The Retreat From Community and the Language of Disengagement

 

Paper Presented at the Fifth International Conference of

The International Communal Studies Association. June 1995

Ramat Efal, Israel

 

©ARTHUR S. KEENE (1995)

 

ARTHUR S. KEENE

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

UMASS-AMHERST

Amherst, MA, USA 01003-4805

EMAIL:Keene@anthro.umass.edu

 

READING VERSION: This is an abridged version of a working paper. The longer version is available on request. Comments are most welcome. You may cite this paper freely though you may wish to check with the author to see if a more current version is available.

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

In her 1974 utopian novel The Dispossessed Ursula K. Leguin imagines an entire planet, organized along anarchist principles, a world, which very much resembles a global kibbutz. The founders of this world were refugees from a capitalist planet caught up in intra-continental class warfare and intercontinental struggles for global domination. The story begins generations after a group of hearty pioneers come to settle the harsh and unforgiving uninhabited planet of Annares. In attempting to shed the cultural baggage of their old world, the settlers create a new language. The citizens of Annares are radical minimalists. Striving for simplicity and functionalism as the proper path for provisioning each according to their needs, they define need in the most rudimentary terms. They reject acquisition and ornamentation as wasteful -- as excremental. They reject the notion of private property, of government, hierarchy and control. Their language, which they call Pravic, is as sparse and unembellished as the world they now inhabit. It lacks elaborate adjectives which would enable flowery description and it lacks possessive pronouns. One cannot say this is MINE in Pravic. LeGuin reminds us throughout her novel, that language does more than reflect the culture of Annares - it actively shapes it.

 

In the next few minutes I would like us to consider the role of language in shaping the current crises of community and of communality that are the focus of so many papers at this conference. As we consider the multitude of complex causes effecting a diminution of community and communalism I would like to make a simpler point: that we have not paid sufficient attention to the language used within our communities. I will suggest that our communities have come to be dominated by a set of discourses that reflect and promote the cultures of selfishness and capitalist business administration. Like the fictional language Pravic, these dominant discourses do more than reflect the reality of the people speaking the language - they define that reality. Thus, resolving the crises of community will necessitate some consideration of the language that is at our disposal to shape those solutions.

 

I want to explore this relationship, between language and the erosion of community, in two culturally dissimilar localities: the Israeli kibbutz of Givat Oz and the small New England college town of Amherst, MA. Now, on first glance, it would seem that these two communities would have little in common and it might seem odd to examine a municipality in New England at a conference devoted to the future of the commune. There are however, important parallels. Both communities have strong communitarian legacies and both are now experiencing a deterioration of community life, identity and values. What I find striking abut these two cases is that prominent in both are nearly identical discourses about individualism, selfishness and business administration that function to legitimate a disengagement from community.

 

Although I am not a socio-linguist I became sensitive to the similarity in discourse in the two communities as I began to think about changes in governance in both communities. Three years ago Givat Oz decided to abandon its form of participatory governance - the general assembly - in favor or a much smaller elected council. This year, a faction within Amherst town government has spearheaded a campaign to disband town meeting (our own form of participatory democracy which is very similar to the kibbutz general assembly) in favor of a small elected council. I have been involved in the campaign to retain our current participatory form of government in Amherst. While engaging in debates about the value of participatory democracy and the importance of continuing to fund strong community services, it struck me that I had heard it all before - that the very same arguments used to dissuade popular opinion about town meeting and community spending were prominent on the kibbutz as well. Both communities invoked identical language - the same vocabulary, the same metaphors. This got me thinking about the language and how it works.

 

I want to set up the rest of this paper by recognizing that the histories of these two communities ARE very different. The changes in governance are due to very different (though not wholly unrelated) complex events. Yet there has been a distinct change in popular discourse both in Amherst and at Givat Oz in the last decade. There HAS BEEN a convergence in language.

 

THEORY: ThE TYRANNY OF CONCEPTS

 

Socio-linguistics operates on the premise that the language habits of our community predispose us to experience the world in certain ways - that language defines and limits our field of interpretation. I borrow from the work of socio-linguists Carol Cohn (1987) and Susan Gal (1989) to argue that the language we use shapes our categories of thought, defines our field of interpretation and actively produces the social order. Cohn offers as an example, the language of techno-strategic discourse (i.e. the language used by "defense intellectuals" in planning nuclear war). She shows how this language sanitizes nuclear warfare, cloaking it in elaborate abstraction and bland euphemism, substituting explicit discussion of destructive consequences with metaphors of construction and creation. The language does more than obfuscate. As one learns to speak the language one starts to think in it - one is seduced by it. The questions one asks, the metaphors one employs, the lenses one uses to see the world are shaped by the language itself. Cohn found that the more she became immersed in the language the more difficult it was for her to express her own opposition to nuclear proliferation. She notes that the language simply does not allow certain questions to be asked or certain values to be expressed. And as one becomes more immersed in the discourse one becomes alienated from the external vocabulary necessary to critique it. Just as the language promotes certain vocabulary and metaphors, so does it exclude others. Cohn notes that the word "peace" simply does not exist in techno-strategic discourse. She refers to the phenomenon by which the language comes to shape our categories of thought as "the tyranny of concepts".

 

I argue that the language of selfishness and of administrative culture is no less limiting, no less powerful than the language of strategic defense. I argue that such language has become pervasive in the kibbutz, in Amherst, indeed as a global language. It is Hegemonic not just in the popular sense of being dominant but in the Gramscian sense of shaping the popular will in ways that do not serve popular interests.

 

I call this hegemonic language the language of disengagement. What does this language do? For the moment, let's regard community as purposeful associations based on connection, commitment and mutual responsibility. The language of disengagement works to sever this connection and this feeling of commitment and mutual responsibility to the larger social body. Such language effectively promotes the material, emotional and spiritual disengagement of the individual from the community. The language of disengagement is one that turns our gaze inward away from society and towards the self. It promotes a parochial vision in which the linkages between the public and private sphere are severed. It atomizes life, isolating the individual from the whole and disassembles the bonds that link people in webs of social relationships. The language venerates individual fulfillment and opposes this to common interests. In other words it replaces a vocabulary of community with a vocabulary of parochial interest.

 

How does it do this? It does this by removing certain concepts from the vocabulary and by promoting new metaphors that transform meanings. Just as techno-strategic discourse recasts nuclear annihilation as a form of creation so does the language of disengagement demonize the public interest confusing it with special interests, constituting the social as a burden on the individual. It employs the language of business administration, privileging key concepts like cost, efficiency, personal responsibility and consumerism - concepts which work in concert to undermine effectively ideas like connection, solidarity, commitment, cooperation and compromise. Let's briefly consider some of these concepts and how they work.

 

THE LANGUAGE OF MONEY AND COST ACCOUNTING AND THE CULTURE OF DEFICIT

 

It should not be surprising that money is a concept that explicitly informs much public and private discourse in Amherst and Givat Oz. Money is not just a tool of commerce but an idiom, a conceptual lens through which ideas can be focused. It is not just the economies of kibbutz and town that are monetized. Public discourse has been monetized as well. Both Amherst and Givat Oz are emerging from a period of financial plenty and relatively unrestrained spending in the 80's. Both communities are now facing difficult choices about how limited financial resources are to be allocated. Both explicitly define the primary challenges facing their communities as fiscal.

 

In a recent public forum in Amherst an elected official stated that

 

"the diminution of community is a direct product of the diminution of budgets".

 

With less money to go around there is overt struggle within the communities over the resources that exist. The metaphor frequently invoked is a fight over pieces of an ever shrinking pie. (similar sentiments are commonly voiced at Givat Oz where annual personal budgets are 15% below the average for the movement as a whole).

 

Why does this analysis privileging competition over material resources make sense to us? Why should there be a diminution of community in the wake of fiscal crisis? Given the documented human capacity for people to pull together in times of need - give the historic evidence for this tendency in both communities under consideration - why do we see this invocation of Hobbesian language of "all engaged in a struggle against all". And why is this language of need, struggle, hardship and insecurity so prominent in communities which by most standards are relatively affluent?

 

Last year I recorded a conversation on the kibbutz concerning its economic future. One member's forecast was that the future was bleak because there are too many folk who produce less than they consume. She offered a few names as examples and soon others began to add to the list. In a few minutes we compiled a rather lengthy list of specific people who, in the eyes of their comrades, are a drain on the community- people whose daily earnings do not match what it costs to support them, a list of members whose costs outweighed their benefits.

 

From the point of view of business administration such an analysis makes a lot of sense but within a community of mutual responsibility they do not. Do we FIRE members of our society who are not maximizing production. Do we REPLACE them with others who require lesser supports. Do we DOWN-SIZE in hard times, eliminating those whose contributions have become REDUNDANT or INEFFICIENT. It might seem exaggerated to conflate business and society or business and community, but this is precisely what the language of disengagement does.

 

Money is one way of providing a concrete standardized measure of cost, benefit and value. But money, like cost, benefit and value - is a cultural construct and thus its meaning is contingent. Step outside the framework of neo-classical economics and cost, benefit and value take on different meanings - i.e. cost and benefit may not be reducible to a dollar value - and even if they are - the calculus for arriving at these dollar values may be quite different. For example, inputs like occupational health and safety, degradation of the environment and unpaid domestic labor are but a few of the inputs that are typically left out of conventional cost-benefit analysis inputs that would significantly alter the calculations (Bowles and Edwards 1985) . In addition - inherent to conventional cost/benefit is a recognized bias for "productive work" (i.e. of a commodity). On the kibbutz, such language diminishes the contribution of members who work in service branches like the kitchen, laundry or day care center or who are vital to the community in other ways.

 

Constructing value through the metaphor of money, cost and benefit helps to atomize societies and actions within them removing actions from their social context. It simplifies or reduces complex meanings as each entity can be reduced to a decontextualized monetary standard. We are directed to ask -what does this cost (in terms of dollars) rather than what are the complex consequences of specific actions and ideas.

 

So, the vocabulary of cost and benefit says more than that communities should be fiscally responsible, that they should plan, budget well and pay their bills as indeed they should. It's not that cost accounting per se creates disengagement - it is the way that it articulates and informs other vocabularies of disengagement. The tyranny of concepts does not derive from any individual item of vocabulary. In isolation, the vocabulary is quite innocuous - it derives its power from working in concert with other concepts. Each conversation or each concept mutually informs and reinforces the others. Taken alone they seem natural and mellifluous, but together they are powerful, persuasive, restrictive and constitutive of society.

 

Let us consider a few more pieces of the vocabulary:

EFFICIENCY: Efficiency is prominent in daily discourse in both kibbutz and Amherst and was a central issue in the debates about changing government. Both communities argued that participatory democracy was inefficient. Both argued that this inefficiency has concrete costs - e.g. popular participation allows anyone to participate in the decision process. This leads to uninformed people impacting decisions in an irresponsible way, often with costly results. Furthermore, decisions take a long time (and time is money - at least metaphorically). Efficiency conventionally means to maximize the output of useful goods and services for a given amount of input. Colloquially this means saving time and money. Hence as I noted above, inputs which are not reducible to time and money (like environmental degradation or social solidarity) are excluded from the calculation and hence from the vocabulary. To be inefficient is by definition is to be wasteful - but wasteful of what? Within the hegemonic discourse it IS inefficient to let all citizens have their say on an issue. However, working together, within this "inefficient' process creates connection, commitment, accountability, a strong sense of common purpose. It creates community in the face of differences of opinion. But as the language of efficiency begins to dominate the conversations of those who believe in the community and want to preserve it, it begins to dominate the way we see the world and promotes a social order at odds with a just, democratic community.

 

PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY: This term is drawn from the American Republican Party's "Contract with America" (a conservative legislative program which generally demonizes government and offers to expand the rights of individual citizens to be free of government regulation). A central aim of this program has been legislation that will promote personal responsibility. Here, personal responsibility is a euphemism for retrenchment in government spending on social services. The program aims to transfer what was once a societal obligation back to the private individual. It says, individuals should be responsible for meeting their own needs. The emphasis on personal responsibility arises from the belief that too many people are getting something for nothing. The fear of parasitism is overt in the USA (and even in progressive Amherst) in efforts to reform social welfare and to roll back spending on human services. On the kibbutz parasitism is frequently blamed for the tenuous financial state of the community. In both locations the language distorts the social reality. The elimination of social welfare would not begin to reduce fiscal crises in Amherst and elimination of free riders within the kibbutz community would fail to make a dent in the community's debt (nor is it responsible for its origins (see Keene, nd). In both cases the communities' fiscal struggles are the direct outcome of fiscal policy overdetermined at the national and global scale. Yet the language of personal responsibility fosters an attitude of blame, resentment and anger which undermines the ability of folk to work together or to see the common causes of their local hardships.

CONSUMERISM - prominent in both communities today is the language of consumerism. Such language turns the focus away from general or societal needs to individual needs and desires. Consumerism negates the language of sacrifice, compromise and common good offering in its place self validation through the interminable process of individual consumption. A consumerist economy reconstitutes the individual through consumption as opposed to through social relationships. It fosters an outlook that asks what does this cost me? For example, Why should I pay for schools when I don't use them? Why should I pay for public transportation when I don't ride. It proposes, let me pay for what I use and let others pay for what they use. Spending on the common good is constructed as an obstacle to spending ones self. This parochial outlook allows the relatively affluent to adopt a vocabulary of poverty even in the presence of plenty.

 

CONCLUSIONS:

 

My goal has not been to essentialize language - I don't propose it as THE determining factor for understanding the erosion of community. The examples I have offered should be SUGGESTIVE of how hegemonic discourse constitutes the social order, of how our everyday speech may interfere with our goals and ideals, of how we consent to the erosion of community through seemingly innocuous speech. It is worth considering how this language is produced and disseminated but that is the subject for another paper. It is also worth considering what a counter-hegemonic language (a vocabulary that fosters connection and commitment) looks like - but this too requires another paper. I have suggested that hegemonic discourses kill the language of community and work effectively to isolate us from one another. In a recent speech at Harvard University, Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (1995) extended the argument suggesting that the same language that I have implicated is fostering fascism in our midst. Here are her concluding words:

 

fascism talks ideology but it is really just marketing -marketing for power. It is recognizable... by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship; all non-profit organizations to profit making ones -so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into tax payers- so individuals become angry even at the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers so that the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own... When our fears have all be serialized, our creativity censured, our ideas market-placed our rights sold our intelligence sloganized, our strength downsized...we will find ourselves living not in a nation but in a consortium of industries and wholly unintelligible to ourselves except for what we see as through a screen darkly.

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I am grateful to Uzi Baram, Al Husdon, Jackie Urla and Martin Wobst for their helpful comments and their encouragement when it was most needed.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 

Bowles, Samuel and Richard Edwards

1985 Understanding Capitalism. Harper and Row: NY.

 

Cohn, Carol

1987 Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals. Signs 12(4):687-719.

 

Gal, Susan

1989 Language and political economy. Annual Review of Anthropology 18:345-67.

 

Keene, Arthur

nd The retreat from socialism and the Israeli kibbutz: privacy, privatization and power in a modern communal society.

 

Leguin, Ursula

1974 The dispossessed. Avon: NY

 

Morrison, Toni

1995 Racism and fascism. The Nation. 260(21):760.