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This year's Making Light Dysfunctional Families Day[1] post prodded me to put together some things I've noted about the idea of deference.
A couple of centuries ago, deference was a structural part of how society (in the West, at least) was run. Everyone had their place and unless you were absolutely on top of the heap there were people whom you deferred to, and the deferential relationships were a large part of the formal structure of society. If you look at accounts like The Making of the English Working Class you can see several corollaries of this:
But we don't structure society like that any more. Formally, the extension of the vote has not only enfranchised the workers, but it has been accompanied by the replacement of networks of social deference with economic dependencies: our money comes from corporate employers (meaning that even the senior executives are formally in a parallel rather than a higher level, as co-employees). Many of us expect to mingle as relative equals with people "above us" in our employment scale once work is over. The "parson" is now frequently shepherding a congregation many of whom are equally-or-better educated and who are not likely at all to react in a "Father knows best" manner. The Tories no longer champion the landed establishment: they support "small business owners" (read: petit bourgeoisie).
Deference at an adult level is now mainly an optional kind of social varnish: for every person who thinks that the PM or the Queen or "captains of industry" should be deferred to there are probably several who would disagree. (The use of the term "deference" to refer to a recognition of a genuine expert's expertise in an area is really a different thing.)
However...
Many people have retained the deference model in terms of how to bring up children. It made (pragmatic) sense to inculcate deferential behaviour in children when they would have to continue showing that behaviour all their lives. It makes none now. Deference (as distinct from politeness) is not an adult social skill (or it's not supposed to be: there are workplaces which are exploitative not only economically but socially and co-dependent family relationships which subordinate one partner or the other -- these exist, and some people (Southern Baptists wrt women, for example) think of them as desirable in some cases, but such positions are frowned upon by society as a whole)). But many people still expect that the norm for children to relate to adults is a deferential one, even though this is no longer a preparation for life.
Many (not by any means all) of the life stories on the ML thread seem to me to reflect just this sort of breakdown -- parents who are upset at any failure of deference and who are willing to go to great lengths in reacting to it -- especially when expressed by adults whse resources in dealing with a failure of expectations are not good -- are angry, or easily outraged, or have dependency problems, or the like.
Schools are an odd mixture. The typical classroom structure is designed to produce effective wage slaves, modelled on industrial work[2]. It depends for control on children's deference to the teacher, even though the emphasis is not on producing deferent but obedient workers. They're appallingly bad at producing real knowledge workers, because they don't have the resources to provide the one-on-one attention required to foster and train up intelligent critical thought.
If we want to address this sort of thing systemically then we need not only to provide counselling and support resources on a large scale, but also explicitly address the obsolescence of the adult/child dynamic which shapes those relationships.
[1] Which I follow but do not contribute to: I have been lucky in having supportive, non-angry, intelligent, not-too-intrusive parents (and grandparents) and sane siblings. I can't say as much for my relations with my peers at school in public school, where I had variants of the usual geek/outsider problems, but that wasn't a family thing.
[2] During the early industrial revolution factory employers did not like hiring adults who had not been trained to factory work as children because their mode of work and capacity for extended repetitive tasks did not match factory production. The classroom model of the 19th and 20th century school ensured that children would have those abilities without the need for child labour to inculcate them.
A couple of centuries ago, deference was a structural part of how society (in the West, at least) was run. Everyone had their place and unless you were absolutely on top of the heap there were people whom you deferred to, and the deferential relationships were a large part of the formal structure of society. If you look at accounts like The Making of the English Working Class you can see several corollaries of this:
- The initial protests against the conditions of the industrial revolution were not meant to be about anything new: they were almost always seen as trying to get back to a state of previously enjoyed rights, following a model whereby there were group rights between tenants and landlords structured via paternalism. (I'm going to ignore how much this was an idealization, as well as how long this ideal model had been seen as breaking down, except to point to Pope's "Windsor Forest", Whigs and Hunters, and complaints about sheep crowding out tenants from as far back as More's Utopia.
- The to our minds extreme reactions which the magistrates and landlords/factory owners had to even mild demands look far more explicable once one sees how much they were driven by outrage at insubordination rather than simple objections to the changes demanded.
But we don't structure society like that any more. Formally, the extension of the vote has not only enfranchised the workers, but it has been accompanied by the replacement of networks of social deference with economic dependencies: our money comes from corporate employers (meaning that even the senior executives are formally in a parallel rather than a higher level, as co-employees). Many of us expect to mingle as relative equals with people "above us" in our employment scale once work is over. The "parson" is now frequently shepherding a congregation many of whom are equally-or-better educated and who are not likely at all to react in a "Father knows best" manner. The Tories no longer champion the landed establishment: they support "small business owners" (read: petit bourgeoisie).
Deference at an adult level is now mainly an optional kind of social varnish: for every person who thinks that the PM or the Queen or "captains of industry" should be deferred to there are probably several who would disagree. (The use of the term "deference" to refer to a recognition of a genuine expert's expertise in an area is really a different thing.)
However...
Many people have retained the deference model in terms of how to bring up children. It made (pragmatic) sense to inculcate deferential behaviour in children when they would have to continue showing that behaviour all their lives. It makes none now. Deference (as distinct from politeness) is not an adult social skill (or it's not supposed to be: there are workplaces which are exploitative not only economically but socially and co-dependent family relationships which subordinate one partner or the other -- these exist, and some people (Southern Baptists wrt women, for example) think of them as desirable in some cases, but such positions are frowned upon by society as a whole)). But many people still expect that the norm for children to relate to adults is a deferential one, even though this is no longer a preparation for life.
Many (not by any means all) of the life stories on the ML thread seem to me to reflect just this sort of breakdown -- parents who are upset at any failure of deference and who are willing to go to great lengths in reacting to it -- especially when expressed by adults whse resources in dealing with a failure of expectations are not good -- are angry, or easily outraged, or have dependency problems, or the like.
Schools are an odd mixture. The typical classroom structure is designed to produce effective wage slaves, modelled on industrial work[2]. It depends for control on children's deference to the teacher, even though the emphasis is not on producing deferent but obedient workers. They're appallingly bad at producing real knowledge workers, because they don't have the resources to provide the one-on-one attention required to foster and train up intelligent critical thought.
If we want to address this sort of thing systemically then we need not only to provide counselling and support resources on a large scale, but also explicitly address the obsolescence of the adult/child dynamic which shapes those relationships.
[1] Which I follow but do not contribute to: I have been lucky in having supportive, non-angry, intelligent, not-too-intrusive parents (and grandparents) and sane siblings. I can't say as much for my relations with my peers at school in public school, where I had variants of the usual geek/outsider problems, but that wasn't a family thing.
[2] During the early industrial revolution factory employers did not like hiring adults who had not been trained to factory work as children because their mode of work and capacity for extended repetitive tasks did not match factory production. The classroom model of the 19th and 20th century school ensured that children would have those abilities without the need for child labour to inculcate them.
