Exclusion As A Substitute For Norms, Law, & Governance
Hell may not be other people, but worry sure is. That is, what we worry most about is what other people might do to us. People at the office, near our home, at the store, on the street, and even at church.
To reduce our worries, we can rely on norms, law, and governance. That is, to discourage bad behavior, we can encourage stronger informal social rules, we can adopt more formal legal rules, and we can do more with complex governance mechanisms.
In addition, we can rely on a simple and robust ancient solution: exclusion. That is, we can limit who is allowed with the circles we travel. We can use exclusion to limit who lives in our apartment complex, who shows up at the parties we attend, and who works in a cubicle near us.
Now the modern world tends to say that it disapproves of exclusion. The bad ancient world did much gossiping about what types of people could be trusted how, and then it relied a lot on the resulting shared judgements within their norms, law, and governance. We today have instead been trying to expunge such judgments from our formal systems; they are supposed to treat everyone equally without much reference to the groups to which they belong.
In addition, we’ve become more wary of using harsh punishments, like torture, death, or exile. And we are more wary of using corruptible quick and dirty evaluations within our norms, law, and governance. For example, we have raised our standards for shunning neighbors, pulling over drivers, convicting folks at court, and approving large bold governance changes. And people today seem less willing to help the law via reports and testimony. Oh we may be more willing to apply norms to people we read about on social media; but we apply them less to the people we meet around us.
As a result of these trends, many people perceive that we have on net weakened the power of our systems of norms, law, and governance to constrain bad behavior. In response, I think they’ve naturally increased their reliance on exclusion. They look more carefully at who they allow into their schools, firms, apartments, and nations. And they are less willing to give a marginal person the benefit of the doubt.
Since we don’t want to look like we are excluding on the basis of simple group affiliations, we instead try to rely on a more intuitive and informal aggregation of many weak clues. We try to get a feel for how much we like them or feel comfortable with them overall. But that need not result in more mixing.
For example, colleges that admit people just on GPA and test scores can be more open to lower class students than colleges that require applicants to have adopted the right set of extracurricular actives, and to have hit on the right themes in their essays. Lower class people can find it is easier to get good grades and scores than to track the new fashions in activities and essays.
Similarly, Tyler Cowen makes the point somewhere that when firms had simple and clear rules on dress and behavior, someone with a low class background could more easily pass as high class; they just had to follow the rules. Today, without such simple rules, people rely more on many subtle clues of clothes, conversation topics, travel locations, favorite music and movies, and so on. Someone with a lower class background finds it harder to adopt all these patterns, and so is more obviously outed and rejected as not one of us.
The point seems to apply more generally. The net effect of our today relying less on norms, law, and governance, and avoiding simple group labels in exclusion, is that we rely more on exclusion based on an intuitive feel that someone is like us.
This may be a cause of our increasing class and political polarization, at home and work. Feeling less protected by norms, law, and governance, and shy of using simple group identifiers, we are more and more surrounding ourselves with others who feel comfortably like us. We can tell ourselves that we aren’t excluding Joe or Sue because they are Republicans, or don’t have a college degree. Its just that those sort of people tend to give off dozens of other off-putting signs that they are just not people like us.
We would call it an outrage if society as a whole excluded them explicitly and formally because of a few simple signs. Only ignorant and rude societies do that. But we feel quite comfortable excluding them from our little part of the world based on our just not feeling comfortable with them. Hey, as anyone knows, in our part of the world it is just really important to have the right people.
Consider this another weak argument for relying more on stronger norms, law, and governance. That could let us rely less on exclusion locally. And mix up a bit more.
«In addition, we’ve become more wary of using harsh punishments, like torture, death, or exile»
Torture or death (and some forms of exile) are very common, just not for middle class people. Because middle class people don't like paying taxes to fund proper processing of suspected violators, they have given enforcers the ability to torture and kill "on suspicion" the underclass. The enforcers use routinely such a blank cheque. "Due process" is expensive, and underclass people are cheap, and the middle classes, especially after the 1960s riots, want them to be terrorized.
«For example, colleges that admit people just on GPA and test scores can be more open to lower class students than colleges that require applicants to have adopted the right set of extracurricular actives, and to have hit on the right themes in their essays. Lower class people can find it is easier to get good grades and scores than to track the new fashions in activities and essays.»
The original (pre-WW2 and perhaps even pre-WW1) rationale for using extracurricular activities and essays as paramount in admission to "top jobs" granting colleges was to exclude the sons of jewish mothers, quite a few decades ago: on simple admission exams they were "stealing", like asian students today, the places that should have gone to the sons of WASP mothers. IIRC at some point sons of jewish mothers were winning around 20-30% of admissions even at a WASP finishing school like Harvard, because jewish mothers were much better at being "tiger moms" and squeezing their sons very hard for admission exams.
I think why it appears that groups are jumping directly to exclusion rather than working through norms is twofold. First, people seem to have forgotten that it takes work; work to educate, nudge and influence new comers to norms. They seem to want ready-made just-like-me buddies to pop into their lives. Second, some groups are being shocked into realising that even though they profess to be inclusionary, they are only selectively so. From feminists who are really only pro-choice feminists, to champions of the down trodden but only those foreign born not the middle American ones, to vocal activists who must sway to a particular political agenda or be chased from the public square.
Interestingly, the incredible power of action at cross-cutting group purposes flexed extraordinary muscle this year when a cross-section of women tackled a universal objective and, perhaps unexpectedly, ended up making powerful, career ending plays against predators who have kept all women in check. If nothing else comes of the caotic social shuffling this year, the message of this benefit, to build coalitions with groups at seemingly opposite philosophical vantages, will hopefully ring true and loud as we start the new year.