The Pattern of Sociological Theory
Rabasseire, Henri
A CURIOUS PAPER was recently found in the archives of the University of Kenya. Judging from the typescript characteristics, it was written in the third quarter of the 20th century, and is...
...They shrewdly foresaw that unification of the continent would give occasion to the building of many roads and would create opportunities for many people to visit states which otherwise they might disdain as foreign countries...
...they accept poor service for considerable money, obey various laws affecting the ways and speeds they may use while traveling, and they agree to unspeakable crowding in the favored circuits at prescribed seasons, where they meet people they detest, where they helplessly have to listen to especially designed instruments dinning so-called folk airs into their ears while they are trying to relax (we shall presently expand on the question why they accept these disturbances and even pretend to like them) —briefly, they suffer a condition of existence which the stranger has great difficulty in understanding but which will become very transparent as soon as we consider the condition of the country...
...I find it impossible to reconcile these laws with theories, held by some of my eminent colleagues, that self-immolation by speeding is some kind of religious rite with the Wameriku, or that motion in general is their religion...
...He will not find any Wameriku ready to admit the truth about the country...
...One has the very distinctive characteristic of supplying means of transportation, servicing same, waylaying the other group on the road with various enticements to eat, to sleep and to enjoy themselves in the manner of people who move around...
...And since at that time, during the Great Depression, not many people could afford to use all these roads, the New Deal forced them by making them government officials or drafting them into the Army...
...The other is an unhappy agglomeration of people at large who are forced to travel, to buy or to use means of transportation and to pay the first group for the servicing of their vehicles and bodies while on the road...
...Consider, for instance, the early history of these states...
...The Civil War gave considerable impetus to this movement toward traveling from one place to the other and an attendant ideology was created to condition people so that they would believe there was special happiness in following such slogans as "Go West, young man...
...Nor do political scientists care to train the light of research on these abuses, not to speak of attempting a serious theory of their meaning in terms of the economic structure of their country...
...The very fact that no social scientist in that country has ever studied this curious relationship, not to speak of denouncing it or building a system on it, this very ignoring, I say, of such a most obvious and striking fact clearly in the view of all must make us highly suspicious...
...MANY a traveler has wondered why the Wameriku habitually sacrifice their lives to their curious ideas on traffic and mobility...
...As will be well remembered, President Roosevelt started his campaign in 1944 with a speech under the sponsorship and chairmanship of the then president of the teamsters, Dan Tobin...
...While not disregarding the possibility, I should like to suggest a more realistic theory which takes into account economic and social motives hitherto neglected...
...It certainly speaks volumes that notoriously frequent and pointless inspection tours of Congressmen, government officials and high brass are always humorously referred to as "junkets" but never frowned upon seriously...
...The traveler who moves around in this country, as its natives are wont to do, must soon become aware that its population is divided into two groups of different sizes...
...He should not be disturbed by any of these abnegations...
...Finally, a war was started, involving large-scale movements of troops for the sole benefit of the pirates of the road...
...Why are they so indifferent to life and property when on the the other hand their laws tell them to avoid these accidents...
...For this interesting document, which hereafter is published in full, already contains the basic ideas which we now have accepted as the valid theory of Wameriku society...
...But so sorry is the state of that unhappy country, that both major parties alike are dedicated to the interests of the highwaymen...
...He will find no politician and no scientist ready to abandon the special axe which each of them has to grind...
...As is well known, thousands yearly suffer death on the roads for no other reason than an apparent compulsion to get speedily from one place to another, and a vast machinery has been developed to make this possible...
...Wameriku are not even al lowed to discuss the most important social fact of their life, and their sociologists look away, learnedly telling their students of all kinds of groups, associations, antagonisms and forces of conflict except the one which nearly everybody must have remarked upon and even grumbled about many a time...
...It is here suggested that life in these parts of the world should be studied under the aspect of this basic pattern...
...They take a perverse pride in their individual ability to break up their homes or just to travel all the forty-eight states...
...Trade unions pretend to fight the bosses and corporations while they are in fact allying themselves with these employers for the purpose of either extracting more money from the road users or fighting off the monopolists of the road...
...Unfortunately, communication with the land of the Wameriku now has become so difficult—a price we gladly pay for our liberation from the exploiters of the seaways— that at this point we cannot inform our readers on the progress of further research which meanwhile may have produced particulars about the author of this interesting paper or his unhappy suppression by the authorities...
...I would even go so far as to maintain that those deaths are unwanted and purely accidental, not deliberate as has been assumed...
...Judging from the typescript characteristics, it was written in the third quarter of the 20th century, and is apparently a lecture read to an academic audience...
...Nothing, two hundred years ago, pointed to any need or necessity which might urge the peoples of these colonies to unite and to form one country...
...IT MAY BE ARGUED, as in fact it has been, that there are other differentiations and even other forms of exploitation among the Wameriku...
...They are, however, highly interesting, and any even superficial perusal of other travel reports on the life and customs of this strange continent will yield a crop of examples, not only of the cruelty of this exploitation but also of the utter uselessness and futility in sending goods and people from one part of the country to the other...
...Congressmen who are sent to Washington from the provinces for the sole purpose of getting roads built in their constituencies, pretend to fight for socalled issues which are entirely irrelevant to the basic social problem of this country...
...The point is that nothing must ever stay where it is, and hence people must believe that it is God's will if they submit to the commands of their exploiters...
...They are an incidental expense and must strike us civilized people as another indication of the callous cynicism which characterizes the Wameriku ruling class...
...It is no accident but has been very little noticed that the change from the Democratic and New Deal governments to a Republican administration had been preceded by an important shift of power in the Teamsters' Union...
...All the other groupings and conflicts are built up deliberately to becloud the basic issue and to deflect attention from it...
...They submit to all kinds of indignities, such as paying tolls, eating whatever they are offered, sleeping in different beds every night...
...As the unknown speaker seemed to fear, the power of the interests which he denounced at that time was so vast, and indeed extended to the far-off shores of Kenya, that his paper—if he ever managed to pilot it through the censorship of his Board—fell a victim to the conspiracy of silence for more than a hundred years...
...Now eventually they have come to a point where they not only pretend to enjoy mobility but even see a virtue in this exercise...
...For frankly—who benefits from the arrangements which cause these accidents...
...The press of course neither dares to tell its readers why these trips are necessary...
...The Republican land grab and the pilfering of wares by the dockers are all of one cloth and it is not accidental of course that so many directors of an automobile corporation were members of the Eisenhower administration...
...Its author, certainly an observant traveler, may have been a faculty member since forgotten—unjustly so, as will presently appear...
...As history shows, these insurrections of common sense and egalitarianism always were ruthlessly suppressed, and behind the forces and ideologies that were making for unification we always find, if we only look closely enough, those interests which were at all times ready to exploit mobility...
...There even is ample evidence to the contrary, namely that most people at the beginning favored a more loosely constituted confederation, and again and again regionalistic and even secessionist tendences have sought and found political expression...
...If they did, they certainly would lose their jobs...
...I will add only one remark as a warning to the serious student...
...However, these appearances only tend to obscure the fundamental and essential relationship which exists between those who are moving and those who profit by their mobility...
...On the other hand, his prediction also came true that finally the hard labor and courage of devoted scientists caught up with the facts...
...then we will much better understand where power really resides and how this country is run and how its people function economically, socially, politically, ideologically and even religiously...
...He will run into vicious attempts to frustrate any serious inquiry and he may find deliberate misconstructions of the social edifice by the various interested parties and their subservient ideologists...
...A CURIOUS PAPER was recently found in the archives of the University of Kenya...
...The great myth of Manifest Destiny and of the individual pursuit of happiness, the social slogan of homesteading, staking out claims, hewing a path into the wilderness, the great national legend of the pathfinder and later of the pioneering inventors of motor vehicles—all this was viciously designed to condition people for the special kind of exploitation prevalent in this country...
...Once the truth has been discovered by an objective and disinterested traveler, almost inadvertently, it can no longer be hidden and will sooner or later be recognized as the underlying cause which helps us understand the strange behavior of the Wameriku in their home as well as in foreign affairs...
...IT IS IMPOSSIBLE in the course of a brief report to describe all the ramifications of the basic law by which the road monopolists extort a tribute from the rest of the population...
...In this connection, gentlemen, may I venture the methodological remark that the very absence of any such theory should make us suspicious and, in fact, may militate in favor of its acceptance by serious students...
...Moving hither and thither has become a patriotic duty or at least the source of patriotic satisfaction, and as a reflection in the sphere of ideology, shrewdly engineered by the pirates of the road, people moreover see similar virtues in other kinds of mobility, such as climbing the social ladder...
...The passage of power from the hands of Tobin into those of David Beck and later J. Hoffa corresponds to the downfall of the New Deal insurgents and the reconquest of power by the gangsters of the road and elsewhere...
...Far from trying to wrest power from the monopolists, the Democrats launched a vast program of road expansion...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
