Looking at Society's Square Pegs

...There are certain difficulties inherent in the very nature of culture which will not yield to any efforts at reform...

...Deviance is equated here with maladjustment...

...Reference to "governing" principles leaves these problems of conflicting values unresolved, in theory no less than in the real world...

...Bredemeier and Toby do not raise this question except as it is implied in certain of the readings they include in their collection...

...To Freud and Fromm and Mills, the values and institutions of our society are its primary social problems...

...Their failure to ask the ultimate social questions, to place the problems with which they are concerned in their historical and institutional context, to view social problems as much more than functional disorders, to regard the fundamental assumptions of American society as the crux of our social problems rather than merely their setting—all this appears to be not a limitation of scope, but a defect of theory and a deficiency of insight...

...In short, we like American society and our criticisms are not to be taken for over-all condemnation...

...Their desire to alleviate human suffering reflects no discredit upon them...

...They are materialism or secularism, self-reliance, competition and negotiated exchange (the principle of buying as cheaply and selling as dearly as possible...

...The authors have made "an effort to develop a theoretical framework for understanding and, ultimately, doing something about social problems...

...Reviewed by Jonathan David IN THIS COLLECTION of readings in social pathology, subtitled "Costs and Casualties in an Acquisitive Society...

...The authors argue that a person needs to feel adequate to the tasks his fellows think are rightly his, worthy of their approval in what he is and what he does, gratified by a sense of meaning or "point" to his life, and secure in the belief that others with whose lives his own is closely interwoven, and about whom he cares, also care about him...

...A high level of material welfare may even be necessary for personal liberty and political democracy...

...Braving the dangers of misunderstanding—and they truly are to be commended for it—the authors "suggest that a competitive struggle for material possessions and social status produces a high rate of human casualties and certain inefficiencies in social organization...

...It involves their attempts to cope with this frustration and, in particular, the channeling of these attempts by the governing principles of American society...

...In a classic non sequitur, they note that "this framework fits the analysis of deviance provided by leading sociological theorists...

...Not only can it do so, but it does, and with generally painful and sometimes disastrous consequences...

...The notion of "maladjustment" or functional disorder is not sufficiently penetrating to pierce to the heart of our social problems...

...Presumably because it is not of sufficiently widespread concern...

...Men are not gentle, friendly creatures wishing for love, who simply defend themselves if they are attacked, but . . . a powerful measure of desire for aggression has to be reckoned as part of their instinctual endowment...

...The authors are remarkably steadfast, if not always successful, in their intent to exclude all data which cannot be tucked neatly into their theoretical scheme...

...They recognize that the four "governing principles" do not always govern, but they touch upon the complexities of American values and institutions only to ignore the obvious necessity in all that follows to incorporate these complexities into their theoretical scheme...

...They have tried to define specifically a theory of American social problems and to document and substantiate their theories with readings from a wide variety of sources...

...The notion of "consensus" is just not sufficiently inclusive to embrace all the complexities, all the contradictions, all of the conflicts of American values and institutions...

...Neither is the institutional framework in which they are set examined critically...

...Come, brave hearts, let us face up to it...

...Both his powers and what they create become estranged, something different from himself, something for others to judge and to use...

...Those for whom the affirmation is thought necessary will not pardon us on its account...

...Oddly enough, the fact that "the interpretive framework imposed by these three conditions is not so flexible that [just] anything can be called a social problem" appears to raise no questions about the framework itself in the authors' minds...

...The sources and institutional significance of standards of value are not discussed...

...These are socio-cultural dimensions of deviant behavior which are of only remote interest to our two theorists of social pathology...

...These general propositions on the nature of man and society are succeeded by a more specific characterization of American society in terms of four "governing principles...

...The authors doubtless will think the question unfair...

...If they are the dominant notes of our society, there nevertheless are overtones of cooperation, of interdependence, of compassion or charity, of non-acquisitive aims and values...

...it is simply a datum among data...

...Costs and casualties in an acquisitive society" sometimes run high...

...In the marketing orientation man encounters his own powers as commodities alienated from him...

...The familiar starting point of the authors' theory of social pathology, as so narrowly defined, is that we perceive nature, our fellows and ourselves in terms of socio-cultural standards which we have learned...

...As C. Wright Mills comments in The Sociological Imagination, "In many ways the nub of liberal practicality is revealed by . . . the notion of 'adjustment' and of its opposite, 'maladjustment.'" The sociologists of "liberal practicality" described by Mills "do not usually consider whether or not certain groups of individuals, caught in underprivileged situations, can possibly achieve these goals [of adjustment to middle-class standards] without modification of the institutional framework as a whole...

...Nor do the authors consider the implications of human plasticity for social change, or the processes by which human nature changes...

...But the authors are uneasy: they "fear that the overall impression of American society conveyed by our book is negative...

...But the query is not irrelevant when one confronts a general theory of deviant behavior...

...These four "governing principles" set the major terms on which a person can gain a sense of adequacy, worthiness, gratification and security...

...Conscious or unconscious rebellion against a social order arises when men fail to achieve the satisfactions they seek through socially acceptable means...

...As social theorists, however, the limitations they impose upon themselves are crippling...

...Fair enough, and probably good sense too, but the non-academic reader cannot help speculating about the intellectual and political environment in which this italicized affirmation is thought necessary...

...Plasticity, symbolism, dependence and self-evaluation are static analytical categories of thought in this "conceptual overview" of social problems...

...This simply will not do...

...Harry C. Bredemeier and Jackson Toby, Rutgers University sociologists, have made an interesting if not altogether successful attempt to sketch a general theory of deviant behavior...

...to Bredemeier and Toby, only some of the consequences are...

...If we had any doubts about it, this book proves it...

...Erich Fromm describes the "alienation" of Western man...

...The form that this attempt to cope with frustration takes arouses widespread concern within the society...

...For example, in a selection from Man for Himself included in the book...

...Who are the deviants in Nazi concentration camps and Bolshevik slave labor camps, the jailers or the jailed...

...A situation must fulfill all three of the following conditions in order to be considered a social problem in this book...

...In still more general terms, the theory of social problems advanced in this book takes little cognizance of the type of social critique epitomized by Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents...

...It involves people who are frustrated because they fail to meet the . . . standards of their society—or who anticipate failing to meet these standards...

...Our two sociologists introduce this radical critique of a society which derives its fundamental values from the market place with the deadpan observation that Fromm "comments on the process whereby the distributive principle of negotiated exchange can emerge in the personality as a basis for self-assessment...

...He acquires material goods by self-reliant negotiation in a competitive society, or he is frustrated, and "frustrations are transformed into social problems...

...it raises issues well beyond the chosen scope of their book...

...If materialism, self-reliance, competition and negotiated exchange are the dominant standards of American life—and there is no contesting that they are—then their meaning is significantly different now than before World War I or the Civil War...

...Science, technology and rationality have their points...

...These standards are expressed in symbols, the essentially arbitrary meanings with which a society by "consensus" invests all the data of personal experience...

...Again, these are formal and static categories...

...Neither the authors nor American society are wholly insensible to values other than those of the market place...

...The market concept of value . . . has led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself...

...While men, unlike other creatures, are free from highly specific biological determination of behavior, they are all the more dependent upon their fellows for the terms in which they respond to their environment and themselves...

...The character orientation which is rooted in the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one's value as exchange value I call the marketing orientation...

...Bredemeier and Toby accept the principles of our competitive society—there is no arguing with a "consensus" for the theorists of functional order and adjustment—but they object to their application if it is "relentess...

...The wisdom of the ages reverberates in Freud's profound and brooding thoughts on human nature and the pain-laden meaning of culture...

...Talcott Parsons, "whose ideas we have borrowed freely," and Robert K. Merton may or may not be pleased that they are cited in this context...

...Indifference is what characterizes modern man's relationship to himself and to others...