French sociologist, Emile Durkheim 

                                 (credit: Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Chapter 1.    (continued) 

But our scientific view must be extended even further if we are to define and clarify the scientific model on which we can build a new moral code.

At this point, we should move from Biology into the social sciences, and in a moment, we will. But first, we must clarify a profound general concept, one we must agree on if we are to say anything meaningful about social science.  

For a statement to qualify as being worthy of consideration in science, it must make a claim that is testable in the real, empirical world. A statement that meets this condition is called “nomothetic”. For example, here's a nomothetic statement: “Any two bodies in space are drawn together by a force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them”. It is a verbal statement of the Law of Gravitation (which can also be stated mathematically). Nomothetic statements can be made in all branches of science. A nomothetic statement is one that, at least in theory, can be decisively proven wrong by tests done in the real, physical world.

On the other hand, whether nomothetic statements can be made about human societies is a matter of bitter debate. Can I devise a hypothesis about societies that is testable in the way that the law of gravitation is testable? In short, can we make nomothetic statements in Social Science?  

One study that is often cited to support the idea that we can make nomothetic statements about societies was done by sociologist, Emile Durkheim. In the late 1800s, he studied suicide statistics in France. He saw that Catholics committed suicide at a higher rate than Protestants. He hypothesized that this was because Catholics, generally, as a sub-group within his society, felt more connected to their communities than Protestants did. Statistics supported his hypothesis.

In other words, we can’t understand why one person committed suicide while others with similar troubles did not if we look only at the psychological profiles of individuals. In order to understand why a suicide victim took that ultimate step, we do need to look at his individual profile, but also at his whole society and how it influenced and shaped his thinking.

In other words, most of who you are is heavily shaped by the concepts, values, morés, and customs that you learned growing up in your society. Each of us is, mostly, a product of her/his culture. Individuals, Durkheim said, could only be fully understood if we looked at those individuals through the lenses of their societies. This was true, he said, with nearly all phenomena observed across whole societies.

In short, there are social facts – facts that are true of whole societies and that can be studied objectively. In addition, they are greater than the sums of the psychological profiles of the individuals in those societies. All societies are built around programs for human living – cultures – which underlie, permeate, and inform the thinking of every person in the whole society. 

It offends many people to think that every human is mostly a products of her/his culture. Nevertheless, we speak and act in ways that have been subtly informed and shaped by the ways that the adults around us spoke and acted as we were growing up. For most of us, most of the time, we model what we saw. There is still room for individual agency in this model, but by and large, you respond to an event in your environment by choosing and implementing one of a set of beliefs, models, or customs which your culture has programmed into you.

For example, if a man you are working near gets injured, you will likely respond with the first aid that you learned in your culture. Clear airways, with a finger if necessary; put direct pressure on serious bleeding; if breathing and/or heartbeat have stopped, begin mouth to mouth resuscitation and heart massage, as you learned in your first aid/cpr class. This is the set of responses known to most people in my culture, which is a typical Western one.

Similar decision processes are used in almost all branches of Western culture; we have a set of options from which to choose in almost all situations. Wisely picking one of these choices and implementing it, in the example, requires learning first aid theory and getting practical training within the institutions available in my culture.

The options for action available in my culture are not familiar in some cultures. On the other hand, other cultures often have their own responses to injuries, some that we in the West are just beginning to learn. For example, in some cultures, plants whose juices coagulate bleeding in open wounds are well-known and used.

The point in all cases is that the customs of a culture aim to increase the range of options available to a tribe member for him/her to use in response to situations that have occurred before in that culture. All cultures contain many concepts, morés, customs, etc. that enable the tribe that lives by that culture to respond effectively to reality. But the options differ from culture to culture, as would logically be expected given that environments of different tribes vary widely. Even inside a given culture, the individual almost always has options, or in short, agency. I’m not always going to do cpr if I come upon an accident victim. I use my knowledge and judgement to make a decision. Then I act.

In any case, offended or not, all people think and act nearly all of the time in ways that are consistent with their cultural programming. Even their wish to be free is a way of thinking that they were culturally programmed to believe in.

Furthermore, there is also room for tribe leaders to shape a whole tribe’s future. If s/he is wise, a leader may see, for example, that the tribe must move if it is to live. The plant species that they have long used for food in their homeland is dying out.

The culture each human learns usually has the aim of increasing human control over real events, especially over those events that repeat in patterns that can be learned and anticipated by humans. I don’t know how cold this winter will be, but I do gamble with a high degree of confidence that there will be a cold season in which food will be hard to find. Therefore, I set aside food now when it is plentiful. It may require hard, hot work when I would rather swim or play tag. But I do the work. Members of my tribe all do and have done so for generations.

A culture programs those who live by it not to have fun, but to survive. Most of the customs that I have been programmed to follow, even if I resent the ways that they infringe on my personal freedom, turn out to have long term beneficial effects for me and my offspring. Eating meals of porridge and root vegetables all winter is not pleasant, but it’s preferable to starving. So, I till, plant, and harvest my fields as my grandfather did. And his before that.    

In a paradoxical but very real way, the whole point of the morés and customs in a culture is to steer tribe members toward making choices and acting in ways that enhance survival odds for them, their children, and their whole tribe. Thus, the view of human life offered in this essay does leave room for human freedom.

We don’t build up a way of life – knowledge, understanding, and skilled action to elude uncertainty. That can’t be done. We build up our cultures in order to deal more and more effectively with uncertainty. To improve our odds. Decision by decision, action by action, we are free to use what we have learned to inform and guide what we do next. Or to try something new if the old ways simply are not working. This is the nature of human freedom.  

Our smartest seers are people who can see beyond their programming, people who find ways to amend their culture so that their lives and the lives of their fellow tribe members keep getting healthier and more satisfying. I become a loyal child of my culture in order to keep practicing it, but also improving it, if I can.

  accident victim, Jeremy Brunson with man who saved his life, Sgt. John Jackson 

                                           (April, 2014) 

            (credit: Maj. Fred Williams, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)