Knowledge and power (Clara B. Jones)

Knowledge and Power

Charles Darwin subordinated God, trapped Him in a corner of history furnished with adaptation and selection—change through time both fast and slow. Mostly, like generations of slaves picking cotton on the red clay soil of Mississippi, slow to breathe the fast air of the European world in Natchez. Would Darwin have watched the blacks as he watched finches in Galapagos, fit to their own southern habitats, trapped in their own struggles to survive a change in climate, in kin, in friends?

John Hurrell l Crook stated, “Social behavior is a subterfuge.” The myth of sociality is as ancient as a Nubian kingdom’s secrets. The slave is bound by chemistry and time to serve herself. Thus are the master’s interests opposed to his subordinates’ as Darwin’s were to God’s. The world’s Pareto Optimum is a formula for social stasis, slow as slaves moved on red clay…slow as the kings of Nubia moved through history.

Definitions are relative to criteria defining the parameters of particular domains or events or phenomena. In the case of offspring quality, criteria depend upon the particular cultural standards of success. Are children in Harlem to be judged by the norms of the subordinate African-American culture or the dominant European-American culture? By definition, the success of all children in American society is determined by dominant folkways, European and technological, and a challenge to any alternate group to assimilate, to mimic, to condition themselves to the dominant paradigms. The black child in Harlem or Oakland may be a good person by Judeo-Christian standards, but she may not be acceptable by other standards of Western European and/or American society. Certain African-American interest groups may consider this unfair or racist; but, it is simply a byproduct of the architecture of power relations throughout history. If blacks assume the posture of victims until European society incorporates their standards (“ebonics”, welfare, “affirmative action,” dysfunctional/disorganized families, etc.), the conflicts of interest between the two cultures will likely intensify. Non-European standards represent a tax on European society, a tax that will ultimately incur more costs than benefits for both cultural regimes.

Many hypotheses have been proposed to account for the status of social inferiors (non-immigrant Afro-Americans, women, children, homosexuals, etc.) in American society. Of necessity, these hypotheses entail endogenous factors, exogenous factors, or factors produced by an interaction between these stimuli. Three non-evolutionary hypotheses accounting for the behavior of social inferiors with reference to environmental causes are particularly persuasive. These are “learned helplessness”, “resentful demoralization”, and “social phobia”.

a. “Learned Helplessness”

A large literature exists on Seligman’s “learned helplessness,” and my application of the mechanism to the condition of social subordinates, in particular, blacks and women, is not unique. It was clear to researchers who first identified learned helplessness in canines that the concept may apply under stress or weakened defenses to other taxa, including humans. Dogs in an experimental situation were shocked electrically without a means of escape. Having learned that escape is impossible, the experimental dogs gave up trying to escape, becoming “helpless” in a manner preventing their detecting a change in the experimental condition leading to avoidance of shock.

Following the arguments of researchers in the field of “learned helplessness,” that condition may be more apparent than real. Just as some non-immigrant Afro-Americans may learn to associate “success” (reward) with precocious pregnancy, impulsive aggression, drugs, and rap music, so might they learn to associate success with delayed gratification, individual responsibility, and individual principle. If early experience teaches that the environment is hostile, unpredictable, or uncontrollable, then the child may generalize this mind-set or conditioned responses to other situations, making social inferiority likely. The child’s early environment may construct a cognitive map of a world in which powerlessness is not only a function of her racial or sexual value in society but, also, is a function of her role in the personal domain of family which may condition impotence, in part, by failing to teach behavior reflecting morals, ethics, character, and, perhaps most important, self-worth. A lesson for humans of the “learned helplessness” experiments is that a concordance exists between perceived self-potency and freedom. While the environment may be like a network with rewards of varying value at only a proportion of its nodes, the individual can learn to combine and recombine rewarded pathways into a lifetime strategy minimizing self-abuse and abuse of others, maximizing individual accountability.

b. “Resentful Demoralization”

Another psychological mechanism that may explain the social inferiority of some groups is “resentful demoralization” whereby individuals in one group become less productive, less efficient, or less motivated than they might have been because of resentment stimulated by perceived or real special treatment received by another group. This state may be more apparent than real, emphasizing the value of teaching individuals rational and conscious problem-solving skills, as well as, statistical thinking, to measure the difference. “Resentful demoralization” would seem to render the individual more vulnerable to manipulation by others, contrary to the individual’s self-interests. If social inferiors can enhance their status by a more realistic and less resentful interpretation of reality, perhaps retraining could revise cognitive maps or conditioned responses in such a manner that alternative tactics and strategies might be envisioned. This suggestion implies that cognitive or conditioned mastery-training or some other form of psychological, especially, behavioral, immunization might combat both “resentful demoralization” and “learned helplessness.”

c. “Social Phobia”

A third explanation for social inferiority might be “social phobia” in which the individual fears evaluation by others in all its forms. Persons with this phobia avoid anxiety-producing situations or tolerate anxiety-producing situations with significant discomfort. “Social phobias” are thought to arise by classical conditioning during which reflexes (including emotional responses) are paired with new stimuli (such as the stimuli in a social situation inducing anxiety). Responses to stimuli may permeate an individual’s social life through the process of stimulus generalization whereby the individual responds similarly to similar stimuli. While phobias may sometimes be overcome by a number of therapeutic techniques (e.g., “systematic desensitization”), learned behaviors are difficult to change once consolidated, as Skinner pointed out.

“Learned helplessness,” “resentful demoralization,” and “social phobias,” if unchecked, may lead to obsessions and/or compulsions about the individual’s social inferiority, further inhibiting the likelihood of change. Non-immigrant African-Americans, for example, can become fixated on race, skewing their perceptions of the world and their roles in it. These and other fixations can lead to an overestimation as well as an underestimation of her abilities relative to the rigors of the environment. Such behaviors may lead to responses varying in severity such as the rigid, authoritarian parenting styles* common among non-immigrant African-American families or the rigid adherence to the black church. Such obsessions and compulsions reduce the individual’s anxiety in the face of discomfort but reinforce the individual's social incompetence in the dominant society.

*See classic research by Pinderhughes EE, et al. (2000) Discipline responses: influences of parents' socioeconomic status, ethnicity, beliefs about parenting, stress, and cognitive-emotional processes. J Fam Psychol 14(3): 380-400.