Roland Inglehart on the Post-Materialist Cultural Shift

Discussion

Arnold Schroder:

"There is such a glut of social theory in this world, the vast majority of which has no predictive power of any kind, that we don't really have terminology for the massive distinction that exists between it and works like Ronald Inglehart's 1977 book The Silent Revolution: Changing Values among Western Publics. Written before the internet, Inglehart's analysis does a better job of predicting how it would affect society than liberals writing days before the January 6th right-wing riots at the US capitol. (Being absolutely shocked by social developments seems to border on a vocational obligation for liberal analysts—it must be noted that at a certain point, if everything that happens in the world is surprising, then one has very little claim to understanding it.)

Inglehart saw the countercultural explosion and the revolutionary politics of the 1960s as manifestations of a deeper, and often quieter, trend. The emphasis on revolutionary social transformation that gave way—so rapidly, after so little of what could really be called political struggle—to an emphasis on transcendental business meditation and the exploration of novel cosmologies were both manifestations of a general shift in society. This was of a dual nature, towards more unique, oppositional worldviews, but also towards the self-expression of those worldviews—rather than their instantiation in the world—as the primary pursuit.

Many notions of our current sociopolitical reality, and its possible futures, fail to really comprehend and incorporate the implications of what Inglehart called the post-materialist shift. It is an important element of understanding facts as superficially disparate as the lack of concrete political objectives in movements like Occupy (Smucker 2017) to people's growing need to have alternate narratives about literally everything, even the kinds of things that were previously never sources of contention, from mass shootings to catastrophic floods. In a world on fire, the post-materialist shift implies vast complications for collective mobilization.

The Silent Revolution illustrates the power of using a little bit of biology as a starting point for your social theory, based as it is on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Inglehart's contention was that the first two levels of this hierarchy consisted of needs that were largely being met in affluent societies after world war two, and that their continued accommodation was a reasonable assumption: basic physiological drives like hunger were no longer fundamental forces in people's lives, accounting for the first level of the hierarchy, and many people in such societies felt reasonable security that their country was not about to be invaded, accounting for the second.

… when at least minimal economic and physical security are present, the needs for love, belonging, and esteem become increasingly important; and later, a set of goals related to intellectual and aesthetic satisfaction looms large. There does not seem to be any clear hierarchy within the last set of needs, which Maslow called "self-actualization needs." But there is evidence that they became most salient only after an individual has satisfied the material needs and belonging needs. (Inglehart 1977)

Inglehart's methods were simple: he administered surveys to large numbers of people in multiple countries asking them to rank their priorities from a list. He coded the priorities materialist or post-materialist; the former were items like “grow the economy” and “fight crime” and the latter were items like “more beautiful cities” and “less impersonal society”. It may seem dubious that people who want to grow the economy and fight crime are oppressed, but in very broad terms these categories correspond to the formulation that some people involved in political struggle are fighting oppression while others are fighting alienation (Graeber 2009). The war on alienation tends to gather a lot more momentum when starvation isn't imminent.

Inglehart found a set of generational and geographic correlations to the answers he received. Those who had not lived through world war two, and who inhabited societies of greater affluence, were more likely to prioritize self-expression and self-actualization. Maybe this isn't shocking on its own terms, but his ability to see how this change in outlook would interact with communications technologies—which largely didn't exist at the time of his writing—is somewhat uncanny. Like McLuhan proclaiming that the medium is the message, he was able to anticipate how mass communication becoming more participatory would shift not just the form but the content of mass communication, and how in a society that emphasizes developing a unique perspective, this would ultimately imperil the existing power structure.

His work, therefore, has a troubled quality. It is as if he has similar values to the people churning out shocked and bewildered commentary about right-wing agitation for The Atlantic or CNN, but he's the one who isn't shocked, who sees it coming from very far away: “The future looks difficult for Western governments. If they do not solve current economic problems, they risk losing the support of the Materialist majority of their citizens. But renewed prosperity has its own dangers: it seems likely to evoke a new set of challenges and demands.”

This is a statement I believe warrants rephrasing in slightly stronger terms: according to Inglehart, governments of affluent nations could either starve people and risk revolution against misery and deprivation, or feed people and risk revolution against boredom and a loss of agency. As one author described his predictions of politics under post-materialism:

… people wouldn't participate in politics in the same old ways, Inglehart hypothesized. Instead of being "elite-directed," they would engage in "elite-challenging" activities. They would vote less but be more likely to join a boycott or sign a petition. People wouldn't become disengaged from politics, even though voting percentages would decline. Rather, they would adopt a politics of self-expression. Postmaterialists wouldn't settle for picking between two candidates. They would want to make decisions themselves, acting more directly on their political choices instead of following the orders of leaders. (Bishop 2008)

Inglehart referred to the cause of this “elite-challenging” mindset as cognitive mobilization (a truly remarkable statement about the society we live in, that this turn of phrase describes a threat to it). It can be effectively described as the acquisition of the ability to do politics. While such simplifications are always hazardous, we could perhaps describe human societies along the technological trajectory according to three phases. First, a small-scale phase, in which everyone had the means of contestation and participation within group decision making processes (one could argue about whether everyone exercised these means, but they existed—if you're physically present with everyone in your society, you have the ability to communicate with everyone). Second, a mass phase, in which most people didn't, and a relatively small cadre of people with concentrated wealth and a set of shared cultural affects and epistemological conventions made decisions, while everyone else just voted (or gave a proportion of the harvest to their feudal overlords, or whatever). Finally, a mass phase in which everyone has the same internet, and the means to assert their own version of reality, and tends to want to do so, regardless of who happens to believe themselves to be in charge or consider themselves an expert.

Western publics are developing an increasing potential for political participation. This change does not imply that mass publics will simply show higher rates of participation in traditional activities such as voting but that they may intervene in the political process on a qualitatively different level. Increasingly, they are likely to demand participation in making major decisions, not just a voice in selecting the decision-makers. (Inglehart 1977)

Inglehart related the overall shift in values he was studying to the protest movements of the 1960s, but also to the decline among the broader public in support for existing political institutions. In the former case, participation in protests was heavily predicted by youth, relative affluence, and college education. In the latter case, a similar, less dramatic process was occurring throughout the entire populations of industrialized societies: a slow but inexorable disaffection with the system, or whatever features of it happened to be salient to different people. This shift involved none of the spectacle and grand narrative associated with youth revolt, but was nonetheless extreme, rapid, and ultimately more consequential. “In the late 1950s, eight out of ten Americans said that they could trust government to do the right thing most of the time … The 80 percent of Americans who had approved of government in the late 1950s had dropped to 33 percent by 1976.” (Bishop 2008)

In other words, the reason that people grew more oppositional to the political system at this time was not because of anything in particular the system did, but because they had become temperamentally more prone to challenge authority (in case it isn't abundantly clear, I do not say this in defense of that system). There were, of course, resistance movements—like the American Indian Movement and the Black Panthers—that emerged in response to subordination, extermination, and trauma, but statistically speaking in the US, participation in protests at large was highly predicted by post-materialism and its socioeconomic corollaries, and outside of the US, protests developed around other issues than civil rights and the Vietnam war, but with the same demographic profile of participation."

(https://www.againsttheinternet.com/post/the-world-got-a-lot-like-the-internet)