I keep thinking that bits of behavior such as the anecdote I am about to relate are somehow important rather than just an amusing human interest story (as they are in The New York Time's "Metropolitan Diary") or else something to trot out to students to show off a sociologist's ability to put into words what other people, including the students, notice but do not think worthy of comment. Maybe this is just because I am always into significance mongering even if, in fact, some social phenomena are of no significance at all. And I am not sure I have put my finger on the significance of this anecdote, not having deployed all of the resources of quantitative sociology. Anyway, here goes.

I got on a bus today that was already crowded. I am allowed to sit in one of the three seat front benches (the benches that parallel the windows rather than sit perpendicular to them) because there is a sign that says I may do so. So my sitting there was not just a matter of custom or good will but of a permission granted by the law. The law, Max Weber would say, is reinforced by the overall congruence of law and custom. Laws that don’t make sense will not be obeyed and customs that do will be made into matters of law. The people who do not pick up after their dogs are in violation of the law and not just the customs of West End Avenue, even if I get angry and think the law that requires poop scooping should be enforced. How dare these people not pick up after their pets? It is so easy. I do it.  

I sat down between two other people who were also padded against the cold by their jackets and their own flab. As the three of us adjusted ourselves, rubbing haunches so that each of us would fit in the available space, the woman on my left gave me a look that indicated she was not pleased by the crowding but that I was entitled to try to fit in and I had. It wasn't a question of a little more crowdedness making my act additionally deviant; it was a question of whether I was fitable or not. If I weren't fitable, then I should get up; if it were close, I was entitled to try, but expected to stand up if the fit were too tight. I passed. So, in this case, deviance is not a question of degree but is an either/or thing. You are a fit or you aren't, and will be labeled obnoxious or pushy or something if you persist in trying to sit your carcass in too small a place. (Did you know that New York City bus seats are too small for the New York City rump? The reason for this is that the busses were designed in Japan and so made suitable for Japanese size rumps. That just may be an urban legend I learned some time ago, but it doesn’t feel as if the busses have been much redesigned since then.)

At the next stop a woman got on who was perhaps a bit too young to qualify for seating for the aged and the (otherwise) disabled. (The old may or not be frail but they certainly don’t have the dexterity or suppleness they once had or that teenagers, I notice, all seem to have.) But she sat down opposite me between two people, a black woman to her right and a black man to her left. She had a number of packages as well as a delivered Saturday New York Times, which includes most of the Sunday sections. (I know this because I get the same delivery but I don't carry it around because it is too bulky.) But just as she got herself seated and had settled herself from having arranged her stuff on her lap and in front of her, she looked stricken and started shuffling through her stuff. The woman gave her a dirty look which continued, unabated, even after the woman explained that she had lost something important. She continued shuffling and then stood up, which discomfited her two seat partners, and looked under the seat. The guy to her left rolled his eyes at the three of us sitting opposite. I smiled my indulgent smile of good humor (everyone has one of those) to suggest we should all be of good will because these sorts of things happen to everybody. The woman was rising to her feet when the guy still sitting there next to her spot said he saw it under his feet. She bent down again and retrieved her wallet which I took to be where she had put her Metrocard after having paid her fare. She sat down again and resettled. 

The incident was over and now the job was to restore civility. The angry woman sitting at her side changed her expression just a little bit and said only a bit gruffly to her seatmate that she should have put her wallet in the back pack she was carrying. The woman said in a conversational tone that that was what she had been trying to do, and so accepted the criticism while reestablishing herself in the now conventional condition of someone who has managed all the little tasks that are necessary to be accomplished even in order to do such a minor thing as taking one's seat on a bus-- dealing with the stops and starts, the people milling about so that they can get off at the next stop, having recently enough washed so as not to give offense, and keeping an eye out for one's stop, at which time one will have to maneuver one's way to either the front or the back of the bus without holding up the crowd too much. How much is too much? You know when you take too long, just as I have known for years that bus drivers will comment because I take a long time to drop change in the machine or, nowadays, put my Metrocard in properly, due to very bad small motor coordination. I no longer get chastised though perhaps because slowness is now regarded as part of the syndrome of being old rather than out of keeping with my previous role as an apparently fully capable adult.

The woman got off a few stops later and I only a stop after that so I could change buses and go over to see an exhibit on 19th Century American art at the Met before the show closed. So we keep ourselves secret while we negotiate the world as best we can. Nobody on the bus knows who I am though I suppose I am as obvious to the people who observe me as they seem to be to me: the woman with The New York Times very much like my wife or some other one of the New York City young elderly, the black man and woman of an age to remember when things were much worse and that speaking back to a white woman would be noticed although in New York it would not have morphed into a racial incident. At this juncture in our national life, race did not arise as a salient matter.

The commentary cards at the Met exhibit were very sensitive to race, going on and on about racial exploitation just because the kid serving liquor at an election day party in the 1850’s was black while all the other people in the picture were white. Well, that seems to me to be reading in. The black kid was not a symbol of exclusion; he was part of a description of what a scene like that would have looked like. Blacks were in a number of eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings because they did play a role, even if a subservient one, in American society, and it is only today that we are self conscious about that. Better if white artists had not rendered blacks at all in their portraits of a social life that was, by the way, dominated by whites? It was ordinary life, our life today still ordinary even if there are poor people and people die from cancer. Will a time come when interpretations of pictures of life as it is today will be dominated by the fact that some of the people sitting on the bus might have cancer? 

There is another interpretation of the significance of the incident that seems more apt. I think that the black woman was trying to tell the white woman that she had done something wrong, the black woman looking around for a way to turn her annoyance into a feeling of having been wronged. The black woman wanted to recover from the possibility that she had been rude not to give the white woman sufficient time to find her purse. We all have to be patient with one another, the people at airline terminals being especially on their guard to be so and not only because they can be arrested if they are not. They want to safeguard their own sense of themselves as civil people. People who are not civil are perceived as having crossed the line not into deviance but into incivility. So the black woman wanted in her tone (and she succeeded) in having returned to civility while yet maintaining the white woman had gone over the line by not having cared for her possessions properly and so having caused undue discomfort to those around her. That was inconsiderate, which is a vice rather than merely the mildly discomfiting consequence of an event bound to happen sooner or later in overcrowded bus conditions. The black woman was desociologizing the event.

That a trespass is taken as a moral violation rather than as a violation of custom may be no more than to say that moral violations are an articulation of a categorical view about violations of custom. It is included in behavior that either is right or wrong rather than as a more or less imperfect carrying out of a procedure, something known in all religious ceremonies, perfection in performance not necessary for a sacrament to have become efficacious. The custom is abstracted out, as Weber might say, into being a principle whose violation is wrong rather than merely inappropriate. The principle can therefore weigh in as an assessment of a defect in the character of the person who has violated the custom. From this, the idea of sinfulness is born, an abstraction based on the more primitive idea that customs are useful or are, at the least, givens that there is no necessity to modify. (Notice my strictly rationalistic approach to Durkheimean territory: it all makes sense and none of it is a value, only the result of a practice of abstraction, which is inevitable in human reason.) You can notice this process of custom evolving into morality happening not merely in the history of religion, back in Stone Age times, or times old enough to be said to have residues of Stone Age ways, but everyday (in winter and in summer) on New York City busses.