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I see males as so programmed to “check in” with what everybody else is thinking before they allow themselves to decide their what their own agenda will be that they will permanently freeze out what would be the most obvious practical approach in purely abstract terms. Prime example: the inability of America’s progressive economic elite to pick up on the easy solution — that could be even more easily sold — to America’s uniquely low labor pay: sector-wide labor agreements (I’m not the least bit kidding about any of this) — American supermarket and airline workers would kill for legislated sector-wide agreements.

But males are programmed so heavily — this was an all important survival mode — to integrate their thoughts with everyone else in the group — this is not the time for new ideas: the wild pig is getting away! — that they are impervious to the most practical abstract innovations. When they are alone in the library at one in the morning they are still on the “hunt.”

Meantime 20-25% of America’s workforce is earning less than the minimum wage…
…of 1968! Meantime top one percentile income averaged $1.2 million in 2006 according to CBO* — while our intellectual males (unconsciously) chase ever receding wild pigs.
* http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2789

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Money and power, and those without money and power is what it seems to boil down too. Yet the “power” controls both parties in modern countries.

Global Warming, Pollution, Food shortages are all fast comming upon us. Yet so called ‘Liberals’ have abandoned the notion of overpopulation, and China is barely on the radar for its secondary American regressive industrialism. That is to say American corporations skirt American environmental laws by going to China or elswhere.

The chickens are comming home to roost.

What exactly is the reason for humans to peacfully co-exist and how could this possibly be accomplioshed with the levels of diverstiy and want of resources?

Humans have been fighting and killing, just as most life forms do, over territory and resources. What exactly will compel such primatives to stop? This question has been asked for millenia, lots of science fiction movies from the ’50′s explore the issue.

Humans are too stupid to deal with these issues. Are you going to use genetics to accomplish your social goals? That’s about the only way to do it, but it may take near extinction to get there.

We humans have about worn out our welcome.

Interesting site.

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Your remarks about complexity are also important. It is one thing to insist that we respect and take the time to understand the complexities of life in smaller groups and another to deny that larger groups are, indeed, more complex in what may be interesting and important ways.

I also have to admit it; the poo is a wonderful example. What a marvelous demonstration that you have your sh**t together.

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Kerim, you make a nice distinction: “you are conflating Durkheim’s argument about the universal rationality of humans with his argument about the progressive rationalization of human institutions. It is our Religious institutions which becomes more rational in Durkheim, not the people themselves.” I would only quibble with one premise and one word. The premise is that Durkheim was always doing the same thing. The word is progressive. You could make a progress argument about Division of Labor and maybe even the Rules. But in his later work, including the second Preface to DoL plus, of course, The Elementary Forms, he wasn’t talking about progress at all, in an evaluative sense.

(I felt bound to answer but apologize for this long post tangential to the thread.)

So John, to come back to your question, Durkheim simply gave up on the mechanical/organic schema later because it was much too linear and simplistic. The reason for it in the first place was that DoL was a work of sociology in the present; it was about ‘organic solidarity’. He was talking about a changing situation, implying a ‘before’, and so he sort of concocted ‘mechanical solidarity’ as that which had been changed from. He became aware of two things as he got older: that what he called mechanical solidarity was consistent with various forms of association in modern societies (e.g. “professional ethics and civic morals”); and that what he called organic solidarity characterized the general moral order of all societies.

The Elementary Forms is accordingly another crack at organic solidarity (not called that any more), only now understood not as a stage in human history but as the structural format of all human conceptualization. So Kerim, I agree with you that he’s working on establishing the universal rationality of humans in order to ground his comparative method.

Again, where I don’t agree is in the implication of judgment in the social ‘evolution from simple to complex’. John is right that there’s danger of a conflation of evolution with social darwinism here. Societies are objectively more or less complex, just as any other whole with parts is more or less complex. My tennis team is less complex than my college; my social ‘self’ in those two contexts does flex in and out. The point is that by evolution Durkheim did not mean progress, he meant adaptation. There is no sense of higher and lower, better or worse forms in Durkheim.

He argued that demographic expansion drives a complexified division of labor in modern societies. Well right, it does. That and its consequences are a lot of what we criticize (impertinently) about modern societies, when we’re in that mood. My brother designs sewer systems for suburban developments. That is a sentence that would not have made any sense for a variety of reasons in 13th century Europe, not least that coping with masses of poo had not yet emerged as a sort of problem that required layers and layers of professional specialization to cope with.

Of course, people in 13th century Europe coped with their poo just fine; probably better, from an environmental perspective, than my brother’s systems do. But there were fewer of them, less densely packed, with a lot less poo to cope with. So without getting into ‘progress’ or ‘civilization’ as terms of evaluation, the kind of society in which poo can be composted for fertilizer or left in the street to eventually wash into the river by rainfall is a different sort of adaptive environment than the one in which unprocessed poo would saturate every waking moment.

My brother is only very dimly aware of the larger environment in which his specialized local knowledge operates. My specialized academic local knowledge involves being aware of larger environments but not of where my poo goes when I pull that handle. I am no more or less adapted to my situation than he is; like him, I would be helpless without it. Durkheim’s point might be that society ‘evolved’ each of us to do work that needs doing, and equipped us interactively with the general categories of understanding (‘habitus’, later) that would enable us to funtion effectively in the various milieux we encounter. Of course this all has to be coordinated, which is where institutions come in. And they do need to be rationalized, just in the sense of procedurally getting stuff done reliably.

I am certainly aware that judgments about higher and lower, more and less, better and worse have been attached to concepts like complexity and civilization. I get it that these evaluations serve the interests of oppressive power and must be resisted. But if that spills over into denying that scale and context have any effect on societies or the people in them, which is what Durkheim was arguing, then I don’t see how we can get much of anywhere toward understanding the real diversity of human experience.

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I’m sympathetic to these critiques (my main criticism is that he is using a sort of Victorian ‘Comparative Method’ which many of us consider to be problematic). But reread the article — do you think it really constituted ‘crapping all over him’? And do I ever say that ‘only anthropologists can write about this’ or ‘you can only write about this in an anthropological way and he doesn’t'? No. I think it is easy to imagine Diamond facing such an opponent, but I also think its important to recognize that opponent isn’t me.

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