On “The Social Sciences”
“It is not difficult to visualize how the stepping-stones between the natural and social sciences might be arranged and traversed. Consider a particular macrosocial event such as the decay of families in the American inner city, the implosion of rural populations into Mexico City, or middle-class resistance to the prospective introduction of euro currency in France. Social scientists addressing such issues start at the level of conventional analysis. They bring order to the facts, quantifying them in tables, graphs, and statistical interpretations. They examine the historical background. They draw comparison with similar phenomena in other places, examine the constraints and biases of the surrounding culture, and determine whether the genre to which the event belongs is widespread or instead unique to that time and place. From all this information they intuit the causes of the event and they ask: What does the event mean, will it continue, will it occur again?
Most present-day social scientists stop there, and write their reports. With consilient theory, however, future analysts will probe more deeply and finish with greater understanding and predictive power. In the ideal scenario during the decades to come, they will factor in the principles of psychology, and especially social psychology. By these last two words I do not mean the intuition of a single person or a team, however gifted, or folk beliefs about human behavior, however emotionally satisfying. I mean full knowledge from a mature, exact discipline of psychology. In short, the subject usually ignored by social scientists.”
To respond to parts of Consilience I find that I have to be careful to separate how I feel about Wilson’s ideas from whether or not I agree with them. One might think that if I am bothered by an idea it is probably because I disagree with it, but this isn’t always the case. Like in the above passage, for example.
Initially, I was a bit taken back by Wilson’s claim that our current social science and humanities based approaches to solving political and social problems is insufficient. His motion to not just introduce natural science into the search for solutions to social problems but to base the entire process on these sciences strikes me as a little bit frightening. I cannot help but think of the way ecological landscapes are managed by experts. I’m not saying this is inappropriate or that there is any better way of doing this, or that this is bad. It’s just that this process involves a certain amount of objectification, and to do the same thing to human societies (which is already being done, but in an imperfect way, argues Wilson) seems just a little bit scary.
Step 1 is studying and understanding societies, just like with ecological landscapes, and then the natural step 2 would be to do the same thing that we do with natural landscapes — manage them. Now, what is important to remember here before I bring up a worst-case scenario is that most natural resource management is not about intimately managing and regulating the minutiae of forest ecology but letting little critters do their thing. Still, I can’t help but feel Wilson’s dream is just a little bit 1984ish or Brave New Worldish, or that there is at least see a risk of increased technologization of the human organism in some of the projects Wilson oulines.
aaron :: Nov.28.2005 :: Inscape / Landscape class ::