CASBS fellow Jerry Davis (2020-21) interviews legendary scholar-activist Amitai Etzioni, a 1965-66 CASBS fellow, about his influential book “The Active Society,” the fracturing of our shared realm of fact, the necessity of re-encapsulating capitalism, and his project to promote civil dialogues.
Narrator: From the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, this is Human Centered. Today on Human Centered. Jerry Davis, recent CASBS fellow and the Gilbert and Ruth Whitaker Professor of Business Administration and Sociology at the University of Michigan, interviews renowned sociologist and former CASBS fellow Amitai Etzioni about his influential book, The Active Society. The two discuss the fracturing of our shared realm of fact, the necessity of re-encapsulating capitalism, and Amitai's project to support civil dialogues Really excited to be speaking with Professor Amitai Etzioni today.
Jerry Davis: He's one of my intellectual heroes, as he is for many of us in the field of sociology. Big influence on organization theory, which is my own domain of study, and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences around 1966. Is that right?
Amitai Etzioni: Right.
Jerry Davis: And during that year, uh, he wrote his book The Active Society, uh, which I learned was the first time I had ever seen the word postmodern appearing in print. So in case you thought that French theorists had invented this idea sometime around 1985, turns out it has a much longer history than that. Um, but I'd love to start out hearing about your experience at the Center for Advanced Studies, sort of where you were in your career at that time and, and and what the experience was like. You know, it's gone through a lot of twists and turns on the wine-dark sea over the few decades. And it seems like you were there at kind of a golden era. So maybe you could share a little bit about your experience then and how you came to write "The Act of Society." [SPEAKING GERMAN] Thank you for your kind words, first of all.
Amitai Etzioni: And I'm really delighted to revisit my association with the Center. Because in all seriousness, when people ask me what I would like to write on my tombstone, it says only a very short thing: the author of The Active Society, which I think is my, by far, my most important work. And it's the one which I could not have written in any other place than at the Center.
Jerry Davis: So, so tell me about the book and why you think of it as your masterwork?
Amitai Etzioni: So that will take me an extra minute. So let me put it in two halves. One is historically people started by being what I would call passive. And that sense that if you go, let's say to the old Greeks, they did not think about the world as something they can marshal. Things happened. It was fate. And you accepted nature, it was cruel and nothing to do about it, and you accepted your status. In fact, Aristotle already created a theory which later, in the evil ages, the church adopted, what you and I would call status acceptance. And that the next idea was, if you were born a lord, God wanted you to be the lord. And if you were born a serf, God wanted you to be a serf, don't try to become a lord. Everybody should do the best they could in whatever way they were casted.
Jerry Davis: Yeah, it's a great chain of being.
Amitai Etzioni: And of course the same in India, it's not just a Western idea. In India very much the ideology is if you're a lower class you should pick up the shit, and if you're the upper class you should enjoy other people picking up the shit. But you should not try to mix things up. So then came the, the age of enlightenment and Renaissance and science, and we moved from a passive orientation to an active orientation toward nature. So we started saying we can use resources, make electricity, make steam engines, which will use the force of nature like hydrophobic and such, to allow us to marshal nature. Actually, we thought we were doing much better. We recently discovered that between COVID and climate change, that we haven't really quite learned how to do that. But the basic idea was, the idea of science was to unlock the secrets of nature. So we became active toward nature. Then came Karl Marx and the Fabian socialists and said, you know what? Don't look just at nature, look also at society, not as given. Let's see if we can reorganize, revolutionize, reorganize society. So we extended the active orientation from nature to society. Then came Freud and he said, you know what, let's also do the same to the self. Do not accept the demons as given. We can go— you need a priesthood of psychoanalysts but you can help you marshal yourself. And now, most interestingly, this year we come into the bestseller book called The Codebreakers. They're now going to do the same thing to DNA. So we're now going to take our biology and also say we're going to turn the active orientation onto our body. So the whole history, from my viewpoint, is an ever-expanding of the active orientation, from being passive and accepting, and accepting our status, accepting our fate, to becoming, in the older language of the 1960s, we'd say, have men on top, the human being be in charge. Now, so you come now to this society, and I ask the question, how can a society marshal itself so it can reform itself in line with the goals its members have. To make it very short, it's like this: we start with the idea which comes from cybernetics. Cybernetics takes the position that there are machines, which they are equivalent of the muscle power, and on top of it there are communication systems which guide the machines, the equivalent of the nerves in the body. And so when you want to accomplish things, it's not enough to have more muscle power, but you also have to have good signaling systems. So that's the idea of cybernetics. So half the book asks how you get better signals, how you get— process information better, how you make better decisions. But then when you come to human society, you cannot have a top-down system because down there are not machines but are people, are human beings. And so you need combine any top-down signaling which comes from the government with the consensus and active participation of those who are the people. Now, in a simplistic way, it's supposed to work as a democratic process. In effect, the democratic process is often very inadequate. So we have half the book that deals with the question: under what conditions can you mobilize people like civil, civil, above all social movements like the civil rights movement, like the Black Lives Matter, like the MeToo movement, like environmental movement. These are all movements which are not top-down, which mobilize people. And then we get a very complicated interaction between the overriding top-down system and the up-mobilizing system, and they allow us to restructure society to create difficulties in line with our values. So the book tries to spell out what are the building blocks of society, it's in charge of its own history, are then subject to it.
Jerry Davis: It's a very optimistic vision. And one of the thoughts that occurs to me is it's 53 years later. Social sciences had decades to develop. We should be really good at this. We should have developed a set of tools for sort of monitoring the information, conveying our understanding— our understandings of it, sharing those with society, and coming to some kind of democratic consensus to intervene in the ways that you describe. And I wonder how your viewpoint about that has changed. I'm thinking in particular that at the time that you wrote, there were 3 major broadcast networks and a relative handful of major media outlets. And there were mechanisms of coming to a consensual view or a relatively consensual view on reality. We're now living at a time when large chunks of our electorate have a very peculiar view of what happened in the election in November, what happened on January 6th, whether there is a COVID pandemic out there in the land or not. It seems like things that should be matters of very wide consensus seem to elude that now. So I wonder, you know, it's Shoshana Zuboff refers to this as an epistemic crisis. And I think there's something about that, that it's not just can we gather the data, but even if you had data, what does it take to come to some kind of consensus about sort of what's going on in the world? Even a map these days can be quite contentious. Even the most basic, seemingly basic factual matters seem to elude us. So what are your thoughts about that?
Amitai Etzioni: Professor, of course, you're absolutely right that there's been enormous fractioning of the factual world. So in the past, we at least could agree about the facts and then we would argue about the policies. Though, you know, there was McCarthyism and there was— so it's not like before that everything was beautiful. What I think is happening is there is a consensus there, it's just some of my colleagues don't want to hear it because it's a very uncomfortable consensus. Here's one way of putting it. Arthur Schlesinger used to argue the United States is going through alternative periods of liberal and conservative periods. So there was conservative period, then came the Roosevelt, then came McCarthy, then came Democrats got elected. So you go forth and back, liberal period, democratic period. I think it's a wrong reading of American society. I think we have a conservative country with very short and troubled liberal interludes. That's why, for instance, Clinton supposedly the liberal period, what did he do? He signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which defined marriage has to be between men and a woman. He ended social welfare as we knew it. He froze all social programs for 5 years in order to get a balanced budget. So it wasn't very much of a liberal period. I was in the Carter White House, and whatever you say about Carter, by the way, he was a wonderful ex-president, but during his presidency, the only thing he really, really, really, really believed in was balancing the budget. So he was a very conservative, good Christian president. And again, about Obama, I admire Obama. He flattered me by reading my communitarian books and quoting them. How can I resist that? He's a wonderful human being, a wonderful family, wonderful thing that we elected him. How much did he achieve as a liberal? Not a very long list. And now we— and then we had Trump. And now we get a momentary correction, which I think will last about a year. And we're going to get a very bad midterm election and then a competent Trump in 2024. So what does it tell you? The underlying consensus of the American society is not liberal. That's why we have such hard time when we're trying to defund police and Tons of billions, which as Biden does in his farm program, only to Black farmers and such. So the American society will not stand. Now, please don't mishear me. If it's up to me, I would— I believe in reparations. I believe there is systematic racism. I believe major, major reform is necessary. But you're not asking me what is my dream ticket. You're asking me what I see is the American society. American society that took conservatives for every liberal, and the consensus is a very raw and ugly consensus. And the question, the real challenge is how to get into a period in which given that background, given that human nature, we can get some very major overdue reforms beginning with the climate change and on to social justice.
Jerry Davis: So let me move us on from this theme. You recently published an essay in Society called "Capitalism Needs to Be Re-Encapsulated," and I had the opportunity to read the essay in draft form and then write my own response. I enjoyed it very much, and you are describing there a similar hinge point that we are at right now. And so if I summarize the article, it feels like you describe a pendulum swing between an encapsulated capitalism where there's firm regulation in place and where those energies released by markets are, are kept in check, and then the capsule breaks down as you describe it, sort of the regulation goes away and those energies sort of jump the tracks in a sense and create various sorts of pathologies. And you describe this long list of business bad behavior, like marketing nicotine capsules to teenagers or pre-teenagers using candy flavorings, pharmaceutical companies drastically raising the price of essential medicines for vulnerable populations, for-profit prisons for grownups or for-profit prisons for toddlers on the border. And you have a sort of grim list of the many, it's like I describe it as a buffet of pathology in American capitalism. So many businesses are doing things that seem really reprehensible. And I, found no way to disagree with your list. And what struck me was, is this happening everywhere in capitalism? Or is there something distinctive to the American system of capitalism that breeds monsters? And I guess my own take on this was, you don't hear about a lot of Danish companies or French companies coming up with for-profit prisons or marketing nicotine pods to children. So is there something about American capitalism— I use the phrase an institutional terroir— that breeds monsters, or am I misreading that?
Amitai Etzioni: I appreciate that you joined the conversation on the Page of Society because I believe it is an important subject. So just one minute, 30 seconds to step back to the basic image. So I think it's helpful to compare capitalism to nuclear energy. In nuclear energy, if you have a very well and very strong tower or capsule, you can get very cheap, very clean energy, which can fuel everything. Hospitals, farms, and so on. If the energy breaks out of the capsule, it creates radioactive deserts. So this idea that it's well encapsulated is wonderful, run amok is terribly dangerous. And so now what's the capsule made of? It's very important, of two things. First of all, values. In many societies, there is a notion that something you just don't do. The reason that's important is in the end you can police only that much. So if you, if everybody in society is out to go maximize themselves, the way my colleagues in economics tell them they should do, then there'll never be enough police and custom agents and inspectors and accountants. To supervise it. So the starting point has to be a notion that a decent profit is fine, but greed is not. So some notion— I remember in a previous scandal of junk bonds, there were some firms, so-called old firms on Wall Street, said we're gonna not touch this stuff, that's not us. So A, our values, B, their regulations. Now I so happen to be, I was there at the birth of the deregulation movement because in the Democratic Carter White House came a guy, a professor, a liberal professor from Alkan from Cornell, and he called for deregulation of airlines. And he argued it's going to reduce the cost of flying. Carter loved it. And that started the deregulation movement, then Reagan came and so on and so on. Trump, of course, did more to it. But basically most regulations don't work anymore. Even if they're on the books, the Congress gutted the enforcement mechanisms, cut the budget for enforcement, like it did to IRS, by the way. So the point, just to give an example, there is a bureau in charge of controlling guns, but it does not allow to use computers. So they have millions of pieces of paper, you want to find something, go for it, by all means, we did the paperwork. So, and they have 8 people to regulate thousands of drug dealers, gun dealers. And so we basically, in effect, got the regulatory mechanism and the result is that I did that study as you referred to. So what I did, I said, people often talk about what's wrong with the government, how wonderful the private sector is. So I said, okay, every time I point out that the major industry, not one corporation, major industry is engaging in illegal behavior, people say, well, that's a rotten apple, but the barrel is fine. So I said, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to at random put my hand and pull out one industry after the other and have a look. So I pulled out 20 and each one of them have a major systematic corruption. Like the opiates they sell, the pharmaceutical industry, like the people who, like Volkswagen, designing the car in such a way that it will pass the pollution test Why it's polluting. Now this is not some slouch little fly-by-night company, this is one of the most important car companies. So the conclusion is capitalism, you're right, American capitalism is particularly wild. Now it's also wild in China. So China is now beginning to step in. Again, not because they're Soviet Jews, because they discovered there's one other thing. When capitalism runs amok, it does one more thing: it also builds up political power. So what happens in our United States, very often the companies legalize what is corrupt. So they pass laws, first of all, of course, allow unlimited campaign contributions by corporations, but they also write regulations such a way that it cannot fail them. So for instance, nursing homes now are allowed to inspect themselves. They wrote the law that way. So it's not only the regulations have been sent out and not enforced, but the laws are being rewritten in favor of capitalism and corporations. In China, they're beginning to change that. Because they don't like the political power of the corporations at the beginning to introduce regulation. In France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, capitalism is more regulated, but it's also breaking through its moorings. So you will find also French— especially in France— corporations engage in quite a bit of mischief. But they have such strong social markets that they can, at least to some degree, at least protect people from the most extreme consequence of capitalism, which we do not— which we don't.
Jerry Davis: That's useful to hear. I mean, it does feel that an essential component of thinking about re-encapsulating capitalism, or how we think about capitalism at all, is to really take seriously just how much cross-national diversity there is. So I want to make sure in our remaining time, you have a new project called Civil Dialogues, and I wonder if you could share a little bit about what that is all about.
Amitai Etzioni: Thank you for asking. That's really— I care deeply about. So about 5 years ago, I got a major theater in Washington, D.C. to give me the stage once a month, and I got people from different viewpoints to have dialogues. For instance, in one case we had an African-American professor of law from Georgetown arguing about the forthcoming 2020 elections, that they were completely irrelevant, there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans, what we needed was a revolution. And we had on the stage the head of Third Way, argued that this election could be an epoch-defining election, it's going to make all the difference in the world. And we had two other people in between and we had an hour and a half conversation. And if you went away from listening to that, in a moment I mentioned, they're all on tape by the way, they're all on YouTube. You went away with understanding very clearly what the different positions are, what the middle ground is. We had a conversation about China, between China hawks and China doves, and even between Trump supporters and Trump opponents. 25 of them, they're all on YouTube. They're all very civil. Then came COVID and we had to close down. And I decided I wanted to do the same thing online. It took me 6 very painful months to work with Silicon Valley to try to create an online version of that. Civildialog.org, and I did two unusual attributes. One is you have to identify yourself, because I discovered that when you go to all the other places, the people have aliases, the conversation are very toxic. If you go to civildialog.org, my little thing, you see All conversation is civil. So I proved correct that having to identify yourself makes people much more civil. Now people tell me that as of the Federalist Papers, it's very important for these centers to have anonymity. And I say, absolutely, there are 1,000 places you can be anonymous. I'll give you one place not. Second and last, The founding fathers were very worried about the mob, impulsive decisions. Serious consensus building requires time and deliberations. So my civildialog.org has a computer system which tallies the vote, but only once a week. So it gives you time to listen to other people, you can push a button and change your vote. So there is time for deliberation you can vote closure, but not before a week. And so we succeeded after quite a bit of effort to have so far hundreds of people conducting dialogues on a large variety of topics from bioengineering to China policy to childcare policy, but very much looking for more people to use this system. And my tagline is, "Zoom is a real-time, be at any time." So, people can wake up in the middle of the night, it's all textual, and join the conversation. So, I hope very much my fellow at the Center and anybody else listen to this program and you yourself, join the dialogue on civildialogue.org. The one thing I can assure you, it'd be civil.
Jerry Davis: No, it's a fantastic model. I mean, we really have to wonder why the incredible tools that we have for communication, for dialogue, and for greater democracy have not spread more deeply into our society. I keep wondering. I used to end my talks 10 years ago, starting 10 years ago and up until now, on the question, where is the workplace democracy app that turns General Motors into a kibbutz? And I know the kibbutzim may not have worked out as magically as they might have, but it is surprising that we do not have more grassroots democracy. We have the tools in our pockets, you know, almost every one of us, to be able to have civil dialogues, to be able to vote, to share our sentiments, to persuade each other one way or another. Why are we using these tools to get people into attention-focused, ad-based businesses rather than better dialogue and more democracy? It seems to me that there's great opportunities there if we could get some of the current Silicon Valley companies out of the way. Really delighted to see that you're pioneering this with civildialogues.org so that people can understand at a ground level, you know, what civilized dialogue on real issues is all about when, when it's not anonymous and where people have an opportunity to add their opinion and, as you said, change it if a miracle happens and people's minds are changed by civil dialogue. So thank you for that, for that great contribution.
Amitai Etzioni: I thank you, and let's close on— and that's where it all ties together— to be active, you need other people. You can't change the world by yourself. So get people together, see if you can form a joint position, and let's, let's take it from there.
Jerry Davis: I love it. Well, thank you, Professor Amitai Etzioni. It has been wonderful speaking with you, and I, I hope that people listening to this have an opportunity to visit civildialogues.org. And if they're interested, maybe they could visit our dialogue on the society, the journal society's website.
Narrator: That was Jerry Davis in conversation with Amitai Etzioni. You can learn more about this and other CASBS events by visiting our website at casbs.stanford.edu. Or you can find us on Twitter. We're @CASBSStanford. The CASBS live event series Social Science for a World in Crisis is still on its short summer holiday, but in the meantime, we've got more original interviews coming your way, so be sure to follow us in your podcast app of choice. You won't want to miss those. Until next time, from everyone at CASBS and the Human Centered team, thanks for listening.