Goodbye - 2017

Those who died this year who I liked or admired in some way:

Mary Tyler Moore - 25th January, aged 80.

John Hurt - 27th January, aged 77.

John Wetton - 31st January, aged 67.

Peter Skellern - 17th February, aged 69.

Bill Paxton - 25th February, aged 61.

Chuck Berry - 18th March, aged 90.

Don Rickles - 6th April, aged 90.

Powers Booth - 14th May, aged 68.

Roger Moore - 23rd May, aged 89.

Peter Sallis - 2nd June, aged 96.

Adam West - 9th June, aged 88.

Michael Bond - 27th June, aged 91.

Martin Landau - 15th July, aged 89.

George A. Romero - 16th July, aged 77.

Deborah Watling - 21st July, aged 69.

Robert Hardy - 3rd August, aged 91.

Bruce Forsyth - 18th August, aged 89.

Jerry Lewis - 20th August, aged 91.

Harry Dean Stanton - 15th September, aged 91.

Hugh Hefner - 27th September, aged 91.

Fats Domino - 24th October, aged 89.

There are probably more, in less 'Celebrity' fields, but celebrity lists are much easier to find of course.

There may be more yet I suppose, but we are nearly done with this year.

This list gets longer as I get older.

"I grow old … I grow old …I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled."

Am I getting old?

I don’t think that I am old. I am 66 years, a pensioner.

I have had a good life so far. Not an exciting life, not a reality-TV show kind of life, but a good one. I had a fantastic childhood, the usual ‘difficult’ teenage years, and then a comfortable adult life.

I had the privilege of going to University when that meant something. I have only been unemployed once, for a relatively short time. I haven’t had big, powerful, meaningful jobs. But that is alright. I was never, ever a ‘career’ person anyway. I have earned just enough to be comfortable.

I am, in fact, very grateful for the life that I had, and am having.

I have been married twice. I am now married to the most wonderful partner a man could wish for.

One regret is that I have no children.

Despite the global population almost trebling in my lifetime, I have seen the world get better and better in so many ways. By any objective measure, all the key indicators have improved beyond all recognition during my life: Death rates; Infant Mortality Rates; Maternal Mortality Rates; Poverty; Starvation all going down, and general ‘Quality of Life indicators’ showing a massive upward trend. I have seen the fall of the most totalitarian, cruel and brutal political system. I mean, of course, communism.

I grew up with the ‘Cold War’ dominating politics and policy in the West. To most younger people that is just history now. And, as the discipline of History has been transformed into a mishmash of post-modernistic nonsense, I don’t suppose they even learn about it anymore.

I have seen the most amazing explosion in technology. There are things, today, in routine use that, even 20 years ago I wouldn’t have believed possible. This has had effects both good and bad I think.

In so many ways the world is a much better place than it was when I was born.

Yes, I took a degree in Sociology at the University of Essex from 1974 to 1977. After that I did some post-graduate work, finally leaving the University in 1979. Later I gained qualifications in Social and Cognitive psychology and went on to teach sociology and psychology to adults.

I loved teaching.

When I took my degree Sociology was, to some extent, seen as a ‘soft’ subject. It wasn’t. The focus was very much on empirical methods. The use of documents and the measuring of social processes. The focus was on how this could be done in a way to maximise the validity and reliability of the data extracted from the raw material using rational processes.

Marxism was, of course, very much present, but the focus was very much on ‘Humanist’ Marxism’. How to develop a theory of Marxism that took account of the individual.  But, the course was very open to all kinds of theories as long as empirical data was used and, of course, rational argument.

Even the Marxists, at that time, were prepared to discuss, debate and talk to people with differing views. They attempted to use empirical data and reason. They didn't just assert.

Post-modernism was, already, a cloud on the horizon, a foreshadowing of the coming storm. I discovered Foucault during this period and was wild about him. I still have a tiny, tiny soft spot for him or, at least, some of his work.

I learned a great deal, a very great deal both in the sheer breadth of knowledge and the importance of empirical data and reason.

All that seems to have disappeared from the so-called ‘social sciences.’ It astounds me how utterly ignorant modern students and professors are of basic facts about history, culture and reasoned argument. I can no longer call myself a sociologist and hold my head up.

Psychology, too, although it was always a dubious ‘science’ has disappeared in any real sense.

My politics at that time were various versions of Marxism, sliding slowly into libertarian socialism and finally anarchism. Later I became a left-wing Labour Party supporter but wasn’t very active. Today, if I should call myself anything, I would say that I am a conservative Classical Liberal.

But I don’t vote.

I have come to regard political ideologies as utterly irrelevant to what actually happens in the real world. It is now, and always has been, about power and the struggle for power. This goes under a variety of names and labels of course, but they mean nothing.

Humans in groups will always disagree and a means of resolving disagreements will always be needed. This is politics. Politicians and government are a necessary evil. But I have no respect for politicians. They are supposed to be the servants of the various groups of individuals they allegedly represent. Their job is to administer and ensure the security of the individuals to whom they are accountable.

Anyway, today the political process has become dominated by ideological movements of various kinds, both secular and religious. Maybe it always has been. I think a good argument could be made this is a central part of being human because humans love certainty, predictability and a nice simple narrative to ‘explain’ the world. Ideologies claim to provide this.

Politics - ‘Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ to quote the greatest playwright ever, somewhat out of context.

These days, of course, one can identify several significant religious movements. Islam, I have raved on about before. The other significant movements can be subsumed under the general heading of ‘progressivism’. Under this heading, I would place all the manifestations of social justice movements and third, or is it fourth, wave feminism, although they are not social and have little to do with justice.

Ideologies tend towards demanding a commitment to a central doctrine and will tolerate no disagreement. They all have dogmatic tendencies, a central creed, saints and sinners, and punishments like public shaming and ex-communication.

‘The question is, who is to be master, that's all’ as Humpty Dumpty says.

All these ideological movements are very similar to each. One could argue that Islam, at least, is honest about this.

The Enlightenment has gone. That short period in human history that seemed to offer hope for the human race and a way out of religious intolerance has gone. And I fear the future.

However within the next 20 years or so I will be dead and gone, soon to be forgotten and all this writing of mine will become even more irrelevant than it is now.

Maybe it is just because I am getting old. Old people, I know, have a tendency to see the past through rose-tinted spectacles and be somewhat nostalgic about the past.  That is part of it I am sure. But I would still maintain that my perception of the current malaise is accurate to a large extent. Some can be demonstrated empirically, the rest by using reason. A skill that is almost lost these days. 

I suffer from bipolar disorder and, for some people, that is enough to write me off as ‘mentally ill’, but it is worth noting that depressed people tend to have a much more realistic view of things.

I have been excommunicated by people I once thought of as friends because of my views.

So be it.

Anyway, those are my thoughts at this point in my life.

The Social Web - A rough first draft.

Here is a claim, an assertion – institutions, organisations, cultures, societies and so on do not really exist. They are genuine social constructions, narratives, discourses, ‘spooks’ in the words of Max Stirner.

Physical, material, reality does really exist whether we like it or not and cannot be ignored. Many different perceptions of physical reality exist. But it is possible to establish a truth about physical reality distinct from these perceptions.

For the most part, the most paramount elements in a human beings life are the socially constructed elements. Physical reality intrudes occasionally.

The institutions, organisations and other such constructions are made up of the individuals who constitute them and who to a greater or lesser extent believe in them. The daily interactions between these individuals constitute the ‘reality’ of these structures.

This is an old idea of course, and I claim no originality here. The origin of this can be traced a long, long time back in intellectual history. Relatively recently I would point to the work of Max Weber, George Herbert Mead and the symbolic interactionist tradition within sociology which was inspired by this work.

Deriving from the SI tradition other concepts may also be useful, such as negotiated order, the ecology of games and, even though he is not within the SI tradition, C. Wright Mills’ vocabulary of motivations. One could even draw on elements of the work of Michel Foucault, especially those to be found in his work Discipline and Punish. I cannot forget Erving Goffman of course and even, maybe, the early J-P Sartre, the Sartre of Being and Nothingness.

Now, I realise that I am just throwing out names and concepts here, name dropping in fact. I can, however, ground all these elements and concepts in a pretty thorough knowledge of the field. Right now I am just drafting areas to look at. When I get around to writing a more serious piece I will support all this with proper references and sources.

I also realise that, at this stage, I am not considering if these positions are even consistent with each other, or compatible.

One serious problem with this entire field, however (except, perhaps, Weber) is that it can so easily slide into a totally relativistic social constructionism. In fact, that is what has largely happened, especially since postmodernism reared its ugly head.

One of the reasons for this is that SI has no ground on which to stand. It is not rooted in anything outside of itself. This can be seen, for example, in Mead’s extremely woolly notions of the Me and the I.

Attempts have been made to ground SI on, for example, Freudianism and even Marxism. However, this is, ultimately, to try and base chalk on cheese, or cheese on chalk, whichever. These imported positions are fundamentally incompatible with SI.

I was, and to a degree still am, a big fan of SI, starting 40 odd years ago in my University days. So I am, basically, sympathetic to it as a field of study.

So, I would ground it in physical reality, specifically the reality of biology and evolutionary processes. This is the basic foundation upon which human behaviour and social interaction rests.

There is a great deal, a very great deal, to unpack in that claim I know. I hope to achieve that unpacking one day.

Elements of human social interaction – first draft:

1. Behaviour – biology, evolved, neuropsychological mechanisms (linking us to the world), = perception – non-conscious and fast.
2. Hormonal
3. Emotion
4. Personal belief system - ‘ideology’
5. Action – goal oriented, has meaning
6. Social action – stance, attitude towards the other, goal-oriented, has meaning
7. Rules of the game, available verbal motivations, explanations, resources …e.g., institutional ‘rules’
8. Goals – Cooperation – Conflict; Dominance – Submission; Persuasion – Resistance;

COMMUNICATION and how it rarely succeeds as intended.

I have also considered the notion, from Sartre, of the fundamental project. I don’t know. It may not be compatible. BUT – the idea that people live their lives forward, are always ‘becoming’ (not meant in some mystical or spiritual way by the way) is important in understanding individuals and social interaction.

However, human beings are not as unified as this concept implies. I once saw the human being described as a republic of separate systems working, more or less, towards the same goal just on different time scales, and with different histories. I cannot remember where I saw that, but I rather liked it.

An episode of human social interaction thus involves many elements. This is a field that has been covered in many ways elsewhere, and it is a topic of great interest to me. I admit that I have made, again, many claims here that need exploring and unpacking. Hopefully, when I get the time, I will do that.

I retire in 5 months time. Maybe then.

Out of these episodes of human interaction arises a web of social connections. This web IS the institution, society, culture or whatever. And this web creates the institution etc., etc.

Insofar as people are committed to the rules that nominally govern them, to the degree that they conform to these rules, and to the degree that they submit to these rules, the institution exists.

This means that change can come suddenly. Unexpectedly. The institution is, in principle, unpredictable and not fully understandable. The charts and diagrams, the descriptions of ‘social structure’ are simply rough maps of the social network.

And the map is often mistaken for the territory.

We humans like narratives and ‘stories’ are often created to ‘explain’ events. Such stories are highly selective, ignoring vast swathes of peoples lives and experiences and cannot possibly know all the details and, even more so, cannot know what is unknown.

Again, a lot of huge claims here, that require a great deal of work to flesh out and I hope to do so.

These, then, are some ideas that I am working on and thinking about. A series of potential hypotheses that require some empirical support.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Ralph D. Stacey as sources of great intellectual inspiration.