Request Day: What I Think About (Shhh) Secret Societies

Z requests a post about the secret societies at Yale:

In particular, what bases for excluding people from formal social groups are legitimate? What are the effects of exclusive secret societies on the greater community?

Here are my thoughts about this.  I'm not particularly egalitarian at core.  I hope that I'm open minded, but I don't get too riled up about fairness.  The fact that not everyone who might want to be in or might benefit from being in a secret society gets the chance to be in one doesn't strike me as a fatal criticism against the institution.  That's true of a lot of things in the world.  I keep writing sentences and deleting them because I'm not doing a very good job saying what I mean.  I think that's because I have conflicting and internally contradictory ideas about this.  I'm not generally a fan of secrecy -- I don't favor it, and I feel a pretty strong pull toward transparency and authenticity in my own life.  And I think there are a lot of bad kinds of exclusivity and human beings have a dangerous tendency to be tribal and small-minded and divisive.  But on the other hand, I think people are more trusting, kinder, and more expressive in environments where they feel safe -- and often that is in small groups of like-minded people.  These beliefs are in tension, and it's hard to be clear when I guess my thinking is in a grey area.  Maybe I should just talk about my own experience, because that's firmer ground.

I was in a secret society at Yale.  Shhhhh.  It was a really good experience for me.  And the contours of that experience were shaped by the limitation on the size of the group I was part of and the complete confidentiality of our shared time together.

There's something mysterious and mildly fascinating about having these secret societies on campus, these big impressive windowless tombs standing in and among the other campus buildings.  You wonder what goes on in them, what they look like inside, how people get tapped into them.  As a freshman I wondered about that kind of thing.  I heard rumors about seniors who were in societies and idly wondered in the dining hall what it was about them, and what they did.  Did they wear a robe?  Did they do spooky rituals?  They seemed so normal.... As I got older I started to know people who were in them.  You know this mostly because you don't see that person on Sunday nights or Thursday nights anymore, and they don't tell you where they go on those nights.  People have friends that you didn't realize they knew, and when you say, "I didn't realize you guys knew each other," they look at one another and pause like co-conspirators before telling you they have a class together.  You learn scraps of information.  Different people -- and different societies -- have varying degrees of secrecy.  Sometimes you just know someone is in one, but not which one.  Sometimes you know everyone who is in one, what they do together and what they think of one another.  Some of them have open parties, where non-members are invited into the tomb.  And some are very secret. 

I know some people who thought they were stupid and divisive, but I don't think their presence on campus was terribly disruptive.  The backdrop of secrecy is why I accepted the invitation to join -- I was curious about what these things were, and excited to have the chance to be part of one.  It's a huge time commitment, and if there weren't that institutional cachet from the secrecy I'm not sure I would have had the maturity to pledge so much of my senior year.  But something about the legacy and the secrecy and the exclusivity makes it feel serious to join, and made me ready to show up with some earnestness and a real commitment to fulfilling my responsibilities.  And because of that, I think I had a really good experience. 

What did I get out of it?  I won't say too much, because, after all, this is a secret.  But I think all the societies do some of the same things.  All of them have between 12 and 15 members.  All of them meet every Sunday night and Thursday night, from early evening until midnight or later.  In all of them, each member has to tell his or her complete life story to the others.  In all of them, the members haven't chosen one another -- they've been selected by the class before them.  So the groups are very likely to include people who don't think alike, and may not particularly like one another. 

And that is what, for me, was wonderfully beneficial.  It was my first experience committing, significantly, to people who I did not necessarily like.  I had to tell my secrets to people I wouldn't have chosen to trust in other situations.  I trusted them because of the institution -- because of the vow of secrecy we all had.  We didn't talk trash about one another outside of the group, and that was unquestioned.  But within the group we argued and we perplexed one another.  We asked hard questions, we confronted one another.  In the rest of life when that happens, you can just walk away.  In this artificial institution, we had to come back the next Sunday or Thursday.  We were cemented together for the year.  So we had to learn how to find common ground, and how to trust each other.  I learned a ton from that.  I ended up with some deep bonds, with people who I might never have gotten to know -- in fact, with people I actively disliked for a good part of the year.  I learned that if you commit to someone and keep coming back you can find a place where you connect.  You can get comfortable with people, even if you disagree about some fundamental things.  I cried at some of the bios of my fellow members and started to understand what different paths people travel.  It was a really good experience for me.  It made me less judgmental, more aware that a failure to connect with someone just means I haven't spent enough time trying.  When we chose the individuals for the following year's class, we tried hard to find people who would challenge one another, who would not be an easy mix. 

I think it's an experience that everyone should have.  But if I try to think about how to do it universally I can't think of a way.  You can't make it mandatory or ordinary, or people won't show up with the same earnest seriousness of commitment.  And that commitment, that respect for the institution, is really necessary to pull people through when it would be a lot more fun to hang out with their roommates or their teammates or the friends they've already made.  You can't make it transparent or people won't trust one another to go deep, to tell the truth about their life experiences without fear of judgment or social reprisal.  You can't make the groups too big or you won't have intimacy and meaningful connections.  Exclusivity and secrecy are dumb, generally.  But I don't see how you could take them away and still have the kind of experience that I value so much.      

Comments

[wab]

That was a wonderful post. To me it said enough about the value of the societies to the Yale undergraduates, without saying too much... something that would breach the confidentiality from which value derives. As a young faculty member at Yale, I was very curious about strange student rituals based on what I assumed were motives of Yankee hegemony; as someone that loved to explore corridors and rooftops for photography, the forbidden nature of these interesting buildings added intrigue. The periodic many boxes of empty beer and liquor bottles outside of WH always seemed to amuse me.

Thanks for the post

[z]

I guess it just all seems a little mean.

To me, the criticism of exclusivity is not that some people don't get to participate (although I don't really understand why the number of societies can't increase), but that if one endorses exclusivity and secrecy, how to prevent that attitude from spreading to other, more consequential spheres.

I understand that I'm not going to talk you out of your endorsement, but it seems like you kind of blew off the potential for divisiveness by saying they weren't "disruptive". Might they have been divisive without being disruptive? I didn't go to Yale, but I have heard other alumni say they were in fact disruptive of their social relationship and that the time of year when people are joining groups was one of pain and disillusionment.

[hilllady]

Speaking as an non-society alum who never had any interest in joining (though I had good friends who did join), I think most of the hype about secret societies comes from outside of Yale. Singing groups are the truly divisive element on campus, since everyone tries out and not everyone gets in. Plus, they're loud.