The Segmented Society
This is an updated version of something I wrote in 2006. This discusses how American society became segmented and discussed the movie “Crash” which had won the Academy Award for Best Picture and the 1975 book The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America by Robert Wiebe.
There has been much talk lately about the United States being a divided nation.
The only Oscar nominated movie which I saw was "Crash." When I saw it I hardly thought of it as an Oscar winner but certainly felt that it was an excellent movie. Post award commentary refers to "Crash" as a movie about racism. That misses the point of this movie. Racism is nothing new. What "Crash" is about is the segmentation of society. In "Crash" racism is a surface issue. If there is racism in L.A. then everyone there is a racist. The movie stereotypes white cops, Koreans, Iranians and blacks. The people in "Crash" are clueless about race. They are clueless because they understand only those in the segment of society in which they have chosen to live. Korean grocers are referred to as "Chinamen." They do not understand that the Iranian is not an Arab. The black cop is having a fling with his Latina partner but cannot remember what country her relatives are from. Ludacris acts like a college student complaining how white folks are looking at him as if he is a criminal and then whips out a gun and does a carjacking. No one really trusts anyone outside their segment. Rodney King's "Can't we just get along?" question is answered vociferously with a resounding "No! And by the way, Rodney, we really don't want to all get along!"
"Crash" is not simply about racism. It is about the effects of segmentation - the deliberate choice of folks to isolate themselves from all but a small part of society with whom they feel comfortable. The homicide cop (David Cheadle) nailed the concept. "It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something."
Some of our modern technology is segmenting. Cars isolate us from those nearby. Cell phones make people walk down the block inattentive to those physically proximate while they talk to someone far away. Ditto instant messaging. With these technologies not only can we ignore fellow citizens in other neighborhoods but we can ignore coworkers in the same room and people we are standing next to. Technology has made segmentation easier.
For me this was not a story just about L.A. but relevant to America in general. We are a segmented society. This is a notion spelled out in Robert Wiebe's 1975 book The Segmented Society: An Introduction to the Meaning of America. The segmentation of society is most noticeable regarding politics. You can live in a community where Rush Limbaugh is regarded as the dispenser of the truth. You can live in a community where Michael Moore is regarded as a sage. You can a visit left wing web site. You can visit right wing web sites. Doing so serves to reinforce one's beliefs.
We have new segmenting forces in cable news and the internet. The folks who run cable news networks know full-well what they are doing. Segmentation exists and they are monetizing it and, by doing so, reinforcing it. Ratings = Income. No one understands segmentation better than advertisers. While Fox was always a Republican supporting network and MSNBC was a Democrat supporting network what has happened recently is that CNN, which had been closer to the center, decided to monetize Trump. As Larry King recently said: CNN no longer does news, they do Trump.
The Internet has become a bizarre example of segmentation. I find this strange because the Internet should be a desegmenting force. It is an equal opportunity, equal access thing. The internet has become a sort of alternate reality where segmentation is blatant. Not so much an alternate reality but a small subset of reality in which only certain opinions are tolerated. People use social media to have their opinions reinforced. That makes no sense to me. If you want to grow and expand you do so by exposing yourself to people with ideas different from those you hold.
Getting back to Wiebe, his point was that segmentation has almost always been part of American society. The exception was the period from the 1940's to the 1960's. There was largely a single popular culture with nationwide appeal then. Everyone loved Lucy. My own personal experience is that this acceptance of culture somehow ended the day that President John Kennedy was assassinated. In fact I would offer that the cohesive American cultural society lasted precisely from the day Pearl Harbor was attacked until the day Kennedy was shot. There was shock that this Southerner (LBJ) who was really from a different culture than Kennedy had come to power in such tragic circumstances.
The 1960s' encouraged segmentation: black power, hippies and the woman's movement. Instead of trying to all get along and think of ourselves as one group (Americans) we were encouraged to choose our segment. This segmentation has economic and political values.
The segmentation American society has a simple and obvious root. We are a nation of immigrants. In the early 20th Century Italian and Irish immigrants segmented themselves by choosing to live in certain neighborhoods in the cities. It felt safer to be around people who spoke the same language and could relate to the "old country." More recently we see Latin immigrants doing the same thing. "Crash" worked because segmentation in L.A. is so blatant. Latinos, Koreans, blacks and whites all in their neighborhoods not quite trusting each another. The immigration of Mexicans into the U.S. may be a different issue than these previous examples of immigration because, for some, it is a temporary thing - they go back and forth. But one truth is that all immigrants came here seeking a better life.
This segmentation is not merely about skin color or ancestry. There is political/social segmentation. There arose a segment of what are Progressives a group fueled by University intellectual elites and the professional middle class which was espousing an ideal that government had to protect the consuming public against the inherent evils of greedy capitalistic robber barons.
The person who best expressed this is Camille Paglia: "The basic Leftist premise, descending from Marxism, is that all problems in human life stem from an unjust society and that corrections and fine-tunings of that social mechanism will eventually bring utopia. Progressives have unquestioned faith in the perfectibility of mankind. The horrors and atrocities of history have been edited out of primary and secondary education except where they can be blamed on racism, sexism, and imperialism — toxins embedded in oppressive outside structures that must be smashed and remade. But the real problem resides in human nature, which religion as well as great art sees as eternally torn by a war between the forces of darkness and light."
We preach the wonderful multicultural nature of American society but like the multicultural folks in "Crash" we then voluntarily decide to live in segmented sub-societies. These are determined by personal choices and deliberately maintained. The fact is that any of these places may be penetrated by anyone who chooses to live there. The only barrier is real estate prices.
This notion of segmented society is many times more serious in nations such as Afghanistan or Iraq than it is here in the U.S. Strangely, while not recognizing the reality of segmentation here we have attempted to establish something resembling democracies in two of the most segmented countries on the planet. Of course this was not an "out of the blue whim" but a reaction to a dramatic event here with little mind to the cultural difficulty of these tasks.
Here we openly discuss our differences, argue, vote and then argue some more but I do not think that we are in serious danger of a civil war among the segments. Better the battle is fought in cyberspace than at Gettysburg.
Segmentation has economic value. If folks chose to identify with a subset of society it makes it easier to decide how to market a product to them. This is a large part of why Facebook and Google make money.
Segmentation has political value. A politician can be given a punch list of what the constituents want to hear and parrot those values.
There are instances in which the rules of segmentation change. When we go to a baseball or football game we set aside the notions of segments which exist outside the stadium and we all root for our team. We do not care about the race, age or economic status of our fellow fans. We have a common agenda: root, root, root for the home team. The enemy segment is the other team and, sometimes, the officials.
For now and in the near future segmentation will exist and have its embarrassingly awkward moments captured nearly perfectly by "Crash." For me there is one foolish thing about choosing to be segmented - it makes you ignorant. The irony is that a simple guy like Rodney King would have asked the right question. Strange. Very strange.
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