The Social Animal

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Preface

I: A Very Social Animal

II: What Exactly Do You Want to Know?

III: A Catalogue of Errors

IV: Power

V: Matters of Chance

VI: Structures and Cultures

VII: History

VIII: Ups and Downs

IX: Possible and Impossible Worlds

X: Uses and Abuses

Notes

Index

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

PREFACE

The Social Animal is intended as a short and necessarily selective introduction to sociology for readers who either, on the one hand, are unsure quite what sociology is all about or, on the other, think of sociologists as a bunch of self-appointed arbiters of the existing social order who are neither clever enough to be philosophers nor knowledgeable enough to be historians. I have tried not to exaggerate our achievements or gloss over the controversies that divide us. But my principal hope is that I have managed to convey what a fascinating subject sociology is to work in. This is not only because it’s all about us – human beings, that is – ourselves. It’s also because so much more is now known than even a few decades ago about the remarkable differences and no less remarkable similarities in human institutions and behaviour down the ages and across the globe.

This is, moreover, a particularly exciting time in which to be engaged in sociological research on account of the many advances which are currently being made throughout the behavioural sciences, whether in demography, linguistics, and economics, or in genetics, biological anthropology, and developmental and cognitive psychology. The more dogmatic oversimplifications of Marxism, Social Darwinism, Behaviorism, Structuralism, and Durkheimian cultural anthropology are being left behind; ‘postmodernism’ has come and largely gone, taking with it those aspects of the study of human social behaviour which properly belong with literature rather than science; and a new evolutionary paradigm is beginning to emerge within which historical and cross-cultural hypotheses can be formulated and tested in accordance with standards shared among all the various disciplines involved in explaining why human beings are what they are and do what they do. So to any reader of this Preface who may be hesitating whether to take up a career in academic sociology, my advice is: go for it – there’s everything to play for.

My thanks are due to Patricia Williams for her practical advice and to Stuart Proffitt and HarperCollins for accepting the book, as well as to Geoffrey Hawthorn, Toby Mundy, and David Runciman for valuable comments on the initial draft and to Hilary Edwards for preparing the manuscript for publication. I am also grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to quote from Syme’s The Roman Revolution in Chapter VII.

Trinity College, Cambridge September 1997

I A Very Social Animal

IT IS MORE THAN two thousand years since Aristotle said that a human being capable of living outside society is either a wild beast or a god.1 But what does that mean? What kind of social animal are we?

You, like myself and every other human being in the world, are at the same time three things. First, you are an organism – that is, a living creature born (which not all organisms are) of one male and one female parent from both of whom you have inherited your genes. Second, you are an organism with a brain, and therefore a mind; and although other species have minds too, yours is altogether more complex and sophisticated than the minds of even the cleverest of our close genetic relatives, the chimpanzees. Third, you are an organism with a complex mind living in regular contact with other organisms with complex minds, and therefore you have a social life in which you have relationships with other people to which you and they attach a meaning.

Sociology is the scientific study of human behaviour under the third of these headings. It takes due account of those aspects of human behaviour which are studied by biologists and psychologists. But sociologists are concerned specifically with the groups, communities, institutions and societies in which human beings act out their relationships with each other in accordance with the rules which make them what they are. (Not that all their members follow their rules; of course they don’t. But for the nonconformists to break the rules, the rules have to be there to be broken.) Beneath that omnibus definition, there is obviously room for a large variety of more or less specialized disciplines – sociology of law, politics, education, religion, etc. But if there is a single question in which the subject-matter of sociology can be summarized, it is why the various human groups, communities, institutions and societies which there are and have been in the world are and have been as we find them.

There is no implication in this that the ‘scientific’ is the only way to look at human social behaviour. But it is categorically different from non-scientific ways. Unlike them, it presupposes that the behaviour of groups, communities, institutions and societies can be observed, and the differences between them explained, in terms which can be agreed to the extent that evidence which is there for anyone to see supports the observations and explanations which one or another sociologist has put forward. If you think that this can’t be done, I can assure you that it’s happening every day and ask you to read on. If, on the other hand, you think it puts out of court what philosophers, preachers, and poets have to say about human social behaviour, I can assure you that it doesn’t. The difference is between reports and explanations that you have no choice but to accept, to the extent that the evidence rules out any plausible alternatives, and conclusions of other kinds that you remain free to share on other grounds with your favourite philosopher, preacher or poet.

There are many kinds of human collectivities which sociologists study, some of which we shall meet again: households, families, clans, tribes, sects, classes, castes, armies, schools, clubs, political parties, monastic orders, patron – client networks, voluntary associations, business enterprises, professions, secret societies, trade unions, criminal gangs, pressure-groups and so on and so forth. But common to them all is that their members belong to them in a defined capacity for which the generally accepted term is role. Roles are, so to speak, what they are made of; and to the question ‘what are roles themselves made of?’ the answer is practices – that is, units of reciprocal behaviour informed by mutual recognition of shared intentions and beliefs. Precise definitions of important concepts are not, luckily, a prerequisite of successful explanation in either the natural or the human sciences; the findings quite often come first and the conceptual refinements later. But misunderstandings which are only about words should be avoided if possible; the important point about roles is that they are at the same time performed and occupied, however confusing a mixture of metaphors that may seem at first sight.

In its most familiar sense a role is, as you will hardly need reminding, a part played by an actor: ‘All the world’s a stage,’ says Jacques in As You Like It, ‘And all the men and women merely players.’ So we can all stand back from our various roles and see ourselves performing as sales executives, lieutenant-colonels, godparents, voters, housewives, mafiosi, university students, or whatever. But there is another aspect to it. If we really were ‘merely’ players, we could sign up for our parts as we pleased, and if we didn’t like the script we could turn it down. But we aren’t and we can’t. Take what is for many people their most important role: as wage- or salary-earners, we are paid for the work we do in accordance with rules which are not of our own making. We may be able to change from one employer to another, and some of us may not need to work for our living at all. But we don’t decide the legal and customary framework within which we and our employers operate any more than churchgoers decide the rituals and doctrines of the religion to which they belong or electors decide the constitution under which they vote their politicians into office. Real-life roles, in other words, are governed by rules which the people who occupy and perform them have no choice but to take as given – even if they would like, and accordingly sometimes try, to change them.

What’s more, these rules are of a special kind. They determine who is in a position to influence who else’s social behaviour because of the roles which they respectively occupy. As organisms with minds belonging to a common culture, we can take from each other whatever ideas, tastes, manners or fashions attract us through a process of individual transmission from mind to mind, and although we may be more strongly disposed to do so if the person learned from or imitated – the ‘role-model’ – is of high prestige or manifest authority, it is still a matter of individual choice. You don’t, unless you’re in a uniform of some kind, have to wear the clothes you’re wearing any more than you have to whistle your favourite tune or read your favourite book. As incumbents and performers of roles belonging to a common society, however, we relate to each other in accordance with institutional rules which place us relative to each other in a social space defined by the boundaries within which the rules apply. Since people can have several different roles, and since boundaries in social space are neither fixed nor impenetrable, the head of the CIA may be a Soviet agent, the President of Pepsi-Cola (Europe) may be an American citizen, and the King of Naples may be a Frenchman appointed by the Emperor in Paris. But within their common groups, communities, institutions and societies, employers and workers, landlords and tenants, officers and soldiers, ministers and officials, chiefs and commoners, lords and vassals, priests and parishioners, professors and students, all behave towards each other in ways which depend on the practices which the rules prescribe for both parties to the relationship. That is what is involved in saying that roles are places to be occupied within a rule-governed system (which all institutions are, or they would fall apart) as well as parts to be played (which can, as on the stage, be interpreted by different actors in different ways).

But we must be careful not to flatter ourselves. Social behaviour isn’t unique to human societies. Patterned interaction between individuals over extended periods of time is a characteristic of anthropoid primates going back millions of years. Admittedly, that’s not the same as what goes on at the golf club or the opera house or the family funeral or the school board meeting. But there are other social animals besides ourselves well able to perceive each other as acquaintance or stranger, friend or foe, owner or intruder, and behave accordingly. And when the smart chimps in the Gombe rainforest start to learn from each other how to make, use and reuse tools and, what’s more, to do so within different and distinguishable stylistic traditions, it doesn’t sound very convincing to talk about the meaningfulness of interaction between mothers and children, or teachers and pupils, as something uniquely human. Yes, we all have our fully-formed languages and they don’t: the linguistic ability of any normal three-year-old human infant is enormously greater than that of even the most carefully trained full-grown chimpanzee. But you don’t have to have language to have culture. Language makes us more social in many ways – more actively social, more self-consciously social, more intensively social, and more effectively social. But we were social already.

Then is our sociability all in our genes? That depends on how you interpret the ‘all’. Many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection have brought it about that all human beings are born with a set of shared inborn propensities, instincts and capacities of which sociability is one. But along with sociability comes aggression, too, and the ability to bully, cheat and deceive. Hatred as well as affection, betrayal as well as loyalty, and shame as well as gratitude all go back long before the evolution of language. Altruistic and selfish behaviour are everywhere found together and the existence of both is fully explicable, thanks to Darwin and his twentieth-century successors, from within the theory of natural selection. The difference is the enormously greater variation in patterns of social behaviour among human beings – much greater than can plausibly be accounted for in terms of natural selection alone. Take relations between men and women. It is through natural selection that we procreate sexually, with all the consequences for our behaviour which follow. It is also through natural selection that men differ from women in some aspects of psychology as well as physique. But how much that still leaves to be explained! The different forms and degrees of subordination of women to men (or sometimes vice versa), the conditions under which women come to occupy and perform political roles, the success of some and failure of other movements for female emancipation, the range of rules of marriage, descent and co-residence, and the diversity of manners, mores, and attitudes surrounding both heterosexual and homosexual relationships are impossible to account for entirely in biological terms. Yet they are equally impossible to account for on the assumption that biology can tell us nothing about them. In this as in every aspect of our social relationships we are the people we are, behaving towards one another as we do, as the outcome of a continuous interaction between heredity and environment. Some patterns of behaviour are universal: all human societies have gossip and play, punishment and retaliation, exchange and the division of labour.2 But out of that common inheritance from the long millennia of the Pleistocene, there continue to evolve new and different patterns of social behaviour that succeed each other in an open-ended sequence which is impossible to predict. All we can do is wait for them to happen and then, with the benefit of hindsight, explain them as best we can.

The best way to summarize the process by which it all comes about is the phrase in which Darwin summarized his fundamental insight about evolution: ‘descent with modification’. Because, through no fault of Darwin’s own, a lot of fallacious racist nonsense was for a time preached in the name of ‘Social Darwinism’, many sociologists feel uncomfortable about referring to him in a sociological as opposed to a strictly biological context. But there is nothing for them or anyone else to be alarmed at in the notion of ‘descent with modification’. At first glance, indeed, it might be said to look like just another way of putting what we already know. It’s hardly new to point out that since the proverbial Dawn of Mankind human beings and their cultures and societies have been reproducing themselves in forms not identical with their predecessors. But what Darwin saw was that changes of this kind, including the evolution of social behaviour itself, can be explained without reference to an antecedent grand design in the mind of God or anybody else. As he put it in one of his notebooks, ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’3 Darwin himself couldn’t know just how right he was, because he couldn’t know what molecular biologists now know about the genetic code and the way in which DNA passes down the generations from parents to children. But he was the first person fully to grasp that for the process of ‘descent with modification’ to come about, two and only two independent conditions need to be fulfilled. First, the basic ingredients of the object of study must be capable of acting as replicators – that is, of reproducing themselves, but with the possibility of small but significant differences for which the conventional term is mutations. Second, these mutations must have the property of being capable of influencing their chances of reproducing themselves in turn – with, of course, the inherent possibility of yet further mutations. Whether mutations do in fact survive, spread and replicate then depends on how far the environment in which they emerge is favourable to their likelihood of doing so.

This, let me emphasize as strongly as I can, is not the ‘survival of the fittest’ in the vacuous sense that the evidence for fitness is survival and survival the evidence of fitness. It’s a question to be settled by empirical research what mutations, whether in organisms, cultures or societies, have had their probability of replication and diffusion enhanced (or not) by what features of their environment. There is still room for argument about the value of the concept of evolution in the study of human societies – some of it prompted by the irrelevant fear that it will have implications which could be held to be ‘politically incorrect’, and some by the misguided suspicion that it implies that sociology is nothing more than applied biology. Anthony Giddens, who was for some years the professor of sociology in my own university of Cambridge, used to insist that there is no place at all in social theory for the concept of evolution, which to my mind is about as sensible as insisting that there is no place in physical theory for the concept of gravity. Nobody can deny that human groups, communities, institutions and societies are of many different kinds and that they all change sooner or later from one kind to another. So no sociologist, even those who start frothing at the mouth at the mention of Darwin’s name, can seriously dispute the proposition that something has to have happened to cause them to do so.

The history of human social behaviour, accordingly, is inescapably ‘evolutionary’ in the sense that all new forms of it have evolved out of previous ones, but not – emphatically not – in the sense that change from one form to another is in the direction of some final state of affairs which can be specified in advance: that is precisely the mistake which rightly discredited nineteenth-century ideas about social evolution in twentieth-century eyes. The story goes all the way back to the emergence of organic matter out of the basic chemical ingredients of the universe as found on planet Earth, and forward all the way to the human mind and its ability to build and program computing machines which themselves have ‘mental’ capabilities. This doesn’t mean that the things which have emerged in the course of it are all things of the same kind whose workings can all be explained in the same terms. Our thoughts can’t be explained directly in terms of physics, even though our minds consist of nothing other than exceptionally complex molecular machinery. Nor can our institutions be explained directly in terms of biology, even though social behaviour consists only of what is done by individual organisms with minds in interaction with one another. Although evolution is, so to speak, seamless – God did not, one Sunday morning, decide suddenly to implant life into matter, and another Sunday morning decide suddenly to implant minds into living things – the changes which result from ‘descent with modification’ are of kind as well as degree. The important consequence, so far as sociology is concerned, is that what human beings do has to be analysed at three different levels which correspond to three different kinds of behaviour for which I shall from now on use the terms evoked, acquired and imposed.

Suppose you are watching a baseball game at the Yankee Stadium. Provided you know the rules of baseball, you are in no doubt what is going on: the batter goes back to the dugout because the outfielder has caught the ball which the batter hit before it reached the ground, etc. But there are still three different ways in which you can look at it. From a biological (or ‘sociobiological’) standpoint, it’s an instance of human beings’ inborn propensity to enjoy sports and games in which the participants try to outrun each other, or throw or catch a ball of some kind, or wield an implement with which a ball can be hit. But from a cultural standpoint, it’s an instance of how psychologically gratifying leisure pastimes and the idioms, styles and fashions that go with them are popularized through imitation and learning among adjacent and successive populations. And from a sociological standpoint, it’s an instance of the workings of a capitalist economy in which professional sportsmen are hired by the proprietors of rival teams out of the proceeds of what the fans will pay to watch them (and the sponsors to advertise on the TV channels which show them).

The direct response of players and spectators to the hitting of a moving ball is evoked behaviour: it is elicited by a stimulus to which we react as a result of those hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection during which those of our ancestors who had reactions like these were more likely to live long enough to replicate their genes than those who didn’t. The idioms, styles and fashions which attach to this particular sport, however, are acquired behaviour: they have been adopted by those who chose to do so from other people, whether known face-to-face or indirectly. And the hiring of salaried players by rival proprietors is imposed behaviour: although the contracts of employment are freely entered into, the transaction is conducted in accordance with institutional rules which, like all institutional rules except those framed at a time of constitutional choice, are not of the parties’ own making. To be sure, we can’t occupy and perform our roles without having learned the rules which govern the practices which constitute them. But although imposed behaviour presupposes acquired behaviour, just as acquired behaviour presupposes evoked behaviour, it is not merely an instance of it. A strike of professional baseball players is more than a matter of taste, just as their jargon and style are more than a matter of instinct.

Although I’ve chosen a game as an example, I could just as well have asked you to suppose that you’re observing a religious festival, a court case, a stock market crash (or boom), an election, a battle, a strike, a revolution, or an office party. Whatever form of social behaviour it is, you will start by asking yourself what these people are doing – which means ascertaining what roles they are occupying and performing. But all three aspects of their behaviour will have to be covered before you can satisfy yourself why they are doing what they are doing – i.e., manifesting evoked, acquired and imposed behaviour of a specified kind. In practice, sociologists seldom observe directly the patterns of behaviour they are studying. But whether they are dealing with documents, eyewitness reports, tables of statistics, answers to questionnaires, or even monumental inscriptions or archaeological objects, the nature of their task is the same; and if they succeed in it, they and their readers will be left with a validated account of how the particular group, institution, community or society functions and how it has come to be what it is.

Since all new forms of human social behaviour have evolved in one way or another out of old ones, the process which has brought about any particular form of it is by definition a selective process: to a sociologist, history is not just one damn thing after another, but one damn thing instead of another. But this immediately leads to the question of what it is, at each different level, that the ongoing process of selection selects. At the biological level, the objects of selection are genes. This has, as it happens, been disputed until very recently by biologists who have held that natural selection selects either the individual organism or the group; but neither organisms nor groups fulfil the conditions necessary for them to act as replicators in the way that genes do. At the cultural level, however, when instinct is supplemented by imitation and learning, the objects of selection are the units, or bundles of units, of information or instructions affecting behaviour which are passed from mind to mind. Some sociologists and anthropologists use for them the term ‘meme’ which was coined in the 1970s by the biologist Richard Dawkins,4 whereas others prefer to use the term ‘trait’ in order to allow for the replication not merely of units of information but of whole complexes of representation such as works of art, scientific theories, systems of myth and ritual, and so on. But it doesn’t much matter which term you use. The point is that to explain cultural evolution – i.e. changes in patterns of acquired social behaviour – you have to have a hypothesis about the features of the environment where the behaviour occurs which have helped the mutant ‘memes’ (or traits or bundles of instructions) to spread and replicate.