The Social Animal

At the social level, by contrast, the objects of selection are, as I’ve pointed out already, units of reciprocal action, since the rules which define the roles we occupy and perform are prescriptive for both parties to the relationship to which they attach a common meaning. The objects of social selection, therefore, are and can only be the practices which define of their respective roles. Practices, no less than bundles of information and instructions passed from mind to mind, fulfil the two necessary conditions for them to act as replicators. So it can accordingly be said – to go back to the threefold distinction as I put it at the very beginning of this chapter – that as organisms we are machines for replicating the genes in our bodies, as organisms with minds we are machines for replicating the traits in our cultures, and as organisms with minds occupying and performing roles we are machines for replicating the practices which define those roles and the groups, communities, institutions and societies constituted by them.

Since evolution, whether natural, cultural or social, is not proceeding towards any predetermined final state but only away from what may, for the moment, be a more or less stable equilibrium, it will never be any more possible for sociologists to predict the future of institutions and societies than for anthropologists to predict the future of cultures or biologists to predict the future of species. In the words of the American demographer Joel E. Cohen’s only half-joking Law of Prediction, ‘The more confidence someone places in an unconditional prediction of what will happen in human affairs, the less confidence we should place in that prediction.’5 The problem is not just the incalculability of the consequences of the interaction of an enormous multiplicity of separate events. It’s also that, as the philosopher Karl Popper has argued to particular effect, to predict the future state of human societies would involve, among other things, predicting the future of sociological knowledge itself, and there is no way in which we can claim already to know what we have yet to discover. Critics of sociology sometimes argue that because sociologists can’t predict how future societies will evolve it isn’t really a science at all. But then they will have to say the same about biology and its inability to predict the future evolution of species. If what distinguishes science from non-science is that its conclusions are prescriptive for all observers in accordance with the strength of evidence which they can all go and check for themselves, there is no argument whatever for dismissing explanations which can be tested only with hindsight as ‘unscientific’. Sherlock Holmes can’t predict the clues which will enable him to solve the crime; but when he follows up the clues which do indeed solve it, his solution is no less ‘scientific’ than if he had conducted a laboratory experiment whose outcome he had specified in advance.

On the other hand, it would obviously be a mistake to argue that human social behaviour isn’t predictable at all. How else, for a start, do advertisers grow rich? We are successfully predicting each other’s social behaviour every day of the week, and the continuance of the cultures and societies to which we belong depends on our ability to do so. If you and I are introduced to each other on a social occasion, I am at least as sure that if I hold out my hand you will shake it as I am that if I depress the accelerator pedal of my car it will start to go faster. We wouldn’t be the very social animal that we are unless we could rely on each other’s responses to each other’s behaviour for most of the time. When somebody’s social behaviour is totally and consistently unpredictable, we can tell at once that we are confronted with one of Aristotle’s wild beasts or gods. A society in which nobody’s behaviour was predictable wouldn’t be a society at all.

But wait a minute. Suppose that in order to justify what I’ve said in the preceding paragraph I am rash enough to bet you $100 that if I hold out my hand to Joe Soap, whom I’ve never previously met, he will shake it as our respective roles and the conventions of our common culture dictate. Your ploy is obvious. All you have to do is take Joe on one side and offer him $50 (or, if he is the kind of organism with a complex mind who turns out to be a really tough bargainer, $99) to keep his hands to his sides. This isn’t as stupid an example as it looks. It brings out just as clearly as a more serious-looking example would do the implications for the scientific study of human social behaviour of the familiar fact that most of it is a matter of purposes and goals and self-conscious decisions to pursue them. From this, some sociologists have concluded not merely that predictions about human behaviour can be overturned in ways that predictions about inanimate objects can’t, but also that the only way to explain human behaviour is for the observer to reproduce in his or her own mind what is going on in the minds of the people whose purposes and goals are dictating their behaviour. This second conclusion, however, is right in one sense but wrong in another. It’s right in the sense that for me to explain what you’re doing, I do have to know what you are doing. If I think you’re really trying to throttle your little schoolfellow when it’s only a game you’re playing, my research project about the social behaviour of young adolescents in educational institutions isn’t going to get very far, just as if I think you really believe that the spirits of your ancestors can somehow influence what happens in your own life when you’re only performing what you know to be a purely symbolic ritual at their gravesides, I shan’t be a very good sociologist of religion. But it’s wrong in the sense that it mustn’t be supposed that this makes the explanation of behaviour into an exercise of a quite different kind. It doesn’t. The question ‘what made you decide to pursue your chosen objective and act accordingly?’ can be addressed by the same methods, and the answer assessed by the same criteria, as the question ‘what made you respond instinctively to what you heard and saw in the way that you did?’ The fact of our self-awareness of our acquired and imposed behaviour doesn’t affect one way or the other the validity of the explanation of the behaviour of which our behaving selves are aware. What matters is that the researcher who is doing the explaining should know what’s going on – that is, should have identified the intention which makes the action what it is before going on to identify the motive which lies behind it and the environmental conditions which have brought that rather than another motive into play. The !Kung San of the Kalahari Desert are as aware as are the professors and graduate students who study them of the function of meat-sharing in reinforcing their social ties. But the function would be the same even if they weren’t.

Many people find this way of looking at human behaviour counter-intuitive because it seems more natural to look for the reasons which we have for our decisions than for external influences which we are able, if we so choose, to resist or ignore. But the antithesis is a false one. The concepts of social selection and environmental pressure are not in contradiction with the concepts of individual decision and rational choice. On the contrary, there is every reason to suppose that the human mind has been programmed by natural selection to calculate the trade-off between the costs and the benefits of one course of action rather than another. But although our imposed as well as our acquired behaviour is therefore a ‘matter of choice’ – the only thing we all have to do is die, and as Wittgenstein said, death isn’t an event in life – to say so explains neither the cause of the choice (and thereby the behaviour) nor its consequences. The question ‘with what conscious purpose in mind was this mutation in social behaviour introduced?’ is quite compatible with, but leaves still to be answered, the question ‘how did this mutation affect the subsequent evolution of the society in which it occurred?’ Let me give an example from military history. The rulers and generals of seventeenth-century Europe who first introduced infantry drill into the training of their previously undisciplined recruits had a clear idea of what they wished it to achieve and of how it would serve their interests, both personal and patriotic, if it did. What’s more, they had an evident inkling of the biological as well as sociological reasons for why they were right: as the famous Maréchal de Saxe, among others, was aware, men marching in step in close formation to the sound of music respond instinctively in a way which makes them more effective on the field of battle. But although the innovators succeeded in their aim – which is more than most innovators do – it’s not their desire to win wars and battles which explains their success. To explain that, and the consequent changes in how European wars were fought, it has to be shown why they were right – which means showing what competitive advantage was conferred by the adoption of this novel set of practices on the soldiers trained in it, the armies manned by those soldiers, and the states whose armies they were.6

‘Then if sociology can explain why people choose between alternative patterns of social behaviour in the way that they do, does this not amount to a claim that sociology is a predictive science after all?’ No, not truly predictive. A prediction, to deserve the name, has to be more than a guess which turns out to be right. There may be any number of twentieth-century sociologists who can claim to have said in advance that, say, the economy of the Soviet Union would collapse sooner or later, or the British Labour Party would be out of power for several general elections after 1979, or a resurgent Islam would pose an increasing threat to the political stability of the Arab states. But for a guess to be turned into a prediction, the conditions which, if they hold good, will produce the predicted outcome at the predicted time and place have to be specified. And if you think that’s easy to do, just give it a try. An article in the journal Contention in the issue for the winter of 1993 by Jack B. Goldstone is called ‘Predicting Revolutions: why we could (and should) have foreseen the Revolutions of 1989–91 in the USSR and Eastern Europe’.7 So maybe you could, Jack. And if you could, you should. But you didn’t.

Nobody is going to pretend that the most brilliant economist who ever lived could predict what the prices are going to be on the New York Stock Exchange a year ahead. Just imagine what would be happening on the traders’ screens if a consortium of investors somewhere had a software package that could do that for them! But economists may be able to predict the conditions under which commodity prices will rise or the marginal cost of a product’s entry into a new market will fall, and even (maybe) the conditions under which the stock market will move up or down in the short term. Similarly, not even the most brilliant political scientist who ever lived could predict what the distribution of seats will be in the British House of Commons or the American Congress in fifty years’ time. But political scientists armed with the results of sample surveys are quite good at predicting the outcome of a general election to within one or two per cent of the popular vote at the start of the campaign. Even sociologists may succeed in making some predictions which aren’t just guesses. But could any sociologist have predicted when and how the fall of the Roman Empire, the rise of Islam, the Spanish conquest of what thereby came to be known as ‘Hispanic’ America, or the evolution of industrial capitalism out of agricultural feudalism were going to happen? Of course not – no more than a biologist surveying the world five million years ago, when our ancestors were first diverging, genetically speaking, from the chimps, could have predicted when and how it would one day come to be dominated by Homo sapiens, i.e. us.

This may seem to imply that the more specialized social sciences gain their apparent ability to frame more accurate predictions at the price of increasing remoteness from the recalcitrant facts of actual social behaviour. What, for example, do economists have to say about buyers of luxury goods who knowingly pay more for less? What do political scientists have to say about voters who are motivated entirely by the candidate’s looks? But there is nothing inherently inexplicable about decisions like these, and nothing in the explanations of the resulting behaviour put forward by economists and political scientists which is incompatible with anything said in this chapter. This book will touch on the specialized social sciences only in passing. But that doesn’t mean that they have less interesting things to say about human social behaviour than sociology itself. What is ‘interesting’ is, to be sure, a subjective matter which we all have to settle for ourselves. But many practitioners of many different social sciences have produced explanations of patterns of human social behaviour which are much more than abstract constructions about idealized human beings and which have withstood attempted refutation just as well as anything sociologists have found out about groups, communities, institutions and societies as such. Besides, we sociologists need all the help we can get, from biologists, psychologists, historians and even philosophers no less than from practitioners of the specialized social sciences whose concerns overlap with our own.

One last preliminary point. I hope that no reader of this paragraph will dispute that explanations of why the world is as it is are logically independent of value-judgements about whether the state of the world is good or bad. If it’s true that the Normans conquered England in 1066 because King Harold was killed by an arrow in his eye at the Battle of Hastings, the conclusion stands whether or not you or anybody else thinks that the Norman Conquest was a good (or bad) thing. But readers of sociology books often find that they are being treated to both. Nor should this come as a surprise. Sociologists, like everybody else, have and can’t help having views of their own about the kinds of institutions, forms of social behaviour, and performances of individual roles which are to be admired or deplored, and their approaches to the study of them may well be influenced by those views. But that makes no difference to the validity of their competing explanations of why human groups, communities, institutions and societies are as they are, any more than the moral, political or aesthetic values of geologists make a difference to the validity (or not) of their competing explanations of why the continents and oceans of the earth are as they are. True, nineteenth-century geologists were influenced, among other things, by their different interpretations of the Book of Genesis. True, too, you can and probably do have a view about the morality of capitalism which you can hardly have about the morality of continental drift. But whether the causes and consequences of capitalism are what, according to your moral, political or religious views, you would wish them to be is something you must decide for yourself on other grounds. And if somebody says, ‘But look at how much sociological writing is blatantly biased against (or in favour of) capitalism (or socialism)!’, the answer is: ‘No doubt; but the fact that bias of this kind can be detected is itself a conclusive demonstration that the author’s values are logically distinct from the hypotheses of cause and effect of whose validity the same author is trying to persuade you as well.’

That being so, it comes as something of a surprise (at least to me) to find a distinguished British historian of medicine, Professor Roy Porter, quoted by the Times Higher Education Supplement in 1995 as saying that he can’t help feeling that the increasing recent success of evolutionary theory is ‘a political project’. But on reflection, I think I know what he means. It is undeniably true of science, both natural and social, that it can have political consequences and that its practitioners may themselves have political motives. Darwinian theory has been used, or rather misused, for political purposes, and if you are worried that the discoveries of either natural or social science may be invoked in furtherance of ends which you deplore you are fully entitled to wish that scientists would stop trying to make them. But that does nothing to undermine their claims to be doing science. On the contrary: it is when their findings do succeed in withstanding attempted refutation that their possible political uses become a threat to those with whose interests and purposes they conflict. When in the early seventeenth century the Vatican was getting uptight about Galileo and his telescope, the Pope’s advisers might very well have said to him: ‘Watch out, Your Holiness! This newfangled astronomy is a political project which could seriously damage the reputation of the Church!’ From his and their point of view, they would have been right to warn him. The Church’s traditional monopoly of the secrets of the universe was indeed under attack. But Jupiter’s moons were there to be seen through Galileo’s telescope whether the Vatican liked it or not. That was the trouble.

II What Exactly Do You Want to Know?

EVEN BEFORE OUR remote ancestors were in contact with the extinct people whom we now call ‘Neanderthals’, people of one kind, or in one group, or from one territory, have been curious about the behaviour of people other than themselves. Much of the curiosity is about their acquired behaviour: why do they wear such funny hats? how can they bear to eat that meat raw? what on earth are those pictures they’re painting all about? But questions about their imposed behaviour will occur no less readily to trained and untrained observers alike: how do they choose their leaders? what is the distribution of property among them? what are they either required or forbidden to do by the incumbents of roles with the power to see to it that they do?

Herodotus, the so-called ‘father of history’, can at least as plausibly be called the father of sociology. His famous book, written in the mid-fifth century BC, is primarily concerned to narrate the victory of the mainland Greeks over the invading Persians. But it is also a rich and fascinating repository of observations about other peoples, obtained by extensive travel and systematic analysis of oral traditions, eyewitness accounts and physical records. Although he does appear to have believed some things which he shouldn’t, such as that the walls of Babylon were 200 ‘royal cubits’ (300 feet!) high, it’s remarkable how often his account has been subsequently confirmed – in the most spectacular instance, by archaeological evidence about Scythian burial customs discovered less than half a century ago. What’s more, he articulates precisely the two fundamental aspects of all sociological enquiry: the recognition that every society is different from every other, but that all are at the same time variants of a universal human nature. Although, as Herodotus explicitly remarks, the members of all societies are inclined to take their own as the paradigm, none are any more entitled to do so than any others, however strongly they believe, now as then, that they are.1

It follows from Herodotus’s approach that there are two different but equally valid responses which the members of one society will have to what they find out about another: ‘how unlike us they are!’ – yes, but at the same time: ‘how recognizable!’ Admittedly, all such comparisons have to start from somewhere – in the case of Herodotus, from the viewpoint of a Greek looking at non-Greeks – and different observers will always be interested in, and surprised by, different things. Thus: ‘They not only kill their prisoners of war but eat them!’, or ‘Black people are treated differently from white people over there!’, or ‘The state owns all the factories as well as the land!’, or ‘Would you believe it – in ancient Mesopotamia a nun could be a businesswoman, and in Anglo-Saxon England a priest could be a slave!’ But equally: ‘They admire successful athletes just like we do!’, or ‘Look how those late Roman bureaucrats behaved – no differently from ours!’2

Whatever the contrast being drawn between ‘our’ roles and ‘theirs’, sociologists owe it both to their readers and to themselves to get their basic observations right. This isn’t always as easy as it may seem. For a start, there is the language problem: if an English-speaking sociologist asks a French-speaking informant about the role of the informant’s boss, the English-speaking sociologist must beware of equating ‘patron’, which is what English speakers mean by ‘boss’, with ‘patron’, which isn’t. But even when both the sociologist and the native informant understand correctly what the other is saying, the sociologist may be misled by having failed to ask the right question. When Captain R. S. Rattray, a British colonial officer who had spent many years among the Ashanti of what was then, in the 1910s and ’20s, called the Gold Coast, asked his native informants why he had never been told that the Queen Mother used to outrank the King, they replied: ‘The white man never asked us this; you have dealings with and recognize only the men; we supposed the Europeans considered women of no account and we know you do not recognize them as we have always done.’3

This sort of experience is disconcerting enough. But even if the sociologist has asked all the right questions, the questions may not have been asked of the right people. Or the right people may, for reasons of their own, have given the wrong answers. A classic example is the account of female adolescence in Samoa by the American anthropologist Margaret Mead. Her account, which was uncritically accepted by an enormous readership for several decades after its publication in 1928, depicted a guilt-free world of permissive sexuality. But Mead had no detailed knowledge of Samoan society and language, she didn’t check what she was told by her 25 young informants against either direct observations of her own or alternative accounts by other, adult Samoans, and it never seems to have occurred to her that she might be being deliberately misled. It is, accordingly, no surprise that she should turn out to have got it quite badly wrong. The surprise is that it took so long for her mistakes to be diagnosed by other observers.4 But there are many other instances where researchers whose intellectual honesty (as opposed to their judgement) is not in doubt have applied themselves to explaining something which was never there to be explained – for example, explaining the emergence of ‘nuclear’ households of parents and children by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘extended family’ pattern attributed to the pre-industrial past, or explaining ‘new’ working-class lifestyles by contrast with a purely presumptive ‘proletarian’ culture attributed to nineteenth-century industrialization. Or take Captain Archibald Blair, who reported on the basis of an exploration carried out in 1789 that chiefs in the Andaman Islands were ‘generally painted red’. Nice try, Captain. But as the British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown discovered a little over a century later, the Andaman Islanders don’t have any chiefs.5

The difficult cases can be very difficult indeed. A notoriously intriguing one is the reception of yet another Captain (Cook this time) by the Hawaiian Islanders when he arrived there on board HMS Resolution in 1778. Did they or didn’t they regard him as a god? The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins is sure that they did, given that Cook’s appearance was entirely consistent with their beliefs and expectations and that they had no previous direct acquaintance with Europeans. But the Sri Lankan anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere is sure that they didn’t; what they did (or so Obeyesekere believes) is deify him for their own political purposes after he had been killed in a scuffle which broke out during his third and unexpected visit. It’s a particularly difficult case for two reasons. First, the evidence, both historical and anthropological, is ambiguous and incomplete. But second, the question is such as to stir up just the kind of accusations of intellectual bad faith as in fact it has. For Obeyesekere, Sahlins is imposing on the natives of eighteenth-century Hawaii a white imperialist myth about their propensity to see visiting Europeans as gods. For Sahlins, Obeyesekere is imposing on them a myth of universal (but really only bourgeois European) rationalism which denies them their own coherent and distinctive culture. So far, at least, Sahlins seems to have had the better of the argument.6 But that’s not the point. The point is that if we could go back in time, check out the evidence as it has come down to us, interview the people involved, and observe how they actually behaved, we’d know for sure. The conclusion to be drawn isn’t that arguments of this sort are difficult to settle conclusively (they are), or that they can be used to fight ideological battles of the here and now (they can), or that they touch on deep philosophical issues about the nature of religious belief (they do). It’s that for all that, they are amenable in principle to empirical research.