The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science

THE HUMAN DIFFERENCE

THE HUMAN

DIFFERENCE

Animals, Computers, and the

Necessity of Social Science

ALAN WOLFE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES OXFORD

Portions of this book have appeared in somewhat different form in the following articles: Sociological Theory in the Absence of People: The Limits of Luhmann’s Systems Theory, Cardozo Law Review 13 (March 1992): 1729-43; Mind, Self, Society and Computer: Artificial Intelligence and the Sociology of Mind, American Journal of Sociology 96 (March 1991): 1073-96; Social Theory and the Second Biological Revolution, Social Research 57 (Fall 1990): 615-48; Up from Humanism, The American Prospect, Winter 1991, pp. 112-27; Algorithmic Justice, Cardozo Law Review 11 (July/August 1990): 1409-34; Sociology as a Vocation, American Sociologist 21 (Summer 1990): 136-48; and Books vs. Articles: Two Ways of Publishing Sociology, Sociological Forum 5 (September 1990): 477-89-

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. Oxford, England

© 1993 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfe, Alan, 1942-

The Human difference: animals, computers, and the necessity of social science / Alan Wolfe.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-520-08013-0 (alk. paper)

1. Sociology—Methodology. 2. Social sciences— Methodology. 3. Sociobiology. 4. Human ecology.

5. Computers—Social aspects. I. Title. HM24.W64 1993

301’.01—dc2o 9²-$355

CIP

Printed in the United States of America 123456789

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ®

The difference between facts which are what they are independent of human desire and endeavor and facts which are to some extent what they are because of human interest and purpose … cannot be got rid of by any methodology. The more sincerely we appeal to facts, the greater is the importance of the distinction between facts which condition human activity and facts which are conditioned by human activity.

John Dewey

This book is dedicated to my children,

Rebekka, Jan, and Andreas,

Contents

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chapter One A Distinct Science for a Distinct Species

Sociology’s Fragility

Nature’s Revenge

Equality at What Price?

The Interpreting Self and the Meaningful Society

Chapter Two Other Animal Species and Us

Social Theory and the Second Biological Revolution

The Case for Other Animals

What Sociobiology Teaches Us

Tertiary Rules and Human Choice

Chapter Three Mind, Self, Society, and Computer

Respect for Machines

The Human Essence Test

Software Intelligence

Hardware Intelligence

Computers, Humans, and Rules

Chapter Four Putting Nature First

The Environmental Impulse

Animal Rights and Human Imagination

Deep Ecology

Gaia

The Computer in the Woods

Chapter Five The Post-modern Void

Between the Sacred and the Profane

Beneath the Sacred and the Profane

Information Versus Meaning

Algorithmic Justice

A World Safe for Systems

Chapter Six Social Science as a Way of Knowing

The Two Faces of Social Science

Methodological Pluralism

Sociological Realism

Social Science as a Vocation

Is Sociology Necessary?

Chapter Seven Society on Its Own Terms

Competing Metaphors

What Social Institutions Are For

Philosophical Anthropology Revisited

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

It is inevitable that those who come late to their passions are more attached to them, and more concerned with how they flourish, than those who develop them early. My concern with sociological theory is relatively recent. Trained as a political scientist, I learned Durkheim and Weber by teaching them to undergraduates when I accidentally found myself employed in a sociology department. It was a case of appreciation at first sight. Sociology, a field with little public respect (and an often all too easy target when administrators eye departments ripe for closing), remains, for me, the best way available to understand what it means to be modern. It is an academic discipline capable of offering lasting insights, not only into how we live but also into how we ought to live.

As a late convert to sociology, I have spent considerable time drawing intellectual maps that locate this discipline in relationship to other ways of inquiry. My previous book, Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation, was at one level an effort to address the contradictions between modernity and morality. But it was also concerned with the relationship between sociology and the other social sciences, especially economics and political science. Even if this second theme was more important to me than it was to many of the book’s readers, I felt a need to say something positive about a discipline that seemed to have lost a sense of purpose. In attempting to map sociology’s location among the social sciences, I made three general points.

First, I argued, sociology generally proceeds by moving from particulars to universals, whereas economics and politics often go in the other direction. If there is something distinct about sociology, it is an emphasis on specific places and situations, based on the belief that knowledge lies in the details. (This emphasis on location may well be responsible for my concern with sociology’s own location.) Erving Goffman is in this sense the quintessential sociologist. From a particular encounter, event, or situation, Goffman would extract more detail than anyone thought possible. His refusal to generalize, always the mark against him as a theorist, may have been a silent protest against other social scientists who were so quick to reach conclusions in the absence of particulars. (To argue, for example, that all behavior is motivated by self-interest, as many economists do, is to run roughshod over the particulars of time and place.) Sociology, in making those particulars its major domain, will always stand in awkward relationship to the modern tendency to universalize. The attention lavished by sociologists on community, ethnicity, family, and informal networks is at least to some degree an effort to preserve particulars in the face of increasing universalization.

Second, I pointed out that sociology’s distinct location on that intellectual map called knowledge was a product of how it thought about parts and wholes. For economists, whose commitment to methodological individualism is strenuous, individuals and their voluntary choices make up social systems. For political scientists, concerned with states and (in the contemporary world) even larger entities, individuals disappear into classes, populations, and vast shifts of power. But sociologists, unable to decide whether the macro or the micro ought to be their major focus, combine both in ingenious efforts to reconcile positions that other disciplines take more for granted. This ambivalent location between the macro and the micro can work to sociology’s detriment, as when practitioners turn with envy to the models generated by other social sciences for their inspiration. But it can also be a major advantage, staking out a claim that an adequate theory for real people will concentrate neither on individual decisions nor on large-scale structures but will find truth in the interaction between them.

At the heart of the sociological enterprise is a concern with how parts and wholes interrelate.

The third major difference between sociology and the other social sciences, I concluded, lies in the way each discipline approaches the problem of rules. Whatever the differences between theories based on voluntary choice and those that emphasize the coercive capacities of states, both imagine the individual agent as a rule-follower. The rule may be a law codified by a state or an instinct hard-wired into the brain, but in both cases individuals are understood to confront a set of predetermined options and to pick one (or to have one picked for them). The somewhat naïve psychology of both approaches was, I argued, a major flaw in their ability to account for the paradoxes of modernity. Sociology’s concern with rule-making—that is, its emphasis on how people construct the world around them—contrasts with the concern with rule-following contained in economics and political science. If we are to understand how people make the rules that in turn rule their behavior, we will need a more sophisticated understanding of how cognition is not universally hard-wired into brains but situated in particular contexts. A sociology influenced by ethnomethodology, like a psychology capable of understanding culture, could supplement and enrich those models of human behavior that are more concerned with predictability and regularity than they are with the messy details of real people acting in real life.

The Human Difference is a sequel to Whose Keeper?—not because it directly addresses issues of moral obligation (it does not) but in the sense that it carries forward a concern with the location of the sociological enterprise. This time, however, the map is not confined to the social sciences; rather, it extends the borders to adjacent fields of inquiry. Since at least the middle of the nineteenth century, many practitioners of social science, including sociologists, have assumed that the physical and biological sciences constitute the proper model of how to conduct the search for knowledge. We now may be at the end of a specific period of intellectual history characterized by that faith, for the results produced by the scientific model have been few indeed. Although the scientific model continues to dominate the way social science is carried out in American universities, an earlier optimism that behavioral science would both produce uncontestable findings and help us bring order out of modernity’s chaos no longer rings true. At a time when the natural sciences themselves are racked with epistemological, political, and gender-sensitive disputes over knowledge, they can only reinforce, rather than solve, dilemmas that have been at the heart of social science since their origins.

But if the social sciences are not science, what are they? C. P. Snow told us in the 1950s that the intellectual world was characterized by two cultures, the scientific and the literary, and there was regrettably little communication between them. Should social science, in turning away from the natural sciences, turn instead to literature? Historians of sociology, such as Wolf Lepenies and Bruce Mazlish, have begun to uncover the important nineteenth-century relationship between literature and social science, and later in this book I will argue that there are reasons why modern literary forms and modern forms of social science share some of the same assumptions. But whatever the relevance of literature to social science, literary theory, as currently practiced, is another matter entirely. Literature is in fact under attack, and rarely with more vigor than among its own interpreters, especially those influenced by post-modernism. Texts are not written, especially not by authors, we have been told; they write themselves. The study of literature ought really to be understood as the study of rhetoric, it has been argued, and while the laws of rhetoric may be different from those of physics, they are laws and they do have their own logic. It would be odd indeed for the social sciences to turn away from science to literary theory when literary theory is itself turning to information theory and other sciences for models of how texts can organize themselves self- referentially.

I argue in this book that neither science nor literary theory can serve as a proper model for the social sciences. Social science is different from these adjacent fields of inquiry, just as, within the social sciences, sociology has emerged in a form quite different from economics and political science. Specifi cally, the subjects of the physical sciences play no role in interpreting the rules that govern their behavior, whereas the subjects of the social sciences at least have the potential to do so. We cannot study rocks, plants, and beavers (or computers and other algorithmically driven machines) with the same tools that we use to study modern people, who have capacities of mind, because the tools that offer insights into the former are unlikely to help us predict and understand the behavior of the latter. The social sciences, I will argue, are distinct sciences because the species they presume to understand is a distinct species. To understand the location of the social sciences on contemporary maps of intellectual knowledge, one must return to the emphasis on philosophical anthropology that characterized nineteenth-century efforts at grand social theory. Because humans are different from other animal and mechanical species, our methods of understanding their behavior have to be different as well.

Like Whose Keeper? this book argues that there are distinctive ways of understanding the world associated with different academic disciplines. My arguments to some degree go against at least one significant strain in contemporary theorizing, which advocates techniques that cross disciplinary boundaries. Rational choice theory, post-modernism, and hermeneutics, whatever their differences with each other, all see themselves as applying to many disciplines, not just one. I often feel uncomfortable when I argue for one particular discipline, especially when the discipline I advocate has practitioners, including many of the leading voices in the profession, who do a very different kind of sociology than I do. Nonetheless, there is a historical discipline called sociology; it included many of the greatest social thinkers ever to reflect on the modern condition—people such as Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and George Herbert Mead; and it remains a continuing source of inspiration for late-twentieth-century dilemmas.

Although The Human Difference carries forward an argument for sociology, however, it is less confrontational with the other social sciences than was Whose Keeper? For this bookin comparing the social sciences to ways of knowing associated with the natural sciences, on the one hand, and rhetoric, on

Figure i

the other—necessarily emphasizes at least one similarity between economics, political science, anthropology, and sociology. All of them presume, at least most of the time, to study human beings. (Each, however, has a few practitioners who want to apply the insights of these disciplines to animal behavior.) Because my concern is with human beings, I hope that what I have to say will be of interest to all social scientists, even though, because my own field is sociology, I will speak disproportionately of it and will, especially in the first and last chapters, argue for its special insights. My objective is not to practice a form of sociological imperialism—I consider myself generally a pluralist in these matters—but simply to use the discipline with which I am most familiar to argue for insights valid to the social sciences as a whole. And if a touch of sociological imperialism remains, it may be because sociology has focused more thoroughly on the question of the human difference, and its implications for how we understand the world, than other intellectual traditions.

Sociology, as a social science, can be located on a vertical axis with respect to its adjacent disciplines, just as it can be located on a horizontal axis with respect to its sister social sciences. If the arguments of Whose Keeper? are linked with those presented in this book, sociology would be located as shown in figure i—although what is on the top and on the bottom, as well as on the right and on the left, can all change, depending on one’s perspective. From this perspective, sociology is in many ways on an equal plane with the other social sciences, while at the same time occupying something of a special location. That captures, as best as I can map it, my own sense that sociology both is and is not a special and unique way of understanding the human world around us.

If there is one conclusion that follows from this mapping, it is that social scientists ought to stop looking around them to decide how to carry out their work. It is time for them to find a way of studying human beings that takes full account of the distinctiveness of the human beings they study. The Human Difference is a defense of humanism, not in the sense that the humanities are different from the sciences, although they are, but because humanism is especially concerned with our species and what it does. We are a puzzling species, capable of doing great things while also capable of wreaking great harm. Our fascination with ourselves strikes some of our numbers as arrogant and narcissistic. But for all our concern with ourselves, we have only recently begun to understand some of the most elementary things about us. The more we learn about how we act and think, the less likely we will feel the need to model our understanding of ourselves on the study of other animal species or computers. Humanism is anything but at the end of the road; properly understood, it has only just begun.

Acknowledgments

Colleagues at two institutions provided the critical commentary necessary to a project of this sort. When I was at Queens College, I received sound advice from Charles Smith, Dean Savage, and Melvin Reichler. At the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, Richard Bernstein gave the entire manuscript the benefit of his careful reading as well as his frank and helpful criticism. Neil Smelser and Howard Becker provided in-depth commentary when asked to do so for the publisher, and I am grateful to both (though neither bears any responsibility for the final product). Abdul Malik helped with the bibliography. Finally, as always, I want to thank my wife, Jytte Klausen, for her confidence in me.

Chapter One

A Distinct Science for

a Distinct Species

Sociology’s Fragility

Sociology, one of the youngest of the social sciences, may also prove to be one of the most short-lived. The product of a progressive intellectual milieu, sociology announced a faith in the ability of people to control the world they had created. Just as the forces of civilization and culture were beating back the irrationality and wildness of nature, so the forces of reason and science would create order out of what was once a Hobbes- ian war of all against all. Sociology’s optimism stood in sharp contrast to the debunking realism that had prevailed in political thought since Machiavelli and the playful cynicism that Mandeville contributed to the science of economics. To its earlier practitioners, sociology was the queen of the sciences because it was at one and the same time noble, caring, and somewhat imperious.

Begun at a time when the problems of industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization raised in compelling form the question of what it means for humans to live together in groups, sociology sought a precarious path between the attractive individuality of liberalism and the equally seductive, but even more dangerous, quest for a return to organic wholeness and unity. Its stance would always be in the middle—not only, in Wolf Lepenies’s phrase, between literature and science but also between left and right, realism and romanticism, the sacred and the profane, and the individual and the collectivity.¹ This last ambivalence is worth stressing. Sociology’s two greatest discoveries were the self and society, and neither of them had much in common with the individual and the state. Unlike the individual, who in liberal theory was governed by an unvarying human nature, the self was embedded in culture and was plastic enough to develop and learn. Unlike the state, which in theory exercised a monopoly of violence, society was the product of consensus openly arrived at, ruled by the norms created out of the behavior of real people in real life. Sociology was the product of a particular intellectual opening, a period- no one now knows how brief—when it seemed possible to maintain order without sacrificing liberty.

This precariousness of sociology gives its subject matter a temporality, in contrast with the more timeless concerns of economics and political science. No one doubts that there will always be money, that some will try to get more of it than others, and thus that scarcities of valuable things will always constitute the human condition. Similarly, despite the shock effect he thought he would have on polite opinion, Gaetano Mosca’s discovery that there will always be some who rule and others who will be ruled no longer seems especially noteworthy. But that society can continue to exist, that ties of solidarity will continue to link people together as partners in a common project—this is a riskier proposition. The rise of totalitarian states in this century showed that organic unity can destroy the social self as well as the atomistic individual. The popularity of laissez-faire conservatism in the late twentieth century, two hundred years after its significant flaws were exposed, shows that untrammeled individualism can weaken society as well as the state. Late in arriving, sociology could be early in leaving.

Its departure would be a tragedy. For the very fragility and temporality of the social make it worth preserving. If the social ties that link people together in groups are unappreciated, there is little need for a discipline emphasizing their continued importance. And if such ties are universal and permanent, we need hardly concern ourselves with the ways in which changes in social and intellectual fashion threaten them. Sociology, un-like the other social sciences, requires constant rediscovery, taking us by surprise at precisely those moments when we forget about its existence. Always vulnerable, it is always changing, critically reexamining itself to account for rapid social transformation. (In contrast, the very timelessness of the economic contributes to the fact that the discipline of economics has changed so little, in all but technique, since Adam Smith.) The more we take society for granted, the more we need to rethink its importance.

And, it seems, we do take the social very much for granted. Modern societies are composed of dense cities, complex bureaucracies, huge industries—all of which are dependent on fragile social ties to function at all. We rarely understand the importance of these ties until their breakdown results in crime, chaos, or lowered productivity; and we all too often rely on models of human behavior that pay little attention to them. The concerns of sociology—especially ties of trust, caring, and personal knowledge—are in one sense trivial and obvious and in another sense vital and irreplaceable. They are so crucial to our existence as human beings that we can, for long periods of time, forget about them completely.

The classical social theorists of the nineteenth century understood better than we do the potential fragility of the social. For them, the social world was an essential aspect of the human world, and the human world was understood to be a very recent discovery. Indeed, compared to the natural world, which has been with us since the beginning of time, the social world seemed not only miraculous but also improbable. Nineteenth-century sociologists could not take society for granted, because it was all so new to them. Today, surrounded by societies that seem overdeveloped in their density and complexity, we would rather ignore the social than argue for its special role in our existence.

No other aspect of nineteenth-century social theory better captured this sense of society’s fragility than the almost automatic anthropocentric assumptions it contained. Sociology was a product of the notion that humans were, and ought to be, at the center of our attention. Its founding thinkers agreed that the line between humans and the worlds surrounding them was dangerously thin and that, therefore, humans and their accomplishments required a special defense. This sense that the social could at any moment be taken back by other worlds recently conquered gave nineteenth-century social theory its predisposition to view our own species as superior to everything else.

From the perspective of nineteenth-century sociology, two worlds surrounded human creations: the supernatural world above them and the animal world below. At one level, sociology’s anthropocentrism represented a long struggle on the part of secular thinkers to turn attention away from superhuman entities to human ones. Asserting the centrality of the human was a way of insisting that the products of people’s activity, including religion itself, grew out of the capacity of individuals to make the world in which they lived. Because some of its practitioners, especially Durkheim, regarded sociology as a secular religion, they placed humans at the center, just as theologians placed God at the center. As long as sociology and religion were to some degree in competition, many sociological theorists were not prepared to conclude that the social world was safe from the supernatural one. Indeed, Durkheim could ensure the security of the human and the social only by elevating them to the status of the sacred.

The milieu that led sociology to its anthropocentrism was shaped by sociology’s relationship not only to the superhuman but also the subhuman, the world of other animal species. Sociology separated itself from the world of nature just as vigorously as it separated itself from the world of God. Nearly all thinkers in the sociological tradition regarded humans as a special and distinct species capable of taking control over its destiny. No one doubted that humans were driven by biology, or that some aspects of their behavior were similar to the behavior of other animal species. Obviously, humans lived in nature and therefore were to some degree subject to the laws of natural science. But because humans built culture out of nature, their affairs could not be understood on the basis of laws borrowed directly from the study of the nonhuman world. Different from religion, sociology would also be different from science, at least the biological sciences. It would certainly bor row much from science, as indeed it would from religion, but its ultimate calling would be neither prophecy nor taxonomy.

Sociology and religion have settled into a relationship of tolerable coexistence. Since the intellectual turf of both is similar, sociologists soon developed respect for religion, and religious thinkers made their peace with sociology. But if a war ended between the human centeredness of sociology and the God centeredness of religion, no peace exists between the human centeredness of sociology and the challenge to anthropocentrism coming from those who respect nature and other animal species. The contemporary intellectual milieu, which finds little to question in the secularism of sociology, challenges at every turn the sociological separation of culture from nature. It is precisely the commitment to humans and their accomplishments—an outgrowth of the Enlightenment and its faith in powers of