Politics/Social Commentary
Philosophy
April 2013
On Monday morning I ran into some trouble getting to my class. Somebody had stolen our bikes. Agata, Mary Elizabeth, and I all had spent the weekend in Statesboro, visiting family and attending a swing dance workshop. Nathan stayed in Tallahassee, but he was in and out of the house a lot. Usually the bikes were locked up, but because the bikes couldn't be taken without coming all the way onto the porch, I figured that they were relatively safe. I stand corrected.
After class, I filed a police report and started calling around. Working from the closest pawn and bike shops to the farthest, I told them I was looking for a couple of stolen bikes and gave them their descriptions. With about the sixth or seventh call, I found them. A bike shop over by our grocery store had bought them off a lady on Saturday. I felt bad for the owner. He had tuned up the bikes and replaced a few parts here and there. I overpaid him for the parts and labor, but I'm sure he still had to eat some of the cost. He were pretty cool about the whole thing though. I offered to bring a copy of the police report, but my description of the bikes had convinced him; "Naw man, these are your bikes. Just come get them." It was while I was chatting with him afterwards about the thief that he informed me somebody had just bombed the Boston Marathon.
I spent the rest of the day in a funk: checking the news, staring at the ceiling, trying to understand all of the feelings in my gut. We live in a relatively poor part of town, surrounded mostly by low-income black families. But we, and especially my roommates, have put a lot into this area. A group of local youth work at the urban farm next door. We all know our neighbors and the folks who walk up and down the street everyday. This is more than simply a group of houses; it's a community. So the feeling that I felt most on Monday was betrayal. How dare that person, I thought. And yet, simultaneously, I felt how silly it was to be focusing on a couple of bicycles while chaos reigned and lives were lost in Boston.
I also have been reading a lot of Pierre Bourdieu, a French sociologist known for his work on what he calls habitus: the "structuring structures" of society which mold us from birth. Our habitus informs our language, our goals, our dispositions, and the very mental concepts we use to understand the world, concepts like ownership, rights, private property, and privilege. Our habitus is what dictates our feelings of normality, what arranges the world into something that simply make sense, what turns the contingent into the natural. Bourdieu isn't a fatalist, but he does think that we, as agents, are guided and formed by these structures subconsciously.
In The State Nobility, Bourdieu analyzes hundreds of responses of essay graders in France. He picked out the adjectives used by the graders and compared them to the socio-economic backgrounds of the students who wrote the essays. There was an incredibly strong correlation. If a student succeeded and was from a well-to-do family, with a father who was a professor or highly ranked civil servant, then it was because the student was "brilliant", "original", or "gifted". However, if a student succeeded and was from a lower class family, the student was "hard working", "dedicated", or "made a strong attempt". Without even realizing it, the graders were not only judging the students' work, but they were grading the person too: did he carry himself well, did she speak properly, was he polite, did she pay the proper respects, was he a fine, upstanding citizen? A huge part of who we are and how we see the world comes from the society in which we live. We are, inextricably, social beings.
So, where does that leave me? Does the thief's background and social status excuse her behavior? No. Does the world in which the Boston bombers grew up justify their actions? Never.
Still, I recall a "Firing Line" piece I wrote for the Daily Texan while at UT about Palestinians lashing out at Israelis and how, perhaps, if we give people no other way to express their hurt, their pain, their hunger, and their repression, can we really ever be surprised if they resort to suicide bombing, to self immolation, to throwing rocks at armed troops, to stealing bikes? If the world ignores you and treats your suffering as necessary, or it simply condemns you as lazy or backwards and therefore unworthy of aid, or bulldozes your home because a story from millennia past says that somebody else's God gave your land away, what recourse do you have?
One of the core issues we are addressing in this Bourdieu class is that of conflict in and between groups of people. Conflict seems to be one of the fundamental features of any collective. We must come to terms with the fact that any society we can imagine will always have fissures, power structures, the disenfranchised, and the comfortable. We will never be able to keep violence from erupting. So the question now becomes: how can we minimize the damage? How can we heal afterwards? How can we protect ourselves without resorting to martial law? How can we begin to understand the structures which produce violence, the worlds which make people desperate enough to kill in order to be heard, the societies which allow such poverty that theft becomes necessary? And, finally, what can we all do to start bringing about change? We can't simply chalk violent acts up to insanity, extremism, or fundamentalism. These are symptoms, not the disease. These people aren't bad apples; they are the fruit of the same tree which produced you and me. Now what do we do about it?