I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas. I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter mentions at the beginning of his book that he has mixed with Burke's ideas the ideas of William Rueckert, Rene Girard, and others. Carter also admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. I will below refer to this synthetic body of thought as being from "Carter and Burke."
In his book on Burke, Carter argues that Burke has three domains from which we humans receive anxiety and produce guilt: the Rod, the Ladder, and the Skull. The Rod seems to relate to physical violence; the Ladder seems to relate to social hierarchies; and the Skull is the fear of death.
I have written before about the structure of human groups. In my Theory of Humor series, the blog entry regarding Status Hierarchies discusses my own observation that group hierarchies can either be either dominance hierarchies, which are enforced through threats of violence, or statue hierarchies, which can be driven from the bottom-up. Burke's Rod seems to refer to dominance hierarchies, though according to Carter, they also seem to be tied up in the moral system that forms the basis of language.
One thing I like about Carter / Burke is that they recognize the necessity of social hierarchies. "Like the ethical negative, hierarchy is an unavoidable feature of human life. As Burke has demonstrated, order, including social order, is 'impossible without hierarchy' (Attitudes 374)" (Carter, 8). Burke even acknowledges that non-human animals have hierarchies similar to human hierarchies; however, human hierarchies are qualitatively different because of the moral negative. To recast this in terms of evolutionary psychology, all social animals have hierarchies within their cooperating groups, but humans have evolved a level of strong reciprocity that allows group selection that goes far beyond the cooperation of most other social hierarchies.
Carter / Burke's symbol of the ladder seems to refer largely to status hierarchies rather than dominance hierarchies. Burke sees the human status hierarchy emanating from language. "Use of language creates social stratifications, each consisting of individuals anxious to consolidate their seemingly shaky position by asserting themselves over those beneath them, and, as a result, abuse of power is endemic." (Carter 10). "By the operation of linguistic rigidification (or reification), the hierarchy is perpetuated over time." The fact that dominance and status hierarchies are present in animals without language suggests that Burke is wrong to conflate language with social relations. Humans might use language to enforce hierarchies, but hierarchies do not come from language.
A nice aspect of Carter / Burke is that the lower classes police the upper classes as much as the other way around. "Workers have their own local hierarchies of knowledge, skill, and power, in the terms of which any newcomer is a lowly beginner who must earn respect" (Carter, 11).
I disagree with Carter / Burke that status hierarchies come from language, but I do appreciate Burke's identification of guilt and moral commandments as being part of human social organizations. "Even one's relationship with one's own self has an ingredient of hierarchical rhetoric, with 'conscience' defined as the effort to address one's conduct to the spirit of an ideal community in whose esteem one wishes to be raised." (Carter 12). I concur with Carter: the guilty look on your dog's face after he has stolen your dessert is a sign of submission by a group member lower in status for an act that may trigger violence by a dominant member of the group.
I view hierarchies as within-group orders. Dominance hierarchies in particular benefit the individual fitness of the group members at the top. (How many wives did King Solomon have?) However, I view many of the aspects of moral systems as efforts to improve group fitness by suppressing individual fitness. As Bowles and Gintis would say, moral systems allow for "reproductive leveling" (Bowles and Gintis, 112). The moral condemnation of polygamy, for example, is beneficial to lower status males who thereby have a better chance at finding a mate.
The symbol of the skull relates to the fact that we humans are smart enough to realize that we will all die and to fear that death. The guilt from the fear of death drives the sort of human sacrifices that James Frazer incorporated into his magnum opus, The Golden Bough. Curiously, Carter talks about an historian of religion named Eliade, but he never cites or refers to Frazer, who dealt with similar patterns. Perhaps by 1996, it was taboo to mention Frazer, part of the moral negative of post-modern literary theory. These fears of death relate to scapegoats: "Indeed, for Burke, it is the anxiety resulting from the fear of death, in addition to anxieties resulting from ethical guilt and hierarchical insecurity, that cry for 'cathartic discharge.' Our stories do not just symbolize the death we fear but often argue for the deaths of others" (Carter, 51).
Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity and its Evolution. Princeton UP, 2011.
Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
