From: rrizzo@star-trek.bbn.com (Ron Rizzo)
Newsgroups: soc.motss
Subject: Do hard times cause hate?
Date: 5 Jan 1993 23:05:05 GMT
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: archive.bbn.com
Keywords: economics, cause, prejudice, sociology



        	HARD TIMES AND HATE


I haven't been reading the net much for months (due to my workload)
so I don't know if there's been any discussion of the following topic
or if anyone's already criticized the notion as I do below.

The past year a lot of people (in politics, the media and punditry) 
have said something like, economic hardship causes more outbursts of
bigotry as people look for scapegoats.  Both they and their audience
seem to take this as proven.

Since I believe events of the last 12 years indicate that gay men and
lesbians are at or near the top of the laundry list of targets for
scapegoating, I think it's worth examining the notion.

The idea's a rather crude cliche that's been around for a long time.
I think you could trace it all the way back to the middle of the 19th
century, as a kind of corollary of Karl Marx's very general idea that
capitalism increases its internal contradictions as it develops until
a social crisis occurs which undermines capitalist society itself.

I'm not saying Marx derived this idea.  On the contrary, he would
probably have said that racial and ethnic bigotries, if not created by
capitalism, are transformed (updated) by it, sometimes enhanced by it,
and that prejudice, like nationalism ("patriotism") and the war fever
it can create, are manipulated by the capitalist class to divert the
attention of the masses from the root problems of society which are
economic and systemic.

But in this century such distinctions have been blurred, and an
assortment of political activists have easily embraced the cruder
idea.

Sociology began as a kind of reaction to the work of Marx and his
prophecy that European capitalist civilization was doomed.  Max Weber
in Germany, Emile Durkheim in France and a number of economists and
historians took up Marx's challenge by closely examining both the
social/historical implications of Marxian theory and the actual
structure of their own societies.  Others such as Vilfredo Pareto
and the syndicalist Georges Sorel borrowed more of Marx's ideas and
attitudes but saw different outcomes or formed opposite allegiances.

If it's true that homophobia fits the pattern of other more recognized
forms of prejudice, then a massive social psychological study done
just after WW2, THE AUTHORITARIAN PERSONALITY by Theodor Adorno and
others, must be considered.  This project tried to explain why Nazism
arose by looking at it on an individual level and asked how it was
possible for people to be favorably disposed toward such a movement.
Although Adorno was a Marxist, both as a social thinker and music critic,
the study he presided over ended up with a complex model of factors that
link the individual to social hatred.  It's anything but a one-cause,
economic theory.

In North America the notion of a link between economics and prejudice
was considered at least as early as the 1930s, receiving a lot of
attention early on because attitudes and behavior about race were
perhaps the leading focus of work in sociology, anthropology and
social psychology in the 1930s and 1940s (the brief behind the 1954
Brown case which found school segregation illegal was virtually
a recapitulation of 20 years work in the social studies).  These
investigators were sensitive to the link: the occurrence of some
major race riots in the US was associated with economic hardships
In addition, northern factories brought into contact as economic
equals racial groups who were segregated in the south, neither being
materially well-off.  Among the whites were social levels known for
their endemic and overt racism "back home," ie, lower middle and lower
class whites in the Southeast.  They could easily convince themselves
that they were competing with blacks for scarce jobs.

But this early work circumscribed the application of the idea of a
link between economics and racism: it limited it to being a disposing
condition during particular social moments (eg, the poverty of white
and black emigrants from the South in Chicago in 1919, the background
of wartime shortages in 1942 Detroit) when mass violence occurred, or
to being a factor only between particular segments of racial groups
in the context of a specific region, subculture or history (blue collar
and petty bourgeois whites in small Deep South towns who formed the
bulk of Klan membership).

Since then, the idea has been picked apart, inferences drawn and each
part and inference tested in varying social contexts.  The last I
heard (this dates from the late 1960s) is that the idea had been
reduced, or refined, to a theory of "status discrepancy."  The
bulk of studies up to this point indicated that any adequate
explanation of why particular social groups either chronically or
at specific times express bigotry* and can be mobilized politically
by it must include a number of distinct conditions:  economic, social,
and perhaps religious and political factors are involved.  And if you
want to preserve the idea that it is some invidious factor, whether
a conflict between groups, a contradiction in a group's social attri-
butes, etc. that causes the problem, the factor itself is complex,
made up of parts which by themselves can't cause the effect.

Specifically, in a study of people attracted by political or other
appeals associated with prejudice (the study actually used as an index
not bitoed ideas per se but an American version of that part of the
"authoritarian personality" profile involving social and political
opinions) investigators found "bigots" were defined not simply by
economic and racial matters (eg, poor whites) but that political, religious
and other factors were involved.  Only those people with particular "status
discrepancies" seemed pre-disposed.  For example, among economically
marginal whites, mainly Protestants, and those who attended high-status
denominations or churches where most members were more affluent and had
higher social standing than they.  In other words, people who suffered
from "status inconsistency."  (I may've got the actual topic, subjects
and details of the study wrong; it's been a long time.  But I believe
the general form of results I describe is accurate.)

To sum up, the simple idea that hard times causes an increase in bigotry
because different social groups are competing, or perceive themselves as
competing, for scarcer resources, is a gross oversimplification.  The idea
as baldly stated was discarded by serious investigators years ago, it
overlooks decades of focussed social research, and it is probably simply
wrong.  

I don't think we or lesgay leaders and organizations should contribute
to easy assent to this idea.  We should examine what we say, as well
as what others say about us, when discussing the times and why they've
soured so much.

The idea has a dangerous aspect to it.  It seems to predestine us to
abuse.  When people adopt such an idea, then to that degree they become
fatalistic, and emotionally, if not intellectually, fatalism tends
ever so little to dull us morally, making us less likely as onlookers 
to intervene or protest and as victims to fight back or feel outraged.

Regards,
Ron



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