Status Claims and Cultural Conflicts

Status Claims and Cultural Conflicts: The Genesis of Morality Policy

by Raymond Tatalovich and T. Alexander Smith

Morality policy is fast emerging as the focal point for a new research agenda in policy studies. Two research strains are readily identifiable, one that builds upon Theodore J. Lowi’s policy typology and is grounded in case studies and another where the intellectual legacy stems from Kenneth J. Meier and derives quantitative models using cross-sectional statistics. The academic cross-fertilization from these two strains has fueled the popularity of morality policy as a leading indicator of post-materialist politics. Smith and Tatalovich are devotees of Lowi, who a decade ago acknowledged that moralism can radicalize any type of public policy. Meier has groomed many influential scholars, notably Christopher Mooney and Donald Haider-Markel, but nobody thus far has explained why morality policy has surfaced now, at this juncture in history. That is our purpose in this essay, a piece of our larger comparative project on morality policy (Smith and Tatalovich, FORTHCOMING).

Let us preview our line of argument. The core to understanding morality policy is social status–not class. However the implications of status politics in the sociology of the 1950s and now, with multiculturalism, have been defined through the prism of ideology. Previously, sociological theory used “status” to explain right-wing behavior; today critical social philosophy uses status deprivation as a means to promote a left-wing moral imperative. Both these literatures, therefore, pose difficulty for anybody seeking an analytically neutral tool for studying morality policy.

In point of fact, the concept of “status anxiety” knows no special political and ideological boundaries. If status anxiety leads to preservationist politics on the right, then most assuredly status anxiety excites political demands for equalization from the left. What is commonly termed “identity politics” are essentially campaigns by “victim” groups–women, racial and ethnic minorities, homosexuals, and indigenous peoples–to elevate their social status by gaining political recognition and legal rights as members of ascribed groups, not as autonomous individuals. Obviously it matters whether a group is super-ordinate or sub-ordinate in the social hierarchy, so status anxiety should be applied neutrally as an analytical tool rather than viewed through an ideological prism. In order to ground status within a more value-free framework of analysis, our choice is “cultural theory” as originated by the English anthropologist Mary Douglas and imported to the United States by the late Aaron Wildavsky.

Status in Society

Alexis de Tocqueville (1945: 208-208) observed that “democratic institutions strongly tend to promote the feeling of envy in the human heart” insofar as they “awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy.” But it was Max Weber who gave the concept of status sociological precision. Weber considered Marx's singular emphasis on economic structures as too extreme, believing that status may be no less significant for social relations than class conflict was to the means of production (Nisbet, 1966).

When custom and tradition reign supreme, status, class, and social roles will be clearly defined, so moral conflicts do not loom large. But when status positions and social roles are uncertain, there exists a strong propensity for individuals and groups to search for modes of self-expression calculated to establish a secure identity. In postmodern societies this drive is particularly evident. Rapid social and economic mobility erode the influence of family, neighborhood, church, and other structures, in the process liberating the individual to a far greater extent than was previously possible. The restlessness and frustration that accompany this demand for personal self-expression provide fodder for a growth in the number of status claimants, including disputes about alternative cultural styles of life, and issues revolving around questions of race, ethnicity, gender and other group concerns.

What, therefore, is status identification? It is a two-way street of interpersonal communications in which claims to honor and standing come from one side and their bestowals come from the other (Mills, 1963). From this perspective, "identity" establishes what the person is and where he or she is situated in terms of others (Stone, 1962: 87-95). In our world, however, class, status, and occupational roles do not always send clear messages, so the roles we play and the reciprocal expectations upon which they are established may be contradictory and incompatible than in traditional, hierarchically ordered societies. Competition and conflict necessarily expand under modern "democratic" conditions, and debates about how status ought to be allocated and the types of conduct, morals, and ideas deemed acceptable are perceived as challenges to the psyche. After all, the growth in incomes has enabled ever greater numbers to play the status game. Whatever their benefits, occupational complexity, an intricate division of labor, large private and public bureaucracy, and abundant leisure create fertile soil for an explosion in demands for status and recognition.

Extremism as Status Politics on the Right

The rise of fascist movements during the inter-war period undoubtedly perplexed many Europeans, and the mass appeal of right-wing parties in Italy, Germany, and elsewhere demanded an explanation. The answer, they believed, lay in the concept of mass society. A mass society was an impersonal social order in which groups that traditionally mediate between the individual and the state no longer supplied sufficient social and moral support for increasingly alienated and isolated individuals (Kornhauser, 1959; Arendt, 1951; Fromm, 1941; Lederer, 1940; Ortega Y Gasset, 1932). Once fascism was defeated, it did not take long before scholars extended the concepts of "mass man" and status anxiety to extremist movements elsewhere. Here the catalyst was Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), whose sudden rise was read as confirmation of "massification" tendencies.

The New American Right, edited by Daniel Bell (1955) was an important event in this intellectual history. In a stinging commentary, historian Richard Hofstadter (1955: 39, 41-42) condemned the “new right” as being a "revolt" of rootless, paranoid "pseudo-conservatives" involved in a "peculiar scramble for status and its peculiar search for secure identity." According to Hofstadter, the status anxiety of WASPs stemmed from the large influx of foreigners from southern and eastern Europe, whose different languages and behaviors aroused their fears that the predominant WASP culture was threatened. Yet ironically the WASPs were joined in supporting McCarthy by recent immigrants and, again, the sociological answer was the search for identity. The more recent German and Irish immigrants, mainly Catholics, were obsessed with improving their status in America by proving themselves every bit as patriotic as the earlycomers (Hofstadter, 1955: 44).

The most systematic effort to link status frustration to the political right was made by Lipset and Raab (1970) fifteen years later. “New areas, new industries, new migrant groups, new ethnic groups, have continually encroached upon the old as important and influential," observed Lipset and Raab, who make it plain that the resistance to modern conditions was to be found on the political right. Thus, they equated right-wing status “preservation” in terms of “maintaining or narrowing lines of power and privilege” whereas the left-wing was equated with “innovation” for its “broadening lines of power and privilege.” While Lipset and Raab were aware that another “ideological axis ranged between “individualistic...at one pole and statist at the other” (commonly termed conservative-liberal), they nonetheless believed that this economic dimension was secondary because “[i]t is the axis of preservation which most essentially and invariably distinguishes ‘Left Wing’ from ‘Right Wing’” (Lipset and Raab, 1970: 24, 19-20). Even in contemporary sociological theory “right-wing movements” are conceptualized as “social movements whose stated goals are to maintain structures of order, status, honor, or traditional social differences or values” as compared to left-wing movements which seek “greater equality or political participation”(Lo, 1982: 111-112).

This provocative view of status anxiety was time-bound as well as culture-bound, since few academics pursued that paradigm. Historian John Higham (1958) had linked nativist outbursts to “status rivalries” and sociologists later applied “status anxiety” to counter-movements such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Gusfield, 1963), anti-pornography campaigns (Zurcher and Kirkpatrick, 1976; Zurcher, Cushing, and Bowman, 1971), opposition to the proposed women’s Equal Rights Amendment (Scott, 1985) and secularized education (Page and Clelland, 1978), as well as support for prayer in public schools (Moen, 1984). Abortion, sociologist Kristin Luker (1984: 193, 214) claimed, is “a referendum on the place and meaning of motherhood” that involves fundamentally unlike pro-choice or pro-life “world views,” and for pro-life women “to accept contraception or abortion would devalue the one secure resource left to these women: the private world of home and hearth.” Also “status discontent proved to be a significant predictor of orientation to the Christian Right,” concluded Wald, Owen, and Hill (1989: 13-14).

If abortion divides women, then arguably gun control separates men from women as another issue worthy of analysis. Although firearms number in the hundreds of millions (one-fourth of all households owns a gun) and majorities of Americans say they favor gun controls, what typifies the hard-core gun fanatics apart from their NRA membership is that the American “gun culture” is a western, rural, and southern phenomenon (with a strong dose of masculinity thrown in). In their own minds, activists like Charleton Heston must feel that their “lifestyle” is under attack by modernity as much as by liberal Democrats and the media.

Identity as Status Politics on the Left

It was Hegel’s (1977: chapter 4) conception of a “struggle for recognition” that underpins contemporary critical social philosophy (Honneth, 1995: xiv). Hegel employed a dialectic between master and servant to show that “self-consciousness” depends, explains Herbert Marcuse (1954: 114-115), on “association with other individuals” but that relationship “is by no means one of harmonious co-operation between equally free individuals” but “rather a ‘life-and-death struggle’ between essentially unequal individuals” with the consequence that “[f]ighting out the battle is the only way man can come to self-consciousness, that is, to the knowledge of his potentialities and to the freedom of their realization.” To simplify this thesis, no person’s identity is inherent but is defined by his or her relationships in society. There can be no master without a servant; there can be no servant without a master. Marx came to view this Hegelian struggle in economic terms, represented by “class” interests, but what motivates the contemporary understanding of Hegel is the “status” relations between people in higher or lower social positions.

Critical social philosophers thus contend that social justice requires more than a fair distribution of material goods. According to Canadian political scientist Charles Taylor, “misrecognition shows not just a lack of due respect. It can inflict a grievous wound, saddling its victims with a crippling self-hatred. Due recognition is not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.” The irreducible philosophical principle of universal dignity drives his argument as Taylor (1992: 26-27) believes that “this concept of dignity is the only one compatible with a democratic society” and, as such, replaces the pre-modern concept of “honor” in hierarchical societies. Says Iris Marion Young (1990: 172), an American feminist, the victimized are “[g]roups experiencing cultural imperialism [that] have found themselves objectified and marked with a devalued essence from the outside, by a dominant culture they are excluded from making” or shaping. Similar assumptions guided a study of gay rights in the United States insofar as “[i]dentity politics is rooted in groups based on ‘race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality’ rather than the traditional group divisions associated with politics–economic classes, interest groups, industries, labor unions, and the like” (Button, Rienzo, and Wald, 1997: 5).

While “status” will not entirely displace “class,” it is anticipated that “status...becomes more rather than less significant in the development of the political systems of late capitalism” by being an essential “part of the process of political mobilization, whereby groups, enjoying relative levels of privilege or disprivilege, constantly organize in the interests of maintaining or improving their position within society” (Holton and Turner, 1989: 145-146). One profound historical difference reflects the feudalistic legacy of Europe against the lack of a feudal tradition in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Its significance is that the social order in these white colonial settler societies “was inevitably bound up with racial conflict, ethnic differences, and the problem of national identity, given the[ir] extreme cultural variation...Hence, in these societies the problem of order was debated in the context of the problems associated with the melting pot, the notion of a mosaic society, and the issue of multi-culturalism (Holton and Turner, 1989: 158).”

Will Kymlicka (1989; 1995) and Joseph Raz (1994) are Canadian philosophers who justify granting collective rights to the Aboriginals (or First Nations) to assure that they can sustain their cultural way of life. Canadian political scientist H.D. Forbes (1997: 14) similarly concluded that “the most typical ethnic conflicts seem to have remarkably little to do with clashing material or economic interests...[but rather] more intangible goods such as power, respect, or social status.” Where status preservation may motivate those nativists who favor official English language laws in the United States, according to Tatalovich (1995), Ronald Schmidt (2000) argues that bilingualism advocates manifest an identity politics.

The notion of victimization in multiculturalism extends to the contemporary debate over “hate crime” legislation. The added deterrent value from a hate crime designation when somebody is driven to attack or murder a person because he or she is gay or a racial, ethnic, or religious minority is surely a marginal consideration for such a demented mind. The political significance of hate crime legislation is to ascribe special “status” to those victims as opposed to the millions of other Americans who are criminalized each year. The same logic applies to politically correct speech codes adopted by some universities.

Yet even multiculturalism does not fully embrace the political agenda for status equality. Other “disadvantaged” groups have status claims, as does the animal kingdom. Consider the recent argument within the deaf community that American Sign Language (ASL) is not a disability but a linguistic culture. Those who hold that view oppose technological advances (like cochlear implants) which can restore hearing to children of deaf parents. This poses a threat, they say, to family bonding and, to prevent that possibility, these ASL militants want the “deaf culture” to be formally recognized by government (Dolnick, 1993). Or environmentalism. One empirical study concluded that “[e]galitarianism...is very much at the heart of today’s environmental movement,” so much that “environmentalism has become enmeshed in a culture war between individualists and egalitarians” (Ellis and Thompson, 1997: 183-184). Animal rights is a moral crusade with the same motive force. These activists basically want to elevate the moral “status” of animals vis-a-vis human beings and, as such, they refer to “companion animals” instead of pets to imply “a relationship based more on friendship and equality than on domination and obedience” (Jasper and Nelkin, 1992: 11-12). For these activists, animal rights is comparative to human rights, and “speciesism (the assumption that humans are a superior life form) is no more morally defensible than racism, sexism, or other forms of discrimination that arbitrarily exclude some humans from the scope of moral concern” (Francione, 1996: 13).

Cultural Theory and Cultural Wars

Cultural theory argues that three dominant cultures--individualist, hierarchical, and egalitarian--exist in any particular society, although their respective influence will vary over time. Thus, cultural individualists prefer a life of bidding and bargaining in competitive markets, with few prescriptions other than punishment for fraud and abridgement of contracts. Cultural hierarchs seek to impose order through a division of labor, inequality, and a sacrificial ethic geared to the welfare of the collective. Unlike individualists, who are mainly indifferent to social inequalities (unless they stand in the way of competition), or hierarchs, who want to expand and solidify roles and magnify differences, cultural egalitarians wish to reduce them as much as possible (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky, 1990)

At bottom, “cultural wars" are struggles between the forces of status-differentiation and status-equalization (Thompson, 1992) The social power of each culture, however, depends upon the relative moral, physical, and social resources that each commands at any time. We would hypothesize that the terms "left" and "right" accord most clearly with reality when a strong hierarchism and a committed egalitarianism confront one another.

Cultural hierarchs regard rigorous codes of conduct and boundaries established between good and bad, right and wrong, or permissible and impermissible as essential to an orderly existence. What makes the hierarchs most objectionable to cultural egalitarians is their extolling the virtues of traditional religion and religious institutions. Hierarchs are typically found among traditional Catholics, Baptists, Evangelicals, Fundamentalists, and Orthodox Jews. For their part, egalitarians prefer to "transgress" social and mental categories, reclassifying codes of conduct and mores for the sake of personal autonomy and/or equality. In this regard, they are at one with postmodernism. In their desire to reduce differences between races, income levels, teachers and students, parents and students, men and women, and public officials and citizens, they are inclined to be critical of bureaucratic organization (Wildavsky,1991:6) Egalitarianism evokes much sympathy among cosmopolitans, intellectuals, journalists, college professors and administrators, feminists, environmentalists, gays, blacks, and the "liberal" clergy.

Cultural individualists do not fit neatly into a right-wing slot. More likely they are a “swing” group depending upon whether the issue is economic or social. Despite their defense of free markets, they nevertheless can agree with egalitarians on the principle of "equality" as the ability to transact freely on a one-to-one basis. Issues bearing upon personal choice, such as same-sex marriage, the absolute right to terminate a pregnancy, the right to traffic in pornography, burning the national flag, or eliminating religion from the public square, may find them fighting with egalitarians on the same side of the cultural divide.

Whereas individualists have little complaint about marketplace driven inequalities of income or property, egalitarians could not be more in disagreement. If anything, on this battleground hierarchs are more likely to join individualists–though again for different reasons. In sum, if individualists expect people to be essentially robust actors in the market, and egalitarians see them as fragile and thus needing help, hierarchs expect them to be organized and under control. As to motivation, finally, cultural hierarchies are not status "preservationists" because they are somehow "frustrated" with their current status. Hierarchists simply wish to "preserve" the social order because they value the functions performed by different social roles and statuses in maintaining the community.

Most likely the strongest force in society supporting cultural hierarchy is organized religion, so it is no coincidence that contemporary sociologists of religion have devoted so much attention to what has been popularized as the “culture wars” in American politics. This latest sociological thesis was provoked when the Christian Right was politicized as the Moral Majority in the 1980s. Well known sociologist James Davison Hunter (1991) coined the phrase “culture wars” to describe the battles over abortion, child care, government funding for the arts, affirmative action and quotas, gay rights, secularism in public education, as well as multiculturalism, all of which Hunter (1991: 42) traces to divergent views of “moral authority” or “the basis by which people determine whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, acceptable or unacceptable, and so on.” The culture wars divide “the impulse toward orthodoxy” and the “impulse toward progressivism,” insofar as orthodox believers are guided by an external, definable, and transcendent authority (Scripture) whereas progressives redefine their faith according to prevailing assumptions of contemporary life. Thus Hunter (1991: 46) says “we can label those on one side cultural conservatives or moral traditionalists, and those on the other side liberals or cultural progressives.” At its heart “cultural conflict is ultimately about the struggle for domination,” about raw force in “a struggle to achieve or maintain the power to define reality” (Hunter, 1991: 52). Most pronounced is the difference of opinion about the desired sexual ordering of society, meaning marriage, family and gender. Among the “non-negotiable moral ‘truths’” of the orthodox is that homosexuality “is a perversion of the natural or created order” whereas the progressive understanding is that homosexuality “does not represent an absolute and fundamental perversion of nature but simply one way in which nature can evolve and be expressed.” (Hunter, 1991: 122, 126).

The Hunter thesis has been criticized on conceptual and empirical grounds. One line of criticism is that Hunter presumes that society is separated by one huge cultural divide (Williams, 1997: 3). The “common wisdom” about a culture war sociologist Fred Kniss (1997: 259, 277) finds “too simplistic” because “[s]ome issues...are crosscutting and may produce attenuation rather than intensification of conflict. Different issues have different histories, different ideological components, and different constituencies.” Professor Kniss is right on target, we believe. Morality policy involves many culture wars, in different places, over different issues, involving different social groups (though some, like abortion, surface repeatedly).

This dimension has lead quantitative analysts of morality policy to include some religious variable(s) in their statistical models. As Mooney (2001: 16) explains, given that “the United States is perhaps the most religious Western democracy today” and “[w]ith so many people holding authoritative religious values, the chances for a fundamental clash of first principles increase.” The presence of conservative Christians helps to explain why certain American states do not adopt lotteries as a revenue source (Pierce and Miller, 1999) and why others do enforce anti-obscenity laws (Smith, 1999). Yet Catholics were not necessarily opposed to state-sponsored lotteries, nor did a Catholic presence have any effect on anti-pornography enforcement. Those findings support our position that Catholics and the Christian Right are not necessarily allies on every morality policy.

Concluding Observations

Our understanding of the genesis of morality policy comports with the characteristics attributed to that policy type by such analysts as Lowi, Meier, and Mooney. First, they agree that values–not economics–lie at the heart of these disputes, and “status” claims are inherited by tradition and custom rather than defined through market forces. Governments intervene in the marketplace to achieve distributive goals, but status equalization looks toward the erosion of (largely private-sector) social hierarchies. These social interactions are fundamentally dissimilar from economic transactions.

Second, if divergent status claims are crystallized in cultural conflicts, religious values will hold primary sway in the American context. Virtually all the quantitative studies of morality policy–gay rights, drinking, gambling, drugs, abortion--substitute religious variables for economic ones. Just as class politics once divided the body politic during industrialization, so too can social values mobilize public opinion during the postmaterialist era. The delineation of superordinate or subordinate statuses and social roles are largely grounded in public attitudes and behavior patterns.

Third, it is for that reason that Professor Meier’s differentiation between one-sided and two-sided morality policy is so important. Looking across time, at one point or another every morality policy was one-sided, based on widespread public consensus, and that normative order was not breached until “new” social movements demanded status equity for some group historically deemed socially inferior. Public opinion is not a political actor as such (unless activated as an electorate or plebiscite) but rather operates as a political “constraint” on policy-makers. This fact explains why politicians are risk adverse when faced with two-sided morality policy, such as abortion or gay rights, but often too eager to engage the battle against “sin” with respect to one-sided morality policy (with the result, says Meier, that they usually exacerbate an already bad public policy).

In summary, though peoples in modern societies are said to be obsessed with material goods and economic issues, there is growing evidence that many of the most important policies reaching public agendas are driven by moral concerns. The status frustrations so prevalent in these democratic societies reflect a "paradox of progress" in which increased social and economic advancement stimulates but simultaneously fails to satisfy the ongoing status and identity aspirations of many groups and individuals (Smith and O'Connell, 1997:7-9,17-18, 44-46). Perceived threats to esteem and identity that were ignored or repressed under trying economic circumstances now enter the political arena as cultural demands for recognition. In a word, material affluence and status politics create the milieu conducive to the "cultural wars" of our age.

Raymond Tatalovich, is a Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. T. Alexander Smith is a Professor of Political Science, University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

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