What Do We Owe One Another Once We See Asymmetries Being Done by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

What Do We Owe One Another Once We Can See Asymmetries Being Done?

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

Once we can see asymmetries being done, something irreversible happens to moral life. The ordinary world no longer appears neutral. Interactions that once seemed merely awkward, efficient, or unfortunate now reveal themselves as systematically tilted, quietly disciplinary, and unevenly forgiving. What had passed as "just how things work" becomes recognizable as an achievement—one accomplished through talk, categorization, institutional procedure, and unequal accountability. This recognition does not arrive with fireworks. It arrives slowly, often painfully, as the accumulation of moments in which one begins to notice who must explain themselves, who is granted patience, whose errors are repairable, and whose mistakes become permanent marks. The ethical question that follows is not abstract. It is practical, relational, and unavoidable: what do we owe one another once this asymmetry becomes visible?

Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis have long taught us that social order is not imposed from above but produced moment by moment through members' methods. From Harold Garfinkel's insistence that social facts are locally accomplished, to Harvey Sacks's demonstration that categorization is a morally organized inference engine, the Santa Barbara tradition has dismantled the comforting fiction that inequality resides only in "structures" somewhere else. Don Zimmerman's work on institutional interaction showed that authority, obligation, and responsibility are not abstractions but sequentially organized practices. Douglas Maynard demonstrated how moral reasoning, blame, and justification are interactionally accomplished rather than cognitively presumed. Taken together, this body of work leaves us with a difficult inheritance: if domination is done in the ordinary, then ethics cannot be postponed to policy statements, attitudes, or distant reforms. Ethics must also be ordinary.

Critical Interactionism begins precisely here. It accepts the EM/CA refusal of reification, but it refuses the conclusion—sometimes drawn too quickly—that description exhausts responsibility. Seeing how asymmetry is done creates a moral remainder. Once we can see it, we cannot return to innocence. Neutrality becomes untenable, not because every interaction demands heroism, but because absence, silence, and smooth participation now have visible consequences. The ethical problem is not that we are implicated—we always were—but that implication is no longer deniable.

I learned this not first in theory, but in outreach.

One winter afternoon, while doing street outreach, I accompanied a man I had known for years into a county office to help him resolve a benefits issue. He was calm, prepared, and deferential. He brought the documents he had been told to bring. Still, within minutes, the interaction turned brittle. A missing form—one he had never been told about—became the focal point. The worker's tone shifted. The man began to apologize excessively, his body shrinking as he tried to repair a trouble he did not create. When he asked a clarifying question, it was heard as resistance. When I spoke, the same question was treated as reasonable. The asymmetry was not subtle. It was sequential, embodied, and immediate. I could feel the interaction reorganize itself around my presence. What struck me most was not the cruelty of any individual act, but the speed with which dignity became conditional.

Once you can see moments like this for what they are, ethics stops being a matter of good intentions. It becomes a matter of presence under unequal conditions. What we owe one another is not purity or detachment, but the willingness to enter interactions already shaped by injustice and to refuse to behave as if those conditions do not matter. This is not an ethic of blame. It is an ethic of attention.

What, then, do we owe? I want to be concrete.

We owe one another presence—but presence of a particular kind. Not presence as surveillance or rescue, but presence as witness, accompaniment, and solidarity. In twenty years of street outreach, I have learned that showing up is not a preliminary to the real work. It is the work. The person sleeping under the bridge does not need me to solve homelessness. They need me to see them, to say their name, to treat them as someone whose experience counts. Presence interrupts the asymmetry of recognition. In a moral economy where some people are systematically unseen—where civil inattention shades into civic erasure—the simple act of acknowledgment is already a form of resistance. Tomorrow is Saturday. I will wake early, fill my backpack with supplies, and walk the streets of Santa Barbara. I will find people in doorways, under bridges, in cars. I will say good morning. I will use their names. None of this will solve homelessness. But it will be presence, and presence matters.

We owe one another recognition—the practical acknowledgment that the other person is a full participant in the moral order, entitled to the same standing, credibility, and patience we claim for ourselves. Recognition is accomplished in the smallest details: whether we make eye contact or look away, whether we use someone's name or a category, whether we wait for an answer or interrupt, whether we extend the benefit of the doubt or demand justification. Once we can see how recognition is unequally distributed, we owe one another the work of redistributing it. We owe patience where haste is rewarded, generosity where efficiency is prized, flexibility where rules are rigid—not as charity, but as counterweight.

We owe one another resistance—the willingness to contest asymmetries even when contestation is costly. I think of a case conference where a colleague described a client as "non-compliant." The term landed easily, efficiently. It could have passed without comment. Instead, I asked—carefully—what compliance would look like under conditions of untreated trauma, unstable housing, and constant surveillance. The room grew quiet. The label lost some of its power. Nothing revolutionary happened. No policy changed. But for a moment, the moral economy of the room shifted. That moment mattered. Resistance does not require heroics. Often it consists of slowing an interaction that is accelerating toward humiliation, refusing a category that is doing too much explanatory work, or translating institutional language back into human terms. These acts feel awkward, risky, sometimes socially costly. But they disrupt the smooth reproduction of inequality.

We owe one another repair—acknowledgment of harm that has already been done, and action that exceeds what is formally required. Formal equality asks what the rules demand. Ethical responsibility asks what would make the interaction livable. For those who live under category saturation—"homeless," "addict," "illegal," "non-compliant"—every encounter is already burdened. Once we can see this, minimalism becomes cruelty. In thirteen years of organizing Santa Barbara's Longest Night vigil, I have read hundreds of names—each the endpoint of asymmetries that accumulated until they killed. The vigil cannot bring anyone back. But it insists that their lives mattered, that their deaths will not disappear into statistics. Repair includes the work of mourning.

And we owe one another hope—though not optimism. Optimism believes things will get better. Hope shows up even when they might not. Many interventions fail. Many asymmetries persist. Showing up does not guarantee gratitude or success. But hope, here, is not a feeling. It is a practice. It is the decision to act without guarantees, to intervene without certainty, to stay engaged even when outcomes are partial or reversible. Waiting for perfect conditions is another way of opting out. Despair is a luxury of the privileged. For those whose lives depend on things being otherwise, hope is survival.

Seeing asymmetry also requires abandoning the fantasy of innocence. Many moral frameworks encourage us to ask whether harm was intended, whether attitudes were biased, or whether rules were followed. EM/CA redirects us to a more unsettling question: what did this interaction require of different participants in order to proceed? Who bore the burden of repair? Who was accountable for smoothing the encounter? Who was granted the benefit of the doubt? Asymmetry lives here, in the uneven distribution of interactional labor. Once visible, innocence is no longer a refuge. To proceed "as usual" is already to take a side.

What we owe one another, then, includes loyalty to the vulnerable rather than to interactional smoothness. Social life rewards those who keep things moving, who avoid discomfort, who do not "make it awkward." But once we can see how comfort is unevenly distributed, smoothness becomes suspect. Civility is not neutral. Order is not innocent. Sometimes the most ethical act is to introduce friction—to side, publicly and accountably, with the person whose dignity is most at risk.

Which brings us to the hardest obligation: staying anyway. Once we can see asymmetry being done, withdrawal becomes tempting. Institutions are flawed. Interactions are exhausting. Progress is slow. Yet when everyone who sees leaves, the asymmetries become harder to contest, not easier. Critical Interactionism insists that ethical life does not begin after withdrawal, but within compromised fields. Staying does not mean compliance. It means continued, accountable presence—refusing both despair and denial.

On December 21st—tomorrow, as I write this—I will stand on the courthouse steps for the fourteenth year and read the names of those who died while experiencing homelessness in Santa Barbara County. Some of them I will have known. Some of them I will have seen just days before. Some of them I will have failed. I will read their names anyway. I will light a candle for each one. I will stand in the cold with the small group of people who still show up, and we will refuse to let these deaths disappear.

This is what we owe one another once asymmetry becomes visible. Not redemption or purity—something quieter and more demanding. A commitment to keep the human visible where systems prefer it erased, to intervene where silence would be easier, and to show up even when the ground remains uneven.

This is not a utopian ethic. It does not imagine the end of inequality. It insists instead on something more radical and more achievable: that ordinary moments matter, that dignity is fragile, and that absence is never neutral. Once we can see asymmetries being done, what we owe one another is the refusal to look away—and the courage to act as if that refusal counts.

About the Author

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D., is an independent scholar, sociologist, and certified substance abuse counselor in Santa Barbara, California. He studied ethnomethodology at UC Santa Barbara under Don Zimmerman and has conducted street outreach with people experiencing homelessness for over two decades. He organizes the annual Longest Night Homeless Memorial Vigil, now in its fourteenth year. His work develops Critical Interactionism as both a theoretical framework and a practice of solidarity.