Fundamental Sorting Research Articles

Les Valeurs économiques et les valeurs morales

Economists have always presumed that economic behavior is based on individual and collective value choices, but it is likewise presumed that these choices are essentially materialistic in that they seek to maximize selfishly defined social and personal utility above any other consideration. Our current economic system reflects this presumption by seeking to maximize productivity and short-term profitability over all other considerations. This paper examines and supports the thesis that economic activity actually presupposes an (often unacknowledged) underlying morality of a more fundamental sort, a morality deriving from the value choices we make about the most basic aspects of human relationships and human existence: trustworthiness, truthfulness, cooperation, suffering, compassion, etc. In the light of this thesis, it is seen that both capitalism and socialism are morally defective, though in somewhat different ways. Capitalism is based on the desire for constantly increasing consumption and leads to unbridled (indeed exponential) increases in production, but only as long as certain conditions are met (e.g., a ready supply of raw materials, a constantly expanding market, etc.). Capitalism also leads to morally unacceptable extremes in the distribution of wealth (and thus of the fruits of production). Socialism seeks to place a higher value on satisfying the needs of all before gratifying the desires of a few, but it lacks an adequate incentive to production and often leads to morally unacceptable coerciveness. Both of these systems are compared with the Bahá’í system, which seeks to link economic activity directly and explicitly with its underlying morality. This is accomplished by stressing the primality of the spiritual function of work—the healthy actualization of the higher capacities of the self through service to and cooperation with others—over the purely material function. The Bahá’í system combines certain elements of both socialism and capitalism with other novel features, and is seen to constitute a truly practical solution to current economic problems. Thus, the crassly pragmatic morality underlying current economic systems is, in the final analysis, less practicable than the morality on which the Bahá’í system is based, while Bahá’í morality is more idealistic but ultimately more satisfactory.

The ideology of progress in Levinson's theory of adult development: A response to Basseches and Kalinowski

Basseches and Kalinowski make a number of perceptive criticisms of The Seuson’,~ ofu Man’s Life, but they seem finally unable to grasp the significance of their own insights. Consequently, after a review which implicitly undermines the basic structure of Levinson’s work, they end by reinforcing its fundamental perspective. The author’s basic criticisms are of two fundamental sorts: (1) they maintain that Levinson’s work suffers from defects in research design, broadly defined, and (2) that the work in fact advocates compliance with present society under the guise of a value-neutral empirical description. I will refer to these basic critiques under the heading of “methodology” and “ideology”.* I believe that both assertions made against Levinson are valid, but that the authors do not fully grasp their inter-relationship nor the devastating implications that follow for any study of human development.

Linguistic Anti-Structure

The organization of face-to-face languages ranges from an extreme positive structuring to an extreme negative structuring. Positively structured language is a context-independent system of arbitrary, clearly defined units. Negatively structured language is a context-dependent system of multi-channeled, partially motivated, ambiguous unit. Negatively structured language must be said to be a primary and fundamental sort of organization insofar as it performs the task of constituting the social group which in turn constructs and employs positively structured language. Positively structured and negatively structured languages are not part of a static typology of language types. Rather they are dialectically related pressures existing within all language communities. Every resolution of the dialectic tension between these pressures is constrained by the social situation of a people. Specifically, a people who are secure in their social unity and social significance will develop a positively structured language. A people who are dominated and thereby made to doubt their social significance will forsake positively structured language in order to focus on their fundamental task of social and cultural self-definition through the use of negatively structured language.

Pictures and Make-Believe

P EOPLE, objects, and events are pictured, or depicted, in representational paintings. In novels, by contrast, such things are described. Novels employ verbal symbols, whereas (we might say) paintings and other pictures use ones. This difference is both obvious and elusive. That there is a distinction of a fundamental sort between depicting and describing seems beyond question. But the difference threatens to vanish when we reach for it. In reading a novel to ourselves we look at the print on the pages. We examine a copy of Brothers Karamazov with our eyes in order to find out about Alyosha, as we visually investigate the canvas in order to learn about the peasants in Breughel's painting Haymaking. Why then don't the marks on the pages of the novel count as symbols, and the novel as a art? Of course novels, unlike pictures, can be heard as well as seen, when they are read aloud. Does that mean that the novel is, indifferently, an aural or a visual art? The trouble is that novels seem not to be perceptual at all, in some sense in which paintings (and sculptures) are perceptual, despite the fact that novels, or copies or readings of them, are to be perceived. A too easy explanation is that paintings, or parts of them, look like or resemble what they picture-Haymaking looks like fields, peasants at work, haystacks, and so forth. But a copy of Brothers Karamazov does not look like the people and events it describes, nor does any of the print it contains. And neither do the sounds of an oral reading of the novel sound like what is described. There are serious difficulties in this proposal, some

Resistance and Social Movements

SOCIOLOGISTS and anthropologists have long been interested in the tenacity of culture and its slowness to change. Representative of this concern are Tylor's survivals, Bagehot's cake of custom, Tonnies' sitte, Sumner's mores and folkways, Boas' inertia, and Ogburn's lag. Common to these concepts is the notion that once a pattern of social relationships has been established, it tends to carry on unchanged, except as the dynamics of other social forces operate to undermine it. Closely associated with the study of cultural persistence is the study of resistance to social change. The one, however, should not be confused with the other. Resistance is not simply a function of cultural persistence. Resistance implies behavior on the part of some or all of the members of society, either passive or active, which is directed toward the rejection or circumvention of a social change. Except perhaps for Bernhard J. Stern in his studies of resistance to medical and technological change,' writers have concerned themselves with resistance primarily as a by-product of other work and interests. Thus Veblen and Marx in their respective analyses of vested interests and the bourgeoisie treated resistance to social change as it originated from particular groups within society. There have also appeared various descriptive accounts of social movements with a predominantly resistance orientation.2 And some aspects of nativistic phenomena studied by anthropologists have possessed characteristics of resistance movements.3 However, in most nativistic movements the revivalistic rather than the perpetualistic component appears to be the dominant theme, e.g., the Ghost Dance among the Plains Indians.4 Unfortunately sociologists in the field of social movements have tended to neglect these materials and the phenomenon of resistance in their studies. Social movement traditionally has been defined in a manner which would automatically exclude movements resisting social change. This has been the product of either explicitly or implicitly treating social movements as agencies seeking to bring about social change, often of a fundamental sort.' Thus the work which has emerged in the field is a study of reformistic and revolutionary movements. Representative of the reformistic orientation are the following concepts of a social movement:

Implications of Supranational Federation

M t MANY persons advocate the formation of a democratic, federal, supranational government, during or immediately after the war. Most scholars who have studied the subject agree that there is no insuperable administrative, technical, or economic barrier to the establishment of such a government, if enough people want it, and if the Axis powers do not become too strong.2 It appears not impossible that enough persons will want it, but the history of other attempts at changing human institutions imposes a warning. It is one thing to persuade people to adopt a significant social change such as supranational Federal Union; it is another to organize affairs so they do not eventually return to the old order. The introduction of a new cultural feature of a fundamental sort will necessitate considerable readjustment of the culture as a whole,3 and in the process of readjustment, certain groups will be inconvenienced. These groups will join forces and insist on going back to the good old days. If they succeed, the brave new hope is written down all right in theory but not in practice. Those who support a proposal for human betterment are apt to meet criticism of it by an ever more intense emphasis upon the long-range desirability of that which they advocate. Unfortunately, as a practical matter, this type of reply is often irrelevant;4 a hero of modern Federal Unionists said on this point:'