…it is a notable feature of power
relations that they are themselves capable of generating the evidence needed
for their own legitimation. Thus the evidence of superiority and inferiority
which justifies the inequality of condition between dominant and subordinate is
itself largely the product of that condition. Those who are excluded from key
positions, activities or resources are thereby denied the opportunity to
acquire or demonstrate the capacities and characteristics appropriate to their
occupation or exercise, so justifying their subordinate position. This is true
even where relatively open processes of selection are at work, once the
selection is performed by an educational system which is given the task of
preparing children differentially for their respective future roles. Evidence
about the fitness or appropriateness of people to exercise power thus tends to
be structured by the relations of power themselves, and therefore to have a
self-fulfilling quality about it.
The same holds true for
demonstrations of the general interest. Once some necessary social resource or
activity comes to be controlled by a particular group, it follows that the
interests of society at large can only be met through satisfying the interests
of that group, and on terms acceptable to them. (pp. 60-61)
[…]
The capacity of power structures
to generate the evidence necessary to their own justification, and to reproduce
the conditions of dependency from which consent to subordination is freely
given, helps to explain how it is that their legitimacy can come to be widely
acknowledged by those involved in them, the subordinate included. ‘Dominant
ideology’ theories tend to put far too much emphasis upon the determining
influence exercised by the powerful over the ideas of the subordinate, through
their preferential access to the means of ideological construction and
dissemination … The account offered here suggests a different kind of
explanation: that both the evidence and the interests of the subordinate that
the justifications advanced for the rules of power prove plausible to them
within the given social context. Their plausibility can only be challenged from
a position or standpoint outside that context, e.g. by comparison with
alternative rules of power, or when social changes have come to undermine from
within the evidence on which they are based. (p. 62)
I think this is pretty insightful, though I still want to
take issue with it. Basically, what Beetham is arguing is that to the extent
that subordinate groups willingly accept their position within large-scale
systems of domination (e.g., to the extent that women accept a subordinate
position to men in patriarchal societies, peasants to landlords in an agrarian
societies, low-caste groups in caste societies, or for that matter
disenfranchised people in a dictatorships or workers under capitalism) this is not primarily because they are duped by the propaganda of the dominant (the
classic “false consciousness” explanation), but rather because the operation of
the system makes the claims of the dominant – their claims to greater skill,
intelligence, effort, care for the common good, etc. – generally plausible. People will accept the propaganda of the
powerful only if (and so long as) it is not obviously in conflict with their everyday
experience; and a system will remain legitimate
only so long as it works to reduce the gap between the lived experience of people
in subordinate positions and the justificatory rhetoric of the powerful by
producing systematic evidence that
the claims of the powerful are plausible, even true, at least within the
context of shared categories of interpretation (which may themselves be structurally
biased to favour the views of the powerful). Moreover, given the plausibility of these claims, it will
make sense for the subordinate to pursue their interests within the terms set
by the system.
It is worth stressing that Beetham does not argue that this
is
always the case in every social
system. Not every social system is experienced as legitimate; and those which
are
not experienced as legitimate are
precisely those where the subordinate can perceive an obvious gap between the
qualities or actions the powerful say justify their position and the qualities
they actually have, or between the possibilities for pursuing their interests
given within the system and possibilities obviously available elsewhere. Moreover,
his argument only
applies to
large-scale social systems. Small-scale relations of domination could not
systematically generate the evidence
necessary for their own justification; they must “borrow” it from the larger
scale system within which they are embedded. For example, in a highly
patriarchal society the claims of men for their
own position – claims based on education, experience, etc. that are themselves
differentially allocated - will only be
generally
plausible to women; exceptions will abound, and within
particular relations it will not always make sense for women to
“accept” subordinate positions. (There
are a lot of nuances and complications
packed into the term “accept,” but let that pass for the moment). If women experience
this system as legitimate, it will not necessarily be
because of their individual “micro-experience,” so to speak, but
because their understanding of “normative” facts (that is, their understanding
of what is “normal”) tells them that in general women are less educated, have
fewer of the relevant qualities for rule, etc., and that
given those facts it will be easier to pursue their interests
within the terms set by men.
Yet I think Beetham still puts too much stress on belief as a way to explain stability and
pays too little attention to the constraints that opportunities for exit and
collective action impose on these same beliefs. If anything, stability explains belief, rather than
the other way around. To say that a legitimate system is stable, I want to
suggest, is merely to express a tautology: systems of domination that are believed to be stable (even if this belief
exists only because, for example, no one can coordinate large numbers on specific
alternatives) will (most of the time) produce beliefs rationalizing the legitimacy of the system.
Consider the question of why repressive dictatorships invest
so much effort in monopolizing the public sphere and policing the “attention
economy.” The problem such regimes face is
not
that the majority of the people fail to believe the justificatory rhetoric
of the rulers
now (though they may or
may not!), but that whatever they believe
now
cannot stabilize the regime
in the
absence of the regime’s efforts to monopolize the public sphere; if their justificatory
claims were self-evidently true, they would
not
require policing the public sphere in the same way. These regimes can close
the gap between their justificatory claims and the experience of the people
subject to them
only by credibly
threatening to punish those who might want to break their monopoly over the
discourse of justification. It is only when the system is believed to be
stable – that is, when the threats to those who would like to break the state’s
monopoly over the public sphere are deemed to be most
credible – that
people
will be most likely to adaptively accept the claims of the powerful.
One might also point to a
number of experiments (
ungated) that suggest that it is precisely when a constraint is experienced as inevitable or absolute that people are most likely to accept it, whereas when they experience the constraint as somehow not quite as absolute – perhaps because they see a way of changing it or resisting it that they are most likely to reject it.What
matters causally, in other words, is the belief in
stability rather than the belief in the
justifications for the relation of domination; absent the belief in
stability, the belief in the justifications also goes.
Or consider the case of the dalits in India,
as described in a short piece I came across
recently by Shikha Dalmia. The caste system endures even
where formal institutions do not enforce it; it is an informal equilibrium which
the dalits themselves help to perpetuate. But why? Dalmia notes that an
individual dalit will often do best by
abiding by the rules of the caste system:
How? Consider Maya’s story.
Maya assigned herself to our
house in 1977. We had no choice. If we wanted our trash picked up, bathrooms
scrubbed and yards cleaned, Maya was it. Indians find dealing with other
people’s refuse not just unpleasant, but polluting. Hence only dalits are
willing to do this work, something that both stigmatizes them and gives them a
stranglehold on the market. And they have transformed this stranglehold into an
ironclad cartel that closes all other options for their customers.
When Maya got married at 16, her
father-in-law paid another dalit $20 for her wedding gift: the “rights” to
service 10 houses in our neighborhood, including ours. Maya has no formal deed
to these “rights,” yet they are more inviolable than holy writ. Maya’s fellow
dalits, who own the “rights” to other houses, can’t work in hers, just as she
can’t work in theirs.
Doing so, Maya insists, would be
tantamount to theft that would invite a well-deserved beating and ostracism by
the dalit community. No one would help a “poacher” or attend her family
functions like births, weddings or funerals.
This arrangement has guaranteed
Maya a monthly income of $100 that, along with her husband’s job as a “gofer”
at a government lab, has helped her raise three children and build a modest
house with a bathroom, a prized feature among India’s poor. But Maya’s monopoly
doesn’t give her just money. It also hands her clout to resist the upper-caste
power structure, not always for noble reasons.
None of Maya’s employers dares
challenge her work. Maya takes more days off for funerals every year than there
are members in her extended family. Complaining, however, is not only pointless
but perilous. It would result in stinking piles of garbage outside the
complainer’s home for days. Every time my mother gets into spats with Maya over
her sketchy scrubbing, my mother loses. One harsh word, and Maya boycotts our
house until my mother cajoles her back. Nor is Maya the only sweeper, or
jamadarni, with an attitude. All of New Delhi is carved up among Maya-style
sweeper cartels and it is a rare house whose jamadarni is not a “big problem.”
This is consistent with Beetham’s story: Maya accepts her
position within the caste system (to the extent that “accept” is the right word
for what is going on, but let’s pass that over) because she finds that it is plausibly in her individual interest to do so,
though collectively this results in a bad outcome for all dalits, including
social segregation, lack of mobility, etc. (Prisoner’s dilemmas everywhere!).
But it is plausibly in her interest to accept her position because opportunities both for collective action to change the system and
for exiting the relationship are thought to be unlikely; the collective
action or exit constraint is prior to
Maya’s first-order beliefs about her caste position, which would easily change if these collective constraints and exit opportunities changed, as we can glimpse near
the end of the story:
Maya is resigned to such
discrimination, but not her oldest son, 36. He holds a government job, works as
a sales representative for an Amway-style company and dreams big. He is
embarrassed by his mother and lies to his customers about her work. He makes
enough money to support Maya and wants her to quit, but she will have none of
it. She fears destitution and poverty more, she says, than she craves social
respectability.
But the choice may not be hers
much longer.
Upon retirement, she had planned
to either pass her “business” to her children or sell it to another dalit for
about $1,000. But about six months ago, municipal authorities started
dispatching vans, Western-style, to collect trash from neighborhoods, the one
service that protected Maya from obsolescence in an age of sophisticated
home-cleaning gadgetry.
Maya and her fellow dalits held
demonstrations outside the municipal commissioner’s office to stop the vans.
They finally arrived at a compromise that lets Maya and her pals collect trash
from individual homes and hand it to the vans for disposal. But Maya realizes
that this arrangement won’t last. “I got branded as polluted and became unfit
for other jobs, for what?” she wept. “To build a business that has now turned
to dust?”
Her son, however, is pleased. He
believes that this will finally force his siblings to develop skills for more
respectable work instead of joining their mother. But Maya shakes her head.
And she might be right.
Post-liberalization, the most dogged and determined dalits are able to escape
their caste-assigned destiny and get rich. But for the vast majority, as Maya
says, opportunities are better within the caste system than outside it.
Where does that leave us? If I had to make a grand claim –
which I probably shouldn’t – I would suggest that relationships of domination are
disrupted not so much because people come to
reject the claims of the powerful, but because opportunities for
exit or collective action become concretely available that make these beliefs
dispensable. (Another example:
the
end of footbinding and infibulation. Link is to a superb paper by Gerry Mackie -
ungated here).
[update 3/3/2012: fixed some really unclear sentences]
