DISCOVERING THE OBVIOUS:
A MASTER PARADIGM FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES*

1986

INTRODUCTION
Deep into his five-volume study of Christendom, sociologist Werner Stark repeats a universal cry: "Why are we here? And why are we not at least carefree like flowers and the beasts? Who knows? We may and must ask, but there is no reply."1

Renowned psychologist Eric Fromm offers an unsettling response to this lament. "Man is the only animal," Fromm observes, "who finds his own existence a problem which he has to solve and from which there is no escape."2

Philosophers, social scientists, and other observers of human behavior have long struggled with this problem, trying to come to grips with the characteristics of the human situation and what it means to be human. In the paragraphs that follow, I briefly describe five paradigms which are representative of these attempts at definition and categorization.

Let me begin with Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, a paradigm so famous that it hardly needs reiteration.3

In the 1950's, sociologist David Riesman identified three basic human personality types in a paradigm that gained great popularity following the publication of The Lonely Crowd.4 In this critique of post-war American society, Riesman identified what he called the tradition-directed, the inner-directed, and the other-directed personalities.

Theodore White, a journalist with twenty-five years of experience observing presidential campaigns, wrote a critical analysis of American society in the 1980's.5 White identified three "fundamental ideas" which he thought characterized the country's past, present, and very probably its future: equality, limitless abundance, and the federal union as "a climate of opinion". In the last several decades, White concluded, these ideas (which provided the names he gave to three central chapters in his book) have taken form as "The Great Society", "The Great Inflation", and "The Reign of Television".

Almost everyone has now heard of Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman's perennial best seller, In Search of Excellence.6 Equal in importance to their eight steps to excellence is their reference to three basic human needs: the need for meaning, the need for a modicum of control, and the need for positive reinforcement--to be members of a winning team.

The last example is a paradigm implicit in Fyodor Dostoevsky's famous parable of "The Grand Inquisitor" in The Brothers Karamazov.7 In this story within a story, through which the young priest Alyosha and his worldly, atheist brother Ivan confront one another, the three temptations of Christ are described as the three questions in which "the whole future history of mankind is, as it were, anticipated and combined in one whole, and three images are presented in which all the insoluble historical contradictions of human nature all over the world will meet." Had Jesus accepted these temptations, says Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, he "would have accomplished all that man seeks on earth, that is to say, whom to worship, to whom to entrust his conscience and how at last to unite all in a common, harmonious, and incontestable ant-hill."

AN OLD/NEW MASTER PARADIGM
These are five seemingly disparate illustrations from five different fields: psychology, sociology, journalism, organizational consulting, and literature. Yet they have something very much in common, a commonality which is made available through the master paradigm which we offer in this paper. This paradigm is both old and new; the product of insight and persistence, resulting as much from "recovery" as from discovery.

Working with a wide range of sources over a number of years, the material we have assembled points to the conclusion that the fundamental features of human existence can be expressed in terms of three dimensions. We have found it useful to think of these dimensions as the constellation of anxieties and responses to these anxieties endemic to the condition of being human.8

ORDER, MEMBERSHIP, AND MEANING
Order, membership, and meaning are the terms that capture the essence of these features and summarize the themes recurrent in the rich body of material we have gathered. Our reading of this extensive (and constantly expanding) commentary on the human condition clearly suggests that as human beings negotiate their lives, they struggle to meet three fundamental needs, each of which has an accompanying anxiety. There is a need for order against the frightening possibility of chaos, a need for membership to counter the threat of isolation, and a need for meaning in the face of incoherence and confusion. In order to help its members meet these needs in the face of their anxieties, every society provides its members with a stable frame of reference (order), a sense of belonging (membership), and an awareness of purpose (meaning). Order, membership, and meaning thus constitute those dimensions in terms of which both individuals and societies experience, manage, and assuage the fundamental existential anxieties attendant to being human.

It may be useful to think of these three features as a sort of ontological troika; however distinctly each dimension might be articulated or analyzed, the three remain an entwined unity. In conceptualizing this three-in-one phenomenon a helpful geometrical image is the triangle, but even more evocative is the Christian metaphor of the Trinity.

Actually, a religious example is instructive. The first great dramatic act in the biblical story of Genesis is God's creation of order out of chaos. God does this by dividing things into categories that are counterpoised to one another--night and day, the firmament and the heavens, the land and the waters.9 Such ordering is a necessary prelude to meaning; we come to know the meanings of things by contrast and comparison.10 T.S. Eliot makes a similar point in a much more whimsically manner in his poem, "The Ad-dressing of Cats", from Ole Possum's Book of Practical Cats (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), where he says (slightly paraphrased here):

So this is this, and that is that.
Again, I must remind you that
A dog's a dog,
A cat's a cat.

And meanings--what things are and what to do in regard to them, what to expect from them--are, both by definition and by necessity, acquired only through group membership.11

Here we immediately encounter the elements of our paradigm, each one occurring almost simultaneously with the others: order first, enabling and thus followed by membership, both in turn sustaining meaning. Concertedly, they establish that there is some arrangement to the world and together the inhabitants make sense of it.

But what are order, membership, and meaning? What do we mean by these terms? Although it may be blatantly obvious, we have emphasized these three dimensions here as a way of highlighting their recurring centrality.

ORDER
Early in The March of Folly12 historian Barbara Tuchman comments that "disorder is the least tolerable of social conditions". Fellow historian Eric Voegelin echoes a similar note: "Every society is burdened with the task, under its concrete conditions, of creating an order...."13 And Alexander Pope claimed that "Order is Heav'n's first law". Both logically and intuitively, order heralds itself as initial and prerequisite. Order is so basic, so fundamental, that it is indeed "prime-ordial". Nothing sensible or understandable can precede the ordering of reality; even though we might experience something, without order there would be no way of knowing what it was--or wasn't.

In addition to being God's first major project, order also suggests its primacy in being so difficult to define. Grappling with this most basic level of human phenomenon is like grappling with the "big bang theory" of the universe;14 an "unordered" starting point, like an "uncaused" one, is almost inconceivable, nearly ineffable. But however awkward it may be, it is at this level of the groundedness of being that the discussion of order must begin.

Sociologist Peter Berger, noting that the propensity for order is a "fundamental human trait", offers a description that inevitably includes the other two elements as well:

Any historical society is an order, a protective structure of meaning, erected in the face of chaos. Within this order the life of the group as well as the life of the individual makes sense. Deprived of such order, both group and individual are threatened with the most fundamental terror, the terror of chaos that Emile Durkheim called anomie (literally, a state of being "order-less").

Noting that men have believed in a created order of society "throughout most of human history," Berger identifies an even more basic element:

This is the human faith in order as such, a faith closely related to man's fundamental trust in reality. This faith is experienced not only in the history of societies and civilizations, but in the life of each individual--indeed, child psychologists tell us there can be no maturation without the presence of this faith at the outset of the socialization process. Man's propensity for order is grounded in a faith or trust that, ultimately, reality is "in order," "all right," "as it should be".... This is an experience that is absolutely essential to the process of becoming a human person. Put differently, at the very center of the process of becoming fully human, at the core of humanitas, we find an experience of trust in the order of reality."15

In her "meta-sonnet" on chaos--a sonnet on the writing of sonnets--Edna St Vincent Millay reinforces this primordial function of order. Addressed to the idea of ordering itself, the sonnet is both expression and representation of its subject:

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, fire, and demon--his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict confines
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape
I hold his essence and amorphous shape
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more nor less
Than something simple not yet understood;
I shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.16

MEMBERSHIP
In comparison with order, the element of membership may seem far easier to explain: A person simply is a member of a group. That is, there are others like oneself in certain ways and everyone who is one of these people knows and feels that they all belong together.

Anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists deal with group membership all the time, although seldom at this elemental level. But people belong to certain membership categories in an almost ontological sense. To be an adult, for example, means to occupy a category past which it is almost impossible to go without becoming reductionist, i.e., without ending up with something not fully human.17 Sex tends to be another such category; even though cultural variations occur in gender, ultimately one is either male or female.18

In actuality, these categories are socially created and maintained; their ontological status is a reflection of their social efficacy. That is, they exist because they work. Social realities (including the reality of membership itself) are defined for members by the very fact of their social membership. It is in this way that membership precedes meaning; in fact, some arguments consider membership as even precedent to order.

MEANING
Whatever priority is given to order and membership, meaning appears to be the last and most derivative dimension. Clearly, membership makes meaning both possible and available. Meaning, by definition (that is, by common consent), is something which is shared. But meaning turns out not to be as simple as that.

Meaning becomes established when something tied to previous human experience carries implications for future behavior.19 Both philosophers and social scientists have amply demonstrated that meaning does not reside in things themselves but comes into being through convention.20 Thus the making of meaning is a group process; while invention may often be an individual act, "convention" is always social. This distinctively human capacity for convention brings into being a fantastic array of "things", ranging from the necessary numerical concept of the square root of -1 (an "imaginary" number), to complex systems of legal statutes, to the symbolism of the crucifix and the pot of gold which lies beneath the rainbow. However "real" these are, they exist only at the level of social convention.21

Of all the embodiments of social convention, language is the most elaborate and the most instructive.22 Language is often considered to be the sine qua non of humanness. Since there can be no such thing as a language understood by only one person, language exists only at the social level. But more significant is the fact that only through language can individuals transcend their ultimate isolation from one another.23 It is essentially through language, especially the ordinary talk and silences of everyday conversation, that people create and maintain their mutually shared conventions and the worlds that these conventions make possible.24

Order and membership seem necessary for meaning to emerge. But it would be more accurate to recognize meaning as the medium within which humans operate, providing the dimensions in which they are most situated. Where order and membership might be seen as the parameters and context of the human gestalt, meaning looms actively in the foreground as the medium of consciousness itself. Humans think in terms of meanings; they act in terms of meanings; shared meanings define membership; established meanings comprise order.

We have presented the three elements of our master paradigm in what seems the most sensible sequence (or order, if you will). But this sequence is itself just an analytical way station to full understanding. It may be well to reiterate that order, membership, and meaning are reciprocally contingent and interdependent. They are simultaneously the one and the many.

While necessity may be the mother of invention, order, membership and meaning are necessity's inventions, resulting in the invention of necessity.25 Human beings have no alternative but to invent the things they then must necessarily do.26 Order, membership, and meaning--in whatever sequence we might finally arrange them--are the dimensions of the socially invented world required to constrain, and so to enable human action.

SUPPORT FOR THE PARADIGM
Once pointed out, the centrality of order, membership, and meaning seems immediately, readily, and widely apparent, lending popular credence to our model.27 Descriptions of the paradigm have prompted reactions of instantaneous recognition with such frequency that we have come to think of the paradigm as almost intuitively obvious. The frequency of such reactions lends significant additional support to our paradigm. But our development of the paradigm has been moved by other considerations as well.

In fact, the paradigm draws its primary sanction from the large number of scholars, scientists, and writers who, although often in strikingly different ways, have identified, alluded to, or implied the existence of these three particular features of the human situation. To illustrate this point let us return to the five examples introduced at the beginning of this paper.

On second glance Abraham Maslow's connection to our paradigm is fairly obvious. If his first level need (for food and shelter) is omitted for being primarily physiological, Maslow's remaining four needs (for safety, love, self-esteem, and self-actualization) especially when subsumed under the concepts of security, acceptance, and significance, clearly parallel the three dimensions of order, membership, and meaning.

David Riesman defines his three personality types as follows: The tradition-directed person is directed by rigidly fixed patterns of the past; the inner-directed person by an inner sense of direction implanted early in life; the other-directed person by a highly developed sensitivity to the directions of his or her peers. While the tradition-directed person is internally constrained by a set of externally imposed structures, inner-directed and other-directed persons are more internally guided, the one by a sort of psychological gyroscope, the other by something akin to social radar. Each of these three personality types tends to emphasize one of our three dimensions: the tradition-directed personality reflects an emphasis on order, the inner-directed an emphasis on meaning, and the other-directed an emphasis on membership.

Theodore White's trichotomy requires some additional elaboration. White articulates his fundamental American ideas of equality, limitless abundance, and the federal union as "a climate of opinion" in three key chapters of America in Search of Itself. In the first of these, "The Great Society", he addresses the demand of American minorities for full inclusion as citizens (membership); in "The Great Inflation", he explores the disruptive impact of inflation upon social order ("when money goes, order goes with it...and faith is lost."), while in "The Reign of Television," he addresses our most basic (some would say primitive) means of providing meaning ("Television, especially in America, explains the world to those who, if they will not read, can look.")

Tucked away almost unnoticed in Thomas Peters' and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence is a reference to the important but largely neglected work of Ernest Becker. Becker's ideas reiterate the conclusion that the basic creatureliness of the human animal leads it "urgently to `seek transcendence,' `avoid isolation,' and `above all fear helplessness.'" These three needs, along with those named by Peters and Waterman themselves--the need for meaning; the need to think of ourselves as members of a winning team; and the need for a modicum of control--clearly resonate with our concepts of meaning, membership, and order.

Finally there is Fyodor Dostoevsky's great parable of "The Grand Inquisitor". In describing the three temptations of Christ, Dostoevsky sees them as containing the central issues of human existence, which he identifies as the means to accomplish "all that man seeks on earth...whom to worship [and thus find order], to whom to trust his conscience [and thus know meaning] and how at last to unite all in a common, harmonious, and incontestable ant-hill [and thus establish membership]."

The fact that so many students of human behavior have referenced the same three dimensions (see the appendix displaying at the end of this paper) strongly reinforces our belief in the saliency of the paradigm. This congruence among such a divergent group of observers when taken as a whole argues for both the paradigm's veracity and its pertinence.

EXCURSIS AND CONCLUSION
There is a parallel between the paradigm offered here and the explanation of human behavior implicit in the work of Emile Durkheim, especially in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Durkheim's conclusions rest on a philosophy of human nature hauntingly parallel to that expressed in Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor."28 This view of human nature lies at the heart of our argument and can be summarized as follows:

Like all the other animals, human beings have to act in the world in order to survive. But unlike all the other animals, human beings lack the genetic instructions for specific behaviors provided by instinct. The dilemma of having to behave but not knowing what to do is resolved through the most basic of all social inventions--that of rules.29 But these are not just rules in some simple way, but rules that are credible and binding enough to guarantee coordinated activity among this most interdependent of all living creatures.30 It is not enough that such rules are physically enforced to warrant compliance through fear; it is much more important that the rules be emotionally embraced in order to accomplish their conformity through desire.31

What leads people to embrace the rules so passionately? One broad answer is suggested by that vague sense that we humans have of our own potential "open-endedness", that constant but seldom conscious awareness of the possibility of becoming lost, of drifting on the vast sea of human possibility with no means of charting a proper course or choosing an appropriate destination. But a more immediate answer lies in the factual realization that certain concrete rules--the "right here and now rules" of everyday life--are believed in and are continually in use by people who are very much like ourselves.

In his wartime memoir, Goodbye, Darkness, William Manchester provides a moving example of this universal behavior. As a young Marine in the South Pacific during World War II, Manchester was wounded in action and transferred to a field hospital. He immediately sneaked out and rejoined his unit, which was still fighting on Okinawa. Standing on the same mountain where he and his fellow Marines had been dug in 35 years earlier--when anyone then standing there "would have had a life expectancy of seven seconds"--Manchester reports that he understands at last, "in one of those great thundering jolts in which a man's real motives are revealed to him ...why I jumped hospital [and]...returned to the front and almost certain death."

It was an act of love. Those men on the line were my family, my home. They were closer to me than I can say, closer than any friends had been or ever would be. They had never let me down, and I couldn't do it to them. I had to be with them, rather than let them die and me live with the knowledge that I might have saved them. Men, I now knew, do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. It is this kind of emotional, almost visceral commitment to internalized rules that enables humans to transcend the dilemma of their situation. Jean Paul Sartre noted that humankind is "condemned to freedom." But Otto Rank observed that men and women inevitably create "out of freedom a prison". So we are impelled to concur with Rousseau in his disturbing conclusion, that "while man is born free he is everywhere in chains".32

Modern sociological understandings would suggest that at least some of these chains will inevitably be the rules that ally people together and enable them to act. The restive dialectic between individual separate selfhood and social interconnected selfhood--those tense contraries of autonomy and inclusion--remains a dilemma to which there is not, and cannot be, any simple or final resolution.33

CAVEATS
The paradigm we have presented here is still in its early stages of development; much work remains to be done. While the paradigm appears profound, it is also greatly oversimplified. The basic concepts of order, meaning, and membership need to be elaborated in greater detail and at greater depth; the concepts need to be operationalized; their dimensions remain to be detailed.

For example, we are currently exploring how many different levels of order there seem to be. One fundamental level of order--the very orderliness of phenomena themselves--appears to be developmentally established in all children at a very early age. This level appears to be a "deep structured order" which seems to be something quite different from the socio-cultural order into which one is subsequently socialized. In turn, these two levels differ from that order into which an adult is introduced when becoming a member of a social organization.34 

Along similar lines, order, membership, and meaning seem to occur differently at the individual and the social level. Further, order seems to have an especial affinity to philosophical investigation, while membership connects more strongly with sociology, and meaning with psychology. In sum, we are clearly just at the beginning of much further study.

* Subsequently published in Social Science Perspectives Journal: Proceedings of The 1986 NSSA Seattle Conference, 1987.


1 Werner Stark, The Sociology of Religion: A Study of Christendom, Volume Four, Types of Religious Man (New York: Fordham University Press, 1970), p. 37.

2 Eric Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1955), p.24.

3 Maslow's "hierarchy of needs" paradigm has many sources. We have used "A Theory of Human Motivation", first published in 1943, from Walter E. Natemeyer (ed.), Classics of Organizational Behavior (Oak Park, Illinois: Moore Publishing Company, 1978), pp.42-57. Most of us are familiar with his categorization of an ascending set of needs, beginning with the basic physiological needs of food and shelter and then moving through the more human needs for safety, love, self-esteem, and self-actualization. There are many references to this paradigm in Maslow's writings, and in some instances the last four needs are summarized under the three headings of security, acceptance, and significance.

4 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character, abridged edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), pp. 5-31.

5 Theodore H. White, America in Search of Itself (New York: Warner Books, 1982), pp. 99-195.

6 Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman, In Search of Excellence (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 59-60.

7 "The Grand Inquisitor", appears as a chapter in Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Volume One, trans. David Magarshack (Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1958), pp. 288-311.

8 Almost every child experiences these anxieties intensely. Where did I come from?, Where am I going?, Why am I here?, they demand to know. Such universal human concerns found formal philosophical expression in the words of Immanuel Kant, who identified four essential questions regarding human existence: What should I believe?, What may I hope for?, Why am I here?, What ought I to do? The very asking of these questions implies meaning; that they are directed to others implies membership; and that they can be answered implies order. If a viable culture is one which provides satisfactory answers to these questions, then a truly successful culture would be one in which the answers are so immediate, complete, and reassuring that the questions them-selves never intrude upon awareness. From this perspective, the history of Western civilization is characterized by an increasing clarity of the questions accompanied by an increasing haziness of the answers.

9 A number of social scientists have made this point; e.g., Eric Fromm, The Sane Society, op. cit., and Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1969).

10 Ernest Becker sees comparison and contrast inevitably leading to pejorative distinctions and pushes this position toward an unsettling conclusion--he sees this as the irremediable source of evil. See Escape From Evil (New York: The Free Press, 1975). For a slightly more hopeful application of this perspective, see Michael A. Toth, "Earthquakes, Bootcamp, and Karo Syrup: My Other, My Self", unpublished paper (1983).

11 Peter Berger draws upon a rich sociological tradition in coining the term "nomization" to describe this social process of jointly naming and defining. See The Sacred Canopy, op. cit.

12 Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly (New York: Ballentine Books, 1984), p. 16.

13 Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume I (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1956), p. ix.

14 What makes the "big bang" explanation intellectually quixotic is that its occurrence necessarily would have destroyed whatever existed prior, thus eliminating the evidence of any possible cause and so, in effect, of its own happening.

15 See A Rumor of Angels (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1970), pp. 52-56. Elsewhere Berger writes: "This nomic function of the symbolic universe for individual experience may be described quite simply by saying that it `puts everything in its right place'." See The Social Construction of Reality (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1967), p. 98.

16 Millay's sonnet is a wonderful example of what Gregory Bateson called a "metalogue", a discussion the form of which itself expresses the point being made. See Gregory Bateson, Steps To An Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballentine Books, 1952), pp. 1-58.

17 For a general framework to understanding this point in greater breadth, see the argument in Michael A. Toth, "Why Sociology is Difficult: Emergence, Structure, and the Peculiar Location of Self-Consciousness in Nature", The Social Science Journal, Vol. 19, No. 4 (October 1982); for a more specific discussion, see Michael A. Toth, "Therapeutic Dyads and Groups as Opportunities for the Revelation of Person Construction", Proceedings of the Alpha Kappa Delta Research Symposium (Virginia Commonwealth University, 1972).

18 Whenever these "ultimate categories" are breached a pervasive social confusion usually results, a reaction most readily seen in the wake of persons who go through publicized "gender reassignment" (sex change). These instances are, in effect, the exceptions that give the rule. Relevant interesting discussions can be found in Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1959), in David Matza, Becoming Deviant (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall 1969), and in Toth's article on "person construction", op.cit.

19 Such behavior is not always overt action; it can be the withholding of action, adoption of a mental attitude, etc.

20 Especially germane to the social sciences on this point are the writings of George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962) and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953).

21 Convention exists on the basis of what Talcott Parsons called "reciprocal contingency", a sort of "I'll do it if you do" cycle, the effective implementation of which results in Durkheim's "social facts", social realities which become externally present and mutually binding because jointly produced. Thus convention is much more the result of an emergent than a deliberative process.

22 We are singling out verbal and written language wherein meanings are relatively precise (i.e., agreed upon), in contrast to "aesthetic" languages (such as music or painting) where they are less so.

23 "Perhaps the greatest breach in nature is the breach from one mind to another." Only through words can that breach be crossed. So wrote William James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1890), p. 237.

24 The implications of both words and silence (and membership as well) are humorously illustrated in this scene from Joseph Heller's WW II classic Catch-22 (New York: Dell, 1961), pp. 70-71):

      Lieutenant Scheisskopf tore his hair and gnashed his teeth. His rubbery cheeks shook with gusts of anguish. His problem was a squadron of aviation cadets with low morale who marched atrociously in the parade competition that took place every Sunday afternoon. Their morale was low because they did not want to march in parades every Sunday afternoon and because Lieutenant Scheisskopf had appointed cadet officers from their ranks instead of permitting them to elect their own.
  
     "I want someone to tell me," Lieutenant Scheisskopf beseeched them all prayerfully. "If any of it is my fault, I want to be told."
  
     "He wants someone to tell him," Clevinger said.
  
     "He wants everyone to keep still, idiot," Yossarian answered.
  
     "Didn't you hear him?" Clevinger argued.
  
     "I heard him," Yossarian replied. "I heard him say very loudly and very distinctly that he wants every one of us to keep our mouths shut if we know what's good for us."

A somewhat similar scene appears in an English novel, Brian Aldiss's A Soldier Erect:

        The [training camp] C.O. spoke to us on passing-out parade, neat, heavy, anonymous, standing immobile in the shade while we sweated immobile in the sun to listen to him.
  
     "...You have acquitted yourselves well. You must be proud to know that you are now fully-trained fighting machines. Your training...has not been wasted. It has given you experience of any conditions you are likely to meet....You have been a splendid body of men to train, well worthy of the division to which you belong, well worthy of the objective for which you have been trained....And I only wish I was coming with you...."
  
     "You can have my fucking place, for one." That was Dusty Miller.
  
     "No talking in the ranks," [Sergeant] Meadows said.

Quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 85. Note that in this last sentence order is being reasserted. For a brief general discussion of words and silence see Michael A. Toth, The Theory of the Two Charismas (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1973), pp. 159-163.

25 Fiction writer John Irving, in The Hotel New Hampshire (New York: Dutton, 1981), has one of his characters say, "So we dream on. Thus we invent our lives." Yet even before this remark there is a recognition of the need for order in the admonition to "keep passing the open windows" through which the allure of chaos always beckons and ultimately summons one of the book's heroes to suicide.

26 His revelation of this process may be why many people are always a bit uneasy with Durkheim or, for that matter, with sociology itself. Peter Berger, one of sociology's most artful and articulate practitioners, in A Rumor of Angels, op. cit., p.38, calls sociology "the most dismal science par excellence of our time." Elsewhere Berger warns against the study of sociology for everyone. See Invitation to Sociology (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1963), p. 24.

27 It might even be said that these dimensions are so obvious as to be transparent; people ordinarily look right through them without notice. To name and define them is therefore to make them opaque. (This is a criticism often leveled against the terminology of the social sciences.) Strangely enough, it is this very opaqueness which renders the dimensions visible.

28 Durkheim's view is most clearly set forth in his quasi-empirical study, Suicide (New York: The Free Press, reprinted in 1951); greatly amplified, this view can be found in much of Berger's work. Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor", first published in 1880, remains timeless. Earl Shorris, in The Oppressed Middle (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press, 1981), cleverly invokes Dostoevsky's ideas to highlight the totalitarian practices of modern corporate management.

29 Becker reminds us that Hocart used the term "prosperity" to suggest that human survival is qualitatively different and more problematical than that of the other species. See his Escape From Evil, op. cit., pp. 1-5, and The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973), especially pp. 1-30.

30 Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning, 2nd Edition (New York: The Free Press, 1971), pp. 83-83: "Action has to be dependable and predictable. And the area of least dependability in social life is, naturally, people. After all, each person is working out the peculiar scenario of his self-esteem needs, and we never really know what he is about. As Sartre so bitingly puts it: `Hell is other people'. The problem of `What will the next person be like' is at the core of human adaptation, because self-preservation may depend on it." Yet "person-objects"--"powerful and capricious", "massively unpredictable"--"are always beyond control."

31 Wrote Durkheim in Sociology and Philosophy (New York: The Free Press, 1953), p. 36: "But the notion of duty does not exhaust the concept of morality.... For us to become the agents of an act it must interest our sensibility to a certain extent and appear to us as, in some way, desirable."

32 William Manchester, Goodbye, Darkness (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 1982), pp. 450-451. Especially in time of war men seem particularly cognizant of and compelled by their membership in groups. The literary tradition of war is replete with stories like Manchester's. Even two of the most anti-war poets of WW I, Sigfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, expressed similar feelings. Yet such noble sentiments are not without their irony on a larger scale. As Arnold Toynbee somberly noted, "Nationalism is the Achilles' heel of the 20th Century." Nationalism, of course, is simply group membership writ very large.

33 Peters and Waterman correctly make much of this dualism in their In Pursuit of Excellence, op. cit., and find both dimensions attended to in top American corporations. One might well agree with the Grand Inquisitor that only through such existential "chains" does freedom exist at all. To rephrase the point with one of Toth's aphorisms, "Freedom lies on the other side of discipline." In a similar way, one might say that individualism lies on the other side of society. Both Becker, in The Denial of Death, op. cit., and Irving Yalom, in Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980), remark pointedly on the dual human needs both for individuation or specialness and for protective submergence in groups.

34 That is, any social organization that is less than a total institution. See Erving Goffman, Asylums (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1961).