454 - Improper Behavior: When and How Misconduct Can Be Healthy for Society

Improper Behavior: When and How Misconduct Can Be Healthy for Society

By Elizabeth Janeway

New York, William Morrow, 1987. 240 Pp. $15.95.

This is a book about power: the uses, unexpected consequences, failures, and dangerous triumphs of power. It is about authority's. duty to make rules and the human tendency to break them. Looking with care at what most of us take for granted, Janeway explores the connection between law-making and law-breaking.

Troubled individuals and troubled societies ask similar questions, always hoping to ease their anxiety and perhaps to achieve health. But those in power perceive such questioning as improper behavior that threatens the status quo. Members of the establishment have the right and the duty to define; and because they are satisfied with things as they are, redefinition does not come easily. Therefore, the demand to "redraw social maps" never originates with authority's own top people. Instead, rude and unwelcome questions urge those top people "for once, to think their way into the minds of those who have been defined as children or as 'others'." This means that authority is gradually forced to take seriously the misconduct that stems from the often-not-very-coherent requirements of those groups whose needs are underrepresented on the current social maps.

Janeway suggests that society's best hope for health would be to examine the range of improper behaviors that plague us and to attempt to evaluate them as symptoms. (Doing this will help people in authority to locate and alleviate the points of strain.) After that, it is time to ask questions like these: What has changed the world so as to render inadequate the ways of managing that used to be successful? And how can we remake the superstructure of mythic concepts that we have inherited from the past?

If, as Yeats says, "the center cannot hold," something must certainly have come adrift. Therefore, those in authority had better interpret what they are currently doing in order to figure out what they ought to think and plan, looking at the evidence before leaping to conclusions.

Elizabeth Janeway is chair of the New York City Council for the Humanities and author of six novels and four previous works of nonfiction, including Man's World, Women's Place and Powers of the Weak. Here, as always, her thoughts are original and humane, her curiosity wide-ranging and fearless. She insists that her readers recognize the link between defining and directing: "The progress from naming to issuing directives is the regular course of events that authority expects from the power to define." Hence, authority-be it political, scholarly, medical, or moral-initially deals with disagreement by

456 - Improper Behavior: When and How Misconduct Can Be Healthy for Society

labelling it misconduct. In order to reveal the effects of that label, Janeway analyses contemporary politics and Imperial Roman politics; black-white, female-male, child-parent, and slave-master relationships; and left-wing and right-wing social movements.

Because television is the most potent influence on the process of definition within current society, Janeway examines in depth the effects of television's self-definition as "entertainment." Complicated truth takes time to tell, is debatable, and is frequently in flux. Hence, television-as-amusement focuses more on personality and novelty than on serious reality. "Because trivial entertainment does not dare involve us in deeper and disturbing emotions, it is sentenced to keep our attention by keeping us guessing. 'You don't know what's going to happen next,' says the action on the tube, and it's a prescription for observant passivity." Only strong and virile heroes can break the pattern of randomness; but they are unlike us ordinary people who dare not take such risks. As Janeway comments, "The political effect of that repeated statement is, as it always has been, to keep members of the governed majority from joining together and acting for themselves."

It feels like improper behavior to level adverse criticism at a book this honest, fresh, and challenging. But encouraged by Janeway's acceptance of such behavior, I must express my astonished dismay that she used the pronoun "he" for doctors, the pronoun "she" for children, and the masculine designation "Lord God" for references to deity. Thus, in a book concerned about society's health and the remaking of mythic constructs that no longer satisfy a significant number of people, Janeway herself has supported, alas, the worn-out linguistic map of patriarchy that legitimizes injustice toward women and girls.

Nevertheless, this is a book to be read and pondered by those who wield power in the church and other institutions. For them, it will explain the proper use of the improper behavior they are encountering from women, gay people, and racial and other minorities. It is also helpful for those of us who are working to bring about social change and have as a result been variously labeled as "deviants, rebels, outlaws, criminals, or crazy people." After reading Janeway's analysis, we may feel that the labels are an inevitable segment in the process of social change, and that they therefore lose some of their power to shame and paralyze.

VIRGINIA RAMEY MOLLENKOTT

William Paterson College of New Jersey
Wayne, New Jersey