My Trip to the Coffeehouse: Social Relationships & Dangerous Dependencies

Sociological Meanderings Towards Collective Well-Being

https://www.otherwayround.travel/colombia-coffee-region/

Today I drove from my house to my favorite local coffee shop, where I bought some coffee beans for home, and an iced mocha to enjoy while sitting by a river in the sunshine. The coffee I bought–decaf for me, no matter the time of day–is sourced from Columbia and roasted in the West Loop in Chicago. The company’s story highlights the potential environmental impact of roasting coffee, particularly in terms of air pollution (apparently, traditional roasting methods require burning smoke and natural gas to offset the smoke). There is the potential here for a “dangerous dependency,” but this one company’s mission aims to eradicate the environmental danger of their business.

For clarity, let’s ask: what is the dependency?

• Me, dependent on this company for my coffee habit, this company dependent upon farmers in Columbia to source their coffee, all of us dependent upon the roads; me driving on roads from my house to the coffee shop, the distributors driving trucks on roads from Columbia to Chicago. It’s possible they fly. I honestly don’t know, but either way, we are dependent upon the transportation infrastructure. This leads to even more dependencies: the construction workers who repair roads and the Air Traffic Controllers who watch the planes in the sky. Plus, I am dependent upon the staff member who worked at the cash register this morning, the one who made it possible for me to get my hands on the bag of coffee I brought home. And that transaction was dependent upon the banks who made the money travel from my bank to theirs, plus the technology (the chips, the devices) that facilitated this transfer. These are all businesses that operate from within capitalism/the economy, but they are also regulated by the government, so my dependency is on both institutions. I could go on, but I’ll stop here.

For further clarity, what would make this a dangerous “dependency”?

• As stated, coffee roasting has an environmental impact, and the extent to which this impact negatively impacts the climate, it is a “dangerous dependency.” Meaning: in order to consume the coffee that I love drinking I am contributing to a process that increases the amount of greenhouse gasses, thus, the relationship might provide me a resource (coffee) but it also presents a risk (air quality). Of course, the closer I live to where the coffee is roasted, the higher the danger, so in this way, the danger is more abstract than literal, though the West Loop isn’t far from where I live (~30 miles). That said, this company uses a roasting process that aims to minimize this environmental impact, which is why I feel good about supporting this company. They are trying to make the danger less dangerous, and they use that to market their product because they are dependent upon consumers (like me!) buying their products, and being a “green company” is both an ethical stance and good public relations.
• One more danger: driving. I was in a car accident a little over a year ago. My body was unharmed, but my car was totaled, and it was really scary. In my accident, I was hit by another car from behind, and the driver was going over 90mph. Every time I drive now, this possibility is present and not theoretical. So, when I drove to the coffee shop this morning, I was mindful of and dependent upon, all the other drivers on the road at the same time as me, in addition to needing to be attentive to my own driving. Driving is always a “dangerous dependency” in this way. We are dependent upon our cars in the suburbs because public transportation isn’t very accessible. This dependency is always dangerous, given the risks of driving.

A “dangerous dependency” that helps to explain the concept of ANOMIE:

• I listened to this podcast today while driving to the coffee shop. In the podcast, Rebecca Solnit (who wrote Hope in the Dark, of which you will soon read an excerpt) makes the case that the internet, in particular social media, weakens social connections. When we talk to each other in person, on the phone, or through letters, we have long, meandering conversations and connections, and those relationships allow us to hear divergent points of view while remaining open and interested. On the other hand, social media encourages us to react, divide, and stay entrenched in our pre-existing opinions, unmoved by others. In this way, our dependency (the resource we have access to) on social media (on which we are also exploited because someone else is profiting off of our time on the platforms) is (potentially) dangerous (the risk) because it renders us more and more politically divided and lonely.
• This isolation is also what Durkheim meant when he wrote about anomie. When older forms of social connection (in this example, like the telephone, like face-to-face communication, like public forums and debates) are weakened, social cohesion is also weakened, at least until new systems emerge to replace them. Lacking social cohesion, we stop caring about the generalized others (our neighbor, the staff person at the coffee shop, the farmer in Columbia who picked the coffee beans, etc…) on which we depend. Anomie emerges in this weakened space: we feel less connected to our community, to our society, and thus less apt to follow the historical/typical norms. This isn’t about our intimate relationships but the more public ones, those dependency relations we are in with the collective, whom we sometimes refer to as strangers and sometimes as neighbors or fellow citizens. You can see this in the political realm, in the United States and abroad, where divisions–often fueled on social media by disinformation campaigns–are weakening democracy. In this space of deep division, people come to feel left behind by, or left out of, their government, and rather than follow the historical/traditional rule of law, some are resorting to violence, such as the insurrection on January 6, 2021, with many people believing that violence is a good option.

Soon, we will discuss how to counter these dynamics. Now, we can deepen our critical thinking and explore these ideas with openness, knowing that you get to decide for yourselves whether you agree or not, whether you want to engage in any kind of social change that aims to heal this anomie, and, of course, what that social change might look like. It’s up to you!

As always, take good care of yourself and others.

Dr. Monica