Doug Henwood wrote:
> How's that? You have some examples that show both similiarities and
> differences. Similarity: lots of guns. Differences: on the
> dependent side, murders; on the independent side, imperial history,
> frontier culture, inequality, racial heterogeneity... You control
> for the similarities and try to see if the dissimilarities are
> significant. That sounds like standard stats to me.
This implicitly assumes that individuals are everywhere and always the same so that differences in behaviour are explainable solely by differences in circumstances.
What if, though, the character of individuals is the product of the social relations within which they develop and live? Then differences in e.g murder rates may express cross-cultural variations in character due to variations in these relations.
This is the source of "crime" emphasized by Marx:
"If man draws all his knowledge, sensation, etc., from the world of the senses and the experience gained in it, then what has to be done is to arrange the empirical world in such a way that man experiences and becomes accustomed to what is truly human in it and that he becomes aware of himself as man. If correctly understood interest is the principle of all morality, man’s private interest must be made to coincide with the interest of humanity. If man is unfree in the materialistic sense, i.e., is free not through the negative power to avoid this or that, but through the positive power to assert his true individuality, crime must not be punished in the individual, but the anti-social sources of crime must be destroyed, and each man must be given social scope for the vital manifestation of his being. If man is shaped by environment, his environment must be made human." <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/holy-family/ ch06_3_d.htm>
The psychoanalytic explanation of character as expressing differing degrees of ego strength and integration, the degree depending to an important extent on the nature of the social relations within which individuals develop, is consistent with this. It also provides an explanation of variation in the tendency of given individuals to act out in terms of the effect on personality structure of the formation of a psychological group e.g. a lynch mob.
Ted