In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on July 13, 2010

In the previous part of this series, I really concentrated on the environment of role expectations and especially, on the boundaries of these.  As I was reading the CBC.ca news this morning, I found a story that just illustrated many of the points I made in the last post, especially the points about communications and flexibility around the interpretation of a behaviour.  In this post, I want to finish up the remaining two environments in which components of ethical systems (patterns of behaviour and perception) are susceptible to selection pressure.

Sub-cultures

In general, most social scientists understand sub-cultures to be groups that have a culture that is somewhat distinctive from the majority culture in which they live if that sub-culture shows a direct relationship to the dominant one.  Sometimes, the term will also be applied to “minority cultures” that cross national boundaries, although it is more frequent to hear these types of sub-cultures referred by some functional term such as “professional cultures”, “religious cultures”, etc.   Given how I have set up the discussion so far, we could also view sub-cultures as distinct centroids or clusters within the broader manifold of the role expectations environment.

I am not, at least in this series of posts, concerned with sub-cultures per se but, rather, with the rather limited sub-set of sub-cultures that have a ritualized standing within their society that serves to set them apart.  Often, this sub-set is discussed solely under functional headings (e.g. the “professions”, “gangs”, etc.), but the primary environmental boundary of them is this ritualized standing.

What is a “ritualized standing”?

I use the term “ritualized standing” to refer to a role expectation that has “hardened” or “crystallized” to the point where being a member of a group with that standing evokes expectations in a particular area that are well beyond those expected of someone who isn’t a member of the group.  The “particular area” is also associated with some more general perception of “danger” or “need”, and the ritualization is often an attempt to contain that sense of danger or need.

The term “ritualized standing” is also more useful than, say, “formal legal recognition” since not all societies ritualize all of the groups covered in that manner.  Furthermore, even when the ritualized standing is covered under formal legal codes by the larger society, we find that many of these groups are self-policing with their own de facto, and occasionally de jure, formal legal systems applicable only to their members or those they claim to be operating in their particular area.

Sub-cultures with ritualized standing

The most recognizable type of sub-culture of the type I am talking about is what we would call “professions”: a collection of groups that are socially and/or culturally recognized as being “specialists” in some particular area that is culturally and/or socially recognized as “important”, “dangerous” and, in general, valued as “good” or at least “necessary”.  One of the generally accepted hallmarks of a profession is that they hold some form of a monopoly on the practice of a certain type of specialized knowledge that is “useful” to the general society. Indeed, Andrew Abbott has shown pretty conclusively that this valuation of specialized knowledge is critical to a group holding the status of a profession (see here).

Professions are not the only type of group covered under this heading: I would also include gangs, certain types of political groups, the vast majority of religious groups, secret societies, etc.  However, for the purposes of this post, however, I will be concentrating on the professions.

One central characteristic of these groups is that they all have their own moral systems that are at odds with the more general socio-cultural systems, and relate to the practice of their claimed specialty.  These systems may be as formal as, for example, Canon Law, or as informal as gang “law” (which, BTW, appears to be getting much more formal over the past couple of hundred years).

For the professions, at least those with social-legal recognition, these moral systems are often quite highly formalized and, generally, go by the term of a “code of ethics” or a “code of professional conduct”.  These codes are rooted in one simple imperative – survival of the group and its privileges.   It you wish to empirically verify this, go out and look at any “code of ethics” or “code of professional conduct” and look for the conduct that will have an individual member of that group expelled from the group; look for what constitutes “betrayal” of the group and its “special privileges”.

One thing that is readily apparent when you examine codes of ethics or professional conduct is that you can with not too much effort, categorize each clause or section based on

• definitions of “betrayal” and associated penalties
• boundary conditions for the claim of applying specialized knowledge / training
  • operational, i.e. where these claims are made for and where they are not made for.
  • functional, i.e. under what circumstances the application of specialized knowledge may or may not be applied.
• claims for specialized privileges (e.g. when something generally considered to be unethical may be used)
• justifications of specialized privileges

There is one final category of claims made in all codes of ethics / professional practice: claims of derivative legitimacy – in Malinowskian terminology (see here), this would be the group’s “Charter”. In plain English, this is the source of authority the group claims to operate under and on which it bases the legitimacy of all its other claims.  This source, it must be noted, might be almost anything: it might be a “God”, a piece of legislation, an ideal “vision”, a bureaucratic regulation, a science fiction book (here and here) or, even, a joke.

For my current purposes, the source of the group’s charter is critical along two, different, dimensions:

• how “seriously” does the group take their charter source in the sense of the source being “real” and having authority over them and their practice, and
• how “seriously” does the society in which the group operates take their charter source in the sense of it being “real” and having authority over them and their practice.

I will return to this matrix later but, first, I would like to move on to the fourth, and final, environment: the socio-legal environment.

The socio-legal environment

I am using the term “socio-legal environment” in a rather particular sense; that of the environment in which and through which formal legal systems of any form, but generally accepted as binding by the members of that society, are produced.  This is the social arena / environment in which sub-cultures with ritualized standing “negotiate” their special privileges and have them “formally” recognized by the broader society as “real”.

Just to make things interesting, the socio-legal environment of any given society is not limited to actors from that one society.  It also includes actors (usually groups) whom that society has formally recognized as having “standing”, such as supra-national bodies like the WTO, EU, or the UN, or actors who just decide they want to be involved and have the “power” to manipulate their way into the negotiations (al Qeada would be an example of this, but so would international NGOs, missionaries, trans-national corporations and other nations).

This environment is critical in two, key, areas:

• it places a moral “valuation” on a group’s claims that, for that society at that point in time, will be considered as its “real” value (although how “seriously” that is taken is moot) and, at the same time,
• it validates and recognizes claims of special privileges (NB: it also invalidates and withdraws recognition of these claims as well).

Andrew Abbott’s The System of Professions examines this process in a number of different professions over time, clearly showing how the “system” is, actually, a Darwinian selection environment.  Rather than recapitulate Abbott’s argument, I will merely refer the reader to his book or to some of the other blog entries I’ve written on the topic.

While the moral valuation, validation and recognition of a groups claims in a formal manner are the key areas of this environment, there is another dimension operating here, partly concealed in the phrases “at that point in time” and “considered as ‘real’”.  Formal social valuation, validation and recognition of claims changes over time but, in order for a society to operate, must be considered as “real” or “true” (the same is true within groups as well; it’s not limited to societies which are, after all, just groups of groups).

This requirement of taking the claims as “true” and “real” once they are validated within the socio-legal environment can, in many cases, cause some pretty serious problems, especially if the rate of change in what is “true” and “real” is readily observable to individuals.  When I was growing up, this problem was colloquially expressed in the rather sarcastic expression “Holy Mother Church in her wisdom has always said that black was white”.  If the changes are fairly rapid, people tend to either focus on one “truth” or focus on the “truth de jour” assuming it will change, as a means of not having to deal with the paradox of being required to act (and think) that the current “truth” is an absolute “truth”.  Either of these responses will allow an individual to stay “sane” even as they accept and deal with change.

There is, however, another pattern of reaction – a strategy if you will – to staying “sane” in such an instance; a strategy that goes by the term “ritualization”.

Ritualization

Generally, ritualization is defined as “a behavior that occurs typically in a member of a given species in a highly stereotyped fashion and independent of any direct physiological significance.” (source: Wikipedia)  In the particular context of this discussion, I use the term in a similar sense, but with a more tightly focused definition: ritualization is the mental strategy that treats socio-legal valuations, validations and recognitions as absolute truths, while disregarding any and all of actual complexities.  One might think of it as mindlessly following orders regardless of their content.

I need to be very clear here: a certain amount of ritualism, in the sense I am using it here, is absolutely necessary for any society to operate.  The difference lies in treating the current “truth” as a necessary convenience, on an “act as if” basis where not acting “as if” is more dangerous to us as individuals and to society as a whole, or in treating it as an absolute and forgetting that it is only an “as if”.  The “as if” stance requires that we keep in mind that the socio-legal “truth” is negotiated, while the absolutist stance negates the possibility of negotiation.

Whether or not one holds the possibility of negotiation in mind is critical for both moral codes and individual ethics simply because it is a necessary condition for the operation of free will.  And without free will or, at least, something approximating it, we cannot account for the annoying human habit of not treating socio-legal truths as absolute truth.  In effect, we need something approximating the concept of free will to account for the empirically verifiable facts of change in socio-legal truths.

There is a further reason why holding the possibility of negotiation in mind is crucial.  If you think back to the first post in this series, I argued that the soul is the site of ethics: the place where “[t]he components and linkages of moral codes are subject to interpretation and rejection by individuals.”.  If an individual utilizes a strategy of extreme ritualization, then they will be forced to deal with an increased number of mutually contradictory components and linkages of moral codes.  This situation may force them into a mental survival strategy of extreme compartmentalization (i.e. the literally cannot integrate their various selves).  It may also force them into what Bateson termed a double bind, which results in a refusal to confront the sources of the apparent paradox.  For the individual, then, a strategy of extreme ritualization is dangerous for both the soul and for sanity.

The strategy is also exceedingly dangerous when applied to the operations of a group.  Outside of the effects it may well have on individual members of the group by forcing them into double bind situations, it has one other damaging effect: it reduces the potential for variation in the groups response to changes in their operational environments.  In this context, ritualization may be seen as a decrease in adaptability.  In environments that are relatively stable, this is not a problem for the group, but when environmental conditions shift rapidly, it can spell the death of the group.

End part 3

Category: Ethics, Working Ideas
Tags: Ethics, Professional Knowledge