How does a traditionalist society accommodate change? How do people find an honored place in a society that is deeply concerned with questions of prestige and rank? This is a question interesting to me not only as a resident alien here in Thailand, but also as a member of a religious culture that is embedded and traditionalist in similar ways to Thailand that is unusual to most Americans from more egalitarian backgrounds. So today I would like to examine briefly the question of how embedded societies can accommodate change and the sort of mechanisms they use.
An embedded society is one where people are enmeshed in patron-client relationships and where their success and life depends on social status and the power of the protectors that they have that are able to overcome barriers of bureaucracy and corruption and laziness. It is a system where who you know and what place you have (as well as what help you are able to derive from your relationships) is more important than the justice of your case. Autocratic governments of any kind tend to develop along these lines because elites and their supporters cannot bear to carry the burden of incompetent government and so there are always shortcuts in an autocracy so long as you are connected to the right people. And so building connections becomes a major strategy in getting anything done or finding any place for yourself in such a society.
To find an honorable place in an embedded society you have to become embedded in the network of relationships. You have to find a powerful patron who can smooth over difficulties, and develop your own patronage network as you develop your own power. By embedding yourself you pay your dues, rise up the ranks, and achieve position and honor in predictable ways so long as you have fully bought into the ideology of the ruling parties that be. I’ve never done well in such systems because I’m not a very ideological person. The truth is always too complicated for ideologies, which are invariably simplifications of a more nuanced and complicated reality so that one can respond simplistically and emotionally to slogans and know the proper coded language to describe things that we don’t understand to resolve tensions and doubts that are far more productive than premature certainty.
How does one embed one’s self? First, one finds a patron and pays dues and finds a good position, rising through the ranks through seniority generally, or one’s merit if it is particularly noteworthy. It helps if one can gain symbolic or real citizenship in an elite, through having the right club memberships or hunting buddies, or marriage partners. This way not only is one embedded, but all of the other elites (and those who aren’t elites that are reasonably sensitive to such matters) can be aware that one is an elite so that one’s status is unquestioned. After all, what fun is being an elite if you have to defend and justify your position at the apex of society? That takes all the fun out of elite membership.
Every once in a while elites have serious problems. Some of these problems are structural. After all, being elite (which means having positional goods of some type) requires that there be a few on top, a large enough group of people that has less privileges but has still bought into the system, and then a group of oppressed and marginalized have-nots who don’t really count for anything in the system. If you expand the elite circle too much elites get diluted and some of them are unhappy. If elite circles are too restrictive than those who could easily be co-opted (like a Thaksin Shinawatra) can turn into deadly foes of the elite through appealing to those who are marginalized or excluded. Likewise, if one lets the marginalized and excluded unite together under a disappointed elite aspirant, it can threaten the survival of the elite system as a whole. These are all serious dangers.
It is during these times of stress that we feel as if we are in a crisis. Crises occur because there are rivalries for power, as well as competing elites with radically different claims about the proper place of themselves and their rivals. Crises are often embedded problems, embedded because elites get too hardened and can’t let in enough new aspirants to positions of honor and respect or let them in fast enough to keep them from trying to fight the system. Crises are especially common when a system tries to limit certain people to subsidiary status when their talents and ambitions are for the highest order. This happened in the American colonies as the American Revolution approached (and is a common imperial problem in general), and is happening right now in Thailand, unfortunately.
Elites face a couple of bad choices when it comes to such problems. If they try to limit elite status to those of particular ethnic status, then it makes it impossible to co-opt would-be elites from marginalized groups because they cannot change their blood, unless they engage in deception and corruption to pass themselves off as belonging to that blood status already, or bribe someone to give them citizenship and then use their blood status to help their relatives attain the status by showing that they are blood relatives, as has happened within my own personal acquaintances here in Thailand. On the other hand, if elites make a certain educational status or belief system to be the gateway to elite status than it is all too easy for that educational status to be mass-marketed (as happens in India) or for people to feign belief in a given worldview to receive the benefits of doing so even without conviction.
Again, if there are too many qualified elite aspirants and not enough positions for them, the social system suffers instability and crisis because the pressure of struggling and competing can very easily turn into a hostility of an unjust elite system (and they are all unjust). If too many elite aspirants are allowed to compete for the highest honor those who consider themselves entitled by ancestry and background to automatically belong to the elite may find themselves shut out by those who are more competitive, and that may result in a great deal of pressure against a corrupt elite system. There are no perfect answers–if you base success on an elite model a lot of people have to lose for a few people to win, and once the wrong people start losing then everyone is in trouble.
And so my thoughts on this subject are rather unsatisfactory. To find a fair and just system is difficult, and to make one just as hard, given the limited practice any of us have with such matters. And yet the alternatives are all bad. If we are elites, we must recognize that we have a position unjustly, that even if we use for good ends (in our mind) may already be corrupted and damnable by what has to be done to gain and maintain one’s power and status. If we refuse to play the right games or accept a lower status than what we feel or believe we deserve, we may suffer hell on earth and be driven to commit great evil in the search for justice. There are many ways where we can go wrong, and so few where we can go right. But if we were born to times of crisis, it is our problem to deal with. May God have mercy on us all.
