Georg Simmel and the Strength to Contemplate “Racial” Chaos

                  One theme of this blog is that the great sociologists still offer provocative and important insights about everyday life. In this case, one of Simmel’s most brilliant essays –How Is Society Possible? – inadvertently tells us how to achieve revolutionary social change.

     Let’s start with the word possible. Simmel never discussed justice, equity or the utopias forecast by a Comte or a Marx. Simmel wanted to know what make life predictable. How did a person from New York successfully navigate a variety of encounters with a person from Kansas? In addition, Simmel focused on social glue like age norms. You married at one age and retired at another. Age norms helped make society possible because they offered shared recipes for living that extended from birth to death.

   To achieve this level of social order Simmel stressed “generalizations”. A contemporary synonym is social identities or labels but, whatever word you choose, Simmel argued that society was absolutely impossible without the generalizations that, “like a veil, hid my uniqueness as it simultaneously gave it a new form.” In a sort of sociological challenge, Simmel said to try and talk about anyone without, almost immediately adding a culturally based generalization. This is Bob, my brother. This is Kathy, my colleague. This is Barak Obama. He is a Senator, a Democrat, black, a husband, a father, a son and a Presidential candidate.

   For Simmel the generalizations function like storehouses of cultural knowledge. At a preconscious level, they tell us –and others- how to think and act in an indefinite number of social situations. To the extent that the generalizations mean the same thing to me that they mean to you, society is not only possible, it is as predictable as the sun in the Caribbean. Lack a consensus and, using another generalization, you can be as unwanted as a Pakistani in New York. The Pakistani may be darker than most African Americans but he or she is not black. America lacks a consensus “racial” generalization for South Asians so they become a “none of the above”. They are racial nothings; it is not a pretty generalization but it provides a modicum of social order until Americans make up their minds about South Asians, Arabs and other racial “misfits”.

   Besides generalizations, society is possible because people are simultaneously “inside of it” and “outside of it”. If only because any society includes contradictory or competing information, people have the chance to question the received generalizations. Simmel called this our “extra social” nature and it does in fact make change possible. When women used two pintsized letters and a period to create a new generalization –the word Ms. - they began a revolution whose ripple effects are almost endless. Simmel said this helped make society possible because it offered a way to include change in an evolving society. Thus, to the extent that contemporary men grasp and accept the meanings implied by Ms., social interaction is once again both predictable and possible.

   Simmel added one last insight. Never expect perfect harmony. But also understand that “individuality finds its place in the structure of generality, and, furthermore, that in spite of the unpredictable character of individuality, this structure is laid out as it were, for individuality and its functions.” Any society offered many thousands of recipes for living; from how to eat, to who we could and not marry. Follow the rules and a society can even manage for, say four hundred years, to define groups of people by what divides them; for whites and blacks the structure is laid out before they are born and as long as we use the approved generalizations, the structure is maintained and society is possible.

      To repeat, Simmel never discussed issues of justice, equity or freedom. But, since this is a blog about “race” and ethnicity we must discuss those issues. What American society does is use a series of generalizations –race, white, black, person of color, nonwhite- to positively and negatively define the “racial” status of everyone on earth. As Albert Murray noted, the generalization nonwhite contains all the assumptions of white supremacy and segregation. White is the designer original and all the “nons” are nothing but God’s knockoffs. Nonwhite is a horrible generalization and Simmel tells us what is necessary to abolish it.

   We must do nothing less than make society utterly impossible. Since the “racial” generalizations cited are vital storehouses of societal knowledge, this is a revolution at the deepest levels of everyday interaction. It invites chaos because, if another person uses these generalizations, we will refuse to abide by the rules of the game. For example, if anyone calls me white, I will not accept that generalization. I try to be polite and empathetic but I nevertheless stress that white people do not exist and the proof is in the pudding. Look in the mirror and white people are actually beige or light brown.

    Some people call me “impossible”. But, that is exactly my intention. Because Simmel is correct about what makes society possible, the best way to achieve serious yet peaceful social change is to reject poisonous generalizations like white and black and embrace chaos until we achieve a new consensus rooted in new generalizations. As Simmel stressed, society is impossible without generalizations that, like a veil, hide our individuality. We are stuck with the need for generalizations but, because of our extra social natures, we are not stuck with nonsense and hate. Race, white, black, people of color and nonwhite can be eliminated if we agree not to use them. Each of us is an “impossible” revolutionary if we vote for chaos and agree to have a national debate about the conscious and deliberate creation of new generalizations that will define three hundred million people by what unites us rather than by what divides us.

   Feminists paved the way. Without reading Simmel, they invented a new generalization that demands that men stop being men in the traditional sense of that social identity.

   So, let’s use feminists as role models. Let’s make society impossible and willingly contemplate “racial” chaos because, as Simmel shows, that is the only way to destroy the old order and create a new one.