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J P Roos Universal sociology and unchanging man Notes in response to the Invitation to the shared reflection by Christian Lalive d'Epinay, The present catastrophe? Why is it so easy for us to accept the thought that politically, economically and culturally, the world is in a bad shape? Actually one could also describe the opposite to be the case. No large scale wars in most parts of the globe during the past 57 years (exactly my own lifetime!). The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan etc. were all more or less local conflicts. The risk of a global nuclear catastrophe is very small (although the bomb may be actually used somewhere, but without risk of a global nuclear war). Democratic or semi-democratic forms of government have expanded greatly since the demise of the Soviet Union.. Human rights have become a serious concern, and there is the distinct possibility that any political or military leader who makes him or herself guilty of wrongful killings, torture or the like, will be brought to justice. Technological development has made life easier to hundreds of millions. Many of us who live in Europe have become immensely richer and live comfortable, if not leisurely lives, without awareness of the fundamental relationship between our way of life and the poverty of the rest of the world (if not otherwise, then at least it is true that the rest of the world can never be as rich as we are now: but of course this has always been the situation of the rich in any society!) So why the sense of impending catastrophe and end of progress? My answer is: we compare the situation to what should have been possible. In the present world, with all the advantages, resources and possibilities, it simply should not be possible that we destroy our environment, that we cannot resolve conflicts, that we accept such glaring inequalities, that we use our resources and capabilities so irrationally. Or that the cold war has been replaced with war on terrorism! The Israeli-Palestinian situation epitomizes in many ways the global situation. Five million people, who have for religious and historical reasons moved to Palestine, have gradually made life more and more miserable to the original inhabitants, and by their continuing occupation and colonization, are in the process of dehumanizing themselves. There is no solution without some very violent and fundamental changes. For us Europeans, it has for a long time been difficult to say openly what most of us think: that Israel has become the heir of the worst colonial, militaristic - and yes, fascistoid traditions of Europe. After South Africa, it is the last shameful place of the worst kind of colonial regimes European traditions have produced. And then the propaganda! The occupying militaristic state calls itself the victim, it speaks of war when it deploys a hypermodern army against people who have only rifles, home-made bombs and stones - and young people ready to kill themselves in senseless suicide bombings, the most dangerous weapon. Its people see themselves as cast in the eternal role of being misunderstood, discriminated against, alone against the whole world. And even here what makes it so tragic is precisely: all the possibilities missed, all the solutions we can now see would have been possible. Instead of creating in itself its worst enemy, Israel could have become the opposite, a beacon of peace and rationality, open to all religions and races. So, I agree that there is little promise, in the short term, in our situation, thanks to our fundamental, collective stupidity. For us in the Northern and Western Europe the paradox is that we are observing the catastrophe so to say from the top of the mountain, practically safe, and just therefore we can see the whole of what it happening, whereas those directly affected can have a much less comprehensive view of the catastrophe. But on the other hand, it feels so terribly conceited and hypocritical to be warning about the impending catastrophe when one is actually practically protected from the consequences. The risk society where we all would be equally subject to risks regardless of where we live and what we do is to a large extent a myth (even the possible negative consequences of climate warming can be avoided in the developed world much better than elsewhere). The 9/11 only accentuates this in its uniqueness. Endless change? Modern sociology, exemplified by such names as Anthony Giddens and Zygmunt Bauman is definitely a sociology of total change (to better or worse): change of tradition to post-tradition or postmodernity, change of human situation, fundamental change of “society” and our sense of time. Especially in Bauman’s case everything is tinged by fundamental pessimism. And if we take the lighter French sociology of Baudrillard, Maffesoli, Latour etc seriously,. we come to a conclusion that the change has also led to a complete loss of reality: we are living in a virtual world where everything floats. This view has been met with enthusiasm by many lesser figures in all countries, also in my own country Finland, which prides itself of a rather realistic and matter-of-fact view of the world. And as usual, the French sociologists have taken the most extreme constructionist positions although of course denying that they are constructionists at all (Latour specially) For the more fundamentalist constructionists, everything is fundamentally malleable and contingent. This is of course a problematic view if we are threatened by a catastrophe: it can then either happen or not happen and in any case it is not real. So if we want to predict catastrophes to happen, we must let them be certain and real. But this paradox does not worry those for whom the virtual catastrophes are equally real as the real ones. There is (was) at least one contemporary sociologist who does not carry with himself the taint of rapid change and virtual (un)reality: Pierre Bourdieu. He was fundamentally rather pessimistic, although believing in the possibility of resistance and overcoming the enormous obstacles for change - in fact he seemed to believe also in the force of extreme situations. But he did not so much believe in the universal catastrophe than in a society where the dominants would always be protected from adverse consequences and misery would be the lot of the dominated. But even for Bourdieu, this slower view of change was connected to the fact that habitus and capital needed at least one generation to change fundamentally. Therefore he scorned the - to my mind also - ridiculous theories of total change in the space of two decades, but would definitely have accepted the perspective of decisive change in one or two generations. Christian Lalive d’Epinay evokes in his invitation Saint Augustine and his Kingdom of Heaven. Of course Augustine is actually much better known from his another contribution to the common human cultural heritage: his Confessions. They have functioned as a model or perhaps even more, a starting point for a great tradition of autobiographies, of individual, personal, intimate revelations of experience, or perhaps most importantly, by telling others of their personal experiences, something nobody else could tell, they have made humanity universal. For me the most important single fact of (social) life is that we share the great majority of our feelings, everyday thoughts, aspirations, with other people in the world. And not only with people who are presently alive but people who have lived before, and who will live after, with one important proviso: IF they will live. For all the change in the world, there is actually a very important aspect of the everyday life which has not changed at all: our feelings, our fundamental, closest relationships, our basic social instincts: friendship, competition etc. In one word, our habitus contains a lot which is not and will never be socially constructed, but comes from the evolved characteristics of our mind and body. So, the one specific problem I wish to address is the tendency of sociology to believe that the human situation is continuously changing and fundamentally different from that of 200 years back, whereas according to evolutionary theory, most of what constitutes the human mind and body has remained relatively unchanged at least during the past 100 000 years. It is my view that this problem pertains to the catastrophe scenarios (loss of hope) discussed by Christian Lalive d’Epinay or Edgar Morin, whom he quotes (but only the pessimistic part: the final optimism where Morin believes that the catastrophe will also bring a solution). The additional and related question is that of social construction, which used to be the absolutely reigning view of sociology (at least from the 80's to this day, but in a longer perspective people like Durkheim laid the foundation for such a view with his dictum that social facts could only be explained by social facts). This was historically related also to the idea of “birth” of something, i.e. that we as humans acquired some important characteristic only very recently, through social change. I still remember well how the suggestion of Philip Aries that childhood was something invented in late middle ages went like wildfire through the social sciences. We have had several other comparable (and related) phenomena, which also then were thought to be have a very short history.. Now we know that Aries was totally wrong. Childhood, motherly love, individualization, the sense of perspective etc are definitely much earlier phenomena than the written history of humanity. And the same goes for autobiography or life stories. For European autobiographies, there is one fixed date of when the autobiography as an art form was born: Rousseau’s Confessions, published in the 18th century. Another, earlier Confessions, those of Augustine are also mentioned but not considered as fully autobiographical. Generally, the argument goes like this: to write an autobiography, a self or an identity distinguishable from a community (or perhaps, human nature), must be developed. This process of individualization starts only with European modernity. Individualization again is something which is socially and culturally constructed and has nothing - or very little to do with human nature. This view is admittedly eurocentric and even otherwise somewhat problematic, but still we have most of autobiographical texts marking the beginnings of autobiography in this way. A parallel problem is the development of perspective in art. We know that perspective did not appear in paintings until rather recently, only a few centuries ago. But did our eyes and brain have "perspective" before that? I think we can safely say "yes". The opposite view is, to put it very simply, that human nature is something relatively unchanging, not socially or culturally constructed but developed in the process of evolution so that most of the fundamental characteristics relevant for an autobiographical activity have evolved something like 100 000 years ago. These include language, the importance of telling stories, the practical existence of a self, basic emotions and human social interaction (love, hate, jealousy, mate selection, etc.). And most importantly, all of this has existed long before we started to articulate it with language. So language as the only means to sociability is a fundamental mistake of the “linguistic turn”, from which we are slowly turning away Thus, although there is nothing in writing to prove my claim, it is highly probable that human beings did tell each other rudimentary autobiographies already long, long ago (and even before that, they carried those stories in their heads (“I am a good guy who helps others and can do a lot of things and these are my children whom I love”) and expressed them in action. These would later be presented in a more or less narrative form, but without necessarily a very clear time perspective. My major argument for why this is so, is the paradox of autobiography: that we can read and understand extremely different autobiographies, which vary in time and place and cultural positions, although we should not be able to do so, or we are told that we cannot really understand this. We don’t need direct experience to understand something- So, my idea is that regardless of the impending catastrophe, there is a long view, which actually is quite independent of the social and economic and technological change discussed by most sociologists. Of course, IF the catastrophe takes place in its extreme form, this is irrelevant. But in all other cases it is the fundamental perspective for us, which makes many lesser catastrophes rather relative (such as the “loss of childhood” or “loss of values” or “loss of history”or “end of progress”). Se we have still grounds for optimism: nothing much will change, except some external conditions. But then the question becomes: what is the relevance of this “permanent social structure” to sociology. If it has no explanatory value, if there is no change, can we safely forget it? My answer is twofold: firstly it is extremely useful and important to be able to distinguish between such things that sociology can legitimately account for. The social constructionism in its extreme form (Latour, for example, who naturally denies being a social constructionist at all) makes social construction responsible even for the development of science, while social scientists often try to find explanations for phenomena, where the thing to be explained is actually causally antecedent (being a rather permanent fixture of evolved human nature). To explain for example the preference for youth (and youthful sexuality) to old age as a consequence of advertisements (which direct our preferences) is typically constructionist.. Of course this may often involve discussions of what part(aspect) of a phenomenon is ancient and what is contextually related to changes in the social structure as well as the problem of morality: not everything in our nature is nice and morally correct. The evolutionary perspective is often presented as morally deficient: it defends injustice, violence, adultery etc. Yet there is no “natural necessity” to accept morally bad behaviour, but it is useful to know what kinds of activities are more difficult than others to weed out. and what strategies might work better than others. I.e. instead of trying to weed out something which we know has been evolved in the past 100 000 years, we might try to direct such habitudes to less dangerous or harmful channels. One might argue for instance that the ubiquity of violence in cinema and television is at least partly a response to the increasing civility and nonviolence in social behavior. And one might speculate that if the virtual forms of violence would be extremely complicated and practically impossible (like in The Sleeping Tiger, a film where extreme violence is presented in an unbelievable and estheticized context)) they might be even less harmful. Secondly, we could profit from a sociology which is interested in universality and those aspects of life that are unchanging, instead of a perspective emphasizing variability and change. That is, empirical studies which look at permanence, how people adapt all kinds of new things to their more or less permanent habitus, how people function in new contexts with their ancient instincts and emotions. But also theoretical discussions concerning the old problems of human needs and their social relevance (which are nowadays passé and quaint as a sociological topic). Conclusion I know that the above is still somewhat controversial. I have not given any direct references to other works, but as this book will appear in the web, it will be easy to create hyperlinks to different websites where you will find references and articles relating to the subject. These thoughts are also based on an article written by me and Anna Rotkirch, which has had some difficulties in getting published (for the same reason). I hope it will give rise to some discussion in this context. Links Bauman Bourdieu Evolution theory Giddens Latour Constructionism Morin J.PRoos
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