"Merely intuitive"? Kelley gave some of the cases of the meager (and that's a good thing) examples of people who were raised outside of human contact. These people are all seriously damaged in some way. Why should one expect any evidence to the contrary?
Your question seems to assume that there is some burden of proof on people who claim the (what should be obvious) point, that people are in fact not "people" in many real ways if they are isolated from their fellow humans. Yet it is the other half of your formulation--the "individual" acting somehow "outside" of society--that seems favored as the assumed postulate. Why? Is there any actual evidence of the existence of this pathological creature, beyond the grossest accidentally or criminally-induced exceptions? Why is this phantasm even considered an object of serious scientific study?
Sorry for the rhetorical questions, but the answer is clear: Bourgeois rule and its effect on ideology in the broadest sense. The very idea of this construct of an "individual" defined apart from human society has been basic to bourgeois thought. (And the rejection of this bourgeois construct is basic to Marx's thought, for one--see, e.g., the intro to the Grundrisse.)
The "free" autonomous non-social (really, anti-social) actor participating "freely" in the market, the idealization at the center of bourgeois economics, is now often presented in a toned-down version by economists as a legitimate scientific model, i.e., admittedly not describing any actual human, BUT based on enough truly human reality-corresponding characteristics that it can act as a useful, simplified working model of how humans operate--and from which legitimate if limited scientific conclusions can be drawn. This is not the case (although such model-building and idealizations are probably necessary to any scientific enterprise), assuming one's interest is the study of humans (as opposed to the study of the continued smooth functioning of capitalism). As a model for human beings, the "individual outside of society" is a counter-productive idealization (counter-productive from a scientific, if not propagandistic, standpoint) that in fact expresses an at best pathological condition. It is quite literally inhuman.
And quite fitting for capitalism.
This doesn't mean one can't show people in capitalist society routinely acting AS IF they were asocial individualists, or that people can come to believe that human beings "naturally" exist as merely atomized, selfish competitors. It also doesn't mean that real conditions of the bourgeois historical epoch don't in fact reduce people to such a state much of the time. This phenomenon is sometimes called "alienation" and is central to the social pathology of capitalist society. But at what point in this process, where people interact with others AS IF they were "individuals outside of society," are they ACTUALLY "outside of society"? Never.
This "really hard-headed skeptic" to which you refer is not a skeptic in any real sense at all. What true skeptic ignores all evidence of their own eyes, ears, and common sense to assume a mythical construct? You are in fact dealing with an ideologue--whether as a victim of an omnipresent ideology or as an interested perpetrator, you can judge. And I can pretty much guarantee that any arguments from evidence will be about as useless as engaging a born-again in an argument against the existence of God. The problem is not the evidence, but the assumptions behind the very "problem," a problem that *doesn't exist* in, yes, a concrete material sense.
----Original Message Follows---- From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Possibly dumb question about socialization/sociability Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 11:10:23 -0400
Gordon Fitch wrote:
> > ...
> > > I assume if people have gone around saying things like
> > "society creates the individual" ....
Carrol Cox:
> This way of putting it would in fact be a denial of a unity of society
> and the individual -- in other words, it is really only a way of denying
> while seeming to assert assert socialization. We have on the one hand
> "society" and on the other hand "individuals," and the former somehow
> creates the individuals. Weird. The best answer to your question (or at
> least the beginning of the best answer) is to note that the question
> implies its own answer in so far as it is a question that could only be
> asked within a complex or ensemble of social relations.
>
> Society doesn't create us, and we have no existence prior to and
> independent of our social relations. So both statements, "humans create
> society" and "society creates individuls," are simply incoherent.
I agree, but my agreement is merely intuitive. I'm trying to think of material evidence for the necessity of society to human existence -- the kind you can bean a really hard- headed skeptic with and make at least a dent.
> Rousseau, incidentally, argued that "in the beginning" individuals did
> only come together to mate. If you haven't read it you should get hold
> of _A Discourse on Inequality_. From what I know, however, social
> relations (or species that had no existence independently of their
> social relations) long pre-date homo sapiens: or to put it otherwise,
> human society is several million years older than humanity.
My impression -- intuition again -- is that all primates live in complex societies, as do most mammals (as far as I know) -- cats, dogs, rats, deer, and so on. As for Rousseau, it seems to me he just made stuff up about things he didn't know about, and that's fine, but it should be called "fiction" or "poetry" and taken as such.
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