{"id":6494,"date":"2010-07-26T00:00:27","date_gmt":"2010-07-25T22:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=6494"},"modified":"2010-07-23T15:10:59","modified_gmt":"2010-07-23T13:10:59","slug":"humanizing-methodologies-in-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2010\/07\/humanizing-methodologies-in-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Humanizing Methodologies in Transformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Talk at the University of South Africa sponsored by the College of Law \u2013 20 Jul 2010<\/em> <\/em><\/p>\n

I want to say that deep cultural changes are needed, and that humanizing methodologies are needed to achieve them.\u00a0 For this reason my activist passion for social change becomes a philosophical passion for favouring some epistemologies and some research and teaching methods over others.\u00a0 In the title of my talk today I recommend \u201chumanizing methodologies in transformation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The words \u201chumanizing,\u201d \u201cmethodologies,\u201d and \u201ctransformation\u201d are used in different ways by different people, as are of course every other word I will be employing, and indeed every word in every language.\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless, since I am recommending that people do social research described by these words, I need to make a special effort to explain what I intend by the three words of my title.\u00a0 \u00a0But I do not think it would be helpful, indeed I think it would be counterproductive, if I were to offer definitions at the outset.<\/p>\n

I will leave definitions of my three key terms until later, and begin by attempting a brief outline of where I am coming from and where I want to go.<\/p>\n

My strategy for thus locating myself in conceptual space will be first to disclose in what sense I regard myself as not normal; and then to share with you a cryptic general diagnosis concerning human nature and another cryptic diagnosis concerning the modern world-system we live in.\u00a0 \u00a0The need for deep cultural changes follows from these general diagnoses.\u00a0 I will then allege that the need for humanizing methodologies in transformation follows from the need for deep cultural changes.<\/p>\n

I am not a normal person.\u00a0\u00a0 A normal person I take to be a person who goes about her or his daily life assuming that the future will resemble the past.<\/p>\n

I do not think the future will resemble the past, at least not in the medium or long run.\u00a0\u00a0 I think that the world as we know it is coming to an end, although perhaps not during the time I have left to live.\u00a0 I am upset about it.\u00a0 It appears to me that unless homo sapiens sapiens<\/em> changes course, we are destined as a species to sink deeper and deeper into social chaos and ecological catastrophe.<\/p>\n

Of the two, social chaos and ecological catastrophe, the second may seem to be of greater importance and in need of more priority attention.\u00a0 After all, if we as a species destroy the biosphere we destroy our habitat and therefore we destroy ourselves as a species.\u00a0\u00a0 Our species can at least survive under conditions of social chaos, but it cannot survive at all without the unusual physical conditions that make life possible on this planet.\u00a0\u00a0 If most of what I have to say is about how to achieve social cohesion, it is because I think ending social chaos is a prerequisite to adopting the ways of life built around green technologies and frugal livelihoods that can save the biosphere.\u00a0 We cannot now come together and act rationally to save ourselves because we are driven by what Ellen Wood calls systemic imperatives to obey what Herbert Marcuse calls the irrational rationalities of our social structure.\u00a0\u00a0 That is where the humanizing methodologies come in: Using them is what you and I here and now as university teachers and researchers can do to lead our species out of its systemic imperatives and irrational rationalities.<\/p>\n

I used to feel rather alone in my pessimism, because even though there are millions who when questioned at an intellectual level will accept the mounting evidence that our species is headed for catastrophe, there are few who are sufficiently upset about it to commit themselves to working for a change of course.\u00a0\u00a0 During the past decade or so I have met Catherine Hoppers and a number of others who have shown me that although I am not normal I am not isolated either.\u00a0\u00a0 The growing number who are both committed to working for change and capable of analyzing the changes needed with the necessary depth and patience have convinced not only that I am not alone but also that there is a real possibility that homo sapiens sapiens<\/em> will change course and will avoid catastrophe.<\/p>\n

My focus is on the deep fundamental changes that are needed.\u00a0\u00a0 Any other focus, it seems to me, is designed perhaps to win some battles, but ultimately to lose the war.\u00a0\u00a0 To vary the metaphor, if we are all passengers on a sinking ship, then we have to assign top priority to the question whether there is any way to keep the ship from sinking.<\/p>\n

In the academic climate we live in I feel that it is necessary before sharing my general diagnosis to say something to defend having any general diagnosis at all.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me start by relating an incident that happened shortly after the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power in Chile.\u00a0 All of us who were then doing educational research in Chile were called together in an auditorium to make each of us a brief oral\u00a0 report on what we were researching to an admiral who sat on the stage in a resplendent white uniform who was the newly designated Minister of Education of the republic.\u00a0\u00a0 One of my colleagues made the mistake of expressing some concern about the process for translating our specific findings into general conclusions for educational policy.\u00a0\u00a0 The admiral then ordered each of us to stick to our specialties, and to leave the drawing of general conclusions to the armed forces.<\/p>\n

But it is not only military dictators who advise us to stick to our knitting and leave the big picture alone.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Positivists, post-modernists, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, and other luminaries chide any pretension to maintain what is disparagingly called a \u201ctotalizing\u201d theory and urge us to be ever more modest about ever smaller specialties as the world collapses around us.<\/p>\n

Amid the deafening roar of voices shouting that any general diagnosis whatever of the present human condition certainly has no scientific or intellectual validity, and will probably be a dangerous weapon of oppression, I quietly assert my methodology.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 My methodology is to do my best to speak responsibly.\u00a0\u00a0 Following the speech act theories of John Searle and Jurgen Habermas, I regard all talking as a form of action.\u00a0\u00a0 I regard all action as called to be responsible, that is to say, to be taken in the light of the consequences of acting, in this case the consequences of speaking, and with the goal of producing consequences that will serve the cause of life.<\/p>\n

My general diagnosis of human nature includes the premise that humans are creators of culture.\u00a0 Being the cultural animal is our ecological niche.\u00a0 We are biologically programmed to be culturally programmed.\u00a0\u00a0 Following the schools of Emile Durkheim and others, I find that a central feature at the core of any culture is that culture\u2019s norms, otherwise known as rules.\u00a0\u00a0 I have read the critiques of Pierre Bourdieu, Michael Oakeshott and others who recommend against using \u201crules\u201d as a key concept for understanding culture, and although I find what they say perfectly true when regarded as warnings to avoid traps into which too much rule-talk might lead us, I still do a lot of rule-talk, trying to be careful to avoid the traps of which Bourdieu, Oakeshott and others have warned us.<\/p>\n

One of the advantages of rule-talk is that it tends to bring the study of law into dialogue with the other disciplines that comprise the social sciences.\u00a0\u00a0 Following H.L.A. Hart in his book The Concept of Law, I find it useful to define law as a union of primary and secondary rules,\u00a0 the secondary rules being the rules that identify what is and what is not a primary rule, for example the rule that whatever is duly passed by majority vote of the legislature is a law.\u00a0 Here the constitutional rule, the one empowering the legislature to legislate, is a secondary rule, while the law the legislature passes is a primary rule.<\/p>\n

Remember that humans are animals whose biological niche is culture, and that the heart of a culture is to be found in its norms, in other words in its rules.\u00a0 Whatever else may constitute a culture, at some point the culture guides and orients what people actually do<\/em>; that is where the rubber hits the road, and why it is helpful to view norms as central.<\/p>\n

Since law is about rules, when we say that the rest of the social sciences are also about culture, and that culture is about rules or what amounts to the same thing about norms, then we change the status of the college of law from that of an outlying territory speaking a foreign language to that of a central province of the federated republic of the social sciences.<\/p>\n

I also find helpful Hart\u2019s analysis of the word \u201crule.\u201d\u00a0 A rule has three characteristics.\u00a0 First, it describes regularity, or at least a tendency toward regularity, in human conduct.\u00a0 Second, violating it exposes the violator to legitimate criticism, and sometimes to legitimate punishment.\u00a0\u00a0 Third is what Hart calls the internal aspect of rules:\u00a0 People consciously look to rules and guide their conduct according to rules.<\/p>\n

My general diagnosis of the modern world-system we live in relies on the more specific concept of constitutive rules.\u00a0\u00a0 Since most of what I have to say today relies on that concept I will spend a few minutes explaining it.\u00a0\u00a0 I will not explain \u201cconstitutive rules\u201d in the abstract, but rather will tie my explanation to the constitutive rules of the modern world-system that presently drives us ever deeper into social chaos and ecological disaster by its systemic imperatives and its irrational rationalities.\u00a0 These particular constitutive rules are, in Charles Taylor\u2019s phrase, the constitutive rules of a \u201cbargaining society.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cConstitutive\u201d is usually contrasted with \u201cregulative.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 John Searle writes, \u201cI am fairly confident about the distinction [between regulative and constitutive], but I do not find it easy to clarify.\u00a0 As a start, we might say that regulative rules regulate antecedently or independently existing forms of behaviour; for example, many rules of etiquette regulate inter-personal relationships which exist independently of the rules.\u00a0 But constitutive rules do not merely regulate, they create or define new forms of behaviour.\u00a0 The rules of football or chess, for example, do not merely regulate playing football or chess, but they as it were create the very possibility of playing such games.\u201d\u00a0 (Searle 1969, p. 33)<\/p>\n

\u201cConstitutive rules constitute (and also regulate) an activity the existence of which is logically dependent on the rules.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 (Searle 1969, p. 34)<\/p>\n

Constitutive rules come in systems.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not so much a separate isolated rule that creates and defines a game, as a set of rules that makes it possible to play football, chess, or contract negotiation. \u00a0\u00a0This last, contract negotiation, is what has defined the market, and therefore the world market, and therefore the world system.<\/p>\n

In his great founding text articulating the constitutive rules of the modern world-system Adam Smith claimed that among all the animals, the human is the only one that makes contracts.\u00a0\u00a0 A natural tendency to truck or barter, he said, develops gradually into what Smith called a civilized, or in other words a commercial, society.\u00a0\u00a0 What makes a society commercial or civilized is what Smith called a tolerable administration of justice.\u00a0 In other words, contracts are complied with and property rights are respected.\u00a0 These rules constitute modernity, the market, and the modern world-system.<\/p>\n

When you know how to apply the constitutive rule, you know not only how to give a piece of behaviour its right name, like, to use Charles Taylor\u2019s example, \u00a0\u201cwalking out,\u201d but also the further consequences for the game that flow from the piece of behaviour.\u00a0\u00a0 A constitutive rule, like \u201cwhen there is a meeting of the minds reduced to writing and signed, there is a contract,\u201d may not so much prescribe<\/em> behaviour as enable<\/em> behaviour by defining what counts as an act-in-the-law or as a certain kind of social performance, e.g. making a date or an appointment.<\/p>\n

Taylor emphasizes that the game of bargaining, and any activity defined by constitutive rules, requires intersubjective<\/em> meanings.\u00a0 People participate in meanings that are not their own.\u00a0 The meanings belong to the social order in which the people participate.\u00a0\u00a0 They are not just common meanings in the sense that each player privately has the same ones.\u00a0\u00a0 Who is the \u201cproperty owner,\u201d who is the \u201cbuyer,\u201d who is the \u201clender,\u201d and who is the \u201creal estate sales agent,\u201d are defined by rules that existed prior to this particular negotiation, and will return in the future to define and govern other negotiations.<\/p>\n

Without the game with its constitutive rules, the act of \u201cwalking out\u201d does not exist.\u00a0 With it, \u201c\u2026leaving the room, saying or writing a certain form of words, counts as breaking off the negotiations;\u201d\u00a0 (Taylor 1971, p. 22)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe language of our society recognizes states or actions like the following: entering into negotiation, breaking off negotiations, offering to negotiate, negotiating in good (bad) faith, concluding negotiations, making a new offer, etc.\u201d\u00a0 (Taylor 1971, p. 22)\u00a0 If it did not do this, our society would not be the society it is, just as chess would dissolve or become another game if the rules constituting it were changed.<\/p>\n

By making constitutive rules visible, we gain a better understanding of what our society is and how it works, and we also become less ethnocentric. \u00a0We become capable of what Catherine Hoppers calls second-level indigenization.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead of first-level indigenization,\u00a0 in which faces and skin colours change, but the constitutive rules of the game remain the modern European ones prescribed by Adam Smith,\u00a0 indigenous knowledge-systems now come into play in deciding what game is being played.\u00a0\u00a0 The formerly subjugated and colonized peoples are not only allowed to play the game; they are allowed to participate in making the rules; they join in deciding what the game is that is to be played.<\/p>\n

By taking notice of our own rules we acknowledge that culture is not nature.\u00a0 We acknowledge that our culture could be different.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 If my pessimism is correct, our culture must <\/em>learn to play different games in the future because the present rule of the game have organized society to self-destruct.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur whole notion of negotiation is bound up for instance with the distinct identity and autonomy of the parties, with the willed nature of their relations; it is a very contractual notion.\u00a0 But other societies have no such conception.\u00a0\u00a0 It is reported about the traditional Japanese village that the foundation of its social life was a powerful form of consensus, which put a high premium on unanimous decision.\u00a0\u00a0 Such a consensus would be considered shattered if two clearly articulated parties were to separate out, pursuing opposed aims and attempting to vote down the opposition or push it into a settlement on the most favourable possible terms for themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 Discussion there must be, and some kind of adjustment of differences.\u00a0 But our idea of bargaining, with the assumption of distinct autonomous parties in willed relationship, has no place there.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 (Taylor 1971 p. 23, referencing Smith 1959 chapter 5)<\/p>\n

Taylor took his example from the countryside of traditional Japan, but he could just as well have taken it from traditional Africa.\u00a0\u00a0 As a general rule, the constitutive rules of indigenous knowledge systems around the world have two features that make learning from them indispensable for achieving the deep changes modernity now needs.<\/p>\n

1. They are ecologically sustainable.<\/p>\n

2. They are socially inclusive.<\/p>\n

Inclusiveness is illustrated by Walter Rodney\u00b4s famous claim that homelessness and unemployment were unknown in Africa before European contact.\u00a0 African cultures were inclusive until they were compelled by force to live under rules that made it possible for a person to have no right to be anywhere, and which made it possible for a person to have no work to do and no legitimate claim to food.<\/p>\n

But I do not want to get into endless discussions of exactly what did and what did not happen in history or what is good and what is bad about modernity and\/or about the hundreds of non-modern cultures that have been studied.\u00a0 I do want to stand by my view that humans are culture-creating animals, that cultures have norms, and that some of those norms are constitutive.\u00a0 Among constitutive rules I want to point out a logical difference between two types of constitutive rule, which may and may not be more or less exemplified by one or another culture.<\/p>\n

1.\u00a0 Exclusive rules, typified by the modern contract or bargaining society, where livelihoods depend on sales and those who do not have anything to sell for which there is a willing buyer in the marketplace are left out, excluded.<\/p>\n

2. Inclusive rules where clans and family-like relations generally provide that everyone has a place in the society, where the constitutive rules are such that for any given person with needs there is a kinship network obligated to meet those needs.<\/p>\n

Sir Henry Maine in his work on Ancient Law<\/span> called the first kind of society a contract society and the second kind a status society.\u00a0\u00a0 Mahatma Gandhi in his polemic against modernity in Hind Swaraj<\/span> called the first kind of society adharma<\/em>, which means without dharma<\/em>, sometimes translated as without duty or without religion.\u00a0\u00a0 The second kind of society Gandhi identified with the traditional Indian village and sometimes with an idealized version of the caste system. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Emile Durkheim like Adam Smith found that the first kind of society was characterized by a high degree of division of labour organized by the lex fori<\/em>, the law of the marketplace.\u00a0\u00a0 For Durkheim the second kind was a societ\u00e9 segment\u00e9e, <\/em>an archaic society organized in clans.<\/p>\n

Human nature, according to me, is such that humans have invented many cultures, and are capable of inventing many more.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me go on now to try to say more about the currently dominant cultural form, identified by Charles Taylor as a bargaining society and often called following Immanuel Wallerstein the modern world-system.<\/p>\n

To express briefly my general diagnosis of the world system I will start with John Maynard Keynes, and then work backwards from Keynes to return to the concept of constitutive rules.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics, writes in his most recent book that the recent and ongoing series of financial crises show the continuing validity of Keynes\u00b4 analysis of the instability of the world system.\u00a0\u00a0 There really is a chronic deficit of effective demand, just as Keynes said there was; that chronic deficit and sundry efforts to cope with it are at the core of the causes of the crises. \u00a0\u00a0Krugman finds that the data provided by today\u2019s current events refute those who believed they had proven Keynes wrong on theoretical and empirical grounds.<\/p>\n

Today I will refer briefly to two of Keynes\u2019 main points that co-authors and I have discussed at greater length elsewhere.\u00a0\u00a0 First, unemployment.\u00a0 Keynes writes: \u00a0\u201c\u2026full, or even approximately full, employment is of rare and short-lived occurrence.\u201d\u00a0 [Keynes p. 250]\u00a0\u00a0 Second, what Ellen Wood calls a systemic imperative; what the French regulationists call the necessity of a social regime<\/em> harnessing all aspects of social life to the single aim of favouring the accumulation of capital; which in the language of Keynes is the dependence of investment and economic growth on maintaining confidence in<\/em> markets.\u00a0 One speaks of investor confidence, consumer confidence, lender confidence, market confidence, confidence in general.\u00a0\u00a0 Keynes writes, \u201cThe state of confidence<\/em>, as they term it, is a matter to which practical men always pay the closest and most anxious attention.\u201d\u00a0 [Keynes p. 148]<\/p>\n

Paul Krugman, seconding Keynes seven decades later in his 2009 book on the current world crisis writes of \u201cthe confidence game.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The classic account of it is found in Chapter Twelve of Keynes\u00b4 General Theory<\/span>.\u00a0 We live in world in which decisions to invest, and therefore the lives and livelihood of all of us, depend on precarious guesses concerning not only other people\u2019s confidence, but other people\u2019s confidence in the confidence of still other people;\u00a0 where the most useless or even harmful speculations often yield fortunes far in excess of those to be made by honest work; where intelligent people vie for high stakes not just\u00a0 in anticipating which way the market will go but in anticipating which way other people think the market will go; where everything else is sacrificed for the one thing needful:\u00a0 the subjective confidence of investors that investment will be safe and profitable.\u00a0\u00a0 Krugman in 2009 called it crazy.\u00a0\u00a0 Keynes in 1936 did not use the word but he expressed the idea.<\/p>\n

I will not discuss the confidence game and unemployment separately because they are closely intertwined.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rising unemployment is a sign of declining confidence.\u00a0\u00a0 Both are connected to social chaos and ecological collapse.\u00a0\u00a0 Crime has long been known to correlate statistically with unemployment, which is one reason why social chaos tends to come when investor confidence leaves.\u00a0 Both boosting investor confidence and saving or creating jobs are standard reasons given for taking giant steps down the road that leads to ecological collapse.<\/p>\n

For Keynes the chronic weakness of effective demand and a permanent tendency toward less than full employment are two aspects of the same problem.\u00a0 [pp. 21-22]\u00a0 Market demand determines employment, so lack of market demand determines lack of employment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 A chronic lack of demand is produced by what Keynes calls liquidity preference.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Keynes lists twelve reasons why people prefer liquidity; that is to say they prefer keeping some of their income as cash or virtual cash, instead of spending it all.\u00a0 Less spending means less market demand, which means less employment.\u00a0 Less spending also means less profit, undercutting the accumulation dynamic that drives the system.<\/p>\n

My point, or our point, mine with my co-authors, is that Keynes did not need twelve reasons.\u00a0\u00a0 The constitutive rules of modernity make full, or even approximately full, employment rare and short-lived.\u00a0\u00a0 The constitutive rules of modernity make the livelihoods of billions depend on market confidence.<\/p>\n

We say Keynes did not need twelve reasons.\u00a0 From the moment that the constitutive rules of a bargaining society say that each individual or firm is free to contract or not contract as it chooses, it is to be expected that for any reason or for no reason market demand will lag.<\/p>\n

The instability and insecurity Keynes analyzes is made inevitable by a basic contrast between traditional kinship-based societies and market-based societies:\u00a0 If I live in a loving family or clan, my needs will be met because of culturally determined behaviour.\u00a0 Other people\u2019s duties are my security.\u00a0\u00a0 My duties are other people\u2019s security.\u00a0\u00a0 The members of my family or clan have an ethical duty to meet my needs.\u00a0\u00a0 I in turn will contribute to meeting their needs because the norms of the culture require me to do so.<\/p>\n

But from the moment I depend on sales to meet my needs, my needs may and may not be met because I may and may not find a buyer.\u00a0\u00a0 Demand is always weak because whether what I have to sell will find a buyer is always in doubt.\u00a0 No contract, no duty.\u00a0 Nobody with a duty to meet my needs, no security for me.<\/p>\n

Modern society constitutes exclusions by its basic rules of the game.\u00a0 The excluded are those who have nothing to sell that anybody else is able and willing to buy.<\/p>\n

Specifically, nobody has a duty to employ me, that is to say, to buy my services.<\/p>\n

People live in fear because instead of possessing a network of human beings they can in principle rely on because the rules prescribe that kin should be reliable helpers of one another; they have only an employment contract.\u00a0\u00a0 Their security has no solid basis. The employment contract (like any other contract) in principle may and may not be renewed.\u00a0\u00a0 It is not a permanent human bond.<\/p>\n

Those who have not even an employment contract feel even more fear, rejection, and humiliation.<\/p>\n

The dissolution of traditional communities generates what Michel Foucault would call the historical conditions of the possibility of unemployment. Without kin, without status in Sir Henry Maine\u2019s terms, the world of the market is a world where Bishop Desmond Tutu\u2019s definition of Ubuntu <\/em>\u201cI am because your are; I am human because I belong, I participate, I share\u201d does not apply.\u00a0\u00a0 It is a dehumanized<\/em> world.<\/p>\n

Keynes was not a Keynesian.\u00a0\u00a0 According to Keynesians, and let it be said also according to many followers of Karl Popper, \u00a0intelligent macroeconomic management can lead simultaneously to full employment, to no inflation, and to a policy environments in which public policy can work to solve all social and ecological problems.\u00a0\u00a0 Keynes was never so optimistic.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The frustrations of attempts to build social democracies under the guidance of Keynesian mandarins without modifying the basic constitutive rules of modern society show that Keynes was right to refrain from being a Keynesian.\u00a0\u00a0 He did recommend public works and public spending, but when asked whether such measures could possibly solve the problems of unemployment and systemic instability in the long run, he could only answer \u201cin the long run we will all be dead.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 He had no long run solution, and he knew he did not have one.<\/p>\n

There is a passage toward the end of Keynes\u00b4 General Theory<\/span> that implicitly acknowledges that only deep cultural change can reverse the deepening of social chaos.\u00a0 \u00a0Keynes concludes a chapter restating his pessimistic conclusions by writing:\u00a0 \u201cBut we must not conclude that the mean position thus determined by \u2018natural\u2019 tendencies, namely by those tendencies which are likely to persist, failing measures expressly designed to correct them, is, therefore, established by laws of necessity.\u00a0 The unimpeded rule of the above conditions is a fact of observation concerning the world as it is or has been, and not a necessary principle which cannot be changed.\u201d\u00a0 [p. 254]\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is only restating Keynes slightly to read him as saying that what appears to be natural necessity is what is foreordained by the constitutive rules of a bargaining society, but that it is not out of the question \u2013indeed it is a necessary task\u2014to transform the constitutive rules.\u00a0\u00a0 Let this be a definition of \u201ctransformation.\u201d\u00a0 \u00a0Change within the constitutive rules is reform.\u00a0\u00a0 It changes the way the game is played.\u00a0\u00a0 Changing the constitutive rules is transformation.\u00a0\u00a0 It changes the game.<\/p>\n

Hopefully I have said enough about where I am coming from and where I am going to be able now to return to the topic of humanizing methodologies in social research.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I am generally in favour of what are generically called qualitative methods, including open-ended interviews, focus groups, grounded theory, action research, participatory research, co-operative research, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, ethnographies, archaeologies and genealogies, histories, case studies, phenomenological approaches, and even hermeneutics.\u00a0\u00a0 However, unlike many of the advocates of qualitative methods, I see them as <\/em>causal models and not as eschewing causal models, and I see them as about social structure, not as micro sociology that leaves larger questions of social structure to others.<\/p>\n

In other words, I may use the same methods with a different methodology.\u00a0 Here is a definition of methodology:\u00a0 Methodology is the broader philosophical framework with which one selects and employs a method.<\/p>\n

I have chosen to regard rules or norms as central to culture, and culture as central to understanding both human nature and a global world-system now in need of transformation.\u00a0\u00a0 The global world-system is a European cultural form that is now globally dominant.<\/p>\n

Rules are causal.\u00a0\u00a0 Explanations in terms of rules are often causal explanations.\u00a0 Indeed I have argued in my book Understanding the Global Economy<\/span> that causal explanations that appeal to cultural rules as premises are the only causal explanations there are in the science of economics,\u00a0 whether the economics in question be liberal, Keynesian,\u00a0 Marxist, or of some other kind.<\/p>\n

The constitutive rules of modern society are the same whether one is dealing with interpersonal relationships or with global structures.\u00a0\u00a0 For this reason I do not agree with a Harold Garfinkel or with an Erving Goffman when they say that they only do micro sociology, leaving macro sociology to someone else.\u00a0\u00a0 Because changing the social world is mainly a matter of changing it norms, and because I think the main norms, such as those of contracts and bargaining, are the same at the micro and macro levels, I agree with Mahatma Gandhi when he says that we begin to change the world by changing ourselves.<\/p>\n

It remains to say something about \u201chumanizing.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the beginning of his book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/span> the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire writes that humanization is the greatest challenge and the highest priority of the times we live in.\u00a0\u00a0 This initial premise informs the whole of Freire\u00b4s work.<\/p>\n

A central feature –perhaps the central feature– of the educational methods Freire uses is that people are given the right to speak and to be heard.\u00a0 To translate literally the original Portuguese, people \u201ctake the word,\u201d an expression which is used when someone takes the floor in a meeting because it is her turn to talk.\u00a0 Writers sympathetic to Freire sometimes advocate methods in which people \u201ccome to voice.\u201d<\/p>\n

I believe that this emphasis on respect for people speaking their own words in their own way accords with our intuitions concerning the use of words like \u201chumanizing.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 We are more likely to call a research methodology \u201chumanistic\u201d or \u201chumanizing\u201d if it proceeds in natural language.\u00a0 We are less likely to do so if it measures operationally defined variables.\u00a0 We are more likely to call it humanistic or humanizing if people are asked to express their opinions.\u00a0\u00a0 We are less likely to do so if people are observed through one-way glass, especially if the observations are then recorded in a technical language which is understood by the researchers doing the study but not understood by the people who are being studied.<\/p>\n

Voice is tightly connected to agency.\u00a0\u00a0 Agency is connected to another reason for calling a methodology humanizing:\u00a0 We call a methodology humanizing when it treats subjects (or participants if it is cooperative research) as free and responsible agents, as the authors of their actions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The connection between voice and agency is deliberation.\u00a0\u00a0 Aristotle called it prohairesis.<\/em> From the conversations of the soul with itself, and from the social exchange of words and symbols with others, there emerges a decision to act.\u00a0 The entity that deliberates and acts is called a person.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Here we must be careful not to do sentimental research.\u00a0\u00a0 To be sure, humanizing research is never only <\/em>research in the sense of being only fact-gathering.\u00a0\u00a0 It is always simultaneously cultural action.\u00a0\u00a0 It contributes to building a better world in which persons are more respected than they are now.\u00a0 Consequently, when we use a humanizing methodology we get a warm feeling of emotional security.\u00a0 The warm feeling goes with the affirmation of \u00a0values we believe in.<\/p>\n

Partly because we have warm feelings and inspire warm feelings in others, we can be and often are accused of doing soft research.\u00a0\u00a0 We are accused of neglecting the one thing research must do as a prerequisite to doing anything else it does:\u00a0 it must ascertain what are and what are not the facts.<\/p>\n

While I have been giving you some background concerning where I am coming from and where I am going I have been anticipating this moment by organizing a case for asserting that precisely the opposite is true.\u00a0\u00a0 When it is properly done, it is humanizing research that is hard research.\u00a0\u00a0 Here is my case:<\/p>\n

Being the ecological animal is the ecological niche of the human species.\u00a0 Although cultures are organized in many ways, where the rubber hits the road as guidance for action we can speak of rules or of norms.\u00a0 Rules are causes.\u00a0 They explain social phenomena.\u00a0 They have what H.L.A. Hart calls an internal aspect, in that people use them to guide their behaviour.\u00a0\u00a0 They have a social aspect in that violations of them authorize people to criticize each other\u2019s behaviour.\u00a0 Therefore, important explanations of conduct are found in the language and images in which deliberation is conducted, and in the rules that guide the deliberation.\u00a0\u00a0 Even if you think I have exaggerated the importance of rules in social life, and that I have underestimated the extent to which people organize conduct in ways that are not helpfully described as rule-following, it still remains true that to explain how people organize and generate their conduct \u2013however that might be\u2014it is necessary to try to see the world from their point of view and therefore necessary to use humanizing methodologies.<\/p>\n

Therefore humanizing research yields insights into the causal mechanisms that produce the phenomena observed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It is hard.<\/p>\n

On top of these theoretical points I want to pile some testimony from my own experience doing social research.\u00a0\u00a0 My experience tells me that if you really want to know what is happening at a given social scene at a given time and place, take a humanistic approach.\u00a0\u00a0 Listen to people\u2019s stories.\u00a0\u00a0 Check them out by triangulating with a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods.\u00a0\u00a0 On the other hand, if you want to do a cover-up, if you really do not want it known who is fighting with whom about what, if you do not want to know who is lying and who is telling the truth, where the money went and where the bodies are buried, then do a study that will follow the precepts of positivist and mechanistic research traditions.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Frame some hypotheses, gather some data, measure some variables, add charts and graphs, put together a narrative by rewriting existing official documents, and deliver it as a report.\u00a0 Then you can rest assured that the skeletons will remain in their closets.<\/p>\n

But I digress.\u00a0 I need to return to my main point.\u00a0 My main point is that<\/p>\n

deep cultural changes are needed, and that humanizing methodologies are needed to achieve them.<\/p>\n

Deep cultural changes are needed because we are in the grip of a rationality deficit, or as Herbert Marcuse said in the grip of an irrational rationality.\u00a0 What rationality ought to do, if it were really to perform its biological function, is to guide us human beings in solving our vital problems.\u00a0\u00a0 Rationality should show us how to end unemployment by providing livelihood for all; how to end crime by seducing criminals into attractive legitimate ways of life; how to save the biosphere by converting to green technologies and frugal lifestyles.<\/p>\n

Our rationality deficit appears in the enormous outputs of information conceptualized within research paradigms that dovetail with the constitutive rules of modern western society.\u00a0 Instead of consulting the elders who hold the traditional knowledge of cultures that excluded nobody, maintained social cohesion, and lived in harmony with their natural environments, we ask ourselves how to crank up a chronically unstable economic machine.\u00a0\u00a0 Instead of using the broader category of livelihood, we use the narrow category of employment and ask how to induce investors to invest in order to create it.\u00a0 \u00a0Instead of asking how to escape the systemic imperative to maintain confidence, we ask how to maintain confidence.\u00a0 Instead of a rational analysis of how to solve the vital problems of 100% of the population within the constraints imposed by the laws of physics,\u00a0 we do a less than fully rational analysis that excludes all options that require breaking the constraints imposed by standard economics.<\/p>\n

There is a gap, a\u00a0 conceptual void.\u00a0 On one side of the\u00a0 gap is a rationality truncated by the systemic imperative to boost sales because our dominant constitutive rules tell us that everybody must live by selling something.\u00a0 The gap is a void between it and a desperately needed truly scientific rationality that would solve our vital problems subject to existing physical constraints.\u00a0\u00a0 To bridge the gap,\u00a0 to build an epistemology of hope and a metaphysics of sustainability, we need humanizing methodologies.<\/p>\n

We need humanizing methodologies to bridge the gap because the task requires changing norms.\u00a0\u00a0 It requires second-level indigenization,\u00a0 transforming the rules of the game.\u00a0\u00a0 Because we need to change norms, we need methodologies that study norms.\u00a0 We will never change norms by studying independent variables, dependent variables, or any variables.<\/p>\n

Because we need to craft the norms of a culture that is physically sustainable, we need to learn from the norms of indigenous cultures that live in harmony with their environments. \u00a0\u00a0We will soon learn that cultural norms do not stand alone;\u00a0 norms are part and parcel of cosmologies, epistemologies, worldviews;\u00a0 they are part and parcel of metaphysics in the sense in which a metaphysics is a cultural matrix that generates both description of the world as it is and prescription of the world as it should be.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0There were many physically sustainable cultures on the African continent and some still survive.\u00a0 We will never learn to live sustainably by copying the North Americans, the Europeans, and our own upper classes who are day by day destroying the future with their unsustainable levels of consumption and pollution.<\/p>\n

Humanizing methodologies lead to transformation by way of ethics.\u00a0\u00a0 Let me explain why at this point I introduce the word \u201cethics.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one level the word \u201cethics\u201d adds nothing to what I have already said.\u00a0 A person who complies with the rules prescribed by her or his culture behaves ethically according to that culture\u2019s standards.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 By studying culturally determined behaviour, as humanizing methodologies do, one automatically studies ethics.<\/p>\n

At a second level, adding the word \u201cethics\u201d brings in another dimension.\u00a0\u00a0 An ethical norm by definition is not just any norm that happens to exist.\u00a0 It is a norm that should exist, and there lies the crucial difference.\u00a0\u00a0 At the first level, the rules of modern culture, moral and legal, permit people who hold wealth to indulge in whatever luxuries they choose to indulge in, even while others suffer from hunger and\/or turn to crime and social chaos increases, and even while their luxury consumption contributes to climate change, pollution, and resource exhaustion that will sooner or later make it impossible for anybody to live at all anywhere on the planet.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Ethics adds a second dimension of judgment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It judges whether the conventional rules of the game are the rules that ought<\/em> to be followed.<\/p>\n

It will be objected that ethics is powerless.\u00a0\u00a0 History allegedly teaches us according to certain kinds of objectors, that social transformation is always only produced by a power struggle in which present power-holders lose power and new power-holders gain power.<\/p>\n

My reply to the objection is that you can do power-talk all you want, but unless the norms change nothing will change.\u00a0\u00a0 Transformation is change of the constitutive rules.\u00a0\u00a0 Whoever may hold power, it is the rules that organize and guide conduct.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Since the present rules of the game are driving us all over the edge of the cliff to catastrophe, it would be to the interest of the powerful, whoever they may be, to change the rules.\u00a0\u00a0 My opinion, however, is that the powerful do not exist.\u00a0\u00a0 It is the system itself with its systemic imperative to maintain market confidence that drives the global economy.\u00a0 It is the rules of the global economy that now organize and guide the world.<\/p>\n

We do not run the global economy.\u00a0 We do, however, run ourselves.\u00a0 We can choose, as Gandhi did, to be the change we want to see by running our own lives according to different rules.\u00a0 We can also try to persuade others to live by different rules, as Gandhi did, writing on the average some four letters a day and two speeches or articles per week throughout his adult life, and also by setting a personal example by his own practices. \u00a0\u00a0But I do not want to insist too much on the example of Gandhi.\u00a0\u00a0 There are hundreds of ways to change human norms and practices.\u00a0\u00a0 Gandhi showed it was possible.\u00a0\u00a0 He did not show the only way to do it.<\/p>\n

The system is made of rules.\u00a0\u00a0 To change it we need to understand it, and to understand it we need humanizing methodologies.\u00a0\u00a0 Let it be a definition of a \u201chumanizing\u201d methodology that it tracks and encourages the kind of behaviour that defines the species, namely culturally determined behaviour that operates through the deliberations and choices of agents.<\/p>\n

In closing, to make one last point before the discussion period, \u00a0I add a second meaning to the definition of \u201chumanizing.\u201d\u00a0 Remember Bishop Desmond Tutu\u2019s account of what \u201chuman\u201d meant in the traditional Ubuntu philosophy<\/em>.\u00a0 \u201cI am because you are; I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.\u201d<\/p>\n

I suggest that the constitutive rules of Ubuntu<\/em> are more typical of human cultures as they have existed on this planet over the centuries and millennia than the constitutive rules of the bargaining society.\u00a0\u00a0 During most of the at least 400,000 years that homo sapiens sapiens <\/em>has either been here or in the process of arriving here she has lived in small groups of hunters and gatherers.\u00a0\u00a0 That was the context of the shaping of her physical body with all its emotional and mental and behavioural tendencies.\u00a0 \u00a0Apart from her very long experience as a hunter gatherer she has spent thousands of years living in cultures that organized the livelihoods of groups of shepherds, of farmers and of fishers,\u00a0\u00a0 But on average (varying depending on which part of the planet we are talking about) she has lived less than 400 years under the constitutive rules of the bargaining society.\u00a0 \u00a0The older rules, anthropologists tell us, were more frequently than anything else norms of reciprocal obligations among the members of clans, and generally also among ancestors, animals, plants, and spirits who rubbed shoulders in culturally defined spaces with homo sapiens sapiens<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Whatever may be happening in modern people\u2019s heads, their bodies still desire to belong, to participate to share.\u00a0\u00a0 Their desire can be seen in their flocking to soccer matches to cheer for their teams, in their flocking to churches to sing and pray to their gods, in their flocking to rock concerts to move to the beat of their idols, and in their massive giving of voluntary aid every time an earthquake or a tsunami creates a tribe of sisters and brothers who need help.\u00a0 Every time an airplane lands and people start using their cell phones and one overhears a few conversations,\u00a0 one realizes that there is still a lot of family in the world, albeit perhaps not as much as formerly.<\/p>\n

The motivations required for transformation are solidly established in the human body.\u00a0\u00a0 They are locked into the DNA.<\/p>\n

Let it be a second definition of a \u201chumanizing\u201d methodology that it tracks and taps the generic tendencies toward kinship-style bonding that are hard-wired in the human body and have been typical of most of the cultures the species has created\u00a0 –the generic tendencies that lie behind the words, \u201cI am because you are; I am human because I belong, I participate, I share.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thank you for your kind attention.\u00a0 It has been a pleasure to be with you, a pleasure to share ideas with you, and it will be a pleasure to come back again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Talk at the University of South Africa sponsored by the College of Law \u2013 20 Jul 2010<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}