Values, directions, and action

 

Several earlier posts have raised the question of rational life planning. What is involved in orchestrating one's goals and activities in such a way as to rationally create a good life in the fullness of time?

We have seen that there is something wildly unlikely about the idea of a developed, calculated life plan. Here is a different way of thinking about this question, framed about directionality and values rather than goals and outcomes. We might think of life planning in these terms:

• The actor frames a high-level life conception -- how he/she wants to live, what to achieve, what activities are most valued, what kind of person he/she wants to be. It is a work in progress.
• The actor confronts the normal developmental issues of life through limited moments in time: choice of education, choice of spouse, choice of career, strategies within the career space, involvement with family, level of involvement in civic and religious institutions, time and activities spent with friends, ... These are week-to-week and year-to-year choices, some more deliberate than others.
• The actor makes choices in the moment in a way that combines short-term and long-term considerations, reflecting the high-level conception but not dictated by it.
• The actor reviews, assesses, and updates the life conception. Some goals are reformulated; some are adjusted in terms of priority; others are abandoned.

This picture looks quite a bit different from more architectural schemes for creating and implementing a life plan considered in earlier posts, including the view that Rawls offers for conceiving of a rational plan of life. Instead of modeling life planning after a vacation trip assisted by an AAA TripTik (turn-by-turn instructions for how to reach your goal), this scheme looks more like the preparation and planning that might have guided a great voyage of exploration in the sixteenth century. There were no maps, the destination was unknown, the hazards along the way could only be imagined. But there were a few guiding principles of navigation -- "Keep making your way west," "Sail around the biggest storms," "Strive to keep reserves for unanticipated disasters," "Maintain humane relations with the crew." And, with a modicum of good fortune, these maxims might be enough to lead to discovery.

This scheme is organized around directionality and regular course correction, rather than a blueprint for arriving at a specific destination. And it appears to be all around a more genuine understanding of what is involved in making reflective life choices. Fundamentally this conception involves having in the present a vision of the dimensions of an extended life that is specifically one's own -- a philosophy, a scheme of values, a direction-setting self understanding, and the basics needed for making near-term decisions chosen for their compatibility with the guiding life philosophy. And it incorporates the idea of continual correction and emendation of the plan, as life experience brings new values and directions into prominence.

The advantage of this conception of rational life planning is that it is not heroic in its assumptions about the scope of planning and anticipation. It is a scheme that makes sense of the situation of the person in the limited circumstances of a particular point in time. It doesn't require that the individual have a comprehensive grasp of the whole -- the many contingencies that will arise, the balancing of goods that need to be adjusted in thought over the whole of the journey, the tradeoffs that are demanded across multiple activities and outcomes, and the specifics of the destination. And yet it permits the person to travel through life by making choices that conform in important ways to the high-level conception that guides him or her. And somehow, it brings to mind the philosophy of life offered by those great philosophers of life, Montaigne and Lucretius.

Guest post by Gianluca Pozzoni on political entities

Gianluca Pozzoni is a PhD Candidate in Political Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. His interests span the foundations of the social sciences, and he has written on Marxism, methodological individualism, and the status of social structures. Thank you, Gianluca, for contributing this stimulating guest post.

BY GIANLUCA POZZONI

Daniel Little’s recent post on Assemblage theory as heuristic raises important and thought-provoking issues for social theorizing.

As Little understands it, Manuel DeLanda’s theory put forth in A New Philosophy of Society can be seen as a manifesto for non-essentialist and non-reductionist social theories. In this view, social entities do not have a fixed place in a vertical hierarchy that moves from the building blocks of the social world (e.g. agents) all the way up to large-scale structures (e.g. global markets).

Instead, the components of the social world differ according to the “assemblages” under consideration. So, for instance, organizations are assemblages of people; nation-states are assemblages of cities, people, and organizations; cities are assemblages of people, organizations, as well as buildings and infrastructures; and so on. Thus understood, assemblage theory allows for no basic constituents of the social because it does away with the very idea of society as a structured totality with a “basis” and a “summit”.

This seems to go in the direction of a “flat social ontology” as described by Daniel Little here. A flat model of the social reality would position actors and their interaction networks (e.g. organizations) all at the same level, without further assumptions as to how some causal powers are “emergent” on others (if at all).

This perspective has undeniable attractiveness. For one thing, it is theoretically parsimonious. It does away with somewhat obscure or ill-defined notions of “emergence” while at the same time allowing for aggregate social entities to be irreducible to their components, for instance by assuming that they have at least an independent functioning. Furthermore, it does not presuppose an abstract layering of the social world, let alone one metaphysically pre-ordered into “higher” and “lower” levels.

Nonetheless, Little has already detailed some limitations of the flat-ontology perspective. For Little, conceiving social reality as flat ultimately boils down to assuming an ontology like the one associated with spare versions of methodological individualism.

Here I wish to point out a different problematic aspect of this approach.

Even setting aside the depth ordering of social aggregates, social theory often makes use of broad categories that help group together heterogeneous classes of phenomena for explanatory purposes. These are, for instance, “the polity”, “the economy”, “the military”, and the like.

What ontological status do these categories have? Let us consider politics. In his Contentious Performances (2008), Charles Tilly writes:

We enter the realm of politics when we interact with agents of governments, either dealing with them directly or engaging in activities bearing on governmental rights, regulations, and interests. (p. 6)

However restrictive this definition may be, it is able to identify the political domain in terms of the typology of networks involved – namely, governmental institutions. Accordingly, Tilly et al. (2001) could use it to group together and explain phenomena as diverse as the Watergate scandal and the Mau Mau rebellion in 1950s Kenya under the common label of “contentious politics”.

In a layered social ontology, governmental institutions can be seen as making up a level of the social in its own right. As Little puts it:

For example, might the state be a level-2 entity, in that it encompasses organizations and individuals and it possesses new causal properties not present at level 1? In principle this seems possible. The state is a complex network of organizations and individuals. And it is logically possible that new causal powers emerge that depend on both base and level 1, but that do not require reduction to those lower-level properties.

If this can be granted, politics can be ontologically grounded onto a level of the social. Specifically, we may confine political ontology to all phenomena that involve government-level causal powers.

Flat social ontologies, however, reject the very notion of “levels” of the social. At best, compound social entities exist as relations among their components; they may well have an independent functioning (link), but no “higher-level” or “emergent” causal powers. So do states, governments, and the like.

What then would a flat political ontology look like? Perhaps it may be helpful to refer to Adrian Leftwich’s distinction in What is Politics: The Activity and its Study between politics as “process” and politics as “arena”:

The latter, or arena, approach tends to have a narrower and sharper focus (normally the state and the institutions of government and local government – sometimes, in a more comparative context, including kings, chiefs or emperors and their courts and their relations with the public). (p. 13)

The theory of politics as arena seems to fit quite nicely the stratified approach to social ontology. The arena metaphor suggests that governmental institutions – national or otherwise – make up a relatively autonomous set of interactions quite distinct from other forms of interaction. This can be supported from an ontological point of view by assuming that such institutions are endowed with causal powers that are all situated at one specific level.

Leftwich contrasts the arena model of politics with the idea of politics as “a general process [or set of processes – G.P.] which is not confined to certain institutional arenas or sites” (p. 14). This dynamic idea may seem appealing to those who do not wish to build political ontology as a “regional ontology”. The processual definition of politics does not make reference to the causal powers of any specific entities and therefore does not necessarily require an ontological layering of them.

However, the obvious question then arises as to what makes processes political as opposed to, say, economic. This question seems to be of crucial relevance if the category of politics is to serve explanatory purposes. As Leftwich puts it:

… does such an encompassing view mean that every human interaction is political in some respect? If so, and if politics is thus so broadly defined, what is left that is distinctive about it? (p. 14)

A catch-all definition of politics, then, seems to be redundant and to have little explanatory use. Unfortunately, the flat theory of society alone hardly provides any guidance for further theorizing along this line.

[Query from Dan Little in response to the final question from Leftwich: Is it possible that the difference between economic and political processes is not after all an ontological difference, but rather a pragmatic difference of classification for us? In other words, it is not a fact about the world but about our interests that "constitution" and "wage labor" are classified as "political/legal" and "economic".] 

Causal diagrams and causal mechanisms

There is a long history of the use of directed causal diagrams to represent hypotheses about causation. Can the mathematics and graphical systems created for statistical causal modeling be adapted to represent and evaluate hypotheses about causal mechanisms and outcomes?

In the causal modeling literature the structure of a causal hypothesis is something like this: variable T increases/ decreases the probability of the occurrence of outcome E. This is the causal relevance criterion described by Wesley Salmon in Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World. It is a fundamentally statistical understanding of causality.

Here is a classic causal path model by Blau and Duncan indicating the relationships among a number of causal factors in bringing about an outcome of interest -- "respondent's first job".

This construction aims at joining a qualitative hypothesis about the causal relations among a set of factors with a quantitative measurements of the correlations and conditional probabilities that support these causal relations. The whole construction often takes its origin in a multivariate regression model.

Aage Sørensen describes the underlying methodological premise of quantitative causal research in these terms in his contribution to Frontiers of Sociology (Annals of the International Institute of Sociology Vol. 11):

Understanding the association between observed variables is what most of us believe research is about. However, we rarely worry about the functional form of the relationship. The main reason is that we rarely worry about how we get from our ideas about how change is brought about, or the mechanisms of social processes, to empirical observation. In other words, sociologists rarely model mechanisms explicitly. In the few cases where they do model mechanisms, they are labeled mathematical sociologists, not a very large or important specialty in sociology. (370)

My question here is whether this scheme of representation of causal relationships and the graphical schemes that have developed around it are useful for the analytics of causal mechanisms.

The background metaphysics assumed in the causal modeling literature is Humean and "causal-factor" based; such-and-so factor increases the probability of occurrence of an outcome or an intermediate variable, the simultaneous occurrence of A and B increase the probability of the outcome, etc. Quoting Peter Hedstrom on causal modeling:

In the words of Lazarsfeld (1955: 124-5), "If we have a relationship between x and y; and if for any antecedent test factor the partial relationships between x and y do not disappear, then the original relationship should be called a causal one." (Dissecting the Social: On the Principles of Analytical Sociology)

The current iteration of causal modeling is a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Felix Elwert provides an accessible introduction to directed acyclic graphs in his contribution to Handbook of Causal Analysis for Social Research (link). Here is a short description provided by Elwert:

DAGs are visual representations of qualitative causal assumptions: They encode researchers’ expert knowledge and beliefs about how the world works. Simple rules then map these causal assumptions onto statements about probability distributions: They reveal the structure of associations and independencies that could be observed if the data were generated according to the causal assumptions encoded in the DAG. This translation between causal assumptions and observable associations underlies the two primary uses for DAGs. First, DAGs can be used to prove or disprove the identification of causal effects, that is, the possibility of computing causal effects from observable data. Since identification is always conditional on the validity of the assumed causal model, it is fortunate that the second main use of DAGs is to present those assumptions explicitly and reveal their testable implications, if any. (246)

A DAG can be interpreted as a non-parametric structural equation model, according to Elwert. (Non-parametric here means simply that we do not assume that the data are distributed normally.) Elwert credits the development of the logic of DAGs to Judea Pearl and Peter Spirtes, along with other researchers within the causal modeling community.

Johannes Textor and a team of researchers have implemented DAGitty, a platform for creating and using DAGs in appropriate fields, including especially epidemiology (link). A crucial feature of DAGitty is that it is not solely a graphical program for drawing graphs of possible causal relationships; rather, it embodies an underlying logic which generates expected statistical relationships among variables given the stipulated relationships on the graph. Here is a screenshot from the platform:

The question to consider here is whether there is a relationship between the methodology of causal mechanisms and the causal theory reflected in these causal diagrams. 

It is apparent that the underlying ontological assumptions associated with the two approaches are quite different. Causal mechanisms theory is generally associated with a realist approach to the social world, and generally rejects the Humean theory of causation. The causal diagram approach, by contrast, is premised on the Humean and statistical approach to causation.  A causal mechanisms hypothesis is not fundamentally evaluated in terms of the statistical relationships among a set of variables; whereas a standard causal model is wholly intertwined with the mathematics of conditional correlation.

Consider a few examples. Here is a complex graphical representation of a process understood in terms of causal mechanisms from McGinnes and Elandy, "Unintended Behavioural Consequences of Publishing Performance Data: Is More Always Better?" (link):

Plainly this model is impossible to evaluate statistically by attempting to measure each of the variables; instead, the researchers proceed by validating the individual mechanisms identified here as well as the direction of influence they have on other intermediate outcomes. The outcome of interest is "quality of learning" at the center of the graph; and the diagram attempts to represent the complex structure of causal influences that exist among several dozen mechanisms or causal factors.

Here is another example of a causal mechanisms path diagram, this time representing the causal system involved in drought and mental health by Vins, Bell, Saha, and Hess (link).

Here too the model is not offered as a statistical representation of covariance among variables; rather, it is a hypothetical sketch of the factors which play in mechanisms leading from drought to depression and anxiety in a population. And the assessment of the model should not take the form of a statistical evaluation (a non-parametric structural equation model), but rather a piecemeal verification of the validity of the specific mechanisms cited. (John Gerring argues that this is a major weakness in causal mechanisms theory, however, in "Causal Mechanisms? Yes, But ..." (link).)

It seems, therefore, that the superficial similarity between a causal model graph (a DAG) and a causal mechanisms diagram is only skin-deep. Fundamentally the two approaches make very different assumptions about both ontology (what a causal relationship is) and epistemology (how we should empirically evaluate a causal claim). So it seems unlikely that it will be fruitful for causal-mechanisms theorists to attempt to adapt methods like DAGs to represent the causal claims they want to advance and evaluate.

Assemblage theory as heuristic

In A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity Manuel DeLanda takes up one of Deleuze's key ideas. This is the idea of "assemblage", and it has been discussed here several times previously (link). (See DeLanda's extensive EGS lecture on assemblage theory below.) Here is a preliminary discussion of assemblage in New Philosophy of Society.

Today, the main theoretical alternative to organic [Hegelian] totalities is what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze calls assemblages, wholes characterized by relations of exteriority. These relations imply, first of all, that a component part of an assemblage may be detached from it and plugged into a different assemblage in which its interactions are different. In other words, the exteriority of relations implies a certain autonomy for the terms they relate, or as Deleuze puts it, it implies that 'a relation may change without the terms changing'. Relations of exteriority also imply that the properties of the component parts can never explain the relations which constitute a whole, that is, 'relations do not have as their causes established ...' although they may be caused by the exercise of a component's capacities. In fact, the reason why the properties of a whole cannot be reduced to those of its parts is that they are the result not of any aggregation of the components' own properties but of the actual exercise of their capacities. These capacities do depend on a component's properties but cannot be reduced to them since they involve reference to the properties of other interacting entities. Relations of exteriority guarantee that assemblages may be taken apart while at the same time allowing that the interactions between parts may result in a true synthesis. (10-11)

In addition to the exteriority of relations, the concept of assemblage is defined along two dimensions. One dimension or axis defines the variable roles which an assemblage's components may play, from a purely material role at one extreme of the axis, to a purely expressive role at the other extreme.... The other dimension defines variable processes in which these components become involved and that either stabilize the identity of an assemblage, by increasing its degree of internal homogeneity or the degree of sharpness of its boundaries, or destabilize it. (12)

In an illuminating discussion of some of Fernand Braudel's comments about medieval villages, DeLanda writes:

This brief description yields a very clear picture of a series of differently scaled assemblages, some of which are component parts of others which, in turn, become parts of even larger ones. (18)

What does this mean in practical terms? As a first approximation, the core idea of assemblage is that social things (cities, structures, ideologies) are composed of an overlapping and contingent collection of a heterogeneous set of social activities and practices. The relations among these activities and practices are contingent, and the properties of the composite thing -- the assemblage -- are likewise a contingent and "emergent" sum of the properties of the component threads. The composite has no "essence" -- just a contingent and changeable set of properties. Here is the thumbnail description I provided in the earlier post:

Fundamentally the idea is that there does not exist a fixed and stable ontology for the social world that proceeds from "atoms" to "molecules" to "materials". Rather, social formations are assemblages of other complex configurations, and they in turn play roles in other, more extended configurations. (link)

Here I want to ask a very simple preliminary question: What is the intellectual role of assemblage theory for sociology and for the philosophy of social science? Is assemblage theory a substantive social theory? Is it a guide to research and methodology? Or is it an ontology?

I think we do best to understand assemblage theory as a high-level and abstract ontological framework, an abstract description of the nature of the social world. It highlights the pervasive fact of  the heterogeneous nature of phenomena in the social world. But it does not provide a substantive theory of what those component threads are; this is for concrete sociological theory to work out. Unlike rational choice theory, Marxist theory, or pragmatist action theory -- each of which rests upon a substantive core set of ideas about the fundamentals of social action and structure -- assemblage theory is neutral with respect to these topics.

So assemblage theory is not a guide to the constituents of the social world; it is not similar to atomic theory or the Mendeleev table of the elements. However, I believe the theory is indeed methodologically helpful. Exploring assemblage theory is a potentially valuable activity for social scientists and philosophers. This is because the theory encourages us to study component systems and underlying social processes rather than looking for unified theories of large unified social objects. In this way it gives value and direction to multi-theoretical, inter-disciplinary approaches.

Moreover, this approach encourages social scientists to arrive at partial explanations of social features by discerning the dynamics of some of the components. These accounts are necessarily incomplete, because they ignore many other constituents of the assembled whole. And yet they are potentially explanatory, when the dynamics being studied have the ability to generate trans-assemblage characteristics (continuity, crisis). (This seems to have some resonance with Roy Bhaskar's idea that the social world is an "open" system of causation; A Realist Theory of Science.)

So assemblage theory is not a substantive social theory. It doesn't prescribe any specific ideas about the components, layers, laminations, or threads out of which social phenomena are composed. Instead, it offers a vision of how we should think of all such constructions in the social world. We should be skeptical about the appearance of unity and coherence in an extended social entity (e.g. the Justice Department or the Muslim world), and look instead to discover some of the heterogeneous and independent processes that underlie the surface appearance. And it gives ontological support for some of the theoretical inclinations of comparative historical sociology (Tilly, Steinmetz, Mann): look for the diversity of social arrangements and the context-dependent conjunctural causes that underlie complex historical events.

Here is a lecture by DeLanda on assemblage theory.

(I chose the illustration of a circus at the top because a circus illustrates some of the layered compositionality that assemblage theory postulates: multiple agents playing multiple roles; transportation activities and business procedures; marketing ploys and aesthetic creativity; and many things happening in the three rings at the same time.)

Meanings and mechanisms

image: photographs of Martin Luther King, Jr. at the University of Michigan, 1962

There are two large categories of factors that are fundamental to understanding social processes -- meanings and mechanisms. I’ve given a preponderance of attention to the importance of social causal mechanisms within historical and social explanation (link). We explain a social outcome when we identify the social mechanisms that brought it about.

It is crucial to bear in mind always, however, that there is a complementary dimension to social life and social process — the pervasive fact that people act within frames of meanings and interpretations that they bring to their social relationships and their social worlds. Human action is meaningful action, and we can't make sense of action without attributing meanings, intentions, and frameworks of understanding and desire to the individuals who constitute a social encounter. 

This is not a new insight, of course; it was fundamental to the hermeneutic approach to social life, including the influential thinking of Wilhelm Dilthey (Introduction to the Human Sciences). But the classical hermeneutic approach tended to under-value the importance of causation and mechanisms in the social world; whereas it is clear today that both mechanisms and meanings are inseparably embedded within the social world.

It is in fact misleading to portray mechanisms and meanings as complementary “dimensions” of social change. Rather, we might say that mechanisms depend upon meanings, for the simple reason that mechanisms depend upon actions, and actions presuppose meanings. This is the thrust of my emphasis on "actor-centered" approaches to sociology (link). The actor-centered perspective takes seriously the meanings, values, cognitive and practical frameworks that individuals bring to their interactions in the social world, and it urges social scientists and historians to improve upon their current theories of the actor.

Institutions and organizations are often invoked as causal factors or mechanisms in the production of important social outcomes. But institutions always work by influencing the behavior of the individual actors whom they touch; so either explicitly or implicitly we need to have a theory of the actor's mental frameworks if we are to understand the causal power of institutions to influence outcomes. 

If we want to know why there is grade inflation in universities, we need to refer to some of the institutional mechanisms that influence grading practices (causal influences!), but we also need to refer to the goals and meanings that participants bring to the interaction between students, professors, and appeals committees. Sometimes those mental frameworks are trivial and manifest -- students want higher grades for reasons of career success as well as personal validation, faculty want to function in accordance with their responsibilities as neutral assessors of academic performance while at the same time demonstrating empathy for the needs of their students. These interlocking intentions and desires lead to a dynamic movement of average grades over time -- sometimes higher, once in a while lower. But sometimes the underlying mental frameworks that drive important social outcomes are more obscure -- for example, the disaffection and doubt that leads inner city minority students to despise high school. 

Think for a moment about how meanings and intentional actions give rise to a common social mechanism, hate-based nationalist mobilization. A few strident leaders formulate a message of hate against a group -- currently, MENA immigrants in various European countries; they find means of gaining access to national media (through provocative demonstrations); and they extend their influence from the tiny percentage of racist extremists ex ante to a sizable percentage of the more moderate population. How does this work? Why do ordinary non-racist citizens fall prey to the hateful messages of the extreme right? Presumably a convincing answer will depend on the specifics of the communications strategies and messages conveyed by the nationalist party, interlocking with an astute reading of the fears and suppressed prejudices of the majority population. In other words, the mechanism of racist mobilization depends on a substratum of political emotion and belief that can be adroitly manipulated by the racist group and its leaders.

Philosophers sometimes distinguish meanings and causes as subjective and objective.(This is implied in Georg Henrik von Wright's classic book Explanation and Understanding.) But this is not a useful way of thinking about the two categories. Meanings are often fully objective -- in the sense that we can investigate them empirically and they can be demonstrated to have stable and enduring effects in the world. And social causes have an element of subjectivity built into them, for the simple reason that social causes always invoke the subjective states of mind of the actors who make them up. It isn't even accurate to say that meanings exist solely within the actor, whereas causes exist outside the actor. The meanings that Weber identified in the notion of the Protestant Ethic are indeed embodied in a population of individuals (inward); but they are pervasive and influential on those same individuals (outward). So the Protestant Ethic is both an inner state of mind and an external and coercive set of values and beliefs.

(The photos of Dr. King above are relevant in this context because the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s offers ample examples of meanings and mechanisms in the evolving mobilizations, legislation, cycles of Jim Crow violence, and emerging ideas about Black Power within the African-American community.)

China's developmental resettlements

The human costs of China's Three Gorges dam project are reasonably well known. Since construction began in 1994 between 1.3 million and two million people have been involuntarily resettled to higher ground and to other provinces. The project has created massive environmental hazards for China (link), and has also created a gigantic human cost among the families and communities who were forcibly relocated.

Less well known are earlier waves of "hydraulic refugees" along the Yellow River beginning with construction of the Sanmenxia Dam in 1954 (completed in 1960). And subsequent water control projects through the next several decades have created yet other large-scale displacements along the Yellow River across north-central China. The movements of peoples created by these major projects of post-Revolution-era civil and social engineering have continued to reverberate until the present.

image: Yellow River topography

In the Sanmenxia Dam case the total number of forced migrants is probably lower than the Three Gorges Dam project, though reliable statistics are not readily available. Some estimates of displaced persons created by the Sanmenxia Dam cite 300,000 migrants. But the longterm effects on individuals, families, and communities have been perhaps even more severe. The project was designed without strong geological or hydrological expertise, and it has failed fundamentally to achieve the intended goals of the project. (Journalist Xie Chaoping was arrested in 2010 for writing a sober appraisal of the failures of Sanmenxia in The Great Relocation; link.)

French scholar Florence Padovani has studied the topic of involuntary relocation in China in detail. Her contribution to Forced Migration and Global Processes: A View from Forced Migration Studies provides quite a bit of factual background on the important hydraulic relocations. Here is Padovani's definition of forced migration:

Forced migration, as it is understood here, involves populations which are uprooted by development programs. These individuals are internally displaced; even when they move thousands of kilometers away from their birthplace, they remain inside national borders. (92)

And here is her summary description of the relocation of population for the SMD project:

The way resettlement was implemented in the SMD case is typical of the way the government at that time considered people to be displaced. The authorities, from top to bottom, adopted the same line of action in a unified rhetoric. As for the resettlers, they did manage to raise their voices through very traditional ways, such as petitioning the central government ..., but also through street demonstrations and even physical fights. ...  We can summarize resettlement policy during the revolutionary period by the following points: First, the vast majority of displaced people were rural dwellers, mainly farmers. Second, they were not involved in preliminary assessment projects and were informed of the government's plan at the last moment. Host communities were not involved in resettlement plans either, so some serious conflicts erupted when newcomers settled on their land. And third, displaced people were not well compensated and their relocation was not well planned, leading to their impoverishment. (97)

Padovani's ethnographic study of Three Gorges Dam emigrants in the Shanghai region sheds much light on the human consequences of forced migration in China (link). This research provides a report of interviews with a few dozen migrants in the Shanghai region.The great majority of displaced people are farmers. So their life prospects following a move are bleak. They need access to land, secure housing, and access to unskilled employment. And none of these  are in ready supply in most destinations. More intangibly, they need access to kinship networks and mutual aid societies of the kind that were available in their home communities. But forced migration has thoroughly shattered those sources of mutual aid. So the lives of these million-plus migrants have not been made more hospitable as a result of the project. 

The disintegration of the social network due to forced migration means that the 'domestic order" (local and personal ties), "civic order" (equality and solidarity), and "market order" (economic performance) have to be rebuilt. (107)

image: The Chinese Dust Bowl, The Walrus (link)

Yellow River communities have experienced another wave of resettlement in the past thirty years, this time along the upper reaches of the river in Gansu and Inner Mongolia, in response to the combined pressures of development and desertification. Irrigated farming communities have been uprooted multiple times as local authorities have sought to make use of scarce land and water resources. (Benoit Aquin's photo essay on this region in The Walrus is a great exposure of these dustbowl conditions.)

Reading the story of these massive dam projects and their state-sponsored programs of involuntary resettlement illustrates some of the perverse processes of development that James Scott describes in Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Scott doesn't consider modern Chinese examples, but he finds a raft of critical problems of environmental impact, social disruption, and human suffering associated with major water projects in other countries. His summary thoughts seem to apply to China's development experience as well:

I believe that many of the most tragic episodes of state development in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries originate in a particularly pernicious combination of three elements. The first is the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society, an aspiration that we have already seen at work in scientific forestry, but one raised to a far more comprehensive and ambitious level.... The second element is the unrestrained use of the power of the modern state as an instrument for achieving these designs. The third element is a weakened or prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. (88-89)

(Here is an earlier post on Scott's critique of state-driven modernization projects; link.)

The Sanmenxia Dam is an unmistakeable failure; siltification and massive pollution have turned out to be irresolvable problems along the length of the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. Experts are now calling for the removal of the dam altogether. There are very strong indications that the TGD is likewise an environmental and social disaster, though this is still not completely resolved. And for the several million people who were forcibly relocated, the Three Gorges Dam has often turned out to be a catastrophic turning point in their personal lives.

Graphing the English-speaking university curriculum

Here is a fascinating and ambitious "big data" project that aims at probing and mapping the structure of the disaggregated university curriculum in the United States and other English-speaking countries. The project is called the Open Syllabus Project and is hosted at Columbia University with a team including Joe Kraganis (project director), David McClure (Stanford University Library), Dnnis Tenen, Jonathan Stray, Alex Gil, and Ted Byfield, along with others.  The project has collected over a million syllabi that are openly accessible on university websites; it has then created a database of the books and articles included in these syllabi. There are currently 934K items in the database of texts.

The project provides two basic tools. First, it allows users to search the database by title and see its frequency and co-references. It is also possible to filter by field, institution, state, and country; for each title it is possible to find the other titles most commonly associated with it in the filtered field of syllabi.

One immediate interest in this project is to see the top 10 or twenty titles overall and in various fields. Overall The Elements of Style, the Republic, the Communist Manifesto, Biology, and Frankenstein are the top five titles. In sociology the top five include Aristotle's Ethics, JS Mill's Utilitarianism, Plato's Republic, Descartes' Meditations, and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In politics the top five include Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Hobbes' Leviathan, Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Aristotle's Politics, and Machiavelli's Prince.

These listings give a somewhat musty feel to the collective curriculum -- the most common titles are "classics" at least 150 years old. (Sam Huntington's Civilizations book and Ken Waltz's Theory of International Politics are the only 20th century works of political science in the politics field top ten. Ranks 11-20 are more contemporary.) This might give the impression that the typical syllabus is dominated by the classics -- not very encouraging for anyone who thinks that new ideas are needed to solve contemporary problems. But that impression is probably a statistical illusion. If the canon is relatively small (perhaps 100 titles) and the more contemporary and topical literature is very large (10,000 titles) then it is likely enough that items in the canon will show up more frequently, if only because there are lots of introductory courses in which those titles are used. There will be a broad spread of the more contemporary titles over the large number of syllabi, with the result that only a few will break through into the top rank.

Here is an example -- my own Varieties of Social Explanation.

VSE appears in 62 syllabi in the database, and it is most commonly paired with Kuhn, Elster, Taylor, Lijphart, Fearon, and Winch. The syllabi including VSE break down by discipline like this: sociology (23), politics (5), economics (5), psychology (4), philosophy (1), other (28). There are 200 titles with which it is paired in at least four syllabi. Some of these would fit handily into a philosophy of social science course; others are more distant.

It is also interesting to use the search tool to gauge the prevalence of various topics within the curriculum. Here is the search for titles that include the word "Power"; quite evidently the topic of power is highly important in the university curriculum. Foucault heads the list, with 1,774 citations. 8th on the list is Steven Lukes' Power: A Radical View. (The high rank for Lukes' book doesn't surprise me; the second-most trafficked post on Understanding Society is an entry on Lukes' theories of power; link.)

Intriguing as the search function is, the most interesting tool currently available through the project is an interactive network graph of the 10,000 most frequently cited titles.

The methodology is not fully explained on the website, but it appears that items are assigned a metric to other titles based on the frequency of cross-reference between them. It results in an intriguing map of knowledge across the galaxy of disciplines. It is possible to zoom in on any region; below is a snapshot within the social science cluster.

It is possible to pick out the classics in the field -- Durkheim, Weber, Mead, Dewey, Goffman, Bourdieu, Freire -- in this cluster of titles. But this should not be equated with importance or influence. One's eye may be drawn to the large central references in this graph -- Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example, and these may appear as stars around which other items revolve. But equally interesting are the titles on the periphery  and in the interstices -- titles which occur with a measurable frequency within the corpus of syllabi but which have relatively fewer affinities with other titles. And in fact many specialists in the various fields would probably find the most innovative works in their discipline on the periphery rather than in the core of these clusters.

This project is a great example of a big-data problem in the sociology of knowledge. The very hard question now is what to make of it; what light does it shed on the structure of university instruction and knowledge conveyance? What analytical questions need to be posed to this data set?

Social Science History Association 2016 CFP

SSHA CALL FOR PAPERS

Macrohistorical Dynamics Network

41st Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association
Chicago IL 17-20 November 2016
Submission Deadline: 20 February 2016

"Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World"

We invite you to take part in Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) panels of the 41th annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 17-20, 2016 in Chicago.  For more information on the meeting as well as the call for proposals, please refer to the SSHA website:

www.ssha.org

Here is the call for proposals:

http://www.ciser.cornell.edu/SSHA/SSHA_CFP_2016.pdf

The deadline for paper and/or panel submissions is February 20, 2016.

The members of the Social Science History Association share a common interest in interdisciplinary and systematic approaches to historical research, and many of us find the SSHA one of the most stimulating conferences that we attend.

The thematic topic of the 2016 annual meeting is “Knowledge in an Interdisciplinary World” – a theme that works very well with the research interests of many of the scholars involved in the Macrohistorical Dynamics network.

Macrohistorical Dynamics (MHD) is an interdisciplinary social science research field that focuses on problems of large-scale, comparative historical inquiry. Contributors to the field have brought perspective on a wide variety of problem areas, including macro- and historical sociology; comparative histories; world history; world-system analysis; comparative study of civilizations; philosophy of history; and studies of long-term socio-ecological, technological, demographic, cultural, and political trends and transformations.  The Macrohistorical Dynamics network brings a rigorous perspective to bear on questions having to do with “large” history.

Possible topics that illustrate some of the general themes of Macrohistorical Dynamics include …

• Comparative Methods in Macrohistory
• Large-scale historical causes: climate, population, geography
• Cultural and National Identities in Large-scale Historical Change
• Theory in Macro-history: Are There Successful Macrosociological Theories?
• Macro-, Meso-, Micro- in Historical Explanations
• Empires and Peoples
• Globalization and World Cities
• Social Evolution and Systemic Transformations in World History

The list of MHD panel themes for 2016 is open, and we encourage you to submit proposals for paper topics or panel themes.

The MHD network will be able to host at least six panels in 2016 and will also be able to place additional papers through co-sponsorship with other networks (for example, with History/Methods, Politics, Culture, State-Society, Historical Geography, etc.).

SSHA requests that submissions be made by means of its web conference management system. Paper title, brief abstract, and contact information should be submitted on the site www.ssha.org, where the general SSHA 2016 call for papers is also available.  (If you haven’t used the system previously you will need to create an account, which is a very simple process.)  The direct link for submissions is now open for submissions: 

http://prd.sshaconference.org/

SSHA has set up a mechanism for networks to share papers, so even if you have a solo paper, send the idea along.  It is possible and useful to identify a paper not only by the MHD network, but also by some other co-sponsoring networks--for example, Theory/Methods, Historical Geography, Politics, Culture, Economics, etc.  Co-sponsored panels and papers are encouraged by the SSHA Program Committee as a means of broadening the visibility of the various networks.

NOTE: There is an SSHA rule concerning book sessions.  For a book session to proceed, the author (or at least one of multiple authors) MUST be present.  Proposals for book sessions should only be submitted if there is high confidence that the author will be able to travel to Chicago November 17-20, 2016.

What parts of the social world admit of explanation?

image: John Dos Passos

When Galileo, Newton, or Lavoisier confronted the natural world as “scientists,” they had in mind reasonably clear bodies of empirical phenomena that required explanation: the movements of material objects, the motions of the planets, the facts about combustion. They worked on the hope that nature conformed to a relatively small number of “fundamental” laws which could be discovered through careful observation and analysis. The success of classical physics and chemistry is the result. In a series of areas of research throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries  it turned out that there were strong governing laws of nature — mechanics, gravitational attraction, conservation of matter and energy, electromagnetic propagation — which served to explain a vast range of empirically given natural phenomena. The “blooming, buzzing confusion” of the natural world could be reduced to the operation of a small number of forces and entities.

This finding was not metaphysically or logically inevitable. Nature might have been less regular and less unified than it turned out to be. Natural causes could have fluctuated in their effects and could have had more complex interactions with other causes than has turned out to be the case. Laws of nature might have varied over time and space in unpredictable ways. So the success of the project of the natural sciences is both contingent and breathtakingly powerful. There are virtually no bodies of empirical phenomena for which we lack even a good guess about the underlying structure and explanation of these phenomena; and these areas of ignorance seem to fall at the sub-atomic and the super-galactic levels. 

The situation in the social world is radically different, much as positivistically minded social scientists have wanted to think otherwise. There are virtually no social processes that have the features of predictability and smoothness that are displayed by natural phenomena. Rather, we can observe social processes of unlimited granularity unfolding over time and space, intermingling with other processes; leading sometimes to crashes and exponential accelerations; and sometimes morphing into something completely different.

Imagine that we think of putting together a slow-motion data graphic representing the creation, growth, and articulation of a great city — Chicago, Mexico City, or Cairo, for example. We will need to represent many processes within this graphic: spatial configuration, population size, ethnic and racial composition, patterns of local cooperation and conflict, the emergence and evolution of political authority, the configuration of a transportation and logistics system, the effects of war and natural disaster, the induced transformation of the surrounding hinterland, and the changing nature of relationships with external political powers, to name a few. And within the population itself we will want to track various characteristics of interest: literacy levels, school attendance, nutrition and health, political and social affiliation, gender and racial attitudes and practices, cultural and religious practices, taste and entertainment, and processes of migration and movement. We might think of this effort as a massive empirical project, to provide a highly detailed observational history of the city over a very long period of time. (Cronon’s Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West is a treatment of the city of Chicago over the period of about a century with some of these aspirations.) 

But now what? How can we treat this massive volume of data “scientifically”? And can we aspire to the ambition of showing how these various processes derive from a small number of more basic forces? Does the phenomenon of the particular city admit of a scientific treatment along the lines of Galileo, Newton, or Lavoisier?

The answer is resoundingly no. Such a goal displays a fundamental misunderstanding of the social world. Social things and processes at every level are the contingent and interactive result of the activities of individual actors. Individuals are influenced by the social environment in which they live; so there is no reductionist strategy available here, reducing social properties to purely individual properties. But the key words here are “contingent” and “interactive”. There is no God’s-eye answer to the question, why did Chicago become the metropolis of the central North American continent rather than St. Louis? Instead, there is history — the choices made by early railroad investors and route designers, the availability of timber in Michigan but not Missouri, a particularly effective group of early city politicians in Chicago compared to St. Louis, the comparative influence on the national scene of Illinois and Missouri. These are all contingent and path-dependent factors deriving from the situated choices of actors at various levels of decision making throughout the century. And when we push down into lower levels of the filigree of social activity, we find equally contingent processes. Why did Motown come to dominate musical culture for a few decades in Detroit and beyond? Why did professional football take off but professional soccer did not? Why are dating patterns different in Silicon Valley than Iowa City? None of these questions have law-driven answers. Instead, in every case the answer will be a matter of pathway-tracing, examining the contingent turning points that brought us to the situation in question.

What this argument is meant to make clear is that the social world is not like the natural world. It is fundamentally “historical” (meaning that the present is unavoidably influenced by the past); contingent (meaning that events could have turned out differently); and causally plural (meaning that there is no core set of “social forces” that jointly serve to drive all social change). 

It also means that there is no “canonical” description of the social world. With classical physics we had the idea that nature could be described as a set of objects with mass and momentum; electromagnetic radiation with properties of frequency and velocity; atoms and molecules with fixed properties and forces; etc. But this is not the case with the social world. New kinds of processes come and go, and it is always open to a social researcher to identify a new trend or process and to attempt to make sense of this process in its context. 

I don’t mean to suggest that social phenomena do not admit of explanation at all. We can provide mid-level explanations of a vast range of social patterns and events, from the denuding of Michigan forests in the 1900s to the incidence of first names over time. What we cannot do is to provide a general theory that suffices as an explanatory basis for identifying and explaining all social phenomena. The social sciences are at their best when they succeed in identifying mechanisms that underlie familiar social patterns. And these mechanisms are most credible when they are actor-centered, in the sense that they illuminate the ways that individual actors’ behavior is influenced or generated so as to produce the outcome in question. 

In short: the social realm is radically different from the natural realm, and it is crucial for social scientists to have this in mind as they formulate their research and theoretical ideas.

(I used the portrait of Dos Passos above for this post because of the fragmented and plural way in which he seeks to represent a small slice of social reality in U.S.A. This works better than a single orderly narrative of events framed by the author's own view of the period.)

Deliberation, rationality, and reasoning

Recent posts have raised questions about formulating a rational plan of life. This way of putting the question highlights "rationality," which has the connotation of short-term, one-off decision making. And this implication plainly does not fit the problem of life planning very well -- as noted in the two prior posts on this topic. Living a life is more like the making of a great sculpture than it is planning a Napoleonic military campaign. But what if we shifted the terms of the question and asked instead, what is involved in being deliberative and reflective about the direction of one's life? Does this give more room for bringing the idea of rationality into the idea of a life plan?

Being deliberative invokes the idea of considering one's goals reflectively and in comparison, considering strategies and actions that might serve to bring about the realization of these goals, and an ongoing consideration of the continuing validity of one's goals and strategies. Instrumental rationality takes a set of goals as being fixed; deliberative rationality works on the assumption that it is possible to reason reflectively about one’s goals themselves. This is the thrust of Socrates’ “unexamined life” — the good life requires reflection and deliberation about the things one seeks to achieve in life. Here is how Aristotle describes deliberation in the Nicomachean Ethics, book 3:

We deliberate about things that are in our power and can be done; and these are in fact what is left. For nature, necessity, and chance are thought to be causes, and also reason and everything that depends on man. Now every class of men deliberates about the things that can be done by their own efforts. And in the case of exact and self-contained sciences there is no deliberation, e.g. about the letters of the alphabet (for we have no doubt how they should be written); but the things that are brought about by our own efforts, but not always in the same way, are the things about which we deliberate, e.g. questions of medical treatment or of money-making. And we do so more in the case of the art of navigation than in that of gymnastics, inasmuch as it has been less exactly worked out, and again about other things in the same ratio, and more also in the case of the arts than in that of the sciences; for we have more doubt about the former. Deliberation is concerned with things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but in which the event is obscure, and with things in which it is indeterminate. We call in others to aid us in deliberation on important questions, distrusting ourselves as not being equal to deciding. (Nicomachean Ethics, book 3)

What Aristotle focuses on here is choice under conditions of uncertainty and complexity. Deliberation is relevant when algorithms fail -- when there is no mechanical way of calculating the absolutely best way of doing something. And this seems to fit the circumstance of planning for a life or career.

How does “deliberation” come into the question of life plans? It is essential.

(1) The goals a person pursues in life cannot be specified exogenously; rather, the individual needs to consider and reflect on his or her goals in an ongoing way. Aristotle was one of the first to reveal that often the goals and goods we pursue are, upon reflection, derivative from some more fundamental good. But Kant too had a position here, favoring autonomy over heteronomy. Reflection allows us to gain clarity about those more fundamental goods that we value.

(2) The strategies and means that we choose may have only a superficial correspondence to our goods and values which is undercut by more rigorous examination. We may find that a given mode of action, a strategy, may indeed lead to good X, but may also defeat the achievement of Y, which we also value. So deliberative reflection about the strategies and actions we choose can allow us to more fully reconcile our short-term strategies with our long-term goals and goods.

Economists and philosophers have sometimes maintained that values and goals do not admit of rational consideration. But this is plainly untrue. At the very least it is possible to discover positive and negative interactions among our goals and desires — the desire to remain healthy and the desire to eat ice cream at every meal are plainly in conflict. Less trivially, the goal of living life in a way that is respectful of the dignity of others is inconsistent with the goal of rising to power within a patriarchal or racist organization. It is possible that there are values that are both fundamental and incommensurable — so that rational deliberation and reflection cannot choose between them. But it is hard to think of examples in which this kind of incommensurability arises as a practical problem.

Consider Bruce, Jorge, and Filippo. Bruce believes that being wealthy by the age of 60 is the most important thing in his life. Jorge believes that attaining a state of spiritual fulfillment by the age of 60 is most important. And Filippo believes that having circumstances of life by age 60 in which he is involved in satisfying work, has successful family relationships and friendships, and has enough income and wealth to support a decent middle-class life is most important. Are there reasonable considerations that any one of these individuals could bring to bear against another to suggest that the other’s goals are incomplete or defective?

Aristotle addresses Bruce directly by asking how wealth could possible be a fundamental good. What does Bruce want to gain by achieving great wealth? Aren’t these activities and goods more fundamental than the wealth itself? This line of argument perhaps succeeds in persuading Bruce to give more thought to what he wants out of life — not wealth, but the things that wealth permits him to do.

Jorge may seem to be just like Bruce except he values spiritual fulfillment rather than money. Indeed, they are similar in that there is only one dimension to their life goals. But Jorge can at least maintain against Bruce that his goal is good in itself, not because of its ability to bring about some other desirable thing.

Finally, Filippo. Filippo has a more complex set of life goals, none of which reduces to a combination of the others. It is true that these goals require tradeoffs in behavior and effort; strategies that enhance friendships may depress the attainment of wealth, for example. But I think it is Filippo that we think of when we imagine a person with a reflective and deliberative life plan: a person who has identified a small but plural set of longterm goals, and who recognizes that it is necessary in the moment to find ways of balancing the attainment of one with what it takes to attain more of the other.

We might think of life planning as being less like a blueprint for action and more like a navigational guide. We might think of the problem of making intermediate life choices as being guided by a compass rather than a detailed plan — the idea that we do good work on living if we guide our actions by a set of directional signals rather than a detailed map. Life outcomes result from following a compass, not moving towards a specific GPS point on a map.

There is an analogy with business planning here. Consider the actions and plans of a CEO of a company. His or her choices in concrete decision moments are guided by several important considerations: remain profitable; prepare the ground today for viable business activity tomorrow; create an environment of trust and respect among the employees of the company; make sure that company choices also take the wellbeing of the community into account; treat employees fairly; anticipate changes in the marketplace that might dictate change in process or product within the company. But there is no certainty, no fixed prescription for success, and no algorithm for balancing the goods that the firm's leadership pursues. The successful firm will have built its success over a long series of decisions oriented towards the fundamental values of the business.

(The reference to Napoleon in Jena in the graphics above is pertinent because of the implications that Hegel drew from his experience of Napoleon as a "world historical figure". Hegel was clear that, even with a brilliant commander and a great general staff, Napoleon's ambitions in Europe were based on an unavoidably incomplete knowledge of the terrain of history. "The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the falling of the dusk.")