Does social categorization inevitably lead to social hierarchy?

Although social categorization leads to social hierarchy and has been witnessed multiple times in history, this result is not always inevitable. Since the prompt states that social categorization is a sufficient condition for hierarchy, this premise breaks down on providing social psychology principles and related counter-examples which suggest the contrary.

According to the stereotype content model, stereotypes can be arranged along the warmth-competence dimension. Groups with high competence and high warmth experience an emotional prejudice of admiration whereas groups with high competence and low warmth experience envy. Research from the field of Social Comparison theory also shows that there is an innate desire for social groups to achieve a superior relative position which in turn leads to competitiveness. Additionally, this comparison can corrupt the comparer, envy and humiliate a certain social group and make them feel ashamed of their own inadequacy.

Thirty Years War

This essay will now apply these principles to instances in history to come up with the first argument in opposition to this prompt. Throughout the Middle Ages to the present-day, Europe has been inhabited by groups that differ in culture, language, ethnicity, prosperity, religion and scientific advancement. However, most of these groups tended to have similar levels of competence but differing levels of warmth. Whenever this took place and there was the genesis of a social hierarchy, the group associated with envy tended to engage in conflict with the ones associated with admiration and separate. This has been observed in several cases, such as the Thirty Years War, which was essentially a war between Catholics and Protestants and led to the formation of new countries such as the Dutch Republic.

The Spanish Armada

Therefore, these ‘groups’ eventually formed smaller nations that were constantly at war with one another on account of trying to establish a superior relative position. However, even today, it is not possible to objectively declare one European Nation to be superior to another. It is not possible to produce an ordered list of nations which are superior in all regards. The Spanish Armada was the most powerful fleet in the 16th and 17th century. The British Empire was so huge that the sun never set on it. Nazi Germany arguably had the most powerful army in the world which they built in a staggeringly small amount of time. All these groups rose and fell before a clear hierarchy between these competing nations could be established. The Nazis had claimed such superiority in the decades between 1930 and 1940. However, their ideology was met with severe resistance and ultimately, they suffered defeat in war and their vision.

In other words, continuous conflict ensured that groups with similar competence couldn’t be placed into one uniform hierarchy. The struggle to achieve a superior relative position was continuous but since the groups were more-or-less evenly matched, a definitive result could not be reached. This prevented humiliation, envy, and discrimination of any one social group (which, it can be argued, would have most definitely happened if Europe was a single nation).

The second example concerns the India-Pakistan partition in 1947. The Muslims were a minority in India and they feared that when the nation got independent and started operating under a democracy, their interests wouldn’t be protected as much as those of the Hindus. In other words, they would be characterized by envy and the Hindus by admiration.

They feared the categorization of the continent based on religion would ultimately lead to social hierarchy with the Hindus, on account of being the majority, enjoying a superior position and using this to humiliate and subjugate the Muslims. However, the Muslims, with the aid of the Muslim League, was in a powerful enough position to demand separation from the British. Since they had the political clout to carve out an entire nation for themselves, the majority of Muslims in the subcontinent were able to avoid the perceived hierarchy they thought they would have to live in. This event is completely justified if the principles stated above are assumed to be true.

Therefore, we can conclude that social hierarchy arises from social categorization only when one group is (politically and economically) more powerful than the other. In cases where two groups wield comparative amounts of power, it leads to separation and sometimes, conflict. In other words, if there is a group that tries to establish and declare itself as superior to others, it only leads to hierarchy if the other groups are not powerful enough to engage (and possibly defeat) the former group in conflict or if it is not feasible for the group declared inferior to separate. Separation and/or conflict were possible in both the examples above and the social groups chose these over a uniform social hierarchy where one group would face the brunt of discrimination and prejudice.

Additionally, the prompt’s premise fails in the social and political environment of today. Our civilizations have advanced to the point where we are self-aware of our prejudices and discrimination capabilities. Therefore, most countries (especially the ones with democratic governments) have laws that prevent a hierarchy from forming and introduce corrective measures to uplift those that they think are disadvantaged.

Apartheid

In India, there is a reservation policy in place that ensures the most downtrodden of communities have representation in politics and government jobs in proportion to their population. South Africa, fresh from its independence of the Afrikaans, have a strong constitution that eliminates any possibility of apartheid or other race-based discrimination. Software companies in Silicon Valley have special events, competitions and hiring sprees for women in order to correct the gender gap in the technology industry. In all these cases, it is legally not possible to have a hierarchy. It is no longer possible to claim that a Brahmin is superior to a Shudra. Or that Whites are superior to blacks. While prejudices still do exist, the scope of acting on them is significantly lower than what was possible just a century ago.

Added to this is the fact that such cognitive interventions can address the psychologically destructive consequences of negative social identities. Additionally, there is research that suggests that exposure to diversity can increase pro-sociality or helpful behavior among people belonging to different social classes and can decreases instances of discrimination. Increasing interactions between out-groups can also transform civic cultures with one social group adopting ‘desirable’ characteristics and practices of another.

With laws that protect the marginalized groups and provide affirmative action policies to uplift their socio-economic status, these groups are in a much better position to yield higher political and economic power and in turn, have a greater sense of self-worth. They become more competent and the laws ensure that legally, there is a comparable level of ‘warmth’. Also, since they attend the same institutions and work in the same jobs as people of ‘higher’ social groups, exposure to diversity reduces the tendency to discriminate and form hierarchies. It also leads to both groups exchanging practices and traits, thus ensuring more homogenization and a shared identity characterized by tolerance and acceptance.

Finally, let us continue to consider this argument through social networks but this time, from a nationalistic perspective. While it is possible to rank countries based on their economy, GDP per capita and military might, it can be argued that it is still not possible to establish a clear hierarchy based on this. It might be true that the Americans are the most powerful people on the planet but there is little they can do to act on it and more importantly, own up to it. The concept of a hierarchy is pointless if the supposed superior group cannot act upon it and inflict damage on the supposed inferior groups.

Increasing the density of social relations can also improve the civic culture or “social capital” of a community. Today, even the smallest of nations are part of military alliances and pacts and an attack on them would automatically lead to a declaration of war by its larger, more powerful allies. Organizations such as the WTO ensure that larger countries do not bully the smaller ones when it comes to trade. The United Nations was founded on the idea that large, powerful nations cannot become aggressors without being met with opposition from the rest of the world. These agreements prevent hierarchies from forming or at least, render them impotent to a point where it does not inflict as much damage anymore. Prosocial behavior also indicates that the formation of these groups tends to make the members hold its leaders to a higher standard of caring, which in turn increases the potency of such groups.

As the stated principles demonstrate clearly, it is human nature form groups which may engage in competition with other groups and try to dominate them. However, if the competing groups wield a similar amount of power, it leads to separation instead of hierarchy. Additionally, we have learned to overcome our biological instincts and the ‘survival of the fittest’ attitude to establish laws and rules that protect those groups which may be considered at risk. Finally, there are also alliances and agreements with powerful groups that give smaller groups protection and save them from the wrath of their immediate, powerful enemy.

Bibliography

1. Durante F, Capozza D, Fiske ST. The Stereotype Content Model: The Role Played by Competence in Inferring Group Status. TPM Test Psychom Methodol Appl Psychol. 2010;17(4):187-199.
2. Garcia, S. M., Tor, A., & Schiff, T. M. (2013). The Psychology of Competition. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 634-650. doi:10.1177/1745691613504114
3. Fiske ST. Envy up, scorn down: how comparison divides us. Am Psychol. 2010;65(8):698-706.
4. World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior. (2014). doi:10.1596/978-1-4648-0342-0
5. Nuthalapati, R. (2010). Mismatched filtering of chaotic codes. 2010 International Waveform Diversity and Design Conference. doi:10.1109/wdd.2010.5592337
6. Muramatsu, N. (2003). County-Level Income Inequality and Depression among Older Americans. Health Services Research, 38(6p2), 1863-1884. doi:10.1111/j.1475-6773.2003.00206.x
7. Putnam, R. D., Leonardi, R., & Nanetti, R. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Gender and Indianness

This essay is an attempt to illustrate the gendered notion of Indianness with reference to certain Hindi films. This essay will explore the portrayal of women in cinema from the early 1930s to the 1950s and analyze the changes that took place post-Independence. It will analyze one of the most globally recognized Indian films of all time, Mother India, and its notions of what it means to be an Indian man and woman. Finally, it will look at a couple of contemporary films and analyze gendered Indianness through its lenses.

Prior to independence, movies portraying female sexuality and autonomy were common. In Aadmi, a dancing girl kills her evil uncle and prefers to stay in prison than accept her beloved’s help. In Duniya Na Maane, the female lead refuses to consummate her marriage with a much older man. And in Hunterwali and Miss Frontier Mail, we see perhaps the only ‘action woman’, Fearless Nadia, gracing the silver screen. Therefore, prior to independence, there wasn’t an extremely robust gendered framework of what it meant to be Indian. It can even be argued that the ‘Indian’ at that time was one who overcame stereotypes and societal expectations to commit heroic acts for the greater good, regardless of gender.

This changed significantly post-Independence. The set up of Raj Kapoor’s RK Films and Dev Anand’s Navketan Films diverted cinematic themes towards male-centric ones. Progressive, idealistic women were increasingly being replaced by the traditional and submissive. India was going through an extremely difficult period post-Independence trying to carve an identity out of itself after centuries of colonialism. And in its quest to discover what Indianness truly meant, it resorted to gendered ideas of what an ideal Indian man and Indian women represented. The Indian woman was chaste, pure and fiercely protective of her family. She placed her husband and her children’s wellbeing above that of her own. The Indian man, in contrast, was in the process of trying to shed its effeminate characterization and take on more masculine, stoic and violent traits.

Mehboob Khan’s film, Mother India is a significant milestone not only in Bollywood cinema but post-Independence Indian history as well. The film, a namesake of Katherine Mayo’s racist account of Indian unfitness to self-govern and a propagandistic portrayal of India’s sexuality, misogyny, culture, and poverty, took on a monumental challenge of redefining what it meant to be Indian. The lead protagonist, Radha, is supposed to be the embodiment of the Indian nation itself. She is also supposed to be the epitome of what an Indian woman should be. Radha continues to provide for her children even when her husband abandons her. She preserves her chastity by refusing to sleep with the moneylender; even if that meant alleviation of all her financial troubles. Finally, she shoots her own son for the greater good. We, therefore, see the genesis of the ideas of chastity, sacrifice and family being associated with the woman.

Mother India also makes allusions to what it means to be an Indian man. While the Indian woman nurtures the family, the Indian man must always be in a position to provide for it. When Radha’s husband handicaps himself, he loses his identity of what it means to be a man. Overcome by the guilt of not being able to support his family financially, he chooses to abandon them and commit societal suicide.

The documentary film Father, Son and Holy War showed the extremely problematic rise of toxic masculinity in India. The documentary claimed that the Hindu man was on a quest to shed its British Raj stereotype of effeminacy and look to militant mythological figures such as Ram and Shiva. Therefore, one of the prime drivers of the Indianness for a man was to preserve his mardangi. This meant keeping the wife in check, waging war against those that threatened their way of life, resorting to banned practices (such as sati) to re-establish male dominance and using misogynistic, effeminate language to describe those that they perceived as ‘the enemy’. For the Indian man, there couldn’t be a bigger shame than being referred to as a eunuch.

In tandem, the woman became the property of her husband. She was expected to be the embodiment of Indian tradition and culture, a personification of the goddesses Sita and Parvati. Her loss of chastity essentially meant the loss of her dignity and life. An unchaste woman was as good as dead. Therefore, what started off as an exercise to rebrand India became dangerously misogynistic, threatening the lives of millions of women nationwide.

The bleakness of the patriarchal notion of Indianness is perhaps best portrayed in the movie Fire. One of the central themes of Fire is sexuality. The film portrays two deeply troubled marriages. The husbands, however, satiate their sexual desires through prostitutes and masturbating to pornography. The wives, in stark contrast, are expected to repress their sexuality if their husbands are not able to satiate it. In their sheer desperation, the women resort to each other to feel tenderness and affection. Their act is considered sacrilegious and an affront to female chastity and purity. The film, therefore, is a comment on the expectations of sexuality. The Indian man is allowed to explore it in any way possible. The woman, on the other hand, can do so only in association with the husband.

Films are perhaps the most potent tools to analyze the expectations and beliefs of its producers and audience. Since the inception of cinema, films have resorted to challenge or affirm the severely gendered notions of Indianness. However, one fact is supported by all; it is that what it means to be Indian starkly differs for a man and a woman. The woman is chaste, pure, repressed, traditional and sacrificial. The man is the provider; violent in his wars and stoic in his pain.

Bibliography

1. Somaaya, B., Kothari, J., & Madangarli, S. (2012). Mother maiden mistress: Women in Hindi cinema, 1950-2010. New Delhi: HarperCollins India, a joint venture with the India Today Group.
2. Thomas, R. (1989). Sanctity and scandal: The mythologization of mother India. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 11(3), 11-30. doi:10.1080/10509208909361312
3. Fire, Sparks and Smouldering Ashes | Bina Fernandez … (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/4083247/Fire_Sparks_and_Smouldering_Ashes
4. Lutgendorf, P. (2007). Is There an Indian Way of Filmmaking? International Journal of Hindu Studies, 10(3), 227-256. doi:10.1007/s11407-007-9031-y

Filmography

1. Khan, M. (1957). Mother India. Mumbai.
2. Patwardhan, A. (1995). Father, Son, and Holy War. Mumbai
3. Mehta, D. (1998). Fire. Mumbai

Kafka and Totalitarianism

Disclaimer: This post is part of a series of essays I wrote at the Young India Fellowship. This particular essay was written as a transcript as part of the course titled Totalitarian Century.

The Trial by Franz Kafka

“Someone must have falsely denounced Josef K., for without having done anything wrong, he was arrested one morning.”: The Trial, Franz Kafka

The opening lines of Franz Kafka’s The Trial is one of the most chilling and memorable of all time. A well-established chief banker, Josef K. is suddenly arrested one day by unidentified agents from an unidentified organization for committing an unidentified crime. What follows is a host of absurdities: the guilt of the protagonist is assumed, he is allowed to roam free despite being ‘under arrest’, trial processes take place in shady attics and the convicted (and the reader) has absolutely no idea of the crime he has committed throughout the entire novel.

As with his other works such as The Castle and Metamorphosis, Kafka’s magnum opus has been subject to a variety of interpretations ranging from psychoanalytical to religious to political. Kafka was a German Jew and there is evidence that suggests that he was deeply influenced by the Anti-Semitic Trials that took place in Hungary, France, and Czechoslovakia in the late 19th century. This, combined with the tensions and rise of totalitarian states in Europe prompted Kafka to write his novel just before the outbreak of the First World War.

In the novel, Kafka states quite clearly that Josef K. lives in a society with a legal constitution, universal peace and enforceable law. Nevertheless, he gets arrested for a crime he doesn’t know he committed and is given little to no legal assistance or context by the state. He also goes through a thoroughly unfair trial and is brutally executed in the end screaming “Like a dog!”. Franz Kafka died in 1924 and little did he know that his absurdist novel would become reality in his country barely a decade after his death.

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party assumed power, they promised to resurrect Germany from its defeat in the First World War and establish a Reich that would last a thousand years. The Nazis were also morbidly obsessed with eugenics and believed that their race, the Aryans, was the master human race. Other lower races, especially the Jews, had to be eliminated to ‘purify’ the human race and make them pay for the crimes they had committed against the state, which was directly responsible for the defeat of Germany in the First World War.

Displaced people in Germany during World War 2

By the late 1940s, hundreds of thousands of Josef K.’s were met by Nazi agents at their doors and were arrested despite not having done anything wrong. Their assets were seized and they were sent to concentration camps without any trial where they faced torture and almost certain death. In other words, they died ‘like a dog’. Der Prozess had become an undeniable reality.

The Nazi Holocaust, although an extreme event, is unfortunately not an exception. Millions of Josef K.’s have died since 1945 in the USSR, Rwanda, and Armenia. All these countries had a constitution and a notion of justice in place. The Trial was most definitely Kafka’s warning about totalitarian regimes. It is fitting that he chose not to disclose the surname of the protagonist. It was his way of saying that this man could be anyone: a Jew in Nazi Germany, a Rohingya Muslim in present-day Myanmar or a Viet in Cambodia in 1975.

So far, this essay has created analogies between The Trial and historical events with the assumption that the protagonist of the story hadn’t done anything which could be considered a crime. The remainder of this essay will have a slightly different take: What if the protagonist had indeed committed ‘a crime’ and simply didn’t know he did?

By now, history has an extremely rich archive of the totalitarian states that have existed (or exist) around the world. Most of these states have very similar characteristics: fervent nationalism, a powerful tyrant dictator, rampant jingoism and tendency to commit genocide of minority and disadvantaged groups.

However, there is a new kind of totalitarian state brewing. Its primary weapon is not massive armies or concentration camps but data; extensive information that it collects about its citizens from every imaginable aspect of their lives. It is unlikely that Kafka had the clairvoyance to predict data-driven totalitarian states in the 21st century but nevertheless, his book manages to serve as a chilling warning to this nouveau totalitarianism too.

Nosedive, Black Mirror

In 2016, the Netflix series Black Mirror released an episode titled Nosedive. True to its theme, it features a dystopian world where people were required to rate other people based on the quality of interactions they had with them. Based on the ratings other people gave you, you would be assigned a social credit score. This score was as important as money as it determined the kind of public places you could visit, homes you could rent and neighborhoods you could live in.

On the outset, this episode may seem like science fiction but a state like this is actually taking shape in the People’s Republic of China. China announced that it was experimenting with a social credit system that could determine the kind of loans you could avail and jobs you could take. Traditionally private information such as shopping history and friendships of an individual could now be made public.  The Chinese Government claimed that it was to build a system of trust but the underlying repercussions of this system are immense. This system is the first step towards total surveillance. The effects have already begun to seep through. For instance, a number of students in China were barred from admissions in schools and colleges on account of their parents’ low credit scores. The parents were apparently on a ‘national blacklist’. Josef K. had once again faced consequences without having done anything wrong and without knowing the nature of his crime.

Another interesting facet of Josef K.’s trial was his freedom of mobility. Despite being under arrest, he is allowed to roam freely and conduct his business as usual. This is because the unidentified authority that has charged him has means and tools at its disposal that allows it to identify the location of Josef K. at any given time. Many countries in the west have tools that enable them to track people’s locations and they have misused severely by authorities. For instance, authorities at a local police department in the US were found guilty of using traffic light tapes to identify cars parked outside of gay bars and blackmail the owners into revealing their sexuality to their family. China is also undertaking a project of supplying its police force with AR spectacles that would automatically identify a person. Therefore, the surveillance aspect of The Trial is not science fiction anymore; it is slowly becoming a disturbing reality.

Throughout the novel, we do not have any idea of the nature of crimes that Josef K. has committed. And neither does Josef K. himself. But can this be possible? To answer this question, this essay will devise a thought experiment that borrows elements from George Orwell’s dystopian novel, 1984. In 1984, there is a separate class of crime called ‘Thoughtcrime’ which is the crime of having thoughts considered ‘illegal’. The Big Brother in the novel takes elaborate steps to ensure no one is committing this crime but recent development in technology might make this process much easier.

Neuroscientists and major Software Giants (including Facebook) are developing a technology that can directly convert thoughts to speech or text. Considering the fact that this technology will be embedded into wearable devices, this has the potential to give the provider unlimited access to our thoughts. The question, therefore, begs to be asked. What if totalitarian governments used this technology to read the thoughts of its citizens and incarcerate those that harbored thoughts that were considered dangerous? Then, we would finally have the answer to The Trial’s most burning question. Josef K. of the 21st century had harbored a thought that made it eligible to be considered as Thoughtcrime. Unbeknownst to him, this thought was recorded on his wearable device and transmitted to the Government. The Government then arrested Josef K. without giving him any explanations regarding the circumstances.

Dystopian novels have been revered as being important hallmarks of literature but we often ignore the salient warnings they give out. The Trial is no exception. Despite its ‘validation’ from history, readers will still find the piece to be absurd. But the warnings that it gives out must be taken seriously. It may not be very long before we too have agents outside our door waiting to arrest us, deny us a fair trial and execute us like dogs.

Bibliography

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