DEFEATING SEXUAL AGGRESSION: EVEN HARVEY WEINSTEIN MOSTLY FAILED

 
Violence is difficult to carry out. This is the main finding of  research on what happens when humans find themselves in situations threatening violence. It runs contrary to our cultural beliefs,  and the way violence is depicted in the news and entertainment media. But the news reports violence that happens, not fights that abort, angry quarrels that fritter out, or guns that are pointed but not fired, or fired but miss. Films and TV shows make violence look dramatic, but if they showed what it actually looks like no one would want to watch it.

Does this pattern fit sexual aggression? We may think sexual aggression is easy and automatic, a product of male hormones or domineering male culture. But our evidence is mostly sampling on the dependent variable, and lumping different kinds of sexual advances together. Attempted rapes often fail, and many kinds of sexual advances do not get very far.

This, I suggest, is good news. It means there are micro-interactional conditions by which sexual aggression can be deterred-- locally, on the spot, by participants themselves. The question is whether the micro-processes that make physical violence succeed, also apply to sexual aggression. This is a genuine question; there is little systematic research on it yet.  But sifting through ethnographic evidence plus news reports -- which since the last quarter of 2017 have been suddenly full of graphic detail--  gives an indication of whether the micro-sociology of violence also explains when and how sexual aggression fails. Just asking the question points the way to better research on the turning points of sexual violence.

Parallels between homicide and rape

Homicides divide into the following categories (which are also causal pathways):

-- murders among family members, friends and acquaintances (the most frequent kind of homicide);

-- murders by strangers,  including:

            -- serial killers -- the rarest kind of murder, although the most highly publicized;

            -- murder in the course of a property crime such as burglary or robbery; 

            -- political murders including assassination, terrorism, and war atrocities;

            -- vendettas, the traditional pre-modern form of violent politics, and its contemporary equivalent, gang wars.

            -- violence in carousing zones.

The same set of causal pathways apply to lesser forms of violence, ranging from minor battery to felonious assault (where someone is severely wounded).

Rape divides into the same categories and causal paths:

-- acquaintance rape, the most frequent type of sexual coercion, AKA date rape.

-- stranger rape and its sub-types:

            -- serial rapists-- comparatively rare, but highly publicized. These have a similar pattern as serial killers, an ostensibly ordinary individual with a clandestine life of carefully selecting victims and planning attacks. Serial killers are often serial rapists.

            -- rape in the course of robbery or burglary, especially when a home intruder finds an easy sexual victim. These rapes are impulsive rather than planned.

            -- political rapes, including revenge rapes in societies with traditional vendettas; ethnic cleansing rapes during genocides; mass rapes in highly ideological wars and civil wars. These are gang rapes rather than individual.

            -- party rapes and carousing zone rapes. These are the sexual equivalent of fights at parties.

Micro-dynamics of violent conflict

The triggers-- and inhibitors-- of violence are in the emotional details of human interaction. The following summarizes evidence from my 2008 book, Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, and subsequent research using video and other data.

Confrontational tension and fear:  In situations threatening violence, participants may start out with angry bluster, loud voices, and menacing gesture. But when it comes to bodily attack on their opponent, even the most aggressive show tension and fear on their faces. This tension makes most violence incompetent. Soldiers and cops who are proficient on a firing range often miss when their target is a live human being;  gang-bangers are even more incompetent, firing wildly and quickly running or driving away.

Micro-sociology triggers physiology, and bodily reactions get in the way of conscious intentions. Face-to-face confrontations are socially tense, pumping adrenaline, the flight-or-fight hormone, an undifferentiated arousal that can go either way. Many soldiers in combat do not fire their guns. Like cops in shoot-outs, those who do fire often have perceptual distortions, time slowing to dream-like or speeding up to a blur, a sound-proof tunnel where shooters can’t hear their own guns. Some freeze; some hit their own side in friendly fire; some go into a frenzy where they can’t stop firing in an overkill of bullets until they have emptied their magazine. The same applies to fists, kicks, or knife-stabs. The common denominator is high adrenaline levels, which mobilize the large muscles of the body but desensitize fine motor control of hands and fingers.

What happens in a confrontation depends on the relative levels of adrenaline on both sides. If one side can stay in the zone of medium arousal while the other loses bodily control, the more competent performer at violence will beat the incompetent performer. Not that the better fighter at the moment has to be really competent, just less incompetent than the other. At the extreme, one side becomes paralyzed at very high adrenaline levels, making an easy target for the opponent still capable of attacking. 

To be skilled in violence is to keep your own adrenaline level down to medium levels, while driving up your opponent’s to high levels that make them incompetent. If adrenaline levels are equal, neither side performs worse than the other, and the confrontation stalls out, the fight aborting or winding down by losing momentum. We see this also in sexual aggression.

Attacking the weak:  Confrontational tension and fear (ct/f ) is a barrier that aggressors have to overcome if they are to deliver any violence. There are several ways around this barrier. The most common pattern is attacking a weak victim: someone who is physically much weaker; someone who is unarmed when you are armed; someone who is running away. Outnumbering the opponent is a major confidence-booster. In photos of riots and brawls, the most common pattern is a group of between 3 and 6 attackers hitting and kicking an isolated individual. Without this advantage, evenly matched  fights usually are stalemates, coming to nothing or quickly aborting; Having even one supporter on the weaker side shifts the emotional balance.

The advantage is not so much physical but emotional domination. Robbers with guns are nevertheless wary of hold-ups where one is a lone individual outnumbered by victims and bystanders; most successful robberies consist of 2 or 3 robbers against an isolated shop-keeper. Back-up in robberies is confidence-building, and a way to establish emotional dominance over the victim. Even police act this way; the more police on the scene, the more likely they are to commit extensive violence in making arrests. Successful violence comes from establishing the mood and rhythm from the outset, driving the opponent into passivity.

Confrontation-minimizing tactics:  Another way around the barrier of ct/f  is to avoid the main source of tension: threatening the other person face-to-face. Eye contact makes the encounter tense. Robbers and muggers find it easiest to attack from behind, where the two sides cannot see each other’s eyes. Wearing masks and hoods emboldens the attacker and disconcerts victims by making the attacker appear un-human. And in the modern high-tech world, cyber attacks are psychologically easy, since they involve no human confrontation at all.

Audience support: Onlookers who encourage a fight help overcome ct/f  and enable fighters to carry on much longer than they would if there were no one watching. How long and severe the fight is depends on the size and attitude of the audience: most destructive where a large audience is unified in cheering on a fight; shorter and less harmful when the audience is divided or unsure; when bystanders ignore a fight it soon peters out.

Violence as fun and entertainment: Fights are particularly likely on occasions of leisure and fun: parties, drinking places, holidays, crowds at games and concerts. These are carousing zones where normal routines are suspended and special excitement is expected. Violence on these occasions still requires overcoming ct/f, finding emotional domination over weak victims, and/or support of an audience.

Do the conditions for successful violence apply also to sexual violence?

Sexual confrontation/fear.  Like all aggression, sexual arousal pumps adrenaline. Sexual advances which are risky and uncertain generate the excitement-equivalent of the flight-or-fight arousal that can go either way. We would expect to find some jittery rapists, and other sexual aggressors who lose their nerve.

We lack systematic evidence on most of these points, so the generalizations here are hypothetical. But I will cite research where available, and supply illustrations from news accounts and from my own interviews.

[interview:] A young man in his late teens followed an attractive middle-aged woman into her apartment building, by hurrying through the security door behind her. No one else is in the lobby. In the elevator he pulls a knife and threatens to rape her. Although a small woman (5 foot 2 inches), she is a top executive in a non-profit organization, used to exercising authority.  She says disapprovingly, what would your mother think if she knew what you are doing? When the elevator door opened, he runs off.

[interview:]  A tall (5 foot 9 inches), attractive woman in her mid-20s is running in an open area, when a man about her age runs up behind her and grabs her. She turns around and swings at him, knocking off his glasses and breaking them. (What did he look like?) About six feet tall, long hair and mustache, medium build. He immediately starts apologizing. She steps on his glasses, and glares at him as he retreats.

The tables turned when the rapist fails to establish emotional domination. In the previous case, the attacker has a knife, but as in hold-ups, a weapon is not enough to be successful unless the victim is intimidated.

Short of rape, milder forms of sexual aggression often fail, perhaps most of the time. David Grazian’s research on night clubs found that male patrons often engage in “the girl hunt,” seeking pickups. But these young men did more talking among themselves about the women they saw than actually making contact with them. Generally they lowered their sights to getting phone numbers, not too successfully at that; and groups of young women who went to clubs together often gave them fake numbers. In other words, even in venues explicitly themed for sexual encounters, most of the “girl hunters” stayed on the sidelines, did not approach aggressively, and were rarely successful.

Is this true across the spectrum of sexual aggression? Accounts in the news media focus on aggressions that succeed, but even here we find most aggressors do not get far.

A distant-to-close scale of  sexual violations:

[a] sex talk: including talk about sex in general; talking about one’s own sexual experiences and thoughts; talking about sex in regard to the listener on the spot.

[b] sexual exhibition: from the most distant to the most personal, this would include showing pornography; sending or showing nude photos of oneself; exhibiting oneself in front of someone else; at its most extreme, performing sex acts like masturbation in front of someone else.

[c] sexual touching: ranging from any body contact at all; to touching bare skin; touching that approaches genitals and breasts; actual groping. Also along this continuum are various kinds of kissing, from air kisses to mouth kisses to tongue kissing. Hugging is also a continuum depending on what kind of body contact and how forceful.

[d] coerced sex acts: including vaginal, oral, and anal.

Narratives of sexual aggression often claim this set of behaviors is a progression, aggressors trying out [a], [b] and [c] as precursors to [d]. Let us see what the evidence is.

Attacking the weak: Sheer size and muscular domination sometimes shows up in the accounts of sexual harassment.

A hip-hop record producer (Russell Simmons) offered a young screenwriter a ride home from a restaurant. The car doors were locked and he told the driver to go to his apartment. “I desperately wanted to keep the situation from escalating. I wanted you to feel I was not going to be difficult. I wanted to stay as contained as I could.... he did not punch me, drag me, or verbally threaten me. (But when they got to his building, he) ... used (his) size to maneuver me quickly into the elevator.” In the apartment, he moved her into a bedroom and did not stop when she said ‘wait.’ “At that point, I simply did what I was told.”

Here physical pressure without actual violence produces  emotional domination. But sometimes overt force fails: The leader of a labor coalition [Mickey Kasparian], talking to a county employee in his office, pinned her down on a sofa and lay on top of her. “I felt like I was being raped,” she said. But the attempt failed. On another occasion, he asked her to participate in group sex with himself and two other women; she successfully declined, although she did visit his hotel room where he had just finished sex with another woman. Four more advances happened over 3 or 4 years, including touching her breasts and genital areas through her clothes in a parked car. She had initially approached him online because she liked his pro-family labor policies and wanted to pursue a career in labor politics; she regarded him as her mentor, and saw him frequently at union-related meetings and social events. This woman eventually sued him. Another woman who worked for him had a long-term sexual relationship with him-- although he was married-- from the time she was hired in 2001 until she retired in 2016. She eventually joined the round of law suits in 2017.

The chief creative officer of a New York advertising agency, while on a business trip to France in the 1990s with a senior art director, pushed her onto a hotel room bed and tried to kiss her. She pushed him off. Several months later she complained to the agency President. Six months later she was fired, as “not the right fit for the agency.” 

At the NFL Network, a wardrobe stylist (i.e. she dressed on-screen speakers backstage) charged a former football star with pinning her against a wall, demanding oral sex and pulling his pants down. She accused an executive of sending nude photos of himself, rubbing against her, and trying to coerce her into having sex with him. Two other former football players at the NFL Network sent nude photos or videos of themselves and propositioned her on multiple occasions. All these approaches failed. When the sex scandals broke out in October 2017, she filed suit for wrongful termination.

Another successful rape was again by the hip-hop producer, when he took a 17-year-old model to his hotel room and tried to force her to have intercourse. “I fought wildly,” she said later. Eventually he relented, when she agreed to perform oral sex on him. “I guess I just acquiesced.” Feeling disgust, she took a shower, when he walked up behind her in the shower and briefly penetrated her. She jerked away, and he left.

All of the news reports are about acquaintance rape attempts; on the whole, they do not rely on attackers outnumbering the victim. Stranger rapes are more violent, especially when they are solo. Solo rapists frequently operate in teams; this is always the case in political rapes, where the teams are very large. Serial rapists are loners, hence they are generally armed (the Boston Strangler, however, was a large muscular man who approached housewives during the daytime posing as a repair man).

Not all violent rapes succeed. [interview:]  a medium size, attractive woman was attacked in her bedroom by a burglar; a trial lawyer, she was able to talk him out of raping her. Thereafter she always slept with a pistol at her bedside.

In high-profile sexual harassment cases, strength and weakness is mainly through rank and prestige. Aggressors are film producers and directors, famous actors, successful politicians, orchestra and opera conductors, advertising agency executives, newscasters and TV personalities. Victims/targets are generally their employees, lower staffers, young interns or career-seekers.

[interview:] In the 1970s, a woman holding high rank in a state government heard from her young female interns that when they carried reports to a high-ranking legislator, he would stick his hands up their mini-skirts. Furious at this treatment of her protégés, she barged into the legislator’s office-- past his protective secretary-- and angrily denounced him: “Next time, pick on someone your own rank!” He was cowed, and desisted-- no public charges being thinkable at that time, when women were just entering politics. Like an experiment, the case shows equality of rank makes a difference.

[interview:] An attractive woman hospital chain executive, very talkative and friendly, attended a conference of professional peers. After a convivial dinner, she went to her hotel room where she found one of the men from the dinner had gotten inside with a key he picked up from the desk. Although he was large and intoxicated, she locked herself in the bathroom and called security to get him out. (This was her main example when asked if she had ever been sexually harassed.)

But not just rank difference alone is operative; reported incidents show a pattern of times and places that favor the aggressor and weaken the victim.

Home turf advantage:  Sexual aggressions happen especially where an important person works at home, surrounded by female assistants; or where they put in very long hours at the office, into the small hours of the morning when no one else is around.

Independent news interviewer/producer Charlie Rose worked mainly out of his estate 60 miles from New York, with a personal assistant and young interns. A 21-year-old assistant recalled a dozen instances when he emerged from the shower and walked nude in front of her; he also telephoned her repeatedly to describe his fantasies of her swimming nude in the mansion pool. In the most serious charge, a young job applicant was invited to his estate, where he told her he needed to change clothes after getting his pants wet in the pool. He returned in a bathrobe open at the front, and tried to put his hand down her pants. Later she called it “the most humiliating experience of my life.” A total of 8 women accused him of unwanted advances and trying to kiss them without permission. Other staffers said he was “often flirtatious, but never inappropriate”-- possibly those who did not work at his home.

Hollywood producer Brett Ratner had a mansion where he and his friends would invite aspiring models and actresses for screen tests and film viewings. In this backstage atmosphere, she would be isolated from companions and locked in a bedroom. One director [James Toback] asked a women he had approached for a tryout to show him how she masturbated. “I was afraid that if I didn’t do what he said, it would get worse,” one said later. “I felt frozen.” Finally he humped her leg and ejaculated. In another instance, Ratner groped a young actress in the bedroom. “I was saying, ‘No, stop, I don’t want to.’ And he took his pants off and he was trying to grab my hand, and put it on him-- ‘Just touch it, just touch it, come on.” When she refused, he masturbated and ejaculated.  In both instances, the attackers settled for sexual exhibition and masturbation when rape failed.

Federal Court of Appeals Judge Kozinski demanded a strenuous work pace from his young law clerks, often extending past midnight. By December 2017, 15 women accused him of misconduct, mostly making sexual comments, but including 4 who said he touched or kissed them inappropriately. One woman said that on at least 3 occasions he called her into his office to show her pornographic pictures on his computer, asking if she thought it was digitally altered and if it aroused her sexually. (Three other clerks told similar stories of being shown pornography in his office.) He also showed her a chart of the number of women he and his college classmates had sex with. Kozinski had been appointed as a very high-ranking judge in 1985 at the age of 33;  apparently he regarded himself as continuing the life of a fraternity boy.

As recently as a dinner in 2017, Kozinski sat next to a woman law professor, told her that he had just had sex, pinched her leg above the knee, and tried to feed her with his fork. This was apparently his idea of recreation, a jokey-silly good timer.

As a high-prestige person, he showed off before audiences. Another woman, who clerked for a different judge, described a luncheon break where court staff were discussing workouts; Kozinski suggested she should exercise naked, and when the group tried to change the topic, kept coming back to it: “It wasn’t just he was imagining me naked, but trying to invite other professional colleagues to do so as well. That was what was humiliating about it.”

Audience support:  The last is an instance where someone uses an audience to support verbal aggression. In these celebrity cases, audience support for violent sexual assault is rare; one reported instance is when hip-hop mogul Simmons attempted to rape a 17-year-old model in his hotel room while his then-young protégé, Ratner, stood by and watched, adding to her feeling of being outnumbered. When relying on sheer rank and prestige, celebrities generally preferred privacy to audience support.

The pattern differs in the case of fraternity party rapes and coerced sex, where audiences are of the essence. [Sanday, Armstrong/Hamilton, Moffatt] Anthropologist Peggy  Sanday goes so far as to call these homosocial bonding rituals: the frat brothers not only talk at length about who managed to score at a party, but would barge into a room where they were having sex, or view through a window. Although fraternities may tout their reputation as places where there is a lot of action, only an elite minority of their members get sex at any given party. Most of the girls who came with companions leave before their number dwindles-- i.e. they use their audience support to protect themselves from going too far even when they are drinking. Conversely, towards the end, the audience becomes overwhelmingly the drunken bros, who may even dance in a circle around the few isolated women who are left. Adding to the pattern, women party-goers are ranked in prestige: high status goes to women who are engaged or girlfriends of fraternity members, and who only have sex privately. Low status are girls from off campus, and from a lower social class; these are the ones who stay until they are the only females left. This is the pattern for fraternity gang rapes, serial sex “trains,” and the sex-on-display-for-the-bros scenes described above.

Confrontation minimizing:  It might seem sexual assault is not possible without body contact. Stranger rapists, like armed robbers, prefer to attack suddenly and from behind. Back in the era when women wore long skirts, a typical move was to pull her skirt up over her head before raping her (Hemingway reports this for World War I and subsequent civil wars). This eliminated face-to-face contact, creating both greater helplessness on the victim side and greater confidence for the attacker.

The cyber era has made possible new form of long-distance sexual advances. Letters and phone calls, in the past, also served this purpose, but sending nude photos of oneself makes it more graphic. From the number of scandals of this sort, apparently it is more frequent, although perhaps just easier to document.

At NFL Network, a wardrobe stylist reported at least three former players and executives sent her nude photos of themselves, one of them a video of himself masturbating in a shower. Sending nude selfies was a fad, probably regarded as cool and edgy, in the period when cellphone cameras and email photo attachments were coming in. Rep. Anthony Weiner (married to Hillary Clinton’s aide) got into repeated scandals when he sent nude photos of himself to several young women. Rep. Joe Barton got in trouble when nude photos he had exchanged with a woman who approached him on-line were publicized after their affair broke up. This case had no allegation of sexual aggression, but in the atmosphere of spreading scandal in autumn 2017, all sex scandals were lumped together. Women staffers for Rep. Blake Farenthold routinely discussed male lobbyists who sent pictures of their genitals. In this office, men and women chatted about strip clubs and whether newscasters had breast implants. Here nude photos were not regarded as a threat (perhaps because they came from low-ranking persons); also because the office atmosphere included much sexual banter and “off-color jokes.” A press secretary said the “workplace culture was more like a frat house than a congressional office.”

Sending nude photos of oneself was rarely taken as a serious offense by recipients, unless it went along with in-person physical advances. By itself, nude photos over the Internet were unsuccessful in getting sex.

Travels away from home base: Trips to exotic places give a sense of freedom from normal constraints. This is a network effect; sexual aggressors are less concerned about their reputation; sexual targets are away from their social support.

The chief creative officer of a major New York advertising agency began advances on a female copy-editor accompanying him on assignment in L.A. in 2011 to shoot a commercial. She rejected his advances, but days later he invited her to his hotel room to discuss business. After a short conversation, he got naked, got into bed, and said “You decide what you want to do.” She gave in, saying later she felt she had no choice.  On a 2012 trip to Cannes, an executive producer at his agency reported, he offered her a key to his hotel room, but she rejected his advances.

NBC host Matt Lauer began an affair with a co-worker covering the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, continuing after they returned to New York. She made a public complaint in Nov. 2017, leading to other complaints and his rapid dismissal from his high-profile TV show.

Many of the political scandals over sexual harassment take place because elected officials work in a national or state capital, away from their home, and where there is a constant round of quasi-official socializing. Rep. Farenthold drank heavily, and aides accompanying him to Capitol Hill social functions joked about having to keep him from getting in trouble with attractive women. This is the context for news revelations of female Members of Congress and staffers “groped from behind” by Congressmen, who “grinded up against her and stuck his tongue in her ear.”   Rep. Bob Filner, who was forced out as Mayor of San Diego in 2013 after his staff sued him for aggressive hugging and kissing, was known in Congress as someone female members of Congress would avoid getting into an elevator with. 

Special events among politicians are especially likely venues for sexual advances. Rep. John Conyers invited the head of his Michigan office (57 years old at the time) to a 3-day Congressional Black Caucus event in Washington D.C. in 1997. She said she “felt honored to attend.” He came to her hotel bedroom, called room service, and ordered sandwiches. “I had my nightclothes on. I was scared to death. He sat in the bedroom taking his clothes off. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything.” Nothing happened. “He didn’t go naked. He was down to his skivvies. He sat there eating sandwiches and then he stormed out and slammed the door. I was so embarassed and ashamed of myself for being so stupid. I needed a job. He didn’t put his hand on me, but the message was loud and clear.”  She said incidents of unwanted touching happened the following year, when he was driving a car on a road trip.

Another former aide said Conyers invited her to his Chicago hotel room to discuss business. “He pointed to the...  genital area of his body and asked me, you know, touch it.” Apparently she refused.

The case of Senator Al Franken, one of the sensational news stories of November-December 2017, combines elements of these situations. In 2006, as a famous TV comedian, he was on a USO Christmas tour entertaining troops in Afghanistan. He wrote a skit in which he would kiss a young radio broadcaster (30 years younger than himself). Although she explicitly planned to turn her head and not be kissed on the mouth, during rehearsal “he mashed his lips against mine and aggressively stuck his tongue in my mouth.” *

*Rehearsals in professional entertainment are a favorable site for sexual touching by high-status persons. New York Metropolitan Opera director James Levine was accused of several homosexual advances over several decades in such venues; London orchestra conductor Charles Dutoit was accused of groping and kissing singers and musicians. The situation combines the ritual veneration given to musical maestros, with a backstage, out-of-sight atmosphere, and performers who spend most of their time practicing alone, thus are socially weak and isolated targets. And elite musicians are often on the road.

What happened next sounds like escalation against her resistance. On a military plane flying out, Franken had his picture taken with his hands on her breasts-- she is asleep, wearing a flak jacket and helmet, safety precautions in the combat zone-- while he turns to the camera with a comic leer. After the trip she was given a copy of the photo along with other mementos of the trip, apparently all to be taken in good humor. This good humor broke down 11 years later, in the midst of the spreading scandal about producer Harvey Weinstein’s casting couch. It also happened at a time of intense political maneuvering over tax reform, when Republicans held a slim majority in the Senate; and coincided with a scandal about Alabama Republican Senatorial candidate Roy Moore dating and kissing teen-age girls 40 years earlier. It was a perfect storm for Senator Franken, deserted and pressured to resign by most of his liberal friends without going through an official hearing. Franken was the poster child of the sex scandals, above all because the embarrassing photo was circulated so widely. It might well be called, “what we did on vacation.”

Sexual aggression as fun and entertainment:  It is striking how many scenes of sexual aggression are times of sociability and carousing. This is especially true for lesser aggressions, verbal and touching, rarely forceful rape. Self-regarding cut-ups and party animals (Judge Kozinski, Rep. Farenthold) mostly operate in this zone.

A top executive for Visa credit cards, regarded as a rainmaker and ace negotiator of crucial deals, was reprimanded and then fired in Dec. 2017 for having consensual relationships with mid-level employees. He ran a high-profile division, with a “work hard, play hard atmosphere.” “To be in the inner circle, you needed to party with the inner circle, going out for drinks. Most of the women who joined the circle were go-getters. They wanted face time with people who make decisions. To spend time with those men is to be looked upon as a rising star.”

Rosabeth Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporation  (1977) describes the era when women were just becoming accepted into management, mainly by helping their husband’s career through sociable contacts, but sometimes by loyalty to a boss who pulled her along with him. Joining the coattails of a ‘water-walker’ was how men advanced, too, getting highly visible assignments and building their corporate resumé. Zooming back to the present, adding a sexual element, plus a work-hard-play-hard atmosphere, makes a volatile mix.

Jobs that involve a lot of hanging around in bars create opportunities for sexual fun, sometimes leading to serious public trouble.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush was accused and fired at the height of the fall 2017 scandals for: while in a bar hangout of news employees, putting his hand on a woman’s thigh and kissing her; kissing a female colleague on the street after leaving a bar; surprising another colleague with an unexpected kiss.

More serious sexual advances have gone unpunished. A 23-year-old lobbyist in a state capital (in 2005, as she recounted it in 2017), was drinking with an important legislator, then he masturbated in front of her in the bar bathroom. She never revealed his identity, for fear of retaliation; she is still a lobbyist.

Social greeting ritual:  Finally, we should add a category that has no counterpart in the sociology of violence, unwanted hugging or touching. Ostentatious full-body greetings that came into style among the fashionable elite from the 1980s onwards, and have become more or less obligatory in such circles, gave opportunity as well as excuse for this kind of sexual touching.

John Lassiter, creative chief at Disney Animation, went on leave at the height of the controversy in November 2017. He was known for prolonged hugging, both in public and privately. Some former employees said “it made people feel awkward or uncomfortable.” Because hugging was a central part of his public persona, employees felt “it would be difficult to ask him not to do it.” One employee said he would hold her arm in public without asking permission, and hug her for extended periods of time that made her uncomfortable. She also said that several years ago during a meeting he put his hand on her thigh underneath the table.

A week later, comedian Garrison Keillor was banned by Minnesota Public Radio, for an incident in which: “I put my hand on a woman’s bare back. I meant to pat her back after she told me about her unhappiness. Her shirt was open and my hand went up it about 6 inches. She recoiled. I apologized. I sent her an email of apology and she replied she had forgiven me and not to think about it.” Keillor says he is not a person who follows the hugging style. Her accusation came out during the rush of #MeToo charges. MPR subsequently announced that one female colleague had accused him of multiple verbal incidents and touching.

Success rate of sexual aggressions

Taking together all the high-profile cases reported in the news during fall 2017, and listing the types of sexual aggressions charged: a total of 76 specific accusers charged 36 perpetrators with 44 instances of sexual talk; 77 instances of touching, 25 of sexual exhibition, and 12 coerced sex acts or rapes.

The proportion of sexual aggressions that led to coerced sex was 12/76, or 16%.  If we exclude the 4 homosexual rapes (all by one man), 8/72 sexually harassed women were raped (11%).

The surprising result is that only a small proportion of sexual harassments result in rape. If we expand the definition of coerced sex to include being forced to witness or perform masturbation, the figure rises to 18%. There is some good news in this figure:  the large majority of women experiencing sexual harassment have managed to escape.

If the celebrity figures are not representative of the population, in which direction is the statistical bias? Elites in entertainment and politics have usually good opportunities for sexual harassment. The rates of sexual aggression are likely to be lower, perhaps much lower, in other occupations. This is an empirical question; it needs research, asking about specific kinds of aggressions and particular occasions.

The summary just given does not include Harvey Weinstein, the subject of lengthy news reports starting Oct. 5, 2017, which set off the cascade of accusations against others. Is his pattern representative, or an outlier? 

A total of 85 women accused Weinstein of sexual aggressions: 56 instances of sex talk, 62 of touching, 31 of sexual exhibition, and 19 of coerced sex acts.  If Weinstein was looking for sex with each of these beautiful actresses and assistants, his success rate was 21%.  In detailed scenarios, it appears he settled for making them watch him masturbate when he wasn’t successful, as a sort of consolation prize for himself. If we include forced witnessing masturbation, his success rate rises to 25/85 or 29%.  Weinstein was the most powerful sexual predator, able to offer elite career opportunities, and supported by his wealth and organization. Even so, most of the time he failed. *

* Is the sample biased, perhaps because women who gave in to him were ashamed to come forward when others did? To raise his 21% success rate above 50%, another 50 women would have to come forward with rape charges, and no further women charge anything less than rape. To get his success rate to 80%, 250 more raped women would have to make accusations. These numbers are implausible.

So is Weinstein typical of the elite? He made explicit sexual propositions in 52% of the cases, as compared to celebrities in 14%; he used physical restraint or violence in 32%, celebrities in 16%;  his rape rate was twice as high, 21% to 11%.  Harvey Weinstein is not the tip of the iceberg, but more like an iceberg himself.

Details: Celebrity perpetrators

number of perpetrators: 36

number of victims/accusers: 76 (plus multiple others mentioned in news reports with similar experience)

* each tally sums the number of distinct incidents, or series of events with a particular perpetrator as told by one victim; i.e. some stories covered a period of time, without distinguishing particular encounters.

1. Sex talk

-- in general  3

-- about self  6

-- about target  17

-- proposition  11

-- “sexual harassment/advances” (not explained)   7

total: 44

2. Touching

-- anywhere on body (not elsewhere classified)  2

-- hugging  2

-- kissing (or attempt) 12

-- legs, buttocks  12

-- grope breast or genitals  18

-- forced to touch man’s genitals  2

-- physically restrained, manhandled, grabbed  12

-- humped, grinded body against  5

-- unwanted or “inappropriate” touching (not explained)  13

-- “sexual assault” (not explained)  4

total: 77

3. Sexual exhibition

-- pornography  9

-- nude selfie  4

-- appear naked or partly  8

-- forced to witness masturbation  4  (includes 1 described over phone)

-- victim forced to masturbate  1

4. Coerced sex acts

-- intercourse; “rape” (not explained)  5

-- cunnilingus  1

-- fellatio  1

-- homosexual rape  4

total: 8 heterosexual, 4 homosexual

5. Other

-- consensual sex affair in inappropriate rank relationship  3

-- offering alcohol to minor  1

Harvey Weinstein’s record

number of victims/accusers: 85

1. Sex talk

-- about self  4

-- about target  2

-- proposition  44

-- “sexual harassment/advances” (not explained)  6

total: 56

2. Touching

-- anywhere on body (not elsewhere classified)  4

-- hugging  1

-- kissing (or attempt)  8

-- legs, buttocks  2

-- grope breast or genitals  10

-- forced to touch man’s genitals  3

-- physically restrained, manhandled, grabbed  27

-- unwanted “inappropriate” touching (not explained)  4

-- “sexual assault” (not explained)  3

total: 62

3. Sexual exhibition

-- appear naked or partly  20

-- forced to witness masturbation  11 [4 also raped]

total:  31

4. Coerced sex acts

-- intercourse; “rape” (not explained)  11

-- cunnilingus  6

-- fellatio  2

total: 19  [18 different victims, some mutlple acts in same event]

5. Other

-- offering alcohol to minor  1

Emotional domination as turning point

In sexual aggression as in other violence, there is usually a micro-turning point: whether emotional domination is established or not.

Aspiring actress asked by a movie director to show him how she masturbated:  “I was afraid that if I didn’t do what he said, it would get worse. I felt frozen.”

A job applicant approached by a celebrity TV producer, naked beneath an open robe, who put a hand down her pants: “Why didn’t I hit him? Why didn’t I run inside? I was completely wracked with guilt and self-hatred.” 
-- Humiliation at the very moment made her passive. The underlying process is like soldiers who are massacred after they get tangled up trying to find cover on the battlefield; they become paralyzed with fear, which is what happens at very high surges of adrenaline, in a situation where one is unable to decide which way to move.

A law clerk shown pornography by Federal Judge: “I felt like a prey animal-- as if I had to make myself small. If I did, if I never admitted to having any emotion at all, I’d get through it.”

A staffer for a high-ranking member of Congress: “I was scared to death. I didn’t say anything and he didn’t say anything... He didn’t go naked... He sat there eating sandwiches and then he stormed out and slammed the door.”

-- This is similar to how threatened fights peter out: by keeping the action stalled (typically this happens by repeating the same insults over and over until it winds down from boredom) and slamming the door.

From Weinstein files:

Successful rapes via emotional domination:

A college student, approached by Weinstein at a New York club and asked to his office for a casting meeting. He both flattered her and recommended she lose weight to be on his reality show [an emotional put-down]. “After that is when he assaulted me. He forced me to perform oral sex on him. I said, over and over, ‘I don’t want to do this, stop, don’t.’  “He’s a big guy. He overpowered me. I just sort of gave up. That’s the most horrible part of it, and that’s why he’s been able to do this for so long to so many women: people give up, and then they feel it’s their fault.” “The kind of control he exerted, it was very real. Even just his presence was intimidating.”

After being cast as lead in a major movie, 22-year-old was called to his hotel suite, where he placed his hands on her and suggested massages: “I was a kid, I was signed up, I was petrified.”  --- This is probably literally true, paralyzed by fear and the sense of no way out.

French actress, invited to Cannes hotel room. He went into bathroom, and she heard the shower being turned on. He came out with an erection and demanded she lie on the bed. ‘It was like a hunter with a wild animal. The fear turns him on.’ -- Like successful armed robbers and bullies, attacker battening on fear.

Rapes by sheer physical power:

Former Miramax employee, raped by Weinstein in basement of his London office: “He grabbed me and he was so big and powerful. He just ripped my clothes away and pushed me, threw me down.”

Italian actress left alone with him in French Riviera hotel room; reluctantly agreed to give him massage, then he raped her. “[He] terrified me, and he was so big. It wouldn’t stop. It was a nightmare.” “If I were a strong woman, I would have kicked him in the balls and run away. But I didn’t. And so I felt responsible.”

Even so, some were without fear, and overcame physical power with psychological preparedness:

French actress invited to his hotel room for drink: “We were talking on the sofa when he suddenly jumped on me and tried to kiss me. I had to defend myself. He’s big and fat, so I had to be forceful to resist him. I left his room, thoroughly disgusted. I wasn’t afraid of him, though. Because I knew what kind of man he was all along.”

Targets who eventually achieved a turning point:

Actress/producer, at Sundance Film Festival, invited to his hotel room to review script she had written: Half an hour later, he went to bathroom and emerged wearing only a bathrobe open at front. He insisted on listening to her pitch in his hot tub, then asked her to watch him masturbate. When she said was leaving, he grabbed her arm, pulled her into the bathroom and told her he could green-light her script -- if she watched him. “I was on the verge of tears but I pulled it together and quickly exited.”

Swedish actress: “I sat in that chair paralyzed by mounting fear when he suggested we shower together. What could I do? How not to offend this man, this gatekeeper, who could anoint or destroy me?” After realizing there was no way he would settle for anything but “an erotic exchange,” she managed to get out of the room. “Later I sat in my hotel room and wept.”

Model was brought his hotel room in the south of France, where he emerged naked and asked for massage: “I did not want to do that and he asked if he could give me a massage... I didn’t know what to do and I felt that letting him maybe touch me a little big might placate him enough to get me out of there somehow.” Before long, she bolted into bathroom. He banged on the door with his fists before eventually retreating, putting on a dressing gown and starting to cry.

-- in these last two incidents, someone ends up crying uncontrollably. The escaped victim has a belated adrenaline discharge, similar to what happens after one leaves an angry situation where you couldn’t express yourself. And the frustrated rapist melts down, too, in frustration, suggesting that for all the bluster he was a nervous rapist.

Successful resistance throughout the encounter:

TV actress invited to his room to show her a script, told him: “I’m not interested in anything other than work, please don’t think I got in here with you for any other reason.” He was “furious” and walked her back to the elevator, holding her “tightly” by the arm. The encounter “left her in tears and feeling completely powerless.” -- again, tears once safety is reached.

British singer and TV-host, propositioned by Weinstein during lunch at Cannes Film Festival, told him “(expletive) off” and left the meeting “disgusted and angry.”

Some blithely avoided emotional dominance, and being caught:

Actress, then 17 and unknown: “I was incredibly naive and young and it did not cross my mind that this older, unattractive man would expect me to have any sexual interest in him. After declining alcohol and announcing I had school in the morning I left, uneasy but unscathed.” 

Waitress and aspiring actress, lured to hotel, where he waited in a bathrobe in front of what he said were contracts for his next three films-- but only if she would have three-way sex with him. She laughed, assuming he was joking. Weinstein grew angry: “You’ll never make it in this business. This is how the business works.” She fled.

Temporary front desk assistant at his company, said she had to refuse his advances “at least a dozen times.” Nothing happened between her and Weinstein -- but only because she “escaped five times.” (These numbers are presumably rhetorical.) “All I remember was I ducked, dived and ultimately got out of there without getting slobbered over. Well, just a bit.”

Successfully de-escalating violence

Recent micro-sociological researchers have uncovered some of the conditions by which participants themselves, on the spot, control whether threatened violence will happen or not.

Research on when political demonstrations turn violent or stay peaceful, by Anne Nassauer (on U.S. and Germany) and Isabel Bramsen (on Arab Spring demos), have zoomed in on turning points. Using videos as well as interviews with protestors and police, Nassauer found that demos that announce they are going to use violence, nevertheless may remain peaceful, just because the militant protestors do not find an opportune moment for breaking into violence. That moment happens when there is a two-part sequence of heightened tension (which can be documented in the shift from loose to tense body postures), followed by a sudden shift to emotional domination-- among the protestors or police locally on the spot, which unleashes them against a temporarily off-balance opponent.

There is also an optimistic side: at such moments of tension, and even when a local cascade of violence is unleashed, participants can cool their opponents down, or at least provide immunity for oneself. Protestors (or cops) can achieve this by directly facing the opponent (not turning one’s back, which creates a weak target inviting attack), and calling out in a strong, clear voice, such a message as: “We are peaceful, what about you?” There is a crucial detail here. Screaming the same message hysterically, with an expression of terror or rage, has no effect in deterring violence. It has to be done with voice, face, and body postures strong and calm.

But although this may happen in the relatively civil protest traditions and policing tactics of contemporary Western democracies: what about in societies where demonstrators aim for maximal disruption, and regime forces brook no defiance and are authorized to use maximal force? Surprisingly, Bramsen shows that even here, local conditions of time and emotional mood determine when and how much violence will occur on either side. Although the spectrum is shifted towards more violence overall, nevertheless there are moments of emotional equilibrium when demonstrators and regime forces (e.g. in Syria or Bahrain) let each other go through ritualized displays without using violence; and times when tension rises uncontrollably into situations of local advantage and hence violence. Many of the demonstrators in Bramsen’s analysis are women cloaked in traditional Arab dress, who nevertheless sometimes stand off against Arab men; and conversely, women in German and American protests can confront the police successfully, or give the wrong micro-signals and get beaten up.

All this suggests there is a gender-transcending process of conflictual interaction, and it contains turning points that stymie violence, including sexual violence. Extending the argument, there are micro-turning points that deter rapes, as well as less intense forms of sexual aggression.

Further clues come from research on conflicts in public places, bars, and entertainment venues. Threatened fights and actual scuffles peter out when they remain in emotional equilibrium, each side mirroring the other and no one getting an advantage (Collins; Jackson-Jacobs). When bystanders intervene to break up such fights, they almost always succeed (Levine et al.). The importance of keeping the emotional equilibrium comes out even when the belligerents are armed. Joe Krupnick’s research on veteran gang members, passing by rivals on Chicago streets, shows the existence of an etiquette for getting through dangerous situations: notice the presence of your enemy with a slight gesture or casual word; do not stare or a take guarded stance, since this suggests wariness that can precipitate an attack; do not look back; keep studied indifference while listening to music or beat-boxing. Violation of these manners is called “slipping” and will get the offender beaten up, if not shot. Keeping the common rhythm is keeping the peace, even when it isn’t friendly.

Nassauer’s research on videos of robberies recorded on CCTV shows, conversely, that successful robbers establish the rhythm of interaction, getting the store clerk to immediately fall into passively doing what the robber demands. This is not merely a matter of verbal commands, but of a visible rhythm of body movements and reciprocal postures. But store clerks do not always fall into the robber’s rhythm; it can be disrupted, for instance, if a robber trips in vaulting the counter, or if the clerk ignores them or laughs at them, or grabs a broom and starts swinging at them. Once again, we find that holding superior weapons is not a guarantee of compliance, and armed robbers can also lose their nerve and retreat. This appears to be a gender-transcending pattern. Women are among the clerks who deter robbers by not falling into their rhythm. At the same time, as video research at the Sociology Department, University of Copenhagen shows, resisting a robbery increases the chance of being injured, while it reduces the robbers’ chances of success. There are probably yet more detailed micro-processes that are fateful in these kinds of encounters.

Bottom line: the micro-sociology of violence in general suggests there are pathways by which women can deter sexual aggression. Perhaps surprisingly, such micro-deterence may be more successful in preventing the extreme forms of sexual violence-- bodily rape, than lesser forms like verbal aggression. But we just don’t know, since we have so little evidence covering situations where women silence men's verbal advances. The common denominators are, extrapolating from violence generally: keep facing your opponent; looking him in the face, head up, as directly as possible; keep calm and strong-voiced as possible; repeat-repeat-repeat to the point of boredom.* Even the arch casting-couch rapist, Weinstein, failed in the majority of his documented attempts; and this is consistent with other evidence.

* These tactics are less likely to work when rapists operate in groups against isolated victims; but that is the ratio in which other kinds of violence are most successful too.

Even without a survey of successes and failures of deterring sexual advances, it is striking that so many of the detailed instances I have assembled show extreme sexual aggression is unsuccessful. News reports and accusations are motivated to publicize the most atrocious instances, but even here, most of what they report fits the pattern that sexual aggression is not easy and is often deterred.

How often do women pay the price for resisting sexual advances?

But if women are often successful in resisting, aren’t they trapped by retaliation in the form of losing their job or career opportunities? 

There are some data on this, in the charges reported by Weinstein’s 85 accusers.  He was successful in raping 18 women, and forced an addition 7 into witnessing him masturbate. Of this total of 25 victims, 11 had successful careers in the entertainment world.

Another 58 women successfully resisted or evaded his aggression. Of these, 34 had successful entertainment careers, including 8 who became big stars.

Surprisingly, women who resisted were more likely to have career success (59%) than those who were unable to resist (44%).  This is not enough data to generalize from with confidence, but it does come from the biggest sexual predator of contemporary times, a man who was famous for threatening his victims’ careers. We have seen this pattern before, in the realm of violence, where bluster and bluff is common before a fight but doesn’t carry over into winning the fight, unless the recipient believes the bluster.

None the less,  more than a third of the resisters did have mediocre or failed careers. Without indepth research, it is difficult to judge how many of them were never on a career track or had few prospects, and how many were destroyed by Weinstein’s retaliation. In the business world, we have instances where women who complained lost their jobs.

Where anti-harassment laws and procedures come in

Research by Justine Tinker, Shannon Rawski, and others has shown that sexual harassment training in workplaces is ineffective. It tends to reinforce gender stereotypes-- men as strong and aggressive, women as weak victims; men who like their masculine identity feel motivated to be more aggressive; many regard the described offenses as trivial and the whole procedure as bureaucratic wheel-spinning. And many women are unwilling to punish co-workers with being fired for what they too regard as small offenses.

I argue that instead of relying on top-down training and reporting programs, women can take action on the spot, making the micro-moves that prevent emotional domination and deterring most serious sexual aggression. Where official procedures would be most useful is protecting women who successfully resist from retaliation against their jobs and careers.

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Civil War Two, Part 1

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Appendix: research needed on experiences of deterring sexual aggression

This is a make-shift analysis. We still need well-balanced surveys, systematically asking the right questions:

-- In your experience, how many instances can you recall where you were subjected to unwanted sexual advances?

-- What did the aggressor do? Check all the relevant categories of sexual talk, touching, exhibition, and coerced sex acts.

-- Were you successful in resisting these advances? What did you do?

Ask about surrounding circumstances:

-- was the attacker bigger and stronger? did he have a weapon? was he of higher rank?

-- how many other persons were present: your companions; attackers and their companions? if an audience was present, what did they do?

-- what were your emotions at the time, and those expressed by the attacker and others? did you have a pounding heart beat, shortness of breath, time distortions? did you feel paralyzed for a while, and how long?

-- what kind of location? was it an entertainment venue, social event, ceremonial gathering, dinner or party, bar, street? what time of day was it?  how long did it go on? was there a home turf advantage? was it a location away from your usual home base?

-- above all: who got emotional domination and how did they get it? were there any turning points and what were the details of how dominance shifted?

References

Randall Collins, 2008.  Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory

Jack Katz,  1988. Seductions of Crime.

Eric Hickey. 2002. Serial Murderers and their Victims.

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs. 2013. "Constructing Physical Fights: An Interactionist Analysis of Violence Among Affluent  Suburban Youth." Qualitative Sociology 36: 23-52.

Edward O. Laumann et al. 1994. The Social Organization of Sexuality.  pp.333-339 “Forced/coerced sex in adulthood.”

Cheryl Brown Travis (ed.), 2003. Evolution, Gender and Rape.

Lee Ellis. 1989. Theories of Rape.

Rosabeth Kanter. 1977. Men and Women of the Corporation.

Michael Moffatt, 1989. Coming of Age in New Jersey.

Peggy Reeves Sanday, 2007. Fraternity Gang Rape..

Jody Miller, 2008. Getting Played.

David Grazian, 2008.  On the Make.

Elizabeth A. Armstrong and Laura Hamilton, 2013. Paying for the Party

political rapes:

Mary Kaldor, 1999. New and Old Wars.

NPR, Oct. 20, 2009. “Guinea shaken by wave of rapes during crackdown.”

Nicole Rafter. 2016. The Crime of All Crimes. Towards a Criminology of Genocide.

sources for Weinstein accusers:  USA Today  Oct. 27, 2017; Washington Post Oct. 5, 2017; BBC 20 Dec. 2017; Wikipedia.

news sources for celebrity scandals Oct.-Dec. 2017:  New York Times; Wall Street Journal;  Los Angeles Times; Washington Post; San Diego Union-Tribune; AP news service.

A full search of all charges in the news or online is beyond the scope of this article.

preventing violence:

Anne Nassauer, 2013.   Violence in demonstrations. PhD dissertation, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Anne Nassauer, 2017. "Failed interaction rituals: armed store robberies gone wrong." Special Issue: “Crime Caught on Camera.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.

Isabel Bramsen, 2017.  Route Causes of Conflict: Trajectories of violent and non-violent conflict intensification.  (PhD Dissertation)  University of Copenhagen.

Joseph Krupnick and Christopher Winship, 2015. "Keeping Up the Front: How Black Youth Avoid Street Violence in the Inner  City"  in Orlando Patterson and Ethan Fosse (eds.),  The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth.

Mark Levine at al. 2011.
"Third parties, violence, and conflict resolution." Psychological Science  22: 406-412.

Justine Tinkler. 2012. “Resisting the enforcement of sexual harassment law.” Law and Social Inquiry 37: 1.24.

Justine Tinkler. 2013. “How do sexual harassment policies shape gender beliefs?” Social

Science Research  42: 1269-1283.

Shannon Rawski. 2017. “The effects of identity threat reactions to sexual harassment on training outcomes.” Academy of Management Proceedings.

NORTH KOREA: WHEN DOES NUCLEAR WAR BEGIN?

Mutual escalation between the US and North Korea has risen to a high level. There have been threats of destruction, personal insults between heads of state, and even claims that a state of war exists. Beyond the realm of words are provocative actions including firing missiles and testing nuclear explosions on the North Korean side, and naval and military aircraft movements by the US.

Assuming the worst, when will nuclear war begin? This is a more complicated question than it might appear. According to the conventional model of escalation and counter-escalation, if both sides do not pull back, nuclear war would seem to be inevitable.

Nevertheless, there are some grounds for optimism. If we look at research on threatening situations of smaller-scale violence, we find that violence does not always break out. In most situations where antagonists insult and challenge each other, violence does not happen. This is true even when both sides have weapons, show them off, and make threatening gestures with them.

I will summarize what we know about when protest demonstrations do or do not turn into violent riots, and similarly about confrontations in bar fights, street fights, and gang wars.

When do demonstrations become riots?

According to Dr. Anne Nassauer, sociologist at the Free University Berlin, most demonstrations are peaceful. Her research focuses on demonstrations in the US and in Germany, with comparisons elsewhere in Europe, where 92-98% of protests are peaceful. The impression that demonstrations easily turn violent is created because the news media ignore most demonstrations unless they are violent.

Even when participants announce in advance they will use violence, that is not enough to predict that a demo will be violent. Nor does it matter whether authorities announce a zero-tolerance policy, declaring that any provocation by demonstrators will be met by force and arrest.

It makes no difference whether or not a demonstration includes participants who come prepared to fight. Since the 1990s, demos have generally included an avowedly violent group known as the Black Bloc-- who wear black clothes, facemasks, body armor and shields, and link arms in aggressive tactics against police and opponents. The names have changed over the years; in the 1960s the pro-violence faction were called “Maoists”, while very recently they have gone under the “Anti-Fa” banner. Such groups are usually a small proportion of a large demonstration. But as we can see in photos of riots, only 5-10% of the those present do all the violence; so a relatively small violent group can potentially make a demo into a riot. The surprising finding is that whether such a group is present or not does not make a difference in whether the demo will stay peaceful or not.

Avowed intentions do not matter much when it comes to violence. Declaring that you are going to be violent does not predict what you  will actually do. On the flip side, declaring that a protest will be peaceful does not guarantee that it will turn out that way; violence can break out even when demonstrators plan to use non-violent tactics and the policing style is hands-off. As Nassauer shows, even when the police announce they will avoid using force, and both sides meet beforehand to plan the protest route and agree on how to avoid confrontations, things can go wrong. At the moment of outbreak, violence is inflamed by surprise and outrage on each side that their agreement was violated.

Why don’t groups of people do what they say they are going to do? In contentious protests, whether the event turns violent is the result of turning points that first increase tension on both sides, and then trigger off a collective reaction. It is less a matter of conscious planning than of emotions building up during the situation when the two sides confront each other face to face. It is an emergent process.  Dr. Isabel Bramsen of Copenhagen University, who studied demonstrations and violence in the Arab Spring uprisings, called her analysis “Route Causes of Violence”-- i.e. the causes of violent outbreaks emerge en route, rather than determining what will happen in advance.

Take the case where we would most expect violence: the demonstrators are ready to fight, and the authorities have said they will put it down by force. Yet, without the emotional turning points en route, this does not happen. Why not? Above all, it is a matter of timing.

Typically, if violence occurs during a protest demonstration, it will break out one to three hours in. A demo does not start out by being violent from the very first minute. Even if protestors intend to be violent, they don’t start off with using rocks, guns, or gasoline fire bombs; nor do authorities immediately fire tear gas and automatic weapons. *  It takes time to build up high tension, to build up the feeling of when the moment is ripe for violence. This is a mutual moment felt on both sides.

*  This is true, amazingly enough, even in Arab Spring locations like Tunisia, Bahrain, and Syria. Bramsen found that even though authoritarian regimes order their forces to use force, they do not start firing at the first sign of a demonstration. Here, too, timing and collective emotions determine what will happen.

A simple formula for avoiding violence is:

-- no violence at minute number 1

-- no violence at minute number 2

-- no violence at minute number 10

-- no violence at minutes number 30, 40, 50...

Then approaching the danger zone--

-- getting through minutes number 60, 90, 100, up to 150... without violence.

If the emotional trigger does not happen by then, both sides start to relax. As if both unconsciously feel, too late now, maybe next time. 

Small-scale violence most frequently aborts

A similar dynamic, based on emotions and timing, exists in small-scale disputes in bars, parties, and entertainment zones.

Curtis Jackson-Jacobs, a UCLA researcher, followed a loosely-organized gang in Tucson, Arizona, as they went looking for fights. It consisted of a couple of dozen young white men, all of them bored with middle-class life style, who went to parties hoping to find someone to fight with. They were looking for opponents who would give them some action and boost their prestige, at least in their own eyes:  black guys, tough guys, Hispanic gangs, bikers, athletes.  But although there were plenty of over-crowded house parties in this desert city, with plenty of loud music and drinking going on, the surprise is how difficult it was for them to find a fight. They took a belligerent attitude, bumped into people, gave people the eye, but most of the time fights didn’t happen. Fights were rare enough that when one happened, the group would spend weeks thereafter talking about it, going over the details, bragging about what they did and even about taking a beating if they lost.

Why did this action-seeking group have so much trouble finding fights? Jackson-Jacobs spelled out the subtle details that had to happen if two sides were going to fight. These little details were only semi-conscious, but they boiled down to the fact that both sides had to decide that a fight was coming up, and this had to be a mutual feeling of emotion and timing. Like a demo only turning into a riot a couple of hours in, no one walks into a party and starts a fight from the very first minute. And if the minutes go by long enough, there is a feeling that this isn’t the time and place, so the action-seekers go somewhere else. *

*Another hypothesis is that fights were also inhibited because typically rival groups fight within the same identity or demographic: as we know from gang murders in Chicago (Andrew Papachristos’ research) and gang fights generally, most such violence is segregated: black gangs fight with black gangs, Hispanic gangs with Hispanic, Irish gangs with Irish, Italian Mafias with each other. Jackson-Jacobs’ white middle-class guys were an anomaly on the tough-guy scene; they didn’t identify as skinheads, so they had no counterpart group to fight with them. J-J’s crew were looking for the prestige of fighting somebody tough; maybe they didn’t perceive that the same goes for the other side, and real fighting gangs didn’t think they were a worthy opponent.

The pattern holds generally across different kinds of small-scale fights: most encounters where people threaten each other with violence do not actually end in violence. Most stay at the level of angry insults—the human bark is worse than our bite. Even if it gets physical, most fights do not go beyond pushing and shoving. Videos of fights (posted from cell phones) generally show that after a few wild swings, fighters tend to spin away from each other, leaving themselves at a distance just out of reach while the fight winds down. Showing your willingness to fight is on the whole more important than what damage you do. Researchers in England, using CCTV from pubs and the streets outside, found that angry disputes were broken up, in the great majority of cases, by friends separating the fighters.

The fact that fights mostly abort is well known to club bouncers and other habitués of so-called dangerous places. But researchers did not start documenting the pattern until quite recently, helped by the abundance of videos. For a long time, we relied on official statistics. The trouble is that police records report only the most violent cases: almost all murders are reported, but assaults only if someone is badly injured or if a cop happens to be there. This is sampling on the dependent variable, counting only the cases where violence happens. What gets missed are all the cases where a quarrel did not turn into a fight, or at least not one serious enough to do much damage.

This isn’t just a quibble about statistics, because the upshot is entirely different when we start at the other end and ask about quarrels, to see if they end up in a fight. Most crime statistics have a pessimistic tone; we don’t have an accurate idea of what causes violence, but the causes usually cited-- poverty, discrimination, disrespect, gangs, popular entertainment-- are things that we can do very little about.  But the findings of today’s micro-sociologists are a rare piece of social science that shows optimistic results: most threatened fights do not come off. We are beginning to understand the subtle turning points that lead, sometimes to escalation, but most of the time, to the fight petering out.

A key feature that keeps quarrels from escalating is when they are balanced. Two guys quarrel with each other. They push out their chests, get their hands into fighting position. They yell insults at each other, each getting louder, trying to shout the other down. A lot here depends on what the audience will do-- whether other people take sides or encourage them to fight; or do the opposite, ignoring the quarrel, which tends to take the energy out of it. Left to themselves, the belligerents usually find themselves repeating the same insults, over and over; they are both talking at the same time, which means they aren’t listening to each other, and it just becomes a contest of keeping up the noise. (How long do dogs go on barking at each other? Check it out.) After a short period of time-- usually less than 60 seconds-- this gets boring. They get tired of a quarrel that is going nowhere. Typically they will break it off, with a gesture of disgust, or slamming the door on the way out.

This suggests some practical advice. If you get into a threatening face-contest with someone, keep it in equilibrium. Just mimic what the other person does; don’t escalate it. After a while it becomes boring-- and boredom is your friend. (Sir Francis Bacon, 400 years ago, wrote that if you are in an angry dispute, keep it to common terms of abuse; don’t try to score a cutting remark with a personal insult that your opponent will never forgive.)

Different groups of people have their specific ways of carrying out quarrels, their own cultures of quarreling. But cutting across most of them is an unconscious common denominator: most of the time they have ways of keeping their disputes this side of violence. Research on quarrels among roommates or neighbours shows that such disputes often fester, but they almost never go all the way to violence. Gangs have an explicit culture of violence; they brag about it and measure their prestige by it. Nevertheless, close ethnographic observations by trained observers on the spot show that gang fights are much more about showing off their weapons than using them.

Street gangs have a turf and challenge anyone who enters it who fits the demographic of a rival gang; and often in a show of bravado they will invade someone else’s turf. But what happens then? If the groups are more or less evenly matched, they confine themselves to flashing their gang signs, showing their colors, exchanging trash talk. On a schoolyard in southern California, rival gangs pull up their shirts to show the guns tucked in their waist-bands; but nothing happens, until the school janitor comes out and shoos them away. On the streets of west and north Philadelphia, the local culture of gun gesturing has evolved in the last 20 years-- opening your coat to show the butt of a gun; pulling the gun but keeping it pointed at the ground while continuing the duet of insults; pointing the gun in the air. This requires a good understanding of what’s going on, and accomplished tough guys need to be able to read the signs of where this ballet of danger displays is leading. Shootings do occur in these neighbourhoods, but most of the time these incidents are survivable.

In Chicago, ethnographer Joe Krupnick accompanied seasoned gang members-- men in their 20s who had gone through years of living dangerously, and who always went armed. But although they often met members of rival gangs on the street (this was after the big hierarchic gangs had broken up and no one controlled the old turf in the city projects), they had an etiquette of how to pass one another, with just enough recognition, and without showing too much suspicion that the other would turn on them. When things got escalated, these armed men might even fire a bullet in the air-- a way to alert the police, and giving everyone an excuse to leave the scene.

These gangs displayed what Elijah Anderson called “the code of the street”:  show you are capable of violence, don’t back down from a threat, but recognize that if we both play by the street code, we can save face and at the same time avoid violence. You gain prestige by playing the street code, and the highest prestige comes not from killing other people but by showing you are in the fraternity of those who know how to handle such situations.

What relevance do small scale fights have for nuclear war?

There is a huge difference between two states armed with nuclear weapons and the military apparatus to deliver them to targets across the globe, and a few guys outside a bar, or a protest march in the streets. The military is much better organized and this gives them much more staying power in a battle, once it gets going. But at the core, there are two sides confronting each other; two leaders of nuclear-armed states who are getting in each other’s face, surrounded by coteries and audiences who amplify or dampen their emotions. The process of escalation, on an abstract level, is similar on each scale; and so is the process of de-escalation. What we have learned about small-scale fights applies also to the risk of nuclear war.

Threats, insults, and displays of weapons-- even firing them off in the wrong direction-- happen at the small-scale level, without them necessarily leading to all-out violence. They can fall into an equilibrium that keeps violence from happening-- in fact this is the most frequent outcome of such incidents.

The most important lesson from the micro level, that we can apply to the geopolitical level of nuclear war, is this: conflicts can stop escalating even without deliberate agreement, without negotiating, apologizing, or offering concessions. 

In the world of international politics, the issue is generally posed as either taking a tough stance, or else turning to negotiations. But what do you do when the other side refuses to negotiate? Or when they make it clear that one thing that is not negotiable is building nuclear weapons that can wipe you out? This is a terrible dilemma. It makes advocates of negotiation look like they are shying away from a frightening reality through acts of blind faith.  But micro-level conflicts show that there is another way out: threats of violence, even with the strongest expressions of hostility between the sides, nevertheless can arrive at an equilibrium that stops short of the brink. And this happens without negotiating, without making an explicit agreement.

When and how does this happen? Micro conflict shows it is a matter of shared emotional moods shifting over time. It is a minute-by-minute process, or day-by-day, even month-by-month. De facto de-escalation occurs with the sheer passage of time, avoiding irretrievable steps along the way, and keeping the sides in emotional equilibrium.

When is the point of no return?

Look at the timing of how shooting wars break out-- the timing of daily events that preceded the actual fighting.

A war clearly begins with a incursion into enemy territory. World War I went through a period of  intense public emotions for five weeks before this happened. The heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated on June 28. At first, the European heads of state all sent condolences and showed no inclination to go to war. But crowds assembled in the streets of every major city in Europe-- from Vienna to Berlin, St. Petersburg to Paris to London-- enthusiastically pressing their leaders to go to war. Diplomatic messages became more and more testy. On July 29-- after a month of emotional build-up-- Austria invaded Serbia (source of the assassination). The next day, the Russian army mobilized, and two more days later Germany mobilized and declared war on Russia, while France and England also mobilized. August 2 Germany attacked through Luxenburg; August 3 Germany declared war on France; August 4 Germany attacked through Belgium, and Britain declared war on Germany. Threats (i.e. mobilizing your army or putting your fleet on war stations) led to declarations of war; but the real shooting war started with territorial invasions.

Threats and even official declarations do not necessarily mean war. In 1939 Germany and Russia invaded Poland, triggering declarations of war by France and England, but it remained a so-called “phony war” until May 1940, when Germany attacked France and began aerial bombing of Britain. And so on. The Korean War was never officially called a war (it was a “police action”), and the Vietnam War was never officially declared by an act of Congress. The 4-day Gulf War in February 1991 happened in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, after six months of waiting time while the US gathered allies and prepared its attack. Again in the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the build-up took 18 months, instigated by the 9/11/2001 al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington D.C.

In all these wars, the escalation of force-- and the difficulty of de-escalating or extricating oneself-- became locked in through a territorial incursion, when boots hit the ground.

In the case of a North Korea vs. United States nuclear war, there is no obvious territorial incursion, short of all-out nuclear attack at long distance. Hypothetically, North Korea could invade South Korea, or the U.S. could invade North Korea; but both seem unlikely. N. Korea would not be hitting its main enemy and would leave itself open to a nuclear strike before it launched its own; in the second scenario, the U.S. would have to move many troops and ships into place, thus giving away its intention and prompting N. Korea to begin a nuclear attack.

Is this a conundrum, or an opportunity for violence to abort?

If neither side attempts a territorial incursion, we are in the same situation as a demonstration that doesn’t turn into a riot while the emotional danger-zone ticks by; in the same situation as gang members showing off their guns while trash-talking but only pointing them in the air. It looks dangerous, but it is survivable.

The scenario that worries everybody is that N. Korea will continue developing its long-distance nuclear weapons. If it does this publically-- firing rockets near U.S. allies, or testing an H-bomb in the atmosphere--  that still remains at the level of bluster and threat. And as we know from smaller-scale examples, this could go on for a long time without breaking the emotional equilibrium, without reaching the moment when one side or both feels they must start nuclear war.

Who wants to be responsible for nuclear war?

Leaders in such circumstances have a heavy burden of decision-making. This is a moral concern, over and above the pressures and emotions driven by insults, anger, public posturing, and realistic assessments of the danger of not pre-empting the other’s nuclear attack.

Both leaders have to consider:

Do they want to be responsible for enormous damage to one’s own country? This could run to millions of casualties at home, and possibly far worse.

Do they want to be responsible to their own conscience? Some might question whether the 45th President of the United States or the dictator of North Korea have a conscience. Sociologically, everyone is affected by the opinion that other people have of them, because they have internalized an image of how they want other people to see them. Starting a nuclear war would bring an enormous reaction from one’s fellow citizens, as well as from the rest of the world. If you start a nuclear war, your name will go down in history for this alone, whatever else you do in your life. Call it “conscience,”  or call it concern for one’s historical reputation, it comes to the same thing. 

And the conscience/reputation problem remains, even if you are the “victor” in a nuclear war. This applies mainly to a U.S. pre-emptive strike, which conceivably might be successful in the sense of destroying North Korea militarily, with little damage to the mainland U.S.  It is hard to conceive of this kind of “success” without killing millions of people in Japan and South Korea as North Korea strikes back, as well as near-total annihilation of North Koreans.  In whatever fashion it plays out, the leader who gives the order for nuclear attack would be saddled with the moral onus of killing millions.

I am not saying that these leaders (or conceivably others) will decide not to strike, out of consideration for casualties of this scale. But they are feeling the emotional pressure. This adds one more force for delaying the moment, in the usual fashion of violence that does not come about because the “emotional moment that is ripe for violence” has not yet arrived.

Leaders will tend to prolong the decision. And waiting is itself a possible path to emotional de-escalation, perhaps the only path we have.

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Civil War Two, Part 1

by Randall Collins

Giveaway ends May 24, 2018.
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References

Nassauer, Anne. 2013.  Violence in demonstrations. A comparative analysis of situational interaction dynamics at social movement protests. PhD dissertation, Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences.

Bramsen, Isobel. 2017. Route Causes of Conflict: Trajectories of violent and non-violent conflict intensification.  PhD Dissertation,  University of Copenhagen.

Jackson-Jacobs, Curtis. 2013. "Constructing Physical Fights: An Interactionist Analysis of Violence Among Affluent  Suburban Youth." Qualitative Sociology 36: 23-52.

Levine, M., P. Taylor, and R. Best. 2011. "Third parties, violence, and conflict resolution." Psychological Science  22: 406-412.

Copes, Heith, Andy Hochstetler, and Craig J. Forsyth. 2013. "Peaceful Warriors: Codes for Violence among Adult Male Bar Fighters." Criminology 51: 761-794.

Papachristos, Andrew. 2009. “Murder by Structure: Dominance Relations and The Social Structure of Gang Homicide,” American Journal of Sociology 115: 74-128.

Emerson, Robert M. 2015. Everyday Troubles: The Micro-politics of Interpersonal Conflict. University of Chicago Press.

Joseph Krupnick and Christopher Winship.  2015. "Keeping Up the Front: How Young Black Men Avoid Street Violence in the Inner  City." In Orlando Patterson (Ed.), The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth.  Harvard University Press.

Anderson, Elijah. 1999. The Code of the Street.  Norton.

Randall Collins. 2008. Violence: a Micro-sociological Theory. Princeton Univ. Press.

NORTH KOREA ICBMs: A COLD WAR SOLUTION

North Korea continues its march towards a nuclear-tipped ICBM capable of hitting anywhere in the U.S. Military experts agree they will eventually have this ultimate weapon, although maybe not until the end of Trump’s 4-year term.

What can be done to stop it? All the proposals have terrible drawbacks. A pre-emptive strike to knock out North Korea’s missile launchers, storehouses and military facilities would certainly fall short of 100%, leaving North Korea able to retaliate by killing tens of millions of people in South Korea and Japan and conceivably a few American targets. And if we didn’t also obliterate their ground forces, artillery, and submarines, their conventional weapons could devastate Seoul and elsewhere. A covert plan to assassinate the dictator Kim Jong Un would be extremely difficult to arrange, given his paranoia and lack of insider information about his precise whereabouts; and there is no guarantee his successor would be any different.

The remaining alternative-- tightening economic sanctions-- does not look promising. It has been attempted against North Korea unsuccessfully for decades. And in general, economic sanctions have a very poor track record in dissuading rogue regimes anywhere.

Nevertheless, there are some grounds for optimism. We are back in a Cold War situation with North Korea. But our 45-year Cold War with the Soviet Union and China has some favorable lessons. Nuclear war did not happen, above all because of mutual deterrence by nuclear weapons. And both the Soviet bloc and Communist China succumbed, unexpectedly, to what might be called the blue jeans offensive: the lure of Western consumerism.

There are also good sociological grounds for reversing North Korea’s hostility. Here we need to remind ourselves of the social psychology of collective hostility, as well as of de-escalation. Isolating an enemy is just the wrong way to change their behavior. Our historical experience with Russia and China shows how to do it right.

The Cold War Nuclear Standoff

The U.S. exploded its first atom bomb in 1945; the Soviets four years later in 1949. The pace picked up: the first U.S. hydrogen bomb was 1952; the first Soviet H-bomb 1953. By 1957 the Soviets jumped ahead with their Sputnik rocket. This was not just the prestige of the space race, but an ICBM-- an intercontinental ballistics missile capable of hitting targets across the globe. The US soon had their own ICBMs (not to mention long-distance bomber fleets with aerial refueling, and submarine-launched missiles). By the late 50s magazine articles were  explaining how to build backyard bomb shelters. When I was a kid, being woken up by a lightning storm made me think nuclear war had started. In 1964 Dr. Strangelove showed us on screen how the end of the world could happen.

By the 1970s, Soviet and US nuclear arsenals were so large that they could annihilate all animal life on the planet, through poisonous radiation drifting around the globe and the likelihood of a nuclear winter when the sun didn’t shine for years.

But it didn’t happen. Nuclear weapons were never used in war (except against Japan, when only one nation had them), even with proliferation to the UK, France, China, Pakistan, India, and probably Israel. Why not? In retrospect, we can see that mutually assured destruction (MAD) made everyone realize that escalation on that scale was too risky. Even conventional war between the great powers (i.e. nuclear-armed powers) ceased as well. Despite threats, the last direct great power war was the Korean War during 1950-3, when Chinese and US troops fought. Since then, wars have been proxy wars with conventional weapons supplied from outside. At the time, we thought MAD was madness-- an unconscious joke in the acronym. But in fact it worked. Governments were not crazy enough to start a war that is certain to annihilate their country.

This is the first piece of good news from the Cold War: a nuclear arms race is survivable. And it leads to a second piece of good news: devastating threats on both sides eventually foster negotiation.

The Slow Process of De-escalation

As awareness grows about the consequences of nuclear war for both sides, another process sets in. The steps at first are small, putting in place safeguards against accidental escalation. Some steps came from the scare of looking over the brink. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis started with intelligence that the Soviets were shipping medium-range missiles to Cuba. Their motive was adding another arm to Russia-based ICBMs, and bolstering a new ally, while the Soviets basked in a wave of global decolonization and left-wing revolutions. But after John F. Kennedy, Robert McNamara, and their secret emergency committee found a way to combine their own nuclear threat with some small concessions, Khrushchev backed down and withdrew the missiles. Next year, they established a telephone “hot line” between Washington and Moscow to be used in case of nuclear threats.

Further steps happened in following decades. In 1979, Carter and Brezhnev agreed on a Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) which set modest ceilings on particular kinds of nuclear stockpiles. Things went back and forth. Reagan ran for president in 1980 on the issue of the “window of vulnerability”-- that the Soviets had so many extra missiles they could destroy our missile launchers in a sudden first strike, then have enough left to threaten a second strike against our cities unless we surrendered. This was probably not in the cards, since our nuclear tripod (missiles, bombers, submarines) could not be knocked out in that way-- paralleling our problem today with Kim Jong Un’s North Korea. At any rate, Reagan got elected (probably more because of the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis at the U.S. embassy in Tehran), and proceeded on  a renewed arms buildup.  Nevertheless, when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, Reagan established a personal relationship with him, and opened further SALT negotiations. Part of the widespread enthusiasm for Gorbachev during those years-- not only in the USSR and its satellites, but Western Europe as well-- was the feeling that the threat of nuclear war was finally over. In this atmosphere came the popular movements that broke up the Soviet bloc, and eventually massive reduction of armaments in the 1990s on both sides.

The Blue Jeans Offensive

The slow process of pulling back from the nuclear arms race was accelerated by an unexpected development. Up through the 1980s, citizens of the communist regimes were restricted from traveling to the West, but gradually European and American tourists began to trickle inside the Iron Curtain. There they found it was worthwhile to carry an extra pair of blue jeans, because they could barter it for the cost of their trip. Consumer goods were scarcely available, and communist citizens were eager for anything that looked fashionable and hip. The cult of American jazz had existed in Russia-- usually the records were years out of date, but the Soviets at least approved of Negro musicians as an oppressed group. More up-to-date styles from the 60s and 70s gradually filtered into awareness of communist youth.* The state-run economies had made great strides in recovering from WWII, but concentrated almost entirely in heavy industry and military buildup. As long as the communist regimes controlled culture and propaganda, they promoted an image of the evil capitalists of the West keeping their workers in poverty. Once contacts started to open up, another reality seeped in.

* I remember traveling to Budapest with my daughter in 1986, where a man at the train station, eager for western currency, offered us a bargain rate on a hotel, which turned out to be his apartment in a collective living complex. In the dining hall were a tour group of Russians, dancing to a rock n’roll band from the 50s. They were allowed to go as far as Hungary, on the border of the West, but no further.

Gorbachev’s turn towards reforming the communist system started in the 1970s, when as a reward for political loyalty he was allowed to travel with his wife on a visit to Italy. They had their own car, saw how many other people had cars, TVs, and nice clothes, and returned with a vision of what the real Soviet future should be like.

China, too, after the first steps towards opening to the world were made in the 1970s, discovered Western consumer goods in the 1980s and 90s, and became their mainstay of production for the world market.

America’s greatest asset internationally is its consumer way of life. Not just that we have more stuff; we have more cool stuff. The communists’ most vulnerable point is that they are not cool. We beat them when we’re not fighting them because they want to be us.

Isolation Breeds Group Solidarity

The policy of isolating an enemy until they change their behavior does not work. It has not worked in the past. Basic social psychology of solidarity and conformity shows why.

The ingredients that produce high levels of group solidarity are a combination of:

-- isolation of the group from outsiders

-- mutual focus of attention, all paying attention to the same thing

-- a shared emotion

When the three ingredients get stronger, they feed back on each other. Paying attention to other persons and seeing them express the same emotion makes one’s own emotion stronger; stronger emotion makes one pay more attention to what’s causing it; both processes increase isolation from people not in the loop.

When people experience a rush of these ingredients, they feel a sense of solidarity and group identity; heightened identification with the symbols of the group; stronger attachment to our beliefs, and decreased tolerance of non-conformity. We’re in this; you should be in it too.  At high levels of solidarity, people are ready to fight over perceived insults from outsiders, even when there is no material damage.

Conflict with an outside group has an especially strong effect.  Conflict makes both sides set up barriers; it makes us concentrate on the enemy and on our own leaders. The more violent the conflict, the more we feel fear and anger towards the enemy, while we pump up pride and support for our team. This has been called the “rally-round-the-flag effect.”

The ingredients of solidarity and conformity operate on the level of small groups of individuals; but also on medium size groups like organizations and social movements. They also operate on very large groups like states,  provided they have mass communications so that everyone can focus on the same thing. That is why the era of nationalism began in the era of newspapers in the 1800s, and strengthened when other broadcast media developed like radio in the 1920s and TV in the 1950s.

The strength of the ingredients determines the strength of the outcomes. But most ingredients cannot remain intense for a long time. I measured these processes in the days and months after the attack of 9/11/2001, and found that the maximal amount of displaying national symbols (flags, images of firefighters) was in the first three months, then began to decline. Political discussion and dissent was more or less forbidden during those months; but around Christmas time, articles started appearing about “Is it okay to take our flags down now?”  For those few months, President George W. Bush, whose approval rating before and afterwards was rather low, shot up to 90%, the highest on record. 

In a complex society like the modern U.S., it takes a tremendous amount of shared emotion to keep people coming to public gatherings like those commemorating firefighters and police in the fall of 2001. After a while, their focus of attention goes back to their local and private concerns, their emotion falls, and their commitment to the cause of defeating the enemy declines. We saw the growing division of pro-war and anti-war factions from 2002 onwards.

All this is understandable through sociological theory of solidarity. The tremendous shock of the 9/11 attacks, stories about the victims’ families, the heroism of the firefighters and cops, were broadcast everywhere and monopolized everyone’s attention for the first few months. But a complex society has many things to pay attention to, and a media-rich democracy cannot force people to keep replaying the high-intensity solidarity ritual when they no longer feel like it. This is different in a dictatorship, which monopolizes the media and enforces attention on a single message from the regime.

Flip this over to the point of view of our enemies. Their media tells them that we are a terrible threat; they  are the heroes resisting the bad guys.  Their media are inescapable: in North Korea, loud-speakers are on every street corner. No doubt there is an artificial strain of keeping up the required emotions-- fear of outsiders; love of our Dear Leader. [See Faces Around A Dictator] But the other ingredients are too strong: no alternatives to the single focus of attention; isolation from any contacts to the outside.

Our policy of trying to change enemy states by isolating them is worse than ironic.  Isolation is exactly the condition that makes them more confirmed in their beliefs.

Why do we keep on doing it?

If isolating the enemy is such a counter-productive strategy, why does it appeal to us so strongly?

For one thing, conflict processes are symmetrical across both sides. Once a conflict gets intense, we both feel angry at the other, paint the other as a fearful demon, adulate our brave fighters and our leaders. We try to isolate ourselves from having any human contact with them, just as they do towards us.

People who like to think of themselves as civilized may consider isolation a humane way to deal with the problem, rather than resorting to violence. The old-fashioned way of disciplining children was “go stand in the corner until you behave.” This was updated by modern child psychology into the “time-out.” But it only works if-- like a parent with small children-- you have total superiority of power (which is not the case between militarized states).

And it only works when isolating an individual.  If the bad-actor is a group, punishing them by isolating them together doesn’t work. This is putting gang members together in prison with members of the same demographic; it recruits new members and strengthens the gang organization and its culture. Isolating a group not only won’t change their behavior; it makes it worse.

How to reduce enemy hostility

The theoretical model of group solidarity shows a solution. To reduce their hostile emotions and the beliefs that support them, break up the single focus of attention. The best way to do this is to reduce isolation, so there are more things outside themselves to pay attention to.

The Cold War gives evidence of how a policy of reducing isolation works to transform international enemies. In summer 1971, Nixon sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger on a secret mission to China. Kissinger, a political scientist, was trying to exploit the Sino-Soviet split. He worked out a deal that the U.S. would not oppose the PRC taking Nationalist China’s seat (practically speaking, Taiwan) on the United Nations Security Council. Six months later, Nixon himself traveled to China and met Mao Zedong, where they agreed to establish some form of diplomatic relations. This is remarkable enough, considering it was at the time when China was just emerging from the Red Guards movement that nearly tore the country apart in 1966-68; and the U.S. was still bogged down in the Vietnam War.  But there is an underlying logic: both sides were trying to get out of their own quagmires; de-escalating at least one piece of international hostilities was a victory for both.

Within a few years, Mao was dead, the Gang of Four eliminated, and in 1977 the reformer Deng Xiaoping was reinstated. Soon came full diplomatic relations and Deng’s visit to the U.S. In the 1980s market-oriented reforms were launched, burgeoning in the 1990s. China soon became the chief supplier of the U.S. consumer economy. In recent years, 30 years in, America has become the place where Chinese want to send their kids to college and where they themselves want to live.

China and Russia are the positive cases of how ending isolation led to a whole-sale shift away from communism and hostility to the West. China is the strongest case, because it has become so highly integrated into the market for western consumer goods, both as producer and consumer. Russia somewhat less so, since its export economy remained heavy industries, oil and military equipment.  A glaring negative case is Cuba, where a strict policy of isolation has kept the communist regime stagnant for over 50 years. The presence of a large group of anti-communist refugees in Florida has kept the old polarization alive: the older generation of refugees has been a veto group in U.S. politics, preventing any moves that would actually change Cuba into becoming more like the U.S.  We may soon see the effects of more commercial connections between ordinary Americans and Cuba.

The solution to the North Korean nuclear threat

The solution is right before our faces. Pursue the policies of Nixon and Reagan in opening up and de-escalating conflict with China and Russia. This is not a quick process. With China, it took 20 years to pay off.  With Russia, results were quicker, but the blue-jeans offensive was already doing its work.

The last is what we should be pushing above all.  We do not want North Korea exporting or importing military goods. We have little to gain from letting them open up to the world market in heavy industry. But U.S. policy should be trying to facilitate ways that  American consumer products-- for that matter, Western and Japanese consumer products in general-- can get into North Korea.  Hello Kitty, Japanese toy fads, American smart phones and action-adventure movies: whatever is hip and stylish. This is the soft offensive that can break the psychological isolation of North Koreans and put them on the Russian and Chinese path.

That means we need to get over the self-righteous emotional jolt of demanding that they go stand in the corner. It is far from clear we will get over it soon. Right now its easy political appeal is shared on both  sides of the political spectrum. But sometimes professional diplomats, international entrepreneurs and maverick presidents make a difference.

So there are two hopeful messages, one quite confident: Cold Wars threatening nuclear destruction can and do de-escalate. The second is more chancy, but possible through processes from below: the blue jeans offensive translated into today’s consumer fads. Either way, the world can survive North Korea.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Civil War Two, Part 1

by Randall Collins

Giveaway ends May 24, 2018.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

References

David R. Gibson. 2012.  Talk at the Brink. Deliberation and Decision-making during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

David Skarbeck. 2014.  The Social Order of the Underworld. How Prison Gangs Govern the American Penal System.

Randall Collins. 2011. “C-Escalation and D-escalation: A Theory of the Time-Dynamics of Violence.” American Sociological Review.

Randall Collins. 2004.  “Rituals of Solidarity and Security in the Wake of Terrorist attack.” Sociological Theory.