Universals and particulars in anthropology

Anthropology has had a difficult relationship with acknowledging human universals. The contradiction is that the claim that all cultures are particular and all universals are social constructs particular to the culture in question logically leads to a conclusion that humans share noting in common.

Dealing exclusively with the micro-level of cultural particulars is well known to result in culturalism and villagism, known malaises amongst anthropologists. However, those who work with the macro-levels, like political scientists and IR people, tend to zoom out of even such staples as ethnicity, gender and even political economy. But what if all of them are correct, but not completely? Like those blind men touching the elephant, they all make correct guesses but miss the entirety of the picture. This article (albeit I do have some beef with it) offers a handy way of thinking about what we have been discussing here: (Bloch's Blob)

Traditional anthropology is holistic only to a limited degree on the micro-level, looking at the social context of the tail, not just the tail itself and also somewhat aware of the hind legs (say, political economy). The rest of the elephant and the biology of the tail escapes the view. What would really come in handy, is an awareness of that fact and participant objectivation Bourdieu-style, the deconstruction of the Homo academicus. But then again, that would take another level of self-reflexivity and painful soul-searching. It is a huge individual endeavour and not everyone would be willing to put themselves through that...

Science boffins to philosopher kings: is the rule of science a good thing?

Lack of methodologies for collecting empirical data and  the Second Danger of Unreflexive Scientific Observation (over-intellectualising) keep plaguing many branches of social sciences. When you're not required to find any evidence to back up your claim, yet feel entitled to professing opinions by the sheer virtue of your fancy education, things can go really wrong. Reading a recently published article (Maciej Pletnia 2014, Asian Identity: Regional Integration and Collective Memory of the Pacific War in Contemporary Japanese Society) on a topic very close to my heart reminded me of that part of War and Peace (Volume IV, Part Two, VII), where Andrei Bolkonsky reminisces about the haughty conviction of Austrian generals in the Battle of Austerlitz that things in reality would go exactly the way they, highly learned and esteemed generals, believe they should happen: "Die erste Kolonne marschiert... Die zweite Kolonne marschiert..." Things, of course, did not pan out according to someone's educated guess, and a humiliating defeat ensued. 

So is, sadly, the case with many branches of social sciences, where arm-chair ponitification reigns supreme, with no signs of abating. It could be simply annoying, if ignorable, should the ideas produced in that manner remain safely within the Ivory Tower. Unfortunately, the recent surge of technocrats assuming top government positions (repeatedly exalted by the Economist's editorial board) indicates that we are in for some years of painful rule by "philosopher-kings", which both Plato and empirical research warned against.

 

Two variables are not reality: private prisons vs. universities

The US apparently boasts the most extensive prison system with the highest incarceration rate per capita in the world. A fair share of the prisons are private companies running for and actually making profit, so in terms of market efficiency they are probably world's best. SCORE! Let's all go private! (in my best Eric Cartman's voice) That would however ignore that such a system is fed by the judicial systems where too many people are incarcerated long-term for minor felonies, that private prisons are allowed to select "low-cost" inmates and have access to funding, the slavery-like labour exploitation (re. the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution), the poor staff training and low wages, the lack of oversight and accountability, the inhumane living conditions due to cost-saving, etc., etc.

This is merely to illustrate the point that describing reality in terms of two variables, i.e., no state funding = high success of universities (most cited research papers + high rankings), is a formal logical fallacy. That and treating social and environmental costs as "externalities" are exactly the kind of destructive pseudo-scientific thinking that Economics and Political Science students are indoctrinated in, and which is, unfortunately, is presently the language of power and self-proclaimed "science".

#GoodForTheEconomyShitForThePeople

Sad truth for you, earthlings

All human social  systems only produce waste and difference. That's it.

10 worst things science has unleashed on us

I totally see where the recent wave of religion-bashing is coming from: it's a reaction of intellectuals and those aligned with them to the recent surge of the swivel-eyed religious fundamentalist spectrum of varying degrees of militancy in all corners of the world. However, the anti-religionist argument itself is none better than the religious fundamentalism: the only actual difference is that instead of invoking a paternal projection, commonly marketed as "God", the militant atheists invoke idolised science, the infallible source of rational truth, to justify their views and actions. It could be forgiven to laymen, whose naive idea of science  is of clever egg-heads shoving spadefuls of the ultimate Truth to the furnace of progress and development.  Disturbingly, however, the same kind of unreflexive, self-congratulatory drivel is peddled by professional academics cum media-enhanced prophets like Neil Degrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Despite or, perhaps even, because of their wide public acclaim, this is just yet another proof that natural scientists should be banned from making any statements about humanity, religion and society and stick to what they were trained to do in the first place: sticking bits of DNA up the microbes' asses, overinterpreting MRI scans, or gazing into starry skies. Thank God (sic!), their likes rarely get to any decision-making positions, but when they do, we are never too far away from carnage and rampage - Yugoslavia's genocide-mongering Biljana Plavšić, a widely published full professor of biology who incited the massacre of Bosnians using her political power and scientific reasoning, being the latest example. Science made into a god is none more rational, benign or reliable for designing social policies than any religion.

The common argument brought forward by the scientism camp is a list of all wrong-doings incurred upon humanity by religion: the Crusades to the Inquisition to witch-hunts. There's no denying, that religion did serve as justification and a rallying cry for those. For the sake of balance, however,  let's look at what the Age of Reason with its deification of Science has brought us:

1. ethnic cleansing, 
2. psychiatry, 
3. Ayn Rand, 
4. chemical weapons, 
5. genetically modified organisms, 
6. the nuclear bomb, 
7. scientific racism, 
8. colonialism, 
9. two world wars, 
10. environmental destruction...

Let us also not forget that the peace-loving and benevolent regimes of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kim family were staunchly atheist.

As it usually goes, both sides of the argument fight over a false dilemma. The human nature is the problem, not religion or science.

Teeming humanity and hyper-social reality

At times, especially upon a peak into the news, it feels like the world has gone mad. But looking back, it becomes obvious that it has always been the case. However, this time around it's with a difference. I am the last one to bring forward scientism or biologism to explain humanity, but now it seems, to a point, justified. Social facts exist externally, i.e., beyond the control of the society's members. Compared to Durkheim's times, the latter-day rising interconnection of the humanity and its increasing density start bringing about a hyper-social reality: we start living as one global entity with new realities even less within our control than before. There are too many of us now and humanity start behaving like a hyper-chaotic system, acquiring certain characteristics of a physical entity with the critical mass of components having reached a certain saturated level.

With increase in numbers, the quality of the system changes. There are too many of us, the chaos, that has always been there as in any other system, has taken on a different level.  Overall, the interaction is more intense, magnified by technology. Inside, we start feeling crowded, annoyed by our exposure to the different: it particularly comes to head where the population density is high and the influx of foreigners is highly visible. There are more explosions of violence, state-sanctioned and glorified like drone attacks or democracy export wars, or spontaneous and publicly reviled like rape and xenophobia. Perhaps, the only reason keeping it all from building up into another world war is, not Ban Ki-moon benevolent, Mona Lisa-like semi-smile, but another fear, that of the nuclear deterrent. 

Governments and bureaucracies, the supposed rational actors that have never been such, even as far back as in Weber's, are too part of the chaos and subject to it, and also, consisting of live perceiving feeling actors, reacting to it emotionally, psychologically, irrationally. Do we need GM crops to feed all? Do we need mass surveillance to keep it all stable? Will "green technologies" actually save the envrionent from the exponentially growing excreta of the "thinking mold"? What do we need to keep in line with the growing demand for energy to sustain our increasingly unsustainable lifestyles and those aspiring to have those too? Those questions are answered with quick, unreflexive institutional knee jerks, reflexive spasms of bureaucratic systems, rather than any meaningful strategies addressing the underlying causes.

In the meantime, the corporate world and its driving engine, the global financial system, keep growing and operating according to their own logic, largely inconsistent with the highest good of everyone and everything else concerned: people, society, nature. Turning everything into the only language it can understand, that of the bottomline, money. The former "externalities" assumed to be subservient and subdued to the needs of economy -  humans, society and environment - are given a monetary value that can later be traded, exchanged, made into financial derivatives, all to support to the constant expansion of credit, i.e., the fractional reserve banking system clocking up trillions of digital money out of keyboard clicks and electromagnetic signals on server hard drives. 

This drive to monetarise everything, express everything through money, was presciently described in Yevgeny Zamyatin's 1927 novel We, where the entire society works to build a kind of super-spaceship, the Integral, that, when launched, will fly across the universe and calculate it all, "integrate the grandiose cosmic equation".  These days, even human emotions, dutifully recorded by everyone into the various apps of their smartphones, are smartly monetarised to create mega-profits for the likes of Facebook, Amazon and their creditors and investors. Billions of human souls' minutest moves all channeled into one powerful stream to propel the wheels of the world's banking - at least, we have one organised, rational, purposeful response to deal with

Ayn Rand and the spirit of Neo-Liberalism

Ayn Rand's spirit is in everything that people, ranging from her disciple Alan Greenspan to the starry-eyed and bushy-tailed business studies undergrads, do.Hers is the Neo-Liberal motto of the deserving vs. the undeserving, an arbitrary, misanthropic choice to divide the humanity, in this case based on their ability to participate efficiently in the market economy, dehumanising those who can't, none different from any other equally pernicious dividing ideology, we have seen so many of them bringing suffering ad destruction to the world.

The foundation of any ideology/personal belief system is in such pre-logical, emotional choices, arguing rationally with whatever rationalisation is built upon that won't achieve anything, because that logic is a mere projection of the now unconscious, internalised value. For example, the seemingly rational approach of treating the rest of reality - people, society, nature - as "externalities" to economy, rests on the irrational belief that market is a wise force that sorts out everything and is worth sacrificing anything for. As a result, we get a situation where market wins at the expense of  exactly everything else: people, society, nature. This kind of pernicious "truths" are fed to young, unsuspecting minds in university departments as unquestionable axioms by imposingly looking, glib professors, indoctrinating them to become the enthusiastic foot-soldiers of forces that sacrifice entire nations' livelihoods, the cooperative spirit of communities, humaneness, whole ecological systems, physical and emotional health of millions, for the sake of growth, i.e., the constant expansion of credit to sustain the fractional reserve system of making money out of nothing.