Why Inequality Between Generations Is More Frightening Than Inequality Within One Generation | 2017 Book Recommendations, Part 3

On the question of "what's wrong with society," we recommend two new books — The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society and Our Kids. Plus a few older ones.

Strictly speaking, these are not put to readers with the rigor of a "best books of the year" list. We lived through a lot this year, and these books, all published in 2017, happen to help us think it over.

We recommend across four categories: humanities and social sciences (fiction excluded), business and technology, lifestyle and aesthetics, and fiction.

The candidates in the first three categories came from two places: recommendations by more than 20 professional publishing houses, and recommendations from QDaily's editors, reporters, and contributing writers. For the fiction section, we gathered the opinions of writers, translators, scholars, book critics, book editors, and literary critics, and commissioned the pieces from them. Everything else was written by QDaily's editors and contributing writers.

We read these books through as far as we could, and "sincerely believe they really are good" — as last year, that is the least we owe you before recommending anything.

This is the third part of our humanities and social sciences list.

It covers two new books, The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society and Our Kids. The review of The Weight of the World is by Li Kang, an associate professor in the sociology department at Peking University, who has translated a large number of classic works of sociology: Émile Durkheim's The Evolution of Educational Thought, C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination (the Beijing Normal University Press edition), Anthony Giddens's The Constitution of Society (co-translated) and Sociology (fifth edition), Zygmunt Bauman's Thinking Sociologically, and Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Wacquant's An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (co-translated), among others.

The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society

Li Kang, Peking University

2017 is over, and if you want to say "I don't miss it," that is probably because so much of it still sits on your mind. The waves kept coming. Some people threw themselves into the storm; others retreated into idle detachment; even reading got pulled about in different directions. Bourdieu's The Weight of the World — a "book of stories" with both theoretical depth and the breath of real life, in which scenes cast light on structures and feeling never crowds out argument — lets you face those tensions head on, and think more clearly about the relation between reading and moving through the world.

Much of Bourdieu is already available in Chinese. Distinction is about the same length as this book and similar in the way it puts theoretical categories flexibly to work and mixes narrative styles, and it is cited more often — but its Chinese translation, unfortunately, is hard going. The Weight of the World is not only the best entry point for reading Bourdieu in Chinese; read alongside the many nonfiction books on the memory of suffering published last year, it also shows a general relevance to the present that reaches beyond sociological theory and empirical research.

In the 1980s and '90s, Bourdieu and more than 20 collaborators spent years tracking down a hundred people to produce a vast field study of French society. The gaps in time and place are real, yet the specific questions each chapter takes up — immigrant integration, urban space, rural decline, education and class division — and the anxiety, resentment, and desolation the book as a whole finds spreading through a society in transition, both set off echoes here and now.

The book looks loosely built but is in fact tightly held together. It opens by laying out its methodological premises, then gathers 60 case studies into five parts. Each part and each section begins with theoretical analysis and the main points, follows with transcribed interviews, and closes with methodological reflection. The afterword at the very end carries real feeling (unfortunately its last sentence is mistranslated in the Chinese edition). In a sense you could read the parts out of order, or read it once and then, after some time, read it backwards — cases, then theory, then the general argument — and the experience would be quite different. That suits the spirit of the book exactly: it fuses transcribed dialogue, the setting of each interview, and the interviewees' backgrounds, schooling, and work histories, showing individual lives inside an analysis of structural mechanisms while keeping constant watch on how faithfully the researcher's own tools of understanding are put on the page.

From the first part, "The Space of Points of View," the theoretical analysis of core concepts — field, capital, habitus — is inseparable from detailed case material. People live inside the particular scenes of a given field, and their daily understanding and lived experience are fed there. Yet different actors placed in the same scene, shaped by different mixtures of status, age, and race, often act in very different ways. The book deliberately picks interviewees who share the same physical space, setting the views of people who "belong to a social category that draws them close to one another, or even into conflict" side by side in the same reading unit, and staging a kind of virtual debate.

Take the opening study of an immigrant family, which brings together the voices of the immigrant worker, his children, and his neighbors. We hear the father's generation grinding on and holding fast, we feel the children's wish to escape, and we catch the neighbor — working within the bounds of political correctness — quietly turning inward rejection into a sense of everyday discomfort. It is the view from structural mechanisms that reveals the deeper meaning in the oral material: interviewees at the bottom, drawing on what they know of public discourse, reshape their opinions into more presentable form. But that cosmetic skill does not actually dissolve the resentment on either side. On the contrary, covering it over only delays the conflict, or sharpens it, until it finally boils over. The media pours fuel on the fire too, repeating certain images over and over, simplifying complicated real causes, hardening stereotypes (stigmatizing people). Whatever the particular position of a given outlet, the terms of the argument come to look self-evident, and emotion keeps slamming around in a dead end.

In the part on field effects, people in the slums have their own distinctive ways of getting by, and deviance and disorder are everywhere; the state, though absent, played the central part in producing that situation. So-called liberalism and enterprise have eaten away at public assistance, and fighting for justice starts to look pointless next to efficiency above all. The 13 cases in "Contradictory Inheritances" show how family relations and the handing down of values shape the course of a life. From wealth to ways of living and hopes for the future, parents and children endlessly repeat the same stories of inheritance and refusal, obedience and revolt — to the point that "a smooth inheritance is itself an act of patricide carried out in obedience to the father."

"Outcasts on the Inside" may be the part that speaks most directly to ordinary students. The interviews range across girls in high school, teachers, school administrators, and immigrant students, but the focus is not confined to the identity labels formed around school. It also looks at how students from different family backgrounds plan their studies differently and end up in different places, showing that the education system, taken to be the road to changing one's fate, is in fact hardening inequality.

We see that the elite, going along with the existing norms about "talent" and academic achievement, ignore the inequality actually in front of them — success, in their account, comes from education and hard work on one's own behalf — and that what vested interests hand down is converted into a cultural community built on a shared structure of knowledge, which then legitimately sets the rules of education and employment that shape the future. Meanwhile children from families at the bottom clumsily gather and spend their meager cultural capital under an illusion about schooling and credentials. The education and employment systems leave no room for the excluded, but the excluded conclude only that they did not try hard enough. The spread of education and the devaluing of diplomas make this hardening worse still…

The book's last part, "Understanding," is a thorough reflection on the methods of social research, and to a considerable degree complements "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," the closing chapter of Mills's The Sociological Imagination. The author fully recognizes the symbolic violence produced in an interview by unequal information and unequal holdings of capital, and rejects the god's-eye view looking down on the multitude — while insisting, too, on not sliding into a populist relativism. He stresses that the interviewer must take the interviewee's particular life history seriously, understand the other person, and accept their ways of knowing and living, while working at the same time to get a fuller grasp of their structural position: "one must grasp both the living conditions and social mechanisms that affect the whole social category to which he belongs, and the adjustments of mentality and social environment tied to his position and particular trajectory in social space."

As Bourdieu says in the afterword, "to bring to light the mechanisms that make life painful, even unlivable, is not to neutralize them; to bring contradictions to light is not to resolve them." But so long as social inquiry can genuinely combine several research methods and styles of writing, genuinely reflect on the part it plays — alongside government, media, and individuals — in filtering information and shaping reality, and set the words of all parties side by side, along with the many layers of the roots of suffering, then it is a useful lifting of the veil. Refusing to let the storm and darkness of a society in transition be written up as a single harmonious spring is precisely what gives the ordinary people who bear this world's suffering the confidence to get through the winter.

Our Kids

Why poor kids grow up suspicious, and the rich so confident

QDaily

Robert Putnam sums up America's traditional ideals like this: "The gist of it comes down to two points. First, we Americans generally believe that political inequality is more frightening than economic inequality. Second, we also believe that inequality between generations is worse than inequality within any one generation."

So when that boy who topped Beijing's college entrance exam said all those things, something about it never sat right with me. Articulate, sharply observant, clear in his logic, able to read the world — none of those compliments would be undeserved. And it is understandable that parents everywhere, sharing the same warm bubble of feeling, or successful people and ordinary people alike who remember sitting their own exam at 18, would put themselves in his place, think "look at that kid," and feel a pang of envy or regret.

What is wrong is that we have made society into this, and it looks like a tragedy.

And the boy who came first takes it for truth, as simply the way things are. If things really go as everyone wishes and this child has a limitless future ahead of him — carrying that "class imprint" out into the world — then his limitless future is a worse tragedy than the tragic truth he has just spoken.

Should the society of the future really be built on "unequal opportunity" taken as self-evident, as the natural order of things? That is certainly worth worrying about. Let us hope that when he grows up into the "pillar of the nation" everyone wishes for, he will not be this worldly and this cold, and will still be able to treat the pursuit of equality as an ideal worth holding.

Putnam treats this as America's great problem of equality, the collapse of a traditional ideal, a double challenge to what Americans believe. "Political inequality passing down and compounding across the generations has already put us in an awkward place: it not only departs from the spirit of the American Revolution, it slides toward the very political system that revolution set out to drive away."

Robert Putnam is an American sociologist whose best-known book is Bowling Alone, regarded as one of the most important sociological studies of American society since Tocqueville's Democracy in America. His new book, Our Kids, carries on the rigorous method, range, and insight of Bowling Alone to answer one question: "Do young people from different socioeconomic backgrounds still get roughly equal chances in life today, and has the state of equal opportunity changed over the past several decades?"

That sounds rather like the question our top scorer raised. Except that Putnam, at 76, is far more worried. "Equality of wealth and equality of opportunity are, after all, not the same thing, and cannot be lumped together. In America today, how income and wealth are distributed among parents determines wildly different lives for their children, and that is the key backdrop to the story we are telling."

When Putnam explains how he works, he always stresses the part played by time. It really does matter enormously: only across a span of 30-odd years can you see the true social effects, the true movement of wealth and of people between classes, and the threads running underneath.

For instance, the hardening of class is closely tied to changes in family structure and community, and that change did not come mainly from the "cultural" forces of the 1960s, the hippies or sexual liberation. It came more from the job losses of the 1980s, when the offshoring of manufacturing cost American blue-collar workers — the backbone of the middle class — not just their jobs but their sense of standing, and possibly their families too.

Sociologists use field research to ask the right questions. The pity is that none of it can be undone: by the time you see clearly what is happening, it has largely already happened. If we take the Beijing top scorer seriously as a subject, we probably have to trace it back much further — the hollowing out of the countryside, the layoffs of urban workers, the break in social development in the late 1980s. By the time this boy notices that a Matthew effect is running things, class has already set hard, and all we can hope is that it is not too late — that this is only the beginning, and there is still room to repair it.

For now, at least, it is hard to see where we might break the spell.

Another example: we look as though we are living through a middle-class boom, with wealth rising, and yet we are not as rich as we imagine.

One important measure of American prosperity is household annual income. American households' assets and annual incomes have both grown, but remember that in the era of Bowling Alone, household income and accumulated wealth usually came from one person; now they mostly come from two, a working couple. Compare that with the assets of Chinese households and you probably have to discount further. Look at the biggest items of household spending: the human capital poured into children's education, usually hidden spending pooled from two generations; and the biggest asset of all, the home, which may well be the product of two generations' saving — the first generation saving outright, a high savings rate bought with a low-consumption life, the second saving under compulsion, through mortgage payments.

And what will that do to the future?

If you care enough about how society is developing, Robert Putnam, a master of sociology, has a great deal to offer. Take the question of trust:

"Not one poor child answered that 'most people can be trusted.' In fact their first reaction seemed to be that the question did not need answering: given the life they had just described to us, wasn't the answer self-evident? Life has already taught them to keep their guard up. The great majority of rich kids, by contrast, believed that in most situations the people around them could be trusted. This stark contrast is not because poor children are suspicious by nature, but because poor children live in a hostile environment, where the people and things around them have let them down again and again, until they finally despair of a world so full of malice."

There is a great deal of thinking like this in the book, all of it built on long and wide-ranging observation.

One last piece of bad news: the internet, once held up as a hope, does not appear to have advanced equality. Robert Putnam quotes a conclusion from the anthropologist danah boyd:

"In a world where information is, so to speak, there for the taking, what matters is often not the channel through which you reach information but your actual network of relationships and circle of friends… Within the landscape of information the upper class has the advantage: their circle of friends can judge information and supply context, while the friends and relatives of the lower class have no idea what to do with what they find online, so more information is not necessarily better for them… It is true that young people today can get online anywhere, and this technology connects them to the world instantly, but that does not mean they have equal access to knowledge and opportunity."

Robert Putnam's field research bears this out. China, it seems, is much the same.

Banner image provided by China University of Political Science and Law Press. The tall lead image is Pierre Bourdieu, from: humanite