Howard Richards

“Tide” as an Image for Cause

I have used the word “tide” and the expression “turn the tide” to evoke an image of a strong underlying force that asserts itself as a general trend in the midst of innumerable events.   The waves go in and out.  Many other movements of water, wind, and sand come and go.   It is not immediately obvious to someone standing on the beach gazing at the water that there is a general trend produced by a strong underlying force.  Yet in a sense one sees the tide coming in or going out even though it may take some time and some understanding to see it as a tide.
        I am using “the tide” as an image of a big effect with a big cause.  I take what is called a “critical realist” view of social science, according to which it is possible to speak of causes of social phenomena and of their general trends.   While the tide image is an imperfect stand-in for the abstract concept, “causes of major social trends,” it has the advantage that it taps the widespread belief (and/or feeling) that there is a growing and somewhat overwhelming crisis—a financial crisis, an energy crisis, increasingly a food crisis, as well as several other crises; and at the same time there is a decline in the power of the United States to bend the rest of the world to its will.   By lumping these things all together in one watery image, it suggests, correctly in my opinion, that this multifaceted growing crisis and this accelerating decline have something to do with each other.    It also suggests that all of this might be scientifically understood, if one could find the formula for it, as Newton found the formula for the tides.

         The general cause I want to introduce using the tide image as its introduction is the polysemic (many-meaninged) and indispensable entity (an entity that is both an idea and a reality that justifies having the idea) called “culture.”  Culture is the ecological niche of the human species.  When we speak of “cultures” we are speaking of the upbringing of children, of the way a human group adapts to and more or less succeeds in coping with its environment, and of patterns of social relationships.  Cultural structures produce and reproduce social structures (Jürgen Habermas writes of “symbolic structures.”)   They (the cultures and the societies –here I do not draw a sharp line between the two, as if culture were one thing and society another, but rather use one term or the other as seems suited to the context) are to some considerable extent constituted by authoritative standards for guiding conduct, briefly named as “rules” or “norms;” which will always be found, sometimes found on the surface and sometimes found after a little digging, to rely for their efficacy on respect for the sacred. 
    (I hope the reader is not trying to parse the entire above paragraph in terms of analogies with tides.  When I try to mix “ecological niche” and “norms” with tides all I get is confusion.  I hope the image of “tide” served its purpose and can be laid down as one lays down a hammer or a saw when one is done with it and is ready to use another tool, although I will be picking up “tide” again in a few minutes.)
    I am saying together with other social scientists and philosophers more or less associated with critical realism that social rules, functioning not in isolation but together with physical facts and as elements of interconnected cultural structures, are causes.   They can be used to explain human behavior and historical trends.
    Among the rules some can be called “basic.”   The basic cultural structures (“basic rules” to be brief and to omit some nuances) govern meeting the basic necessities of life, such as food.  This way of talking fits in with the way anthropologists talk when they describe a culture as, for example, “pastoral,” meaning that the people meet their basic needs by herding animals.  Other cultures might do “fishing” or “slash and burn agriculture,” or like the Hopis do settled agriculture depending mostly on maize.  Once one knows how people meet their basic needs, one has a clue for understanding and explaining other aspects of their way of life.
      Notice that I am outlining a “feminine,” approach to social science, which emphasizes the nurturing of life, the upbringing of children, the cultivation of crops, the raising of animals, etc.; as opposed to the “neocon” approaches of thinkers like Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt who emphasize the role of military violence in history.   My version of realism can also be contrasted with the cultural relativism of thinkers like Samuel Huntington (a relativism which for Huntington leads to “clash”) who hold that cultures are self-justifying, acknowledging no authority higher than whatever the social norms happen to be. (Huntington 1996) In contrast, John Dewey and I and many others who agree with us think it legitimate to evaluate the performance of cultures in terms of how well (I think Riane would add “how gracefully”) they meet human needs in harmony with the natural environment. (Westbrook 19919
    If one knows what the basic rules of a culture are, and how they organize making life possible: then one can combine deductions from what one would expect given that the cultural structures are what they are with inductions from observation to produce a social science.  This is what the authors of the classic texts of the social sciences have mainly done.  (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, John Maynard Keynes,  Ludwig von Mises,  Claude Levi-Strauss, even Pierre Bourdieu when he is not writing about Algerian peasants, Karl Popper, Milton Friedman, and now Anthony Giddens and Thomas Friedman, among many others.)  Bernard Lonergan and Joseph Schumpeter have shown how deduction and induction interact in the construction of a science, rather like a pair of scissors in which both the upper blade (deduction) and the lower blade (induction) are necessary to cut.  Lonergan illustrates this interaction in detail in the history of physics, while Schumpeter illustrates it in detail in the history of economics. (Lonergan 1957, Schumpeter 1954)  What I am suggesting is that in the social sciences for the most part the upper blade (deduction) has not been human nature as it is discovered by anthropology and biology, but rather the juridical subject as it has been socially constructed by a particular cultural tradition.
Most social science outside of anthropology has been about one culture.  Most of the classics have been written by European men in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  What they have mostly tried to describe and explain, sometimes by contrast with other times and places, has been their own culture, which is still for the most part our culture.  It is a culture whose basic rules take the form of what Immanuel Kant called Rechtslehre, that is to say ethics, formal legal codes, and the moral intuitions of everyday life tightly combined.  (Kant 1797)   It is the culture of what Immanuel Wallerstein calls the modern world-system.   (Wallerstein goes on to fault the social sciences for being part and parcel of the system and its defects.)  (Wallerstein 1995)   Fernand Braudel and many others call the system “capitalism” (in a sense of the term broader than Marx’s, which emphasizes modern market relationships more than any particular relations of production).  It is a system in which people meet basic needs by grocery shopping.
   In order to identify some “tides” of the times we live in, which shape our everyday realities and which are reflected in the social sciences that study them, as a preface to elaborating some meanings of “transformation;” and as a preface to appreciating some contributions to transformation made by Barack Obama and Riane Eisler I will sketch at considerable length an outline of the history of a particular culture, ours.  It is a particular culture which has now become, as Immanuel Wallerstein with pardonable exaggeration, the one and only object of study of the social sciences, the global economy.

Part Two— “Tide”  as an Image for Cause
http://howardrichards.org/peace/content/view/113/150/