The Political Identity Paradox | Evolutionary logic of collective action pt.III

by: Jonathan Smucker

Wed Dec 15, 2010 at 12:00

natural born people pleasers

Imagine yourself a gazelle in a herd of gazelles.  Aw snap, here comes a hungry lion out of nowhere - and that lion is fast!  Is this the moment you want to be caught on the peripheral edges of the herd?  Ok, now imagine yourself a lone wolf trying to catch your next meal.  It's freezing out and you're not having much luck.  You're just sitting there, hungry and tired and cold, wondering what it was you said that got you kicked out of the pack.

What do we know about prehistoric life in human groups? While there's a lot of mystery and conjecture, we do know that life was, indeed, in groups.  We're not gazelles or wolves, but, like gazelles and wolves, we like groups. We are highly social creatures.  As evolutionist David Sloan Wilson suggests, "...our ancestors participated in family groups, gathering groups, hunting groups, raiding groups, and so on. Almost everything was done in a social context; to be alone was to be in grave danger." [2004: The New Fable of Bees.  my emphasis]

Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá also hit on this in their book Sex at Dawn: "If you ever doubt that human beings are, beyond everything, social animals, consider that short of outright execution or physical torture, the worst punishment in any society's arsenal has always been exile."

If the thought of being abandoned by the group that you identify with troubles you, congratulations; that's probably a hard-wired adapted way to feel.  Your cave-person ancestors probably survived in part because they liked, and were liked by, the group.  Those who wandered off alone too far, as well as those who pissed everyone off until they got 86'ed, probably didn't fare quite as well evolutionarily.

It makes evolutionary sense that we would want to move toward the center of the group, because those who developed this tendency would have a leg up on those who didn't.  This kind of selection may have helped our predecessors to evolve into a more social, more cooperative, kinder, gentler species.

Where does that leave us now?  It likely equips us with a predisposition to try to get on the good side of the groups we're part of.  We want to feel safe in the center of the group, not threatened on the margins.

So, in some senses we're a species of natural born people pleasers.  (As long as those people are within our group - see War, xenophobia and other downsides to group selection.)  

This helps explain our capacity for cooperation.  In Part I of this series I argued that, under the right conditions, human beings have the capacity for behavior that serves the group, even at a cost to the individual.  One "right condition" or prerequisite is a feeling of belonging within a mostly cooperative group.  If an individual feels integrated within a group and feels like the group has her back - that she will benefit by casting her individual lot with the group - then she is more likely to display group-oriented behavior.

The degree to which a person identifies with the group will affect how much he is willing to give to the group. In other words, level of commitment to a group depends on the level of one's investment and identity with that group. For example, an "online member" of an internet-based progressive organization may identify enough with "the group" to open every tenth email and occasionally call her member of Congress when asked; while a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) may identify strongly enough with "the group" to endure beatings, arrest, and worse.

The REAL March On Washington -- 10 Demands & The Original John Lewis/SNCC Speech

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sat Aug 28, 2010 at 16:30

The 10 Demands of the March on Washington

      1. Comprehensive and effective civil rights legislation from the present Congress - without compromise or fillibuster - to guarantee all Americans:
              Access to all public accommodations
              Decent housing
              Adequate and integrated education
              The right to vote
      2.Withholding of Federal funds from all programs in which discrimination exists.
      3. Desegregation of all school districts in 1963.
      4. Enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment - reducing Congressional representation of states where citizens are disfranchised.
      5. A new Executive Order banning discrimination in all housing supported by federal funds.
      6. Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when any Constitutional right is violated.
      7. A massive federal program to train and place all unemployed workers - Negro and white - on meaningful and dignified jobs at decent wages.
      8. A national minimum wage act that will give all Americans a decent standard of living. (Government surveys show that anything less than $2.00 an hour fails to do this.)
         [The minimum wage at the time of the march is $1.15/hour.]
      9. A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to include all areas of employment which are presently excluded.
     10. A federal Fair Employment Practices Act barring discrimination by federal, state, and municipal governments, and by employers, contractors, employment agencies, and trade unions.

And then there was the speech that John Lewis prepared, with massive input from so many SNCC members that it was, in effect an organizational statement--a clear indication of the motivation of the most risk-taking organization in the Civil Rights Movement.  Although a revised speech was eventually given, primarily toning down its criticism of the Kennedy Administration, this is the true, raw expression of what SNCC thought and felt at the time that it represented the cutting edge of civil rights activism that Beck & other conservatives are trying to claim ownership of today.  Here is the uncensored reality of what they are trying to obfuscate and steal:

Three Progressivisms: Trying to Find Logic in Silver's "Rationalist/Radical" Dichotomy

by: educationaction

Sat Feb 28, 2009 at 14:23

Rationalist vs. Radical

Empirical vs. Normative

Sees politics as a battle of ideas vs. Sees politics as a battle of wills

Technocratic vs. Populist

Prone to elitism vs. Prone to demagoguery

Prone to co-optation vs. Difficult to organize

Optimistic vs. Pessimistic

Conversational vs. Action Oriented

The ensuing discussion focused mostly on how progressives think, or frame the world.  I want to look, instead, at something different and potentially more important: how progressives have historically conceptualized ACTION.  

In ongoing historical work towards a book I'm calling Social Class, Social Action, and the Failures of Progressive Democracy, I argue that there are actually three distinct forms of progressivism, all drawing from different interrelated aspects of middle-class culture:  Administrative, Collaborative, and Personalist progressives.  As with any categorizations, these have their own problems, but I think reflect key historical realities.

Not only do Silver's comparisons miss this three-fold complexity, but he also mixes in working-class models of social action as well.  

After the jump I lay out these three different progressive camps, and then return to Silver's dichotomy, adding in the working-class influence as well.  (This extends on some comments I made earlier)  See my full series on "Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing" here.

Core Dilemmas of Organizing: What is Community Organizing? What isn't Community Organizing?

by: educationaction

Sat Mar 22, 2008 at 22:25

Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds.  But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.  

I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this.  There is no single effective model of "community organizing."  Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America-for good or ill.  I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.  

See the full "Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing" series here.