The Problem of Social Order

1. The Problem of Social Order

2. The problem of social order • Why doesn’t our world resemble The Road Warrior? • Why is social life mostly so predictable? • Why do people • Look out for one another? • Conform to social rules? • Make and obey laws? • Make investments in future ventures?

3. Social order in insect societies • Worker ants sacrifice their lives on behalf of the colony • Workers of one North African species of ants face virtual suicide in foraging for food • Ant supercolonies • In Europe, an Argentine species covers 6000 km; comprises millions of nests, billions of individual workers • Mechanism: high degree of genetic relatedness, combined with chemical signaling of this relatedness

4. Explanation Explanation: inclusive fitness • Among social insects, sisters share 75% of their genes • Among most animals, sisters only share 50% of their genes

5. Critique • Helps explain mother-child bond in human society • Cannot account for cooperation among non-related individuals

6. Two components of social order • Order as coordination • Disorder as lack of coordination • Order as cooperation • Disorder as lack of cooperation

7. Social order, cont’d • Coordination • Predictability allows people to develop stable expectations, which in turn enable them to coordinate. • EG driving • EG the value of money

8. Disorder from lack of predictability • Financial crises

9. Examples of coordination • Traffic • Everyone drives on the right and passes on the left • Availability of consumer goods • Food in the stores

10. Cooperation • People do things that benefit others, not just themselves • EG NPR donations, volunteer work • EG Refrain from taking other’s property, refrain from polluting

11. Disorder from lack of cooperation • Montegrano, Southern Italy, ca. 1950, pop = 3400 (Banfield. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward Society) • There is only one voluntary association • a clubroom where 25 upper class men play cards • No organized charities • Churches do not carry out welfare or charitable activities • Hardly anyone puts money on the collection plate at church • People don’t understand the concept of public-spiritedness – says that no one in town is public-spirited

12. Montegrano: political activity is feeble • Political parties are weak • People are too individualistic to care about mobilizing others for any collective purpose • Political cynicism is extreme

13. Montegrano: collective needs are unmet • Because there is so little collective action, most collective needs are unmet in Montegrano • ‘Amoral familism’ • Still characteristic of Southern Italy, as compared with Northern Italy • R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work

14. Example of cooperative order • New York, and the entire U.S., in the wake of the events of September 11th • Volunteers flooded Ground Zero • NY businesses gave free food to rescuers and victims • Celebrities raised money for the victims in a huge telethon

15. What makes cooperation difficult to attain? • People are social • They need others to be happy and healthy • People are also individual

16. Cooperation, cont’d • So, there is tension between the interests of the individual and the interests of the group

17. Recap • The problem of social order is a key issue in the social sciences and in public policy • In order to create the world we want, we need to have social order

18. Recap • Social order includes two components: • Coordination (predictability) • Cooperation (overcoming individual self-interest) • In this course, we will discuss five theoretical solutions to the problem of social order