Georg Simmel: The Secret Society

Secrecy is part of every personal and group relationship, but in some relationships the secret "may characterize a group in its totality". We are talking here about "secret societies." In normal circumstances a secret promotes "isolation, contrast, and egoistic individualization." This applies also to the secret society, but in addition the "secret determines the reciprocal relations" among the members that share the secret.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

In a secret society, writes George Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff, the secret inspires "confidence" in its members, and this is important because the whole point of a secret society is the "protection" of invisibility. An individual can hide a secret, but not himself; a secret society -- a "conspiracy, a gang of swindlers" or even a group for "sexual orgies" -- can remain itself a secret; the group not the members is concealed.

We are not talking here about groups like the Freemasons, which merely have secret rules.

Secret societies are typically new movements just aborning, that need the protection of secrecy, and sometimes old movements about to expire or be trampled out of existence. For instance, when Christianity was new it often resorted to secrecy; when Christianity triumphed then it was pagan groups that crept into the shadows.

But the confidence factor is just as important. The difficulty of keeping a secret means that he that keeps it for my sake is trustworthy, and implies a great moral strength. Thus secret societies "offer a very impressive schooling in the moral solidarity among men."

Since the keeping of the secret is paramount for a secret society, it typically instructs "the novice in the art of silence." Simmel tells us how the Moluccans, the Pythagoreans, and the Druids did it.

Now we come to an idea about the difference between a small intimate culture and the large impersonal culture. Simmel observes that face-to-face relations promote a complete integration of the individual "with his surrounding, living group."

But once the labor of the species capitalizes its results in the form of writing, in visible works, in enduring examples, this immediate, organic flow between the actual group and its individual member is interrupted.

The connection between the individual and the group is no longer subjective, it is objective. In this notion Simmel parallels the Marxian scandal about "reification" and "commodification" but without the implication of a Fall from primitive innocence.

Simmel expands on the notion of objectivity. Writing, he writes, "is opposed to all secrecy." That is why, we may say, that we talk of "publishing" a book, for all the world to see. Once you write something down it is objective and timeless.

Given the unprotected nature of written communication, the private letter is a particularly interesting form of communication, starting with the idea that indiscretion concerning letters is considered "particularly ignoble." A letter is, on the one hand, an "objectification of its content" and on the other, because addressed from one person to another, "personal and subjective".

The secret may be merely a means to keep an association protected while it seeks material ends, or the secret may be a secret knowledge that the society protects to keep it from the masses. Either way, sociation is needed to protect the secret. But the development of a society may change the attitude towards secrecy, as in the Freemasons, which preserve the idea of secrecy while becoming indifferent towards it. Secrecy is a two way street. Some may seek it for protection; others seek isolation for protection.

Like all other forms of sociation, secret societies have hierarchy. Indeed, writes Simmel, they do it with "great finesse and thoroughness." The need to preserve secrecy demands this, and since the society has a purpose, the hierarchy, and its will to power, must be carefully designed to project power and preserve secrecy. In the degenerate forms of secret hierarchy, such as in the Freemasons, it reaches for the fantastical.

Secret societies are also famous for their devotion to ritual. In this they are probably no different than other institutions, such as "the military organization and the religious community" which aim to "claim the individual wholly" and use ritual to bind members into a total form of life within the community. Another need for the rigor of ritual is that the secret society is autonomous, a community separate from society; it must replace the stability and lawfulness of normal society with its own laws and stability.

The fact of secrecy makes the secret society interesting. For a start, it must always be a society self-consciously within another society and self-consciously apart from that society. It does not form and grow spontaneously, it is necessarily "conscious and intentional." Then, it must have secret signs so that members can make themselves know to each other -- even in another town -- without betraying the society. They need to hide their society from the general run of people, but also be able to recognize each other.

The forming of a special group, separate from society, also feeds the urge towards aristocracy. As well as satisfying the feeling of superior specialness, secrecy hides the "numerical insignificance of the ruling class" and uses it to appear "fearsome, mighty, threatening." The aristocratic individual, separate from a group, "despises all concealment", for if he were to hide himself behind a "mask" he would concede the "importance of the multitude."

It is notable that the gradual initiation of group members "by degrees" into secret societies helps preserve the secret, it provides a "buffer region against non-initiates". The separation of the secret society allows it to be completely self-motivated and egoistic, whereas non-secret associations always have to pretend to work for the good of all. The secret society also stands at one end of the inclusiveness/exclusiveness axis. Some associations include almost everyone; other exclude almost everyone, and the secret society tends towards the exclusive. The separation from the outside assists in internal cohesion because not only are loyalties focused on the inside but are not divided by other associations. Overall then, the secret society sets up a separate social entity with strong centralization, even to the extent of a secret hidden leader unknown to the members, and a de-individualization and equalization of the members. And there is the invitation to irresponsibility. A man may easily do things he would hesitate to do when a member of a secret cabal.

Needless to say, central governments hate secret societies, indeed, special associations of any kind, and it is easy for the general society to image that secrecy hides dangers. Indeed it is natural for governments to view secret societies as competitors of the state. So "every group that is politically rejected, is called a secret society."

Next: Faithfulness and Gratitude.

Suppose the Democratic Party was the Real Rich Peoples' Party?

One of the hardest chestnuts to fall from the tree is the meme that Republicans are the Party of the Rich. Everybody knows it. The college kid knows it; the big company employee knows it.

And everybody knows that insurance companies make huge profits out of the health care system. Democrats have been saying this for years and years, and everyone believes them.

And greedy bankers caused the financial crisis of 2008. And so on.

If I were Ted Cruz I would be tasking my staff to come up with ways to change all that. Because if you ask me the way to win in 2016 is to utterly discredit these old political chestnuts.

So Republicans are the party of the rich? Then how come Warren Buffett carries water for President Obama? How come there are so many billionaires contributing to the Democratic Party and nobody says anything while the only billionaires contributing to Republican and libertarian causes, the Koch Brothers, are every liberal's whipping boys? How come coal billionaire Tom Steyer is a darling of the Democrats and the environmental left?

So insurance companies are screwing health care consumers? So what do we say about the political party that passed Obamacare by filling the mouths of the insurance companies and drug companies with gold? Could we dare to say that such a party, the Democratic Party, is not the party of the little guy? That in reality the Democrats are the party of the special interests, any special interest that wants a deal from government.

So greedy bankers caused the crash of 2008. So why did the party of the little guy enact monstrous financial legislation that enshrines the principle of "too big to fail" for the big banks? And why was it that the principal opponents of the TARP legislation in 2008 were Republicans? And why do Democratic politicians shuttle in and out of big Wall Street banks like horses on a merry-go-round? Could we say that the party of big government, the Democratic Party, needs big banks more than big banks need government? Because the most important government program of all is the program to sell the government's debt through the big banks on Wall Street?

If I were running for president in 2016 the one thing I would want to get across to the US voter is that the Republican Party is the party of the middling sort of person, the kind of person that goes to work, pays their taxes, follows the rules, and obeys the laws. And all they want is for the government to stop taxing them and harassing them and bullying them and regulating them so they can put a little money aside, pay for their kids to go to college, and save up for a decent retirement.

If you ask me, President Barack Obama has basically opened a gaping hole in the Democratic defenses that should allow anyone with half a brain to drive through and utterly encircle and demoralize the two wings of the Democratic army, the rich and the dependent, in what the Germans call a Kesselschlacht, or cauldron battle.

Who will be the first to exploit this grand-strategic opportunity?

Georg Simmel: Secrecy

It's one thing to respect other peoples' privacy; it's another thing to deliberately hide stuff from other people, to go beyond privacy and modesty to deliberate secrecy, writes Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff.

The secret in this sense, the hiding of realities by negative or positive means, is one of man's greatest achievements... [T]he secret produces an immense enlargement of life; numerous contents of life cannot even emerge in the presence of full publicity. The secret offers, so to speak, the possibility of a second world alongside the manifest world; and the latter is decisively influenced by the former.

It is clear that a secret changes the relationship between two people or groups, and it is evident that the occasion of secrecy has changed in modern times: what once was public has become secret, and vice versa.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

We often think of secrecy as evil and shameful -- "the immoral hides itself for obvious reasons" -- but sometimes a "noble individual... conceals his best" for various reasons.

We can understand the use of secrecy for strategic reasons, but should not forget the fascination with secrecy, of knowing something (and thus possessing something) that others cannot. The secret seems to have "special value." This is revealed in the child's boast "I know something that you don't know" and in the fact that revealing British parliamentary discussions used to be a criminal offence. The converse is true: people often think there is some mystery in "superior persons" and "superior achievements;" they long to know their secret ingredient.

How does a secret get revealed? Often enough, in betrayal, when the secret is "dissolved." In consequence there is a constant tension in secrecy, where "the external danger of being discovered" is woven with an internal angst, the fear of being discovered. There is, therefore, in the arc of every secret, a constant interplay between "concealing and revealing."

The question of secrecy is nowhere more revealing than in the modern society of individualism and the money economy. It used to be that few secrets were possible in the small face-to-face community, but the secrets of government as to debts, taxes, and the armed forces were absolute. Today, in the large money economy, secrets are everywhere. Personal wealth is easy to hide, its abstractness and complications make is hard to understand, and its "effect-at-a-distance" allows its "complete withdrawal" from local eyes. And personal privacy has become a social good.  Meanwhile public affairs are supposed to be transparent on the view that "everybody should know the events and circumstances that concern him."

Secrecy "operates as an adorning possession". A "noteworthy person" exists partly in what is concealed. And yet the function of physical adornment is "to lead the eyes of others upon the adorned" in the same way as a secret makes someone special.

Next: The Secret Society.

Yes, What DO Women Want?

A century ago, German sociologist Georg Simmel noted that the emergence of women into the public square was just the beginning. The public square had been created by men for men. But we would have to wait to find out what women would do to adapt it to a more "feminine sensibility."

With all the flap over the "rape culture" on campus, culminating in the fantastical Rolling Stone story on gang rape in a frat house at the University of Virginia, and the flap over rape allegations in Lena Dunham's autobiography, the question arises anew: "What do women want?"

At mid 20th century, Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex told us that the ideal was the "independent woman." And Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique told us that women were dying of boredom out in the suburbs. But what did women really want?

The problem is that there is a difference between what women want and what left-wing activists say they want.

And the problem with left-wing activists -- and indeed anyone doing "activism" -- is that all questions are reduced to politics. But politics is not culture; politics is the pursuit of power. It's hard to know how politics is going to deal successfully with a "rape culture".

The UVA scandal has taught us a lot. It seems that "Jackie," after refusing to report a sexual assault in September 2012, then eventually got to talk to the Dean of Students and then got involved in sexual assault support groups, and got to improve her story, as people do over time. Unfortunately, the sexual assault support groups are really activist groups involved in "doing something" about the campus "rape culture" and supporting the push by the Obama administration to force universities to implement administrative tribunals to deal with sexual assault accusations on campus.

Here's my take. No good will come of politicizing the abusive treatment of young college women. This is not a political problem that can be solved by legislating liberal morality. It is a cultural problem. The problem is: how do we develop a consensus of cultural rules for relations between the sexes after the invention of the Pill and the 1960s sexual revolution? Because it seems pretty obvious that the sexual revolution has encouraged young men to treat young women like meat. And it seems to prod young women into getting drunk enough so that they can lower their inhibitions enough to do the "hook-up" thing when they want to score some desirable male.

The only problem is that young women get really angry when their drunken sexual experiences lead to nothing but heartache. So they use the current non-judicial administrative system to punish the young men that took advantage of them. Or their mothers do it for them.

Back in the Sixties we were told to abolish the "parietal" system in which colleges took over the supervision of adult children from parents. If a young man were mature enough to go to Vietnam, we were told, he was mature enough to conduct his sexual life without parental supervision.

Obviously we are now seeing a revival of the idea that colleges have a parental responsibility for the young people enrolled there. And, of course, the left-wing activism culture encourages the idea that young women are "victims" and not the independent women imagined by Simone de Beauvoir. The left-wing culture requires victims for its political mechanics to work; there must be victims or there is nothing for politics to do. But victimhood reduces young women to the status of "special snowflakes" that need to get together to "share" their stories of abuse and plan "protests" to change the campus "rape culture" and implement administrative processes to act for them when they are abused.

What's needed, of course, is for us all to develop a new culture of responsibility where sex is concerned. We need a consensus on what is acceptable behavior and we need young men and women to propagate that culture by the age-old methods of shame and guilt, naming and shaming, for those that violate the consensus. We don't need more campus bureaucrats and more interventions by federal Title IX bureaucrats and activists. We need a new self-regulating culture.

This is not that hard. Humans are social animals that naturally and instinctively do what the culture expects of them.

Right now the culture expects students to do the "hook-up" culture, get drunk and do things they'll regret. Then it expects them to use the system to find someone to punish for the heartache of rejection. Thanks, liberals, we needed that.

So now we must build a new culture. But first things will have to get worse. Because there is nobody at our universities except foolish liberals, and the only thing liberals know how to do is politics.

But the "rape culture" isn't a political problem; it's a cultural problem, the problem of "what do women want" now that we have thoroughly destroyed the old culture of "gentleman" and "nice girls" and we haven't yet succeeded in replacing it with anything that works.

Georg Simmel: Types of Relationships by Reciprocal Knowledge

The thing about the "other" is that you don't know everything about him, and you don't want to know. And even in groups, people don't know everything about each other. So Georg Simmel in The Sociology of Georg Simmel translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff devotes a chapter to the different kinds of groups and relationships between members of the groups.

Back to start: The Unknown Sociologist.

One type of group where the members know very little about each other is a political interest group. The members make monetary contributions to the group, but they are "psychologically anonymous" to each other. They don't need to know each other's personality; they don't want to know. This "increasing objectivization" is characteristic of our age.

This question of incomplete knowledge about other people in this objectivizing age raises the issue of "confidence" in other people. "[C]onfidence is intermediate between knowledge and ignorance about a man." If you know everything about a person you don't need confidence; if you know nothing, forget it. This is characteristic about the whole of modern society; we know only what we need to know about another party, whether in business, in scholarship, in politics. We only need to know what we "have to know for the sake of the relationship [we] wish to enter."

The point is that in modern society, the personal and the subjective is often replaced by the objective, even in personal relationships where "among educated strata" people relate only as "acquaintances." We know only what is appropriate to know about the other, and the deliberate "staying away" from other knowledge about someone is termed "discretion." There is a boundary, different with different people, beyond which we do not go. The question is what "the individual must know" about the other: the businessman in a long-term contract; the master employing a servant, the "superior who advances a subordinate." The telling opposite of discretion is indiscretion, the violation of boundaries, by betraying a secret thought, or prying into other peoples' lives, or taking advantage of the "slips and helplessnesses of the other."

This relationship at a distance clearly defines modern friendship and marriage. Although they would seem to require total immersion in the other in fact the relationship is usually differentiated. Maybe one friendship is based on affection, another on intellectual aspects, or religion. Such relationships require that people do not look beyond their mutual spheres of interest, in observance of appropriate discretion. In modern marriage, the question of confidence and discretion is difficult, because modern marriage is not a fixed "social and economic institution" but more freely erotic.  Of course, the "conventional or material motive" is still strong, but "the sociological idea of modern marriage is the commonness of all life-contents". A marriage may result in a happy and vital union, or the opposite when anticipated unity is disappointed. In fact, despite the idea of complete union, marriage, like other relationships in the modern age, needs "only a certain proportion of truth and error... and a certain proportion of distinctness and indistinctness in the image of our life-elements." We can give only what the other "may accept" and indistinctness and unclarity may be needed to keep mutual attractiveness alive. Confidence and discretion are needed to make modern marriage work.

Next: Secrecy

No, Harvard Students. You are the Oppressors

I've been taking a class in philosophy at our local flagship state university, the University of Washington. And one of the takeaways was that the two most talkative women in the class seemed to equate politics with protest marches.

I never got to talk to them about this; but I can guess where is comes from. Social Justice 101. And my suspicion was confirmed when Harvard students demanded in an open letter the postponement of finals exams.  Because social justice.

“Like many across the country,” its authors claim, students “are traumatized” and “visibly distressed” — to the extent that there is now a “palpable anguish looming over campus.” The “national crisis” that has been provoked by the cases of Garner and Brown, they argue, has left them with no choice but to “stand for justice rather than sit and prepare for exams.”

This is a joke. It assumes the world-view that the world is composed of oppressors, oppressed, and champions of the oppressed. So Harvard students, in doing the Lord's work of championing the oppressed would be oppressed by having to take their finals on time.

No, Harvard. Because the progressive world view, of oppressors, oppressed, and champions of the oppressed is a lie. It is no less a lie than Marx's world view in 1848 that the world was composed of bourgeois, proletarians, and educated youth.

In fact, in today's world there is no "white privilege." There is only "liberal privilege." The only "micro-aggression" is the aggression that lefties use against their chosen opponents. "Check your privilege" can only apply to liberals. Because conservatives don't got none.

The oppressor/oppressed world view is no less a lie than the Gruberist world view, that there are greedy corporations, working people, and an educated elite that's needed to legislate government programs to protect the people from the robber barons and the racists and sexists.

Here's another world view. There's the unjust liberal ruling class, assisted by its bribed apologists in the universities and the government bureaucracies and the activist groups. Then there are the liberal clients living on government benefits and/or lifetime government jobs. Then there is the ordinary middle class, trying to make a life obeying the law, going to work, following the rules while being harassed by the ruling class and its paid lackeys.

And you, Harvard students, are the bribed apologists and paid lackeys of the ruling class. In case you didn't recognize yourselves. That's why you went to Harvard: to get the connections you need to make a career in the ruling class. Like Jonathan Gruber.

But my favorite world view is simply this: There's a creative class, that transforms the world with surprises, including knowledge, technology, products and services, and social change. There's a responsible class, that tries to live as responsible individuals, serving itself by serving others. And there's a victim class, that experiences itself as subordinate and helpless victims of the tides of power and change. Each of these three classes has its good side and its bad side. The creatives can transform the world with good ideas or bad ideas. The responsible middle class can responsibly develop the ideas of the creatives for good or for evil. The victims can be genuinely suffering from no fault of their own or they could be gaming the system.

People of good will get together and try to tease out the good from the evil, knowing that it's not easy. That's because what I may think of as good another might think of as evil.

But there's one thing that's helpful in deciding who to believe and who to distrust. Anyone that's proposing a new government program ought to be distrusted until they can prove their good faith. Why is that? It's because when you propose a government program, say on curbing the "rape culture" on campus, you are saying that the current system and culture has failed. So government force is needed. And government force means, as we learned in the Eric Garner case, that deadly force may be used. The question is: is this new application of government force worth the death of even one person?

The great thing about social animals is that they have found ways to reduce the use of force. They divide up the world into "us" and "them". For "us" force is not required, only the social cues of shame and guilt, kindness and love. For "them" of course, we have to be on our guard.

What the social justice warriors are doing is expanding the zone of "them" and the application of force. That's weird, because global international capitalism is a system that expands the boundaries of "us" almost to the whole world, and as this cultural revolution has expanded across the world it has reduced the incidence of violent death by about an order of magnitude.

Yet for 150 years the lefties of the world have worked themselves to the bone trying to roll back this beneficial system.

So what do the lefties and the Grubers and the Harvard students really want? They want the thrill of the hunt. They want to be the men with guns, the judges in their robes, the priests at the sacrificial altar. They want to be the guys ordered to eliminate the evil and the hateful from this world. They want power, and power, according to Henry Kissinger, is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Of course, anyone with power is automatically an oppressor. Or do social-justice warriors get a papal indulgence on that? Because they are using power on behalf of the oppressed? Or is there some other reason?

Back to the Solid South

Last Saturday, with the defeat of Sen. Mary Landrieu in a runoff election in Louisiana, the South lost its last Democratic Senator.

That's not surprising, since the South is racist and couldn't be expected to vote for a Democrat anyway. Because racism. Lots of liberals are writing angry screeds about this, in the aftermath of Landrieu's defeat, here and here.

It's the number one article of faith among liberals. Here's how the Narrative goes: President Johnson signed the civil rights acts of the 1960s sighing that Democrats had lost the South for a generation. Then Richard Nixon, courtesy of Pat Buchanan, formulated a Southern Strategy to court white southern voters angered by the end of Jim Crow. Therefore Republicans are racists.

This is the point where a conservative writer typically declares: No We're Not!

But let's face it; there's no defense from the charge of racism, so let's not even try. Let us merely invoke German sociologist Georg Simmel, who wrote that while people appealed to as individuals are intelligent and evolved, in the mass they can only be appealed to in their basest instincts. That's why politics is always about race and identity and ethnicity and loot and free stuff.

So let us stipulate that all Republicans and white southerners are racists, sexists, homophobes. Then what?

Then, does it really make political sense that liberals and Democrats make such a big deal about it? Should Democrats make a point of telling conservative white southerners that they are pond scum?

Let's turn it around. Republicans are often accused of hating, or at least writing off, African Americans. A perennial op-ed topic is declaring the need for the Republican Party to conduct "outreach" to African Americans that vote 90 percent for Democrats. Ditto women and Hispanics. The moral is that a political party exists to win elections; it is political malpractice to write off any group of voters as unreachable.

So why is it OK for Democrats to put white southern voters beyond the Pale? Or white working-class voters. Or white Christian voters?

Back in 2006 the wily Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) recruited a bunch of Democratic candidates and ran them for the US Senate. He carefully chose moderates, people with military service, in order to appeal to red-state voters. In short, he decided to court white middle-class voters. He was so successful that the Dems won the Senate in 2006, increased their majority in 2008, and used those moderate votes to ram Obamacare down our throats in 2009-10.

Ahem. Maybe, Chuck, it would have been a good idea not to sacrifice those moderates as cannon fodder in the Big Push for universal health care, as you now seem to recognize. In your speech to the National Press Club on November 25, 2014 you recognized that most Americans already had health insurance and that the uninsured rarely voted. You recognized that politically, Obamacare had a lot of potential downside and precious little upside. And it's not as if HillaryCare, in 1993-94, was wildly popular.

But my basic point is this. If it's considered to be stupid for Republicans not to reach out to blacks, women and minorities, why is it not considered to be stupid for Democrats to write off the white South and stigmatize them as racists? Not to mention the white working class, the white middle class, white Christians, and white Tea Partiers?

I know that politics is the art of division, but isn't that taking division a bit too far?

In fact, why does it make sense for liberals and Democrats to keep calling anyone that doesn't agree with them racists, sexists, homophobes and bigots?

Just asking.