Fourth Post
In the course of this fourth segment, I shall refer to some books that I consider especially suggestive or helpful in understanding society. I think of these books as "recent," but you need to remember that I am seventy-six, so to me, recent can mean dating from the middle of the twentieth century. Sorry about that.
My purpose in starting with a small medieval village, and then spending time on the rabbit eating fantasy, was to demonstrate that even in the simplest, most apparently transparent situations, there is still a great deal of conceptual opacity in our understanding of society. Before moving on to the real subject of these remarks -- our cognitive grasp of modern, complex societies -- I want to spend some time talking about two important aspects of this conceptual opacity.
The first point is that society, even at the apparently simplest level, is essentially mystified. In using the term "mystification" I do not mean to suggest that society is puzzling, or difficult to understand, or that it requires special sorts of knowledge to understand. All of that may be true, of course, but mystification is something else entirely. To say that some aspect of society is "mystified" is to say that it systematically presents itself as other than what it is, in such a way that it resists being understood as it truly is. [With these remarks, I recommend that you read my little book, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, which is a literary/philosophical interpretation of the first ten or fifteen chapters of Volume One of CAPITAL by Karl Marx.] The heartland of mystification of course is a Roman Catholic Mass, where the ancient language [I refer to the old style of the Mass], the incense, the supposed transubstantiation of wine and wafer into the blood and body of Christ all conspire to delude the communicants into believing that they in the presence of a miracle. But, as Marx persuasively argues, the market is as thoroughly mystified as the alter, or indeed as the throne, where ordinary mortals present themselves, and are experienced, as Kings. In the market, the inverse of transubstantiation takes place. At the altar, the accidents [i.e., properties -- smell, taste, etc] of the host remain unchanged, but the substance changes, so that what was bread becomes the body of Christ [hence the word "transubstantiation".] But in the market, during the sale of a commodity, the accidents change [cloth becomes money, money becomes bread], but the substance [value] remains unaltered, for equals exchange for equals. Marx shows us that the mystification is so successful that none of the participants in the market exchange are aware of any mystery at all. [All of this is gone into at greater length in my book.]
Marx loved the novels of Charles Dickens, and for very good reason. One of Dickens' most successful literary devices is to present people as though they were objects [The Aged P being fluffed up in his chair from time to time like a pillow that has sagged] and objects as though they were people [the fog in the famous first chapter of BLEAK HOUSE.] In just this way, in Capitalism, workers are treated and conceptualized as though they were things -- inputs into production -- while things, "product," take on the allure and life of people, growing and expanding in value as though they were reproducing.
Later, I will return to a crucial point that I do not want to belabor here, namely that the mystification of society is ideologically encoded. Indeed, I shall argue [this is really the boffo conclusion of this entire multi-part exposition] that society is essentially, unavoidably ideologically encoded. There is not, there could not be, a neutral objective standpoint from which society could be viewed scientifically, in a non-ideological fashion. But it will take me a while to get to that.
The second point I want to make is that the conceptual opacity of even the simplest societies is rooted in the processes by which the newborn infant grows into an adult member of society. Here I draw my insights from Sigmund Freud, especially from his theory of primary and secondary thought processes and the way in which, in response to the inevitable frustrations and adjustments attendant upon interactions with independent reality, the infant and young child internalize ways of emotional and conceptual being that constitute us as persons. By the time a child is old enough actually to put words to its experiences, it has so thoroughly internalized habits of being, ways of managing its rages and desires, its bowels and its hungers, organizations of erotic energies in structured roles and practices, that it is recognizably a child in some particular culture and social stratum. It is not open to the child, or the young adult, to choose completely to change this foundational organization of personality. The child, or adult, then experiences such roles as father, mother, son, daughter, worker, and eventually citizen, as objectively determined and given, hence as unalterable. Even radical rebellion has its styles, and different cultures organize those deviances differently.
Several reading suggestions, since Luke's Mother started all of this by asking for some book titles. If any of this interests you, I would urge you to read Capital [and my book], to read some Freud [THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS wouldn't be a bad place to start, but also Richard Wollheim's splendid 1971 book, called simply SIGMUND FREUD. Then read Erik Erikson's classic work, CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY. After that, rake a look at any of Erving Goffman's wonderful books, such as THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE, or ASYLUMS [Reading Goffman is like eating nothing but chocolate deserts. Every page is delicious.]
All right, enough for today. Tomorrow, I will expand my discussion to modern, complex societies, which is really what I am interested in. I do hope you are finding this useful. It is fun to write.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
Wednesday, 6 October 2010
YOU GOTTA LOVE THIS
The young emigre Russian physicist who just won half of this year's Nobel Prize for important work on something called graffene [Google it] is also a past winner of an Ig Nobel Prize [a joke prize given by MIT students for weird useless research]. Apparently he suspended a frog in a magnetic field. He is the first winner of a Nobel and an Ig Nobel.
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY -- PART THREE
One by one, the several "Social Sciences" separated off from "Moral Philosophy" and established themselves as autonomous disciplines, all in one way or other studying the newly discovered object of investigation: Society. Although it is not an essential part of our story, it is interesting to note that in this process, and in a corresponding development in the Humanities, one sees over and over again a decision to focus systematic "wissenschaftlich" [in the Continental sense, "scientific"] attention on elements of human experience previously considered beneath the notice of cultivated and educated persons.
The first example of this is Economics itself. It may seem odd today, when economists puff themselves up as scientists and compete for access to the seats of power, but in the eighteenth century, buying and selling, making and consuming, were thought of as activities not worthy of organized study. If one looks at the two great works of eighteenth century historiography that, between them, defined the modern discipline of History -- namely David Hume's six volume HISTORY OF ENGLAND and Edward Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE -- their pages are filled with the doings of emperors and kings, senates and parliaments, with accounts of wars and dynastic struggles. The buying and selling of commodities in the market was thought to be vulgar, not something a gentleman would concern himself with.
Anthropology, as we have seen, treated the odd habits of naked savages as worthy of serious examination and classification, not merely of amused and witty commentary. Sociology in the hands of Durkheim or Weber attended to statistics of birth and death, to the bureaucratic organization of firms and government offices, and eventually to the opinions of the masses, who for untold ages had been thought beneath the dignity of a gentleman to take notice of.
The most brilliant example of this exploration of materials beneath scientific notice was Sigmund Freud's discovery that dreams, jokes, and common slips of the tongue can serve as pathways to the unconscious, thereby serving both therapeutic and scientific ends.
An analogous movement took place in the humanistic disciplines. In the nineteenth century, novels were considered popular amusements, unfit for serious reflection and discussion by literary critics. These dignified souls concerned themselves instead with poetry and tragedy. By the middle of the twentieth century, one could earn a doctorate by engaging in a serious study of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. Movies, however, were beyond the pale -- popular amusements not worthy of serious literary critical attention. Eventually "film studies" joined "the novel" as appropriate specializations in the Humanities, to be followed by post-Modern quasi-Marxian readings of comic books, television, graffiti, and blogs.
But back to our main story. In order to hold this tutorial within reasonable limits of space, I am going to move directly to the subject that interests me the most: the problematic nature of the concepts we employ in trying to grasp the nature of contemporary social reality. Back in the day, when I projected a trilogy of books on the thought of Karl Marx, this was to be the subject of the third and final volume. The first two volumes have long since been published -- UNDERSTANDING MARX and MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY. [I am reminded by a commentator, David Pilavin, that not every visitor to this blog has read the eight hundred page Memoir that I posted in the Spring and early Summer.] But the lack of interest in MONEYBAGS discouraged me, and I have somehow never gotten around to writing the last volume. Consider these brief remarks a promissory note.
Let us begin small, as it were, and build up to the full problem. Society is, when all is said and done, nothing more nor less than the totality of the habits, practices, rituals, institutions, beliefs, expectations, and behaviors of a group of people. Philosophers may wonder whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound if no one hears it, but there is no dispute that when people disappear, society disappears with them.
Now, in a small medieval village, isolated from the larger world, everyone will be personally acquainted with everyone else. If I have grown up in that village, I will know the individuals, their characteristics, their foibles, their relationships, sanctified or not by the local priest, their children, legitimate and illegitimate. I will know who is pregnant, who has just lost a child, what village elder has just passed away. I will have no need of a Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell me whether the population is growing or shrinking, nor will I need a Department of Agriculture to tell me how last year's harvest was. In an important sense, the social structure and relationships of the village are transparent to me, in much the way that my extended family is transparent to me.
But there is curious fact, of the greatest significance for our study of modern society. Even in this small social setting, in which so much is immediately clear to me that might be obscure or difficult to grasp in a nation of three hundred million souls, the concepts I use to understand my social reality are NOT transparent to me, and may indeed present problems of analysis as complex as those posed by the concepts with which I seek to grasp modern social reality. Consider such elementary social concepts as husband, wife, son, daughter, priest, lord, serf, freeman, apprentice, and master craftsman. It is with these concepts that I would describe my world to myself and make sense of it, were I living in that village. These categories would be as real to me, as objective, as the categories of rock and tree, water and wine, deer and hedgehog. And yet, husbands and wives, lords and serfs, are [as we like to say these days] social constructions. If all the deer but one die, the last living deer will still be a deer, though it may be unable to reproduce. But if all the serfs die, there will no longer be any lords. [One is reminded of the wonderful footnote in Chapter One of Das Kapital, Volume One: "One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is a king."]
To explain this notion, and illustrate it, let me have recourse to a silly thought experiment I constructed some decades ago when I was trying to clarify Marx's claim that the legal, philosophical, and religious ideas of an age are an ideological superstructure erected on a socio-economic base. Now, I do not want to hear from all the rabbit lovers out there, please. [Nor do I want to start an argument about Historical Materialism. Just follow along.]
Imagine, if you will, a primitive society whose entire economic activity consists of running down and killing rabbits. These are folks who eat rabbits, make their clothing from rabbit skins, and even manage toothpicks from those little rabbit bones that seem to make their way into even the most carefully prepared rabbit dish. The entire clan gets up every morning and spends the day wandering through the woods running after rabbits. Since rabbits, though small, are elusive, the clan is living pretty much at bare subsistence level. One evening, sitting around the fire [they do have fire], an old woman makes a radical suggestion: "Why don't we divide the work of catching rabbits into two subordinate functions?' she says. Some of us will fan out and beat the bushes to scare the rabbits into the open. The rest will wait with their clubs [made from rabbit bones, of course] and whomp them as they run by. Well, after a good deal of deliberation, they decide not to burn the old lady as a witch, but instead to give it a try.
The plan is a rave success, and production soars [as we say nowadays]. The next day, the same people go out to beat the bushes and the same people wait to whomp the rabbits. Pretty soon, these two groups start to call themselves bush beaters and rabbit whompers. Little children, born after this experiment was first tried, grow up wondering whether they will be bush beaters or rabbit whompers, these now being thought of as eternal objective social roles, not an ad hoc division of labor suggested by an old woman [who by now has been transmogrified in the story telling of the clan into a Goddess.]
Now, when it comes to dividing up the daily catch, the rabbit whompers keep the lion's share [so to speak] of the rabbits for themselves. At first this meets with protests, since on that first day, as everyone can in the beginning still recall, it was pretty much arbitrary who did which job. But possession being nine tenths of the law, as they have not yet learned to say, the rabbit whompers grow fat and happy while the bush beaters stumble along only a little better off than they were originally. After a while, the improved diet of the rabbit whompers helps them to grow taller and live longer, and so it begins to appear that there are really two races of people in the clan. The larger, healthier group now have so many rabbits that they can afford to support several of their more introspective number as scholars and priests who, while not themselves actually whomping any rabbits, have the job of explaining to the bush beaters that it is God's will that they should live near the edge of starvation while rabbit whompers live high on the hog. When some of the more rambunctious bush beaters protest this arrangement, even going so far as to suggest that the originator of the idea was just an old lady, not a Goddess, the rabbit whompers set aside still more of their heap of rabbits to support several of their stronger and more belligerent number, who become soldiers, defending the stores of excess rabbits from the hungry horde of bush beaters.
And so modern society is born.
The point of this fable, of course, is that by the time a full scale elaboration of law courts, churches, art museums, universities, and philosophy departments has developed, all providing superb rationales for the present state of affairs, no one recalls how it all began, and all of the concepts the members of the clan use to achieve some measure of self-understanding -- lord, serf, priest, soldier, lawyer, bush beater, and rabbit whomper -- seem as solid, ancient, objective, and immutable as the concepts of their nascent natural science.
Well, enough for one day. More tomorrow, if you can stand it.
The first example of this is Economics itself. It may seem odd today, when economists puff themselves up as scientists and compete for access to the seats of power, but in the eighteenth century, buying and selling, making and consuming, were thought of as activities not worthy of organized study. If one looks at the two great works of eighteenth century historiography that, between them, defined the modern discipline of History -- namely David Hume's six volume HISTORY OF ENGLAND and Edward Gibbon's DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE -- their pages are filled with the doings of emperors and kings, senates and parliaments, with accounts of wars and dynastic struggles. The buying and selling of commodities in the market was thought to be vulgar, not something a gentleman would concern himself with.
Anthropology, as we have seen, treated the odd habits of naked savages as worthy of serious examination and classification, not merely of amused and witty commentary. Sociology in the hands of Durkheim or Weber attended to statistics of birth and death, to the bureaucratic organization of firms and government offices, and eventually to the opinions of the masses, who for untold ages had been thought beneath the dignity of a gentleman to take notice of.
The most brilliant example of this exploration of materials beneath scientific notice was Sigmund Freud's discovery that dreams, jokes, and common slips of the tongue can serve as pathways to the unconscious, thereby serving both therapeutic and scientific ends.
An analogous movement took place in the humanistic disciplines. In the nineteenth century, novels were considered popular amusements, unfit for serious reflection and discussion by literary critics. These dignified souls concerned themselves instead with poetry and tragedy. By the middle of the twentieth century, one could earn a doctorate by engaging in a serious study of the novels of Samuel Richardson, Charles Dickens or Jane Austen. Movies, however, were beyond the pale -- popular amusements not worthy of serious literary critical attention. Eventually "film studies" joined "the novel" as appropriate specializations in the Humanities, to be followed by post-Modern quasi-Marxian readings of comic books, television, graffiti, and blogs.
But back to our main story. In order to hold this tutorial within reasonable limits of space, I am going to move directly to the subject that interests me the most: the problematic nature of the concepts we employ in trying to grasp the nature of contemporary social reality. Back in the day, when I projected a trilogy of books on the thought of Karl Marx, this was to be the subject of the third and final volume. The first two volumes have long since been published -- UNDERSTANDING MARX and MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY. [I am reminded by a commentator, David Pilavin, that not every visitor to this blog has read the eight hundred page Memoir that I posted in the Spring and early Summer.] But the lack of interest in MONEYBAGS discouraged me, and I have somehow never gotten around to writing the last volume. Consider these brief remarks a promissory note.
Let us begin small, as it were, and build up to the full problem. Society is, when all is said and done, nothing more nor less than the totality of the habits, practices, rituals, institutions, beliefs, expectations, and behaviors of a group of people. Philosophers may wonder whether the tree that falls in the forest makes a sound if no one hears it, but there is no dispute that when people disappear, society disappears with them.
Now, in a small medieval village, isolated from the larger world, everyone will be personally acquainted with everyone else. If I have grown up in that village, I will know the individuals, their characteristics, their foibles, their relationships, sanctified or not by the local priest, their children, legitimate and illegitimate. I will know who is pregnant, who has just lost a child, what village elder has just passed away. I will have no need of a Bureau of Labor Statistics to tell me whether the population is growing or shrinking, nor will I need a Department of Agriculture to tell me how last year's harvest was. In an important sense, the social structure and relationships of the village are transparent to me, in much the way that my extended family is transparent to me.
But there is curious fact, of the greatest significance for our study of modern society. Even in this small social setting, in which so much is immediately clear to me that might be obscure or difficult to grasp in a nation of three hundred million souls, the concepts I use to understand my social reality are NOT transparent to me, and may indeed present problems of analysis as complex as those posed by the concepts with which I seek to grasp modern social reality. Consider such elementary social concepts as husband, wife, son, daughter, priest, lord, serf, freeman, apprentice, and master craftsman. It is with these concepts that I would describe my world to myself and make sense of it, were I living in that village. These categories would be as real to me, as objective, as the categories of rock and tree, water and wine, deer and hedgehog. And yet, husbands and wives, lords and serfs, are [as we like to say these days] social constructions. If all the deer but one die, the last living deer will still be a deer, though it may be unable to reproduce. But if all the serfs die, there will no longer be any lords. [One is reminded of the wonderful footnote in Chapter One of Das Kapital, Volume One: "One man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is a king."]
To explain this notion, and illustrate it, let me have recourse to a silly thought experiment I constructed some decades ago when I was trying to clarify Marx's claim that the legal, philosophical, and religious ideas of an age are an ideological superstructure erected on a socio-economic base. Now, I do not want to hear from all the rabbit lovers out there, please. [Nor do I want to start an argument about Historical Materialism. Just follow along.]
Imagine, if you will, a primitive society whose entire economic activity consists of running down and killing rabbits. These are folks who eat rabbits, make their clothing from rabbit skins, and even manage toothpicks from those little rabbit bones that seem to make their way into even the most carefully prepared rabbit dish. The entire clan gets up every morning and spends the day wandering through the woods running after rabbits. Since rabbits, though small, are elusive, the clan is living pretty much at bare subsistence level. One evening, sitting around the fire [they do have fire], an old woman makes a radical suggestion: "Why don't we divide the work of catching rabbits into two subordinate functions?' she says. Some of us will fan out and beat the bushes to scare the rabbits into the open. The rest will wait with their clubs [made from rabbit bones, of course] and whomp them as they run by. Well, after a good deal of deliberation, they decide not to burn the old lady as a witch, but instead to give it a try.
The plan is a rave success, and production soars [as we say nowadays]. The next day, the same people go out to beat the bushes and the same people wait to whomp the rabbits. Pretty soon, these two groups start to call themselves bush beaters and rabbit whompers. Little children, born after this experiment was first tried, grow up wondering whether they will be bush beaters or rabbit whompers, these now being thought of as eternal objective social roles, not an ad hoc division of labor suggested by an old woman [who by now has been transmogrified in the story telling of the clan into a Goddess.]
Now, when it comes to dividing up the daily catch, the rabbit whompers keep the lion's share [so to speak] of the rabbits for themselves. At first this meets with protests, since on that first day, as everyone can in the beginning still recall, it was pretty much arbitrary who did which job. But possession being nine tenths of the law, as they have not yet learned to say, the rabbit whompers grow fat and happy while the bush beaters stumble along only a little better off than they were originally. After a while, the improved diet of the rabbit whompers helps them to grow taller and live longer, and so it begins to appear that there are really two races of people in the clan. The larger, healthier group now have so many rabbits that they can afford to support several of their more introspective number as scholars and priests who, while not themselves actually whomping any rabbits, have the job of explaining to the bush beaters that it is God's will that they should live near the edge of starvation while rabbit whompers live high on the hog. When some of the more rambunctious bush beaters protest this arrangement, even going so far as to suggest that the originator of the idea was just an old lady, not a Goddess, the rabbit whompers set aside still more of their heap of rabbits to support several of their stronger and more belligerent number, who become soldiers, defending the stores of excess rabbits from the hungry horde of bush beaters.
And so modern society is born.
The point of this fable, of course, is that by the time a full scale elaboration of law courts, churches, art museums, universities, and philosophy departments has developed, all providing superb rationales for the present state of affairs, no one recalls how it all began, and all of the concepts the members of the clan use to achieve some measure of self-understanding -- lord, serf, priest, soldier, lawyer, bush beater, and rabbit whomper -- seem as solid, ancient, objective, and immutable as the concepts of their nascent natural science.
Well, enough for one day. More tomorrow, if you can stand it.
Tuesday, 5 October 2010
A BRIEF HICCUP
I had planned to post the third part of my little discussion on the study of society today, but writing a ton of thank you letters for my scholarship organization took time, and there have been several comemnts I would like to respond to [including one lengthy comment that got posted four times, thanks to the mysterious ways of the blogosphere], and now I must spend two hours in the dentist's chair for the second part of my root canel, so things are a bit delayed. My apologies.
Monday, 4 October 2010
AN APPEAL TO MY READERS
I am now conducting my annual appeal for support for University Scholarships for South African Students, the non-profit tax exempt organization I started twenty years ago to help poor Black students in South Africa get a university education [see www.ussas.com for more information.] I would like to invite all of my readers to join this effort, which has, over the years, helped more than 1500 young Black men and women to get a higher education and contribute to the transformation of South Africa.
Checks can be sent to:
USSAS
631 Meadowmont Village Circle
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
All donations are tax deductible.
Thank you all.
Tomorrow, back to the tutorial on the study of society.
Checks can be sent to:
USSAS
631 Meadowmont Village Circle
Chapel Hill, NC 27517
All donations are tax deductible.
Thank you all.
Tomorrow, back to the tutorial on the study of society.
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY PART TWO
Thank you all for telling me to continue. And so I shall.
Second Post
If you stand back and try to get an overview of serious writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is astonishing how different the two bodies of literature are. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Rousseau sound nothing like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Freud. To some extent, especially in Philosophy, this is a consequence of the fact that Hume and Kant between them simply killed off rational theology, which had occupied a central role in philosophical writings for two millennia. But I think the difference is more a result of the discovery of Society as an object of investigation independent of Nature and Man. [Don't give me grief. Everyone I am talking about said "Man" rather than "Man or Woman," and at this point I am doing some interpretive intellectual history.]
The change pretty clearly has its roots in the rise of a large, literate, politically active middle class, or bourgeoisie, but its intellectual origins can be traced in part to the impact of the writings of Hegel [a fact I find it painful to acknowledge, since I hate Hegel's writings, but fair is fair.] In his historicizing of the Christian story, Hegel represents history as a series of stages in the unfolding and coming to self-consciousness of Geist, variously translated as Spirit or Mind or even Reason. What matters here is that Hegel had the brilliant idea of characterizing each stage of historical development as exhibiting, in all of its aspects, a unifying aesthetic principle. Thus, we learned to talk of the Classical era, the Baroque era, the Romantic era, and so forth. It became commonplace to speak of Classical architecture, Baroque furniture, the Renaissance Man, Romantic politics. An entire civilization, understood as something other than the mere agglomeration of individual persons, could be conceived as the embodiment of a ruling aesthetic principle.
Starting with Smith in the late eighteenth century, and continuing through the nineteenth century, one disciplinary unit after another broke off from "Moral Philosophy" to become a new Social Science. [In this regard, it is interesting to see the German terms Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft joined by the new term Sozialwissenschaft.] The first new discipline, as we have seen, was Political Economy, as it was called for a while, or Economics, as we now know it. [To Aristotle, of course, "oeconomics" was essentially household management, something relegated to the lady of the house.] We have already commented on the emergence of Sociology, and in particular Emile Durkheim's explicit rationale for its autonomy as a branch of investigation.
Equally striking was the development of what we now call Anthropology. There had always been a literature of travelers' accounts of the strange practices of strange peoples, going back to ancient times, and including the narratives of medieval travelers like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The accounts gave rise to a lively debate about the relative benefits of civilization versus primitive life. Some writers celebrated the peoples of the South Pacific islands as pure, uncorrupted by city life, natural, admirable. Others shared Sherlock Holmes' views concerning "the idiocy of rural life." During the last century or so of the ancien regime in France, Dukes and Countesses at Versailles dressed up as simple shepherds and shepherdesses and played at tending sheep while waited upon by clouds of bewigged servants.
What especially fascinated more thoughtful students of the travel narratives were the accounts of the religious practices of the "natives." Quite naturally viewing Christianity as the highest form of religious belief and practice, [or at least Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the three religions "of the book" what shared a reverence for the texts of the Old Testament], some of these writers developed an evolutionary typology, along Hegelian lines, in which primitive animism gives way to polytheism and finally develops into monotheism. This in turn led one author in particular, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, virtually to create the discipline of Anthropology in his classic two-volume work, PRIMTIVE CULTURE [1871.] Here is the opening sentence of volume one. It is literally the moment of birth of the new discipline:
"Culture or Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
There are, for our purposes in this brief exposition, several very important features of this famous definition. First of all, Tylor uses the term "culture" to refer not merely to classical literature, metaphysical poetry, or the music of Bach and Beethoven, but to the totality of the habits, practices, beliefs, and customs of an entire people. This means that the lower classes have culture too, a profound change from the earlier aristocratic view that only the upper orders have something that can be characterized as culture. The marriage rituals of Irish workers count as culture, as do Cockney rhyming slang and the weaving techniques of Scottish crofters. Secondly, EVERY people will, by this definition, have a culture -- not merely the French [about whom the English had long-standing ambivalent opinions] but also Trobriand Islanders, Zulu warriors, and Algonquin trappers. With this dramatic revision, Tylor creates modern Anthropology and offers to us a new object of study.
Notice -- we shall have a very great deal to say about this later on -- that on this conception of culture, no one can be identified as the creator of culture. Beethoven's Ninth was created by Beethoven. The tragedies of Aeschylus were written by Aeschylus. But no identifiable individual created Cockney rhyming slang. There is a paradox here that needs very careful examination.
On the one hand, Cockney rhyming slang [to continue our example] is obviously a human creation, and therefore at some time or other, individuals must have started trying it out, slowly bringing it into existence, even if those individuals did not leave their names on it for us to find. The same thing is true of all dialects, kinship practices, productive economic techniques, and even habits of bodily display and deportment. They did not grow on trees, and they were not handed to human beings by the Gods [although there are countless myths of this sort about the origin of fire, etc.] On the other hand, each of us, upon being born, grows up into a society in which the roles and practices, dialects and modes of bodily deportment are already in existence and are presented to us as part of the objective world order, as fixed and separate from any identifiable individuals as are rocks and trees. Ask a child, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and she will name a clearly identified social role: Doctor, teacher, resistance fighter.
Well, once again, this is growing much bigger than I anticipated. Tomorrow, I will continue the story.
Second Post
If you stand back and try to get an overview of serious writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it is astonishing how different the two bodies of literature are. Descartes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Rousseau sound nothing like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Burckhardt, and Freud. To some extent, especially in Philosophy, this is a consequence of the fact that Hume and Kant between them simply killed off rational theology, which had occupied a central role in philosophical writings for two millennia. But I think the difference is more a result of the discovery of Society as an object of investigation independent of Nature and Man. [Don't give me grief. Everyone I am talking about said "Man" rather than "Man or Woman," and at this point I am doing some interpretive intellectual history.]
The change pretty clearly has its roots in the rise of a large, literate, politically active middle class, or bourgeoisie, but its intellectual origins can be traced in part to the impact of the writings of Hegel [a fact I find it painful to acknowledge, since I hate Hegel's writings, but fair is fair.] In his historicizing of the Christian story, Hegel represents history as a series of stages in the unfolding and coming to self-consciousness of Geist, variously translated as Spirit or Mind or even Reason. What matters here is that Hegel had the brilliant idea of characterizing each stage of historical development as exhibiting, in all of its aspects, a unifying aesthetic principle. Thus, we learned to talk of the Classical era, the Baroque era, the Romantic era, and so forth. It became commonplace to speak of Classical architecture, Baroque furniture, the Renaissance Man, Romantic politics. An entire civilization, understood as something other than the mere agglomeration of individual persons, could be conceived as the embodiment of a ruling aesthetic principle.
Starting with Smith in the late eighteenth century, and continuing through the nineteenth century, one disciplinary unit after another broke off from "Moral Philosophy" to become a new Social Science. [In this regard, it is interesting to see the German terms Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft joined by the new term Sozialwissenschaft.] The first new discipline, as we have seen, was Political Economy, as it was called for a while, or Economics, as we now know it. [To Aristotle, of course, "oeconomics" was essentially household management, something relegated to the lady of the house.] We have already commented on the emergence of Sociology, and in particular Emile Durkheim's explicit rationale for its autonomy as a branch of investigation.
Equally striking was the development of what we now call Anthropology. There had always been a literature of travelers' accounts of the strange practices of strange peoples, going back to ancient times, and including the narratives of medieval travelers like Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. The accounts gave rise to a lively debate about the relative benefits of civilization versus primitive life. Some writers celebrated the peoples of the South Pacific islands as pure, uncorrupted by city life, natural, admirable. Others shared Sherlock Holmes' views concerning "the idiocy of rural life." During the last century or so of the ancien regime in France, Dukes and Countesses at Versailles dressed up as simple shepherds and shepherdesses and played at tending sheep while waited upon by clouds of bewigged servants.
What especially fascinated more thoughtful students of the travel narratives were the accounts of the religious practices of the "natives." Quite naturally viewing Christianity as the highest form of religious belief and practice, [or at least Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the three religions "of the book" what shared a reverence for the texts of the Old Testament], some of these writers developed an evolutionary typology, along Hegelian lines, in which primitive animism gives way to polytheism and finally develops into monotheism. This in turn led one author in particular, Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, virtually to create the discipline of Anthropology in his classic two-volume work, PRIMTIVE CULTURE [1871.] Here is the opening sentence of volume one. It is literally the moment of birth of the new discipline:
"Culture or Civilization, taken in its widest ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."
There are, for our purposes in this brief exposition, several very important features of this famous definition. First of all, Tylor uses the term "culture" to refer not merely to classical literature, metaphysical poetry, or the music of Bach and Beethoven, but to the totality of the habits, practices, beliefs, and customs of an entire people. This means that the lower classes have culture too, a profound change from the earlier aristocratic view that only the upper orders have something that can be characterized as culture. The marriage rituals of Irish workers count as culture, as do Cockney rhyming slang and the weaving techniques of Scottish crofters. Secondly, EVERY people will, by this definition, have a culture -- not merely the French [about whom the English had long-standing ambivalent opinions] but also Trobriand Islanders, Zulu warriors, and Algonquin trappers. With this dramatic revision, Tylor creates modern Anthropology and offers to us a new object of study.
Notice -- we shall have a very great deal to say about this later on -- that on this conception of culture, no one can be identified as the creator of culture. Beethoven's Ninth was created by Beethoven. The tragedies of Aeschylus were written by Aeschylus. But no identifiable individual created Cockney rhyming slang. There is a paradox here that needs very careful examination.
On the one hand, Cockney rhyming slang [to continue our example] is obviously a human creation, and therefore at some time or other, individuals must have started trying it out, slowly bringing it into existence, even if those individuals did not leave their names on it for us to find. The same thing is true of all dialects, kinship practices, productive economic techniques, and even habits of bodily display and deportment. They did not grow on trees, and they were not handed to human beings by the Gods [although there are countless myths of this sort about the origin of fire, etc.] On the other hand, each of us, upon being born, grows up into a society in which the roles and practices, dialects and modes of bodily deportment are already in existence and are presented to us as part of the objective world order, as fixed and separate from any identifiable individuals as are rocks and trees. Ask a child, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" and she will name a clearly identified social role: Doctor, teacher, resistance fighter.
Well, once again, this is growing much bigger than I anticipated. Tomorrow, I will continue the story.
Sunday, 3 October 2010
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY -- A RESPONSE TO LUKE'S MOTHER
A little experience with the world of blogs has reminded me that I am more comfortable in the role of teacher than in that of polemicist. That may surprise those who have come only recently to my blog, but it will not surprise faithful readers of my Memoir. So I was happy to be invited to step away from the heated world of blogging polemics, and instead try my hand at a little teaching.
In response to one series of comments, "Luke's Mom" asked whether I could say something of a simple and preliminary sort about the study of society. That is a bit like asking whether a physicist can say a little something simple about the study of nature, but it got me thinking. So here goes. This is going to take a while -- quite probably several days of blog posts. I have one request. If Luke's Mother is still out there, please check in with a short comment, so that I know that I am not just talking to myself [a common problem for philosophers.]
Inasmuch as I am, before all else, a Professor of Philosophy, let me begin, as we like to do, with Plato. In the great Platonic dialogue, THE PHAEDO, which records the conversations Socrates had with his circle of followers on the last night of his life, there is a famous passage in which Socrates reminisces about his early study of the natural sciences, and his eventual dissatisfaction with what they had to teach him. [For those who own a copy of the PHAEDO, the passage begins at page 95, as the pages are numbered in the standard edition of the Greek text, and continues for several pages. Most translations put the original pagination in the margin so that everyone can refer to passages easily.] When he was a young man, Socrates says, he studied the physicists, who were quite capable of telling him what movement of muscles and bones explained his sitting there that evening in prison, waiting for the dawn to drink the poison hemlock and die, but who were completely unable to explain WHY he was there - which is to say, what good reasons there were for him to choose to accept his fate, rather than to escape, as in fact he could have done [this is all elaborately gone into in a previous dialogue, the CRITO.]
If I may take a certain literary license, we may say that from this passage spring the two great divisions of human enquiry, which later on, in the eighteenth century, were routinely referred to as Natural Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Natural Philosophy encompasses everything that we would refer to as the natural sciences. Newton's great treatise, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, [Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"] for example, was , as the title indicates, a work of "natural philosophy." Moral Philosophy, by contrast, consisted both of consideration of what today we call Ethics or Political Philosophy, and also what today is called Psychology -- that is to say, the nature of the mind.
Now for the point of all this reminiscing. Notice that there is no room in this classification for the study of society, as we understand that notion today. Pretty much up through to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, no one had a clear, workable idea of Society as a distinct sphere of investigation sharply set off from Natural Philosophy on the one hand and Moral Philosophy on the other. Discussions of the State or the Law or such institutions as Parliament were understood to be reducible, in a manner of speaking, to, accounts of the character and workings of the individual mind or personality [or "psyche," in the Greek sense of that term.] There were of course many writers who talked about the manners and national characteristics of of the French as opposed to the English, or about the strange doings of the "primitive" peoples who were happened upon by travelers during their voyages of discovery or colonization. But though much was made of these accounts, they did not yield a workable concept of Society as an object of autonomous investigation.
The first appearance of the notion in a significant fashion, so far as I know, is in Adam Smith's great work, AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, usually referred to by the last four words of the title. Smith, looking at a market newly freed from traditional and legal constraints, and hence "free," observes that there seem to be certain "natural prices" that underlie the daily fluctuations caused by momentary variations in the supply or demand for goods and services. Corn may be cheap on a given day because many farmers have brought their harvest to market, or dear on another because rain has kept them away. As Smith says in the seventh chapter, "The actual price at which any commodity is commonly sold is called its market price. It may be above, or below, or exactly the same with its natural price." And then, two pages later, Smith makes an observation that is of the most profound significance, for all that it is, in his hands, quite inadequately theoretically explained. "The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating." The invocation of the concept of the force of gravity in 1776, when the book was published, is of obvious significance. Smith is writing at a time when, by universal agreement, Newton's theories were the gold standard of theoretical explanation. Smith is suggesting that there is a sphere of human activity -- the economic -- that is governed by laws as rigorous and objective and irresistible as the force of gravity that rules the physical universe.
The laws of this sphere are not reducible, Smith seems to be suggesting, either to the laws governing the natural world or to the laws governing human character and behavior -- neither to Natural Philosophy nor to Moral Philosophy. It seems there is need of a third branch of knowledge -- Social Philosophy, or the Study of Society.
It takes a long time for this notion of win acceptance, and there are many writers in the early and middle nineteenth century who insist that what has come to be thought of as the realm of society must be reducible either to physical laws or to laws of individual psychology. In this debate, one of the most interesting figures is the great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In his fascinating study of the incidence of suicide in a number of European and Asian countries [published under the title Suicide in 1897], Durkheim explicitly argues for the existence of an autonomous object of study not reducible to the physical or the psychological.
Using newly available detailed statistics of the incidence of suicide, and correlating the figures with age, sex, religion, nationality, and even time of the day, week, month, and year, Durkheim is able to establish pattern whose consistency, he insists, cannot be explained in any fashion by an appeal to the laws of individual psychology. The only explanation is the existence of a group mind, or group unconscious, which must then be the appropriate study of a distinct science, Sociology.
OK, Enough for today. If anyone out there is interested, I will continue with a discussion of Marx's contribution to this investigation, the contributions of Tyler's PRIMITIVE CULTURE, and then a discussion of some very interesting more modern work, all dealing in one way or another with Luke's Mother's question about the study of society.
In response to one series of comments, "Luke's Mom" asked whether I could say something of a simple and preliminary sort about the study of society. That is a bit like asking whether a physicist can say a little something simple about the study of nature, but it got me thinking. So here goes. This is going to take a while -- quite probably several days of blog posts. I have one request. If Luke's Mother is still out there, please check in with a short comment, so that I know that I am not just talking to myself [a common problem for philosophers.]
Inasmuch as I am, before all else, a Professor of Philosophy, let me begin, as we like to do, with Plato. In the great Platonic dialogue, THE PHAEDO, which records the conversations Socrates had with his circle of followers on the last night of his life, there is a famous passage in which Socrates reminisces about his early study of the natural sciences, and his eventual dissatisfaction with what they had to teach him. [For those who own a copy of the PHAEDO, the passage begins at page 95, as the pages are numbered in the standard edition of the Greek text, and continues for several pages. Most translations put the original pagination in the margin so that everyone can refer to passages easily.] When he was a young man, Socrates says, he studied the physicists, who were quite capable of telling him what movement of muscles and bones explained his sitting there that evening in prison, waiting for the dawn to drink the poison hemlock and die, but who were completely unable to explain WHY he was there - which is to say, what good reasons there were for him to choose to accept his fate, rather than to escape, as in fact he could have done [this is all elaborately gone into in a previous dialogue, the CRITO.]
If I may take a certain literary license, we may say that from this passage spring the two great divisions of human enquiry, which later on, in the eighteenth century, were routinely referred to as Natural Philosophy and Moral Philosophy. Natural Philosophy encompasses everything that we would refer to as the natural sciences. Newton's great treatise, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, [Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"] for example, was , as the title indicates, a work of "natural philosophy." Moral Philosophy, by contrast, consisted both of consideration of what today we call Ethics or Political Philosophy, and also what today is called Psychology -- that is to say, the nature of the mind.
Now for the point of all this reminiscing. Notice that there is no room in this classification for the study of society, as we understand that notion today. Pretty much up through to the last quarter of the eighteenth century, no one had a clear, workable idea of Society as a distinct sphere of investigation sharply set off from Natural Philosophy on the one hand and Moral Philosophy on the other. Discussions of the State or the Law or such institutions as Parliament were understood to be reducible, in a manner of speaking, to, accounts of the character and workings of the individual mind or personality [or "psyche," in the Greek sense of that term.] There were of course many writers who talked about the manners and national characteristics of of the French as opposed to the English, or about the strange doings of the "primitive" peoples who were happened upon by travelers during their voyages of discovery or colonization. But though much was made of these accounts, they did not yield a workable concept of Society as an object of autonomous investigation.
The first appearance of the notion in a significant fashion, so far as I know, is in Adam Smith's great work, AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS, usually referred to by the last four words of the title. Smith, looking at a market newly freed from traditional and legal constraints, and hence "free," observes that there seem to be certain "natural prices" that underlie the daily fluctuations caused by momentary variations in the supply or demand for goods and services. Corn may be cheap on a given day because many farmers have brought their harvest to market, or dear on another because rain has kept them away. As Smith says in the seventh chapter, "The actual price at which any commodity is commonly sold is called its market price. It may be above, or below, or exactly the same with its natural price." And then, two pages later, Smith makes an observation that is of the most profound significance, for all that it is, in his hands, quite inadequately theoretically explained. "The natural price, therefore, is, as it were, the central price, to which the prices of all commodities are continually gravitating." The invocation of the concept of the force of gravity in 1776, when the book was published, is of obvious significance. Smith is writing at a time when, by universal agreement, Newton's theories were the gold standard of theoretical explanation. Smith is suggesting that there is a sphere of human activity -- the economic -- that is governed by laws as rigorous and objective and irresistible as the force of gravity that rules the physical universe.
The laws of this sphere are not reducible, Smith seems to be suggesting, either to the laws governing the natural world or to the laws governing human character and behavior -- neither to Natural Philosophy nor to Moral Philosophy. It seems there is need of a third branch of knowledge -- Social Philosophy, or the Study of Society.
It takes a long time for this notion of win acceptance, and there are many writers in the early and middle nineteenth century who insist that what has come to be thought of as the realm of society must be reducible either to physical laws or to laws of individual psychology. In this debate, one of the most interesting figures is the great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In his fascinating study of the incidence of suicide in a number of European and Asian countries [published under the title Suicide in 1897], Durkheim explicitly argues for the existence of an autonomous object of study not reducible to the physical or the psychological.
Using newly available detailed statistics of the incidence of suicide, and correlating the figures with age, sex, religion, nationality, and even time of the day, week, month, and year, Durkheim is able to establish pattern whose consistency, he insists, cannot be explained in any fashion by an appeal to the laws of individual psychology. The only explanation is the existence of a group mind, or group unconscious, which must then be the appropriate study of a distinct science, Sociology.
OK, Enough for today. If anyone out there is interested, I will continue with a discussion of Marx's contribution to this investigation, the contributions of Tyler's PRIMITIVE CULTURE, and then a discussion of some very interesting more modern work, all dealing in one way or another with Luke's Mother's question about the study of society.
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