Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt

The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt

Barrington Moore, Jr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315496511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

First Published in 1978. This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation. I his most ambition book to date, Barrington Moore, Jr explores a large part of the world's experience with injustice and its understanding of it. In search of general elements behind the acceptance of injustice he discusses the Untouchables of India, Nazi concentration camps, and the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority.

Part One
The Sense of Injustice

Some constants and variables

Chapter One
Recurring elements in moral codes

1. Starting points

Once upon a time in those happy days when students of human affairs were sure of their ground, it was possible to draw a sharp distinction between a political and social system based on force and fraud and one based upon rational authority and justice. Even if it might be rather difficult to find a convincing empirical example of a just society, this distinction appeared to be an elementary and obvious one, the foundation of intelligent political discussion. By the end of the nineteenth century this pleasant certainty had largely crumbled away under the onslaught of ideas that by now have become part of the intellectual fare conveyed in fifty-minute portions at many of our universities. Anthropologists shook our assurance by vividly exhibiting such a variety of human customs and beliefs as to make the notion of any single standard of moral and political judgment seem no more than a provincial rationalization for some brief phase of European history. Oddly enough it was the philosopher Herbert Spencer, in many ways the epitome of philistine Victorian provincialism, who culled the writings of anthropologists and historians to present in the opening pages of Social Statics (1850) one of the most spirited attacks on behalf of moral relativism. Though Spencer is now somewhat of an intellectual curiosity, from more acceptable sources the modern reader may learn that conflicts over values, or basic assumptions about good and evil in the ordering of human affairs, are issues that science cannot settle because science concerns the way things are, not the way they ought to be. Lest such a viewpoint have too corrosive an effect on traditional moral beliefs, one might add some saving clause to the effect that in a democracy one has the duty as a citizen to take a stand on political and ethical issues but should not make these claims as a scholar or scientist.

To recapture old certainties is then out of the question, at least in the form they once existed. Nevertheless there are grounds for suspecting that the welter of moral codes may conceal a certain unity of original form, as well as a discernible historical drift in a single direction, and that variations from this pattern of a single basic form undergoing prolonged historical modification are explicable in general terms. It is at least just barely possible that human affairs do make sense after all.

We can begin looking for sense by taking an example of the kind of situation this book will be analyzing throughout. It will be both a greatly simplified example and a hypothetical one. Let us suppose one man strikes another man hard enough so that it hurts. How will the victim feel? There will be some physical pain. On the other hand, we know that the ability to tolerate pain varies a great deal for all sorts of reasons that would bear looking into.¹ This book will not do that in any detail, but it remains an important point to remember. If the victim has reason to believe that the blow was for something he did that was very evil, he is rather likely to feel some sense of relief that he got off so lightly. There may or may not be some residue of anger as part of the response to punishments that are felt to be thoroughly deserved. Now let us change the example slightly and make it more concrete to see a different kind of feeling.

The man who strikes the blow is a white policeman in an American city. The victim is an educated black man who has been doing nothing more than minding his own business in a perfectly peaceful fashion. In that situation the black man is almost certain to feel moral outrage, because, as far as he can see, the blow and injury were totally unjustified and undeserved. In what sense was the blow unjust? What does the word really mean? Simply put, it means that the white policeman had no right to do what he did. If the episode happened in an ideal racially integrated community, everybody else would agree with the black man. There is only too much reason to fear that no community is like that, though some may approach it. In most American cities the black man would feel angry because the policeman had violated a rule that the former felt with all his heart ought to be the one that governed decent social relationships.

Evidently social rules and their violation are crucial components in moral anger and a sense of injustice. Essentially it is anger at the injury one feels when another person violates a social rule. There are two distinct possibilities here. One can be angry because one feels that the existing rule is itself wrong and that a different rule ought to apply. In real life such situations frequently take the form of disagreements about what the rule actually is. But for the sake of simplicity we can set this situation aside for the present. Without rules governing social conduct there could be no such thing as moral outrage or a sense of injustice. Likewise, awareness of social injustice would be impossible if human beings could be made to accept any and all rules. Evidently there are some constraints on the making of moral rules and therefore on the possible forms of moral outrage. There is also a great deal of variety. How can both be explained?

To the extent that there are any recurring or constant features in moral outrage, they would have to derive from the interaction between more or less constant aspects of human nature and equally recurring imperatives that stem from the fact that human beings must live with each other, that is, in human society. There are formidable difficulties in the way of spelling out any general characteristics of human nature and human society in a fashion that is both scientifically tenable and nontrivial. There is a great risk of being either wrong or banal or both. Nevertheless the risk is worth taking because the position taken on these issues, consciously or unconsciously, is likely to have a powerful influence on the way other questions are asked and through them on the findings that emerge.

The first difficulty stems from the fact that it is impossible to observe anything that can be called pure or innate or biologically determined human nature uncontaminated by social influences, or at least any form of such behavior that would be very relevant to understanding moral outrage and the sense of social injustice.² Nevertheless, it is obvious that human beings do have something that can be called innate needs. They are not simply blank slates upon which it is possible to impress any kind of personality, as many parents of even very small children will testify with some vehemence.

To deny any possible knowledge of what appears as obvious as all this—the existence of innate human nature—seems in the end a curious counsel of scientific perfectionism. One way to get some clues is by noticing human wants or needs that are common to most known societies and inferring that they have their origin in innate human nature. Therefore let us first ask a very simple question: What is generally noxious to human beings? Since our general problem is to account for situations in which anger does and does not occur (or is present to a very low degree) as a response to injuries, it will be helpful to have at the start a working notion of what things actually are injurious to human beings.

Failure to satisfy certain physical requirements is quite obviously harmful. Roughly in order of their importance these requirements are air, water, food, sleep, shelter in the sense of protection against extremes of heat and cold, sexual gratification. Failure to meet these needs will cause suffering for any human being. Except in the case of sexual gratification extreme deprivation produces death. And without heterosexual reproduction—until or unless a satisfactory substitute takes hold—human society will die out. Disease and physical mis-treatment, such as torture, are clearly harmful, though, as will appear shortly, human beings under certain conditions inflict torture on themselves.

Moving away from these physical needs, which are always satisfied in culturally elaborated fashions, psychologists and anthropologists would be likely to agree that the lack of love and respect from other human beings is also harmful to the individual. Indeed, there is a wide range of favorable responses whose absence can be in some way damaging. Here I will mention only one: distinction. I suspect that the desire for distinction is universal because so many cultures either invent and embellish ways to envy other human beings, while other cultures condemn or try to suppress envy. Another noxious situation that has not yet received the attention it deserves is sheer boredom.

Finally, the inhibition of aggression against dangerous targets (natural or human) is certainly harmful, since the inhibited person is thus rendered vulnerable, an easy victim. There is little profit in trying to settle the issue of whether or not aggression itself is some form of an innate human instinct. All that we need to notice for the present is that (1) there is no known human society in which aggression does not appear in some form; on the other hand, (2) the scope of its expression and damage to other human beings is extraordinarily wide, ranging from the hostile glance to the obliteration of whole populations. Because of this range of possible effects, it does not seem to me very useful to discuss aggression in terms of an instinct. Rather it appears more useful to think of it as some sort of human capacity that is set in motion in a great variety of ways with equally many different consequences that depend on specific circumstances. Therefore the social causes have far greater explanatory power than the elastic biological capacity. Again, that is not an issue that has to be settled here.

As a working hypothesis, I propose a conception of innate human nature, innate in the sense of being prior to any social influences but not necessarily immune to them, for which not only physical deprivations are noxious but also psychic ones: specifically, the absence of favorable human responses, boredom, and the inhibition of aggressions. To the extent such a conception is valid it implies the existence of a “natural morality” in the sense that some moral preferences, particularly negative ones, are not merely the consequence of social training and conditioning. Generally human beings will try to avoid these situations anyway. And on a closer look one can see that it does not make much difference whether one describes the behavior in terms of negative avoidance or a search for positive goals. In addition to the satisfaction of physical needs, we could say, human beings seek some degree of variety and challenge in their lives, favorable responses (including distinction) from other human beings, and opportunities for the discharge of aggression, a human capacity which, if not instinctive, is aroused by such a variety of frustrations that it is bound to find expression somehow. Up to this point it has been possible to avoid the use of the slippery and loaded term “healthy.” But it is plain that successful aggression against real danger deserves to be called healthy and the suppression or inhibition of such aggression a form of pathology. After all, the human animal does possess remarkable powers of logical thought and can use them in the pursuit of any goal.

The main value of any conception of natural morality lies in the implication that moral codes, moral anger, and hence a sense of social injustice have some very important roots in human biology. Human biology not only sets limits on what forms moral codes can take, but also gives them a certain direction and impulse. The political optimist believes that it is possible to create a social order based almost entirely on natural morality. A pessimist, of which Freud is the best-known though not necessarily the most convincing example, believes that this hope is illusory. This is scarcely the point at which to resolve such an issue; I hope that the book as a whole will clarify some of the relevant considerations. But it is worth drawing attention to the issue in order to keep before us the prospect that it may not be at all possible to have completely healthy human beings and still have society at all. Some aspects of human society, it could turn out, are bound to be noxious for some human beings.

If human society is noxious for anybody, why then does it exist? The obvious and banal answer is that by means of the division of labor, possible only in and through society, human beings enormously enhance their capacity to adapt to and control their environment. And even if it is obvious and banal, it is also true. Without the invention of human society, Homo sapiens might well have become extinct long, long ago. As a biological specimen man’s individual capacities to cope with the environment are quite unimpressive, while the collective capacities of human society have now reached the point where they may be able to destroy all forms of life. By any criterion, that is quite a remarkable achievement. Nevertheless there have been costs all along, and far from equally distributed. Living and working with other human beings generate their own demands on human behavior and human feelings. It is one thing to be a solitary hunter completely dependent for survival on what one can kill with one’s own hands and a few simple tools. It is something else again to be a member of a primitive hunting tribe with its set of rules about who beats the bush to drive the game, who takes the risk of killing ferocious wild animals, how the catch is to be divided up, and so on. The need to cooperate with other human beings produces a new and distinct system of causation for human behavior. Social causation will not work without some of the qualities and capacities that innate human nature provides. But it has to be understood in its own terms. Together with biological or innate factors, social causation—a very shorthand and inadequate way of expressing the fact that there are lots of other human beings in the world with whom it is necessary to come to terms—creates the actual human nature we can see and study. It is in this sense that the fact of living in society generates moral codes. To say that “society” generates moral codes can be misleading, because it is actually concrete individuals who create the moral codes. A very large part of the time some individuals create moral codes for their own particular advantages and to the detriment of others in the society. Nevertheless there is a sense in which everybody in any society has to hang together or else each will hang separately.

To elaborate slightly, certain problems always arise wherever and however a number of human beings attempt to live together and reproduce their kind. These problems can be lumped together under the general notion of the problem of social coordination. In turn this problem can be broken down in several ways. There is the problem of authority. In very small and simple societies it amounts to hardly anything more than who is going to make suggestions and who is going to follow them. There is the problem of the division of labor: who is going to do what work and when and how. Then there is the problem of allocating the resources available to the society and distributing among its members the goods and services that they collectively produce. Pace Marx, or at least some readings of Marx, the social relations of production and exchange will not always determine the system of authority that prevails. The lines of causation can run in both directions.

In a sense these three divisions of the problem of social coordination (authority, division of labor, and allocating goods and services) have about them an air of Cartesian arbitrariness. In many a nonliterate society the three aspects flow together in such a way that it is easy to misunderstand how the society works by being too precise about the distinction. Nevertheless I would maintain that the problems do exist in any given society and that for its members it is imperative to find some solution. Otherwise the society would cease to exist. It is in this sense legitimate to speak of social imperatives lea...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Part One The Sense of Injustice: Some constants and variables
• Part Two An Historical Perspective: German workers 1848–1920
• Part Three General Perspectives
• References cited
• Index