[lbo-talk] The postmodern prince

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Fri Dec 5 15:29:17 PST 2003


On Friday, December 5, 2003, at 11:49 AM, Miles Jackson wrote:


> --And just as
> a physicist can use her theories to make good estimates of
> how snowflakes typically fall, a social scientist can make
> surprisingly good predictions about typical behavior by
> accounting for social structure (e.g., what kind of
> restaurant? Is the person a chef, customer, or waiter?).

Actually, not just social scientists -- *human beings* have proved to be pretty good at predicting each others' behaviors on the basis of knowledge of how their societies are put together, as well as a lot of other kinds of knowledge, as long as there have been human beings. (And members of their fellow primate species predict each others' behaviors pretty well, too!)

Or to put it another way -- we are all "social scientists." The problem with us average humans as social scientists is that we tend to mess up our understanding of each other with a lot of prejudices and emotions so often. But still, we do manage to make pretty shrewd judgments of each other (embodied in that often maligned "common sense") most of the time. We have to; otherwise we couldn't live with each other.

I think this helps to explain something that always puzzles me when I hear people making the claim that a lot of high-powered "social theory" or "social science" is needed for effective radical political action: the fact that there have been revolutions going back to ancient Greece, ancient China, ancient nearly everywhere else. If a social science that even its champions admit is still far from being in a mature stage were necessary to pull off a successful revolution, how could it have been possible so long ago?

Clearly, it was possible because folks were just as smart about sizing each other up and getting the lay of the social land then as they have been ever since and are now. In other words, contrary to a common conception, people have not just been wallowing around in the swamp of religious/ideological darkness through all of its history up to -- pick your Age of Enlightenment: 18th, 19th, 20th century? Yes, there is all the "false consciousness" that is so maddeningly prevalent in our species, but we can take care of business, too, when we put our minds to it.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ Belinda: Ay, but you know we must return good for evil. Lady Brute: That may be a mistake in the translation.

-- Sir John Vanbrugh: The Provok’d Wife (1697), I.i.



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