Wulbert’s observation that people often go past one another when they try to communicate is a deep insight to which I supply examples, most particularly from “Pride and Prejudice”.
The sociologist Roland Wulbert presented to me what I thought of as a theory of social control though he insists that the four sociological items he compared were neither a theory or about social control but were items that played on whether items were named or not. We will see. His first item is a norm, which he defines as a habit or social practice which is not named until it is violated. Norms include making small talk at a party, or working nine to five, or not being aggressive towards women until they are asked. When a violation occurs, the event pops out as being a guide for behavior. People seem sullen or shy when they don’t chitchat, as when happens when Darcy does not do so at the party where he first meets Elizabeth Bennet and people who work at night are noticed fir not being in accord with the usual routine and overly aggressive men are noted as being so by women among themselves or even with male friends. For my part, I am not sure there is even such a thing as a norm in that I think people are well aware of how they behave and reason for doing what they do. They engage in chit chat so as to ease dealing with strangers they do not know well enough to engage in deep discussion that might give offense. The work nine to five because that is what employers set as the times of collective service so as to make get going. Women carry “mad money” should a beau get fresh. Norms are always practical or conventional and people know when one or the other applies, an open hand an offer of friendship even without knowing it originally meant not varying a weapon.
A second social item Wulbert mentions is etiquette where people do have words to describe how to behave properly, such as using the right fork or wearing appropriate dress or not being insulting. Wulbert is right in thinking that the description of manners is an important, even fundamental, thing rather than just an affectation of unnecessary gracefulness in that it constitutes most of what people do, even contentiousness and warfare having their politesse because as etiquette columnists will say it is about people showing how to be comfortable with one another as when the axeman is given a coin by the king to be executed to show there are no hard feelings towards him. The third social item is law, where there are a great deal of words said about what can and cannot be done and elaborate social institutions to legislate and adjudicate and punish infringements of these statements to insure that the word of the law is accurately followed rather than violated to the point that the details can obfuscate what is clear from etiquette or unspoken but somehow known in the case of norms, law regarded quite properly as an overlay that the evolution of social life has imposed upon etiquette and norms if you think norms were always there as the glue that held social life together from when people developed free will.
The payoff of Wulbert mentioning these three sociological items is to highlight the fourth of them, which is a practice that has no name but cuts very deep which has to do when people are going past one another in a conversation, which Wulbert thinks often happens without that being noticed as a failure of communication, but that when it happens is addressed with derision or being non-plussed. Here are two examples I offer as to this fourth category that have to do with intellectual or even philosophical matters where such things regularly do happen. Piers Morgan, the British interviewer who takes up controversial issues such as about the Israeli-Hamas War, was interviewing Hawkins, who is an evolutionary biologist who regularly debates between his own atheism with a variety of twists. Morgan asked him what will happen when he does. Hawkins said he would rot because his brain was made of brain cells that would die and there would be nothing left of him and added when Morgan pressed that no, there was no spirit or afterlife when that happened, and Morgan, a sophisticated man, showed in his perplexed expression and his silence, that he could not appreciate what Hawkins was saying even though he had heard the words. They did not compute.
These four sociological practices or structures can be considered a theory because they are comparable, in that they result from the presence or absence of description and cover a big territory of social life. They can be considered a theory of social control because all of them are ways for acceptable behavior can be punished. Durkheim thought that violating norms resulted in anger and banishment. Etiquette leaves violations with at least rebuke but also the ostracism of people who don’t know how to eat or dress properly. They are of a different class of people. Laws obviously enough van be awarded punishment and the fourth category also has a punishment as when a long lst buddy did not continue our reawakened conversation because I talked too much about being anti-climate change. My loss.
Here are some other incidents from my own life when people talking with me went past one another. I was talking with a Christian Sunday School teacher who was trying to sympathetically describe the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah. She said that it was a festival that celebrated the miracle whereby the oil lasted for nine days even though the people had no oil. I said that the holiday celebrated the triumph of the Maccabees to take control of Israel. She was very angry with me because for her a holiday had to be a miracle rather than a political event. To consider it just political was to demean it, given her understanding of what was required for an event to be religious. Another time, while I was a graduate student, I met a professional wedding musician. He asked me what I wanted to become. I said a literary critic and he assumed I meant an entertainment reviewer, which seemed an odd calling when what I meant was an academic student of literature. He told me that was a tough occupation in that people would pan you for panning performers. I facetiously said I also wanted to be a stand-up comedian and he did not want to say that I was hopelessly naive because that indeed was a very tough profession, he not realizing that I was being ironic.
So at least a portion if not all of going past one another involves one person thinking themselves to have superior or clearer knowledge than the other, that they are talking about philosophical or religious or social misunderstandings and also social class distinctions where the superior position assumes the person of a lower class to be crude and naive. The Sunday School teacher was in fact condescending to Judaism without meaning to because she assumed her own religion included a different one and the wedding musician thought my youth meant that I was hopelessly naive. The same rules apply in more telling examples where people do not even think the other side is just quizzical rather than misinformed. But the best examples of the phenomenon are when neither party knows what the grievance of either interlocutor knows what this is about and so suggests that communication itself has to do a lot of work so that people do not go past one another.
An extended example of people going past one another is presented in Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”. That is not surprising in that Austen relies on dialogue to change opinions and change the plot and also the understanding by the reader of what is being learned from the novel. Conversation also has these multiple functions in Shakespeare, whose plays are a model for Austen. Her novels also start with tragic circumstances. Othello starts as a Moor put in high places and so set up to have a fall. Hamlet is involved with a nation where a shady usurpation of the throne has taken place. “Emma” starts with a father too dependent on his daughter and “Mansfield Park” with a poor relative taken in clumsily to a rich household, the reader wondering what will come of her poor beginnings. Austen, however, ends these tragic beginnings with Shakespearean comic endings where couples pair off. Darcy and Elizabeth fall in love and marry and Fanny Price in “Mansfield Park” finds her true love even if the family in which she was ensconced falls apart.
Here begins in “Pride and Prejudice” why Elizabeth is unsuitable for marriage because what she says goes past people and that makes her seem weird. A man offers in conversation the usual platitude that women are so accomplished in needlework and playing music, to which Elizabeth responds that these are petty accomplishments and so amount to faint praise because men are accomplished in more serious matters. The men do not understand what she is saying because it never occurs to them that accomplishments have necessarily to be associated with a particular sex rather than compared across them and Elizabeth suggests that is merely to be perplexed and find the remark and the person making it odd. There is no point in Elizabeth making remarks that cannot be understood and so, as best she can, withholds her observations.
It takes a while for Elizabeth to learn how to engage conversation about weighty matters and her attempts can be clumsy. When Darcy first offers marriage to Elizabeth, he does it clumsily, emphasizing that he is driven by love despite her disadvantages and would have to deal with their discrepancies. Rather than acknowledge the fact of disparity and have to work around them, she is like a present day man or woman who rejects a pre-nuptial agreement so as to make them only equal in personal feeling whatever other arrangements might also have to be made to insure neither was a golddigger or had unequal responsibilities to extended family and takes the offer as an insult and dismisses Darcu which is not really what she wanted to do but simply to retain her own dignity which requires her an impossible outcome. By the time of his second proposal, DFarcy is willing to completely capitulate to her and blame himself for even having considered conditions for the alliance of the two, Elizabeth completely triumphant because Darcy is so smitten. The reader wonders how Elizabeth will manage as the mistress of Pemberley. Jane Austen presents Elizabeth as being able to conquer everything and so symbolically the revenge of women against their condition of social class and gender subordination.
Actually, Elizabeth’s rhetorical skills to engage a conversation so that she can fruitfully engage her interlocutor occurs a bit earlier when Lady Catherine comes to Elizabeth’s home, that fact alone a concession in that she arrives at Ellizabeth’s door rather than asking her to call, the formality being that the underling weights on the superior, so anxious is Lady Catherine to insist that Elizabetyh make clear that she will not marry Darcy, expecting her own prestige to force Elizabeth to acquiesce. Instead, Elizabeth acts like a defense attorney who offers the minimum which means avoiding the issue. She says she has not been asked and so has no reason to respond. Lady Catherine, hardly a dumb woman, presses on and asks whether Elizabeth will deny an offer of marriage if Darcy offers and Elizabetth who by this time clearly would accept if the offer were made, simply says that is her own business, which makes her noncommittal and free though obviously enough allowing the possibility, of which Darcy hears word, as Elizabeth might expect to hear from Lady Catherine and that is encouragement enough for Darcy to dare to make his second proposal. What Elizabeth wanted to accomplish with her words is right on the mark. It describes the situation and moves the conversation to the desired conclusion. Elizabeth has ;learned how to engage discourse rather than go past it.
Elizabeth, seeming like a lawyer, does not miss the mark about how engaged communication works. It takes a lot of construction for communications that are engaged with one another to take place that are conversations that amount to more than asserting mutual solidarity. Lawyers and academics are disciplined to make their remarks relevant to what an interlocutor has said. Justice Amy Comey Barrett had the view that states controlled election procedures and Congresswoman Crockett had to employ the Constitution and quotes from the Federalist Papers to show that to the contrary, the federal government needed to and had the right to supervise whether state voting procedures were acceptable and the Justice seemed abashed at having been countered, a recognition of having lost the interchange rather than inconclusive, an accomplishment of communication amidst the daily and ordinary communications whereby people at best engage in glancing blows even if they do not completely go past one another.
Despite Durkheim’s attempt to treat norms as a “natural” way to accomplish social control, which is the object of his endeavor, an additional characteristic can resolve the question of whether passing one another by is a matter of social control or not. Social control can be regarded as an institution dedicated to that purpose. So police and militaries and Human Resources Departments of corporations and the dean’s office in a college can be considered mechanisms of social control while processes of culture are not even though there are negative consequences for these procedures. So people talking past one another is not a matter of social control nor are girls telling one another that some boys get handsy. Those are just responses that take place in social interaction and so Durkheim use of norm as a social control measure is inaccurate if you take that as other than the derision or anger that comes from other than normative action unless the police respond to a social infraction with a jail sentence or a crime. Otherwise, going past one another is like slurping soup. It too can be met with being seen as crude just as any violation of a social custom seems that way. It is just that meeting past one another is especially important because the phenomenon shows how difficult it is to have a communication whereby people engage one another well enough to convey meaning to one another. Daily conversation just goes at people supporting one another and disputation concerns trying to find what people disagree about and it takes a lot of work to decide precisely how even experienced debaters and academics disagree and so oftentimes more likely than most peo[ple think, just do go past one another.