"Natural" Social Behavior

[barking_iguana]

I am reading Sex at Dawn: The prehistoric origin of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, on which more later.In the mean time, I'll share this pearl, often recognized when overtly political, but less so when not:

The sciences of human nature tend to validate the practices and preferences of whatever regime happens to be sponsoring them. In totalitarian regimes, dissidence is treated as a mental illness. In apartheid regimes, interracial contact is treated as unnatural. In free-market regimes, self-interest is treated as hard-wired.

—Louis Menand

Paradoxically, in each of these cases, so called natural behavior has to be encouraged and unnatural aberrations punished.

—Ryan and Jethá

Comments

[avram]

Is this true, though?

Our own society is nominally a free-market economy, but we punish theft (an excess of self-interest) and encourage philanthropy (with tax breaks).

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

We give incentives for education and use social stigma against stay-at0home dads and others whom we think are insufficiently devoted to earning money.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

But do we really stigmatize stay at home dads? Mothers who are on public assistance? Definitely.

Ack, hit the button too soon.

It's funny you would post this because Salon.com had a piece written by Barbara Ehrenreich on the 10th anniversary of Nickel and Dimed and it brushes up against this issue.

[avram]

Do we gives incentives for education or accreditation? (Not sure if that makes a difference, since if accreditation is itself useful, it's something you'd expect people to pursue without the incentives.) (On the other hand, it's difficult to gauge the usefulness of accreditation distinct from the social structure within which it is entangled. It's possible that what we're actually giving an incentive for is submission to the branch of the social order that controls education.) (Which itself could be considered hard-wired behavior if you believe that human beings are born with an instinct for fitting into social hierarchies.)

[cbreakr.livejournal.com]

There are always going to be several different systems at play. While we are a free-market economy, we also have a strong basis in Christian ideology which tends to temper just how far our sense of self-interest can go. This is exactly the reason why conservatives have made a point of attaching themselves to religion - so that they can push an agenda on both fronts in synchronicity.

[chemoelectric.livejournal.com]

Unsurprisingly, under our regime it is an affliction of economists more than other social (semi-)scientists.

(On second thought, it seems to affect the E O Wilson offshoot, too. Dawkins is their current figurehead, I guess.)

[barking-iguana.livejournal.com]

Yes, and the book I'm reading is in part using sociobology's own intellectual framework to refute the ways that sociobology, like anthropology before it, has been stupidly applied to wrongly assert orthodoxies concerning natural human society.