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Causing Change
I've been thinking a lot about large-scale social evolution for the last couple years. I'm interested in this because (to put it real simple) I'm an activist, so I want to play a part in making this place a better place. So, I have these questions about how to get from here to someplace different, and I have these questions about how we got here in the first place.
So why not just read a bunch of history? Well, I'm both frustrated and overwhelmed by often-unspoken rules of history writing (even bottom-up social histories), that require the writer to construct an event-level narrative of specific historical processes, and to not speculate too much on the larger patterns and regularities across cultural contexts. This method has been called "particularistic," and it's mostly just the way things are done in history. A contrasting approach is sometimes called "nomothetic", wherein the writer proposes and defends patterns and tendencies, or even rules and laws, of social change across cultural contexts. "Nomothetic" literally translates to mean "law making."
That latter orientation is the one that I'm attracted to. When applied to large-scale and long-term social change, it amounts to an interest in what is generally called "social evolution." One problem with this orientation is that it includes a lot of bullshit proposals about the nature of "progress," that have been used in pretty awful ways in the European colonial project. Still are, as a matter of fact.
But it doesn't have to be that way. While those bullshit progress narratives have gotten a preponderant amount of airtime, there are many counter-examples of folks using a social evolutionary perspective in a positive and critical way. There is a difference, after all, between endorsing a system as natural and good, and simply describing how an undesirable system functions. One pretty well-known critical thinker to propose a set of social evolutionary principles was Marx, and of his dialectical historicism was definitely oriented towards a project of emancipation. It was also deeply flawed in a number of ways, that I won't get further into here.
I won't get into those issues, that is, except to say that some of the problems with Marx's social evolution are representative of problems that are endemic to this whole way of thinking. It seems to be the nature of this endeavor - identifying broad principles of historical change - to try and identify THE fundamental cause or causes behind it all; as Marx did so eloquently when he identified class conflict as the "engine of history."
The thing is, the way that we generally understand cause and effect is (barely) serviceable for navigating the complexities of our day to day existence. We are drawn, culturally-instinctively, to single causes and linear explanations. The classic metaphor for cause and effect is the billiards table, right? Force impacts a ball, it moves and impacts other balls (and so on) in a context that for a long time was the closest we could get to pure Newtonian mechanics. Our desire, in everyday life, for billiards table-style explanations carries through into our other endeavors.
The problem is that not even billiards is that simple. This nearly-there approach to Newtonian simplicity is embedded in a system of measurement and craftsmanship that are calibrated to the tolerances of the human senses. When we identify the vector speed of the cue ball as the cause of subsequent motion on the billiards table, we are taking for granted all of the regularities that mark our lives on Earth, and that mark, for us, the nature of playing pool. But these regularities are contextual and specific, they are not naturally given or eternal. The regularities that mean "billiards" to us emerge, in part, from a historical relationship between craftsmanship and the ability to sense small differences. The gravitational constant, the capacity to sense and measure level and smoothness, the hardness of surfaces, the density of materials (ball, table, cushion), frictiveness of the felt, angle of cushions, the density of the cue, and on and on.
These are the constraints of the terrain. They are each constructed and made-real on the scale and in the perspective of the human observer. If any of these variables were different, what happened on the table would be different. Because we can depend on most of them to be constant, we disregard them as causal factors - even though they are each necessary for the given outcome to occur.
The scale of the observer, extended to include the player holding the cue, includes the fineness of the grain of the player's focus and attention, her cognitive capacity to simulate and predict, her current state of spatial/muscular coordination, physical strength, and degree of small motor control. These are constraints that could be called biological.
These, in turn, intersect and overlap with the player's evaluation of the state of the game, sense of her own skill in that moment, knowledge of the game, strategic disposition, and motivation for participation - including pleasures, social costs and benefits, fear, and broader social strategic priorities. These are the psychological constraints.
Her psychological make-up, then, emerges in a context of her awareness of institutional and unbounded social systems. The rules of the game, the particular context of this game (a tournament? a bar? after work against the boss?), the mood of the group (including degree of competitiveness), and the offers, potentials, and threats that inform the players' motivation for playing - conviviality, sex, esteem, money, danger, conformity, obligation, retaliation, etc. These are a few of the social constraints.
A change in any of these variables, across all these levels of contraint, could change what happens on the table, possibly in ways that we could not hope to pinpoint. Now, imagine that instead of poking balls with a stick, our player is poking other players - living systems as complex as herself. How predictable is the reaction now? Where is the causality now? Imagine that her poking is sometimes with a stick, and sometimes with sentences and gestures. Imagine her, then, as one autonomous observer in a group of autonomous observers, perturbing (poking) each other in specific and hard-to-predict ways, constrained by and altering their physical environments, both in ways that they are aware of and ways that they are not aware of, at the scale of human senses and not, generating a fuzzy-bordered social system through their communications, that in turn institutionally and statistically constrains and coordinates their behavior, and that all the changes at the levels of terrain, biology, psychology, and sociality, persist and accumulate, are obscured, and shape and constrain everything that comes after them.
Now (still there?) imagine that our protagonist is not an individual player at all, but is actually the whole assembly. And now our conversation/game that we are observing is not between individuals, but between two aggregates, a conversation between conversations, in a broader landscape of physical/social aggregates. Remember, unlike our autonomous observers, our players now are not discretely bounded. They freely exchange not only energy and materials, but autonmous observers, and the ideas, social forms, and technics, that they carry.
In the case of social evolution, I think its desirable to be extremely skeptical about claims of simple causality - of engines of history. When taking the approach of comparing the development of different cultures, and trying to identify the causes of change, we are asking the question "What makes the difference?" Something can only be said to make a difference when we decide, at least somewhat arbitrarily, what regularities we will take for granted and what differences we will ignore.
What is worthwhile, I think, in investigating social evolution, is to draw out particular subsets of relations, in a context of desire. For example - and this is what I'm after - the relationship between energy extraction on one hand, and persistent inequality on the other. The "context of desire" part means that this project is not objective. I try to be honest, but not objective. Its not about just generating knowledge (which is why I've resisted grad school so far), not about being a scholar because it's fun (though I do like parts of it a lot). It's about creating tools, making strategies for intervention. Its for the design of projects based on an analysis of these subsets of relations and the desire for a new, different, social dynamic. Its about trying to understand how we got here, and where we might be going, so that we can figure out how to make a difference.
So why not just read a bunch of history? Well, I'm both frustrated and overwhelmed by often-unspoken rules of history writing (even bottom-up social histories), that require the writer to construct an event-level narrative of specific historical processes, and to not speculate too much on the larger patterns and regularities across cultural contexts. This method has been called "particularistic," and it's mostly just the way things are done in history. A contrasting approach is sometimes called "nomothetic", wherein the writer proposes and defends patterns and tendencies, or even rules and laws, of social change across cultural contexts. "Nomothetic" literally translates to mean "law making."
That latter orientation is the one that I'm attracted to. When applied to large-scale and long-term social change, it amounts to an interest in what is generally called "social evolution." One problem with this orientation is that it includes a lot of bullshit proposals about the nature of "progress," that have been used in pretty awful ways in the European colonial project. Still are, as a matter of fact.
But it doesn't have to be that way. While those bullshit progress narratives have gotten a preponderant amount of airtime, there are many counter-examples of folks using a social evolutionary perspective in a positive and critical way. There is a difference, after all, between endorsing a system as natural and good, and simply describing how an undesirable system functions. One pretty well-known critical thinker to propose a set of social evolutionary principles was Marx, and of his dialectical historicism was definitely oriented towards a project of emancipation. It was also deeply flawed in a number of ways, that I won't get further into here.
I won't get into those issues, that is, except to say that some of the problems with Marx's social evolution are representative of problems that are endemic to this whole way of thinking. It seems to be the nature of this endeavor - identifying broad principles of historical change - to try and identify THE fundamental cause or causes behind it all; as Marx did so eloquently when he identified class conflict as the "engine of history."
The thing is, the way that we generally understand cause and effect is (barely) serviceable for navigating the complexities of our day to day existence. We are drawn, culturally-instinctively, to single causes and linear explanations. The classic metaphor for cause and effect is the billiards table, right? Force impacts a ball, it moves and impacts other balls (and so on) in a context that for a long time was the closest we could get to pure Newtonian mechanics. Our desire, in everyday life, for billiards table-style explanations carries through into our other endeavors.
The problem is that not even billiards is that simple. This nearly-there approach to Newtonian simplicity is embedded in a system of measurement and craftsmanship that are calibrated to the tolerances of the human senses. When we identify the vector speed of the cue ball as the cause of subsequent motion on the billiards table, we are taking for granted all of the regularities that mark our lives on Earth, and that mark, for us, the nature of playing pool. But these regularities are contextual and specific, they are not naturally given or eternal. The regularities that mean "billiards" to us emerge, in part, from a historical relationship between craftsmanship and the ability to sense small differences. The gravitational constant, the capacity to sense and measure level and smoothness, the hardness of surfaces, the density of materials (ball, table, cushion), frictiveness of the felt, angle of cushions, the density of the cue, and on and on.
These are the constraints of the terrain. They are each constructed and made-real on the scale and in the perspective of the human observer. If any of these variables were different, what happened on the table would be different. Because we can depend on most of them to be constant, we disregard them as causal factors - even though they are each necessary for the given outcome to occur.
The scale of the observer, extended to include the player holding the cue, includes the fineness of the grain of the player's focus and attention, her cognitive capacity to simulate and predict, her current state of spatial/muscular coordination, physical strength, and degree of small motor control. These are constraints that could be called biological.
These, in turn, intersect and overlap with the player's evaluation of the state of the game, sense of her own skill in that moment, knowledge of the game, strategic disposition, and motivation for participation - including pleasures, social costs and benefits, fear, and broader social strategic priorities. These are the psychological constraints.
Her psychological make-up, then, emerges in a context of her awareness of institutional and unbounded social systems. The rules of the game, the particular context of this game (a tournament? a bar? after work against the boss?), the mood of the group (including degree of competitiveness), and the offers, potentials, and threats that inform the players' motivation for playing - conviviality, sex, esteem, money, danger, conformity, obligation, retaliation, etc. These are a few of the social constraints.
A change in any of these variables, across all these levels of contraint, could change what happens on the table, possibly in ways that we could not hope to pinpoint. Now, imagine that instead of poking balls with a stick, our player is poking other players - living systems as complex as herself. How predictable is the reaction now? Where is the causality now? Imagine that her poking is sometimes with a stick, and sometimes with sentences and gestures. Imagine her, then, as one autonomous observer in a group of autonomous observers, perturbing (poking) each other in specific and hard-to-predict ways, constrained by and altering their physical environments, both in ways that they are aware of and ways that they are not aware of, at the scale of human senses and not, generating a fuzzy-bordered social system through their communications, that in turn institutionally and statistically constrains and coordinates their behavior, and that all the changes at the levels of terrain, biology, psychology, and sociality, persist and accumulate, are obscured, and shape and constrain everything that comes after them.
Now (still there?) imagine that our protagonist is not an individual player at all, but is actually the whole assembly. And now our conversation/game that we are observing is not between individuals, but between two aggregates, a conversation between conversations, in a broader landscape of physical/social aggregates. Remember, unlike our autonomous observers, our players now are not discretely bounded. They freely exchange not only energy and materials, but autonmous observers, and the ideas, social forms, and technics, that they carry.
In the case of social evolution, I think its desirable to be extremely skeptical about claims of simple causality - of engines of history. When taking the approach of comparing the development of different cultures, and trying to identify the causes of change, we are asking the question "What makes the difference?" Something can only be said to make a difference when we decide, at least somewhat arbitrarily, what regularities we will take for granted and what differences we will ignore.
What is worthwhile, I think, in investigating social evolution, is to draw out particular subsets of relations, in a context of desire. For example - and this is what I'm after - the relationship between energy extraction on one hand, and persistent inequality on the other. The "context of desire" part means that this project is not objective. I try to be honest, but not objective. Its not about just generating knowledge (which is why I've resisted grad school so far), not about being a scholar because it's fun (though I do like parts of it a lot). It's about creating tools, making strategies for intervention. Its for the design of projects based on an analysis of these subsets of relations and the desire for a new, different, social dynamic. Its about trying to understand how we got here, and where we might be going, so that we can figure out how to make a difference.
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