Optimism versus hope —

conversations with Mitsuru Shimpo

about conditions that facilitate

reciprocal relationships

Kenneth Westhues, University of Waterloo, Canada, 2015

In the following selection from my book, The Remedy and Prevention of Mobbing in Higher Education (Mellen 2006, pp. 228-233), I report Mitsuru Shimpo's critical response to my earlier book on academic mobbing, The Envy of Excellence, which had focussed on the collective movement to oust Herbert Richardson from the University of Toronto. The big question on my mind, the topic of many conversations between Shimpo and me, was about the future of academic life, and more broadly, Western civilization. Would the incidence of mobbing increase, entailing steadily more destructive nastiness? Or contrariwise, would the ethic of live-and-let-live prevail, with constructive, enlivening relations of mutuality and reciprocity? For me, the idea of reciprocity is at the centre of a truly human life.

When Shimpo died in 2015, I decided to make these five pages from the book available online. Apart from the substantive value of his reflections on differences between Western civilization and the subsistence-level cultures he had studied, these pages also illustrate the constructive, enlivening relation Shimpo and I had somehow managed to achieve between us. To Shimpo, friendship was not a matter of scratching another's back, in the expectation of having one's own back scratched. It meant affirming another through attentive listening (or reading), then making some kind of fresh, honest, creative, critical response, trusting that the other would in due course, in an indeterminate and possibly surprising way, reciprocate. I learned a lot from Shimpo and am grateful for his influence on my scholarship and my life.

Is academic life generally on a downhill slide, away from a lively, constructive, collaborative search for truth, toward destructive, internecine conflicts?

Any answer to so broad a question is necessarily tentative. It bears mention that Richardson himself, in his writings and teachings in the 1960s, detected a demonic tendency in the intellectual trends being spawned at that time, trends that have strengthened ever since. The rise of metacritical, relativistic scholarship, he argued, the assessment of ideas in relation to power instead of by some independent, external yardstick, would result in steadily more intense and irreconcilable ideological conflict. The antidote Richardson proposed was ardent, mature Christian faith, the kind he sketched in his own theology. I devoted Chapter Five of The Envy of Excellence to this cultural context of Richardson’s careeer. Here it is enough to note his own gloomy prognosis, forty years before his dismissal: that the rise of relativism and the demise of religion would put people more and more at each other’s throats.          

Another commentator on The Envy of Excellence, the Japanese-Canadian sociologist Mitsuru Shimpo, has offered a similarly gloomy prognosis, but from a different angle. Shimpo has spent decades studying aboriginal cultures in Canada and Australia, fairly isolated peoples functioning close to a subsistence level. In them he has found a degree of decency, tolerance, mutual respect, and reciprocity that is rare in the advanced industrial mainstream. Shimpo therefore finds my proposal of reciprocity as the remedy for mobbing in our own society unrealistic. Let me quote with thanks his own words:

I found Westhues’s conclusion very interesting – namely, that the development of reciprocal relations will be the solution for mobbing. In this regard, I have two questions. (1) How can one develop reciprocal relations in a workplace with problems? (2) Are “reciprocal relations” as universal as “mobbings” are?

In my opinion, the second point needs further theoretical refinement. Richardson’s dismissal took place in North American society, which has abundant social and economic resources. Westhues pointed out that this quarrel consumed almost half a million dollars. What would have happened in a less affluent society?

One of my areas of study has been Japanese society.  Japan is now considered to be a rich country, but when modernization began in 1868, it was estimated that Japan was as poor as Burma. In Japanese peasant society, there were approximately ten sets of social relations which required cooperation among community members: initiations, weddings, funerals, births, construction of a house,  travelling,  fire-fighting,  flood conditions, and disease. When a community member was branded as a social deviant, eight sets of social relations were discontinued against both the individual and the family to which he belonged. The exceptions were funerals and fire-fighting. Funerals represented a loss to the labor force in the community and fires could destroy the whole community. In other words, social sanctions were not applied to the limit.

How about a society with only a minimal amount of resources for survival? Take the case of Australian Aborigines whom I studied during my sabbatical year. In their society, there are no equivalent words for “thank you.” Words are not considered sufficient to repay for what you have received. You must repay your social and economic obligations with your own deeds and material things. This is an extreme case of “reciprocal relations.”

From the above, I would say the amount of resources in a given society will affect the degree of reciprocity. If resources are minimal, then reciprocal relations are full. If the resources are abundant, then reciprocal relations are hard to realize. Many cases will be at some point on the continuum. Richardson’s case is certainly at one extreme.

If I understand Shimpo’s hypothesis correctly, it means that affluence, conditions of material abundance, may unleash eliminative impulses and remove checks on the destruction of designated enemies more than do conditions of material scarcity. Poor societies place high value on cooperation because all available hands are needed – not just for fighting fires but for producing food, caring for children, and doing all the other things necessary for the society to endure. Hence norms arise that, so far as possible, build people in. A rich society, by contrast, can afford to eliminate some members from time to time, even totally, because they can easily be done without. Social extermination thus becomes more common.

To confirm my understanding of Shimpo’s scary point, I sent him the preceding paragraph for his comments. He responded by citing a film he had just seen, Ingmar Bergman’s “Saraband,” which depicts relations between an educated and wealthy retired music professor, the successful lawyer who is his former wife, and his son from a previous marriage, also a retired professor. The harshness of the professors toward each other and toward life itself sends shivers down the spine. There is scant milk of human kindness in these men. The father’s living ex-wife, powerfully portrayed by Liv Ullmann, the son’s deceased wife, and the son’s still-innocent teenaged daughter, are the foil against which the pathetic self-absorption of the two twisted old professors leaps out in horror. Shimpo comments:

My wife and I agreed that the film is Bergman’s warning to the Swedes that unless they cultivate a cooperative spirit, their future will be one of cold, icy human relations.

Each professor lives alone in his own house. The social welfare programs in Sweden are so well developed that an individual can survive without help and cooperation from others. If an individual can survive without others’ help, he tends to be independent, a loner, rejecting interference from outside. As a result, whichever way he turns, he faces only hostile, uncooperative people.

In a subsistent economy, no individual can survive without belonging to a group: a family, some kind of cooperative community. In such a society, human relations almost have to be warm and reciprocal.

Shimpo’s broad hypothesis gains plausibility from applying it on a smaller scale. I have observed in my research that professors are less likely to be mobbed in fields where there is a seller’s market. “We need this guy’s expertise,” administrators and colleagues seem to say, “and we are not likely to be able to replace him; therefore we have to put up with him.” In those sectors of the academic labor market where there is a buyer’s market, by contrast, the reasoning is opposite: “Scholars with his expertise are a dime a dozen, so let’s dump him and find somebody easier for us to get along with.” Richardson’s situation at St. Michael’s was thus doubly inauspicious: not only were Protestant theologians in oversupply, but the Catholic college did not value their expertise.

I followed a mobbing case in a Canadian city some years ago, wherein a firestorm of moral outrage arose against a well-known physician whom police caught trying to procure the services of a prostitute. He was humiliated in the media, and there were demands for his ouster from the medical profession. Then the news came out that he was one of the city’s few specialists in cardiac surgery, and that if he were decertified, many heart patients would be deprived of needed operations. Almost as quickly as it had flared, the uproar died down. The doctor’s sin was glossed over, apparently forgiven. So far as I know, his work in the operating room continues as before.

The broader reference of Shimpo’s hypothesis is troubling: that the farther above subsistence needs our society rises, the more dispensable people become – and the more vulnerable to being “taken out” by angry crowds. Our universities may be on the leading edge of the trend, at least in the humanities and social sciences. For here is a whole organization secure in its basic subsistence needs and radically removed from mundane concerns like the production of food, clothes, and shelter. What purpose it serves for the larger society, however, has become steadily more doubtful and ambiguous, the old canons of literature, philosophy, theology and history having broken down. Academics on the arts side of campus may be like the generously endowed “boatload of knowledge” Robert Owen steered down the Ohio River in 1826, hoping this assemblage of high-minded utopians would create a perfect society in New Harmony, Indiana, on the American frontier. The experiment lasted scarcely two years before crumbling under the weight of internal strife.

Shimpo and I are regularly exposed to the incredible abundance of our society, and the worry about what it will lead to, through our involvement in the Working Centre, a community organization in Kitchener, Ontario, aimed at building community especially among poor and marginalized citizens, and providing them along the way with access to food, clothing, shelter, and the tools by which to regain control of their lives. The centre reminds me again and again that very many people in our rich society feel utterly alone, unneeded, unwanted, dispensable, worthless. These people do not lack intelligence, talent, skills, or heartfelt desire to contribute to Canada in a positive way. They respond eagerly to programs at the centre that allow them to develop and exercise their skills cooperatively for the common good. Mainly, what they lack is a credential and specialized skill that would enable them to occupy some niche of employment in our complex economy.

Something else strikes me even more at the Working Centre, and at the soup kitchen and used-goods store it operates: that poor and marginalized people no longer depend on the actual charity of others to keep body and soul together. Only a fraction of the food served in the soup kitchen and of the second-hand clothing and furniture made available at low cost is donated by people who “miss” what they have given away. In the main, the donors have not sacrificed anything in order to provide marginalized people with the necessities of life. These necessities are no longer scarce. On the contrary, the bulk of the food, clothes, and furniture the Working Centre provides to poor people is waste: groceries, for instance, that are slightly past their best-before dates and would be trucked to the landfill if not distributed for free, clothes that would be bundled and sold for almost nothing to rag merchants if they were not recycled onto poor people’s backs, and functional household appliances that have been replaced by newer models in affluent homes and that would be hauled away in garbage trucks if they were not stocked in the Working Centre’s store called “Worth a Second Look.”

Others learn in different ways what the Working Centre teaches Shimpo and me: that the extent of material abundance in today’s Western World, our emancipation from the need to cooperate day by day and face to face in the production of necessities of life, is without precedent in history. That this heady condition might result in a gradual weakening of norms of reciprocity and the ethic of live and let live is a scary prospect, maybe also a likely one.

I share the pessimistic outlook suggested in different ways by Richardson and Shimpo, and in still other terms by Martin Buber, Pitirim Sorokin, Werner Stark, Christopher Lasch, and other theorists. Yet like them, I do not let my mind dwell on gloom too much. The important distinction (Lasch spells it out nicely in The True and Only Heaven, Norton, 1991) is between optimism and hope. The former is just a forecast. The latter is a deep-seated trust in life, the kind Gollnick, Richardson, Shimpo, and many more express in Christian faith. One can be pessimistic, obliged by evidence to predict nastier forms of social relation in the future, but still hopeful that by determined, joyful, reasoned, cooperative effort, we can reduce the incidence of mobbing and other kinds of harm for future generations.