The Social Animal

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W. Runciman G.. The Social Animal

THE SOCIAL ANIMAL. W. G. Runciman

CONTENTS

PREFACE

I A Very Social Animal

II What Exactly Do You Want to Know?

III A Catalogue of Errors

IV Power

V Matters of Chance

VI Structures and Cultures

VII History

VIII Ups and Downs

IX Possible and Impossible Worlds

X Uses and Abuses

NOTES

INDEX

OTHER WORKS

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

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Cover

Title Page

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At the social level, by contrast, the objects of selection are, as I’ve pointed out already, units of reciprocal action, since the rules which define the roles we occupy and perform are prescriptive for both parties to the relationship to which they attach a common meaning. The objects of social selection, therefore, are and can only be the practices which define of their respective roles. Practices, no less than bundles of information and instructions passed from mind to mind, fulfil the two necessary conditions for them to act as replicators. So it can accordingly be said – to go back to the threefold distinction as I put it at the very beginning of this chapter – that as organisms we are machines for replicating the genes in our bodies, as organisms with minds we are machines for replicating the traits in our cultures, and as organisms with minds occupying and performing roles we are machines for replicating the practices which define those roles and the groups, communities, institutions and societies constituted by them.

Since evolution, whether natural, cultural or social, is not proceeding towards any predetermined final state but only away from what may, for the moment, be a more or less stable equilibrium, it will never be any more possible for sociologists to predict the future of institutions and societies than for anthropologists to predict the future of cultures or biologists to predict the future of species. In the words of the American demographer Joel E. Cohen’s only half-joking Law of Prediction, ‘The more confidence someone places in an unconditional prediction of what will happen in human affairs, the less confidence we should place in that prediction.’5 The problem is not just the incalculability of the consequences of the interaction of an enormous multiplicity of separate events. It’s also that, as the philosopher Karl Popper has argued to particular effect, to predict the future state of human societies would involve, among other things, predicting the future of sociological knowledge itself, and there is no way in which we can claim already to know what we have yet to discover. Critics of sociology sometimes argue that because sociologists can’t predict how future societies will evolve it isn’t really a science at all. But then they will have to say the same about biology and its inability to predict the future evolution of species. If what distinguishes science from non-science is that its conclusions are prescriptive for all observers in accordance with the strength of evidence which they can all go and check for themselves, there is no argument whatever for dismissing explanations which can be tested only with hindsight as ‘unscientific’. Sherlock Holmes can’t predict the clues which will enable him to solve the crime; but when he follows up the clues which do indeed solve it, his solution is no less ‘scientific’ than if he had conducted a laboratory experiment whose outcome he had specified in advance.

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