THE FETISH OF POWER INEQUITIES

Human relations cannot be reduced to power alone

Viewing the relations between social groups primarily through the lens of power relations has become a fetish of our times. There are those who possess power over others and those who are the powerless and the oppressed. The privileged and the unprivileged. This is true enough.

But this take on reality has congealed into a doctrine and has become dogmatized. It is a political slant that comes primarily from the left. It has become a dominant vantage point from which people are judged, and too often severely excoriated. It has become the contemporary touchstone of political correctness, and those who fail to see political realities through this lens can fall victim to the cancel culture. And they do. It is not always clear who the judges are, but they flourish especially on social media and their influence has permeated the thought of many who identify themselves as progressives

This phenomenon touches me personally in that I have identified myself as a leftist and progressive for more than half a century, yet this is a progressivism I cannot recognize. It induces feelings of estrangement from my political home, and my political home is central to my identity.

These may sound like fighting words so I need to unpack what I mean. In the first instance, to affirm the inequalities of power that come with their commensurate privileges, is nothing new. In fact it is ubiquitous. I contend that all human relations and all encounters are marked by differentials of power. They may be subtle and hidden, perhaps not even conscious, but they are always present. It is part of the existential human condition, ineluctable and inescapable. But if we leave matters there our take on reality remains woefully deficient. That is my point which I will develop further on.

My critique is not that power inequities don't exist, but that their role in understanding social and human relations has become reified and, again, turned into a dogma. In the minds of some this binary is all that counts. This viewpoint becomes the template around which to frame one's moral universe and the sole understanding from which political criticism and activism are launched. There is no place for complexity.

Clearly this view is most readily applied to the politics of race and gender, which needless to say has grown divisive, fraught and militant in our time. Here I need to be clear. I firmly believe in the pervasiveness of institutionalized racism that has endured and has corrupted the landscape from America's earliest years. We need to understand it and struggle to undo it in the name of equality and justice.

In addition, patriarchy has been a reality since the beginning of time in this country and around the globe. There is no doubt that women have made great progress in the past 50 years. My mother was unusual in that she was a college graduate, Hunter, class of 1933. But in concert with the mores and opportunities of the period, my mom did not do a great deal with her education. She worked for several years as a bookkeeper at the Gotham Book Mart, a quaint shop in midtown Manhattan. After that, she lived her life as a housewife raising my brother and me until her untimely death in 1960. She did not live to experience the emergence of the modern feminist movement.

Today, by contrast, there are more women than men enrolled in America's law and medical schools. Nevertheless, despite great progress women have experienced, I would argue as a grand conclusion that in our society authority and leadership overall remain the possessions of men. Power inequity endures as a salient and consequential reality in gender as well as race relations.

But here is my problem: Understanding the political world from the overbearing perspective of power inequities is reductionistic, simplistic, anti-intellectual, and to the extent that it is proffered as the exclusive vehicle by which to understand the relations among people, it is wrong. Its fallacy is that it rides roughshod over nuance, subtlety, complexity, ambiguity, that is, the multifarious dynamics which comprise social and political realities. The distribution of power among groups is of critical importance, but it not the sole reality that comprises human interactions.

In my view, the dogma that reduces politics to the binaries of power is a lingering vestige of Marxist ideology. For Karl Marx, history is inexorably pushed forward by the dynamics of class struggle. The dynamics of class oppression, that is power inequity writ large engenders conflict that will end in the inevitable emergence of communism and a classless society. Marx contended that his historical materialism was rooted in fact and was an absolute law, in short, it is scientific. Marxism has run its course, but the template of power, privilege, the oppressor and the oppressed, remain salient in our current politics.

But is this reading of political dynamics adequate? A while back I reread a text that had caught my imagination when I was politically coming of age in the 1960s. It was an intriguing debate between the Soviet Marxist, Leon Trotsky, and the American liberal philosopher, John Dewey. Their debate was brought together in a brief volume entitled “Their Morals and Ours.”

Dewey felt that Trotsky was brilliant and indeed he was. Not only was he a major theoretician of the Russian Revolution, and commander of the Red army, but a literary critic and broad ranging intellectual. Dewey was eager to engage him in debate because he recognized that Trotsky was the first thinker to elaborate a Marxist theory of morality.

In briefest terms, for Trotsky, the ultimate goal of society is liberation over the inhibiting powers of nature and the oppression of man over man. Moreover, the class struggle is an ironclad law of history and whatever advances the class struggle is good. For Trotsky the class struggle is “the law of laws.” This, by application, enabled Trotsky to employ terror as a political means without any constraint of conscience.

Trotsky's assertion of the class struggle as the sole means of seeking human liberation, Dewey believed, revealed Trotsky to be a dogmatist and a fanatic. For Dewey, the fallacy in Trotsky's moral reasoning is that in his dogmatizing the class struggle, Trotsky was obviating the reality that there may be many other vehicles that would lead to human liberation. For Dewey, struggle between classes holding differentials of power may indeed be a way by which society advances, but as a liberal and pragmatist Dewey strongly believed that one has to closely look at facts and be willing to test various approaches to see which work in achieving one's ends. It was Dewey's conclusion that not solely struggle, but cooperation among people is a potent engine of social progress. My sympathies lie with Dewey. Power inequity and the pursuant conflict is not the sole reality nor vehicle by which change takes place.

The point I am reaching for is that reality is complex and not reducible to an understanding of binary relations of power that exclude other dynamics. I want to evoke some contemporary examples.

In the realm of race relations, it is often noted that the reality of institutionalized racism ensures that even the most destitute Caucasian can take solace in the reality that he or she remains higher on the social ladder than Blacks. One can sustain one's feelings of superiority because there always remains someone one can look down to. Institutionally, I concur that this is true.

But human beings do not exist solely within the realm of institutional hierarchies. Take for example the middle class African-American professional who holds a successful position in a corporation or is a university professor. Compare that person with a 60 year-old white male who is chronically ill, cannot work and lives close to subsistence. This person, all too common in our society, has to make the agonizing choice between paying his rent and purchasing the medication he needs to relieve his pain or ensure that his health is at least stabilized. On the institutional level, we can conclude that this Causasian individual sustains the status of white privilege. But from the subjective standpoint such privilege, I contend, is at least arguable. Certainly it will do little political good to try to convince such a disadvantaged person for whom survival is a daily struggle that he is, in effect, privileged. In his world it is an abstraction. My sole point, again, is that reality is complex and not reducible to simple political formulations however initially appealing.

I draw an example from my personal experience. I have had a long relationship with Columbia University. I began my graduate work at Columbia in 1976 and received my three graduate degrees from Columbia, two masters and my Ph.D.

For the past 20 years I have taught human rights in Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. More specifically, I teach in the Institute for the Study of Human Rights. The Institute enables students to attain a free standing masters degree in human rights, and this is the program in which I teach.

For inexplicable reasons, human rights at Columbia is a female-majoritarian field. Of the approximately 900 students I have taught, close to 90 percent have been young women. Last year, it finally happened; there were 16 people in my classroom and I was the only male.

The power inequities in academia are very palpable. And unlike the Ethical Society. where I also work, by contrast the classroom is also a very charged environment. My students want something from me very badly, and, of course, that is superior grades and positive recommendations. My evaluation may be a determining factor as to whether they are accepted to law school or not, whether they receive a fellowship they seek or land the job they aspire to.

The dynamics of power, the power inequities, defining my relations to my students seem stark and clear. I have the power, and hence the privilege and they don't. But I contend that the reality is not so simple or clear. In the first instance, if I offend or students have a problem with me, they can bring their concerns to a dean or an office that receives student complaints about faculty members. In addition, at semester's end students are invited to submit evaluations of their professors. Those evaluations can make significant difference with regard to my professional status.

There are more subtle dynamics as well. At the graduate level it is not unusual for students to be more knowledgeable in their areas of specialization than their professors. While my general range of knowledge is often greater, and my personal experience especially is (I like say that what is history for them is for me memory) some of my students are truly brilliant, which can only evoke my admiration and respect. The respect they command is a form of power, subtle though it may be. If not in a formal and institutional way, the power I wield is partially offset by their intellectual maturity, their accomplishments (some come with very impressive resumes) and by their personal attributes that make powerful impressions. In subtle ways who they are and how they express themselves bear influence on how I am compelled to treat them. Power is not uni-directional but flows along a two-way street.

My point is that the dynamics of power are diverse, subtle and move in several directions. They are not summed up along the hard lines of structural, merely binary inequities. And while we are at it, let’s not forget the presence and power of love, compassion and service to others.

As I get older I increasingly hold to a pluralistic view of reality. I abjure simplistic reductionisms. I believe we are best and most intelligently served by engaging life with an appreciation for detail and nuance, subtlety and even ambiguity. Things are often not as they appear. By accepting the notion that often complexity abides, we are more prone to avoid the arrogance of certitude. We can avoid falling into rigid, ideological and dogmatic modes of thought.

Aided by this orientation to life we can leave ourselves more open to the flow of ideas, to dialogue and cooperation. We can avoid drawing thick lines between ourselves and others and by so doing bring more understanding, benevolence and even peace to a social environment that is badly fractured and divided.