Re: Prigogine & Co.

Is nature that different from society?  Is it not perhaps time to speak
differently about the experience of nature, in a manner that does not erect an
artificial separation between the two?  Does not the mighty Marx himself - in no
doubt occasional passages alone - refuse the separation?  How to theorize about
the embeddedness of society in nature is one of the challenges that face all
materialist thinkers.  It is I want to argue, an ethical undertaking.  Ganesh.

Trichur Ganesh wrote:

> I disagree with those who think that reading Prigogine or Stengers is
> tantamount to 'going down the reductionist road'.  There is nothing
> reductionist about Prigogine, there is nothing reductionist about Stengers,
> and I do not suffer from Wagar's experience of  inferiority complexes in
> saying so.  In any case where does he read a 'shrinking of social phenomena to
> the dimensions of the natural'?  In Wallerstein's use of the concept of
> 'bifurcation'?  But is that all that one may see in Prigogine?  Ganesh.
>
> wwagar@binghamton.edu wrote:
>
> >         I wish it were possible to dissuade social scientists from going
> > down the reductionist road yet one more time.  The interest expressed in
> > Prigogine by various world-systems scholars is just another example of an
> > age-old determination to shrink social phenomena to the dimensions
> > of natural phenomena, which began at least as long ago as the medieval
> > schoolmen (Aquinas et al.) with their convoluted treatises on natural law.
> >
> >         From the very earliest origins of social science (once known as
> > "social physics") the Great Minds have done their best to collapse
> > the vast gulf between the behavior of atoms and the behavior of human
> > beings in society.  I am a materialist, in the sense that I believe human
> > beings are collections of atoms subject to the same vicissitudes as all
> > other matter, but human beings, especially in their interactions, are
> > immeasurably more complex, by so many orders of magnitude that even rough
> > analogies between the two levels of being are almost certain to prove
> > false.
> >
> >         Nevertheless, social scientists have always pursued the
> > will-o-the-wisp of scientific exactitude, imagining that they could
> > reduce the behavior of human beings in society to a set of laws or
> > abstractions grounded in mathematics and/or the natural sciences.  So
> > whether the inspiration is geometry, mechanics, gravity, the felicific
> > calculus, the law of the three states, entropy, evolution, mutual aid,
> > relativity, indeterminacy, organic systems theory, Godel's Proof, chaos,
> > or whatever, and whether the basic science involved certifies the
> > existence or non-existence of free will, social scientists have time and
> > again taken the bait and tried to anchor the findings of their research
> > in the natural sciences.
> >
> >         This is not to say that human beings in society do not behave in
> > ways that can be measured, classified, trimmed to generalizations, and
> > sometimes even predicted.  We are not ants, but we also exhibit
> > patterns and regularities in our social behavior that deserve careful
> > observation and analysis, including at the macroscopic level of
> > world-systems.  But why this urge to turn social science into natural
> > science or conflate the two?  What strange inferiority complex drives
> > social scientists to ape "real" scientists?
> >
> >         As for this unlikely bedding-down of Habermas with Derrida, of a
> > moralist with an amoralist, I'm with Gert.  Most of the countries of
> > Europe belong to the core of the modern world-system, the rest are
> > scrambling to join it, and any hope of a "kinder, gentler" Europe based
> > on a vote that didn't take place in the Security Council on the issue
> > of whether or not to pound Iraq into the dust in March as opposed to
> > October, and with or without a few brigades of Frenchmen, is surely
> > misplaced.  The E.U. may or may not emerge as the next hegemon, but it's
> > the demise of the modern world-system, not the next chapter (if any) in
> > its bloody career, that really matters.
> >
> >         Warren