of positivism survive and prosper, in the worlds of statistics, biology, economics and rational choice, und so weiter.

A turn or realignment is not the end of history. All the other movements of the huge contemporary intellectual world do not go away; they are there is the absences I have not mentioned, in psychology and political science, in all the branches of sociology that go their own way, not very surprisingly, and maintain their own research programs. My title turns out to be merely rhetorical, if it is taken to imply one big triumphal turn in the later 20th century.  But even with all the caveats, it has been a big movement, a major part of the action. Unpacking Garfinkel’s trajectory and influences connects him to much of the most serious and profound intellectual life of the 20th century. Unlike so many others this side the Atlantic, Garfinkel was not merely transplanting Francophone influences. He got there first, in his own way. And he launched a research program, one that announced most dramatically the presence of militant micro-sociology under sail.

Downstream from Garfinkel and Goffman, we are beginning to appreciate the channels they ripped open, and the flood-plains on which we float today, towards the always approachable but never-attained sea.

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 Napoleon Never Slept: How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy  

 Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

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For sources on movements of 20th century philosophy see: Randall Collins. 1998.  The Sociology of Philosophies. A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Harvard University Press.

To witness the continuing insights of ethnomethodological research: Kenneth Liberman, 2013. More Studies in Ethnomethodology.  SUNY Press.

TIPPING POINT REVOLUTIONS AND STATE BREAKDOWN REVOLUTIONS: WHY REVOLUTIONS SUCCEED OR FAIL

In the last few years, many people have come to believe they have a formula for overthrowing authoritarian governments and putting democracy in their place. The method is mass peaceful demonstrations, persisting until they draw huge support, both internally and internationally, intensifying as government atrocities while putting them down are publicized by the media. This was the model for the “color revolutions” (orange, pink, velvet, etc.) in the ex-Soviet bloc; for the Arab Spring of 2011 and its imitators; further back it has roots in the US civil rights movement. 

Such revolutions succeed or fail in varying degrees, as has been obvious in the aftermath of the different Arab Spring revolts. Why this is the case requires a more complicated analysis. The type of revolution consisting in the righteous mobilization of the people until the authoritarians crack and take flight may be called a tipping point revolution.  It contrasts with the state breakdown theory of revolution, formulated by historical sociologists Theda Skocpol, Jack Goldstone, Charles Tilly and others, to show the long-term roots of major revolutions such as the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russia Revolution of 1917, and that I used to predict the 1989-91 anti-Soviet revolution. Major revolutions are those that bring about big structural changes (the rise or fall of communism, the end of feudalism, etc.). I will argue that tipping point revolutions, without long-term basis in the structural factors that bring state breakdown, are only moderately successful at best; and they often fall short even of modest changes, devolving into destructive civil wars, or outright failure to change the regime at all.

Tipping Point Revolutions with Easy Success

Tipping points revolutions are not new. Some of the early ones were quick and virtually bloodless. For instance the February 1848 revolution in France: There had been agitation for six months to widen the very restrictive franchise for the token legislature. The government finally cracked down on the main form of mobilization-- a banqueting campaign in which prominent gentlemen met in dining rooms to proclaim speeches and drink toasts to revolutionary slogans. The ban provided a rallying point. The day of the banquet, a crowd gathered, despite 30,000 troops called out to enforce the ban. There were minor scuffles, but most soldiers stood around uneasily, unsure what to do, many of them sympathetic to the crowd. Next morning rumours swept through Paris that revolution was coming. Shops did not open, workers stayed home, servants became surly with their masters and mistresses. In the eerie atmosphere of near-deserted streets, trees were chopped down and cobble-stones dug up to make barricades.  Liberal members of the national legislature visited the king, demanding that the prime minister be replaced.  This modest step was easy; he was dismissed; but who would take his place? No one wanted to be prime minister; a succession of candidates wavered and declined, no one feeling confident of taking control. 

Mid-afternoon of the second day, just after the prime minister’s resignation was announced, a pumped-up crowd outside a government building was fired upon. The accidental discharge of a gun by a nervous soldier set off a contagious volley, killing 50. This panicky use of force did not deter the crowd, but emboldened it. During the night, the king offered to abdicate. But in favor of whom? Other royal relatives also declined. The king panicked and fled the palace, along with assorted duchesses; crowds were encroaching on the palace grounds, and now they invaded the royal chambers and even sat on the royal throne. In a holiday atmosphere, a Republic was announced, the provisional assembly set plans to reform itself through elections. 

In three days the revolution was accomplished. If we stop the clock here, the revolution was an easy success.  The People collectively had decided the regime must go, and in a matter of hours, it bowed to the pressure of that overwhelming public.  It was one of those moments that exemplify what Durkheim called collective consciousness at its most palpable. 

This moment of near-unanimity did not last. In the first weeks of enthusiasm, even the rich and the nobility-- who had just lost their monopoly of power-- made subscriptions for the poor and wounded; the conservative provinces rejoiced in the deeds of Paris. The honeymoon began to dissipate within three weeks. Conservative and radical factions struggled among the volunteer national guard, and began to lay up their own supplies of arms. Conservatives in the countryside and financiers in the city mobilized against the welfare-state policies of Paris.  Elections to a constitutional assembly, two months in, returned an array of conservatives and moderates; the socialists and liberals who led the revolution were reduced to a small minority, upheld only by radical crowds who invaded the assembly hall and shouted down opponents. In May, the national guard dispersed the mob and arrested radical leaders. By June there was a second revolt, this time confined to the working-class part of the city. The Assembly was united against the revolution; in fact they had provoked it by abolishing the public workshops set up for unemployed workers. This time the army kept its discipline. The emotional mood had switched directions. The provinces of France now had their own collective consciousness, an outpouring of volunteers rushing to Paris by train to battle the revolutionaries. Within five days, the June revolution was over; this time with bloody fighting, ten thousand killed and wounded, and more executed afterwards or sent to prison colonies.

The tipping point mechanism did not tip this time; instead of everyone going over to the victorious side (thereby ensuring its victory),  the conflict fractured into two opposing camps. Instead of one revolutionary collective consciousness sweeping up everyone, it split into rival identities, each with its own solidarity, its own emotional energy and moral righteousness. Since the opposing forces, both strongly mobilized, were unevenly matched, the result was a bloody struggle, and then destruction of the weaker side. In the following months, the mood flowed increasingly conservative. Elections in December brought in a huge majority for a President-- Napoleon’s nephew, symbol of a idealized authoritarian regime of the past-- who eventually overturned the democratic reforms and made himself emperor. The revolutionary surge had lasted just four months.

Tipping Point Revolutions that Fail

The sequence of revolts in 1848 France shows both the tipping point mechanism at its strongest, and the failure not so far downstream to bring about structural change. Modern history is full of failed revolutions, and continues to be right up through the latest news. I will cite one example of a tipping point revolution that failed entirely, not even taking power briefly. The democracy movement in China centered on protestors occupying Tiananmen Square in Beijing, lasting seven weeks from mid-April to early June 1989. Until the last two weeks, the authorities did not crack down; local police acted unsure, just like French troops in February 1848; some even displayed sympathy with the demonstrators. 

The numbers of protestors surged and declined several times. Initially, students from the prestigious Beijing universities (where the Red Guards movement had been launched 20 years earlier) set up a vigil in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of a reform-oriented Communist leader. This was China’s center of public attention, in front of the old Imperial Palace, the place for official rituals, and thus a target for impromptu counter-rituals.   Beginning with a few thousand students on April 17, the crowd fell to a few hundred by the fourth day, but revived after a skirmish with police as militants took their protest to the gate of the nearby government compound where the political elite lived. Injuries were slight and no arrests were made, but indignation over police brutality renewed the movement, which grew to 100,000-200,000 for the state funeral on day 5. Militants hijacked the ritual by kneeling on the steps of the ceremonial hall flanking Tiananmen Square, in the style of traditional supplicants to the emperor. The same day rioting broke out in other cities around China, including arson attacks, with casualties on both sides. Four days later (day 10) the government newspaper officially condemned the movement-- the first time it had been portrayed negatively; next day 50-100,000 Beijing students responded, breaking through police lines to reoccupy the Square. So far counter-escalation favored the protestors.

The government now switched to a policy of conciliation and negotiation. This brought a 2-weeks lull; by May 4 (day 18) most students had returned to class.  On May 13 (day 28), the remaining militants launched a new tactic: a hunger strike, initially recruiting 300; over the next 2 days it recaptured public attention, and grew to 3000 hunger strikers. Big crowds, growing to 300,000, now flocked to the Square to view and support them. The militants had another ritual weapon: the arrival on May 15 of Soviet leader Gorbachev for a state visit, then at the height of his fame as a Communist reformer. The official welcome had to be moved to the airport, but the state meeting in the ceremonial hall flanking Tiananmen was marred by the noisy demonstration outside. On May 17, as Gorbachev left, over one million Beijing residents from all social classes marched to support the hunger strikers. The militants had captured the attention center of the ceremonial gathering; the bandwagon was building to a peak. Visitors to Tiananmen were generally organized by work units, who provided transportation and sometimes even paid the marchers. A logistics structure was created to fund the food and shelter for those who occupied the Square. The organizational base of the Communist regime, at least in the capital, was tipping towards revolution. Around the country, too, there were supporting demonstrations in 400 cities. Local governments were indecisive; some Communist Party committees openly endorsed the movement; some authorities provided free transportation by train for hundred of thousands of students to travel to Beijing to join in.

The tipping point did not tip. The Communist elite met outside the city in a showdown among themselves. A collective decision was made; a few dissenters, including some army generals, were removed and arrested.  On May 19, martial law was declared. Military forces were called from distant regions, lacking ties to Beijing demonstrators. The next four days were a showdown in the streets; crowds of residents, especially workers, blocked the army convoys; soldiers rode in open trucks, unarmed-- the regime still trying to use as little force as possible, and also distrustful of giving out ammunition-- and often were overwhelmed by residents. Crowds used a mixture of persuasion and food offerings-- army logistics having broken down by the unreliability of passage through the streets-- and sometimes force, stoning and beating isolated soldiers. On May 24, the regime pulled back the troops to bases outside the city. But it did not give up. The most reliable army units were moved to the front, some tasked with watching for defections among less reliable units. In another week strong forces had been assembled in the center of Beijing.

Momentum was swinging back the other way. Student protestors in the Square increasingly divided between moderates and militants; by the time the order to clear the Square was given for June 3, the number occupying was down to 4000. There was one last surge of violence-- not in Tiananmen Square itself, although the name became so famous that most outsiders think there was a massacre there-- but in the streets as residents attempted to block the army's movement once again. Crowds fought with stones and gasoline bombs, burning army vehicles and, by some reports, the soldiers inside. In this emotional atmosphere, as both sides spread stories of the other’s atrocities,   something on the order of 50 soldiers and police were killed, and 400-800 civilians (estimates varying widely). Some soldiers took revenge for prior attacks by firing at fleeing opponents and beating those they caught. In Tiananmen Square, the early morning of June 4, the dwindling militants were allowed to march out through the encircling troops.

International protest and domestic horror were to no avail; a sufficiently adamant and organizationally coherent regime easily imposed its superior force. Outside Beijing, protests continued for several days in other cities; hundreds more were killed. Organizational discipline was reestablished by a purge; over the following year, CCP members who had sympathized with the revolt were arrested, jailed, and sent to labor camps. Dissident workers were often executed; students got off easier, as members of the elite. Freedom of the media, which had been loosend during the reform period of 1980s, and briefly flourished during the height of the democracy protests in early May, was now replaced by strict control.  Economic reforms, although briefly questioned in the aftermath of 1989, resumed but political reforms were rescinded.  A failed tipping point revolution not only fails to meet its goals; it reinforces authoritarianism.

If the Chinese government had the power to crack down by sending out its security agents and arresting dissidents all over the country, why didn't they do so earlier, instead of waiting until Tiananmen Square was cleared?  Because this was the center of the tipping-point mechanism. As long as the rebellious assembly went on, tension existed as to which way the regime would go. If it couldn't meet this challenge, the regime would be deserted. This was in question as long as all eyes were on Tiananmen. Once attention was broken up, all those security agents could fan out around the country, picking off suspects one by one, ultimately arresting tens of thousands. That is why centralized and decentralized forms of rebellion are so different: centralized rebellions potentially very short and sudden; decentralized ones long, grinding and much more destructive.

We like to believe that any government that uses force against its own citizens is so marred by the atrocity that it loses all legitimacy. Yet the 1990s and the early 2000s were a time of increasing Chinese prestige. The market version of communist political control became a great economic success; international economic ties expanded and exacted no penalty for the deaths in June 1989; domestically Chinese poured their energies into economic opportunities. Protest movements revived within a decade, but the regime has been quick to clamp down on them.  Even the new means of mobilization through the internet has proven to be vulnerable to a resolute authoritarian apparatus, which monitors activists to head off any possible Tiananmen-style assemblies before they start.

The failure of the Chinese democracy movement, both in 1989 and since, tells another sociological lesson. An authoritarian regime that is aware of the tipping point mechanism need not give in to it; it can keep momentum on its own side by making sure no bandwagon gets going among the opposition. Such a regime can be accused of moral violations and even atrocities, but moral condemnation without a successful mobilization is ineffective. It is when one’s movement is growing, seemingly expanding its collective consciousness to include virtually everyone and emotionally overwhelm their opponents, that righteous horror over atrocities is so arousing. Without this, protests remain sporadic, localized and ephemeral at best. The modest emotional energy of the protest movement is no rushing tide; and as this goes on for years, the emotional mood surrounding such a regime remains stable-- the most important quality of “legitimacy”. 

A Contested Tipping Point: The Egyptian Revolution

Egypt in January-February 2011, the most famous of the Arab Spring revolutions, fits most closely to the model of 1848 France. Egypt took longer to build up to the tipping point-- 18 days instead of 3; and there were more casualties in the initial phase---  400 killed and 6000 wounded (compared to 50 killed in February 1848) because there was more struggle before the tipping point was reached.  Already from day 7, troops sent to guard Tahrir Square in Cairo declared themselves neutral, and most of the protestors’ causalities came from attacks by unofficial government militias or thugs. By day 16, police who killed demonstrators were arrested, and the dictator Mubarak offered concessions, which were rejected as unacceptable. On the last day of the 18-day revolution, everyone had deserted  Mubarak and swung over to the bandwagon, including his own former base of support, the military. This continuity is one reason why the aftermath did not prove so revolutionary.

Again, honeymoon did not last long.  By day 43, women who assembled in Tahrir Square were heckled and threatened, and Muslim/Christian violence broke out in Cairo. Tahrir Square continued to be used as a symbolic rallying point, but largely as a scene of clashes between opposing camps. Structural reforms have not gone very deep. The Islamist movement elected in the popular vote relegated to a minority the secularists and liberals who had been most active in the revolution. President Morsi bears some resemblance to Louis Bonaparte, who rose to power on the reputation of an ancestral movement-- both had a record of opposition to the regime, but were ambiguous about their own democratic credentials. The analogy portends a reactionary outcome to a liberating revolution.

Bottom line: tipping point revolutions are too superficial to make deep structural changes.  What does?

State Breakdown Revolutions

Three ingredients must come together to produce a state-breakdown revolution.

(1)  Fiscal crisis/ paralysis of state organization. The state runs out of money, is crushed by debts, or otherwise is so burdened that it cannot pay its own officials. This often happens through the expense of past wars or huge costs of current war, especially if one is losing. The crisis is deep and structural because it cannot be evaded; it is not a matter of ideology, and whoever takes over responsibility for running the government faces the same problem. When the crisis grows serious, the army, police and officials no longer can enforce order because they themselves are disaffected.

This was the route to the 1789 French Revolution; the 1640 English Revolution; the 1917 Russian Revolution; and the 1853-68 Japanese revolution (which goes under the name of the Meiji Restoration). The 1989-91 anti-Soviet revolution similarly began with struggles to reform the Soviet budget, overburdened by military costs of the Cold War arms race. 

(2) Elite deadlock between state faction and economic privilege faction. The fiscal crisis cannot be resolved because the most powerful and privileged groups are split. Those who benefit economically from the regime resist paying for it (whether these are landowners, financiers, or even a socialist military-industrial complex); reformers are those who are directly responsible for keeping the state running. The split is deep and structural, since it does not depend on ideological preferences; whoever takes command, whatever their ideas, must deal with the reality of organizational paralysis. We are not dealing here with conflict between parties in the public sphere or the legislature; such partisan squabbling is common, and it may also exist at the same time as a state crisis. Deadlock between the top elites is far more serious, because it stymies the two most powerful forces, the economic elite and the ruling officials.

(3) Mass mobilization of dissidents. This factor is last in causal order; it becomes important after state crisis and elite deadlock weaken the enforcement power of the regime. This power vacuum provides an opportunity for movements of the public to claim a solution. The ideology of the revolutionaries is often misleading; it may have nothing to do with the causes of the fiscal crisis itself (e.g. claiming the issue is one of political reform, democratic representation, or even returning to some earlier religious or traditional image of utopia). The importance of ideology is mostly tactical, as an emotion-focusing device for group action. And in fact, after taking state power, revolutionary movements often take actions  contrary to their ideology (the early Bolshevik policies on land reform, for instance; or the Japanese revolutionary shifts between anti-western antipathy and pro-western imitation). The important thing is that the revolutionary movement is radical enough to attack the fiscal (and typically military) problems, to reorganize resources so that the state itself becomes well-funded. This solves the structural crisis and ends state breakdown, enabling the state to go on with other reforms.  That is why state breakdown revolutions are able to make deep changes in institutions: in short, why they become “historic” revolutions.

Reconciling the Two Theories

Tipping point revolutions are far more common than state breakdown revolutions. The two mechanisms sometimes coincide; tipping points may occur in the sequence of a state breakdown, as the third factor, mass mobilization, comes into play. In 1789, once the fiscal crisis and elite deadlock resulted in calling the Estates General, crowd dynamics led to tipping points that are celebrated as the glory days of the French revolution. In 1917 Russia, the initial collapse of the government in February was a crowd-driven tipping point, with a series of abdications reminiscent of France in February 1848; what made this a deep structural revolution was the fiscal crisis of war debts, pressure to continue the war from the Allies who held Russian debt, and eventually a second tipping point in November in favor of the Soviets. But state breakdown revolutions can happen without these kinds of crowd-centered tipping points: the 1640 English Revolution (where fighting went on through 1648); the Chinese revolution stretching from 1911 to 1949; the Japanese revolution of 1853-68.  Conversely, tipping point revolutions often fail in the absence of state fiscal crisis and elite deadlock; an example is the 1905 Russian Revolution, which had months of widespread enthusiasm for reform during the opportunity provided by defeat in the Japanese war, but nevertheless ended with the government forcefully putting down the revolution.

A tipping point mechanism, by itself, is a version of mass mobilization which is the final ingredient of a state paralysis revolution. But mass mobilization also has a larger structural basis: resources such as transportation and communication networks that facilitate organizing social movements-- sometimes in the form of revolutionary armies-- to contend for control of the state. If such mobilization concentrates in a capital city, it may generate a tipping point situation.  But also such mobilization can take place throughout the countryside; in which case the revolution takes more the form of a civil war.

Tipping Point Revolutions and Imitative Revolutions

At times, waves of revolution spread from one state to another; the success of one igniting enthusiasm for another. It is the mass mobilization of the tipping point, the huge crowds and the widespread feeling of solidarity in the pro-revolutionary majority, that encourages imitations. We can see this because some of the famous ignition-revolutions were not very effective in making changes, but they were still imitated. One such wave was in 1848, spreading from  Switzerland and Sicily to the fragmented states of Italy, and most spectacularly to France. Soon after news propagated of events in Paris, Europe’s most famous city, crowds demanded constitutional reforms in Vienna, Berlin, and most of the German states and in the ethnic regions of the Austrian Empire. Some rulers temporarily fled or made concessions; troops mutinied; parliaments and revolutionary assemblies met. All of these were put down within a year and a half. Some were extirpated by the intervention of outside troops, as conservative rulers supported each other in regaining control. Of these revolutions, hardly any had a permanent effect.

The wave of Arab Spring revolts began with a successful tipping point revolution in Tunisia, imitated with temporary success in Egypt; but failed in Bahrain; had little effect on an ongoing civil war in Yemen; led to a full-scale military conflict in Libya that was won by the rebels only through massive outside military intervention with airpower; in Syria generated a prolonged and extremely destructive civil war sustained by outside military aid to all factions. The lesson is that if tipping point revolutions themselves are not very decisive for structural change, further attempts to imitate tipping points in other countries have even less to go on. Regimes may or may not be removed but the downstream situation does not look very different, although there may be a prolonged period of contention amounting to a failed state.

The major exception would appear to be the wave of imitative revolts from 1989-91, as the Soviet bloc fell apart. The states of eastern Europe overthrew their communist regimes one after another; some with relatively easy tipping point revolutions as in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and East Germany, and bloodier battles in Romania and eventually Yugoslavia. A second round of revolts began in 1991 as the USSR disintegrated into its component ethnic states. Here was indeed a structural change, dismantling communist political forms and replacing them with versions of democracy (some continuing control by ex-communist elites), and shifting the property system to capitalism. But this series of revolutions were not mere tipping points alone; they were all effects of a deep structural crisis in the lynch-pin of the system, the Soviet empire, that underwent a state breakdown revolution. Revolts can spread by imitation; but what happens to them depends on what kinds of structural conflicts are beneath the surface.

The Continuum of Revolutionary Effects, from Superficial to Deep

If we use the term “revolution” loosely to mean any change in government which is illegal-- outside the procedures provided by the regime itself-- there are many kinds of revolutions. They range from those with no structural effects at all, through those which change the deepest economic, political, and cultural institutions.

Coup d’etat is the most superficial; there is no popular mobilization, only a small group of conspirators inside the circles of power, or in the military, who replace one ruler with another. Often there is not even the pretence of structural change or appeal to the popular will.

Tipping point revolutions are more ambitious; emotional crowds who are at the center of the mechanism for transferring power are enthusiastic for grand if often vague ideological slogans. But such revolts often fail, if the government is not itself paralysed by a structural crisis. When tipping points succeed, the new regime often has only ephemeral support, and may peter out in internal quarrels, civil war, or reactionary restoration.

State breakdown revolutions have a less ephemeral quality. The state cannot come back into equilibrium until its own organizational problem is solved; and since this means its fiscal, military, and administrative basis, reforms must go deep into the main power-holding institutions. Whether or not the same ideological brand of revolutionaries continues in office, these structural changes lay down a new order that tends to persist-- at least until another deep crisis comes along.

Today: the Era of Tipping Point Revolutions

After the fall of the Soviet Union and its empire, there have been many repetitions of tipping point revolutions (Ukraine 2004, Georgia 2003, Kyrgyzstan 2005, Serbia 2000) mixed with personal power-grabs that are little more than coups masked as popular revolutions. The Arab Spring revolts have relied heavily on the tipping point mechanism. Where the government has had a strong faction of popular support, tipping point attempts have brought no easy transition; the result has been full-scale civil war (Syria), or defeat of the revolutionary mobilization by a mass counter-mobilization (the Green uprising in Iran 2009). The popularity of tipping-point revolts, as in the anti-Islamist uprisings in Turkey and Egypt, appear to have all the weaknesses of their genre.

Napoleon Never Slept:

How Great Leaders Leverage Social Energy

Micro-sociological secrets of charismatic leaders from Jesus to Steve Jobs

E-book now available at Maren.ink and Amazon

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

References

Cambridge Modern History, Vols. 4 and 11. 1907-1909.

Collins, Randall. 1999. “Maturation of the State-Centered Theory of Revolution and Ideology;” “The Geopolitical Basis of Revolution: the Prediction of the Soviet Collapse.” chapters 1 and 2 in Macro-History: Essays in Sociology of the Long Run. Stanford Univ. Press.

Collins, Randall. 2012.  “Time-Bubbles of Nationalism.” Nations and Nationalism 18: 383-397.

Goldstone, Jack. 1991. Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World. Univ. of California Press.

Harris, Kevan. 2012. “The brokered exuberance of the middle class: an ethnographic analysis of Iran’s 2009 Green Movement.” Mobilization 17: 435-455.

Tocqueville, Alexis de. 1987 [1852]. Recollections of the French Revolution of 1848. Transaction Publishers.

Weyland, Kurt. 2009. “The diffusion of revolution: ‘1848’ in Europe and Latin America.” International Organization 63: 391-423.

Zhao, Dingxin. 2001. The Power of Tiananmen. University of Chicago Press.

CLUES TO MASS RAMPAGE KILLERS: DEEP BACKSTAGE, HIDDEN ARSENAL, CLANDESTINE EXCITEMENT

This article can now be found at:
 http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11873-014-0250-2

For a follow-up post, see:   
SANDY HOOK SCHOOL SHOOTINGS: LESSONS FOR GUN-OWNING PARENTS

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

DRUG BUSINESS IS NOT THE KEY TO GANGS AND ORGANIZED CRIME: WITH A PROGNOSIS FOR THE MEXICAN CARTEL WARS

It has become conventional to refer to all types of gangs and organized crime as if they were synonymous with the illegal drug business. Popular terms like "drug gangs" and "narco-cartels" obscure a fundamental point: crime organizations are political organizations. They are rivals to the legitimate state, and their fundamental asset is their capacity for wielding violence. Their rise and fall, and the amount and kind of violence they perform is explainable by political sociology.

It is easy to demonstrate that drug business is not central, since most crime organizations historically have had little to do with it.

The Mafia in the U.S., in its most flourishing period between 1930 and 1980, was primarily involved in extortion/protection rackets. It drew most of its income and spent most of its time on rake-offs from illegal gambling, prostitution, loan-sharking, debt-collecting, as well as extortion of legal business such as construction, waste collection, wholesale food markets, restaurants, and corruption of labor unions and local government. One of the five families of the New York Mafia, the Lucchese Family, was a major conduit of heroin smuggling and wholesaling in the 1940s-60s. But this was a small part of the overall operation; the prosperity of the Mafia did not rise or fall with the heroin business, and the occasional power struggles in the five families were not over the drug business. One might argue, analogously, that alcohol prohibition during the 1920s was the stimulus to the formation of the Mafia; but Mafia organization dates from 1931 when Lucky Luciano set up the Commission, and its period of greatest dominance was in the 40 years after the end of Prohibition.

The Mafia families in Sicily, from their reestablishment after the fall of the Fascist regime in World War II through their demise in the 1990s, were involved in what Diego Gambetta [1993] calls the business of protection. In the absence of government regulation and in at atmosphere of pervasive distrust, all economic transactions needed a protector or guarantor, and this was provided by traditional secret societies of "men of honor" who received payoffs in return. The scope of businesses under Mafia protection was even wider than in the U.S., and consisted more of legal activities than illegal ones-- gambling was not prominent in Sicily, though an illegal source of income was smuggling cigarettes to avoid taxation, and turfs for pickpocket gangs were enforced in Palermo. Sicilian Mafia families did become important pipelines for heroin processing and smuggling from the Middle-East across the Atlantic. But this was not the key to the Sicilian Mafias; they existed long before the heroin trade, and their protection business remained centered on the local economy.

The Russian crime organizations of the 1990s arose during the period of privatizing the Soviet economy. Their main focus was selling protection/extortion to licit businesses, ranging from small street market vendors to commercial and industrial companies, and they had a large role in taking over former state enterprises. The biggest criminal protection businesses amalgamated with the crumbling government bureaucracy and became legitimate as the economic "oligarchs". By the early 2000s, Russian crime-orgs had ploughed back so much of their illegal gains into the above-ground economy that they abandoned illegal force and became a major part of normal business. Even during their outlaw period of the mid-1990s-- when they were most violent-- they were relatively little involved in running illicit businesses such as drugs. Why focus on drugs when you can take over oil and gas?

The Japanese Yakuza originated historically in gangs allocating stalls in outdoor markets. During the US occupation after WWII, Yakuza families expanded to provide ordinary consumer goods on a black market-- i.e. making scarce goods available outside of government rationing. Since that time, Yakuza activities have resembled those of the NY Mafia, including strong-arm debt collecting, labor disciplining for manufacturers, and protecting illicit businesses such as strip clubs and prostitution. Drugs were at most a minor part of their activities.

Similarly with smaller crime organizations: historically most gangs concentrated on other activities than drugs; even today, when many street gangs are involved in some aspect of drug distribution, for most gangs it is not their central activity. For instance, some motorcycle gangs (i.e. white gang members) are involved in distributing methamphetamine, but the primary purpose of these gangs is showing off and fighting against rival motorcycle gangs. Local gangs are sociable groups in it for action and fun, but they have a political aspect because they organize violence to back each other up-- and with organized violence, we enter the realm of politics and the state.

There are several kinds of crime organizations, and their differences are explainable by their politics. This means their internal politics-- how they control violence inside their own ranks-- and their external geopolitics-- how they deal with rival organizations. Drug business affects the structure and violence of crime-orgs only as it feeds into their politics.

What makes some gangs small, while others grow into large but loose alliances, and a few become underground governments? What makes some crime-orgs centralized and hierarchic, while others are localized and egalitarian? Why do some engage in lengthy wars of expansion and extermination, while others confine themselves to local crime and skirmishing at the borders of their turf, and still others-- the most successful ones-- make their violence terrifying but limited and stealthy? Let us compare.


Types of Crime Organizations:

Mafia-style syndicates -- protection/extortion, govt. corruption;
underground govt.
New York, Sicily, Russia, other ex-Soviet republics, Japanese Yakuza,
Chinese Triads
Local neighborhood turf gangs (10-20-50-100 members)

Symbol-based alliances
Crips (30,000) , Bloods (15,000),
Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13 & other factions: 50,000 in US )
Multi-gang alliances with political / religious ideologies
People Nation (comprised of Blackstones, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Bloods)
Folk Nation (comprised of Gangster Disciples, Dieciocho, Hoover Crips)

Large Corporate Gangs ( Chicago) – hierarchic, mainly drug business
Blackstones / Black P. Stone Nation (60,000), Vice Lords (60,000)
Latin Kings (30-45,000)


Mafia-style syndicates

After a crime war among rival Italian, Irish, and Jewish gangs in the New York area, the victorious alliance in 1931 set up a Commission consisting of the heads of five Mafia families, with all other crime families around the USA under the jurisdiction of the one of the New York families. It was called the Peace Commission because its aim was to prevent civil wars. It kept a low profile. All killings inside the Mafia had to be authorized by the Commission; if not, the perpetrator himself would be killed. Killing policemen and government officials was strictly prohibited, and anyone found out plotting such a killing was reported to the Commission and executed. The policy of the Commission was to corrupt local government by reaching accommodation, not to fight with it and draw down the force of the Federal government. Executions were ordered as a matter of organizational discipline, targeting specific individuals as a warning to the rest to stay in line. This was strictly Mafia business; women and personal relatives of those punished were to be left alone and even supported after their man was dead. The aim was to cut off chains of revenge killings by imposing a political solution. And it was all done through layers of secrecy: the technique of murder was not a risky gunfight but a stealthy shot at point-blank range or a bomb under foot, usually set up by betrayal of one's closest friends.

The system worked but not perfectly. Occasionally aging Mafia chiefs were killed or forced out by the younger generation, and some families had brief civil wars. The Commission usually legitimated the outcomes of these wars and carried on. It was able to rule with a high degree of secrecy for 30 years, with near immunity from the corrupt New York government. Publicity began to expose the Mafia in the 1960s, and in the 1980s and 90s Federal prosecutors using RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) law reduced the Mafia to a trivial presence in a few American cities.

The Yakuza also operated more with a show of toughness than widespread use of violence. There were some periods of war between rival organizations, but for the most part the Yakuza stabilized in separate territories. They achieved a modus vivendi with Japanese government officials, and even operated openly out of offices with their names on it. Unlike the US, where Federal law enforcement was a counterpoise to corrupt state government, the Japanese national government monopolized police functions and rarely made much effort to eliminate organized crime, probably because of its long-standing alliance with the ruling party against leftist labor organizations.

Russian crime orgs in the 1990s began with a large number of small gangs, with shoot-outs peaking during 1993-95. They never achieved a centralized governing body like the New York Mafia. But they evolved a relatively peaceful (if threatening) technique of negotiating rival claims over who was protecting which business; as the gangs winnowed down to an oligopoly, their above-ground organization increased their staff of business and negotiation specialists, and eventually reduced their reliance on force as they acquired legitimate property and made alliances with government officials. Here too the path to success was by limiting violence and substituting political arrangements. The Russian crime organizations were the world's most successful Mafia. They had unusual opportunities-- the chance to take over state properties during a time when socialism was privatizing-- and relatively weak opposition-- a crumbling government bureaucracy without a legal tradition setting boundaries between crime and the new capitalist system. Ordinarily, big crime-orgs expose themselves to government attack because their sheer size becomes hard to keep under cover; in the case of the ex-Soviet Union (here we should include most of the successor states besides Russia), they were able to move above ground and become the new Establishment.

In contrast to these successful Mafias, the Sicilian Mafia fought a series of bloody civil wars among themselves in the early 1960s, and again in the late 1970s-1980s, killing up to 1000 Mafia members including many bosses. There were over 100 separate Mafia families, and they were never able to achieve stable alliances. Under the advice of lordly American mafiosi visiting in the late 1950s, at attempt was made to set up a Peace Commission, but it broke down immediately when it was unable to resolve disputes. A split in the Commission over money owed in a heroin smuggling case set off the first Mafia War. This was a political war, not a drug war; the issue was the suspicion that the Commission was just a means for one faction to impose its domination over the others. (A similar issue would break up the Crips, when that attempt at a black-unity gang alliance fell apart in accusations of a power grab.)

Spiraling Mafia violence attracted government attention from the mainland; when investigating officials were assassinated (chiefly by bombs in roadways and cars), the Italian government escalated its crackdown, with mass arrests and maxi-trials. The Sicilian mafias fought not only with each other but engaged in war with the Italian government, probably because they were made arrogant by long-standing local political control and failure of national state penetration into Sicily. But the Italian government mobilized military and police forces far exceeding the strength of the divided Sicilian groups; mafiosi under death threat from rivals began to break their oaths of silence and provide evidence. By the end of the 1990s, the Sicilian mafia was largely destroyed; on the mainland, it was displaced by Calabrian and Neapolitan crime orgs. Fighting against the government proved to be a fatal mistake. As the New York Mafia and the Russian crime-orgs demonstrate, the most successful do best by corrupting the state rather than fighting with it.

Local neighborhood turf gangs

Turn now to the other end of the scale. Gangs are relatively small groups, controlling a few blocks of a city. Structures vary; some have elected leaders, others are informal. Their origins are in children's play groups, dedicated to having fun and getting into mischief. They may engage in crimes, but this is not necessarily an organized activity of the group. The clubhouse or hangout is a place where gang members can form ad hoc crews to carry out car thefts, burglaries, robberies, or extortions; i.e. the gang is more of an umbrella under which its members come together to commit their own crimes. Some gangs claim a percentage of their criminal profits, others collect dues, chiefly for the clubhouse and for parties. Neighborhood gangs are often like social clubs, fraternities for poor people, who support themselves to an extent with crime.

The identity of the gang is based on its violence, or more precisely, ostentatious bluster and threat. Elijah Anderson argues that the code of the street in the black inner-city is mainly projecting a tough demeanor; when this is done correctly, it establishes membership and deters violence. But the gang has to demonstrate some violence, both in initiation fights, and in threats against rivals who enter their territory, and occasional incursions into enemy territories. Gang "rumbles" existed since violent teen-age gangs appeared in the 1950s, first with Puerto Rican gangs in New York City. The early gangs were not fighting over drug business, nor even protection rackets; they existed largely for the prestige of fighting, and their main concern was "action".

Since the 1970s and 80s, it has become common for local street gangs to be connected with the drug business, usually at the low retail end, and violence can take place over prime vending locations. But this is not a necessary gang activity; gangs have existed without the drug business, either as an umbrella for crime crews, or just for sociability and the excitement of fighting. In the 1950s, gangs were often consumers of heroin, but not dealers. It is still the case now, when gangs sell drugs, either as a collective enterprise or as individuals protected by the gang, that gang members consume much of the drugs themselves; such gangs do not derive much profit from the drug business. Gangs with a lavish, hedonistic lifestyle accumulate very little wealth from crime-- including non-drug crimes. Here is another way gangs differ from successful Mafias, which are much more disciplined in their lifestyle. The most self-disciplined of all were the Russian crime-orgs, which reinvested their income in buying up legitimate businesses, and eventually raised themselves out of the crime world.

Symbol-based Alliances and Multi-gang Alliances: Diplomatic Peace Treaties

These are loose, horizontal alliances between gangs who adopt the same symbols. Symbol-based gangs, with their distinctive gang colors and signs (hand gestures, ways of strutting, etc.) are diplomatic peace treaties among those who belong. Instead of every local gang being the enemy of every other, half the gangs they encounter may be their allies. It is suggestive that the cities with the highest homicide rates--- Detroit, Baltimore, Philadelphia-- have no little structure beyond small gangs fighting each other every few blocks.

The Crips were created in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, during the Civil Rights movement, in an attempt to stop fighting among Black gangs and concentrate on their racial enemy-- hypothetically whites, but in practice Hispanic gangs. The Crips alliance did not hold together, and a split produced the Bloods, a rival gang who spend their time chiefly in hostility to the Crips, thus producing a grand division between two different segments of black gangs. In areas where there are only Crips and no Bloods, the alliance does not work, since its outside enemy does not exist; in these places Crips divide into local factions who fight each other. As is typical of gangs, most violence is inside their own ethnic group; black gangs usually fight each other, Hispanic gangs are against each other, with white gangs in yet a third arena (such as rivalries between motorcycle gangs). Racial segregation of violence in the gang world is evidence that their violence is largely honorific; despite occasional ideological claims of rebellion against dominant white society, gang violence is a local game in a racial arena, a way of claiming status simply by being in the action. * Compared to Mafias, who are after real power and use violence strategically to uphold their organization, gang alliances and their violence are largely adolescent-style bravado.

* Crips-vs-Bloods conflict was called off during the major race riot in Los Angeles in 1992, following the Rodney King verdict. For the moment, racial alliance was reestablished while there was open violence against whites and Korean store-owners.

Symbol-based alliances have no hierarchy. There is no national leader of the Crips or the Bloods. They are umbrellas joining together all those who display the same symbolism. They are simply dividing lines, telling you who to fight, and who not to fight. The component gangs inside these alliances may engage in various crimes, including the drug business. But the symbolic alliance per se does not engage in the drug business, or any other collective activities. An analogy in political history would be wars between Catholics and Protestants, with further subdivisions of radical Protestants (Calvinists, Evangelicals) against conservative Protestant churches (Anglicans or Lutherans).

A stronger form of alliance has been attempted in multi-gang alliances such as the People Nation (comprised of Blackstones, Vice Lords, Latin Kings, Bloods) and the Folk Nation (comprised of Gangster Disciples, Hoover Crips, Dieciocho). These mega-alliances brought together already large gang structures, and were created by gang leaders in prisons-- by imitation one right after the other in November 1978. These too were offshoots of the Civil Rights movement; they had explicit political or sometimes religious ideologies, keeping the peace among gangs to concentrate against white society. But criminal gangs are not well equipped to contest political power on the state level, and in practice the People Nation and Folk Nation operated as diplomatic alliances grouping many of the big gangs into two blocs, fighting each other. For the most part these mega-gangs just concentrated on displaying their identities by flashing symbols, and performed no coordinated action; leaders like Larry Hoover (who held the honorific title of Chairman) were figures of prestige rather than authorities giving orders.

Some mega-gangs pushed further. The Latin Kings began as an organization of Puerto Rican gangs in Chicago, with a breakaway eventually transferring its center to New York. The Latin Kings attempted an political hierarchy, with top leaders adopting titles like the Inca-- identifying with non-Western symbols, much as some of the big Chicago gangs identified with Islam. In the Puerto Rican neighbourhoods of New York, Latin Kings ventured above ground, taking part in Puerto Rican nationalist rallies and political movements. Their move into legitimate politics was not successful, since it did not deter government officials from arrest sweeps and RICO prosecutions. This points up an important difference between even very large gang alliances and the various Mafias: Mafias prospered where they were able to corrupt government, acting surreptitiously and keeping their identity secret; whereas all of the American-style gang alliances have been very ostentatious, flaunting their colors and gang signs in public. This left them in no position to corrupt the government secretly; and it made them easy to identify when the government cracked down.

Multi-gang alliances were not organizational bases of the drug business. Their members might be in the drug business, but the mega-gang gave them little help in this respect. In New York in the 1990s, the Latin Kings became antagonistic to Dominican drug wholesalers who supplied Puerto Rican street dealers. With their increased political consciousness, the leaders of the Latin Kings recognized that the Dominican wholesalers were franchising out drug sales to another ethnic group, who received the smallest share of profits, and took the greatest risk of street violence and arrest. In effect, the Dominican dealers were capitalists exploiting Puerto Rican labor. The ideology of the Latin Kings shows that a large, politically conscious crime-org may actually oppose the drug business.

As Naylor [2004] has pointed out, wholesale production and distribution of illegal drugs is most effective when it is decentralized. It is prudent to employ isolated individuals or small groups, who have little information about supply chains as a whole. An expectable percentage of smugglers are arrested and their drugs confiscated; a wholesaler needs to be decentralized, especially on both sides of an international border crossing. Similarly with the manufacture of raw materials into drugs such as heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine: economies of scale are not desirable, due to the danger of detection and exploitation (either by the government or by rival crime organizations); many decentralized plants are better than a few large ones. Ethnic networks are often useful, since they provide a degree of cultural filtering to provide trustworthy connections, but to speak of a Dominican mafia or cartel would be misleading: its effectiveness is in staying decentralized. It is not surprising that a big, unusually centralized (and out-front) organization like the Latin Kings, would be in low-end drug retailing, and exploited by a decentralized (and much more secretive) network of wholesalers (who are unified only by being Dominican).

Large Corporate Hierarchical Gangs: an exception, but temporary

For a time during the 1960s through the 1990s, large hierarchic gangs built up, chiefly in Chicago. Among the most famous were the Blackstones (with various name changes) and the Vice Lords, each reaching 60,000 members. As we know from Venkatesh, who penetrated the middle levels of the organization, there was an unusual amount of top-down control: low-level members were paid salaries, assigned regular hours, and inspected by managers. Earnings went upwards through middle ranks to the top of the hierarchy, a board of directors who made considerable incomes and held property through their mothers or families. These corporate gangs were to a large extent based on the drug business, not only staking out particular territories (typically staircases in the public housing projects) but also controlling access to wholesalers. It wasn't all drugs; the corporate gang collected protection/extortion money, not only from illicit businesses such as prostitution but also from "gray-market" or "off the books" businesses inside gang turf, such as persons who operated hair salons, grocery stores, or other businesses without getting licenses from the city. It would be misleading to think of the corporate gang as a drug business that operated protection rackets on the side; the key is having sufficient political power to control a territory. If it has this power, it can turn it to any criminal use, including the drug business; but those are outcomes of the criminal organization, not determinants of it.

The Chicago corporate gangs are the major exception to my argument: crime organizations that are indeed centrally based on the drug business. But the big Chicago gangs were largely destroyed in the 1990s; not by eradicating the drug business, but by attacking the political vulnerabilities of the crime-org and its territorial base. Federal prosecutors used RICO indictments pioneered against the Mafia. Especially fatal was the city of Chicago tearing down the massive pubic housing projects in the black neighbourhood-- huge buildings that were effectively no-man's-land where the police would not venture. It was like a real-life experiment, changing the crucial variable. Once their protected turf was gone, the big corporate gangs broke up. Today the old gang names remain, but without economic clout nor violent backup from the hierarchy; Gangster Disciples and others mingle on the streets, warily negotiating mutual threats on the level of small groups. [see forthcoming analysis by Joe Krupnick and Chris Winship]

The Mexican Cartels: Theory and Predictions

The situation of Mexican crime organizations is distinctive because there are so many organizations-- at least 11 major ones. The original cartels were in geographically distinct areas-- the Gulf cartel along the south-east Texas border; the Sonora cartel on the Arizona border; the Arrelano Felix organization in Baja California; the Sinoloa cartel on the major port cities on the Pacific side such as Mazatlan. They were cartels in the true sense, dividing up non-competing territories. More recently they stopped being cartels, as they have invaded each other's territory. The name "cartel" serves as a term of convenience, but it is inaccurate. To call them "drug cartels" involved in a "drug war" is doubly inaccurate. Popular terms are impossible to eradicate, but they hide reality. Mexican crime-orgs are less like rival businesses than rival warrior states of the pre-modern era.

Over time, the situation of territorial cartels developed into multi-sided wars. This came about by a combination of political processes.

Because there are so many players, various alliances were possible. When any one crime organization attempted territorial expansion, counter-alliances were created. Some organizations sent expeditionary forces-- military aid-- to their allies, thereby also expanding their territorial reach, and provoking further defensive reactions. Alliances could change when the host organization felt threatened by the outsiders and made new alliances to throw them out.
A defeat in war, or arrests by the government, would result in a power vacuum. When one organization was weakened, outsiders could move into their territory; or a split would occur within the organization, creating a power struggle among new factions that might crystalize into separate organizations if there were no clear-cut winner. Thus a multi-sided struggle became even more multi-sided as time went on.

Examples: this happened as the Arellano Felix Organization in Baja California split when its older leaders were arrested; when the Sinaloa cartel was split by the Beltrán Leyva brothers; and when Los Zetas broke from the Gulf Cartel. The government acts as a complicating factor in the multi-sided situation, bringing the total number of players to 12 or more, depending on how many independent factions there are in the Mexican government. Above all, government strategy of decapitating the most prominent cartels kept stirring the mix; far from destroying organizations, it kept creating new opportunities for local factions and rival cartels to expand.

These multi-sided conflicts and repeated power vacuums push cartel members into switching sides. Such switches of allegiance are typical in multi-sided geopolitics; the history of European diplomacy is full of them, with the English, French, Germans, Russians and others switching between friends and enemies numerous times over the centuries. The Zetas have been the most aggressively opportunistic. They began as elite airmobile Special Forces set up by the Mexican government distrustful of their own regular military and police. Their very isolation made them amenable to being recruited as bodyguards by one of the quarreling leaders of the Gulf cartel in the early 2000s. Within a few years, as the Gulf cartel was weakened by the government offensive, the Zetas broke free of their underground employers and became another crime-org in its own right. This disloyalty is typical of what happens to paramilitary forces set up by governments outside of normal bureaucratic channels-- for instance in Africa and the Middle East [Schlichte 2009]. Not only are the Zetas not a cartel in the technical sense, but they lack a distinctive territorial base-- being tied neither to particular drug routes nor local roots. They have expanded into anywhere in Mexico where there has been the hint of a power vacuum.

Similarly, vigilante groups set up to keep out intruders or punish criminals the weak state cannot touch, themselves can turn into crime organizations. This has been the pathway of La Familia in Michoacan (far from the major drug routes, but including the Pacific port nearest to Mexico City). It started as a religiously-based rehabilitation movement for drug addicts (not unlike the Synanon movement in California during the 1960s and 70s, which evolved from a group psychotherapy drug cure into a religious cult and eventually into a violent organization). La Famiglia Michoacana (which means "the Michoacan family") gradually shifted from a local self-protection group, defending the region against incursions by the Zetas and others, into the business of protection/extortion and eventually into drug dealing itself. Local loyalties have remained especially strong, since La Famiglia not only maintained its public image as a protector but siphoned its criminal income back into supporting local churches and institutions. The pattern resembles the Latin American tradition of a populist revolutionary movement gone corrupt.

We now have a structural mechanism to explain a distinctive feature of the Mexican cartel wars: spectacular public violence. These are not just killings but tortures and beheadings; displaying corpses-- or parts of them-- in public places; leaving notes on the bodies giving warnings, insults, or explanations.

This raises a technical question in the sociology of violence. In order to torture and mutilate someone, it is necessary to capture them first. This is difficult to do. Many kinds of criminal organizations are unable to do this. American street gangs do not engage in torture and mutilation of their enemies, because their style of violence is brief confrontations or drive-by shootings. Street gangs have narrow territorial boundaries, and lack information about what happens outside their turf.

To capture an enemy requires stealth and planning; this requires information, and therefore informants. A high level of information is displayed also in extortion threats; for instance phone calls to victims telling them details of their families' daily routines.

The structural situation of multi-sided conflicts produces much switching of sides; and this generates useful informants with information about enemies' routines. Internal splits in an organization also creates informants, since whoever leaves one faction can tell the other details about the routines of those they have left.

The situation worsens. As the cycle of defeats and victories, power vacuums, and side-switching goes on, informants themselves are targeted. Informants are the most important weakness for an organization, therefore it tries to deter informants by using spectacular punishments-- more tortures and beheadings.

Public violence has a second purpose: it can be used to send propaganda. Messages attached to bodies can proclaim that it is done to protect the local communities against terrorists, drug cartels, and criminals-- as in the propaganda of La Familia Michoacana. This is propaganda to create local legitimacy. Or propaganda of violence can be used to intimidate possible enemies. But the intimidation is usually not definitive, since in a situation of multi-sided instability, side-switching inevitably happens and the cycle of spectacular violence continues.

What can we predict, using our comparisons among the political structures of crime organizations?

First: drug business is not the key determinant of what they will do. Drugs provide one source of income, and the variety of drug routes provides bases on which some-- but not all-- of the cartels originated. But the main resource of a crime-org is how much violence it can muster, and that depends on its political reach and strength of organizational control. Once the military/political structure exists, it can be turned to different kinds of criminal businesses, whether these involve running a drug business (or any other illegal business); or merely raking off protection money from those who run an illegal business; or extorting protection money from ordinary citizens, including kidnapping. A crime-org might start out in the drug business and shift its activities elsewhere, or vice versa. Randolfo Contreras has shown that in the 1990s when the crack cocaine business dried up in the Bronx, former street dealers went into other areas of crime. In Mexico, when increased border surveillance cut into drug deliveries to the US, crime-orgs expanded into extortion and kidnapping for ransom. The Zetas, because of their organization as Special Forces, were less directly connected with the drug business itself; when they became independent of the declining Gulf cartel, they have moved aggressively into more purely predatory use of violence against other cartels' territories. This is not so much an effort to monopolize the drug trafficking business, as a different political strategy, leveraging their special skill, highly trained military violence.

It follows that ending the illegal drug business-- whether by eradication or by legalization-- would not automatically end violence. Mexican crime-orgs could intensify other types of violent extortion (and so they have, with increased pressure on the US border), as along as they still held territories out of government control; and wars between the cartels would not cease. It is a non sequitur to argue that if the US would stop drug consumption, Mexican cartels and their violence would disappear.

A second prediction comes from historical similarities. The Mexican situation from 2000 onwards resembles the Sicilian Mafia wars that took place from the 1960s through the 1980s. The Sicilian mafias also engaged in corruption of local governments, and a system of protection/extortion covering all economic activities. Surveillance was provided by a large network of informants; and spectacular violence was used when mafiosi were challenged. As in Mexico, there were a large number of Sicilian Mafia families. The wars were multi-sided, both among the different mafia coalitions, and against the Italian national government.

The situation in Sicily was precisely what the US Mafia had organized the Commission to avoid: lengthy civil wars; public violence; and attacks on government officials. After the fall of the crime regime in 1920s Chicago headed by Al Capone-- who was too blatantly public about his political control, and his drive-by machine guns in the street-- the New York mafia ruled by secrecy. There was no effective Peace Commission in Sicily, no centralized organization by which the top Mafia bosses exercized selective violence to keep discipline inside the organization.

The Prognosis: The Italian government won the Sicilian Mafia war; as their local war escalated into attacks on officials of the national government, the government counter-escalated until the Mafia was largely destroyed. Mexico could go the same path. It would be a long war, but winnable-- it took 20-30 years for the national government to reassert control in Sicily.

An alternative pathway could be a change in government policy. Since the PAN administration of President Calderón took office in 2006, the policy has been to pursue all-out war against all the crime organizations, resulting in at least 50,000 persons killed through 2011, with the yearly number rising to 15,000. It is possible that an electoral victory by PRI, the long-time former ruling party known for its history of corruption, would result in a new policy of accommodation. Some of the more stable and least expansive cartels would be given tacit recognition in their region, while the more aggressive and territorially expansive groups-- above all the Zetas--- would be targeted for extermination. The result might be something like the fate of the Russian mafia of the 1990s: ending their mutual turf wars, reducing conflict among themselves, and finding acceptance by corrupt government officials sharing in their wealth. In the case of Russia, the whole process was finished in about 10 years. Given that the intense cartel wars in Mexico so far have gone on about 5 years, the Russian example suggests a decline in violence in a few years might be feasible.

“Collins has channeled his deep knowledge of human violence and the intricacies of combat into a taut and compelling what if fantasy that takes the cultural fissures of our nation to full scale rupture."
– Alice Goffman, author of On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

CIVIL WAR TWO Available now at Amazon

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Mexico: Narco-violence and a Failed State?
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