Buoyant

Mindfulness makes for a magnificent metaphor for the support of social structure.

Mindful Moment

I’ve been staying with some friends at a farm in rural Maine not far from Lewiston–Auburn. I’ve become the new best friend of an eight month old bird dog. On a warm and languid late summer day last week, he led me to the property’s pond, where we played fetch. He lost a ball for a while, so we used a fallen apple. He seemed mesmerized by what I would call “experiential physics” of the apple’s buoyancy, and I was mesmerized by the moment, a break from my life afforded by the generosity of friends. It’s been a minute since I’d written about the politics of generosity in mimicry of nature, and the structural antecedents of mindfulness, on my other blog. (I promise to import that content real soon now.) But the mindful moment had given me an apt metaphor to dive a little deeper into the sociology of these notions.

I’ve been staying with friends because I’ve been displaced in my living situation, and working overtime at my part–time job because I’ve been displaced in my teaching. Yet in dealing with my family, friends, and coworkers, I remain mostly “buoyant.” There’s a friend whom I suspect thinks my buoyancy indicates a lack of seriousness about my situation, and who may even be a little envious of the moments of mindfulness I eke out of my circumstances. To be sure, I dip below the surface of mood in any given circumstance, but I bob back up, just like that apple. People are my passion, and I love to get to know them, and go to bat for them. Yesterday, it occurred to me that I am like that apple in way that makes sociology relevant.

In some circles, I’ve heard that misfortune in life can be accounted for, not necessarily by karma, the consequences of our actions and inactions, but by Lila, the “delightful play of the universe.” Bad things can happen to us because the Universe rolls the dice to see what will happen. In some respects, I think that trouble reveals our character, and the character of those around us. Just like my new friend the bird dog played with the apple, the Universe plays with us, ducking us below the surface to watch us bob up. Or not.

While I deeply appreciate the thoroughgoing debunking of wellness culture by the fine journalists over at Conspirituality, I do often think they risk replicating the hyperindividualism they sometimes critique by resorting to psychological explanations, for instance, the “narcissism” or “trauma” of the cult leader. (More on this later as well).

Enter Agency

But here is where I think the concept of buoyancy reveals a sociological one: the interplay of structure and agency. When I was a college sociology major, a roommate of mine, a religious studies major, said he didn’t like sociology because it “put people in boxes.” I argued that we don’t put people in boxes, but describe the “invidious distinctions” society makes of differences like race, class, and gender. These are the differences of no difference, the consequences of society treating people as if the distinctions were real. Likewise I think one of my teaching evaluations said I was “racist” because I taught about the consequences of these distinctions. I treat this as an echo of the reactionary discourse that critiques “CRT” as racist. But I took seriously my friend’s critique, and sought thereafter to think about the quality among people that resisted the injustice of these invidious distinctions. I sought for a solution to what appeared to some to be the overly determined view of human behavior in a more superficial read of the discipline of sociology. I would contend, in turn, that this read is given wings by the reactionary emphasis of “personal responsibility” in policy discourse, but I digress.

The quality that labors against the consequences of these distinctions is agency. This was brought into clear relief by a colleague’s naming of this interplay. If inquiry reveals social structure both to constrain us and to provide capacity for change, then agency is what makes use of that capacity. In her essay for Critical Sociology on active framing in a UPS strike, Charlotte Ryan wrote, “In the proverbial seesaw between structure and agency, strategy is the pivot.” ¹

More importantly, agency may be individual or collective. Accounts of social change tend to fall into the trap of the “great man of history.” We may rightly emphasize the qualities of leadership of individuals, even tracing their origins to their unique social circumstances. But we ignore collective agency at our peril. We ignore collective agency because of the hyperindividualism of our society, the psychologization of our discourse. Josh Shrei has broadcast quite compellingly on this topic in the episode of his podcast “The Emerald,” “The Revolution Will Not be Psychologized.” But as much as I appreciate the mythopoetic disruption to this tendency of our culture, I find a more proximate solution in sociology.

The buoyancy of the apple is a feature not simply of the apple, but of the water itself.

In the metaphor I’m employing here, the characteristics of the apple are those of the individual. Those of the water are of the milieux, the social structure. Whether individuals are resilient, “buoyant,” which is to say “have agency,” in the face of circumstance, is more than about their mettle. It’s also about the social circumstances surrounding them, in concentric circles like the ripples of an apple dropped into a pond, from the level of interaction, to the social structure of a nation, and the intermediate structures between. Were either the water or the apple of a different substance, the apple would not bob back. Americans focus too much on the “bad apples,” and like fish who swim in it, are unaware of the water all around us.

We live in a time of what I have called the “twilight of the public,” when supportive structures of an earlier era have been torn down, and had never quite risen to the level of the social safety nets of European democracies. Our individualism prevents us from seeing, in C. Wright Mill’s formulation of the sociological imagination, that private troubles are public issues.

Even if an individual’s troubles are profoundly personal, like an affective disorder, an unsupportive social structure exacerbates them, by failing to provide adequate health care, income support, and frankly, rent control. How much more could individuals, could society, be if we attended to the buoyant qualities of the water, our sociopolitical milieux, as much as to the “resilience” of the individual? What if we focused collective agency on changing these structures to meet our needs?

A Word on Culture

Lastly, I want to distinguish structure from culture. Culture is an important concept, but too often it is used in common parlance to “explain away,” rather than explain, social phenomenon.

For instance, it’s a popular conclusion that something unique about Asian culture makes such immigrants a “model minority.”

Strict, uncompromising values and discipline are what makes children raised by Chinese parents successful. That's the message in a new parenting book by Yale Law Professor Amy Chua. "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother," is based on Chua's personal experiences has raised questions about whether the book reinforces stereotypes of the unsparing Asian parent. Host Michel Martin speaks with the author about the memoir and her cultural views on raising children.

“Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother” January 13, 2011, NPR.org

Rather, structural issues like immigration policy and cultural expectations of Asian Americans have a greater impact. A focus on these structural issues removes the burden from individuals to develop the right “mindset”—a term too often heard in corporate circles to counsel adaptation to social structures they don’t want to change.

“Our research debunks the idea that there is something intrinsic about Asian culture, traits or values that produces exceptional educational outcomes,” [Jennifer] Lee says. “First, the change in U.S. immigration law in 1965 was critical, because it ushered in a new stream of immigrants from Asia who are hyperselected — meaning that they’re more highly educated than their compatriots and also more highly educated than the general U.S. population.”

For example, only 4 percent of people living in China have college degrees, but about 51 percent of those emigrating to the U.S. do. In India, the vast majority of people are uneducated and impoverished, but 70 percent of its emigrants to the U.S. are college-educated. Moreover, these immigrants exceed the academic attainment of most Americans, 28 percent of whom are college-educated.

“The biggest predictor of a child’s success is parental education,” Lee notes. “If your parents are college-educated, the likelihood of you going to college and graduating is very high.”

Laura Rico, UC Irvine “Declawing the tiger mom,” July 20, 2015.

I’ll have more to write later about the distinction between structure and culture, but for now, suffice it to say that society is the hardware, and culture the software of our social world. Society is your phone, and culture the app. Your phone has the capacity to take a photo, but your app tells it how to use this capacity, and what to do with the result. This is a metaphor I derive from my favorite introductory sociology textbook, Our Social World. I resisted this metaphor at first, because the distinction is older than personal computers, but I relented because it’s apt, and students get it.

I want to write more about how the sociological imagination, applied in fields like social movements, social policy, and conflict resolution, advances a view of collective agency for change, in order to realize Dr. King’s vision of “Belovèd Community” toward the “uplift of all” (sarvodaya) in which Gandhi followed Tolstoy’s Unto This Last.

1. Ryan, Charlotte, “It Takes a Movement to Raise an Issue: Media Lessons from the 1997 U.P.S. Strike,” Critical Sociology, 30(2): 483-511