Residues, Derivations, and a Fig Leaf

This post is a continuation of the discussion that we started in "Scripts" and is an effort to understand some of the things that might guide human action in the Black Lives Matter movement, or in the public demonstrations against the election of Donald Trump. We draw upon some of the ideas presented by a classical sociologist, Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). The essay was first published by us in May, 2005. Here goes.

No matter how we tried to concentrate on the book reviews and essays for this issue of Contemporary Sociology, high profile events reported in the main stream media distracted us as we prepared work for publication. The first distraction was the Congressional hearings on the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez for U.S. Attorney General. Mr. Gonzalez was questioned about his views of the Geneva Convention agreement and whether the war on terror renders those Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete." Many members of Congress expressed their beliefs that Gonzalez's legal reasoning on these matters paved the way for the Abu Ghraib abuses.

The second distraction was the U.S. media coverage of U.S. Marine Corps Lieut. General James Mattis' remarks on a panel discussion hosted by the Armed forces Communications and Electronics Association. The General is reported to have said:

             Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot...It's fun to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you. I like brawling...You go into Afghanistan. You got guys who slap women around for five years because they don't wear a veil...you know guys who ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.

Distraction number three was provided by Professor Ward Churchill and the media's discovery of an academic paper he wrote soon after 9/11 in 2001.The essay was entitled "Some People Push Back: On the justice of Roosting Chickens." Professor Churchill had the temerity to identify some of the roosting chickens: (1) the deaths of civilians in Iraq during the ten year period of sanctions and bombings following Gulf War I; (2) the existence of a CIA office in the world Trade Center that made the building a military target. He suggested that terrorists mimicked the logic of target selection by military commanders in Baghdad, which means striking a legitimate target and regrettably accepting the collateral damages, including civilian deaths; (3) "it was pious Americans who led the way in assigning collective guilt to the German people as a whole, not for things they as individuals had done, but for what they had allowed---nay, empowered---their leaders and their soldiers to do in their name. If the principle was valid then, it remains so now, as applicable to Good Americans as it was to Good Germans." The central theme to his long and convoluted essay was that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were the natural result of years of U.S. policies in the Middle East.


The fourth and final distraction takes us closer to academic-home and it involves the dust-up at Harvard, where President Lawrence H. Summers appeared to say that one reason for the shortage of women in the sciences might be linked to the "intrinsic aptitude" of women for such pursuits. He also touched upon other possible explanations such as discrimination, gender socialization, and the clash between family and career. Anyone who has ever given a lecture on gender inequality would have covered the same set of potential reasons as did President Summers. However, it is unlikely that they would give each explanation equal standing, which is what President Summers appeared to do.

That's the data of distraction. We wondered if we could make some sense of these disparate events that were causing such consternation to politicians, journalists, TV shock jocks, and talk radio hosts. We think we found the answer in Vilfredo Pareto, the Italian political sociologist whose writings stood in strong opposition to such products of the Enlightenment as rationalism and Marxism. Pareto believed that human action  was motivated primarily by emotions,which he called "sentiments." Action flowing from sentiments could be organized into a number of classes or groups, referred to as "residues," of which the two most important classes (for our purposes) are Class I-- instinct for combinations, and Class II--persistence of aggregates.

Persons who are high in Class I residues are clever, innovative, calculating risk takers. Persons high in Class II are moved by loyalty, devotion to duty, security, and commitment to traditional institutions. If we were to imagine a TV series based on Pareto, the Class I characters would be foxes and the Class II would be lions.

A second important concept in Pareto's theory of action is "derivations," which are the sugar-coatings applied to the explanations given for sentiment-driven action. Since people want to appear logical and rational, they are inclined to sugar-coat their base motivations for action. It also helps to make their ideas more palatable to the audience. For example, a person motivated to transform the Social Security system for purely ideological reasons (i.e. sentiment motivated) hopes to turn it back to conform with an earlier set of values that stress individual responsibility. However, the explanation given for these actions--the derivations--would focus on the technical and financial problems that supposedly demand immediate change. Sometimes, an individual-level derivation ia aggregated and becomes an institutionalized practice that we call a "fig leaf."

Returning to Mr. Gonzalez's difficulties with the Geneva Conventions, it is possible to consider such "rules of war" as a fig leaf designed to make war more acceptable---treating beheading and saturation bombing as aberrations that will be punished (by the victors).

What our four foot-in-the-mouth-award finalists appear to have in common, according to Pareto's reasoning, is a tendency to use residue-driven speech and to be nuance-challenged when it comes to telling it like it is. This is guaranteed to get them in trouble with audiences that have been served derivations for so long that they no longer recognize the spinach.

Despite their shared penchant for residue speak, our finalists differ widely in their animal membership phyla. Two appear to be aspiring foxes, overly intellectual and cleverly engaging and tormenting their readers/listeners. The other two no-nonsense lions who probably love to replay the movie scene in which Jack Nicholson, the Marine Colonel, is being pressured to tell the truth by the young fox-like attorney (played by Tom Cruise). When he can't stand it anymore he bellows from the witness stand" "You can't handle the truth."

To proceed further with this tempest-in-a-teapot script, we return to Pareto, who offered his theory of the circulation of elites as a critical response to Marx's theory of class struggle. Pareto argued that there are two elite classes, governing and non-governing elites and that they differ in their Class I and Class II residues. Our four foot-in-mouthers can probably be called elites, two being governing and two non-governing. Interestingly, for Pareto's theory the two elite groups each have a fox and a lion, supporting his contention that governing elites often need persons with residues that differ from their own. Thus, when the governing elites are mainly lions, they must recruit the more intellectual and clever foxes to help them remain in power. Does this Paretean analysis fit the last two administrations in Washington, and the incoming administration?