The adjective "many-splendored" is used in this work to depict a society with personal freedom and a shining differentiation of six self-governing realms: economy, politics, science, art, religion, and morality. When these societal realms are joined together so that no one rules over the others we have, in my view, a good society.

The Many-Splendored Society deals with emerging categories and spontaneous tendencies in a social science based on properties of language. It is a multi-volume groundwork that might eventually bind in one volume, or one Kindle-type file, as electronic reading devices become ubiquities on campuses.

Let’s speak in larger print of Volume 1, which you are now reading. It is subtitled Surrounded by Symbols. Here we pursue man's symbolic environment, meeting the basic elements of human living with a minimum of references to other parts of man's biology than his language brain, i.e. the latest addition in the evolution to the total human brain. Our message is that human selves and their social life and culture depend on, nay, consist of, and/or are organized by the use of symbols generated by the language brain.

Symbols codify societal orders, represent wealth, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness, and express virtues. We identify common abuses of language in the form of magic, confabulation, and defensive bilge. An enormous potential of personal freedom is built into this language that so deeply shapes our own lives and our own society. It contains an almost unlimited number of linguistic germs: any one of us can create sen-[p vi]tences that never have been heard before. Its fertile environment, of course, is one of freedom of speech.

Taking a telescopic view of total symbolic environments we find recurrent vibrations. We present three proven pulsating strings: tradition vs. modernity, faithfulness vs. instrumentality, and materialism vs. humanism. They are found in many, perhaps most, symbolic environments. Their vibrations have an unusual independence of their contexts of groups, networks, classes, and other social structures. In their various combinations they give us advice about the Zeitgeist that prevails in mankind's spaces and times. Taking a microscopic view of single symbols and sentences we find three recurrent usages: descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions. We propose that they enter into the minimum vocabulary of social reality.

Surrounded by Symbols introduces two default states of human conditions: First we hold that the urge to preserve standing and to avoid degradation is more basic than the urge to improve. Second we claim that an emotive choice is initially more typical than a rational choice. These threads of thought will prove essential in our further explorations.

In a second Volume, An Edifice of Symbols, the use of symbols stripped of magic, confabulation, and defensive bilge, will provide us with a set of general categories and dimensions, all based on properties of language, for the study of social reality. The categories are only starting points. The tale of society is how they interlace into processes and systems, i.e. into mankind's social and cultural achievements. We look at structures of communication, rules and contracts, different stratifications and reward systems, diverse spontaneous orders, and several[p vii]other social attributes. Most thinking about them comes from celebrated persons in the social sciences of past times, so in this presentation we pass many intellectual milestones raised by classical writers of social science, from Adam Smith to Max Weber. Following a lead from the latter that has been largely unused, we discover that all these attributes look different in different realms of social reality. That is, they are different in science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality.

An Edifice of Symbols ends with a summary in the form of a special table of societal realms. A chemist might see this table as kindred to his field, for it has some properties of a Periodic System of the type discovered in chemistry in the nineteenth century. By knowing the place in this table of a phenomenon in social reality, we know a great deal of its characteristics. To us it means that a diversified, many-splendored society is everywhere within reach, an edifice raised by the use of bits and pieces of language.

In the third Volume, Fueled by Symbols, we turn from the use of constructing society by language to find out how we use language to inspire human beings to live in the home that language has built. We prompt ourselves by "justifying vocabularies" and we prompt others by "impelling vocabularies." These vocabularies of motives are short pieces of language with remarkable leverage. This use of symbols makes for civilized life, where conflicts are resolved, not by force, but by words, and violence is reduced to the minimum needed to defend civility.

We find that different justifications are used in all subdivisions of society that appear in our periodic system of societal realms. Impelling language shapes personalities by constructing vocabularies of identity. We look at some length at other impelling vocabularies that shape regulations and rights, avoidance of social exclusion, preserving a favorable self-image, and upholding the order that upholds us. The impelling and justifying vocabularies lock into each other in most inter-[p viii]esting ways. One such way creates the human conscience. Another makes them work together like the left and right part of a zipper, making for a most reliable day-today-motivation.

Such vocabularies, not Hobbes' strongmen of the state, give societies the motivations to flourish. Very few tasks of a modern state need overriding physical force for their executions. Instead the body politic needs impelling vocabularies, as do the other realms of civilized societies. To follow the temptation to use shortcuts of violence instead of diplomacy (i.e. language) to exercise ambitions and to solve routine conflicts have been political wisdom in past times. It is unfit as the highway to the future. We argue that those who still practice it are literally "uncivilized." They should, if they persist, be overpowered at the hands of the civilized side, which in this case — and this case alone — is justified to use a necessary measure of violence.

With Volume 4 in this series on The Many-Splendored Society we begin presenting details about advanced socio-linguistic areas of life, the societal realms. As mentioned, they are science, economy, polity, art, religion, and morality. Each is dominated by usage of some specific types of symbols, and thus depends entirely on language brains. In an animal kingdom without language they would not develop. Already in the first chapter of the first volume we saw the emergence of these societal realms and their roots in European history. Now we can go into details about their cardinal values, communication structures, different stratifications, specific reward systems, and their diverse spontaneous orders. A striking fact is that they have the potential of becoming comparatively autonomous parts of society, a collective home for individuals who have civic rights, academic freedom, free trade, artistic license, and freedoms of religion and of conscience. Our slogan "Six Realms Born Free and Equal," signals both a discovery and a bias: science, art, religion, and morality are as important in society as are today's favorites, economy and politics.

[p ix]Volume 4 is entitled Knowledge and Beauty and deals with the social reality of science and art. The societal realm of science contains not only descriptive verbalism, it has openings to the mathematical brain; physical nature has a structure that can be expressed in mathematics. Social science, however, is based on a grammar, i.e. on something found in language — but not necessarily in the old school grammars. Both physical and social sciences are dominated by descriptive discourses that help us understand the world.

The societal realm of art is concerned with aesthetic forms of revelations, appearances, and entries (Erscheinung) that are worthy of our contemplation. It also depends on descriptive symbolism, but on a different and more emotive kind that opens a door for people to stay in touch with deep expressions of beauty and also with experiences from pre-language stages and worlds.

Volume 5 is entitled Wealth and Sacredness and deals with the social reality of economy and religion; we have now come to Mammon and God. Economy with its focus on wealth uses mostly evaluative language; it is not the goods and services we have that constitutes our riches but the evaluation of them. We give particular attention to two pursuits of riches: manufacturing and finance.

Religion with its cardinal value of sacredness also uses mostly evaluative language but of a very different kind than the economy. The fact that language organizes identities and that all language-using beings are mortal has given rise to religions in which selves are turned into souls.

Order and Virtue is the title of Volume 6. It deals with the social reality of the body politic and morality. The body politic is focused on the exercise of power, using the tools of legislation and diplomatic treaties, usually phrased in the commanding speech of prescriptive discourse. A many-splendored society is a federation of societal realms. The key to ruling such a society [p x]is a ‘central zone’ where exponents of the six societal realms meet and interact. It is essential that access to the central zone is open to comers. ‘Consent of the governed’ takes on new qualities here.

The realm of morality also uses impelling imperatives but of a different kind than politics. In the past morality had a strong focus on how we should cope with biological spontaneities, such as sex and violence. In recent times a new moral focus has emerged in requiring mankind to live so that the physical environment is sustainable, and live so that the animal kingdom can survive. In a many-splendored society comes an additional new moral requirement of authenticity in the cardinal values of knowledge, beauty, wealth, sacredness, order, and virtue.

In dealing with grand societal realms two topics become interesting: how do they search for hegemony within their society, and how they seek a global reach. Now and then in the text we look at their infightings within a society: state vs. church, religion vs. science, morality vs. law, business vs. politics, et cetera. Furthermore, we discover that these realms are the main actors in the process of globalization that so preoccupies mankind at this juncture of history.

So far, the accounts of societal realms. What remains are the interpenetrations between the social world on the one hand and the biological and physical worlds on the other. Physicians, ecologists, engineers, and military officers use language-based skills to cope with bodily spontaneities, vagrancies of nature, technologies, and organized violence. In the seventh and final volume called Life and the Good Life we go a short distance beyond what is created by mankind's language capacity (that is almost "the good life" in Plato's sense) and pursue the impact of some more biologically based life areas. This is where needs for food and shelter and sleep give rise to mankind's tradition of living in households. Sex and reproduction [p xi]give rise to the tradition of living in generational families. Here is also where biological age sets stages for lifecycles.

In all, in these seven short volumes we will tell a story — a social theory — of how man's use of language creates the framework for freedom in a many-splendored society. No author, dead or alive, is a supreme lord over his or her own formulations. New generations make their formulations. As George Herbert Mead (1936, 116) said: "A different Caesar crosses the Rubicon not only with each author but with each generation." I have made several reformulations of the classics of social science and humanities to fit into my schema, and in order to be more relevant to the contemporary state of knowledge. The classics are treated, not as monuments, but as stepping stones.

In presenting thoughts and evidence from other authors I have tried to cite or mention those who formulated them first or, at least at an early stage, and, at the same time, gave evidence that they fully understood their importance. Sometimes I underline the buildup from the past by mentioning the original year of publication in the Bibliography. You will find more old references in this text than in most others that profess to be up to date in the 21st century. I hope this practice will convince readers that there has been much accumulation of knowledge in the social sciences. I have not included the great number of other supporting statements and additional evidence from later dates than the original discovery.

With some ingenuity that at least sometimes goes beyond conventional wisdom, we may discover how our categories can build a set of testable and consistent propositions that give us an understanding of the past and a handle to cope with the future. Not that a future society can be forecasted, but that our options for the present and the future can be less myopically perceived.

[p xii]The schema presented in these volumes is not the property of any particular academic discipline. In the latter half of my professional life I have worked mainly outside universities and their somewhat archaic division of disciplines. Without inhibitions I find it easy to draw on brain research, rhetoric, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, communications, journalism, public opinion research, demography, jurisprudence, political science, economics, business administration, market research, anthropology, history of ideas, as well as sociology, which was my field as a university professor. I hope that deans of liberal arts faculties will take notice: many of the different courses they offer in these fields have a common base; many overlap with one another. A great rationalization of students' study is possible if you can overcome the straightjacket of the historically given borders of university departments.

This text sums up my intellectual struggles searching for categories in a science of human society, and combining them into informative messages. I have thus expressed many of the ideas presented here before, and sometimes with the same formulations as here.

There are differences between ordinary language and the language of learning and scholarship; we specify a most important one in a distinction used by anthropologists between emic and epic accounts (discussed on page 141 et seq. below). However as mentioned, our categories of social phenomena in this work are based on properties of language. This has opened the intriguing possibility to write advanced social science in a way that can be understood by most everyone!

A work of this kind can only be attempted by standing on the shoulders of giants. It is also essential to have good people help you up, and it is particularly important to have many others who in various projects help you not to fall off. In an Appendix to Life and the Good Life I try to tell how it all happened, and to thank some colleagues and friends who have helped [p xiii]me. For valuable comments on this first volume I am particularly indebted to Professors Rhoda H. Kotzin and Bo Anderson; of course, the responsibility for the text remains mine.

Greta Frankel has translated fragments of text that I originally had formulated in Swedish but wanted to reuse here. She has also read the whole work, and has seen to it that parts from academic papers, newspaper columns, and lectures reappear here in a consistent style that can be understood also by non-specialists. What we present in these writings is science about social reality for a general public.

The Many-Splendored Society is dedicated to Karin Busch Zetterberg, partner in marriage and research.

Bromma and Strånäset in Sweden and Fuengirola in Spain in the years 2002-2009.

Hans L Zetterberg

The above text shows how a Preface that also serves as an abstract might read when the manuscript to this multi-volume work is completed. It is planned for seven books, of which this is the first. The text will be updated as new volumes The Many-Splendored Society are completed.

[p 1]

Introduction: Layman's Society and Beyond

Suppose you ask an educated laymen the question "What is a society?" Some will say that society consists of housing, clothing, food and water supplies and other means to cope with the vagrancies of nature in the forms of changing seasons, warm days and cold nights, dry deserts, dense woods, sunny periods and flooded periods, and so on. Tools, carriages, weapons, energy systems, and other aspects of technology are included in their conception of society. They have pointed at the physical aspects of society and at man's attempt to cope with nature. Tailors, builders, machine operators, and engineers, become central persons in their view of society.

Others will mention that society is human beings, how people enter society at birth, find survival by eating plants and animals, try to stay healthy and strong, but eventually face decline and death. These observers of society have pointed at the biological reality of society. They see all the providers of biological necessities — from hunters, fishermen, and farmers to food retailers — as central persons in their view of society. And they turn to their physicians for help in coping with problems of living.

Still others, rather few, but joined by many professional social scientists, will mention something that goes beyond the biological and physical worlds as we usually conceive of them. They would agree, for example, that a sequence of conception, birth, nursing, and weaning represents a biological reality of parenthood. To carry out this sequence they also agree on a physical reality of housing, clothing, food, water, and energy. But they could also include something else in scrutinizing parenthood. They may have heard someone say to them "I pronounce you husband and wife." They may have given a child an individual name: "Mohamed" or "Mary" or some other name considered appropriate in their community. By some complex[p 2] legislation the children are given the right to be called "Americans" or some other designation of citizenship. When their parents accepted that the children were their children, they also accepted some responsibilities for their support and care, and health, as well as obligations to make certain payments on their behalf, and rights to make some decisions on their behalf when the children were minors. Furthermore, modern parents are expected to send their children to school and warn them that if they drop out they will be unable to get employment in many occupations. Unless they live in a full-fledged welfare state, parents, in return, expect some support from their children in old age. And, upon the deaths of the parents, their children receive some or all their property as inheritance.

Table 1. What Goes into a Human Society?

Social reality	Technology	Biological reality
social events, struggles, families, organizations, markets, classes, nations, states, etc.	tools, instruments, weapons non-human energy from wind, water, fossils , etc	Humans male, female; children, adults, elderly; sleep, nourishment, shelter, etc.
Physical reality		Animals domestic and/or wild
nature as shaped and/or cultivated

Lay persons do not have a summary name for the codifications of what parents are or what they shall do and what shall be done to them, including all these dictums of citizenship, schooling, employment, property, inheritance, et cetera. A professional social scientist might call it the social reality of parenthood.

The term social reality can also be applied to performances other than that of parenthood, and include broad phenomena such as states, media, markets, classes, et cetera.

[p 3]The columns in Table 1 show how a layman might apportion the content of a society. It certainly makes some sense. Its underlying logic is the conventional wisdom that says that man is better than other animals at using language and at using tools.

Our ambition in this work is to create a more scholarly elaboration of social reality than what is found in a layman's version. The table reminds us, however, that any layman knows that there is more to society than what is found under the heading social reality.

Approaching Social Reality

In this book project we will pursue, not the total society, but its social reality. Our main hypothesis is that social reality consists of symbols in communicative acts. This seemingly odd but not entirely uncommon assumption can be traced in American pragmatic thought from Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), William James (1842–1910) and George Herbert Mead (1863–1931). When John Langshaw Austin (1911–1960), a leading European philosopher of language, in 1955 gave the William James lecture at Harvard with the title "How to Do Things With Words‛ (Austin 1975) you may say that two congenial currents of thought, one American and one European, began to join forces in defining a strategic role for mankind's use of language acts. One very readable result is a book entitled Construction of Social Reality (Searle 1995) by an American philosopher trained in British linguistic philosophy by Austin.

John R. Searle realized that a future devolvement of the study of the use of symbols to construct social reality is less a task for philosophers but should be a main assignment in a social science based on empirical research. This is actually a vision that several social scientists since long have practiced off and on. It had received a reminder and a revival by Peter L Berger in the United States and Thomas Luckmann in Germany (Berger och Luckmann 1966) The German philosopher-[p 4]sociologist Jürgen Habermas opened up a fuller scope of social reality based on communicative actions that also included struggles between classes, emancipation, and modernization (Habermas 1965)¹.

Our Typographical Border Signs of Social Reality

Sometimes it is interesting to reach beyond social reality in a presentation such as this one; sometimes it is plainly necessary to do so to understand a problem. I will put up some warning signs when my work drifts off its central topic of social reality.

[BIO] We will find that the border between social reality and biological reality is unstable. In a situation of stress, for example, the guidance we set from our frontal lobe in our thinking and language is easily overruled by hormones and generic reactions of "flight or fight." This book does not focus on biological spontaneities and processes, but when needed to understand social reality we bring them in. When we touch the biological base in a more decisive way, we will flag the occasions by a special sign, [BIO], in the margin of the text or after a heading. We will not use this sign when we come across the biological base of language; if we did, it would clutter up too many pages.

[TECH] The impact of technology on social reality has no separate treatment in this treatise; you find it scattered in the text. However, whenever technology is discussed, you will see a [TECH] in the margin or after a heading. Homo Sapiens are better at using tools than other beings, and the relation between technology and human social reality is fundamental. [p 5]The fact that the technology sign does not appear on every relevant page in this text means most often that I am ignorant or forgetful, but sometimes an omission means that there are openings for future applications of technologies that may change the way we live.

[NAT] The border between social reality and physical reality also seems blurred, but only so long as we believe in magic. In point of fact it is a sharp border. Continents and oceans, valleys and mountains, rivers and lakes, sunshine and rain, and numerous other features of nature have great impact on the shapes of human societies. Ecology has recently gained extraordinary attention. This topic, however, is not the center of attention here, but when we bring it in it is marked by a special sign, [NAT] for nature.

[ANIM] A border between man and animals — or between the speaking animal and other animals — is hinted in the lower right corner of Table 1. [ANIM] is our fourth and last sign that we leave our central topic of the language-based social reality.

The Text Ahead

I admit having found pleasure in getting to know the social world from a European perspective. Of course, I too have a bounded but real despair over the shortcomings in European history, its cases of religious and political tyranny, its economic exploitations at home and abroad, and I never forget that Nazism and Stalinism are wholly European products. It is, however, unwarranted that so many intellectuals today are ashamed of the entire European heritage and its North American continuation and unique elaboration after the American Revolution. Where else do we find a richer experience of many-splendored societies?

Chapter 1 is an old-fashioned attempt to learn a lesson from history. It is an extract of history that isolates a streak in the development of European social reality. In several ways the [p 6]Roman Republic (510-50 BC) looked like a beginning of a modern society. The Republic gave way to the hereditary empire of Augustus in which the political realm of life ruled supreme over the rest of society. But after the fall of his empire a significant streak in European history moves toward six self-governing societal realms: polity, religion, economy, art, science, and morality. If fully developed they would form what we call a proper Many-Splendored Society.

With this historical glimpse in mind we turn in Chapter 2 toward bases of social reality in the human brain. We explore its latest manifestation, the language brain, and the lifestyles that have emerged by using the language brain. Six of these lifestyles are more language-dependent than others. They are clearly related to the emerging societal realms we distilled in European history. Since they are products of the universal human brain they can be traced in all human civilizations, not just the European one.

In Chapter 3 we explore the use and misuse of language and its symbols. We try to learn how to strip language from confabulations, defensive bilge, and magic. Thus get a language suitable for both civility and scholarship. It may have mundane and pristine symbols, and we take special note of those specialists in the use of the latter that we call intellectuals.

Chapter 4 deals with some regular vibrations in total symbolic environments that are exhibited by intellectuals and often enough also include most everybody else. They are swings between tradition and modernity, between faithfulness and pragmatism, and between materialism and humanism.

Chapter 5 returns to the close microscopic study of symbols and sentences. It searches for a minimum technical vocabulary needed to study social reality. We begin with a lead from the linguist Kenneth L. Pike and the anthropologists whom he has inspired. They separate information from mundane accounts from field work (emic sentences) from the analytic language of [p 7]scholarship (etic sentences). We continue to draw on linguistics, and recall Noam Chomsky’s theses about the nature of language and how it is learned.

Any use of language, we argue, tends to become differentiated into a trisection of descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive usages, each of which contains a bisection of executive and emotive components. This is our minimum vocabulary needed to study social reality; the rest we can borrow from other sciences. The chapter ends with a hint of how such ideas about language leads to a program of research and writing on "The Many-Splendored Society."

Physical reality can be beautifully summarized in mathematical terms, as Newton, Faraday, Einstein and the other great physicists have shown. Physical reality can actually be understood as mathematics. Social reality, as we will discover, can best be formulated in grammatical terms; at its base we will find a grammar, i.e. a system for a language.²

This does not relegate mathematics to irrelevancy in the study of society, as some students of language and literature may hope. We will need numbers and statistics to cope with the multitudes of language products that constitute social reality and civilization. However, in this work I will not write models of society in equations; our propositions and their interrelations will appear in ordinary language. To stay with writing that makes knowledge of social science and humanities accessible to wide audiences is our ambition.

[p 8]

1. The Spell of Augustus

Gaining Political Hegemony

The Roman Republic (510-50 BC) had elected leaders rather than kings. It had checks and balances between classes (patrician and plebeian) and life areas (trade, defense, religion, etc). It had authoritarian families and relied on slavery; otherwise it had a rather unique structure in the antique world that at least somewhat approximated what we shall call a many-splendored society. The Roman Republic is included among the civilizations that we call ‚axial.‛ They had bursts in a common master trend of civility and rational symbolic activity that occurred almost simultaneously in several locations in Asia and Europe.³

The Republic belonged to the Roman citizens. Their power was housed in various comitae, that is, citizens gathered in council. Most of them were not permanent, but they could be assembled when judges or administrators and leaders of emerging realms of the Republic needed grounded decisions. The advices given by comitae were arrived at by deliberation. Voting by citizens was a foundation of the Republic.

These popular councils were in continuous struggles with a permanent council of elders (patricians), Senatus. Senators did ‚vote with their feet,‛ in the original meaning of these words. When deliberating an issue, they walked on the senate floor to stand near the orator whose position they preferred. A senate majority, particularly one in line with the views of an important comita, had a strong legitimacy. The Senatus was thus the [p 9]most important advisory body determining legislation and decisions on appointments in the city and land of the Republic.

The logotype SPQR, which has been preserved on many of Rome’s ruins and stands for Senatus Populusque Romanus, that is, ‚the Senate and the People of Rome,‛ bears witness to the importance of both sources of authority.

The executive power in the mature Roman Republic was exercised by two consuls with one year terms of office. They were the high commissioners responsible for administration in different sections of society. To hold these highest offices in the Roman Republic you did not have to belong to families with wealth from land or trade, or with hereditary political connections, or have experience as a military commander. Cicero, for one, rose to his consulship in 63 BC from humble origins on the basis of proven skills in some high-profile legal cases. In all, this organization of the Roman Republic allowed people to have different priorities and follow different life courses, pursuing different cardinal values.

In difficult times, such as facing war, natural catastrophes, epidemics, this distribution of power became impractical. To overcome the difficulties and to preserve the Republic then became a dominant concern shared by all. With war on the doorstep, the regular power structure was superseded by the appointment of a dictator for a six-month period, during which he enjoyed unlimited authority in all spheres, not only the military.

This arrangement worked well for a while, but during the social unrest that prevailed during the first century B.C., several dictators refused to step down at the end of their terms, among them Caius Magnus, and Cornelius Sulla. They had not only learned the use of rule by cruelty on the battlefield, they had also been able to amass fortunes from plunder of the defeated enemies, thus becoming independent of the taxation income in Rome. They continued in power beyond the statuto-[p 10]ry six months. When the war lord Caius Julius Caesar subsequently appointed himself dictator for life, the republicans eventually had had enough and assassinated Caesar. The term dictator, which had previously commanded respect, became a term of aspersion.

Caesar did not have a biological son, but had adopted his nephew Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus. Supported by the soldiers who had been loyal to Caesar and who could be paid by the estate he had left, Octavianus seized power. After the defeat of the republicans at Filippi, Octavianus shared power with Caesar’s general Marcus Antonius and another general, Lepidus. The friendship of this gang of three did not last long; after yet another civil war Antonius was defeated at a large naval battle at Actium.

Rome was now in turmoil, and Octavianus, who had assumed the name Caius Julius Caesar, was determined to set things right. He began by formally reinstating the Roman Republic, a popular measure. The different groups in Rome thought that they had regained their autonomy; no one had absolute power.

However, gradually, but within the framework of the constitution of the republic, Caius began to appropriate leadership in all of the most important groups in society. He was already imperator, commander-in-chief. He was appointed princeps senatus, ‚the first in the senate‛ (thereof the word ‚prince‛). This did not mean that he became president of the senate, but that when the senators were assembled Caius would be the first to give his opinion and to vote — a shrewd way of swaying opinion in the direction he wanted. He also succeeded in getting himself appointed tribunus plebes, a kind of ombudsman for the people, a position that had long been available in the Republic. The people’s tribune had the opportunity to veto important decisions. He was also inviolable and could not be removed from office. In addition and very significant, he be-[p 11]came the high priest, pontifex maximus, a kind of archbishop who officiated at the most important offerings to the gods. (The term survives today as a designation for the Pope.) Although the Republic still existed formally, as holder of these offices Caius now had total control of its central zone, that is, what we call absolute power. He made this power hereditary and founded what is known as the Julian dynasty. Its last ruler was Nero.

It is often written about Caius that the once reckless and ruthless youth matured into one of the wisest rulers in history. In time, the senate awarded the honorary title pater patriae, ‚the father of the fatherland,‛ as well as the new title augustus, "the venerated." Caius would become known to history under this title, not his name.

Augustus (as we thus call him) demonstrates a model for transformation of a many-splendored republic with power sharing into a hereditary authoritarian state. His power absorbed the whole Roman society. He shows that a single determined person can kidnap all realms of a society, a process often attempted in history. If successful such a ruler gets the multiple honors of all the different reward systems of his society.⁴

A ruler (Fürer) is essential in this process. Usually he (it is rarely a she) is helped by relatives and friends, or by a party of loyalist, or by a military junta, or maybe by former colleagues in the secret police. Some intellectuals and some jurists who believe that he represents the future always seem to emerge and give justification to his takeover.

[p 12]To be sure, the rise of Augustus benefited his times, not only him personally. But in the long run Roman society did not maintain the freedom, flexibility, and vitality of its Republican days, and it apparently lost much of its moral fiber. The sense morale is that the augusti of human history should not be venerated.

The Differentiation of Europe

In a treatise on the history of world civilizations, Fernand Braudel (Braudel 1963/1993) characterizes the European one as variety of groups seeking freedom and independence for themselves: "The history of Europe has everywhere been marked by the stubborn growth of private 'liberties,' franchises or privileges limited to certain groups, big or small. Often, these liberties conflicted with each other or were mutually exclusive."

Behind this mosaic, we can, however, find a grander pattern, summarized in Figure 1.1. The right side of this figure lists the coming and goings of some empires, the traditional way of structuring European history, which gives us some orientation for the message of the figure. The tree is the message. It depicts the differentiation of social reality into distinct realms in Western Europe. It grows out of the period when, following Augustus, the body politic — or the polity as we say for short — of the Roman Empire reigned supreme and embraced all other societal realms and held de facto control of them.

The Realm of the Polity

In ancient Rome, the polity, the art of statesmanship, politics, and administration in a broad sense, became supreme and was considered more important than religion, the fine arts, ethics, or commerce. Administrations, taxation, police procedures, the juridical system were all thoroughly developed. Well-organized armies guaranteed the Roman peace. The state also [p 13]took considerable responsibility for its citizens, for their activities of needs and lusts, particularly their bread and entertainment. The Roman Empire, which rested on the control by the state of the other spheres of life, eventually adopted the monotheistic religion of Christianity, according to the formula ‚one emperor, one god.‛ This happened under the Emperor Constantine, who also moved the capital from Rome to his new-founded Constantinople, closer to the great centers of Hellenic civilization, Athens, Ephesus, and Antioch.

Figure 1.1. The Grand Structuration of Europe

The Empire split in two, one in the east and one in the west. Eastern Rome survived for a millennium, but western Rome crumbled. The Frankish Kingdom (484-814) was the first of many attempts to revive the Roman Empire in western Europe. Charlemagne spoke of himself as ‚king and priest‛ as an indication of the kind of authority that would rule. Constantine's move of the capitol had weakened the dominance of the body [p 14]politic in Rome and made many new openings for the Pope and his men of religion.

The Realm of Religion

In medieval Europe, religion sought to liberate itself from all interference from worldly powers. Pope Gregory VII (1021-1085) established the authority and leadership of Rome as a reality in the West of the early Middle Ages. His manifest reads: "The Pope is the only human whose feet princes kiss." His German opponent, Emperor Henry IV, who wanted his own government to appoint bishops, was in 1076 obliged to walk barefoot to Gregory in Canossa in Toscana to get his excommunication annulled. This is the most well-known episode in the dramatic and long process of separating the state and church in Europe.

The medieval church wanted, if possible, to control all other institutions. It saw economy, science, art, and ethics as subordinate to the church, and preferably the church should stand above the government as well. In our day, we would associate such religious hegemony over the other institutions of society with some variants of Islam. But in the Middle Ages it was the "Divine State" of Christianity.

Medieval life was a creed: Credo in unum Deum Patrem omnipotentem. True, one worked in farming and animal husbandry, in handicrafts and trade, in tax and customs administration, in the duties and contests of a knight. But it was as a pilgrim in this world, seeking divine goals that one engaged in these mundane pursuits. The liturgical year lasted from Advent through Christmas, Lent, Pentecost and the long stretch without major holy days — coinciding with the height of the agricultural season — to All Saints' Day and a new Advent. This was the rhythm of the medieval epoch. Architecture and sculpture were "Bibles in stone." Literature was pious; music was Gloria and Kyrie eleison; ethics and statutes were embroidery on [p 15]the theme of the Ten Commandments; philosophy was theology; paintings showed Mary with the Infant Jesus and other scenes from the world of the Bible and the church. Wars were holy wars to the glory of God. The great cathedral enclosed everyone: its roof was high, accommodating not only priests and celestial beings but also inviting, and reflecting in its nave and transept, the world of the peasantry, bourgeoisie, nobility, and monarchy.

The medieval strife between church and state ended differently in Byzantium and Rome, differently in the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. In eastern Europe the state was the victor from the very beginning, and the worldly ruler was also the head of the church. Thus, in most of eastern Europe, one single ruling sword prevailed. This "caesaropapism" i.e. the exercise of supreme authority over ecclesiastical matters by a secular ruler, meant that eastern Europe became structured differently from western Europe, a difference present to our day. In western Europe the struggle between church and state ended in a draw. The west-European idea expressed as "two swords," one worldly and one spiritual, prevailed. This abandonment of a single authority over human life is a most significant step in the structuration of western Europe. Eventually we would come to see several more independent swords ruling there.

The Geography of Ideas and Trade

The first and main axis of the European history of ideas runs from the south to the north. The intellectual sources of European culture from ancient Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem spread northward. From Jerusalem, the Europe of the Renaissance al-ready had acquired a single God and the Bible. From Rome it had a legal system and structures of administration. The main inspiration during the Renaissance of new thinking came from the ancient Greeks and particularly from Athens. From here [p 16]major additions to the symbolic environment came to Europe, in part through Arab channels. For it is to the ancient Greeks we owe philosophy, science, and mathematics, medicine, history and drama, sculpture and poetry. And do not forget republican rule, so different from Imperial Rome (but not from the Roman Republic) and from the kingdoms predominant in the Germanic world.

The Alps had always been in the way of a northward march. But already at the time of the Roman Empire armies and administrators traveled to the east of the Alps and formed centers in Budapest, Prague and Vienna. The eastern part of Europe benefited from the long survival of the East Roman Empire with its base in Constantinople and its reach and succession into Russia. Moscow came to call itself "the Third Rome," a source of Russian self-confidence rarely understood outside its borders. In western Europe the influence of Rome had passed to the west of the Alps with Cesar's armies and soon it reached all the way into the British Isles. It developed many centers on the way; eventually the most important one came to be the Gallic town of Paris. Between Paris and Vienna, an arc of lovely cities — Strasbourg, Bruges, Cologne, Constance, Salzburg, and many others — thrived. The Renaissance reviewed what it saw as its antique heritage. It flowered in Rome itself and in Florence, Venice and other places south of the Alps. This was in many ways a new intellectual and cultural legacy that spread northward through France to the British Isles and, with time, to the Nordic regions.

The other axis in European history went from east to west. Here lay the key to commercial development. Of course, the lion’s share of all commerce has always been local, but a good deal of long-distance trading has also occurred. On balance, European commerce traveled from east to west. The Phoenicians and Greeks had the east-west stretch from the Black Sea to the east and west Mediterranean as their trading area. Later [p 17]Venetian merchants traded with their Islamic counterparts along the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Goods from the Orient also followed the Danube and Rhine from Constantinople. Considerable commerce moved from the countries around the Baltic to the countries of the North Sea. In the northern half of Europe, grain, timber, copper, iron, herring, potash, charcoal, and hemp moved from the underdeveloped east and north to the commercially developed west. This commerce led to the accumulation of great riches and a bourgeois lifestyle first in Antwerp and then in London.

In passing we may note that the two axes of European development show that the common assumption that ideas spread by trade is a half-truth. The history of ideas cannot be explained by economic determinism; the economic factor is one by many.

The Realm of Morality

In the Renaissance, the achieved level of separation of church and state come to include also a beginning separation of polity and morality. In Florence a radical humanism emerged. Giovanni Pica della Mirandola (1463-1494) argued that human beings should be subject to no restraints: they are sufficient unto themselves, they are their own masters, freed from the "scale of nature." He signaled a process of liberation whose end we have not yet seen. Soon Machiavelli (1469-1527) taught that nobody could have built Sparta or Athens or the republican Rome and at the same time been morally good, least of all in a Christian sense. He showed how one could make political calculations without allowing moral considerations to intervene. Statecraft could then be seen as something separate from morality and religion, an idea full of dynamite that it would take centuries for the world to absorb.

A morality independent of religion had been the rule in ancient Athens. Much less than other achievements of the classic-[p 18]al world did these messages manage to reemerge during the European Renaissance. It was not until the Enlightenment we saw a secular morality with some intellectual force in Europe. However, a morality independent of the Church has remained a weak streak in European history, a weakness that remains to be redressed.

The Realm of Economy

An economy equipped with some autonomy from other realms has been a growing feature in Europe since the Middle Ages. "All world economies recognize a centre, some focal point that acts as a stimulus to other regions and is essential to the existence of the economic unit as a whole", writes Fernand Braudel "Quite clearly in the Mediterranean in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that centre was a narrow urban quadrilateral: Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence..." (Braudel 1949/1972, 387). In all these cities representatives of government, religion, and the economy balanced one another and none achieved hegemony. Venice took the early lead with a government that gave favors to craftsmen from other cities to establish themselves there, and with a state-owned shipyard that built and leased merchant ships to the entrepreneurs of the city. The visitor to Piazza San Marco can still see how the church, the palace of the doge (chief magistrate), and the various trading houses are equally imposing and keep each other in balance.

Two social innovations assisted the economy in becoming a separate realm: the limited liability company and double-entry bookkeeping. The shareholder enterprise separated business capital from family capital. Many budding entrepreneurs could now join in an economic venture without first marrying into a rich family. The economy could grow independently of kinship and household. An entrepreneur, for example an aspiring ship captain without sufficient fortune of his own could be financed and receive a share of the profit from a big trading expedition. [p 19]The new art of bookkeeping in northern Italy provided commerce and industry with a system of rewards separate from those of the state and the church. Neither church nor state any longer determined who in the business community should receive honors. Distinctions were, simply, linked to satisfactory annual accounts. Thus the economy began to gain autonomy from state and church.

The constitutional liberalism in the restored English monarchy at the end of the seventeenth century paved the way for economic liberalism. In the latter, the thrust was directed against government intervention in economic life and against private monopolies as guilds, or companies with exclusive royal privileges. Emergent English liberalism thus stood for freedom of trade and freedom of contract. Restrictions from medieval times that required that businesses be located in cities and not in the countryside were lifted. Slavery was outlawed and free labor became a hallmark of the emergent capitalism. Eventually the rights of the marketplace became recognized not only for nationals but also for foreigners. International capital and labor from abroad became accepted facts of life.

It took several hundred years before the idea of an independent and decisive role of economic forces in society was accepted. In the middle of the nineteenth century Karl Marx shocked the world, not by his call for a proletarian revolution, but by his "historical materialism," i.e. the idea that the economy rather than the church or the state is the author of history.

The Realm of Science

The emancipation of science from religion was also a protracted process. After the death of Copernicus (1473-1543), his idea that the sun, rather than the Earth, was the center of the universe was banned by the church. The great physicist and mathematician Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) was prevailed upon by the church to deny the testimony of his instruments.

[p 20]One significant step toward scientific autonomy was taken in London when the secretary of the Royal Society, formally founded in 1660, started to keep notes of correspondents and dates when discoveries and theories were submitted to the Society and published. Newton's Principia, for example, was registered on 5 July 1686. Anteriority of discovery became the scientists' criterion for honoring their own: those who first published something new were acclaimed. Those wishing to use another person's discovery for their own reasoning had to acknowledge the originator in a mention, quotation or footnote. Thus, science obtained its own system of rewards distinct from those of the state and the church with their hierarchies. The scientific reward system also became different from the system of the emerging market economy. Scientists gave up property rights in their discoveries in return for honor.

The Realm of Art

Also art loosened its ties to other realms. Rembrandt (1606-1669) belonged to an early generation of painters who were neither church nor court painters. He could choose his subjects freely, without reference to religion or government. Art and beauty, after the Reformation, was not just an attribute of the Holy or Mighty, it became more and more a property of ordinary real life. Rembrandt still painted biblical scenes such as "The Return of the Prodigal Son" and occasionally classical ones such as "Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer." But the novelties of his motives are found in his contemporaries, such as scenes with Hendrickje Stofells, the maid who became his wife, and cloth-making burghers ("Staalmeesters"), the "The Night Watch."

[p 21]Rembrandt's famous breakthrough painting, executed at the age of 25, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp,"⁵ reproduced in Figure 1.2, proves not only the artist's freedom but also the new freedom of science. The church had long opposed public dissections, which were considered intrusions into the sanctity of death and the serenity of the grave. With obvious admiration Rembrandt painted his friend Doctor Tulp performing a dissection. The painting, showing the bright red of oxygenated blood, is very realistic, as realistic as a professor of anatomy could want. In those days, artists and scientists walked hand-in hand and shared the ambition to tell the truth.

Figure 1.2. Rembrandt, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp," Mauritshuis museum, The Hague.

Later art freed itself from science as well. Karl Philipp Moritz (1756-1793), one of Goethe's friends, a novelist and a professor [p 22]in the theory of fine arts, broke with the conventional principle that a work of art is a depiction of reality. In Bestimmung des Zwecks einer Theorie der schönen Künste (1795) he states: "True beauty consists in the fact of an object meaning only itself, designating only itself, containing only itself, being a whole, realized in itself.‛ (Moritz 1795/1973). In other words, beauty was to be separated from any external description and explanation. Organized music that had long been in the service of church or state gained its self-governing life in the European cities. Painting became demarcated and independent of any other worldly and holy pursuits and artistic beauty, was redefined from classical symmetry and realism to include any emotively engaging subjective representations from any part of human experience.

The Glorious Revolution

This overview of the societal realms in Europe that were reaching a bounded independence of one another is, of course, sketchy in the extreme. It would be entirely incomplete unless we paused to consider the consolidation of liberalism in England and Scotland in the second half of the seventeenth century. This was a turbulent and violent period in England: in half a century, the country underwent two revolutions and two civil wars; one king was executed and another exiled; there was an experiment in parliamentary republican government, and another in rule by a military protectorate.

One episode in 1688 in this struggle is "The Glorious Revolution". It was a rather bloodless overthrow of the Catholic King James II of England by a combined force of domestic Protestants and an invading Dutch army of like-minded that established a foreigner, William of Orange, as king of England and Scotland. With him came also a fuller acceptance in London of the bourgeois lifestyle of Antwerp and Amsterdam.

With the Glorious Revolution came liberal ideas for Protestants. Rule of law (not men) should prevail. This meant several [p 23]things. Laws should be clearly articulated. They should be made known to the general public. Retroactive legislation was ruled out. Accused persons should have a right to receive notice of their alleged violations. As in Roman times, they should meet their accusers face-to-face in court. They should be heard on matters of both law and facts. The verdict should be formulated by a competent judge. In short, rule of law should be there to keep governments from exercising arbitrary power. The Catholics in England, however, had to wait another hundred years for civic rights, i.e. safety nets for the individual against the government

In Britain, the Glorious Revolution brought new strides in the differentiation of society. I will use the designation ‘glorious revolutions’ also in a broader sense of any giant step and consolidation of historical differentiations into societal realms in such a way that no realm is allowed to overwhelm any other.

The notable and characteristic revolution in England marked the birth of an "Anglo-Protestant civilization,‛ to use Samuel Huntington’s (2005) designation. This is a precarious and unique strain in European history. It found new strength and expressions outside of Europe, particularly when exported overseas. The North American colonies and the free country of the United States that they formed after the liberation from Britain became a major home for the Anglo-Protestant civilization.

Exporting European Differentiation

The modest level of West European differentiation into societal realms prior to The Glorious Revolution in England was exported to the southern parts of the American continents, while the further differentiation after the Glorious Revolution was exported to the northern parts. Colonies in Latin America [p 24]thus brought over an earlier European structure than the colonies in north of Rio Grande.

Strong echoes of this difference remain in the two Americas to this day. There are deep differences between growing up in, say Mexico and in the United States. Some differences are linguistic, economic, and educational, i.e. of a kind that can be erased in two or three generations by policies of integration. But others are more profound, as Octavio Paz (1953) has written, and seem virtually built into life itself. They have roots in the fate of native civilizations and in the different structures imposed by the colonizers.

Figure 1.3. Different Levels of European Differentiation Brought to Central and South America and to North America by Colonization

From the Iberian Peninsula

The European colonists who went overseas met high-level local civilizations in Central and South America: Aztec, Maya, and Inca. These were as sophisticated as their native one in [p 25]Spain and Portugal. They were diversified into urban and rural segments; their cities had magnificent temples and palaces. The colonists to North America (north of Rio Grande), met other Indians such as the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole. They lived not only from hunting, as was their image in Europe, but had agricultural bases. They produced enough riches to form population centers in the form of camps or villages but not what we would call cities.

When invaders conquer a high civilization three outcomes are possible. The attackers may be absorbed by the high civilization. Unless stopped by the Great Wall of China the waves of invaders from central parts of Asia, in effect, became Chinese. Or, invaders may establish themselves as a parallel civilization on top of the native one. Alexander the Great replaced the old pharaohs of Egypt with a new dynasty that brought Greek culture and language to the court circles of Egypt; its last ruler was Cleopatra. Something similar but more superficial occurred with the British colonial conquest of India with its superb civilization. The latter did not give in to the colonists but remained intact when the colonist left. A third outcome is that a high civilization succumbs to the invaders in the same way as underdeveloped civilizations do. This ending comes closest to what happened in Latin America.

The conquistadores crushed the visible parts of great civilizations of Central and South America. Aztec, Maya, and Inca were replaced by Iberian forms. But their native tongues still carried an invisible heritage from the old civilizations. The big effort to replace them with Spanish or Portuguese took form of public education mostly after the liberation from their colonial masters. The Spanish and Portuguese colonists had had little interest in systematically teaching their language to the natives; but the new nations felt the need for a national language. To this day, however, a number of mostly smaller native populations have not adopted Spanish or Portuguese.

[p 26]Charles V's goals for the New Spain were certainly not differentiated branches of statecraft, religion, and commercial life, but an organic state, graded in titles and ranks, and harmonious. The Latin American societies obtained a foundation of hierarchical institutions that functioned as protective patrons. Private and public affairs were intertwined; the economy remained basically mercantile rather than liberal, with many in-between forms of business decisions and political decisions.

From the British Isles

On the North American continent the Iberian colonial model became firmly set up in Mexico. North of Rio Grande other European governments sponsored settlements. The names of Montreal and Detroit in the northern part of the continent and Baton Rouge and New Orleans in the southern part signal the poles of French settlements. French Canada obtained roughly the same aristocratic and elitist social structure as in the home land before the French Revolution. The "monseigneurs" was the ruling class.

With the founding of the United States, the Anglo-Protestant civilization developed into a distinctly new republican version (Huntington 2005). Government became limited and required consent of the governed. Economic liberalism with private property and freedom of trade became legally protected as in the mother country. The American Constitution also prohibited any alliance between government and religion, a step toward a many-splendored society never taken in the mother country of Great Britain.

The structuration of North America (north of Rio Grande) is not identical with that of the Old World after the Glorious Revolution. There are many influences from colonists but also indigenous ones. Among the latter we count ‚The Frontier,‛ the open land to the west of European occupation. Its message [p 27]‚Go West Young Man!‛ channeled both frustrations and ambitions in by and large constructive ways.

However, in contrast to the native components in Latin America, the emerging North American way of life retained little of the original civilizations. The United States became engaged in what nowadays is called "ethnic cleansing." Forced relocation of Native American peoples from their traditional areas to remoter reservations elsewhere in the country became official policy that cumulated in the Indian Removal legislation of the 1830s. The legendary Trail of Tears of Cherokees, and the Long Walk of the Navajos are examples of the effects. Genocide, that is extinction of American Indians, was never official policy. But the words by General Philip Henry Sheridan’s at Fort Cobb in 1869 — "the only good Indian ... is a dead Indian" sums up a minority sentiment of those days that opened for overkill in the Indian wars.

The civilization of the United States has been successful and has totally outgrown the label "Anglo-Protestant;" it is embraced by all sorts of people. It is this strain in history that most clearly approaches a Many-Splendored Society. The realms of such a society have economic and religious freedom, civic freedoms and freedom of conscience, academic and artistic freedom. In such a society it is not enough to embrace rule of law that prohibits retroactive legislation. It must also prohibit legislation that restricts the independence of societal realms, what Max Weber called their Eigengesetzlichkeit. This important notion will reoccur in all volumes of this work. It is best understood, according to Richard Swedberg (2005, 290), as the inner logic and limited autonomy of a realm. The restriction it imposes on legislators was implemented in the Constitution of the United States in the case of the religious realm, but only loosely or not at all for the other societal realms.

The societal realms have cardinal values of their own, reward systems of their own, and also particular versions of ra-[p 28]tionalism of their own. To fully achieve a many-splendored status the Anglo-Protestant civilization would have to cultivate a more clearly defined and independent realm of morality in pursuit of virtue, something that so far has been underdeveloped. Also, and perhaps needless to say, the Anglo-Protestant civilization with its colonial heritage has been too violent in war-driven pursuits in the past to fully deserve the label "civilized."

The experience of the United States, particularly in the roaring 1920s, shows the risk in an Anglo-Protestant civilization of losing what it has achieved of a many-splendored status by making economy a totally dominant institution. In other words, there is risk in giving the dollar a decisive voice in politics, religion, science, and art. Business leaders have in fact become numerous on the boards of directors of American universities, museums, hospitals, and charitable institutions. In cheap and poor copies of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a constant stream of pulp novels appear in which the heroes almost hear the crackle of dollar bills when they caress the hair of their rich girl friends and the perfume of these girls carry the scent of money. To have an economy so dominant in all parts of life, even love life, is not many-splendored. In fact it is almost as unsplendored as the socialist and communist parts of Twenty Century Europe where governments born in other types of revolutions than the glorious ones dominated over the people’s big and small doings.

An Oscillation Ending in a longue conjoncture

To sum up the previous section about the contours of modern European social reality: the heritage of the monolithic multifunctional structure of the Roman Empire dominated by the state and later the church has become differentiated into a plu-[p 29]ralistic social reality in the form of a six single-function structures: economy, religion, polity, morality, science and art.

Look again at Figure 1.1 showing a Grand Differentiation of Europe. It includes a list of the main empires after the Roman one in western Europe:

482-814. The Frankish Kingdom lasted some 330 years. Its greatest ruler, Charlemagne, professed himself a "king and priest," and the Differentiation process we have dealt with here had not begun.

962-1250. The medieval German Empire spanned almost 290 years, from the middle of the tenth century to the middle of thirteenth. It fought, as we have noted, for a draw with the Pope.

1495-1620. The Habsburg Empire lasted well over 100 years. A remaining symbol of this empire, El Escorial outside Madrid, was a royal castle, the home of a bureaucracy that ran a larger

part of Europe, a cloister, a propaganda center for the Counter-Reformation, a necropolis. The empire maintained an ambivalent relation to the church; one of its greatest rulers, Charles V, voluntarily abdicated to end his life in a monastery. Internal resistance to the empire was greatest in Italy and the Spanish Netherlands, where the differentiation process into separate societal realms was most advanced.

1803-1814. The early nineteenth century saw the beginning and end of Napoleon's empire, which lasted for less than 15 years. By this time the contours in central Europe of differentiated social reality with many realms were clear. Napoleon's main enemy, England, was the most differentiated country at that time.

1939-1945. Hitler's conquests lasted five years in the middle of the twentieth century. He drew resistance not only from political bodies but also from the religious, artistic, scientific and economic communities in Europe and North America with their increasingly differentiated realms.

[p 30]A grand differentiation of western Europe is created through a process of oscillation. Over time, attempts to recreate in Europe anything resembling the Roman Empire in scope and political dominance become less and less successful and lasting.

In discovering the "collective destiny of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century," Fernand Braudel made fruitful use of a division of history into slow- and fast-moving levels. In our case, the dominant levels fluctuate, not like a sinus curve, but between ever longer and ever shorter periods. The periods — longues conjonctures, to use Braudel's language — in which the body politic has a total sway over the entire society become shorter and shorter, and the periods when other realms have a more independent existence become longer and longer. The dominant body politics in Europe may increase in size of territory, number of civil servants, pages of legislation enacted, and taxes collected. But the average number of years they last before disintegration becomes fewer and fewer. The survival rate of a polity seeking domestic or global hegemony over other societal realms has become ever lower in modern Europe.

The latest attempt to recreate something of old Roman and Augustine proportions, the European Union, started with six confederating states and has grown to encompass nearly all of Europe. In this process it has taking on more features of a genuine federation. It has paid little attention to the underlying differentiation of Europe that we have just reviewed. As seen from its history, Europe is emerging as much as a confederation of societal realms as a federation of nation states.

After a promising start to integrate economic markets and expand into Eastern Europe, the body politic of EU is showing the conventional political aptitudes to use dirigisme and meddling into other societal realms. Its modus vivendi is to obtain a favorable position vis-à-vis the United States, Japan, and China in a struggle for hegemony of riches, technology, military strength and diplomatic clout. If this remains EU:s domi-[p 31]nant vision, the European historical differentiation is let down, and its future would belong to EUs successor.

This ends our attempt to derive a lesson from European history. We will have two major concerns in continuing our exploration of social reality. The first is to analyze how language shapes social reality and its realms in a variety of long-lasting forms. The second is to find out how one particular form, a many-splendored society, can emerge and survive.

We shall now take a drastic step and look into the groundings of this social reality, not in excavations and archives, but in the human brain.

[p 32]

2. The Proper Study of Mankind

An Image of the Human Brain [BIO]

To look deeply into the mind and body of human beings is bewildering. To put it frankly, many times, many parts of any human being seem out of sync, yet life can produce fabulous arrangements. A many-splendored life is within reach. Modern brain research has exceptional relevance for the proper study of mankind.

A root of many problems on our way to civilized living is the fact that the longest developmental period of our brains took place before the creatures of the Earth were capable of using language. The full development of societal life as we know it came first with the 'language brain' of Homo sapiens. An expert on the human genome, Francis S. Collins, suggests that a mutation in gene FOXP2 allowed human languages to flourish.

In learning to speak we incorporate a new dimension into our repertoire: the symbol and the codes for its use. These codes are different from the genetic code. The genetic code is internal and inherited in the human being; symbols are both external and internalized. Genetic codes recombine at the moment of conception, when a new generation begins its journey to succeed its parents. Codes for the use of symbols can produce their combinations at any time. In this circumstance we shall find the secret of human freedom.

Research with new brain-imaging technology lets us visualize the bio-chemistry of the brain. For example, we may trace the internal communications — relays of neuron firings — in a brain. Much flexibility and interchangeability has been found in human brains.

[p 33]What a brain can manifestly achieve tells an educated layman more about it than the locations and micro-processes in the brain that are the stock-in-trade of brain researchers. For example, the latter tell us that Broca's area and Wernicke's area are essential to the use of language and that a place in the left frontal lobe allows thoughts to be transformed into words. Abilities and deficiencies in language are affected also by other parts of the Frontal, Parietal and Temporal lobe. However, when we laymen say 'language brain' we think of the language functions of the total brain, not any particular locations or genetic quality. Thus, all those parts and processes of the human brain that are required for speech I shall simply call the 'language brain.' Any layman can recognize speech as such. Other parts of our intelligence, including many advanced functions, are 'pre-language brains' that existed in some form before the emergence of speech.

The many small muscles of the human face express the state of our mind. A special pre-language brain lets us communicate by facial expressions and bodily movements; let's call it the 'gesture brain.' Its messages can be attractive as a dance of love and as frightening as a war dance. Gestures have been a part of the human equipment since times immemorial. Their winks have told us to come or go away, to stand up or lay down, and numerous other rudimentary actions. The use of gestures may develop into man's 'hand-speak brain' that draws full-fledged symbols in the air. In advanced forms it allows the deaf to communicate reasonably effectively.

Hand-speak communications do not work in the dark, or for use around corners. This drawback is overcome by the 'musical brain.' It seems that the Neanderthals could sing (Mithen 2005) but were very underdeveloped speakers compared to Homo sapiens. Their songs may have been wordless. In a similar way babies can communicate by prattling and crowing before they can talk.

[p 34]The language brain of Homo sapience has developed into the separate uses of speech, prose, script, and reading. Everyday human communication depends heavily on body language, i.e. gestures. The gesture brain and the language brain combine in producing speech. When all gestures are replaced with words into grammatically correct sentences and established vocabularies we get prose. A verbatim account of the words used in an ordinary conversation may be unclear, and sometimes nearly incomprehensible to an outsider who cannot watch the body language of the participants. A transcript of a conversation or of an ad lib speech usually needs "editing" to be understood, although to the participants it was clear as a bell. The editing replaces gestures with symbols and replaces incomplete (‚indexical‛) expressions with complete sentences. The result is an account of the conversation in prose.

Prose cannot gesticulate. Speech can sometimes do little else. Speech is speedier than prose. Educators who want to turn all speech into prose cannot count on total success. When rapid response is required speech gets the upper hand over prose. Speech also seems better in communicating emotions that does prose.

Prose can be turned into script, written language. Script can be understood just as speech and prose can be understood. Script can also be read. The most recent achievement of the language brain, only a few thousand years old, is reading. It has actually involved a traceable reorganization of the brain (Wolf 2007). Many humans, particularly in Africa south of the Sahara, belong to peoples without written records in their own language about their history. And many persons, who live in societies with written histories, are nevertheless unable to read and write. We can record the most recent development of human brains in the statistics about analphabetism. These hard numbers represent actual human progress, not an arbitrary [p 35]fairy tale dependent on your point of view, as some intellectuals want us to think about social facts.

Our pre-language intelligence also contains some other extraordinary advanced abilities. Here is a 'spatial brain' that lets us understand what is uphill and downhill, lets us estimate many useful things such as the distance we have to walk to get to water, the borderlines of our turf, the size of our cave or hut. It will tell us the arcs of a thrown stone or spear, the operations of a wedge, a plane, a lever. The classical genius of the spatial brain is the master engineer Archimedes in the second century BC.

Visual imagery produces not only our spatial orientation and understanding. We also have a ‘picture brain’ that processes visual information to record, remember, and recognize images. It apparently records somewhat more than that which reaches our consciousness. This fact supports Freud's idea of the existence of something subconscious, but not necessarily his ideas of its lurid contents.

Spatial ability is probably the origin also of our 'mathematical brain' with its counting, adding, subtraction, multiplication, division, calculus, all of which have spatial representations in geometry. Euclid, a Greek who lived in Alexandria in the third century BC, was the pioneer. Now we use also non-Euclidian geometries that test the limits of our mathematical and spatial brains.

It is a common opinion that mathematics is the crown of human achievement. That may be, but mathematical ability does not seem to be a later achievement than verbal ability. It appears that mathematics does not depend on verbalism. Dyslectics have a brain deficiency that makes their speech and reading difficult. But dyslectics may be brilliant mathematicians. Both Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein suffered from dyslexia.

[p 36]Animals are constantly alert for danger. They flee if the danger is big and strong, and fight if it is small and weak. This is governed by a part of the brain stem and the cerebellum that Paul D MacLean back in 1948 named the "reptilian brain," a term that caught on (MacLean 1990). Humans share this part of the brain with other animals that have emerged in earlier stages of evolution. They produce what can be characterized as bodily spontaneities. Under bodily spontaneity we thus include, among other things, fleeing and attacking, resting and staying awake, eating and drinking, defecation and urination, sexual behavior, sheltering the body from the elements. Females may give evidence of maternal behavior and provide their offspring with nourishment. To totally and blindly follow a leader is spontaneity of MacLean's reptilian brain. A list of human bodily spontaneities is long and belongs in a text on biology. Some with easily observed consequences in society are listed in Figure 2.1.

Bodily spontaneity has its own reward system of lusts and pains. It differs from the social rewards of, for example, admiration, praise, honor, criticism, and shame. Spontaneously initiated bodily actions usually end with a sense of relief and/or lust. Lust is not at all a deadly sin, as the wisdom of past ages holds. The Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn has summarized what we can learn from the liberal arts and biology about lust. Lust is a necessary trick of nature to reward us for performing bodily actions necessary for survival. "We are puppets of our hormones and generic programs. But nature repays us with pleasure" (Blackburn 2004, 125). Also, nature increases our chances of survival by giving us a sense of disgust or fear or pain in hazardous and dangerous situations. Such rewards are purely biological, i.e. ‚hard-wired‛ in the organism. Quenching one’s thirst with a glass of water, assuaging one’s hunger with a hearty meal, the endorphin high experienced by a jogger, the lovers’ orgasms — all are expressions [p 37]of inherited biological systems. Several modern lifestyles are driven by lust and the relief of bodily spontaneities.

Contrast with the language brain is fundamental. With the symbols of language comes a life of bounded freedom, a creative life beyond the puppets of hormones and generic programs. Any human can actually utter sentences that no one in the world has said before! You may even find some in this book.

None of the sites in the human brain is an island unto itself. Yoga as a combination of breathing exercises, physical postures, and meditation has been practiced for centuries in one of mankind's many attempts to bridge the various sites.

Let us sum up. Our contemporary image of a total human brain comes mainly from the study of a series of interconnected relays of neuron firings. Educated laymen distinguish between the reptilian, spatial, pictorial, musical, mathematical, and verbal sub-brains. I hasten to say that such distinctions are not precise enough for students of biology or genetics, nor for professionals in medicine and psychology. But they suffice for many problems in social science.

Most brain research deals with the functioning of a single brain at a time and how it affects the behavior of an individual. Social science calls on the agenda of brain researchers for projects on how one brain affects another brain, a currently small part of the total brain research.

Lifestyles of the Speaking Animal [BIO]

A 'lifestyle' is an enjoyable practice that its practitioners share with one another and for which they develop an affinity.

Personified animals appear in tales told at all times and all over the world. The story teller Aesop lived 600 years BC and is credited with lasting fables such as The Tortoise and the Hare and The Fox and the Grapes. George Orwell's Animal [p 38]Farm from 1945 is a best-seller in the genre; a biting satire of the socialist way of life under Stalin. Animal traits and abilities presumed or real, are elaborated by giving to the animals the gift of speech. In fact, man is an animal with language, in which the pre-language brains and the language brain are continually adapting to one another and to external exigencies. This goes on over both evolutionary time and individual lifetimes.

Many areas of community life flow out of needs that are unrelated to language processes. Among them are, for example, the realm of courtship and breeding, i.e. attracting mates. Here is householding, i.e. getting sheltered, fed and sustained with necessities from the produce of a territory. Warfare, i.e. using violence to obtain, to expand, and to defend the territory that feeds and houses us also belongs to among fields grounded in genes shared with animals but more or less superficially penetrated by language in human beings.

In Figure 2.1 is a list of instances of bodily spontaneities and their modern elaborations into lifestyles with the help of the language brain. Please read the lines of this table as if they were the essence of paragraphs of running text. Many students of liberal arts routinely skip tables in their reading. In this book most tables are concise shortcuts to classifications.

The bodily spontaneities in the left column in Figure 2:1 have become ‘activities of needs and lusts’ that at some turn of events during the evolution have proven essential to human survival. We define these activities by an open enumeration; the reader is welcome to join the game of adding to them.

Human life, however, is not just about survival. To be human in the full sense, our life must be about not just surviving but also some measure of flourishing. Looking in the right-hand column we see the same activities in a modern form elaborated by the specialty of mankind, that is, symbols. To have enough resources — in your household or as an individual — to be able to engage in chosen activities of needs and lusts is an essential human condition.

[p 39]

Figure 2.1. Spontaneous Bodily Actions Initiated by the Pre-language Brains and their Modern Elaborations with Language.


Spontaneous Bodily Actions (with "Lusts" or "Pains")		Elaboration by Language of Spontaneous Bodily Actions into Modern Lifestyles
Birth, growth, decay, death		Age-related lifestyles (celebrating youth, middle age, old age)
Sexual maturation		Gender-related lifestyles (masculinity, femininity)
Bodily prowess		Exercise Buffs (sports addicts, moving longer, faster, higher)
Marking territory		Cocooning (my home, my castle)
Finding and maintaining shelter		House Proud (do-it-yourself, interior decorating)
Seeking nourishment		Providers from nature (hunt, fish, farm, garden)
Eating and drinking		Gourmands (Big Mac & Shake) Gourmets
Maintaining body temperature		Attire Conscious (following the fashions)
Cleanliness		Hygiene, Sanitizing, and Housecleaning Buffs
Resting, sleeping		Comfort Seekers (coziness in one's home)
Playing, dancing		Game Buffs and Dance Buffs
Courtship and mating		Erotic Driven (femme fatales and he-men)
Caring for, protecting offspring		Child-centered (concerned about children, grandchildren)
Rooming around		Migrants, adventure seekers, flâneurs
Flight		Run-a-ways, escapists (going to, dreaming of far-away places)

Violence, Aggression

Hooligans (enjoying a physical fight), Bullies (degrading others)

[p 40]Modern lifestyles like the ones in the right-hand column have been studied mostly by novelists and scriptwriters but also by contemporary marketers and advertisers. Anthropologists who may have run out of research sites in primitive societies have successfully used their methods to study the lifestyles of their home country. University psychologists and sociologists have not always been worldly enough to give high priority to this area of study. But they agree that numerous human bodily activities are imbued with symbols. Many edible substances are, for example, not socially defined as ‚food‛ and some foodstuffs are taboo, i.e. prohibited in strong language, practices that may add tragedy to starvation. Many kinds of clothing and shelters may be reserved for people of a certain age, sex, or status. The physical actions that are the core of sports are likewise imbued with symbols; all sports depend on rules, i.e. prescriptions formulated in language.

Many-Splendored Lifestyles

Lifestyles based on what we have to do to survive, even when they are permeated with symbols, are not the whole story. The full flourishing of mankind involves the exclusive products of the language brain, the ones that are not mere elaborations around bodily spontaneities.

We find six bundles of talking, reading, and writing — 'discourses' is the technical word — that make up and characterize six such lifestyles that anyone can recognize. They are Learning-Buffs, Money-Centered, Civic-Minded, Aesthetes, Believers, and Compassionate. Unlike the lifestyles of speaking animals they have no base in any specific bodily spontaneity. If [p 41]you like fancy words you can say that they belong in "socio-linguistics" rather than "socio-biology."

Learning-Buffs

Learning Buffs have developed the search for knowledge into a lifestyle. They have dedicated their lives to learning ever more. Their self-image is shaped by how much they know. We find them in libraries, in study groups, at the bookstore shelf for non-fiction, in archives, and in laboratories. For them, learning is not a phase in life: it is a life-long mission. They are exceptionally eager to uncover facts and connections are their discourses. They subscribe to journals such as Scientific American and National Geographic or their counterparts in other countries. On Internet they were the first to use and develop the Wikipedia. In their reading they prefer non-fiction to fiction, and in their viewing they prefer documentaries to plays. They are attracted to education and to the realm of science.

Aesthetes

Aesthetes have a lifestyle that constantly makes them look for opportunities to stop and contemplate something beautiful or artistic. Aesthetes need art in order to feel good about themselves and life, to reveal and tolerate the drabness and imperfections of everyday living. In many ways it is true that anything — food, pots and pans, furniture, housing, sewing, boxing, sex, conversations, ice hockey, marching, military battles, and what have you — can be more or less artistic. An aesthetic lifestyle can permeate all aspect of living. The Aesthetes may themselves be performing artists, but need not at all be. If available, they visit art galleries and museums, frequent concerts, the theater, and the ballet. They are informed about dramas on TV and on video, or of recent pieces of fiction, have an eye for interesting architecture and for beauty in the home. [p 42]When choosing a vacation destination they prefer Florence to a beach resort. They are attracted to the realm of art.

Money-Centered

The Money-Centered have a lifestyle focused on wealth. They pay attention on making money, saving money, investing money, and perhaps above all to spend money. Quick to spot their own needs or the needs of others, they scan the horizon for quality, novelty, value for money, or outright bargains. They may be quality consumers, or bargain consumers, pioneering consumers, or consumers of the tried and true. Producing or consuming, they know prices, and they can tell what is profitable or not. They may spend more time on the business pages and advertisements of their newspaper than on politics and culture. They are attracted to the realm of economy.

Believers

The Believers want to walk through life in touch with a transcendental virtual reality of heavenly lights and messages. They have a lifestyle concerned with spirituality. They develop their courage to face ultimate issues such as the existence of suffering and death, and the final evaluation of a person’s life. They have well developed cults to cope with the memories of the dead. They are found not only around traditional religions but also among the followers of new belief systems that have gained ground in secularized parts of the world. They are attracted to the realm of religion.

Civic-Minded

The Civic-Minded discuss politics, and they may turn up at demonstrations, for they believe it is important to manifest their views in order to try to influence events; on balance, however, discussions are more important to them than mere ma-[p 43]nifestations. Nor are they averse to working within their movement or party; they will readily plunge into committee work or act as chairperson. They prefer to associate with like-minded people engrossed in politics and community life, and many of them have little time for small talk. They are attracted to public administration and to the realm of body politic.

Compassionate

The Compassionates practice a lifestyle of doing welfare and doing good. Many are reformers with ethics and virtue as their lodestars. Or, they are Good Samaritans acting spontaneously or consistently to help when they see suffering. Their self-image is that of a person who aims to act decently in all situations, and who strives for a clear conscience. Humanitarian movements, social welfare agencies, voluntary organizations and religious or secular charities are the anvils for their good deeds, not to speak of the many sacrifices made to aid members of their own families. They are attracted to civil society and to the realm of morality.

We shall call the above six lifestyles ‘the many-splendored lifestyles.’ They are specifically human, in that they exist only where language brains exist. We do not need to absolutely deny that rudimentary forms may be found in the animal kingdom, but developed forms are found only where human language is present. In other words, the social reality is populated by Learning-Buffs, Business-Minded, Civic-Minded, Aesthetes, Believers, and Compassionate. These six characters and their six lifestyles — listed in Figure 2.2 — are based on elaborations of basic symbolic communications that we will recognize as different 'discourses.'

The lifestyles differ in that they prefer different discourses: scientific, artistic, economic, religious, political, and moral discourses, respectively. The six discourses correspond to the six [p 44]streaks we distilled from the history of Europe that opened our presentation.

Figure 2.2. Lifestyles Entirely Dependent on Language and Their Discourses

A	C
Language Products	Many-Splendored Lifestyles
Scientific discourse	Learning-Buffs
Artistic discourse	Aesthetes
Economic discourse	Money-Centered
Religious discourse	Believers
Political discourse	Civic-Minded
Moral discourse	Compassionate
The letters marking the columns and the numbers marking the rows will be found in The Table of Societal Realms in Volume 2, The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice Built by Symbols.

The six lifestyles and discourses are all born equally unique in importance. If you suppress any one of them you reduce mankind to something less than it has to be. Notice what a varied cast they make. In this variation one gets a first glimpse of the meaning of a "many-splendored society."

We shall not look for the roots of the many-splendored society in the worlds of violence, territorial conquests, flights, migrations, and the other bodily needs and activities listed in Figure 2.1. The roots are found in the lifestyles entirely dependent on language that are mentioned in Figure 2.2. ⁶

This then makes an insight worth of contemplating: the lifestyles in a many-splendored society are an outflow of the language brain.

[p 45]

3. Language and Its Distortions

Enter the Symbols

We humans have the capacity for speech because of our genetic equipment. As children we begin to speak, count, sing, and dance as instinctively as a bird builds a nest. The human genome programs a stage for and an ability to carry out these activities.

The language brain is the main vehicle for our personal and social development and for the development of social reality and culture. Verbal symbols were more efficient than animal communication about relationships through fighting, scratching, or grooming one another (Dunbar 1996). In the search for knowledge, in economic bargaining, in political deliberations, in artistic, religious and ethical expressions, symbols can come first, and, thereafter, much of the accomplishments of mankind.

Sending brains transfer a string of symbols, a message, to receiving brains. For this they need to establish a channel between them, i.e. to be within hearing distance, or use a technical medium of communication. The sender also has to get the receiver’s attention. Finally both sender and receiver must understand a common code, for example an English vocabulary and an English grammar. Six elements — context, message, sender, receiver, channel, and code — make up verbal communication. With these concepts, a great cosmopolitan scholar, Roman Jakobson (1896-1982), made an inspiring synthesis of Russian, French, Danish, and American linguistics.

Pre-language brains deal primarily with their own bodies and signal to others how we feel. The situation is different in the language brain. Events in one person's brain may not only guide his own behavior, but remarkably, impose complex [p 46]processes in the brains of other human beings. It is this aspect of brain research, still a small aspect with low priority in the brain laboratories that is most relevant to social science. Steven Pinker reminds us in the opening paragraph of an important book:

As you are reading these words, you are taking part in one of the wonders of the natural world. For you and I belong to a species with a remarkable ability: we can shape events in each other’s brains with exquisite precision. I am not referring to telepathy or mind control or the other obsessions of fringe science; even in the depictions of believers these are blunt instruments compared to an ability that is uncontroversially present in every one of us. That ability is language. Simply by making noises with our mouths, we can reliably cause precise new combinations of ideas to arise in each other’s minds. (Pinker 1994, 1). Italics added here.

Since the emergence of Homo sapiens in pre-historic times some 400 to 300 millennia ago the tool of "making noises with our mouths" accomplishes this transfer from one brain to another.

Much more recently in human existence, at least less than ten millennia ago, mankind began to open an alternative route of transferring from one brain to another, namely, reading. Probably we learned to read numbers before we learned to understand script with letters and. In the opening paragraph of another important book Maryanne Wolf states:

We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences. Our ancestors' [p 47]invention could come about only because of the human brain's extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain's ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain's design forms the basis for much of who we are, and who we might become (Wolf 2007, 1).

The social reality in historical times is grounded not only on talk, but also on script. It is generally thought that great civilizations all depend on script. However, since the others have not left any written records we cannot be sure of their lack of greatness.

Let us be formal and pedantic for a moment. The tool of the language brain is the symbol. In this work we will use a single quote around the more or less familiar words that we make into a formal definition. Thus, a 'symbol' is a device by which we at any time and together with others can represent images or notions. This is the symbol rule:

Proposition 3:1. The Symbol Rule: The language brain produces devices (we call them 'symbols') that are available on any occasion to be taken up by the language brain of others who share a 'symbolic environment' and a common 'social context.’

In this work we will look for highly informative sentences that contain or imply many insights about social life, and in addition are grounded in some facts and amenable to be tested against new facts. We mark them by using a labeled indent in the text. In this volume there are twelve such proposed ‘propositions of social science;’ there is a list beginning on page 177 . They are stochastic in nature, that is, they deal with probable but not inevitable actions and events. But many of them combine into social mechanisms or are found as assumptions inside social mechanism that social scientists have discovered. See a short review by Hedström and Swedberg (1996), or a detailed one by Hedström (2005). Examples of such mechanisms are [p 48]self-fulfilling prophesies (like a run on a bank), boom and busts in markets⁷, or, the steps of public opinion formation presented below beginning on page 164.

By no means should propositions about social reality be considered equivalent to the iron-tight laws of physics. While they, like laws of physics, sum up past experiences, they do not necessarily forecast future experiences. Mankind lives in environments full of words. Inside each person there is a set of recipes, or rules of thumb, to cook sentences, some previously unheard of. Human beings also have the capacity to use words to design social arrangements for each other; some tried and true some never before tried. There will always be room for surprises in social science.

Some propositions are counter-intuitive, and they require extra work. Others, like the one above, at first seem more trivial than important. But the latter is usually due to our inability to analyze the familiar — simply because it is so familiar that we don't seem to bother with a deeper study that often would lead to amazing insights.

We reference our social science propositions by chapter and sequence number. The above is 3:1. In a systematic study one may also give proper names rather than mere numbers to important discoveries. This one we call "The Symbol Rule." It presumes a definition of 'symbols' that includes three parts: 'availability on any occasion,' the existence of a 'common context' and a shared 'symbolic environment.' We use a convention to put terms to be defined in single quotes.

Let us look at these constituent parts of symbols one by one.

[p 49]

Available on Any Occasion

The efficient use of communication by symbols separates the child from the infant, and man from beast. Of course, babies and animals make use of a variety of sounds that relate their state of mind. For example, babies and animals express some version of "yum-yum" when they satisfy their appetites. But they hardly converse about the taste of the food once they are satisfied. Their sound "yum-yum" cannot readily at will and on any occasion be used to represent food; mostly it occurs in direct contact with food and satisfaction of hunger (Langer 1948, 85).

Babies and animals may readily express the pleasure of living and the agony of dying. However, the ability on any occasion to talk of and have foreknowledge of birth and death is the privilege of those who have learned to use symbols more efficiently than infants and animals. There is a special opening in the language of religion in a society to cope with our knowledge that a life spent on this earth has an inevitable end.

Through symbols in speech, writing, drawing, music, dance, we tell each other what we have seen, heard or felt, what we like and dislike, and what we want to be done and want to avoid. Symbols acquaint us with a historical past we have not seen, distant people whom we have never met, and a universe through which we have never traveled. Thanks to symbols we can know something without personally having experienced it. Symbols, as we soon shall see, also codify societal orders, represent riches, summarize knowledge, embody beauty, define sacredness, and express virtues. They may introduce us not only to the civil but to whole civilizations.

Having symbols, we can talk about persons who are not present, an absolutely basic fact in the science of humanity. Not only can we tell about their comings, goings and doings and coordinate our activities with them. With the use of symbols come the rankings of our fellowmen. We can tell how much we [p 50]admire or despise them. With the use of symbols comes also that very special human activity called gossip. The evaluations we give to others, as we shall see, becomes handles to their motivation, for most people would rather be liked than disliked.

Shared Symbolic Environment

We learn about outlines of shared symbolic environments from the geography and history of languages. The size of the geographical territories with a shared symbolic environment varies enormously. In mountainous areas such as Caucasus and Afghanistan isolated valleys developed different dialects and a mosaic of different languages although the distances as the crow flies between them are short. The most linguistically diverse area in the world is the island of New Guinea north of Australia, about as large as Texas. Here one million people have some 830 different languages, half which have only about 500 speakers. This differentiation is not caused by a strenuous and mountainous geography. It may be a product of past intense wars with unusual combats, from our point of view, about warfare. The combatants seem to have fought to erect barriers between groups rather than to conquer enemy groups. The highly varied cultures of the many language groups in Guinea have turned the island into the favorite fieldwork location for anthropologists.

A more ordinary warfare is a common background of the large languages. At the turn of the millennium, Mandarin, the largest Chinese language, had about 900 million speakers. English had about 300 million, and so did Spanish. These numbers are triumphs of imperial wars, augmented by a high fertility of conquered territories. However, over half of the world's 6000 languages have fewer than five thousand speakers. Most of them grow or decline by infiltrations.

[p 51]People do not move around as easily as do language symbols. A so called "Matthew effect" accompanies large shared symbolic environments; the larger you are, the easier it is to grow even larger until seas, mountains, desserts, or climate zones raise obstacles. But also in large symbolic environments looms a vulnerability to infiltration, usually by religious or commercial symbols. Nicholas Ostler (2005) has written a pioneering language history of the world focused on the rise and fall of the "empires of the word" during the past 5000 years.

Dependent on Social Contexts

In understanding symbols we are helped by knowing about the larger situation in which they occur. Everyone knows this, but an illustration by G. K. Chesterton from the class society of old England brings it out in a way that social scientists may appreciate:

Suppose one lady says to another in a country house, "Is anybody staying with you?", the lady doesn't answer, "Yes; the butler, the three footmen, the parlor maid, and so on," though the parlor maid may be in the room or the butler behind her chair. She says: "There is nobody staying with us," meaning nobody of the sort you mean. But suppose a doctor inquiring into an epidemic asks, "Who is staying in the house?", then the lady will remember the butler, the parlor maid and the rest. (Chesterton 1981, 76).

The lady’s answers are so-called indexical expressions. They cannot be understood without complementary situational or cultural information. In a series of essays Erving Goffman (1967) showed that we spend much of our time adding to and remedying such expressions. The precision in a transfer from one language brain to another is not always given since knowledge of a context varies between persons and may be more or less accurate.

[p 52]Some contexts provoke confusions. The meaning recorded by a sending brain is called Erstsinn in traditional German rhetoric. It may not always be identical with Zweitsinn, the meaning in the receiver's brain. Misunderstandings do occur. Most seem innocent. In a German marriage advertisement Mr. Sender wrote that he was a "pipe smoker," a factual message implying that he wants a wife who is tolerant of smoking and who doesn't mind the extra trouble and costs of a smoker in the house. Miss Receivers — many of them — read the pipe smoker's ad as coming from a "masculine character," in other words, a desirable mate. A description "pipe smoker" is taken as an evaluation "cozy masculinity" (Stolt and Trost 1976, 32).

In other instances Birgit Stolt (1976) finds that sloppiness in the transfer from one brain to another can spell disaster and viscous confusion. When German medical authorities during the Nazi era said that demented and handicapped had "lebensunwertes Leben" (unfulfillable lives) this phrase was first descriptive, as is customary in science, and then evaluative in public opinion indicating inferior people, and soon it also became prescriptive for the doctors and paramedics who conducted euthanasia with a clear conscience.

This blurring in the practical use of language is known in rhetoric. What has not been known is that this particular confusion of descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive language hits the very foundations of society and civilization, thus justifying the label ‘vicious confusion.’ For, the basic building blocks of society and of the discourses of civilization are precisely this tri-section of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions. Our formal arguments about this begin on page 151 below.

To sum up, the Symbol Rule is generally true, but the transfer from one language brain to another is not quite as unproblematic as Pinker makes it when he says that we can shape events in each other’s brains with "exquisite precision." There may be a high level of precision in good legal, scientific, and [p 53]philosophical discourse, but in the rest of society the precision may be stumpy.

A Note on Historical Contexts

Lucien Febvre's (1942/1982) study of religious faith of the sixteenth century gives us an important observation about historical contexts. Francois Rabelais, the famous French writer with sympathy for and understanding of the vanity of the human race, lived in the first half of that century. He had been a monk and a physician. He wrote with grotesque exaggeration about the joys of eating and drinking, expressed profound dislike for life in the monasteries, treated schools and the Sorbonne with disdain, and sprinkled his texts with covert political satire. He has often been called a pioneering free-thinker by later generations, cutting through the hypocrisy and magic of his time.

Febvre is able to show that Rabelais and his contemporaries were not agnostics denying that God’s existence is provable, nor were they atheists denying the existence of deities. Their language resources, inherited from the Middle Ages, simply did not include the linguistic and conceptual tools to make them disbelievers. Rabelais' symbolic environment, which seems so modern, was not comprehensive enough for the modernity of our times; it did not include agnosticism and atheism.

Lack of knowledge about contexts of sentences opens for a wide variety of interpretations. The words of Plato about Socrates and the words by the authors and prophets of the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) about Abraham and Moses, and the words about Jesus by the evangelists and apostles in the New Testament give us an historical setting that facilitates our understanding. By contrast, Muhammad is said to have taken the utterances from Allah, mediated by the Archangel Gabriel, memorized them, and dictated them to scribes who wrote the suras (chapters) of the Qu'ran. The suras appear without chro-[p 54]nological order and the paraphernalia of a historical circumstance is sparse. They seem time-less — "eternal," the believers say — coming straight from Allah.

One would perhaps think that words stripped of context would be crystal clear; in fact they are the most ambivalent. The Qu'ran probably allows for more divergent interpretations than Plato's dialogues and the Bible's narratives that have more detailed contexts. The only help we have in interpreting the Qu'ran is our outside knowledge about medieval Arab customs and vocabularies and some events around Medina and Mecca . But this aid is very sparsely given by the author of the Qu'ran. This is one reason why Islam has stronger conflicting interpretations than Christianity. They are found, not only between Sunni and Shea branches, but also between various sects within each of these two main streams of Muhammad's religion, and also between leaders of prayers in different mosques. The image of a monolithic Islam, common in the Buddhist and Christian world, is wrong.

All actually existing symbolic environments have categories that are temporary and partial. Essential distinctions may be missing. For example, a language in totalitarian countries does not usually distinguish (and does not have to distinguish) between "state" and "society." Everything is the state, every organization and every piece of property. Of course, a population in such a society would have a handicap in understanding a book on a many-splendored society with many more societal realms than the body politic. This may happen also in non-totalitarian societies. I am sad to say about my own country, Sweden, that after 75 years of Social Democratic dominance in the twentieth century, the everyday and official Swedish language did no longer distinguish between "state" and "society." The Swedes called both "samhället" i.e. society. The state in the sense of "samhälle" was all-pervasive in Swedish thinking in the latter half of the twentieth century, both in public and pri-[p 55]vate life. In other words, the Swedes got a socialist bias built into their mother tongue.

Meadian and Saussurian Symbols

A symbol, we said, is that device by which we on any one occasion can represent an image and/or a notion and use it in conversation with others. This definition hints that there are two kinds of symbols: those related to images and those unrelated to images but found in other notions used in social interactions. I shall call them Meadian and Saussurian to honor two great scholars of the study of symbols. (This does not mean that they have defined symbols exactly as done here.)

Proposition 3:2. The Meadian-Saussurian Division: Symbols divide into (a) those that transmit shared images (here called 'Meadian symbols'), and (b) those that transmit notions ('Saussurian symbols').

Symbols that represent images are the easiest to deal with. In the spirit of young Wittgenstein we can say that such symbols depict or note something in the same way as pictures do. A symbol may in this way depict reality or fantasy, something present or absent, something in the past or in the future. Its meaning is the image it conveys.

A major analysis of the use of symbols in human affairs by George Herbert Mead (1934), a philosopher in the broad school of American pragmatism, was recorded in a posthumous book Mind, Self and Society. His analysis of symbols and their meaning leads us to the first part of our definition: a symbol is a device that on any occasion represents an image. Mead is seen as the philosophical father of the school of thought about society called ‚symbolic interactionism‛ (Blumer 1966) but he has also inspired others (Joas 1993).

Mead distinguishes between gestures and significant symbols. A gesture is a part of a behavior sequence that signals the [p 56]total sequence, for example, a dog, baring his teeth and assuming a certain posture, is a gesture meaning "fight" to another dog. Symbols are abundant among men, very rare among animals. Gestures abound among both humans and among other animals.

A Meadian symbol is a gesture that transfers the same meaning in the receiver as it has in the transmitter: "in this case we have a symbol which answers to a meaning in the experience of the first individual and which also calls out that meaning in the second individual‛ (Mead 1934, 45). The person who cries "fire!" to his neighbor shares images of what is going on within him. In fact, both the one who has seen the actual fire and the one who has only heard the shout of "fire!" react in similar ways, for example, by escaping or by starting extinguishing or rescue work. Mead tries to remain a behaviorist and prefers to talk about their common behavior rather than their commonly held image. We need not put such restrictions on our terminology, and I will nevertheless call these symbols 'Meadian.'

All symbols do not have to refer to something fixed outside them. Abstract symbols do not normally evoke images. If we say "Come here" or "Go away" to a baby who just has learned to walk and talk, he or she may not understand. The words ‚here‛ and ‚away‛ are too abstract. If we say "Go to Mommy" the meaning is clear. ‚Mommy‛ evokes a stable image, ‚here‛ and ‚away‛ do not. Words such as "that" or "which" do not always refer to images but to other words. Some of the latter might, of course, evoke images. Personal pronouns do not by themselves evoke fixed images; the image evoked by "he" or "she" varies by the context. No interrogative pronoun — what? who? how? where? when? and why? — evokes permanently fixed images.

When symbols do not evoke fixed images their meaning depends on how they relate to other symbols in the actual use of language. It does, of course, make a difference if we say "Come [p 57]here" or "Go away." Likewise, "Here in New York" is different from "Away in Dixie." The meaning of ‚here‛ and of ‚away‛ is given by the differences these words make in presentations. What? who? how? where? when? and why? get different responses about the same event. Hence their meanings are different. The point is simply that the very relations between the symbols can mark out their meaning. This way to define "the meaning of meaning" was launched by Ferdinand de Saussure and presented by his students in a book that became classic, Cours de linguistique generale (1916/1959). His analysis of symbols and their meaning leads us to the second part of our definition: a symbol is a device that on any occasion represents a notion.

The starting point of de Saussure is what he calls 'the arbitrariness of the sign.‛ There are no particular relations between the sounds of the mouth pronouncing the word child and its meaning. The word does not look like a child, crawls and walks like a child, cries and smiles like a child. But to the part of mankind that has learned English it means child. In the English-speaking world, one does not experience the symbol "child" as arbitrary. The original arbitrariness has turned into a "collective representation," to use Émile Durkheim's term. When this has occurred we have established an addition to our symbolic environment.

Symbols that can replace one another in a number of presentations (some say ‚arguments‛) have the same meaning; symbols that are irreplaceable in presentations have unique meanings. I shall call interchangeable symbols 'Saussurian.' Their meanings are established by testing the interchangeability of the symbols. When "kid" or "youngster" replaces "child" in our tales we use symbols with Saussurian meanings. Legal phrases, bureaucratic and technocratic languages abound with such Saussurian symbols; they talk, for example, about "national security", and "defense," and not about "soldiers," a word with [p 58]a more clear Meadian meaning. Such replacements may be elaborate chains. Consider Logos, the most famous one: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

All symbols that have a Meadian meaning can be used in presentations. Eventually they may acquire Saussurian meanings as well. It is interesting to note that in such instances the original Meadian meaning seems fresher and more vivid than the Saussurian. In good writing and speaking we avoid diluted or misplaced metaphors, that is, improper Saussurian use of Meadian meanings.

Here is an example from the training of journalists (by Bo Strömstedt, a legendary Swedish editor) taken from an article on public support to culture:

"A slice of the pie for new subsidies to cultural activity is summarized under the heading State Support for Literature. Last spring, after making some remarkable rounds prior to the Parliament's decision, it did not get an entirely favorable start. The main point is, of course, that the motion was in essence swept under the carpet."⁸

A slice of pie, summarized as a heading, makes some remarkable rounds before it gets a failed start, and "in essence" is swept under a carpet. In this text just about every word has lost its original Meadian meaning and, thus diluted, it is used in Saussurian ways. Pie does not mean pie, a round does not mean round, a start does not mean a start, point does not mean point, sweep does not mean sweep, and carpet does not mean carpet. At best, we can retain an image — in this case a mis-[p 59]leading image — that a few crumbs are left and then hidden. Such is the nature of dead writing and diluted speech.

Structuralism

Ferdinand de Saussure inspired a school of thought about language called "structuralism.‛ Claude Lévi-Strauss became its leading social scientist. In his theory of social reality, some symbols form 'myths,' i.e. patterns of thought that are repeated in mankind’s time periods and geographical habitations. In this type of theories, man is incidental, a mere accessory that helps certain symbols in their struggle for survival and hinders others. Such a theory may claim to know the future of symbolic environments and social reality by predicting which symbols and myths will survive.

This may sound like science fiction. But Lévi-Strauss' structuralism shows (or holds, some skeptics would say) that the webs of symbols he called myths actually do the thinking in man's mind; man does not think in terms of the myths, as is usually assumed (Lévi-Strauss 1958). The anthropologist Mary Douglas followed suit and explored How Institutions Think (1987) in a more down-to-earth British manner. A central research task in this endeavor is to find universal myths.

Toward Virtual Realities

The Saussurian chains of meanings may move phenomena from immediate reality to a "hyperreality and simulacra," a process identified by Jean Baudrillard (1981). Derivatives traded on the financial markets are hyperreal; traders deal with them as real without thinking about their underlying instruments of debts, rents, and properties, often without even knowing them. A "simulacrum" is a copy more perfect than the original, like Disneyland.

In the market and media research that Baudrillard has inspired, it was indeed noticed that many modern consumers no [p 60]longer could distinguish between imitation and reality — and that a sizable group preferred the imitations or improvements because they seem more real than life. In other words, the "natural" product was not necessarily considered the best; some modern consumers looked for products that were copied from but improved on nature.

On the Internet a straight webcam recording of what happens in a room soon becomes as boring as a surveillance camera in a bank. But if a TV-producer improves on reality by placing people on an island with opportunities for unselfishness and meanness, romance and repulsion, and gives them some rules for competition and ostracism, then this becomes a hyperreality — without being all-fiction, like a script for a play or a film.

The many computer games that have emerged in the late twentieth century may easily became hyperreal for the participants. The games include many old myths, and they imitate the past of mankind's reality, often in settings of the future. Their copy of reality is perceived by many participants as more real, manageable, and/or attractive than the present reality. These worlds of simulation involve man-made visual and audio presentations and sometimes manipulations also of other senses. They make up what has loosely become known as "virtual reality."

It is common to treat virtual reality as a part of social reality. But as it develops far beyond the use of symbols, it may be reasonable to see it as a separate reality on par with the physical, biological, and social reality. An interesting test will be whether animals other than Homo sapiens develop virtual reality.

Semiotics

A healthy child of structuralism is the theory of signification called semiotics. In America it is linked to the work by the [p 61]philosopher Charles S. Peirce (1908/1992-98). In Europe it has had intellectual victoriesries in Copenhagen under Louis Hjelmslev and in Paris under Agidas Julien Greimas. The latter invented a basic tool called the Semiotic Square (Greimas 1966). It is based on the idea that signs have no meaning in themselves but get meanings through their relationships, as Hjelmslev said, or their differences, as Saussure had put it earlier.

The semiotic square is an aid that sensitizes us to emerging concepts of social reality that may be hidden inside the language we use. It actually helps us to develop theories of social reality. Needless to say there are other ways to achieve this skill, for example, by following Barney Glazer (1978) through the steps of finding a grounded theory. But the use semiotic squares might be your crib if you believe in the premise of this book — seen in discussions started on page 3 and page 141 — that the theory of social reality is hidden in our language.

Greimas' starting point are any opposite concepts found in language such as truth vs. untruth, masculine vs. feminine, life vs. death, good vs. evil, in short, anything that can fit the "S1 versus ~S1" formulae. He added contrary notions and complementary notions and placed all four signs in the corner of a square as in Figure 3.1. If we take the opposites concepts femininity and masculinity, and place them into a semiotic square we obtain a pay-off in the form of two new concepts "the bisexual" (S1+ ~S2) and "the asexual" (~S1+S2) in addition to the original ones, "femininity" and "masculinity".

The exercise reminds us of the bi-sexual person who is both masculine and feminine, and of the a-sexual one who is neither masculine, nor feminine. One can use Greimas' semiotic square to make clarifications and innovations in social reality, for example, to provide a normative environment that has a place for a-sexual and bi-sexual persons.

Since we deal with emergent aspects of social reality that may be blocked to a reader imbued with strict schoolbook logic [p 62]it is advisable to use notions such as 'What seems to be‛ and 'What seems not to be‛ in our semiotic squares.

Figure 3.1 Semiotic Square of Femininity vs Masculinity

Sociologists may take notice that a fourfold table — found in abundance in their writings — contains less information and creative inspiration than a semiotic square. Market researchers and product developers show the way here for a more constructive social science; they use semiotic squares to find out cornerstones of markets and to explore whether or not the pos sibilities of consumer goods are exhausted. To quote French market analyst Christine Woesler Panafiey (2007): "Innovations often come about through the fusion of opposites or on the negation poles. To name but one example: water is the opposite of perfume, but all the 'waters' such as 'Eau de Kenzo' or [p 63]'Eau de Rochas' which were developed in the category of light perfume as followers to '4711-Kölnisch Wasser' are non-perfume/perfume."

Several of our arguments in The Many-Splendored Society are informed implicitly or explicitly by semiotic squares. In the next Volume they will be used explicitly to divulge some available communication structures. In Volumes 4, 5 and 6 that deal with societal realms born free and equal, we will use semiotic squares to expose deformations of the cardinal values of knowledge, beauty, wealth, sacredness, order, and virtue.

The squares we employ are of the simplest kind and built on the mere presence, emergence, or absence of attributes. We will not make them more complicated for ourselves and laymen by using other logical and mathematical operators.

Distortions in Language

Following leads from Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz, the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas (1981/1987) defined one context as "Lebenswelt," (life-world). The life-world of daily activities is imbued with the traditions from past generations in rendering accepted interpretations of symbols. In the life-world their meanings are self-evident. Not so in the "system-world" of modern institutions. Modernization and globalization reduce the sway of the shared meanings of the life-world. Mankind's present disorientation in the universe of meanings is a price paid for the diversity occurring when a modern world of institutional and rational systems colonizes the life-worlds. This is not an entirely hopeless situation. In later writings Habermas (1992) has explored the opportunities for democratic discourse to overcome such difficulties of diverse meanings in a rational way.

Any such undertaking is not easy. What we shall describe as spuma, magic, and defensive bilge fill a fair share of mankind's [p 64]daily chattering. They stream through modern media in the form of trash journalism, bureaucratic jargon, tricky legal parlance, cheap political rhetoric, medical quackery, stupid commercial advertising, quasi-religious persuasions, and idiotic texts appearing even in very good pop music. What in this flow of words stands to reason and what can be put aside?

Enter the Spuma [BIO]

In the fifth chapter of an important book by Steven Pinker (The Blank Slate. The Modern Denial of Human Nature 2002) he shows that brain research is more than conventional biology. It enables us to reach new understandings in the liberal arts and to formulate some laws of social science. Here is my version of two of its ideas:

Proposition 3:3. The Spuma Rule and The Civil Rule: Human activities separate into: (a) spontaneous bodily actions governed by the pre-language brains, activities which humans may decorate by use of symbols, and (b) symbol-based actions governed by the language brain, which generates a person's own symbol-based activities as well as such activities in other human beings living in the same symbolic environment.

This distinction is actually two propositions that require support from empirical research and cannot be settled by mere terminology. They are based on observable tendencies in human nature, not only a proposed jargon.

The first part of 3:3 above — that pre-language action such as sex and violence are accompanied or followed by spats of symbolic activity — we will call "The Spuma Rule." And the second one may be elevated as "The Civil Rule." It involves our use of symbols, not acts of violence, to teach, celebrate, and influence others, and also the use of symbols to set behaviors for ourselves and define our identity.

[p 65]We will use the term 'spuma,' to stand for any froth of symbols, verbal or non-verbal. We will use the Latin spelling spuma rather than the English spume to underline that here is a technical term. If you don't want to be quite as serious you can say "balderdash" or "baloney."

In the midst of the loftiest human pursuit of the human mind, bodily spontaneity is always present. The Cambridge philosopher Simon Blackburn leads us to a quote from Schopenhauer (1819, book 4) about sexual desire permeating almost all human endeavor:

[It] exerts an adverse influence on the most important affairs, interrupts the most serious business at any hour, sometimes for a while confuses even the greatest minds, does not hesitate with its trumpery to disrupt the negotiations of statesmen and the research of scholars, has the knack of slipping its love-letters and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts. Quoted in (Blackburn 2004, 263-64).

A well-known example of the intrusion of sex in serious pursuits is offered by a good-hearted, man with great aspirations, the Prophet Muhammad. He hears permission by an archangel to take a child-bride, Aisa, as a wife. He also learns that he is exempted from the limit of four wives imposed on all other believers. Muhammad's emotional surrender to the lively and witty Aisa is actually a very human episode.

What Schopenhauer said about sex seems to be true for all kinds of bodily spontaneity.

Signals in connection with bodily spontaneity, including even reflection and exchanges, are not unknown among more developed animals. But they abound in humans. When such signals are mixed with the reactions of the reptilian brain the former usually occur after, not before, the actual physical behavior. Studying the pre-language parts and language parts of the human brain, a researcher may first read traces in the pre-[p 66]language brains of actions arising as bodily spontaneity, then, in another part of the brain, he sees the traces of symbols that call for action (Libet 2004). Roughly speaking, the left hemisphere of the brain constantly weaves symbols into a more or less coherent account of the behavior chosen by pre-language brains. The symbols that make up such accounts are mere froth, embellishments of the behaviors already being initiated or even executed. They belong to the broad phenomenon of spuma. Damage in the forebrain can make this confusion of memory and imagination bizarre and can be diagnosed as "confabulation." But in less severe form it is a distortion of language in everyday-life.

Hunting to kill animals is a natural behavior. It was essential in another time to obtain food for sustenance. The dedicated hunter dresses his hunting habits in the spuma of hunting, the tallyho language. The climax of the hunt is the lustful kick when an animal is in the sight of his gun and he presses the trigger to kill. He may speak rapturously about the joy of hunting: it brings you outdoors and close to Mother Nature. But he hardly reaches the same excitement when he is in the woods without his gun.

The discovery of spuma plays havoc with the assumption that human behavior is caused by the symbols mankind willfully uses in speech or writing, e.g. the social norms of the Ten Commandments or other symbolic expressions with an imperative function. The dictum that all uniform human behavior has its causes in social norms (Segerstedt 1948, 23) has an exception and does not apply to man's bodily spontaneity. Such activities are not initiated by social norms. They may sometimes be stopped by restrictive norms, but they are not generated by social norms.

To identify spuma is the first skill a student of mankind must learn. It is a piece of cynicism that separates social reality from window dressing.

[p 67]We may be lost in people's lamentations arising from their bodily spontaneities. If you hear the words "I love you" you have to decode the message correctly. What does it mean this time? "I am bewitched, bothered and bewildered by you," "I want to share the rest of my life with you," "I simply want intercourse with you," "I enjoy(ed) our screwing."

In studies of sexual behavior that get their data by interviewing adults, the total number of heterosexual intercourses reported by men should be the same as the total number reported by women. But the numbers do not tally. Men tell about more sex than do women. Since Alfred Kinsey and his coworkers in (1948) and (1953) had interviewed volunteers in their pioneering works on human sexual behavior, it was easy to suspect that their sampling had been biased by sexually active males. But with adequate probability sampling we found the same discrepancy in Sweden: men seemed to inflate their number of heterosexual intercourses, and women perhaps deflate theirs (Zetterberg 1969). The finding has been repeated in subsequent studies in many countries. This has led to an animated methodological debate (for the summary see Fennell (2002, 22-26). Brain researchers may eventually resolve the dilemma by explaining more spuma in male talk about sex than in the accounts by females.

Spuma is also produced by people who have developed addictions, e.g. have chemically manipulated their bodies to produce lust when they consume an addictive ware. If you ask an alcoholic why he or she drinks so much, you may hear a lot of spuma. A physician specializing in treating alcoholics may draw correct conclusions about actual alcohol consumption from an alcoholic's verbalizations. Others underestimate intakes of alcohol. A survey researcher asking the general public how much alcohol the respondents drink is usually off by about 50 percent or more when he tabulates the answers and [p 68]compares them to the sales figures for alcohol, a fact discovered by Peranen (1974).

No spuma is scientific but you can be scientific about spuma. What Francis Bacon called "idols of the market place" was loaded with spuma. The phenomenon of spuma also turns up in what was called "derivations" by the Italian economist and sociologist Vilfredo Pareto. His term signals that something we say about an action or a person may not be its core, its "residue," but embellishment, hogwash, bilge, claptrap, hallelujah-speak (Pareto 1916)⁹. Terms such as idols and derivations, however, have other meanings today to most students and a new terminology would be all to the good. We propose 'spuma.' For more pathological cases brain researchers have the term "confabulation."

Embedded in mankind's fierce uprisings, brutal crusades, and violent revolutions is a great deal of spuma. Thus lofty ideals praise the successes of rebels, crusaders, and revolutionaries. And the same spuma is sermonized at the burials of those rebels, crusaders, and revolutionaries who met violent deaths in their efforts.

The spuma from past violent uprisings, crusades, and revolutions usually lives on, sometimes for several generations. Almanacs mark memorial days of remembrance for those who have died in a nation's military ventures. The spuma and its echoes may inspire also those who try to live by words. Consider the example when a violent liberation or revolution results in a democratic constitution. Then each forthcoming election represents a welcome celebration of the achievement to create governments that rule by words, not swords. But each election in such a country is also a reminder of what was once [p 69]achieved by violence. Thus, the same spuma may confuse new democratic generations who may easily become revolutionary romantics.

We may go astray in our study of social reality if we cannot identify the spuma when parents, peers, teachers, pop singers, newscasters, artists, and priests lament about the economy, politics, morals, ugliness, and health. To cut through spuma is a necessary art for the student of society. Spuma is the sizzle rather than the steak.

Enter Magic

It was a fantastic event when mankind found out that language used by a person can affect the behavior of other people. You say 'Welcome to the table!‛ and people gather at the table. You say ‚Move this table closer to the window!‛ and helpful hands move it there. 'Help yourself to some wine!‛ and people serve themselves from your wine. You say ‚Try this chocolate!‛ and people put the pieces of dark chocolate into their mouths.

Such experiences make it very easy to believe that language is omnipotent. So you say ‚Move this mountain!‛ or ‚Make this water into wine!‛ or ‚Rise, take up thy bed, and walk!‛ But nothing of the sort happens. You have merely engaged in the magic use of words in the belief that they can affect physics and move mountains, affect chemistry and turn water into wine, affect biology and cure sickness. In advanced forms this is sorcery or witchcraft. If you try to hurt people by magic we call it black magic. If you try to help people, it is white magic. But it does not matter whether you use advanced sorcery or sophisticated witchcraft, or if you have evil or good intentions.

Consider these simple rules of thumb for the normal use of language:

• Language does not affect physical reality.

[p 70]• Language may affect the biological reality of humans, but only in special and limited ways specified by "vocabularies¹⁰ of motives." It may affect animals through the process of domestication.

• Language does indeed both define and affect mankind's social reality, but only in ways and circumstances that can be stipulated in the regularities found in structuration, dialectics, and other parts of social science¹¹.

Incantations claim to temporarily deny the rules of thumb for proper language use and put laws of nature out of play. Entertainer-magicians use incantations (literally meaning "the singing of a spell on something or someone") to get around the rules for proper language use. They invoke Abracadabra, which is an extraordinary interesting Aramaic phrase used by their God: "I will create as I speak." Abracadabra in this creative sense is a possibility also for man in his social reality, but impossibility in his biological and physical reality. More on this in discussions on Freedom beginning on page 157 below.

A 'myth' is a narrative that in some places violates some of the above rules of thumb. This leaves an awfully large amount of language in the realm of myths. If this is to be our definition, it is clear that a human life without myths is a barren life. Fortunately there are many lively, amusing, entertaining and educating myths. They are found in story-telling, literature, theater, street life, family dinners, and the like, even in professional circles. Mass media without myths would have a limited success compared to those that routinely serve us the myth of the [p 71]day. Often the myths are rich in content and most often are cheap to come by.

The splashes of this type of language are particularly broad and vivid in children’s speech and in their preferred reading: Yes, Virginia there is a Santa Claus. In the years after the turn of the century, books on Harry Potter, trained in a magician's school, topped the bestseller lists of children's books in many parts of the world. Everyone knows that there are many streaks of magic in childhood and primordial societies, but few realize the wide streaks of magic in great civilizations. So it is easy to fill our lives with myths, and no one should stop us from using this privilege we have as symbol-using beings. The thing to be aware of, however, is the part of myths that we shall call "magic."

Five Principles of Magic

Ernst Cassirer, a German philosopher in the Kantian tradition, whose ambition was to explore all major forms of symbolism, had to devote the whole second volume of his three-volume work Philosophie der Symbolischen Formen (Cassirer 1923-29/2001-02) to "mythical thought." Some samples:

The whole and its parts are interwoven, their destinies are linked, as it were — and so they remain even after they have been detached from one another in pure fact. Even after such separation the fate of the part hangs over the whole as well. Anyone who acquires the most insignificant bodily part of a man — or even his name, his shadow, his reflection in a mirror, which for myth are also real ‚parts‛ of him — has thereby gained power over the man, has taken possession of him, has achieved magical power over him. — — — The workings of this form of thought can be followed in respect to time as well as space: it makes over the intuition of succession and simultaneity in its own mold. — — — Among certain Indian tribes if an enemy’s spittle can be obtained, it is en-[p 72]closed in a potato and hung in the chimney: as the spittle dries in the smoke, the enemy’s strength dwindles with it. (Cassirer 1923-29/2001-02, II, 51-52). English translation by Ralf Manheim).

Cassirer in his ground-breaking work sees myths, including magic, as a form of symbolism with its own principles. He explores these principles as they have appeared in historical perceptions of time and space, and in conceptions of man and fellowman. We select five of his principles of mythical thinking that also are magical, numbered by me so that we can later refer to them. The third principle, as we just learned, is the most fundamental. Here is our selection of five principles of magic:

1st principal of magic. In time, all events that happen simultaneously belong together. Migrating birds bring with them the summer when they arrive and later take it with them when they leave. In a magical myth, in contrast to science, correlation is always causation. The postulate in astrology that the sign of the zodiac at your birth affects you in later life is the typical example.

2nd principle of magic. In space, all things that have once touched each other thereafter hang together. In the coronation of a king you transfer the royal attributes of past kings by giving the regalia to the new king: the crown, the scepter, the sword, and the scourge. In alchemy you can transfer a property of one metal such as its glow into another by a special mixing of the two. At the turn of the century a number of African males held that HIV/AIDS could be cured by sexual intercourse with a virgin; the purity of the girl would transfer to the smitten male. In myths, unlike in science, even the remotest contact is seen as causation.

3rd principal of magic. What holds true for the part always also holds for the whole, and vice versa. With a strand of hair from a person you get control of the entire person. Merely by knowing [p 73]someone's name you have an advantage, and still better, if you have an image of the person you can control him or her by manipulating the image. In science such "holographic" parallels in which the whole has exactly all the properties of its parts are rare, in myths they are the rule.

4th principal of magic. All happenings and creations are willed by some being. There are beings in material things and behind events. There may be a spirit in a tree, a stone, in everything. There are gods who blow the winds from their places in the north, south, east, and west. The ultimate myth is that a being designed or created the entire universe. When Adam Smith wrote that "an invisible hand" set the prices in the economy he alluded to this magical view of his time. In reality, as he most certainly knew, there was no hand at all. The prices were a spontaneous order, a result of human action but not of human design.

5th principal of magic. A verbal formula can produce a quick change from anything evil to something good, and vice versa. The formula is known to medicine men of yore who could incant it to solve everyday problems in their tribe. In ancient Greece, a "love strike" would bring miraculous benefits. In Medieval Europe magicians outside the Church said "Hocus Pocus," a corruption of the Latin of the priests who said "hoc est corpus," i.e. the magical change of the substances of bread and wine into that of the body and blood of Christ.

The medieval magicians have latter-day counterparts. They may promote quick fixes to personal problems by a new diet. They may solve social issues by slogans about anti-globalization. They may save the planet by abandoning automobiles. They have formulas to turn poverty into riches by neoliberal market shocks or by socialist wage earners' funds. Others have formulas to turn war into peace by making love, not war. Worst of all, some political practitioners of magic promise a blitz war to end all wars. A common denominator of [p 74]all magical formulas using the fifth principle of magic is that the promised changes are effected straight away, or almost immediately.

When any of these five principles appear in a tale or a myth it turns the tale or myth into a magical myth.

Magic is never science. While magic and science are like fire and water, one can nevertheless be scientific about magic. Malinowski (Malinowski 1925/1948) discovered that the natives of the Trobriand Islands were quite able to distinguish practical efforts from magical ones. They would scoff if you suggested that they attempt to replace their practices of gardening or fishing with magic. But at all uncertain turns in their lives, be it unpredictable weather or poor prospects of crop survival, they punctuated their cultivation and fishing with magic¹².

A second skill a student of mankind must learn is thus to identify magic; the first was the identification of spuma. A common indication of ‚progress‛ is the stripping of magic elements from the language of a society. It is not an easy task for there are many magical elements in modern institutions. Natural science, wherever it is taught freely, has done a magnificent job in eradicating magic from our views on nature; the social sciences have some to catch up in this regard¹³.

It is not easy to resist mankind's long romance with magical thinking.

Without the ingrained quick-fix fifth principle of magic Europeans would not so readily have embraced Socialism. The socialists replaced "Silent night," as the most popular song, by [p 75]the Internationale. In 1871 Eugene Pottier wrote its magic message: "C'est la lutte finale / Groupons-nous et demain / L'Internationale / Sera le genre humain." (In English: ‚So comrades, come rally / And the last fight let us face / The Internationale unites the human race.‛). Italics are supplied here.

Without the ingrained third principle of magic, terrorism would have less appeal. Terrorism is the use of violence guided by the third principle of magic; by destroying a small part you believe that you destroy the whole. The terrorist who pulled the trigger of his gun on the 28th of June 1914 in Sarajevo against the Austrian crown prince and his wife believed in the magic that by destroying this visible pair of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire he would destroy the whole empire. A series of unexpected circumstances led to the First World War and to the actual fall of the empire. It is the task of serious historians to explain this process by other means than magic, but allowing for the important fact that the assassin believed in the magic of terrorist acts.

Without the ingrained fourth principle of magic, the world of the first decade of the 21st century would not so readily have accepted the idea that the main cause of global warming is man’s emission of CO² into the atmosphere. The non-human processes in nature that affect global temperature were perceived as more marginal. They include cloud formation, solar, volcanic, and oceanographic activities. Scientists advising the United Nations seemed unaware that their CO²-message on climate change, regardless of the level of support it had from research, played into an old pattern of magic, and for this reason got a good part of its quick and overwhelming public acceptance.

Of particular importance for social science is the debunking of the fourth principle of magic. For this principle means that the social world has no spontaneous formation: all is willed or designed by some being. This unwarranted superstition turns [p 76]human history into a story of villains and heroes, and it turns social thinking into conspiracy theories. It ignores the fact that spontaneous orders are not only legion in society but essential for its functioning. And social scientists can be scientific about them. Examples of such spontaneous orders are public opinion in the body politic, market prices in the economy, wikipedias in realms of knowledge¹⁴.

Enter the Defensive Bilge

In Aesop's fable, the fox who is unable to reach the grapes, attempts to get rid of his resentment at this failure by persuading himself that the grapes were sour and were not what he wanted anyway. Resentment also means that a person inferior on a common scale of evaluation harbors envy of a superior person. This phenomenon obtained its own label from Friedrich Nietzsche when he applied it to resentments in a collectivity. Add an i to resentment so that it reads "resentiment." The slaves often develop resentiment, argues Nietzsche. In order to deal with their envy they become collectively convinced that it is good to be humble.

Nietzsche's resentiment belongs to a class of phenomena we shall call 'defensive bilge.' To sailors, bilge is the water that sloshes inside the boat at its bottom. It is not the real thing, the waves of the big sea. The bilge in a boat may rise to dangerous levels and it often stinks. For safe and pleasant sailing it is pumped into the ocean. Likewise, the bilge in social reality has a self-deceptive odor. The guardians of honesty and realism pump it out.

Psychoanalysis has filled defensive bilge with sophisticated content. The repertoire of maneuvers for a person with a [p 77]wounded self-image is much longer than 'sour grapes'. For example, a worker who is doing a poor job may blame it on his poor equipment. Instead of saying, "I have done a poor job," he may say "The tools were no good," i.e. resorting to a 'rationalization,' as this term is used in psychology to designate verbiage of excuses that may sound reasonable. Other steps might lead to the same end. Actions that are incompatible with his favorable self-evaluation tend to be described by the person as acts of other agents: this is the process of 'projection.' Its typical expression is that "they" are the objects of blame, not "me." Another example is the sexually weak man who never misses an opportunity to tell others of his sexual adventures. To protect the evaluation he enjoys, he pictures his actions as being the opposite of what they really are. Actions that are incompatible with his accustomed favorable self-evaluation and tend to be presented to oneself and to others as opposite to, or different from, what they really are, we label 'inversion.'

In clinical experience one can observe whole chains of defense mechanisms. In our culture, the wife batterer, for example, tends to avoid recognition of his impulses in order to preserve his self-respect (denial). In addition, he may deny that his anger comes from himself, saying by no means, "I am angry," but rather, "You are angry" (projection). Furthermore, he may transfer the latter into "She hates me" (new projection) and thus develop paranoid ideas. All these so-called "defense mechanisms" elaborated by Anna Freud (1942) may be viewed as typical ways in which our perceptions and communications change when our opinion of ourselves is lowered and no other easy design is found to raise it. The defensive mechanisms in Anna Freud's version early were confirmed by quantitative empirical research (Sears 1951, Ch 7) .

Defensive bilge can be augmented by magic. The fact that Black Africa touches Egypt and has done so for centuries has prompted some beliefs that fit the first and second principles of [p 78]magic. Many Afro-Americans, like many educated Africans, whose ancestors did not have a written language to document their history, insist that classical Egyptian civilization was the work of black people south of the Sahara. They believe in the defensive bilge that the white Greeks stole this civilization, that Cleopatra was a black woman, that Pallas Athena in the Acropolis was an African black goddess. This defensive magic bilge is heartily endorsed by many Afrocentrists. Its origin, however, is not African, but a white American, Martin Bernal (1987), sinologist at Cornell University, who mistakenly thinks it is science.

In this type of debate we must stick to the search for the truth and ignore other purposes. Simply because you believe in empowering black people, you are not allowed to lie and say that Aristotle stole his ideas from the library at Alexandria — the library was not there in his time.

For a student of social reality it is as essential to be able to identify defensive bilge as it is important to identify human spuma and magic. It is the third and most difficult skill for students who want to engage in the proper study of mankind, i.e. a study that avoids illusions of language.

Professional public opinion pollsters still lack assessment of the amount of defensive bilge that is included in their reported opinions. For example, they have difficulties in assessing how much of anti-American attitudes recorded around the world are due to defensive bilge with sour grapes about the American wealth and way of life, and how much are due to real grievances. Wall Street’s hard sell of toxic subprime mortgage securities to financial institutions around the world, causing a global banking standstill in 2008, was certainly a real grievance, but no pollster could figure out how much anti-Americanism it caused.

[p 79]

Our Master Trends: the Civil and Rationality

In the centuries since the emergence of man on this earth, the size of the human brain and, more important, average brain complexity has increased. This growth has not necessarily occurred continuously but intermittently in periods of leaps and bounds. The parts of the brain that house the language functions have changed the most. We recall that the invention of reading only a few thousand years ago has already left traceable reorganizations of brains in advanced populations (Wolf 2007).

The language brain does not only produce magic, spuma and defensive bilge. Its main task is very different: to govern our own actions as well as the actions of others living in our symbolic environment. This is the core of civilized living, and language is its vehicle. We are not born civil: we become so by learning how to use and react to symbols. For example, a child may be called civil when it has learned to settle a conflict by use of words — even if some words are foul — rather than by the use of fists, thrusts, and kicks. Civilized parents teach their children to argue with words, not by violence. Uncivilized parents allow and encourage their children to use physical strength in their fights.

Pre-language abilities such as muscular strength, mobility, and sexual prowess have lost some of their obvious advantage when language skills become more essential for survival. In a emblematic job classification at the end of the 20th century Robert B. Reich (1992) separates three types of jobs:

physical jobs such as farmer, fisherman, carpenter, weaver, launderer, repairman;

person-to-person service jobs, such as hairdresser, tailor, waiter, nurse;

symbol-manipulating jobs, such as accountants, journalists, lawyers.

[p 80]A growing number of people are offering the labor market their ability to work with symbols and manipulate them. Fewer people engage in physical jobs in the advanced countries.

The expansion of the symbol-handling activities, i.e. the increased use of language, is a most important development in the modern world. This idea deserves a name of its own, and we call it The Master Trend of Civility. With language comes the issue of rationality, a fact already noted by Heracles. Therefore, a consequence of our master trend of civility is a Master Trend of Rationality

Proposition 3:4. The Master Trend of Civility and The Master Trend of Rationality: The history of mankind is (a) a slow but increasing expanse of language-based activities, both in absolute and relative terms, in comparison with mankind's pre-language activities, and (b) a slow but increasing proportion of language activities based on rationality, both in comparison with the pre-language activities and in comparison with all language activities.

The work you are reading right now can claim relevance exactly because it is focused on these expanding trends in human life. The symbolic environment of mankind is expanding and with that comes expanding rationality.

The Axial Age

It is admittedly difficult to conduct research on the existence of long master trend of civility and on the expanding symbolic environment and rationality. Such trends, as we have noted (page 30) do not develop evenly. There are ruptures in the curve. One of these that intrigue scholars is the so called ‚axial civilizations‛ of China, India, and the Occident in the period 800 to 200 B.C. (Jaspers 1949).

[p 81]

Figure 3.2. Bursts of Sophisticated but Isolated Symbolic Activity during the Axial Age.

Intense bursts of symbolic activity occurred in this period that expanded symbolizations, in particular the more rational ones. The thrust of the period is signaled by a progressively swinging time curve in Figure 3.2 which applies to all axial civilizations, not only the one close to the curve. Imperial China, India with developing Hinduism and Buddhism, Iran with Zoroastrian, ancient Israel during the period of the Second Temple, and not the least, ancient Greece and Rome, all show this pattern.

A striking fact is that these parallel developments in the millennium B.C. occurred without significant mutual contacts between these civilizations, a strange fact (or coincidence) in human history. But each one of them certainly caused a major upheaval for mankind on its territory. The later Christian and [p 82]Islamic civilizations do not have this independence; they are highly dependent on a Jewish and Greco-Roman heritage.

Bursts of symbolic activity can crystallize in different directions. All of the axial civilizations experienced swings toward an emphasis on 'becoming‛ rather than mere 'being‛ (i.e. what we call modernity and begin discuss on page 120). They seem to grow proportionally more pristine than mundane symbols (see page 100 below). Some but probably not all of the axial civilizations experienced glorious revolutions with significant steps in differentiation and consolidation of societal realms. (See page 25 for our paradigmatic European case.) It also seems as if several of the axial bursts in symbolic environments have had counterparts in bursts towards so called Gesellschafts, one of the big master clusters of social organization that we shall discuss under the heading‚ ‘Folk Life and City Life‛ in the next volume of The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice Built by Symbols.

Is the simultaneous and independent growth of the axial civilizations a natural development or a coincident? The foremost among researchers into this problem is S.N. Eisenstadt In later works he rejects more explicitly Jasper’s assumption of a natural historical transcendence and crystallization into axial civilizations. Instead he puts forward four more circumstantial factors from his studies:

First, these analyses indicate that the crystallization of any concrete institutional pattern entails, is contingent on, the development of distinct dimensions of social interaction which differ from the general evolutionary tendencies i.e., from the development of new resources and new symbolic orientations. Second, the crystallization of institutional and symbolic formations is effected by distinct types of actors, the emergence of which constitutes a socio-cultural mutation, which is not predetermined by broad evolutionary tendencies. Third, the crystallization of concrete institutional patterns is contingent on the development of [p 83]patterns of interaction and of mechanisms of control and regulations between major social actors, above all between different would-be elites and between them and broader social sectors. Fourth, historical contingencies play indeed a very important role in the process of such crystallization. (Eisenstadt 2009, 138-39)

Entirely different confirmations of a long master trend of civility can be found watching its predictable consequences. Some are visible in every-day living. For example, in the long run, the victory of the language brain may be confirmed for everyone to see by a victory of the feminist doctrine of equality between the sexes. Women's language abilities are as good (and sometimes better) than men's. This cannot be said for their physical abilities governed by pre-language brains. A safe prediction that a social scientist can make about the development of modern society on the basis of the master trend of civility is this: the female language brain will come to its rights in social reality. In a world of expanding symbolic environments it will eventually win equality between the sexes.

As we have seen in recent years, this equality is speeded up by legislative political activity and designs. But in the very long run its victory is in the cards with or without aggressive feminists and with or without Talibans and other Muslims who prohibit girls from going to schools. More on these consequences of the master trend of civility in a moment.

Rationality

Let us turn to the Master Trend of Rationality — clause (b) in Proposition 3:4 — that deals with those special parts of language activities that are marked by rationality.

A main key to human history is rationality, which we interpret as an effort to make more effective and consonant the many parts of human existence governed by the language brain. Rationality (and its philosophical system of ‘rationalism’) has been a striking warping in the fabric of Western culture from [p 84]its very beginning; no other civilization has so embraced rationality as ours (Weber 1922). Pitirim A. Sorokin (1937-41 vol 2, 31) attempted to tabulate the extent to which Western systems of truth and knowledge exhibit traits of rationalism, empiricism, mysticism, criticism, skepticism and fidelism during each century from 600 B.C. to 1900 A.D. Rationalism takes first rank in 17 out of these 25 centuries and ranks second in the remaining eight.

Max Weber held that rationality is a double star towards which societal development is heading. On the one hand, the multiplicity of human symbols is arranged into systems, and on the other the great repertoire of action in human life is arranged in uniform institutions. The first star guides a rationalization that secularizes religions, demystifies nature, breaks the enchantment of art, lays bare magic in the pursuit of knowledge and salvation, and removes the sense of drama from power. The second star guides a rationality that elucidates everyday life, organizes working life, ritualizes spiritual life, calculates the steps in business life, and bureaucratizes all aspects of governance.

These processes unfold unevenly and jerkily. They were formulated, fairly naively, by thinkers during the European Enlightenment, and they were developed further by social philosophers who wrote in Charles Darwin's spirit of optimism about progress. But it was first through Max Weber that these lines of thought became historically established and many-sided (Roth 1968). This happened when he sought to report on the special nature of his own civilization and describe the severe conflicts in our everyday life and our institutions that have been caused by Western rationality.

The development of rationality in its twin forms — systematization of ideas and organization of actions — results in a kind of triumph of reason, and in our culture a triumph of bureaucracy and technocracy. Weber was not gladdened by this fate: [p 85]as he saw it, it placed man in ‚an iron cage,‛ and moved society towards petrifaction, "an icy polar night.‛ Already in the first decade of the twentieth century, he was able in his 1905 study of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism to outline the typical human being of the twentieth century: "an expert without a heart, a hedonist without moral stature.‛

A careful search through Weber's writings finds twelve somewhat different usages of the term "rationality" (Levine 1985, 210). Looking at more recent works on rationality, for example, by (Nozick 1993), we find many more, some so specialized that they seem beyond the reach of a public with average education.

Most of his life Weber perceived rationality as a unitary phenomenon, albeit with several different attributes. The same also holds for the great formalizers of rational choice theory in economics. We shall return to this issue when we deal with different expressions of rationality in the different realms of science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality. Our conclusion is that they are indeed different from one another¹⁵. But they all are efficient and consistent uses of language and mathematics. They often resist the ever-present spuma, magic, and defensive bilge.

The Specter of Islam: Combatant Fundamentalism

The early efforts to spread the Prophet Mohamad's teachings during three-four centuries after his death were extraordinary successful and soon covered Indian, Persian, Egyptian, Hellenic and European territories.¹⁶ In fact, at that time Mus-[p 86]lims touched the heritage from all axial civilization except the Chinese; Islam also reached China but at a later date. This was a totally unique educational situation.

A Muslim could study, from records preserved on his own soil, the astronomies of India, Babylon, and Egypt; Indian and Persian mathematics; the philosophical concepts of the Greeks; the medicine, geography, astronomy, and mathematics of the Hellenistic age; the botanical, pharmacological, zoological, geological, and geographic lore amassed by the ancient world as a whole (Goldstein 1980, 98).

The Caliphate of Cordoba at its 100+ years of peak in the 10th century could exhibit this fantastic human heritage on European soil. This indeed looked like the take-off of high culture and perhaps a many-splendored society. Some of its richness spilled over into the European Renaissance.

For the Muslim world, unfortunately, this was a short-lived condition. The Muslim teachers and the Muslim youth stopped studying this heritage. Instead they were rewarded for memorizing the Qur'an by rote.

This is a most serious setback in our master trends of civility and rationality. I can think of no greater tragedy in history of ideas than this victory of fundamentalism over civilizations. It shows a frightening weakness of a system in which everything civilized is transmitted, not by genes, but by symbols. In principle, it takes only two mislead generations, equipped with effective persuasion, to wipe out a civilization, i.e. a situation when children do not learn civilized living and culture from parents, nor from grandparents. In practice, of course, it takes longer to wipe out a civilization since it involves not only parents but teachers who educate new generations in schools outside families and households. Immunities to the ways and views of Muslim invaders are hidden in codes of many native languages in territories under Muslim occupation. It may still [p 87]be worthwhile to search for echoes of axial civilizations between the lines of writings by scholars in Muslim lands.

However, all Muslims worth their salt are fundamentalist in the original sense; they believe that the Qu’ran is the word of Allah, and that reciting of the Qu’ran is the road to a good life and to Paradise. In the centuries after the death of the Prophet there is no doubt that such doctrines took precedence over any wisdom handed down from the axial age.

At the time of this writing a specter of a more combatant and persuasive Muslim fundamentalism goes through the world. Can it molest a civilization such as the Anglo-Protestant described on page 23 ? Yes, temporarily, but in the long run the Master Trends of Civility and Rationality will reassert themselves. The Chinese, Indian, and Western civilizations will prevail over Muslim fundamentalism. We can again take the position of women as an indicator.

A religious discourse and a societal realm concerned with sacredness is a natural part of any society¹⁷. Suppression of women, however, is not part of any sacredness. A strong male hegemony is traditionally an entrenched element in Islam, more so than in Christianity and in Buddhism. It is supported by religious practices and teachings in mosques, enforced by courts empowered with corporal punishments, by informal mob violence, and by condoned domestic violence. All this is on its way, either to disappear within Islam, or to drag the entire Muslim religion into oblivion. Such is the hint from the master trend of civility.

[p 88]

The European Enlightenment

Enlightenment is the word we use about a symbolic environment stripped of magic, spuma, and defensive bilge and instead filled with rationality.

Enlightenment is always a matter of degree. We may cling to the idea that education will give students enlightenment. But schools may actually be full of nationalist or ideological baloney. University students and some professors may take the lead in producing defensive bilge against businessmen, or against the United States of America, and often enough against the whole heritage of the Western Enlightenment. Man's language brain is capable of both enlightenment and its opposite. And we as human beings are responsible for both.

Enlightenment became highly honored in Eighteenth Century Europe. In England, the philosopher and essayist Francis Bacon (1561-1626) laid bare the modern canon of scientific inquiry that is empirically grounded and theoretically consistent. His compatriot philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) explained the nature of human understanding of the world and the necessity to limit government to the tasks of defending freedom and property. The French philosopher François-Marie Voltaire François-Marie (1694-1778) denounced bigotry and tyranny, and his compatriot Denis Diderot (1713-1784) explained new ideologies and all known technologies in a monumental encyclopedia. In Germany, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) wrote a secular philosophy of knowledge and morals and his compatriot Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) gave universities a structure appropriate for science. In Scotland, David Hume (1711-1776) wrote a philosophy of skepticism and his compatriot Adam Smith (1723-1790) discovered how markets create wealth without use of violence and plunder.

The experience of the Enlightenment is a decisive event. To use Ernest Gellner's (1994, 50) phrase, it is a "big ditch," in [p 89]which new knowledge surpasses all previous knowledge. European history between the ancient Greeks and the Enlightenment is not particularly remarkable compared to the history of other regions of the world. However, from the time of the Enlightenment and its spread to North America we deal with unique developments, in volume to be sure, but also in kind. They are comparable only to China during the Sung period. Prior to these Enlightenments, a multitude of intellectual styles could claim superiority. In retrospect their claims seem rather arbitrary. On this score the relativism of contemporary multiculturalists is right. After the European Enlightenment, however, there is only one winner on the world scene, regardless of what multiculturalists say in support of the defensive bilge of the losers.

The Master Trends as an Equalizers

With the rationality of the European Enlightenment the language brain came into renewed focus. We got science and technology, government based on the consent of the governed, business based on negotiations between buyers and sellers in a market economy. The creators of the Enlightenment whom we have mentioned were men. They were not men prone to use power and violence; such men came later with the French Revolution. With the possible exception of Bacon who was Baron Verulam, Keeper of the Privy Seal and Lord Chancellor of England, they were men of gentle dispositions and civil pursuits. They masterminded a great clean-up of spuma, magic, and defensive bilge and opened the doors to great advances in rationality and liberty.

[BIO] The fact that the ones we singled out were all males is probably a circumstance of the long developmental history of thousands of generations, when pre-language brains were a major force in mankind's survival and expansion. They ruled over significant differences between the sexes, for example, in [p 90]muscular size, mobility, and proneness to aggression, and produced unequal life chances for men and women. The intellectual achievements of the fathers of the Enlightenment were products of the language brain, i.e. the more recently developed parts of human anatomy. The language brain shows only trivial differences between women and men compared to the pre-language brains, where noticeable differences are found. When the Enlightenment makes the language brain an overwhelming force in shaping society, women can assume what they never before had on a large scale, namely equality between the sexes. Thus the European, white, males who spearheaded the Enlightenment, opened up a new world for women. With the exception of John Locke they may have done this unwittingly or inadvertently.

Prior to the Enlightenment, generations of European society had a gender lens inherited from the pre-language brains that restricted women’s pursuits of language brain activities. Seen through this lens the important and relevant world was the men’s world. This affected the view of numerous problems and their solutions.

The use of this gender lens eased in the 20th century. Then women and men in the Western world more often were observed through the same lens, as fits the language brain’s experience of women’s and men’s equal ability to use symbols. The generations of the 21st century will in all probability eradicate gender restrictions in the pursuit of achievements based on the language brain — in scholarship, business, politics, art, religion, and morality — provided, of course, that our world becomes and/or remains civilized and enlightened.

In most physical sports, however, where the pre-language brain looms large, it will still be considered fair to let men and women compete separately. The same as is the case for juniors and seniors in sports.

[p 91]

Deficiencies of the Enlightenment

The European Enlightenment had two deficiencies that have become obvious to later observers. First, it did not fully appreciate emotive commitments. Shakespeare’s Hamlet says: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." And, at least in one context, the great mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) placed the grounds of the heart ahead of the grounds of reason. The European Enlightenment never found the crucial balance of a many-splendored society between the executive realms of science, economy, and polity and the emotive realms of art, religion, and ethics. In all of Europe, but perhaps more in Germanic Europe than in Latin Europe, the Enlightenment harbored men of intellect living coarse emotional lives.

Second, the European Enlightenment did not do a complete job in abolishing magic. It did well to discredit the first four principles of magic that we have identified (page 72 above). Five Principles of Magic The Enlightenment exposed the magical beliefs that all events that happen simultaneously belong together, that all things that have once touched each other thereafter hang together, that what holds true for the part also holds for the whole, and that all happenings and creations are willed by some being and none by the mere force of nature. But the European Enlightenment failed to debunk the fifth principle of magic, that a verbal formula can produce a quick change from anything evil to something good, or vice versa. The magic that you quickly can transform social reality by a revolutionary rhetoric was cheered rather than debunked by the European Enlightenment.

Among the usually mentioned products of the Enlightenment are various beliefs in reason: liberalism and socialism, the market economy and the planned economy, modern democracy and republicanism, all are children of the European Enlightenment. Actually, all these modern phenomena brought by [p 92]the Enlightenment have been presented as more or less quick fixes that would bring a new era of harmony to mankind, not in heaven but on earth. This, however, is not necessarily working in the real world; it has obvious elements of the fifth principle of magic.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected the Christian millennium, the Revelations of St. John. But they replaced his eschatological paradise with new utopias of their own. Nazism is usually dismissed as a romantic illusion of race. But Hitler, an intellectually inclined Viennese without formal schooling, traced his racism to what he thought was as much enlightened science as his later highway net of Autobahns, his Blizkrieg (war quick as a lightening), and his missile technology. The deeper dependency of Nazism on the Enlightenment has been explored by John Grey (2007, 55-69).

To the cheers of enlightened intellectuals with the slogan "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité" that fired the masses, the French stumbled into a revolution with drastic programs to change the social structure and everyday life. Alexis de Tocqueville started late in life a major study of the French Revolution. In the first part he set out to describe the feudal conditions in France that led to the Revolution. He had intended to go on to chart the revolutionary years and then chart the outcome of a new France, and finally compare the results with the society before the revolution. He only completed the first part of the study in 1856 and called it L'Ancien régime et la Révolution (Tocqueville 1864-1866/1998-2001). In seven short paragraphs in this book he hints at anticipated conclusions of his total planned work. On balance, he says he would report more similarities of importance than differences. He rejects the notion of quick and, if necessary, cruel fixes to change society. The abolishment of feudalism brought about by the Revolution was inevitable and "the old social structure would nonetheless have been shattered everywhere sooner or [p 93]later". He debunks the common idea that the Revolution was a thorough turnaround of French society. "Radical though it may have been, the Revolution made far fewer changes than is generally believed, as I shall point out later". But there was no later detailed analysis. He only hints at an important fact about the power structure of France. The centralized power that the Court in Versailles had exercised was toppled by the Revolution. However, the revolutionaries actually "sought to increase the power and jurisdiction of the central authority". This trend has been easy for others to observe in later French society: the continuous prevalence of an exceptionally strong central government and its ideology of dirigisme. Such trends are actually anathemas to a many-splendored society.¹⁸

To be sure, a long view of history shows great progress by the Enlightenment for the French people, as it does for mankind as a whole. But any grand quick fixes creating a future millennium on earth are as illusory and cruel as they are exciting to the believers. The believers are simply trapped by our fifth principle of magic. On this score the European Enlightenment failed to be realistic.

Post-Structuralism and Enlightenment

A modern symbolic environment has many voices speaking in Saussurian meanings. Jacques Derrida, a master of the close reading of texts, revealed the hollowness in the practice of singling out a particular symbol in a Saussurian chain of meanings and calling it the beginning, the high point, the ultimate stage. Such judgments from outsiders are common among philosophers and among critics of literature, art, ideology, and architecture. They are often authoritarian and generally impossible to prove. This view gained considerable appeal in the [p 94]United States after Derrida had applied it to the very Logos itself in a book on grammatology (Derrida 1976).

Derrida's followers, the deconstructionalists, drew the ultimate philosophical consequences of an exclusive use of Saussurian meanings and their iterability. If symbols get their meaning only from their place in presentations, meanings may shift from time to time in an arbitrary way. Language, literature, legislation, education and everything else involving symbols are then mere games, often chaotic games with ever-shifting rules. Thus they believe that there is no certainty in the Enlightenment.

Michel Foucault had arrived at the same conclusion and used it to deny any unitary truths, beauty and morality. What people talk about as true statements do not tell us how things really are but about who is in charge and has the power and the media access to establish the meanings of our symbols. Thus he believes that there is no truth in the Enlightenment. Art is dismissed in a similar vein. Its beauty, as most see it, is a house of pretty cards set up by the powerful and economically advantaged to uphold their position in the social hierarchy. If so, intellectuals no longer have any defense against spuma, magic, or defensive bilge.

Outside of France such views were called ‚post-structural-ism.‛ It has some elements that are empirically grounded. It cannot be rejected simply by denouncing it as a fitting ideology for nihilists and anarchists. At any rate, the search for Saussurian meanings is at the bottom of much scholarship in contemporary social science and cultural and literary criticism.

In the decennium before and after the turn of the century, games often illustrate the fashionable idea from post-structuralism that there is no such thing as "the truth" and that any statement about "good" and "evil" is arbitrary. Everything is subject to manipulations, a questionable inspiration for those who have to live real lives in the future.

[p 95]

An Appeal

The rapidity of the spread in the Western world of the relativism of post-structuralism has been amazing. Equally amazing is the self-deception of journalists and educators who think they "liberate" people by the message that whatever passes for truth and morality and beauty is actually no more than arbitrary power.

As we will see when we study the dialectics of priorities in the next chapter, an extreme pragmatism opens the gates for an extreme dogmatism. In the new century an increasing number of Europeans apparently find the relativistic stand of post-structuralism to be a weak, empty, and out-of-touch philosophy of life compared to the certainty of, say, Muslim dogma, or the widespread fundamentalisms of environment and gender.

A more viable and lasting critique of poststructuralist views must focus on the fact that all societies also have meanings in the form of shared and stable images. A dosage of George Herbert Mead is needed to rescue us from a chaotic abyss of post-structuralism in which social scientists, journalists, and critics of culture lose bearings.

Shall social scientists and humanists follow the lead of George Herbert Mead and the symbolic interactionists and see symbols as a device to evoke images? Or, shall they follow the lead of Ferdinand de Saussure and the structuralists and see the meaning of symbols in the exchangeability of parts in presentations? The obvious answer is that we shall use both. In language — and probably also in other fields such as mathematics, the ballet, and perhaps also in music — we find both meanings. That is why we define a symbol as that device by which we on any occasion can represent an image and/or a notion used in a presentation. This definition requires the acceptance of both Meadian and Saussurian meanings. And it does not compromise rationality and enlightenment.

[p 96]

4. Vibrations in Symbolic Environments

Rise of Intellectuals: Mundane and Pristine Symbols

Speech gave our ancestors new ways of shaping their relations to one another. Everyday life became imbued with symbols, mundane symbols shaping mundane life. Vocabularies developed that were linked to the local way of practical living. As the standard example goes, the Eskimos developed more names for "snow" than people less dependent on the varying conditions of snow.

When symbols came into human use, some people became especially skilled in their use. They could "reason through" a problem while others had to "muddle through" the same problem. Thus emerged a position that we today call 'intellectual.' The intellectuals sought out meanings in the language in use, reformulated them as precise symbols, and practiced the use of such symbols. They began to talk about the general form of snow, rather than its various weather-bound forms. In this way they shaped what we shall call 'pristine symbols' to distinguish them from the 'mundane' of everyday use.

The symbolic environment of ancient Athens was probably full of mundane symbols in the ongoing course of commerce, wars, and exigencies of living. But the written records also reveal a strong pristine stream of symbols. Human reason could create a world that was clearer than that found in everyday reality. The white color of the Athenians’ dwellings was speckled with gray nuances and spots. But the ideal form of whiteness contained only white. In reality, the good human being did have some shortcomings. But the ideal form of goodness contained only the good. The world of ideal forms, a universe of reasoning in pristine symbols, seemed to represent a purer reality than that which was commonplace and mun-[p 97]dane in ancient Greece. Plato wrote two scenarios of what he saw as ideal societies, the most important one in a book simply called Republic and another, "second-best" version (to use Rhoda Kotzin's words), called Magnesia and found in his book on Laws.

In the following centuries, reasoning around ideals gave rise to the Neo-Platonic view that the imperfectly realized forms of the mundane world participate in an intelligible world of ideal forms. These philosophers believed that the imperfect structures strive to realize themselves as their fixed, ideal structures. "Becoming," rather than "being", was their key to history. Thus in Greek and Hellenic civilization, a vital pristine symbolic environment was added to the ordinary mundane one. In the 420s Saint Augustine gave a Christian version of the mundane and pristine in his great narrative about the City of Man and The City of God. His vision of the City of Man is clearly influenced by the corrupt and wicked years in Rome before the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

Among the specialist users of pristine symbols, the 'intellectuals,' we find not only the philosophers and sophists of antiquity. Max Weber added the prophets of Judaism (several also recognized by Islam), the Brahmins of Hinduism, the Sanguas of Buddhism, and the Chinese literati. S.N. Eisenstadt (1999) added the Jacobeans of the French Revolution, and laid bare modern twists of fundamentalism among contemporary intellectuals.

A specialty of man in the entire animal kingdom is the tension created between his pristine symbolic environments — be they religious, artistic, ethical, scientific-philosophical, or revolutionary and his mundane, everyday life and its symbols. On the individual level, the tension between the pristine and the mundane can be resolved by some sort of "salvation," a Christian term given an extended meaning by Max Weber for use in other religions, and eventually also a scientific meaning appli-[p 98]cable to secular pursuits. It stands for any reconciliation between the mundane life and the pristine ideals.

Mundane symbols can be both what we called Meadian or Saussurian, as can pristine symbols. However, there seem to be some affinities between the two classifications. In a symbolic environment, the combination mundane-Meadian seems more likely than the combination mundane-Saussurian. And the combination pristine-Meadian seems less likely than pristine-Saussurian. I know of no data documenting this and shall not present it as a formal proposition.

The quarrels that the intellectuals became involved in within their symbolic environments have a limited number of lines, three to be exact. Individuals who habitually stick to mundane symbols criticize intellectuals for being up in the blue and "unrealistic." The intellectuals retort that pristine symbols also are a part of social reality. Intellectuals then follow two additional lines in their critique. The mundane fellows are dammed for being earthbound, selfish and materialistic, i.e. for not being pristine. The fellows in the pristine camp are usually criticized for not being pristine enough, i.e. for abandoning their high ideals. You can trace these basic lines of criticisms by intellectuals in scriptures from antiquity, in medieval dissertations, in the polemics of the Enlightenment, up to the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books and the editorial and cultural pages of your local paper. In this sense there is little that is unpredictable about intellectuals. The intellectuals in science are different in their quarrels only in the sense that they have a more agreed upon basis — the scientific method — to guide them into what are acceptable statements.

To sum up:

Proposition 4:1. Tendencies in Intellectualism: (a) Over time, any symbolic environment tends to become differentiated into mundane and pristine symbols. (b) Mundane symbols tend to multiply as living conditions multiply. (c) Among [p 99]skilled symbol users, the intellectuals, there is a spontaneous tendency for pristine symbols to emerge. (d) The consistent users of mundane symbols criticize the intellectuals for being out of touch with reality. The intellectuals tend to criticize the users of mundane symbols for ignoring the pristine ones, and they tend to criticize each other for not being pristine enough.

It should be obvious that I do not use the designation "intellectuals" in its current derogatory sense pertaining to people who pontificate on any topic far outside their own expertise.

Intellectuals are the cultivators of pristine uses of symbols, and among them ‘critics’ have the most difficult task. They do more than agree or disagree with other intellectuals. They are required to understand in depth the symbolic objects on which they offer reasoned judgments. They separate the genuine from the clichéd or adulterated. They are the scouts in our vibrating symbolic environment. In the ever shifting Zeitgeist they help us see the old in the new and they are the first to spot the truly new. A many-splendored society needs many-splendored critics. It is no coincidence that in our preview of this society at the end of next chapter we rest our case with a critic, Kenneth Burke.

A critic may have started by dealing with music, literature, paintings, eroticism, morals, politics, or other specialties. But the most interesting critics branch out and cross the borders of many genres. Celebrated critics such as Edmund Wilson and Susan Sontag were literary critics who also became voices on war, politics, education, economy and other realms of life, and who also tried their skills as authors of fiction. In Europe, most notably in France, there is a tradition that professors of philosophy branch out to be boundless critics.

When a comprehensive intellectual's system of pristine symbols is reasonably void of magic, spuma, and defensive bilge we like to call it a "philosophy." But philosophy can also be a [p 100] celebration of mundane symbols and what they stand for. Nietzsche (1909/1968 sec 10) noted that "these these trivial details — diet, locality, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of self-love — are inconceivably more important than everything men have hitherto considered essential."

The Tension between the Mundane and the Pristine; the Problem of Praxis

The typical response in Europe, the Middle East, and India to the tension between the mundane and the pristine has been that intellectuals impose their vision on the practical version of living. Here the pristine order, as the City of God, is regarded as "higher" or "better" than the mundane, the City of Man. Three important ideas have emerged in this situation.

The first is that man may remodel the world, for example by wars, politics, or morality, to be in line with a pristine world. The pristine order is seen as a pillar of light in the day and a pillar of fire in the night for the mundane order. Here is the origin of the notion that intellectuals — that includes philosophers, prophets, ideologues, and lately also scientists and journalists — should guide the world. The intellectuals of Europe and the Middle East have generally tried to impose 'praxis' inspired by their pristine thinking on the everyday world of their societies. Praxis, as I use it, is a good scholarly term for the resulting mundane order of any intellectual recipes, not only the name of a particular school of Marxism and a cliché of revolutionary Marxism.

The second idea is that mankind is accountable to a pristine world. You shall live to please the gods, not only to please yourself and your fellowmen. This applies also to mankind's rulers. Taken to an extreme, this has at times been interpreted that a king rules "by the grace of God," not by the consent of all the governed or the consent of some elites among the go-[p 101]verned. The king thus can stay in power until God withdraws his grace.

The third idea is that new social arrangements that are introduced in the mundane world must be approved by the pristine world. The pristine order thus provides legitimization of new practices in the mundane world. Thus intellectuals assume the role of endorsing or disapproving worldly powers. Priests officiate at coronations of kings.

These three ideas all have some magical qualities. Whether true or not in a scientific sense, such ideas have had great consequences in human history, not the least in the development of European societies.

As tensions between the mundane and the pristine build, the pristine vision is not necessarily stable. Everyday living is not only streamlined by intellectuals; it becomes disturbed by the many unplanned consequences that seem to emerge from implementing virtually any intellectual plan. The tension between the pristine and the mundane may lead to great reformulations of the pristine.

The dynamics of the tension between the pristine and mundane is not easily understood and may be counter-intuitive. As tensions build, neither vision is necessarily stable. Praxis rarely works as promised by intellectuals. Everyday living is not only streamlined by intellectuals; it is also becomes disturbed by the many unplanned consequences that seems to emerge from implementing virtually any intellectual plan. My tentative hypothesis is that such failures lead most intellectuals to reformulations of the pristine; many of them think that failure has occurred because their vision has not been clear and pristine enough. Thus new intellectual sects are created, more extreme than the old ones. This is counterproductive, and leads in the end to a victory of the mundane over the pristine.

In China the mundane order generally had a high status in itself, and its relation to the pristine becomes pragmatic, rather [p 102]than submissive. The main magical rites became monopolized by the emperor, a fact which kept the rest of the administration relatively free of magic. Having incorporated some Buddhist ideas that dampened their obsession with hierarchy, the Neo-Confucian literati had considerable impact on the practical organization of Imperial China, its taxation, land distribution, technology, and examination system for recruitments to the ruling bureaucracy and military. This is worth a closer look.

The Sung Period

In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, and during a few of the following years when the European Union prepared for one of its expansions, there was much interest in my country of Sweden about European identity, and I was asked to lecture on European Civilization. I usually began such lectures by reading from a history book, omitting any reference to the time and place. As in a TV-quiz show, the audience was asked to identify the period and the country as soon as they could during my reading. Before they hit the right answer, they had usually guessed the Enlightenment in France, or a period in England or New England after industrialization, or Bismarck's welfare state in Imperial Germany, or even the Muslim Caliphates of Baghdad or Cordoba in the Middle Ages. Here is the text:

The emperors reestablished the examination system and created a new, complex bureaucracy. Its characteristic and purpose were that all true decision-making was reserved for the emperor himself and his closest adviser. The state also assumed welfare functions . . . the old people's homes, the clinics, the children's homes, the cemeteries. The policy adopted was a kind of secularization. . . . The new bureaucratic and mercantile upper class embraced rationalist ethics. . . . The process of intellectual rationalization reflects the whole development of society. . . . Agricultural rationalization proceeded apace, with increasingly intensive [p 103]rice-growing and the use of varieties that yielded two or three harvests a year. On this basis /the/ population now, for the first time, topped 100 million. The commercialization of the economy also continued: road and river transport systems were extended and large, multi-decker vessels propelled by blade wheels plied the waterways. Ocean-going ships now used the magnetic compass. . . . Both trade and the taxation system were based more and more on monetary thrift, and when metals no longer sufficed, or became cumbersome as means of exchange, there was a switch to the printing of bank-notes. Not only farming and commerce were modernized. It has been calculated that the use of iron and coal grew faster . . . than during the first two centuries of the English Industrial Revolution. Coal increasingly replaced charcoal. Iron was more and more often used for agricultural implements and weapons, in shipbuilding and bridge-building, in pagoda designs and even in images of deities. . . . The old towns, walled and divided into various specialized districts, were demolished. Open, functionally mixed towns took their place, some getting populations of a million or more (Holmberg 1982, 170), translated here.

As you have guessed, the above description is of China, specifically, during the Sung Dynasty of 960-1200. At that period China probably accounted for two thirds of the entire world's gross national product, GNP. Technology, government by bureaucracies, money-based economies, far-flung trade, et cetera are not specialties of Europe. This was more than obvious to Marco Polo, who visited to the Chinese metropolis of Quinsai, now known as Hangzhou, shortly after the period described. China was united while Europe was split into many parts. Cordoba was giving up its position as the greatest city and Venice, Marco Polo's home town, assumed its place. Both are celebrated in urban history. But Quinsai was the most advanced and prosperous city in the world.

[p 104]However, Imperial China, for all its glory, has never been a model of a many-splendored society. All its societal realms have always been subordinate to the emperor; China was (and apparently still is under Communist rule) a single-splendid society. The emperor was not only the political ruler and military commander; he was also the chief engineer and the supreme scientific authority, the sovereign of trade and industry, and the arbiter of artistic beauty and civic virtue. In time, he was also a god. More specifically, as we noted, he was the chief magician of the empire. The emperors had monopolized the most profound and pristine magic. Most of them delegated the running of the country to the literati, examined intellectuals certified by examinations to be civil servants. The latter did so with their down-to-earth rationality, which was largely devoid of magic.

All were to know their place and duties in Imperial China. Kong-Fuzi (known in the West as Confucius) said that "the sovereign carries out his tasks, and the minister his tasks." It is easy to continue the line and say that fathers should carry out their duties and sons do theirs. And that brothers do theirs, and sisters stay with theirs. Of course, such a single and total hierarchy is incompatible with a liberal society. A recent translation into English of the sayings of Confucius (1997) reveals a streak in his thoughts apparently suppressed by the emperors: insubordination to higher ranks is defensible and even expected in some severe and acute situations. On the surface this sounds similar to justifications of civil disobedience in modern Western thought¹⁹.

[p 105]

Non-Utopian Intellectuals

The varieties of intellectuals in China, Vietnam, Korea, and their counterparts in Japan, are different from the European, Indian, and Arab intellectuals. Max Weber did not hide his admiration for the Chinese literati. Their example reminds Western, Indian, and Arab intellectuals that in the long run non-utopian intellectuals may have more impact on a civilized social order than radical ones who try to realize their pure ideals of living without hesitation and compromise.

During the twentieth century, utopian intellectuals were common in Europe. They promoted various blueprints of social reality. The fascists wanted a society based on the strength of a unifying national creed and united institutions, all based on a presumed historic heritage and mission. The Nazis wanted a society in which all institutions were run by a master race. The communists sought a society based on the revolutionary power and presumed virtues of the working class, whose political party would rule all institutions. The capitalist intellectuals celebrated a society in which all realms were permeated by markets. Intellectuals in the grips of nationalism, fascism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism battled each other with words over such blueprints. Their masters promoted their different visions with the violence of wars, including two devastating world wars.

Non-utopian intellectuals of the twentieth century, a minority, looked upon all this with thoughtful disdain. They preferred to enjoy the present rather than hope for the blessings of future utopias. They tackled the problems of their societies piecemeal, as pragmatic conservatives, or not at all, as did the nihilists. But their survival and continued efforts as intellectuals undoubtedly benefited from the fact that the more liberal and more democratic side won World War I, and World War II, and the Cold War.

[p 106]Interestingly enough, the most successful pragmatists at the turn of the century seem to be Chinese. In 1979 Deng Xiaoping, newly empowered leader of the Communist party, gave a speech that promoted more pragmatism for China than any of its classical scholars had dared. He urged the regime to focus on modernization, and let facts — not Marxist ideology — guide its path. "It doesn't matter if it is a black cat or a white cat. As long as it can catch mice, it's a good cat." At that point China started on the road to becoming the industrial factory of the world and to emerge as one of its top markets. It would employ fewer devices than India and Japan had done to close its home market from imports. China's gross national product (GNP) began to grow by around ten percent a year, and at the time of this writing, more than a quarter of a century later, is still going strong.

But pragmatic and non-utopian intellectuals do not necessarily promote a many-splendored society of independent societal realms of science, art, economy, religion, polity, and morality, China has remained (at the time of this writing) a one-party polity and it is still very hieratical.

From Hegel to Marx and Back

Hegel

Brave scholars have tried to find out regularities that apply to the totality of all symbolic environments. A memorable and often retold effort to find regularities in total symbolic environments started with Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). He developed his philosophy around the dialectical method that came to bear his name. When his philosophizing was directed at pure thought, i.e. the pure relations of pristine symbols, he found that concepts in any language were not static and concluded. Human reasoning develops through its own inner dy-[p 107]namics. It moves, Hegel asserted, through opposites. No one notion or concept is capable of exhausting all the conditions of existence. Each concept therefore points beyond itself to an opposite concept.

However, human thought does not stop at this opposition, says Hegel. Thinking always strives to nullify the dissonance by combining the two opposite concepts into a third, higher concept, which fuses the two opposing ones. An either/or becomes a both/and. This new thought, in turn, is faced with its opposite; together with the opposite it forms a still higher entity — and so on. Thus a continuous process of development takes place in humans' use of symbols — always through the three steps: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Hegel believed that pure thought was a universal ‚spirit‛ that governed social reality and its history through the dialectical principle of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Dialectics shaped mankind's symbolic environment. It operated through the family, the civil society, and the state; the state was its most complete expression. The spirit of the times writes the cultural history. It had moved from Mediterranean antiquity and was located in Western Europe at Hegel's time and was on its way to north America, which he called "the land of tomorrow."

Generally speaking, philosophers and scholars of social reality and its history have not been convinced by Hegel. His own student, Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) rejected his idealism and took a more scientific view that "the spirit" was an illusion: only that which is experienced by the senses is real. Man is not created in the image of God, but God is created by man in the image of man. There is no spirit above man; it is mankind itself that pursues the dialectical sequence. Feuerbach dismissed religion but kept morality.

Max Stirner (1806-1856) took further steps away from Hegel. He scorned Feurerbach's notion of a "mankind" pursuing moral goals. He held that reality could only be the individual. His[p 108] philosophy is a consistent celebration of the individual self, totally independent of others, and without any obligation to others. If there is a dialectic, each person has his own.

Marx

Karl Marx (1818-1883) rejected the idealism of Hegel, the moralism of Feuerbach, and the individualism of Stirner. He moved to England in the 1840s, the promised land of liberalism. He used the liberal climate for his own purposes, and quickly came to view liberal ideology as spuma, as a smoke screen that obfuscated reality. At the time, England was not only the land of liberalism but also the land of the steam engine. Half of the population made a living in urban industries and trade, compared with 10 á 20 percent of the population on the European Continent.

For Karl Marx, the reality he saw in England confirmed the idea that the means of production created new social structures, new occupations, new power factors, yes, new ideologies. The big divide in industrial society lay between those who owned the machines and tools and those who worked with them. New classes were created by this gap: the bourgeoisie and the working class. The family itself mirrored this class society, said his collaborator Friedrich Engels: the husband was the propertied ruler, the wife the propertyless proletariat. The entire nature of society appeared to Marx to be determined by the prevailing technology and its masters and owners. He saw the bourgeoisie grow stronger and more independent; the working class grew poorer and more dependent. Industrial society set a new stage for a class struggle, an omnipresent Marxian dynamic in societal life.

Marx fitted the dialectical method to the analysis of shifts in technology, production and class relations. The class struggles between the advance of the bourgeoisie (thesis) and its demise by the victorious working class (antithesis), would culminate in [p 109]a proletarian revolution and communist society (synthesis). Morals, culture, religion — nay the entire world of ideas in Hegel's "spirit" — are in Marx's view not causes of but rather reflections of this materialistic dialectic.

By putting Hegel on his feet after having stood on his head, as the common metaphor goes, and using the dialectics on material conditions rather than on symbols and spiritual conditions, Marx achieves a testable theory that can be accepted or rejected by ordinary scholarship. The moving force of history was not any Hegelian spirit, but the technology of production. The latter, owned by the bourgeoisie, the capitalist class, would spread all over the world: "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere," Marx and Engels aptly predicted in the Communist Manifesto.

This anticipation of the globalization of the market economy proved correct in its broad outline, but the crucial dialectical part of the theory can be rejected on the grounds that its predictions have not turned out to be true. Contrary to Marx' prediction, the proletarian revolution did not come first to the United States, the most advanced capitalist country; it never arrived there (Lipset och Marks 2000). Neither have most highly developed industrial nations in Europe, nor in Australia or Japan, seen industrial workers carry out a successful revolution of the Marxist type. Rather, Marxism as a political force has triumphed in some industrially underdeveloped countries. Marxist revolutionaries in Tsarist Russia, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, North Korea, North Vietnam, Zimbabwe have, essentially, been supported by an agricultural lower class. Marx' dialectic had not envisioned this outcome, and my reading of Marx suggests that he might actually have forecasted that the latter revolutions would fail, had he known about them.

[p 110]Not all Marxist predictions have failed like the dialectic certainty that capitalism will be succeeded by communism. His thesis of the primacy of technology in social change has stood the test of time, with the qualification that it is far from the only force of history. Questions have been raised as to whether recent history supports or not some other Marxist contentions. His tenet of a universal subordination of ethnic, religious, and gender conflicts to the class conflict has weakening empirical support. This is also the case for the Marxist thesis of the inescapably worsening misery of the proletariat and its working conditions.

Nowadays, few outside the orthodox Marxist camp believe that there exists an all-encompassing master dialectic of the material conditions in a total society. Only limited areas of social reality seem open to dialectics. Furthermore, when a dialectic is located it is not always about one single trend but about several. And, most important, the discovered stages of thesis and antithesis may be there, but they do not necessarily end in a synthesis.

Intellectual Enemies of Many-Splendored Societies

Hegel and his student Marx, as we have seen, are poles apart in many respect. One more difference between the two should be noted. Each points to one realm in society as the leading one, but they differ in their choice.

In Hegel's world there are only two societal realms, the state (Der Staat) and the civil society (Die bürgerlische Gesellschaft). In the latter he included family life, trading, farming, and manufacturing (small-scale in his days), as well as artists, priests, and professors. Hegel's firm conviction was that the state held the decisive role in developing a region and a civilization. Hegel's body politic is an imperialist realm and runs the risk of developing cancerous politics. A many-splendored society in which the body politic is just one societal realm, equal in im-[p 111]portance to several others, was unthinkable to him. No wonder his name often turns up when we search the intellectual roots of Nazism and other recent totalitarian ideologies. A many-splendored society would succumb to state hegemony if and when Hegel's philosophy dominates in its central zone.

Marxian theory assumes extraordinary power in the economic realm of a society. In Marx' world there are only two realms: the economic "base" and its "superstructure." The main trends in politics, art, science, religion, and morality are shaped by the economy; it is what we call an imperialist realm. Everything, particularly in a market economy, becomes a commodity and gets a price: friendship, beauty, knowledge, virtue, and salvation. Science becomes applied and is used mostly for economic calculation. Art becomes window-dressing of the rich. Religion is seen as an opiate to keep the poor contented. It is striking that in Marxian thinking the body politic is also determined by its economic base. A government of a country is thus seen as an executive arm of the richest class. Therefore, a many-splendored society in which different realms, such as science, art, religion or morality, have separate and independent developments is ruled out in Marxian analysis. A many-splendored society succumbs to economic hegemony if and when Marx's philosophy dominates in its central zone.

Let us emphasize that one should not accept a claim that a realm has hegemony in advance of proof. To be sure, money

rules supreme in business firms, particularly in a capitalist economy. Nor is there any argument about the fact that a church, a museum, a university, a government agency also has incomes and expenditures. However, this fact does not determine the direction of their efforts as it does in business where you above all want to make money. In capitalist business you also make more money with the money you have, sometimes to the exclusion of anything else.

[p 112]In the other societal realms than the economy, wealth is not set as the goal of your efforts; it is only one among the several resources that enable you to reach the goal. Marxism fails to see that the moneyed class is not the lord of every modern realm. Hegelianism fails to see that the power of the state is not the determinant of all history. It is easier to fathom the parallel conclusion about scientific knowledge; it is used in every realm to facilitate its efforts. But this does not make scientists lords of the entire society.

Measuring Mentalities

Although philosophers and scholars have not been convinced by Hegel, they have sometimes been inspired by him. The Russian-American sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin (1937-41) was the first to succeed in measuring and quantifying changes in values as they have occurred in history. He classified history on a scale that ranged from ‚sensate‛ concerns to ‚ideational‛ concerns. In sensate cultures most symbols are what we call Meadian and clearly and closely associated with the evidence of the senses, especially evidence about practical artifacts and tools used and the pleasure of the senses. Usually they refer to activities of needs and lusts as we discussed on page 38. In ideational symbolic environments they are more divorced from sensual data; symbols are more often what we call Saussurian and commonly refer to other symbols, often highly charged pristine ideals. By recording the relative prevalence of sensate and ideational symbols one can describe a prevailing mentality.

The work of Sorokin shows how the Western world has fluctuated between sensate and ideational mentality. Beginning with an ideational symbolic environment of ideas in 600 B.C. it oscillated to a sensate symbolic [p 113]environment when the Roman Empire was at is peak, from there to a new ideational symbolic environment in the late Middle Ages, then to a new sensate symbolic environment in our time. In the 1930s, Sorokin launched the prediction that the pattern would repeat itself with time and that the civilization of the West would next move toward a new ideational symbolic environment, a "New Age."

An essential aspect of Sorokin’s theory is that the swings between ideational and sensate mentalities have "immanent causes," i.e. values swing without external influences due to factors that are built into the use of the very expressions for the values. In a swing toward Sorokin's ideational culture, the symbol-system loses touch with everyday realities; the system of values becomes too remote from material and biological conditions to be effective. We then need to formulate more mundane priorities, and give them a more sensate orientation; a sensate mode is given a new opportunity to take over with consistent steps back to an increasingly coherent materialism. However, in the swing toward sensateness, the symbol system loses touch with spiritual reality and the ideational mode gets a chance to return. The curve swings back to ideational mentality, and so on. This is an idea with roots in the dialectics of Hegelianism. We will shortly formalize such a process in Proposition 4:2 on the Zeitgeist.

Sorokin can be particularly honored for his discovery and extensive documentation that the mentalities of different societal realms swing in concert. For example, a sensate mentality in the arts runs parallel with a sensate mentality in government, science and philosophy.

[TECH] There may, however, also be external forces behind the swings. In a comely but imperfect coincidence with Sorokin's main cycle, Marshall McLuhan (1962) also finds turning points in cultural development at about the third or fourth century before Christ, in the mid-fifteenth century, and in the late twentieth century. See Figure 4.1. McLuhan's criterion for [p 114]change is the technological vehicle by means of which the important symbols travel. His stages are (1) oral prior to Plato, (2) written until the end of the Middle Ages, (3) printed until the mid-twentieth century, and (4) pictorial, particularly moving pictures in our days. The medium, he argues, is an integral part of the message: the values of oral culture are those of wisdom, the values of written culture are those of knowledge and information. The use of the "hot" medium of printed text is manly, and drives forward instrumental tasks, while the values of pictorial culture are womanly, using the intimate or "cool" medium of television to express internal states, evoke emotions, and perhaps to maintain harmony and well-being.

Figure 4.1. Communication Technologies and Value Climates in the Expanding Symbolic Environment [TECH]

Several researchers after McLuhan have stressed the autonomy of media technology more than he did. They have added the burning of messages into silicon chips as an additional stage to his oral-written-pictorial sequence of communication [p 115]technologies, e.g. Friedrich Kittler (1997). A research race has started to delineate the cultural values that will be promoted by the new silicon networks. At the time of this writing (2008) the research results still appear inconclusive; but many lay writers complain about a lack of normal politeness that easily slips into communications by the Internet and phone messaging.

Three Dialectical Priorities

To rescue some kind of dialectic in the study of social reality, we may return to the initial lead of Hegel, and focus on oscillations in total symbolic environments in history, however limited their role may be.

This is our terminology: 'Values' are generalized, relatively enduring and consistent priorities for how we want to live. Values belong in the 'vocabulary of motives‛, not in the realm of instincts and biological needs. Values reveal mankind’s aspirations. Needs reveal any creature’s wants. Both values and needs answer the question why we act as we do. Answers to such a question are formulated as lifestyles. 'Lifestyles' are bundles of practices centered on some need and/or value. What we persistently enjoy doing is our lifestyle.

In a book on religion, the pragmatist philosopher Charles Morris showed us that at least three dimensions are needed to classify the great religions of the world, a Promethean, a Dionysian, and a Buddhist one (Morris 1942). They also appear in different guises in the social science literature dealing with changes in the climate of values. From the latter, we shall choose three central themes: modernity, instrumentality, and humanism. (See Figure 4.2). They each pose questions that can be asked about any parts of symbolic environments.

Is it old being or new becoming for those involved?

Is it fixed in fidelity or pragmatically flexible?

[p 116]Does it concern people's inner world or their outer world?

We shall ask these questions with the goal of understanding more of the general dialectics of symbolic environments. We can ask them when we read material about a period or a place, and also when we design questionnaires for interview studies.

Modernity: Choosing The Old or The New

In ancient Greek philosophy you find a sophisticated discussion of permanence and change. It began in the 6th and 5th centuries BC, that is long before Socrates, in what is now western Turkey. There is a permanent or lasting substance, water, behind all changes, said Thales of Miletus. No, said Heraclitus of Ephesus a century later, there is no permanence, rather "everything is flowing" (panta rhei). He is credited with the famous statement ‚You could not step into the same river twice.‛ Plato cites these words (in the dialogue Cratylus) to disagree; forms can be unchanging and permanent, while the mundane world certainly could be varied and shifting.

John Stuart Mill argued forcefully that every individual is free to choose change over permanence. In On Liberty he writes:

The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement. The spirit of improvement is not always a spirit of liberty, for it may aim at forcing improvements on an unwilling people; and the spirit of liberty, in so far as it resists such attempts, may ally itself locally and temporarily with the opponents of improvement; but the only unfailing and permanent source of improvement is liberty, since by it there are as many possible independent centres of improvement as there are[p 117] individuals. The progressive principle, however, in either shape, whether as the love of liberty or of improvement, is antagonistic to the sway of Custom, involving at least emancipation from that yoke; and the contest between the two constitutes the chief interest of the history of mankind (Mill 1869, ch 3, 17). Italics supplied.

The "New" in contemporary times that we here must focus on is the ideas of modernity. The key words in this dialectic is ‘being’ usually seen as permanence or tradition, and ‘becoming’, usually seen as change or modernity.

In the history of ideas, modernity originally took shape in catchwords of the Enlightenment such as "belief in reason" and "technology," which became battering rams against the bulwarks of tradition. In the 1900s new catchwords carried the idea of modernity forward. Nietzsche’s contribution was creative self-realization, the idea of a stellar superman who shapes himself and his world without the constraints of tradition. Josef Schumpeter’s contribution was an analysis of the key role of the entrepreneur as a creator of the new and abolitionist of the old in the economy.

Modernity, however, is not just a question of economics; it also has a place in politics. It was, for example, present in the attitudes of the early labor movements, which named their publications "The Progressive," "Avanti," "Vorwärts," and "New Times." Burgeoning modernity also reshaped Western art, opening for new art forms and new ideas about what is good and bad art. Sigmund Freud ushered modernity into our inner lives through his analyses of drives, which allowed man in the early 1900s to recognize his biological self and reject the traditional idea that suffering was good for one’s character.

Striving toward novelty is and has always been a movement without a definite end. Thus, to be modern means different things at different points in time. According to Alfred North Whitehead (1925), the core innovation of his times was "the [p 118]invention of the method of invention," the ultimate theme of modernity.

Today’s popular regional and nationalistic values that stress the importance of an individual’s roots and ethnic origin are not modernistic but rather express a longing for tradition or stability. Social security may have been a modern value for the first generation in the welfare states, whereas security is a traditional value in the established welfare states.

Vilfredo Pareto formulated a common thread of modernity. He defined the forces of traditionalism as a consolidation of existing arrangements (‘residue I‛) and the forces of modernity as an openness for new combinations (which he called ‘residue II‛). To be modern is to be open for new combinations, "to become" rather than just "to be" (Pareto 1916, para 2057)²⁰.

In Pareto's discussion of this distinction applied in the political sphere he referred to Machiavelli’s well-known political types, the "lion" and the "fox." The first forcefully defends the social order and has implicit faith in his beliefs. The second advances the new with craftiness and cunning and creates new orders. When Pareto discussed economics these distinctions reappeared in the differences between a "rentier," who invests in order to retain his capital and its yields and the "speculator," who tries to make shrewd investments in order to augment his capital.

[p 119]

Instrumentality: Firm Principles or Accepting Compromises

The key words here are "fidelity" and "pragmatism." Max Weber, the great German social scientist, sought the distinctive character of the Western world, compared with other civilizations. Our Western symbolic environment has no monopoly on openness for new impulses and combinations. These were present not only in ancient Athens and Rome but also in the Indian and Chinese civilizations. Weber found that the distinction lies in our singular form of rational openness.

Karl Marx had earlier made the observation that everything fixed is volatilized under capitalism: "all that is solid melts into air.‛ Weber’s observations were more specific. He distinguished between acts faithful to chosen goals (wertrational), that is, those based on firm priorities, and pragmatic (zweckrational) acts, that is, those based on instrumentality (Weber 1922, 12-13). Modern Western symbolic environments are more instrumental than other great civilizations in which fixed priorities have prevailed to a greater extent, a fact we today see evidence of in the conflicts between Islamic nations and the modern West.

In a social reality that adheres to fixed priorities these are dramatized and norms of conduct are rooted in unconditional moral tenets and ethical principles. It orders: ‚Always follow the commandments! If not, there is retribution coming and you will get what you deserve." Such is the rule of fidelity. It is called "deontological ethics" by some philosophers. In ordinary conversations we call it idealism if we like its expressions and dogmatism if we don’t. 'Fidelity' has to do with priorities that you are not willing to compromise. These usually include loyalty to one’s own family, compassion for the ill, the preservation of our planet for future generations, and any other matters of conscience.

In an instrumental symbolic environment one compromises about one’s priorities and norms of conduct are guided by the [p 120]pursuit of happiness and an ethics of responsibility. It says: ‚Do what you want, but take responsibility for the consequences, and aim at a good outcome!‛ Such is the rule of pragmatism. 'Instrumentality' includes priorities that you could experiment and compromise with in order to achieve an optimal result. It has an "ethic of responsibility" to talk in Max Weber’s terms, or "consequentialist ethics" to talk in the words of some philosophers. But in ordinary conversations it is called pragmatism if we like this priority and opportunism if we don’t. Such priorities usually have to do with practical negotiations, calculations, and technical solutions, very common in the realms of modern business and politics. I usually favor such priorities and will signal this by calling their use pragmatism rather than opportunism.

In the next chapter we will argue that rational choice requires more effort than an emotive choice which is more automatic among humans. Adhering to fidelity is often an emotive and almost automatic choice²¹. To choose pragmatism, by contrast, requires a cognitive effort of weighting alternatives. It is no coincidence that the pragmatic culture of the West, as Weber argued, is exceptional in the civilizations of the world.

Humanism: Putting Things or People First

The key words here are "materialism" and "humanism."

When we study changes of basic priorities in a much shorter perspective than Sorokin did, the most useful approach is to separate an interest in material and carnal phenomena from the glimmer of non-material priorities that manifests itself in an interest in human beings and their symbol-filled world. In materialistic symbolic environments the symbols refer to carnal or material substances. In a humanistic symbolic environment the [p 121]symbols refer to human beings and their symbol-based activities.

Labels like materialism and humanism, which we have chosen, give rise to many associations, some of them misleading. When value research based on interview surveys appeared in academic social science (Ingelhart 1971) materialism with its concerns of physical survival, price stability, security and order was opposed to what was called "post-materialism" which developed concerns for freedom for the common man as well as modern values of gender equality, environmentalism, et cetera. Many other designations have been used. One has spoken of "the values of production" (materialistic ones), such as order, punctuality, ambition, efficiency, and other values that facilitate economic growth. These differ from the "values of reproduction" (humanistic ones), such as knowing oneself, empathy, sensitivity, and involvement in people, which facilitate personal growth and a genuine understanding of others. Whatever the terminology, the point is to distinguish between priorities with a more material-bodily focus on the one hand and a focus on the human mind and its empathy on the other.

In the multiphase humanistic spectrum we can single out a difference between "inner-worldly people" and "outer-worldly people." Inner-worldly people are governed by cues from within themselves; outer-worldly people are governed by external cues. To take an example from daily life: outer-directed people diet and exercise primarily in order to look better in their own eyes and in the eyes of others, while the inner-directed people diet and exercise in order to feel good. The former is governed by outer signals, the latter by inner signals. This dimension I take as a central one in a modern value scale of humanism, but, of course, not in all humanism in the full history of ideas.

The three basic priorities shape the symbolic environment into the three-dimensional value space, seen in Figure 4.2.

[p 122][BIO, NAT] The value space does not float on a calm sea or hover in thin air. It is a crest that rests on a foundation of the bodily and ecological conditions of mankind. We have in Figure 4.2 captured only the main thrusts and their oscillations in mankind's symbolic environments in recorded history. Underlying priorities of this kind, not to be forgotten, are man's old conditions of freezing, starvation, rape, and violent struggles for territory and possessions and other aspects of "activities of needs and lusts."

Figure 4.2. The Three-dimensional Space of a Modern Symbolic Environment.

[p 123]

Valuescoping

It is possible to use questionnaires in interview surveys to measure values. You make a selection of situations involving everyday priorities with questions such as "What do you think is most important for children to learn?" A rule of thumb is that at least three situations or conversations of choice are needed to measure priorities with any accuracy worth the name. Adding situations does not usually change the total picture but, of course, provides greater precision. I usually recommend asking about choices between different types of TV programs, choices between people as weekend company, and what one would choose if a good fairy gave the respondents three wishes.

The answers are turned into scores on the three scales of the value space. The researcher then computes averages of the three scales to show the coordinates in the value space for different groups. These averages are gravity points for the groups studied. The resulting graphs show distances: the closer the gravity points for any population groups, the more similar they are in their values, and the further away they are in distance the more different their values.

An illustration of the positions in the value space of different generations is given in Figure 4.3. It is based on 1500 interviews among well-to-do (top 20 percent) dwellers in the biggest six cities in China.

We see a drastic difference between old and young in this diagram. The old hold values of tradition and fidelity to principles. The young hold values of modernity and pragmatism. Furthermore, the older generation is more concerned with material conditions while the younger has more post-material values. Fidelity to the traditional Confucian values has eroded. The two chock therapies of Maoism to modernize China, first in one Great Leap (1958-68), and then in a Cultural Revolution (1968-78), did have effects in a modernized value climate. (One should not underestimate the force that communism can exer-[p 124]cise in an initial modernizing of an agrarian society.) But the cruelty of the processes eroded the belief in socialism. Deng Xiaoping's advice to the Chinese people using the color of cats as an illustration (see page 109 ) was to try anything that works in making money but stay out of politics. It resulted in a push for pragmatic values and rampant commercialism. The crushed uprising by students at

Tiananmen Square in 1989 had more impact abroad than in China, where it is largely unknown due to censorship. But in the time-line it coincides with the emergence of a Chinese generation with post-material values of humanism, freedom of speech, equality between the sexes, and care of the environment.

Figure 4.3. Values Held by The Rich in Six Big Cities of China in 2006

Source: (Lindskog 2007, 42). The method used was developed by Hans L Zetterberg for ValueScope AB.

[p 125]In the dialectic of priorities, a topic to which we now will turn, one can expect that China will for a while pursue this chosen path, but that in due course, it will again empathize a return to "proper" values.

The Dialectics of Priorities

If no historic events occur to disturb their course, the changes that basic priorities undergo have so-called immanent causes. Without external influences they swing back and forth because of factors that are built into the use of their expressions in language and other symbols. In swift steps toward a consistent humanism, the system of symbols they use becomes more Saussurian and too remote from material and biological conditions to be effective; too many contacts with everyday realities are lost. We then need to formulate more Meadian everyday priorities, and give them a more materialistic orientation. Swift steps back to an increasingly coherent materialism leads, in turn, to a loss of contact with human and spiritual realities. The curve swings back to humanism, and so forth.

It is an open question whether the contrast between uniformity and individuality belongs in the list of dialectical priorities. Research is still inconclusive as to whether or not the swings between the two have immanent causes located in language, as is apparently the case of the swings being-becoming, faithfulness-instrumentality, and materialism-humanism.

The repeated swings of the Zeitgeist between extremes do not mean that dialectic priorities at the end of some day revert to any position we can call "normal.‛ Normality is a movable feast. With several priorities swinging independently of one another a stable balancing point between the extremes is rare, and if one does appear it may be short-lived. An individual’s personal priorities may mature and attain balance with age, but the symbolic environment as a whole does not ever seem to attain mature tranquility.

[p 126]The typical pattern of priority shifts is to lurch first and learn later, says Daniel Yankelovich (1997). As if all of mankind were adolescents taking exaggerated positions with abrupt switches between them! Like Yankelovich we must join the many who disagree with Hegel. Instead we pursue the hypothesis in Proposition 4:2:

Proposition 4:2 The Zeitgeist: In the history of symbolic environments in societies that have many activities beyond those of needs and lusts, there is a tendency to develop a dialectic with a thesis, for example, of being, or fidelity, or materialism, and then a corresponding antithesis, for example, of becoming, or pragmatism, or humanism, but rarely a synthesis; apparently the first thesis returns and the process starts all over.

Such is the nature of the Zeitgeist in a symbolic environment; it acts like oscillating gas molecules in a closed glass retort that bounce off a wall only to hit the opposite wall. This particular tendency is unique in social science in the sense that it is a regularity of total symbolic environments and not dependent on any particular classification of the components of the symbolic environment. Other tendencies discovered by social scientists are usually formulated in terms of subdivisions and narrower categories.

An interesting consequence of the Zeitgeist is that heating an argument with extreme zeal, for example, on the blessings of materialism, hastens its bounce to the opposite argument, and thus to its own defeat. In modern marketing of goods and services one is increasingly guided by measurements of the trends in consumer values (Zetterberg 1998), and this may also speed up the changes in the Zeitgeist. The swings in the three dimensions we have identified are an ever-present but often latent factor in our dealings in markets, in politics, and with religion, art, culture, and morality.

[p 127]

Big and Lukewarm Centers vs Small and Convinced Extremes

The dialectic priorities show normal distributions in the population, or, at least they show many people in the middle and fewer at the extremes. They also show the strongest emotive engagement at the extremes and the weakest in the middle. This they share with many scalable attributes in social science. Louis Guttman (1954) discovered this as a mathematical regularity.

Figure 4.4. Distribution of People with Positive and Negative Views and the Emotive Intensity with which these View is Held.

The Irish poet William Butler Yeats bemoaned the same. In his day and in his country conflicts got out of hand all too easily.

Things fall apart;
the centre cannot hold;
— — —
The best lack all conviction,
while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Or in the language of social science:

[p 128]

Proposition 4:3. The Yeats-Guttman Doctrine: Dialectic priorities approximate a bell-shaped distribution and their emotive intensity approximates a U-distribution.

At one extreme there is an opinion or value held with "full of passionate intensity," to quote Yeats; another opinion or value is located in the middle and held by the many people who do good but "lack all conviction", a third opinion or value at the other extreme is also "full of passionate intensity," and, frantically, the extremes battle each other.

In addition to the immanent causes of priority shifts there are almost always unique historic happenings and experiences that contribute to changes ²².

An Illustration: From Virgil to Luther

Let us briefly look at a change in dialectic priorities that was initiated in Imperial Rome between the reigns of Augustus (21 BC–4 AD) and Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD). In these two centuries the virtues of the Roman Republic were still remembered, but the memory of them gradually faded.

During this period Rome had grown into a city of one million inhabitants, many of whom had emigrated from agricultural regions. In the course of a couple of generations they had lost touch with the ways of their forefathers, who had secured their livelihood through farming and raising domestic animals. Many of the new city dwellers were unable to find work in city government, public construction projects, crafts, or commerce. In response to the swelling throngs of restless plebs official steps were taken to provide bread to still their hunger, and to provide spectacles to assuage their unease — the ancients' version of the welfare state and TV networks. Termini, i.e. leisure [p 129]areas and amusement parks with public baths, were constructed. Augustus began paying physicians from government coffers and he introduced the annona, which developed into a system of coupons that could be exchanged for bread provided by over 250 state bakeries. At times pork and olive oil were also sold at subsidized prices. In other words, conditions made it possible for an urban lower class to scrape by and enjoy city life without having to work very hard.

One of the developments among the masses in this societal structure that had provided for ‚the activities of needs and lusts‛ was a version of inwardly-oriented values, putting inner concerns ahead of outer ones.

There are two ancient descriptions of the eruption of the Vulcan Etna, one written by the Greek poet Pindar and the other by Virgil. Pindar writes in a translation by Edith Hamilton (1973, 168):

In the darkness of the night the red flame whirls rocks with a roar far down to the sea. And high aloft are sent fearful fountains of fire.

And Virgil wrote:

Skywards are sent balls of flame that lick the stars and ever and again rocks are spewed forth, the torn entrails of the mountains, and molten crags are hurled groaning to heaven.

Pindar used his senses and recorded what he had seen and heard. Virgil, at a later eruption of the same volcano, used his imagination and recorded his subjective experience.

Roman culture had several layers, including a Dionysian one. But the most visible layer had become extroverted and hardnosed, concerned with military and economic growth, road building, water and sewage systems, law and order, as well as the family home as a fundament and a castle, and a [p 130]concern over visible virtues in public places. Pindar's way of describing reality was most akin to this mentality of outer-worldliness. His rendering of the eruption was generated by external cues, a true craftsman's account. The Roman masses, however, followed Virgil, who became popular and truly beloved. Once the people were assured of their daily bread, ever-larger numbers among them could devote themselves to experience rather than achievement. Inner signals became more important than outer signals. The inner-worldly orientation was later also supported by the spreading Christian religion. The mandate for outer-worldly, pragmatic achievements diminished. It moved from Rome to the provinces, and there and then its vitality evaporated.

The shift in mentality that had begun at this time did not end with the decline and fall of Rome. Many in the generations that had become accustomed to free bread and organized leisure and other ‚activities of needs and lusts‛ did not know how to gain a living from the land and had no longer relatives in rural areas who could shelter them. Starvation decimated the population. One would suppose that the journey to the inner realms of human experience that Virgil had started would thereby have come to an abrupt end and be succeeded by a pragmatic reality orientation. Yet confrontation with grim economic reality did not lead to a return of the old values, at least not for a long time.

The pragmatic mentality and the fondness for novelties in technology and entertainment of the Roman times reverted in early medieval times to dogmatism. The greatest work of medieval scholarship in Europe did not celebrate new discoveries but organized old Christian thoughts and integrated them with old Aristotelian thoughts under the title Summa in the 1260s. The many technological innovations made were poorly exploited, except in agriculture where rotation of crops and multiple harvests in the new millennium became possible due to a [p 131]warmer climate. This facilitated a return to growing populations and living standards. But the cultural mentality of tradition and inner-worldliness remained. The journeys into the world of inner experience found ever broader roads in the Middle Ages. Leadership passed from outer-directed persons, such as generals and merchants, to inner-directed types. For example, outside a few places such as Genoa, Florence, Milan, and Venice, the city fathers would rather organize processions with colored icons and emblems than far-reaching trade routes. The bishops rose in importance while worldly rulers in western Europe marched to Rome, Avian, or Canossa to kiss the feet of the Pope.

Inner pursuits were given free rein in Gnosticism, mysticism, and eschatology. God's poor little Saint Francis talked to the flowers and the birds and organized the hippie movement of his time into a monastic order. And at journey's end we find Dante who, with Virgil as his guide, leads us into the fantastic landscape of the realms inhabited by the souls of the damned and the saved.

There is an important lesson in the above: one cannot assume that the economy rules over cultural mentality. The latter tends to run its dialectic course and change for immanent reasons. Once a new mentality is there, changing economic fortunes — such as agricultural advances in the Middle Age — cannot immediately stop it. The economy may, however, greatly facilitate a dialectic mentality shift that is already on its way.

The Renaissance was ushered in when an outward orientation and an instrumental outlook again become a dominant mentality. Once again, the emphasis was on thinking new and pragmatic thoughts, achieving something visible, and gaining conspicuous recognition and conspicuous rewards.

The ideal was to accomplish something beyond tradition and dogma. An important inspiration came from a vision of returning to the antique world. Although he himself preferred the Middle[p 132] Ages, the historian Jacob Burckhardt (1860/1990) in Basel related in such contagious words about the lively world of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy that his vision is still read and reread to capture the new mentality.

There are few smiles on the faces in medieval paintings. Mona Lisa, painted sometime between 1503 and 1505 in Florence by Leonardo da Vinci, has a smile that signals something of her inner world and its enigmatic concerns.

Parallel to the Renaissance of the arts, Luther, Calvin and Zwingli worked in the religious realm, and their Reformation had notable consequences for the general value climate in Europe. By questioning that any salvation could be reached by any external acts and rituals they shifted focus to man's inner world and its convictions (Taylor 1989, chps 13-14). On a previously unknown scale Europe became populated by inner-worldly persons who felt that they had a special consciousness within themselves, an inner room of an importance that could rival the outside world.

We recall that the wealth that accrues from the northern trade in Europe became first concentrated in the Hanseatic cities, then in Antwerp, and later in London. Here, the material base for European expansion in the world was built up, and the capital that would finance the industrialization and urbanization of Europe accumulated. Industrialization later spread from west to east — in the direction opposite to that of the trade of old. With it came a new wave of materialistic and outer-worldly values, which lead many to the probably mistaken belief that an inner-directed value climate is incompatible with capitalism.

Eight Mentalities

The three dialectic priorities which we have discussed combine freely into different clusters. They help us classify eight different symbolic environments, or, "mentalities" or "climates [p 133]of values," as some people say. Let us look at their shape in modern Western societies.

The 'challenging symbolic environment' of becoming, pragmatism, and materialism. Here we find enjoyment in transactions and the wheeler-dealer, unafraid of the complexities of life. Pragmatism means that liaisons to products, people, and associations may be short-lived. When someone or something no longer is fashionable or useful, or, no longer generates pleasure or profit, interest changes quickly to something different. The pragmatism of this and the following mentality is conducive to entrepreneurship.

The 'mingling symbolic environment' of becoming, pragmatism, and humanism. There is a dislike here of formal rules, but an affinity for flexible informal get-togethers and an openness to new contacts, in particular international and ethnic ones that enrich social life. Here we also often find much knowledge about what is "in" in respect to activities and fashion, but without pronounced materialist ambitions.

The 'advocacy symbolic environment' of becoming, faithfulness, and materialism. Here we find a desire for a comfortable modern life, but instead of old- fashioned status symbols we meet visible convictions — in our days, for example about poverty at home and abroad, about a sustainable use of resources — and desires to change society in accordance with these convictions.

The 'soul-searching symbolic environment' with becoming, faithfulness, and humanism. Here we find a hunt for new intuitive truths and for meaning in life as well as the cultivation of unrelenting sympathy for fellow humans and animals.

The above four symbolic environments are modern, not traditional. The popular view that becoming is materialistic is a half-truth. Our three-dimensional space of dialectic priorities provides for humanistic alternatives to modernity.

[p 134]There exists also a well-known flight from modernity to tradition. If this flight leads to primordial ideas of Blut und Boden and to violence as a means of communication, we are faced with a fascist reaction. But there are other forms of tradition. Our distinctions provide four different traditional symbolic environments.

The 'upright symbolic environment' with tradition, faithfulness, and materialism. Here we find faith in order, honor, home, material assets, and tough law enforcement.

The 'homely symbolic environment' with tradition, faithfulness, and humanism. Here lies a deep sympathy for communion with relatives and close friends and a holiday spirit of togetherness.

The 'matter-of-fact symbolic environment' with tradition, pragmatism, and materialism. Here practical and well-established technical solutions and gadgets dominate living, together with an enjoyment of popular entertainments of yesterday.

The 'conventional symbolic environment' of tradition, pragmatism, and humanism. Here we find flexible social and civic skills and bonds to childhood friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

The eight mentalities shift in strength over time and space but we have found them all represented in Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Latin, Finish-Ugric, Japanese, and Chinese language areas. To know them is useful for all who want to communicate beyond their familiar turfs, be they educators, journalists, politicians, artists, preachers, or salesmen.

Three strings, being-becoming, fidelity-instrumentality, and materialism-humanism, oscillate through the symbolic environment causing the above eight combinations — ever shifting in detailed contents, strength, duration, and expression. They[p 135]provide a first orientation about the Zeitgeist, the social and cultural climates of the times and the space in which man lives.

These three dialectic vibrations appear with a special status in social science. They seem to emerge in any symbolic environment, independent of its contexts of groups, networks, classes, and other social structures. When we later in Volume 3 of The Many-Splendored Society: Fueled by Symbols will look at verbal justifications we will find a large number of other changing values. They differ from our three dialectic priorities in being reflections of different or changing social structures.

[p 136]

5. Linguistic Forms and Usages

Inspiration from Linguistics

Grammarians — the traditional scholars of communication by language — have long classified the parts of sentences: substantives, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, indicatives, interrogatives, imperatives, exclamations, et cetera. Two fields of scholarship, linguistics and the philosophy of language had several breakthroughs in the middle decades of the 20th century that lifted the study of language far beyond the level of traditional lexicons and grammars. Let us start our search for scholarly categories for the study of social reality here.

To describe social reality as scientists we preferably need categories that are universal and comprehensive. How can we get them when our subjects of study normally are restricted to symbols that are temporary and partial? What is the difference between ordinary language in a society and the language used by scientists, scholars, and critics in the study of that society? Anthropologists have contributed to our understanding of this by developing a distinction originally proposed by the linguist Kenneth L. Pike (1954) between emic and etic language. The state of the art was illustrated in 1988 by a four-hour debate before an audience of 600 members of the American Anthropological Association, later published in a book (Headland, Pike och Harris 1990).

The Emic and the Etic

Emic sentences are those that tell how the world is seen by a particular people who live in it. These sentences consist of ver-[p 137]balized beliefs, values, standards, descriptions of techniques, et cetera. They include also the spuma, magic, and defense bilge of this people. Studies based solely on participation use only emic sentences and result in emic propositions and conclusions.

Etic sentences, by contrast, contain additional information besides emic communications. They are sentences of an observer or analyst rather than that of a mere participant. They form the language of science, scholarship, and cultural criticism rather that of mere reporting by a participant.

Etic observation may contradict emic truths. The Aztec religion in pre-Columbian Mexico was a solar religion. The sun god was the source of life. Belief in him incited the Aztecs (or Mexicas as many modern scholars say) to dominate their region as the sun dominated the sky. This sun god required a daily sacrifice of a human being from the Aztecs if he was to return with light and warmth each day. In other words, loud voices threatened an ecological disaster unless they had their ways, a familiar magic of all times, including our own.

The invading Spaniards with roots in medieval Catholicism might well have known of the sacrificial rites of Abraham and Jesus and others. But Aztec sacrifices were alien. Moreover, the navigators and officers from the Spanish ships that had crossed the Atlantic with the Spanish invaders of the Aztec region were accustomed to think differently about the movements of the celestial bodies. Their etic conclusion was that the Aztecs were wrong; the sun would rise without a human sacrifice. Their grounded disbelief in Aztec magic gave them a sense of superiority, a common sentiment when Europeans ventured to new worlds in the era of colonialism.

Marvin Harris requires that the analyst also be an observer, not only a participant.

An emic sentence can be proven wrong if it can be shown that it contradicts the participants’ sense that entities and [p 138]events are similar or different, real, meaningful, significant, or appropriate. Etic statements cannot be proven wrong if they do not conform to the participants’ sense of what is significant, real, meaningful, or appropriate. They can only be proven wrong by the failure of empirical evidence gathered by observers to support the statement in question (Harris 1999, 31-32).

Not everyone agrees with Harris. Presentation of museum exhibits divorced from their emic context has been cited as a blatant practice revealing Western bias, not its science. There are four possible relations between emic and etic in scholarship.

A first position refers to the scientific method as used in the natural sciences and some social science such as economics. The researcher may use emic language only if it is confirmed by observation and is consistent with propositions that can be confirmed by other researchers using the scientific method. This is also the position of Harris.

A second position is an acceptance of those etic sentences in analyses that are consistent with the researcher’s intellectual tradition of choice. This pre-chosen tradition may be Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, Thomism, or some other. A Marxist may, for example, reject certain emic reports from the field as ‘false consciousness’ while accepting others as relevant information about class relations.

A third position refers to poststructuralist philosophy. It dismisses the need for any etic considerations in analyses. It stays entirely with emic expressions. Many modern ethnographic museums take this view, thus attempting to present exhibits without what they see as the bias of Western interpretations.

A fourth position explores the possibility that the emic language actually contains a deep structure that is the appropriate etic language for the proper study of mankind.

[p 139]All these positions have some merits and drawbacks in different stages in the development of knowledge in social science. The first position makes the established scientific method an ultimate arbiter when emic and etic statements are in conflict. The second one incorporates parts of other people's thinking in our own systems of thought, including our ideologies. The third makes us familiar with other people's thinking but it does not integrate it with our own thinking. The fourth one is a line of reasoning that is least self-evident, and it is the one we will explore as a promising strategy in the social sciences.

The young Lévi-Strauss was a proponent of the fourth research strategy. He often said that social reality is like language. With enthusiasm he tackled primitive thought — with all its emic sentences — to unearth the structure of societies. He was critical of the common idea that European (or Western) history is a model for Third World societies. Generalized building blocks and themes for societies could be discovered in any primitive society, and he pursued the latter restlessly. He was criticized for looking for the foundations and scaffoldings of social reality in something behind its everyday language. Anthony Giddens (1987, 195) even declared that "structuralism, and post-structuralism also, are dead traditions of thought." Later in life, Lévi-Strauss tuned down the insistence that the key to social reality was language or something like language, but he never really abandoned this view. However, in editing his oeuvre for an honorable collection to be published after his death, he omitted most of his many investigations of myths from non-literate societies.

Giddens' judgment may be premature. Maybe it is true that Lévi-Strauss' insistence (1958, 206-31) and (1962/1966) on recording and analyzing most every myth in primitive thought is too long a detour to reach the goals of social science. However, a good ambition may still be to find a deep structure in socie-[p 140]ties, in some measure unconscious for the user, but discoverable by science.

This search goes beyond the usual anthropological ambition, which deals with texts, not language. ‚The culture of a people is an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong<.As in more familiar exercises in close reading, one can start anywhere in a culture's repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.‛ (Geertz 1973/2000, 452-453 italics supplied). To deal with texts, emic or not, is different from dealing with language. Language is based in the biologically given language brain, a human universal. A universally valid science of social reality may be within reach if we start with language, not texts.

We believe that a new try with social science based on a language model might be more successful than that of Lévi-Strauss if we start with language stripped of magic, spuma, and defensive bilge. Rather than from a long and slow road via storytellers in primordial societies, we will follow a pragmatic rational for the quick seeking of inspiration for the study of social reality from the history of our own civilization and its critics. This can be done without believing that European societies represent some future level of other societies, a mistake that Lévi-Strauss was so eager to avoid.

Enter la langue

Our understanding and use of symbols rests not only on what is manifest ― the symbol-act and its context ― but also on something that is absent from view or hearing. There are hidden semantic and syntactical codes embedded in symbols that are essential to an understanding of them. Ferdinand de Saussure identified a nearly total arbitrariness of signs, but he found little arbitrariness in the way signs combined into sen-[p 141]tences. While the number of symbols is virtually indefinite, the number of rules to combine them into sentences is limited. These rules are systemic rather than concrete. They form la langue rather than la parole, to use de Saussure's classical distinction. A system of symbols (la langue) is known only from the study of the actual and concrete use of its symbols (la parole). But the use of symbols (la parole) is efficient communication only if it conforms, however roughly, to the rule-governed system of symbols (la langue). Langue and parole presuppose one another.

The Chomsky Theses

When mankind was a single local African tribe — if it ever was — it had a single symbolic environment. Even in those days it is likely that infighting over scarce resources began to separate symbols in the in-group and out-group. As parts of the tribe moved in search of greener pastures — the start of the slow process of spreading mankind over the entire globe — they met formidable obstacles of sheer distance, mountains, and oceans that severed them from their past and its symbolic environment. Gestures, the language of the body, have apparently remained roughly the same during mankind's big journey, but not entirely so. Japanese delivering a mournful message ("Your father has passed away") may have a smile on his face, a gesture seen by Europeans (and most Americans) as entirely misplaced, since a smile to them is a gesture accompanying a joyful message. Languages, by contrast, became highly differentiated. They produced the babble in Babel's tower. However, in the past century linguists have brought order into this chaos. Out of their controversies and agreements we can distill two essential theses, both credited to the work of Noam Chomsky.

Languages consist of a limited number of parts: nouns in the form of objects (e.g., books ), or in the form of persons (e.g., stu[p 142]dents ) , adverbs ( slowly ), adjectives ( difficult ), verbs ( read ), auxiliary verbs ( should ), et cetera. However, the number of possible unique combinations of them is very large. Most combinations make no sense: for example, books students slowly should difficult read are six words that can enter into hundreds of different combinations. The exact number is calculated as a multiplication:

1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 = 720

or, expressed in factorial mathematics: 6!=720. But at least one combination of 720 makes sense: Students should read difficult books slowly. Why does this particular combination make sense? It happens to follow the rules of langue.

Rules of langue are necessary. Six words gave 720 possible combinations. When a child has learned 60 words, something that usually happens before two years of age, the number of possible combinations is 8 320 987 112 741 390 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 or as the mathematicians write 8.32098711274139e+81. Such huge numbers spell a special form of freedom for a language-using animal.

The rules of langue may remain hidden or "unconscious.‛ You may follow them without being aware of them. Millions of people speak in perfectly understandable ways without any conscious knowledge of the rules of any syntax. And even people who have no formal knowledge of the rules may become dismayed (or amused) when someone breaks them in his speech. Intellectuals, particularly journalists, who thrive on their fluency and creativity in the use of language, often underestimate people in politics and business who have a scrambled syntax or other defects in their speech. For example, they have a hard time discovering any political prowess of a Dwight D Eisenhower or a George W Bush.

Inside man there is a set of recipes, or rules of thumb, to cook new sentences, some previously unheard of, from the words [p 143]we know. Linguists have called this set of rules a "generative grammar." Such a grammar is not a school grammar prescribing traditional and polite writing. It is a program for producing understandable speech from a vocabulary and to understand the same speech when spoken by others in the same symbolic environment. It is a program that allows for improvisations, for freedom.

Children pay attention not only to the images associated with words and to the synonyms of words, but also to the way adults order the common features of their language. Thus children learn not only a vocabulary; they also develop (or "grow") a grammatical system to use the vocabulary. They are born with the instinctive ability to infer the rules from their symbolic environment. They come to use this unconscious generative grammar because they have an inherited ability to do so. Here is the explanation why young children may say "I have monies" and "We buyed candy" instead of "I have "money" and "We bought candy." They have deduced the rules from their symbolic environment but not yet found out about exceptions to the rules.

[NAT] [BIO] There is a parallel here between eyes and ears. The physical environment — matter of different kinds and/or waves of different lengths — seems almost infinite in its variety. It is remarkable but true that the pre-language brain finds a structure in this environment mediated by the eyes so that we can see contours, shades, colors, movements, and depth. And it is even more remarkable that the language brain of humans finds a structure in the symbolic environment mediated by the ears so we can understand and speak a language. The parallel between sight and sound, picture and word, fascinated Ludwig Wittgenstein as a young man. He hit the nail on the head in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus when he wrote that our thoughts and representations are best understood as picturing the way things are (Wittgenstein 1922, 2.1).

[p 144]There are some 6,000 known languages. The various languages, as the school grammarians noted, have common features, i.e. parts of speech such as nouns, adjectives, objects, verbs, prepositions, adverbs, et cetera. The ordering of these features into generative grammars for 6000 languages differs somewhat between languages, but not very much. In English we do not say "Knows Erland how to sail a boat?" English verbs (except do and be and auxiliary verbs) are put after the subject: "Does Erland know how to sail a boat?" In French you may put the verb before the subject: "Erland sait-il naviguer un bateau?" In German, the verb at times is put last in the sentence: "Weiss Erland wie man ein Boot segeln kann?"

These differences do not change the fact that English, French, and German all have subjects and verbs and other standard features of language, and each has a consistent order that applies to them. The young Chomsky advanced the thesis that the different generic grammars are in fact variations on a single common prototype, a Universal Grammar. Given the huge number of possible combinations of words, the differences between various generative grammars are trivial. Universal Grammar represents an overwhelming communality between them (Chomsky 1955). The mature Chomsky (in the so called P&P model) expressed the language facility, not as generative grammars being variations of a universal one, but as general principles of mankind’s biological language faculty, plus a relatively short range of options (parameters) from a subpart of the lexicon and from peripheral parts of the phonology. Any language is fully determined by the choice of values for these parameters (Chomsky 1981). The model shows that the many possible human languages can be reduced to a limed number of fixed and invariant principles with limited options of variation. Here we have the rules of any and all human symbolic environments.

[p 145]The proverbial visitor from Mars with his special intelligence knows that the parts of speech in the languages of the universe combine in a huge number of ways and that the rules of combination are legion. But he would immediately hear that all earthlings, in spite of their varied vocabularies, use one and the same set of dimensions in making their combinations, give or take some local differences they assign to the dimensions.

Proposition 5:1. Chomsky's Principles of Learning to Speak: (a) The language brain of young human beings can (unconsciously) infer the rules of a surrounding symbolic environment. (b) These rules are variations of the values attached to a limited set of dimensions of the language ability inherited by all mankind.

Although Chomsky (1996) does not express or endorse it, there are good reasons to believe that the language instinct has evolved through natural selection, as have all other complex organs and hard wirings in the brain (Pinker 1994). So far, we do not have any other scientific explanation for the emergence of such organs other than the one Charles Darwin provided. Natural selection through reproductive advantage may also be an explanation of the special ability of children to learn language. And, if all mankind has a common root in Africa, the common parameters of the speech of all human earthlings may also have their beginning there. Contemplating the possible languages in the universe, we may join our imaginary Martian in the belief that all people on this planet, despite different native tongues, have something in common in our spoken words, namely the African parameters.

A Tri-section and a Bi-section of Common Usages of Symbols

As we noted earlier, (see page 53 et seq.) symbols depend on contexts. To understand a communication we have to know something about the situation in which it occurs. Given such knowledge of the context, it is usually possible to place any [p 146]communicative act in an appropriate category, and above all, to understand the intention of a communication and the needs it may reveal.

In real life you cannot readily assume that you can infer from the structure of a sentence what it means in terms of human actions. The French linguist François Bally, a student of de Saussure and an editor of his work, had already in 1913 showed that such an assumption was questionable. When we say "It is raining," we may actually communicate "It is now raining," i.e. a description; or, "The weather is bad," i.e. an evaluation, or, "Shut the window!" i.e. a prescription (Bally 1913, 23).

Some usages of words combine into 'descriptions,' for example: "This is a paper on social science." Others are 'evaluations,' for example: "This is a difficult paper." Still others constitute 'prescriptions,' for example: "Read this paper!" The tri-section of descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive usages of language is exceptionally useful when we use language to get something done, to be executive.

The conscious separation of descriptions from prescriptions was promoted by David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher. From a description of how society is one cannot conclude what a society ought to be. Many have tried to disprove this thesis from his third volume of the memorable book with the full title A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (Hume 1739-40/2006). But it holds, and the exceptions discovered and proposed presume special conditions.

Similarly powerful separations of evaluations from descriptions and prescriptions have not been made, but they are equally essential. (For a start, see the comments on Carnap and Hägerström below) Without clear separations we easily get [p 147]vicious confusions of the kind that was used to justify the Holocaust²³.

If we want to use language, not to get something done but to convey our feelings there are expressions such as ‚ugh,‛ ‚ouch,‛ ‚gee-whez.‛ But you can also let emotive components seep into any symbols. The appearance and presence of Romeo arouses Julia’s emotive reaction, and Romeo has a similar reaction when Julia appears. The audience is stirred by their budding love. Soon, however, the very names "Romeo" and "Julia" may become loaded with emotion, even when their bearers are not on the scene. An emotive component has then entered into the words "Romeo‛ and ‚Julia." Humans are able to use words loaded with emotions and thus spread emotion from one person to another by means of symbols, not only by gestures and wordless melodies.

The bi-section between executive and emotive use is normally an analytic one: almost every concrete communication contains degrees of both executive and emotive components. The emotive component in language is more obvious in speech than in script. Speech has mountains, valleys, skies with caressing clouds and frightening thunder. Script lies flat on a surface. The intonation, tempo, pitch, and decibels give speech an emotive capacity that is unmatched by script. But script, of course, has the advantage of being more permanent and it reaches beyond the range of the voice. A theater enjoys the advantages of both script and voice and vision and is the most powerful form of communication known to mankind.

By adding the executive-emotive distinction to the tri-section of descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive communications we get a fuller range of usages of human communications, now divided into six types.

[p 148]

Figure 5.1. Flow of Communications Separated into Minimum Types.

Communication		Type
"Ouch, I’ve been hit"		Emotive Descriptive Usage
"Oh, my health is in danger"		Emotive Evaluative Usage
"For goodness sake, help!‛		Emotive Prescriptive Usage
"He is an MD‛		Executive Descriptive Usage
"He is a good doctor"		Executive Evaluative Usage
"See this doctor!"		Executive Prescriptive Usage

Read the above as a brief outline or a synopsis to a story. The idea is that the essentials of what you write can be coded in the six categories.

It is difficult to reduce these six types of communications to a smaller number. Let us mention two attempts that are questionable.

In Vienna the philosopher Rudolf Carnap (1935, 23-24) argued that the value judgment "Killing is evil" is a misleading expression of the prescription "Do not kill!" In Uppsala the philosopher Axel Hägerström (1895) argued that value judgments were expressions of feelings, not of facts. To Canarp we can point out that the phrase "Killing is evil" is ambiguous if given an imperative form. It may mean "Tell your children not to kill!", "Punish the murderers!", or, "Do not use the death penalty!" The same evaluation of killing thus renders different prescriptions. With Hägerström we may argue about the emotive component attached to evaluative and factual statements in moral discourse. They are separated by degree but not kind from everyday down-to-earth language. For example, when a judge in a court talks about killing, it is more factual and less emotive than when a mob shouts about killing.

You may also question if we need more types than the six. For example, are questions — what? who? how? where? when? and why? — a separate type? No, they may usually be formulated as circumlocutions of prescriptions. The what? who? [p 149]how? where? when? and why? become a prescription: ‚Tell the doctor what happened!‛ In British English the question form may at times be used, not to get an answer, but to gain agreement, as in "The weather is nasty, isn't it?"

We can summarize our conclusion about usage of communicative actions as a two-fold proposition.

Proposition 5:2. Tri- and Bisections of Language Usages and The Understanding Principle: a) Any symbolic environment tends to become differentiated by the language brain into a trisection of descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive usages, each of which contains a bisection of executive and emotive components, i.e. totally six types of usages. (b) The language brain of persons in this symbolic environment has the capacity to differentiate these six usages regardless of their syntax.

The Tri- and Bi-sections of Language Usages and The Understanding Principle have the same status as both Chomsky principles in that they are part of the language instinct and as such automatic and not necessarily conscious. Needless to say, we eagerly await reports by brain researchers that have the instruments to trace and illuminate the processes hypothesized in Propositions 5:1 and 5:2.

The second tendency, here called the Understanding Principle, is a welcome addition to the Symbol Rule (Proposition 3:1) about the transfer of symbols from one brain to another. It makes such transfers independent of the tyranny of school grammar, as Bally illustrated. It must, however be remembered from our presentation of the Symbol Rule that in real life any understanding of the trisection between descriptive, evaluative and prescriptive language may be incomplete.

Furthermore, as is well known, there are individual differences in the capacity to operate with symbols of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions. These can be measured by ordinary intelligence tests. One must then use tests that can iso-[p 150]late the verbal ability from the mathematical and spatial abilities that are components of the total intelligence.

Discourses

We started our exposé by mentioning the spontaneous bodily actions governed by the pre-language brain: eating and drinking, fighting, intercourse, etc. As we already noted, they have, emotive components of lust or disgust that drive us to do what is physiologically required for our sustenance. To these we have now added activities of symbols, differentiated into descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions, each of which contains executive and emotive components. For emotions are not intrinsically opposed to reason; they may center upon such grounds of reason as descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions.

The discourses of art, religion, and morality differ from those in science, economy, and statecraft in their greater abundance of emotive (expressive) language. The following relations seem empirically valid:

Executive descriptions are particularly common in scientific discourse: definitions, laws of nature, and accounts of experimental apparatus.

Executive evaluations are particularly common in economic discourse: prices, wages, fees, and capital.

Executive prescriptions are particularly common in polity discourse: laws, orders, and treaties.

Emotive descriptions abound in artistic discourse: paintings, sculpture, fiction, poetry, dance and music. The emotive component is exceptionally pure in music and ballet.

Emotive evaluations are particularly common in religious discourse: the ultimate evaluation of lives cast upon this world and destined to die.

[p 151]Emotive prescriptions abound in moral discourse: exhortations about charity, uprightness, and duty.

The Tri- and Bisections of Language Usages give us the above delineations of discourses in the societal realms of science, economy, polity, art, religion and morality, respectively. In other words, they are an approximation based on analysis of language in the approach to a Many-Splendored Society.

Something Universal in Social Reality [BIO]

The bi-section of executive and emotive communications in a tri-section of descriptions, prescriptions, and evaluations will reoccur many times in this work. As shown in our opening review of this book, their discourses are embedded in European history. It is my assumption is that they also will be found in other civilizations. The origins of our bi-section and tri-section are in the human language brain itself, not in any specific culture or civilization. This tri- and bi-sections of language usages is a universal aspect of our understanding principle" (i.e. our Proposition 4:4).

It may happen that similar (but not identical) categories to our tri-and by-sections emerge also in pre-language contexts. This is particularly the case with evaluations. They may easily be confused with some biological spontaneities and spout reactions to feces, ooziness, sliminess, decay, foulness, and other gory or disgusting aspects of life and death. Martha C. Nussbaum (2004) has raised warnings when such visceral reactions enter the language of the law, and when courts of law confuse them with its reasoned evaluations.

Freedom in Social Reality

Shakespeare used about 21,000 separate words in his writings. Of these he invented about 1,800 words himself. And with words he created characters such as Cleopatra, Falstaff, [p 152]Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Rosalind. Throughout the centuries many in his audiences got to know them and their social worlds better than they knew themselves and their own fellowmen. Certainly language can create realities in a play on stage. Once we have seen it there, we realize that it also creates, changes, and maintains the social reality of our everyday living.

In a book from the 1920s, suppressed by the Soviet government for its formalist Western tendencies, that became famous in French linguistic circles, Vladimir Propp (1927/1968) analyzed 100 Russian fairy tales. He found 31 distinct sub-narratives or plot components. They are of the type "The villain gains information about the victim" (No. 5), "Victim taken in by deception" (No 7), "Hero is tested, interrogated, attacked etc, preparing the way for his/her getting exceptional qualities" (No.12), "Hero and villain join in combat" (No. 16), and "Villain is punished" (No.30). These 31 plot components can form a huge number of different narratives or games (= factorial 31 or, 8.222838654177924e+33). Although random tests have shown that far from all narratives have literary qualities, it is clear that the options are overwhelming to the human mind.

A special human freedom resides in the language brain. We can sum up what we have learned about language in a proclamation of this special freedom available only in the social reality created by human communications:

Proposition 5:3. Freedom in Social Reality: Applying Chomsky's two Rules of Speech Learning, and armed with The Tri- and Bi-sections of Language Usages and The Under-standing Principle, human beings are free to use sentences and narratives to reconstruct old social realities, reaffirm existing social realities, and/or create new social realities, even such that are previously unheard of.

This freedom is available when people's selves, their relations to others, and their societies are shaped. In this process [p 153]we can choose from a long list of sentences — some of them we shall call vocabularies of motives — to respond to events or to one another. Or, we can create entirely new sentences to build new edifices of social reality. The fact that anyone of us can bake new sentences that were never heard of before by our fellowmen is one key to our freedom. It opens the excitement of progressive opinions. But the same freedom can be used to find our way back to the tried and true, i.e. to conservative opinions. Here is excitement in finding lost wisdom in old words and tales, the meanings of which might have been close to forgotten. Obviously, freedom of opinion is the fundamental pre-requisite in all these processes.

Those who are free to use language facilities enjoy much freedom in all their discourses: academic freedom, freedom of trade, civic liberties, religious freedom, artistic freedom, and freedom of conscience. They are free to create, change, and maintain social realities. Needless to say, such capacitates are not given to reptilian brains that simply drive creatures into bodily spontaneities to eat and drink, defecate, urinate, fornicate, nurse, and fight.

Freedom and Responsibility Outside of Social Reality?

[TECH] Generally speaking, freedom is absence of coercion. The coercions may be a technical construction. The animal in a cage is not free, nor is the criminal in a prison.

[BIO] Coercions restricting freedom may be part of biological reality, interfering with a person's normal biological processes.

A suspect is not free if the officer who is in charge of an interrogation with him softens his resistance to confess by starving him for days, or keeping him awake for days and nights. Nor is he free if subjected to force drinking until his stomach bursts from osmosis. Torture always belies freedom. Likewise, he is not free if the officer injects him with a truth serum before an interrogation.

[p 154]We must as scientists fully accept that physical and biological realities are governed by immutable laws of nature. Here there is no personal choice, no free will. Nor can there be any personal responsibility when events are entirely due to laws of nature. The fact that these laws of nature have been formulated in language or mathematics and are part of social reality does not mean that they are changeable by the same principles as social reality is changeable. To believe so is to believe in magic.

At times physical or biological coercions enter into social reality and cancel freedoms in the latter. With the force of domestic violence approved in sharia law, Muslim women may not be free to leave their own house alone, and they have to be specially covered to hide the contours of faces and bodies when they are in public places. This is never freedom, regardless of the defensive bilge that is produced in its favor by both men and women with new multi-cultural ideologies or old religious ones.

In social reality, the question of fate and accountability is different from that in biological and physical reality. We have in social reality many law-like propositions of a stochastic nature, found valid in at least some historical circumstances. These natural tendencies may have been modified, sometimes even nullified, by the social designs of men and women living in the past. And they are continually modified by those living in the present. In addition, to such modifications we have entirely new creations born in someone's language brain.

The fact that anyone of us can bake new sentences that were never heard of before by our fellowmen is one key to our freedom. It opens the excitement of progressive opinions. But the same freedom can be used to find our way back to the tried and true, i.e. to conservative opinion. There is also excitement in finding lost wisdom in old words and tales, the meanings of which have been virtually forgotten.

[p 155]We know that man writes about his own history and that such books are sometimes bestsellers. But does man also create his own history? In reading the social science classics from Plato and Ibn Kaldun to Marx and Weber, we again and again meet the idea that man indeed shapes his society, but that this occurs under circumstances and restrictions that may be hard as nails. Facing resisting social, physical, and biological conditions, man nevertheless imposes at least some parts of his own design on his social reality and its history. These designs have been in someone's language before they became general parts of social reality. For these designs man, and man alone, is responsible.

There are areas of interpenetration between the social, biological, and physical where laws of nature play a significant part, but where the rules governing social reality also play a part²⁴. In such areas we have only limited freedom and can demand only partial personal responsibility; leniency due to physical circumstances and biological factors may often be called for.

Emotive and Rational Choice

Emotive components of symbols can be positive, i.e. releasing pleasure. For most people the word "garden" is such a symbol. Some other symbols have negative emotive charges and release fear, the word "thunder" for example. These are common emotive meanings. Other emotive charges are idiosyncratic. If the name "Bill" — even as the brand of a bookcase — gives you a sense of boredom it might be because a Bill is one of the greatest bores among your acquaintances. However, [p 156]regardless how boring they themselves may be, most people give their own name a positive emotive charge.

[BIO] Being different from other animals, human beings with their large prefrontal cortex brain, have an ability to inhibit automatic responses in favor of reasoned ones. We may be the only species that engages in delayed gratification and impulse control. But it takes a decision or an effort to skip the instinctive immediate emotive choice.

Two important discoveries in the everyday use of symbols should be formalized. The first is that humans register an emotive meaning quicker than an executive meaning. For example, in any text a reader will notice his or her own name a little more readily than other names. Even names similar to your own may be seen faster than other names. Psychologists have shown that this holds also in the laboratory when words are flashed on a screen (Jones, o.a. 2002). The second discovery is that negative emotive charges in symbols are intrinsically more potent than positive emotive charges. Loss in one stock on the stock market usually gives an investor more grief than the pleasure of a gain of the same amount in another stock (Kahneman och Tversky 1979). The names of companies in which the investors have losing stocks have bigger negative emotive meaning to them, while the names of the companies where they have winning stocks acquire an additional, but smaller, positive emotive charge. To realize a loss on the market takes more effort for an investor than to take home a gain of the same amount. In a similar vein, a soccer player finds that those missed chances and boos from the public in a match are not fully compensated by applause at the same decibel and length when he scores.

The emotive components in language make choice easy. We choose quickly according to them, giving somewhat greater weight to negative than to positive feelings. Suppose someone asks "Shall we stay in the garden shelter or go inside the house [p 157]during the thunder storm?" No requirement to reason here. You do not have to consider the quality of the shelter in the lovely garden, nor the risk of becoming wet from the rain before you have to sit down for lunch. Rational or not, you go indoors.

It is only when no distinctive emotive components are present, or when they are suppressed, that man starts reasoning and makes so-called rational choices. They take time and effort. It would become rather unbearable if choices had to be elicited by reason every time a choice has to be made. However, many people, as we know, make important decisions on the basis of "love at first sight" or "never trust a stranger."

The rules of emotive choice and rational choice can be summarized in a proposition with three parts:

Proposition 5:4. Emotive and Rational Choice: (a) In scanning a symbolic environment or part thereof man initially reacts to the symbols, if any, that have emotive charges and then to the executive symbols. (b) In this reaction, negative emotive symbols get greater attention than positive emotive symbols. (c) If all symbols are roughly equally executive, i.e. emotive meanings are spread evenly or are absent, man exercises rational choice as otherwise takes place only after overcoming initial emotive reactions

The healthy life and the favorable circumstances which undoubtedly are a large parts of existence, are not what we first notice when we scan for news. We pay more attention to sickness, separation, sudden deaths, trapped minors, sinking ships, crimes, toppled regimes, et cetera. And, of course, we pay attention to strikes of luck, also something out of the ordinary.

The Rules of Emotive and Rational Choice do not necessarily confirm David Hume's blanket dictum that "reason is the slave of passion." Notice the word "initially" in clause (a) of our Proposition. Reason emerges initially as a slave of passion, but it carries the promise of emancipation from this serfdom of [p 158]passion. Rational choice requires more effort than an emotive choice that is more automatic. Rational choice requires concentration, emotive choice does not. Rational choice is also difficult, for, as its theorists have made clear, it is not easy to define rational behavior on the part of any one person when that very rationality depends on the probable behavior of others. By and large, emotional choice is hardwired into our organism while rational choice belongs in the precarious realm of human freedom.

Rational choice is the mechanism that always applies; such has been the message from important economists since the days of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern (1944) and Kenneth J. Arrow (1951). Rational choice theory has since become important in political science (see, for example Peter C. Ordeshook (1986) on how political science used its early formulations). Under the label "public choice" scholars such as Buchanan and Tullock (1962) merged a broad knowledge of democratic politics with some rational choice as used in economics. In sociology, James S. Coleman (1990) has effectively applied rational choice to most every aspect of sociology.

The conclusions of rational choice theory appear valid, provided we see them as special cases that do not fall under initial reactions as stated in clause (a), nor fall under clause (c) in the above proposition in which the language that presents the choice is stripped of emotive meanings. The general case is the more brutal insight: the emotive choice is the default mechanism for mankind.

[BIO] The above position is grounded not only in observations of the symbolic environment and studies of the consumption of media content, but in the physiology of our senses and the workings of our brains. The state of the art in this field of research at the time of the turn of the century is found in Handbook of Affective Sciences (Davidson, Scherer och Goldsmith 2003). The distinction between rational choice and emotive [p 159]choice was actually known at the beginning of our chronology in the form of a parable, an old literary form that presents comparisons to teach a lesson. In this parable a father treats a deviant Prodigal Son with an emotive choice, while his well-behaved son is treated with rational choice (Luke 15:11-32).

Emotive and Rational Aspects on Opinion Formation

Daniel Yankelovich (1991) discovered that practically every mature public opinion has passed different stages. When an opinion has passed through all of them, politicians, business strategists, editorial writers, PR-consultants, and leaders of voluntary associations can trust them. An initial immature emotional choice has then in successive steps become a mature rational choice, also supported by new emotive arguments.

I will illustrate this process by the shifting opinions that led Sweden to join the European Union after a referendum in 1994. (I had the opportunity to personally follow these events in the opinion climate in detail.)

Sweden, of course, is a part of the geographical and historic Europe, but the country had rejected an earlier opening to join the European Union when neighboring Denmark became a member. Let us take the opinions about joining as an illustration of the Yankelovich stages that public opinion passes through. There are seven steps:

1. Awareness of an issue. As part of the general internationalizations of the late twentieth century many Swedes in leading positions realized that they had became increasingly dependent on other parts of the world, and particularly on those countries already in the European Union.

2. Sense that the issue gets on the public agenda. Openings to join the European Union are far between. The country had to decide before the EU-train with new members had left the station. The next chance lay many years in the future. This insight was well established in government circles.

[p 160]3. Hunting for solutions. The initial emotive reaction of the majority of the general public was that a change was unnecessary. The country could cope with internationalization by staying outside the European Union but become more European anyway by increasing its already institutionalized cooperation and integration with its Nordic neighbors. Or, the country could cope with the internationalization by intensifying its work in the United Nations, which is more encompassing than the European Union.

4. Wishful thinking. At this next stage unrealistic emotive arguments abound. Some say that Sweden has a better welfare system than the other countries in Europe so there is no need to join. Others say that Swedes by joining can reshape the European Union so that it becomes more socialist like Sweden.

5. Working out realistic choices. At this stage rational choice begins to enter. Respondents in polls take a little longer time to answer an interviewer's questions. Most people begin to realize that there are clear advantages and clear disadvantages to

joining, and they began to assess the pros and the cons, usually without abandoning their initial emotive choice.

6. Cerebral solution. The rational choices now dominate over the emotive ones. On the pro-side a sense crystallizes that pro-arguments, and persons and institutions that support the pro-side, are the better ones. On the con-side the opposite sense crystallizes. At this stage of cognitive decision-making the polls in Sweden show even sides. But many who are opposed or uncertain tell the pollsters that they, too, think that the country will eventually join the European Union. This fact hints at the pro-side outcome of the referendum.

7. Mature judgment. At this stage the pros are willing to intellectually and emotionally sacrifice the amount of sovereignty needed for a future in the European Union. And the anti-EUs are intellectually and emotionally ready to give up economic and other advantages of the union in order for their country to [p 161]stay outside and be independent. These rational choices, in fact, begin to achieve new emotive support; both sides think their choice is best for their children. And both can support their views in debates and conversations also on days when media present news negative to their views.

Public opinion is shaky and unstable unless it reaches the maturity of the seventh stage. In the Swedish referendum fewer pros than contras reached this stage. A political decision to join the European Union was made, but the majority opinion recorded by the referendum was not mature. For half a decade after the referendum, the Swedish public was more negative to the European Union than any other public in a member country. The pro-EU forces won the referendum but lost, at least temporarily, their cause.

The Swedish referendum of 1994 concerned, among other issues, whether Sweden ought to join the EU in order to influence its development. However, the public had few mature opinions regarding the Union in respect to a common currency, defense policy, veto rights in the Council of Ministers, or whether the EU’s future would be a supra-state or an inter-state organization. Some of these questions never reached the first stage of awareness, while others got stuck in the search for solutions and wishful thinking (stages 3 and 4). The polls reported in the media are unreliable at these stages. They record mostly emotive choices, not rational ones.

A similar caution must be expressed about polls of party or candidate standing between elections. The standard polling question "If the election were held today, which party (or whom) would you vote for?" suffers from the fact that no election is held today. Only during an election campaign are most voters pressed toward rational choices. Even then they may be victims of the emotive alternatives presented by the political spin doctors.

[p 162]This ends our discussion of insights about more or less unconscious language rules with universal properties. We believe that all insights about the workings of the language brain can be generalized to insights about social life. Above all, we must remember that the emergence of language in the evolution presents a huge number of options that define the freedom of man.

A Preview

An immediate question we have to ask is "Why are the distinctions between descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive language in its executive and emotive forms so fundamental for the study of social reality?" There are two answers. The first is that they capture the drama of social life. The second one is that they meet the criteria of being a minimum vocabulary in a theory.

The American critic Kenneth Burke of the mid-twentieth century penetrated the dramatic uses of language in literature and drama (A Grammar of Motives 1945, A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language 1952, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose 1954, The Rhetoric of Religion. Studies in Logology 1961). His work became an eye-opener for some social scientists.

The eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz spent the 1960s at the University of Chicago. He developed a symbolic anthropology of culture (Geertz 1973/2000), clearly inspired by writings by Max Weber, but also the dramatics of Kenneth Burke. Burke's analysis of language and literature in society had been smoothly merged by Hugh Daziel Duncan (1962) into the sociology symbolic interaction, i.e. ideas emanating from Chicagoan philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934) and Chicagoan sociologist Herbert Blumer (1966).

[p 163]These hints that Kenneth Burke’s ideas apply to social sciences as well as to the humanities are worth noting. Burke’s own commentaries on topics of social science such as the capitalism of his country, like Noam Chomsky’s, do not deserve the same scholarly attention as their language theories. However, a social science based on their discoveries can be more advanced than their own forays into social science.

Descriptive Dynamics

Descriptive language is used to satisfy our curiosity about events. The question openers — what? who? how? where? when? and why? — prompt us to describe an aspect of an event: the acts, the actors, the means, the scene, the time, the motivation. Kenneth Burke discovered that together they provide a full account; none of these six questions can be omitted if the description is to be exhaustive, and to add more questions adds confusion rather than illumination (Burke 1945, xvii).

Use of descriptions allows us to know something without personally having experienced it. Memories need not be hardwired into the human brain and passed on to coming generations by heredity. Language, particularly descriptive language, does the job. Some of this language is mundane and relates to the down-to-earth business of living. Other parts are pristine and have been woven into fantastic webs about the cosmos and Earth, about animals, trees, and plants, about our inner world, life and death. These tales are passed on to fellowmen and future generations by means of language, sometimes supported by stone settings, sculptures and pictures, sometimes recorded in writing. Their reception, as Burke points out, may be marked by wonderment and aha-experiences, or by fear and desperation, thus giving an emotive component to many descriptions.

[p 164]A major descriptive dynamic was formulated in the 1920s by William I. Thomas. "If men define situations as real they are real in their consequences" (Thomas 1928, 572). The cognitions we have of each others' actions in an encounter need not be scientifically correct. To take a more recent example, if a government believes that a state prone to hostilities has weapons of mass destruction, this belief has real consequences irrespective of the correctness of the belief. One consequence may be a preventive war. Another consequence might be a practice of torture or humiliation to find out about the weapons of mass destruction from prisoners.

Evaluative Dynamics

Use of evaluations allows us to grade and rank tools, food, housing, hunting grounds, soils, transports and other things, but also humans, their actions, and their states of mind. Kenneth Burke argued forcefully that language as such produces human hierarchies, "inevitable in any social relation" (Burke 1954, 294). We may specify this by saying that evaluative language produces hierarchies, i.e. divisions into good or bad, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong, rich and poor, well bred and sloppy, competent and incompetent. In the short term, the effect of belonging to hierarchies in the higher ranks is a feeling of elation. In the lower ranks the effect is a state of humiliation that at best can be relieved but never fully cured. Both elation and humiliation add emotive components to evaluative language.

The evaluative language also frames verbal rewards and punishments, i.e. sentences of the type "You are doing well" or "You are doing badly." The rewards of such simple sentences are different from incentives in the form of delivery of food, sex, and bodily comfort. But they resemble the latter in the crucial respect that they affect how we act. A Proposition of Evaluative Motives is one of the most basic laws of social science:

[p 165]Proposition 5:5. Evaluative Motives. Humans in a shared symbolic environment are (a) inclined to act to preserve the customary evaluations they receive in this environment, be these high or low, and (b) they are inclined to act so that they avoid receiving more unfavorable evaluations than these.

This Proposition says in effect that efforts to preserve the existing evaluations people receive is a default mechanism of mankind. This insight will follow us as a scarlet thread as we move through the human drama in encounters, positions and roles, organizations and networks, and through the grand realms of science and education, politics and legislation, economy, art, religion, and morality. It is not stated here because the author has a conservative bias. It illustrate an empirical fact of "a status quo bias" when earthlings use evaluative language. As a pollster in a welfare state, I observed that voters are much more likely to be upset by the prospect that a party removes a benefit which the public already has than by a failure of a party to deliver a benefit promised in its election campaign. ²⁵

The Polish social psychologist Andrzej Malewski (1962) studied a girls' camp in his country and found the inevitable: in the course of their time together the girls developed an informal hierarchy. On the last day they took a friendly but competitive test. The researcher manipulated the reporting of the results of the test. Some of the girls who had lower ranks in the informal hierarchy received high scores on the test and vice versa. There was a prize not only to the winner but to everybody. The prizes varied in value and attractiveness. The girls could choose their own. The low-ranking girls, who had received winning scores on the test, not knowing that they were faked, did not as a matter of course pick their prizes from the [p 166]most valuable category. They had an inclination to choose prizes more consonant with the standing they actually had in the camp community. Likewise, the high-ranking girls, despite their lower scores on the test, picked the more valuable prizes.

Very few Western social scientists hold that our basic motivation is to maintain our standing. They think the basic motivation is to achieve, not to maintain. However, the urge to enhance and achieve more, as we shall see²⁶, is a special case: Alice in Wonderland running faster and faster to stay in the same place. Scholars raised in a Buddhist tradition have less difficulty in making maintenance of standing more fundamental than the urge to enhance standing. A possible link between the two stands is offered by Jon Elster. Envy is the central force in his theory of motivation:

The first urge of envy is not 'I want what he has', but 'I want him not to have what he has, because it makes me feel that I am less'.---(A) weakly envious person does not want anyone to have what he cannot have. A strongly envious person is even willing to give up a part of what he has if that is a condition for bringing others down to his level. In both cases, the concern with self-respect is primary, and redistributive concerns are secondary (Elster 1989, 253).

Prescriptive Dynamics

The use of prescriptions allows us in the first place to define that which is "the Negative": all the Don'ts that meet us, not only as children but also as adults. "The essential distinction between the verbal and the non-verbal is in the fact that language [— prescriptive language we would say — ] adds the peculiar possibility of the Negative" (Burke 1952, 252). A non-[p 167]verbal animal would normally have to use physical restraints to achieve what humans can accomplish by saying "Don't do it!" Man can infuse restrictions into times and places by calling them holidays and holy sites. Tools, houses, land can be called private property to keep others from using them. Bundles of prescriptions form the contracts for the exchange of properties. Equally important, prescriptions set up goals to achieve, actions to perform, standards to meet, ladders to climb. It is obvious that all men cannot obey all negative and positive prescriptions at all times. In time, prescriptive language, therefore, tends to cause guilt in the receiver, as Burke observed. The guilt is an emotive companion of much prescriptive language.

The negative effects of prescriptive and evaluative language can be relieved by other usages of language. The anguish that language has caused men is thus cured by new forms of language. Kenneth Burke finds ample illustrations in literature and drama, for example, the cycle of redemption.

The humiliation arising from human deviations from prescriptive norms and from degradations in evaluative hierarchies can be atoned by mortification, the self-infliction of punishment for one's shortcomings. In comedy, the hero, like a clown, degrades himself so deeply that his fellowmen laugh and reintegrate him into their companionship. In tragedy, the hero is ultimately forced into exile or death. In all mortifications you, yourself, pay for your sins ²⁷.

Our Program

A second answer to the question "Why are the distinctions between descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive language in [p 168]its executive and emotive forms so fundamental for the study of social reality?" is that this six-fold classification of language usage serves as the smallest building block for our theory of social reality. Bertrand Russell (1948, 242-43) used to call such terms ‚minimum vocabularies.‛ He observed that ‚(t)here is as a rule in a number of ways in which the words used in a science can be defined in terms of a few among them.Such a set of initial words I call a ‘minimum vocabulary’.‛ He goes on to explain:

Let us take geography as an example. I shall assume the vocabulary of geometry already established; then our first distinctively geographical need is a method of assigning latitude and longitude. For this it will suffice to have as part of our minimum vocabulary 'Greenwich,‛ the North Pole,‛ and 'west of‛; but clearly any other place would do as well as Greenwich, and the South Pole would do as well as the North Pole. The relation of 'west of' is not really necessary, for a parallel of latitude is a circle on the earth's surface in a plane perpendicular to the diameter passing through the North Pole. The remainder of the words used in physical geography, such as "land" and "water," "mountain" and "plain," can now be defined in terms of chemistry, physics, or geometry. Thus it would seem that it is the two words "Greenwich" and "North Pole" that are needed in order to make geography a science concerning the surface of the earth, and not some other spheroid. It is owing to the presence of these two words (or two others serving the same purpose) that geography is able to relate the other discoveries of travelers. It is to be observed that these two words are involved wherever latitude and longitude are mentioned. (Russell 1948, 243-244).

Having read Russell as a graduate student I started searching and scrutinizing words to see how they would fit a minimum vocabulary for the study of society. Descriptive, evalua-[p 169]tive, and prescriptive sentences in more or less emotive forms seemed fit for this task; the rest could be borrowed elsewhere:

Communicative actions such as 'descriptions,' 'evaluations,' and 'prescriptions' can in an initial phase of research and study be established as understood. Then they can be used either by biographers and psychologists with a focus on the individual, or by historians and sociologists-anthropologists with a focus on collectivities. Different operations then produce precise scholarly vocabularies.

As a first operation consider any procedure used to find a ‘central tendency.’ Central tendencies of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions within one individual thus became defined as his ‘cognitions,’ ‘attitudes,’ and ‘expectations.’ Central tendencies of the same action types among an aggregate of individuals become their ‘social beliefs,’ ‘social valuations,’ and ‘social norms.’ Any other operation can be used to manipulate the primitives; the outcome is other derived terms. For example, if we select the operation of ‘dispersion’ of the action types within one individual we get a definition of his ‘rigidity’; if ‘dispersion’ is applied to actions in the aggregate of individuals we obtain a definition of their ‘consensus.’ We might also apply an operation finding ‘proportions’ to the primitives. An individual with a high proportion of prescriptions among his actions might be defined as ‘dominant.’ As the economic geographer divides the earth into production areas, so the sociologist can divide society into realms according to the proportion of actions of a certain type. The realm of society with a high proportion of prescriptions (laws, ordinances, executive orders, platforms, decisions, programs, commands, etc.) might then be defined as its ‘body politic.’ (Zetterberg 1965, 54-55).

By a series of separate logical or statistical operations, the units of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions thus begin to define units of a social reality: not only attitudes, valuations, [p 170]norms, but a host of other terms in the language of social science such as positions, roles, organizations, networks, media, markets and firms, et cetera. Furthermore, by separating the executive and emotive modes of descriptions, evaluations, and prescriptions we fill out the needed for a scholarly talk about a many-splendored social reality.

These six building blocks — formed by the tri-section and the bi-section of language — will help us to divide the major discourses and realms in modern social reality. To repeat, discourse about grounded knowledge (science and scholarship) is full of executive descriptions, for example, accounts of methods, facts and generalizations. Economic and business discourses are loaded with executive evaluations, for example, prices and costs. Politics and administration, as mentioned, are connected with executive prescriptions, for example, laws and regulations. Art in all its forms deals with descriptive visions that are emotive, expressive. Religious discourse is characterized by expressive evaluations, for example, ideas about the fundamental value of mankind and the meaning of life. Moral discourse contains an abundance of expressive prescriptions, ethical aspects of conduct.

Thus, the six communicative acts provide a potential for six fundamental realms in human social reality: economy, polity, science, religion, morality, and art. Together the latter give us a conception of many-splendored societies with varied stratifications, central zones, and a division of labor between creators, preservers, distributors, and receivers of knowledge, order, riches, beauty, sacredness, and virtue.

We shall in the following volumes of The Many-Splendored Society continue the theme that all these parts of social reality are constructed by the symbols around us. By reading this far, some of these symbols should not only be familiar to us from everyday life, but also — at least in some measure — be suffi-[p 171]ciently precise and presentable for a serious use in social science. It is a light luggage for an interesting journey.

END OF VOLUME ONE

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NOTES

[n1] An account of how I, in still earlier days, had become acquainted with ideas about a base for social realty in language is found in the section on "Encountering Some Ideas about Language" in the Appendix of Volume 7, The Many-Splendored Society: Life and the Good Life (forthcoming).

[n2] We deal more with this topic in a section entitled “Natural and Social Science; The Place of Mathematics” in Volume 4 of The Many-Splendored Society: Knowledge and Beauty (forthcoming).

[n3] See page 79 et seq. about the axial civilizations.

[n4] My friend Erland Kruckenberg XE "Kruckenberg, Erland" has taught me much about Augustus, and I have used some of his formulations above. Like most writers and teachers of the history of antiquity he celebrated Augustus as a creator of a good society. On this score we disagreed.

[n5] In a section entitled "Beauty and Beast" in Volume 4 of The Many-Splendored Society: Knowledge and Beauty (forthcoming), the esthetic significance of this painting is discussed.

^{^[n6]} The discussion of the content that defines these discourses continues on page 153.

[n7] Analyzed in the section “The Stock Market” in Volume 5 The Many-Splendored Society: Wealth and Sacredness (forthcoming).

[n8] Or in Swedish: "Den kaka inom den nya svenska kulturpolitiken som kan sammanfattas under rubriken statligt litteraturstöd fick efter ganska märkliga turer en inte helt lyckad start i riksdagsbeslutet i våras. Det viktiga var naturligtvis att propositionen i allt väsentligt sopades under mattan."

[n9] Pareto’s work has numbered paragraphs. Distinctions are discussed in §119 and 868, classification of residues in §888, and classification of derivations in §1419.

^{^[n10]} “Vocabularies of Motives” is the topic of the entire Volume 3, The Many-Splendored Society: Fueled by Symbols (forthcoming).

[n11] “Dialectics” is introduced in the next chapter. “Structuration” is a recurrent topic in Volumes 2 and 4-6 of The Many-Splendored Society (forthcoming).

[n12] We analyze the relations between magic and science in section “Knowledge, Ignorance, Illusion, and Secret“ in Volyme 4 of The Many-Splendored Society: Knowledge and Beauty (forthcoming).

[n13] When we start discussing in Volumes 4-6 of The Many-Splendored Society polity, economy, art, and religion we will have recurrent sections on the debunking of magic in these societal realms.

[n14] Our discussion “On Spontaneous Orders in Societal Realms” is found in Volume 2, The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice Built by Symbols (forthcoming).

[n15] Documentation is found in Volumes 4-6 of The Many-Splendored Society (forthcoming) which deal with societal realms.

[n16] See the section entitled On the Early Replacement of Christianity with Islam in the chapter on religion in Volume 5 of the Many-Splendored Society: Wealth and Sacredness (forthcoming).

[n17] We write a chapter about this in Volume 5 of The Many-Splendored Society: Wealth and Sacredness (forthcoming).

[n18] Quotes are taken from pages 19-20 in the English translation by Alan S. Kahan.

[n19] “Civil Disobedience” is a topic in Volume 3, The Many-Splendored Society: Fueled by Symbols (forthcoming).

[n20] It seems that persons with a traditional orientation are mostly guided by motivations described in a Proposition called "Maintenance of the Evaluative Order" in The Many-Splendored Society: Fueled by Symbols, while persons with an orientation towards novelty thrive on motivations framed as Proposition "General Achievement Motivation" in The Many-Splendored Society: An Edifice Built by Symbols (forthcoming).

[n21] See page 159 et seq., in the section on “Emotive and Rational Choice.”

[n22] See our discussion of the shifting views in different generations in Volume 7 of The Many-Splendored Society: Life and the Good Life (forthcoming).

^{^[n23]} See the illustration of this confusion on page 52.

[n24] This is beyond our central topics of social reality, but we will deal with some instances in the last volume of The Many-Splendored Society with the subtitle Life and the Good Life.

^{^[n25]}This is another aspect of the phenomenon discussed on page 159 that people value gains and losses differently.

[n26] See the discussion in Volume 3 of The Many-Splendored Society: Fueled by Symbols about General Achievement Motivation.

[n27] We shall deal more with cycles of redemption in the section “Victimage and Redemption” in the third volume of The Many-Splendored Society: Fuelled by Symbols (forthcoming).

[p 172]

Propositions

Proposition 3:4. The Master Trend of Civility and The Master Trend of Rationality: The history of mankind is (a) a slow but increasing expanse of language-based activities, both in absolute and relative terms, in comparison with mankind's pre-language activities, and (b) a slow but increasing proportion of language activities based on rationality, both in comparison with the pre-language activities and in comparison with all language activities. .... 82

Proposition 4:1. Tendencies in Intellectualism: (a) Over time, any symbolic environment tends to become differentiated into mundane and pristine symbols. (b) Mundane symbols tend to multiply as living conditions multiply. (c) Among skilled symbol users, the intellectuals, there is a spontaneous tendency for pristine symbols to emerge. (d) The consistent users of mundane symbols criticize the intellectuals for being out of touch with reality. The intellectuals tend to criticize the users of mundane symbols for ignoring the pristine ones, and they tend to criticize each other for not being pristine enough. ... 102

[p 173]Proposition 4:2 The Zeitgeist: In the history of symbolic environments in societies that have many activities beyond those of needs and lusts, there is a tendency to develop a dialectic with a thesis, for example, of being, or fidelity, or materialism, and then a corresponding antithesis, for example, of becoming, or pragmatism, or humanism, but rarely a synthesis; apparently the first thesis returns and the process starts all over. ... 129

Proposition 4:3. The Yeats-Guttman Doctrine: Dialectic priorities approximate a bell-shaped distribution and their emotive intensity approximates a U-distribution. ... 131

Proposition 5:3. Freedom in Social Reality: Applying Chomsky's two Rules of Speech Learning, and armed with The Tri- and Bi-sections of Language Usages and The Understanding Principle, human beings are free to use sentences and narratives to reconstruct old social realities, reaffirm existing social realities, and/or create new social realities, even such that are previously unheard of. ... 155

[p 174]Proposition 5:5. Evaluative Motives. Humans in a shared symbolic environment are (a) inclined to act to preserve the customary evaluations they receive in this environment, be these high or low, and (b) they are inclined to act so that they avoid receiving more unfavorable evaluations than these. .... 168

[p 175]

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. The Grand Structuration of Europe ...................... 14. PAGEREF _Toc240786663 \h 129

Figure 1.2. Rembrandt, "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp," Mauritshuis museum, The Hague. ................................... 22. PAGEREF _Toc240786664 \h 129

Figure 1.3. Different Levels of European Differentiation Brought to Central and South America and to North America by Colonization ............................................................................... 25. PAGEREF _Toc240786665 \h 129

Figure 2.1. Spontaneous Bodily Actions Initiated by the Pre-language Brains and their Modern Elaborations with Language. ........................................................................................ 40. PAGEREF _Toc240786666 \h 130

Figure 2.2. Lifestyles Entirely Dependent on Language and Their Discourses ............................................................................. 45. PAGEREF _Toc240786667 \h 130

Figure 3.1. Semiotic Square of Femininity vs Masculinity .... 65. PAGEREF _Toc240786668 \h 130

Figure 3.2. Bursts of Sophisticated but Isolated Symbolic Activity during the Axial Age. ..................................................... 84. PAGEREF _Toc240786669 \h 130

Figure 4.1. Communication Technologies and Value Climates in the Expanding Symbolic Environment [TECH] .. 119. PAGEREF _Toc240786670 \h 130

Figure 4.2. The Three-dimensional Space of a Modern Symbolic Environment. .............................................................. 127. PAGEREF _Toc240786671 \h 130

Figure 4.3. Values Held by The Rich in Six Big Cities of China in 2006 ................................................................................. 129. PAGEREF _Toc240786672 \h 130

Figure 4.4. Distribution of People with Positive and Negative Views and the Emotive Intensity with which these View is Held. ............................................................................................... 132. PAGEREF _Toc240786673 \h 130

Figure 5.1. Flow of Communications Separated into Minimum Types. .......................................................................... 153 PAGEREF _Toc240786674 \h 130

[p 176]

Index

Abracadabra, 70

accountability to the pristine, 100

activities of needs and lusts, 38, 112, 122, 129, 130

addiction research, 67

Aesop, 37

Afghanistan, 50

Africa, 145

American Revolution, 5

Anderson, Bo, xiii

Anglo-Protestant civilization, 23, 28, 87

anthropologists, 136, 140

anthropology, xii, 40, 162

arbitrariness of sign, 57

arbitrariness of signs, 140

Archimedes, 35

Arrow, Kenneth J., 158

art, 20

Athens: symbolic environment, 96

Athens: cultural heritage, 15

Augustus, 11, 129

Austin, John Langshaw, 3

axial civilizations, 8, 80, 82, 86

Aztecs, 24, 25, 137

Bacon, Francis, 88, 89

Bally, Charles, 146, 149

Baudrillard, Jean, 59

becoming, 97, 117

being, 117

Berger, Peter L, 3

Bernal, Martin, 78

bi-section of language: executive and emotive usage, 147

Blackburn, Simon, 36, 65

Blumer, Herbert, 55

bodily spontaneities, 36, 37, 38

body politic: in ancinet Rome, 12

bourgeoisie, 108

brain: cortex, 156; gesture, 33; hand-speak, 33; language, v, viii, 6, 38, 43, 44, 45, 51, 52, 79, 83, 88, 89, 90, 140, 143, 151, 152, 154, 162; language, 32; language brain, definition, 33; mathematical, 35; musical, 33; picture, 35; pre-language, 33, 38, 45, 66, 143, 150; reptilian, 36; spatial, 35

brain research, xii, 37, 64, 65, 79, 149

Braudel, Fernand, 12, 18, 30

Buchanan, James M., 158

Buddhism, 97

Burckhardt, Jacob, 132

Burke, Kenneth, 99, 162, 163, 164, 167

Busch Zetterberg, Karin, xiii

business administration, xii

caesaropapism, 15

Caius, Julius Caesar Octavianus. See Augustus

Caliphate of Cordoba, 86

Calvin, John, 132

cancerous politics, 110

capitalism, 132

Carnap, Rudolf, 148

Cassirer, Ernst, 71, 72

Caucasus, 50

central tendency, 169

central zone, x, 11

Charles V (Spain), 26

Cherokees, 25; Trail of Tears, 27

Chesterton, G.K., 51

Chickasaws, 25

China, 101, 104, 106, 123; emperor, 104; Sung Dynasty, 103

Chinese Revolution, 123

Choctaws, 25

Chomsky, Noam, 7, 141, 144, 145, 149, 163

Cicero, 9

civil disobedience, 104

civil society (Hegel), 110

civility, 79; master trend, 80, 83

class struggle, 108

Cleopatra, 78

climates of values, 133

code: genetic, 32; linguistic, 32

coercions, 153, 154

Coleman, James S., 158

collective representation, 57

Collins, Francis S., 32

comedy, 167

communication research, xii

communication technology, 114

communism, 105

confabulation. See spuma

Confucius, 104, 123

consequentialist ethics, 120

conservatives, 105

constitutional liberalism, 19

Copernicus, Nicolaus, 19

Cordoba, 103

Creeks, 25

critics, 99

cultural studies, xii

culture, 140

cycle of redemption, 167

da Vinci, Leonardo, 132

Dante, Alighieri, 131

Darwin, Charles, 145

de Saussure, Ferdinand, 140, 141

deep structure in societies, 140

default mechanisms: emotive choice, 158; preservation of existing evaluative standing, 165

defensive bilge, 76, 77, 78, 85, 88, 89

definition of situation (Thomas), 164

delayed gratification, 156

demography, xii

deontological ethics, 119

Derrida, Jacques, 93, 94

dialectics, 107, 108, 109, 110

Diderot, Denis, 88

discourses, 40, 43, 150, 170

dispersion, 169

Douglas, Mary, 59

Dunbar, Robert I.M., 45

Duncan, Hugh Dalziel, 162

Durkheim, Émile, 57

economic determinism, 17

economic liberalism, 19

economics, xii

education, 86

Eigengesetzlichkeit (Max Weber), 27

Einstein, Albert, 7, 35

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., 82, 97

elation, 164

election campaign, 161

Elster, Jon, 166

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 3

emic and etic relations, 138, 139

emic sentences, 136, 137, 139

emotive choice, vi, 157, 158

emotive sentences: negativly charged, 156; positivly charged, 156; quick registering, 156

Engels, Friedrich, 108

Enlightenment, 84, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 117

envy, 166

Erscheinung (German): revelations, appearances, entries in artistic presentation, ix

ethics of responsibility, 120

ethnographic museums, 138

etic sentences, 137, 138

Euclid, 35

Europe: socialist, 28

European Union, 30, 159

executive sentences: slow registering, 156

fairy tales, 152

familiarity, 48

Faraday, Michael, 7

fascism, 105

Febvre, Lucien, 53

Fennell, Graham, 67

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 107

fidelity (to values), 119, 123

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 28

Foucault, Michel, 94

fox (Machiavelli), 118

Frankel, Greta, xiii

freedom, 32, 116, 121, 142, 143, 152, 153, 154, 155, 158, 162; definition, 153

French Revolution, 26, 89, 92, 97

French settlements in North America, 26

Freud, Sigmund, 35, 117

Frontier, 26

fundamentalism, 86, 87, 97

Galilei. Galileo, 19

Gellner, Ernest, 88

gender lens, 90

gestures, 141

Giddens, Anthony, 139

globalization, 109

glorious revolutions, 82; definition, 23

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 21

Goffman, Erving, 51

Goldstein, Thomas, 86

grammar, ix; generative, 143; school, 136, 144, 149; universal, 144

Greek Orthodox Church, 15

Greertz, Clifford, 162

Gregory VII, pope, 14

Greimas, Agidas Julien, 61

Grey, John, 92

guilt, 167

Guttman, Louis A., 127

Habermas, Jürgen, 4, 63

Hägerström, Axel, 148

Harris, Marvin, 137, 138

Hedström, Peter, 47

Hegel, Friedrich, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112, 115, 126

hegelianism, 106, 113

Henry IV, emperor, 14

Heraclitus, 116

Hinduism, 97

history of ideas, xii

Hitler, Adolf, 92

Hobbes, Thomas, viii

holidays, 167

Holmberg, Åke, 103

householding, 38

human genome, 45

humanism, 115, 120

Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 88

Hume, David, 88, 146, 157

humiliation, 164

Huntington, Samuel, 26

Huntington, Samuel, 23

hyperreality, 59, 60

immanent causation, 113

Imperial Rome, 128

impulse control, 156

incantation, 70

Incas, 24, 25

individuality, 125

inner-worldliness, 121, 130, 131, 132

instrumentality, 115, 120

intellectuals, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 142; non-utopian, 105; utopian, 105

intelligence tests, 149

Internationale, 75

invaders of high civilizations, 25

investors, 156

iron cage (Weber), 85

Islam, 14, 54, 87, 95, 97, 119

Jakobson, Roman, 45

James II, king of England, 22

James, William, 3

Joas, Hans, 55

journalism, xii, 58

journalists, 142

Judaism, 97

jurisprudence, xii

Kaldun, Ibn, 155

Kant, Immanuel, 88

Kinsey, Alfred, 67

Kotzin, Rhoda H., xiii, 97

Kruckenberg, Erland, 11

la langue (de Saussure), 141, 142

la parole (de Saussure), 141

labor movements, 117

Langer, Susanne K., 49

language: bi-section and tri-section, 150, 151; body language (gestures), 34; descriptions, 163; evaluations, 164; prescriptions, 166; prose, 34; reading, 34; script, 34, 114, 147; speech, 34, 114, 147

language brain. See brain, language

language instinct, 143, 145, 149

laws of nature, 154, 155

legitimization by the pristine, 101

Levine, Donald N., 85

Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 59, 139, 140

liberty, 116

Libet, Benjamin, 66

lifestyle: aesthetes, 41; believers, 42; bourgeois, 17, 22; civic-minded, 42; compassionates, 43; definition, 37; learning buffs, 41; money-centered, 42

lifestyles, 115

life-world, 63

linguistics, xii, 136

linguists, 136, 141, 143

lion (Machiavelli), 118

Lipset, Seymour Martin, 109

literati, 97, 102, 104, 105

liturgical year, 14

Locke, John, 88, 90

longues conjonctures, 30

Luckmann, Thomas, 3

lust, 36

Luther, Martin, 132

Machiavelli, Niccolò, 17

MacLean, Paul D., 36

magic, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, 78, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 92

magical myth, 74

magical principles: 1st on same time events, 72

magical principles: 2nd on same place events, 72

magical principles: 3rd on whole and part as equal, 72

magical principles: 4th on some beings as cause of all events, 73

magical principles: 5th quick change, 73

magical principles: 5th quick change, 93

Malewski, Andrzej, 165

Malinowski, Bronislaw, 74

many-splendored lifestyles, 43

many-splendored society, v, ix, 5, 6, 8, 27, 44, 91, 93, 104, 106, 151, 170

maoism, 123

market research, xii

Marks, Gary, 109

Marx, Karl, 19, 108, 109, 111, 119, 155

Marxian correct predictions, 109

Marxian failed predictions, 109

marxism, 108, 109, 138

materialism, 120

Matthew effect, 51

Mayas, 24, 25

McLuhan, Marshal, 113, 114

Mead, George Herbert, xi, 3, 55, 56, 95

Meadian symbols, 55, 56, 58, 95

means of production, 108

medieval scholarship, 130

mentality, 112

Mill, John Stuart, 116

minimum vocabulary: geography, 168; social reality, 168

Mirandola, Pica della, 17

Mithen, Steven, 33

modernity, 115

Mohamad: prophet, 85

monseigneur, 26

Morgenstern, Oskar, 158

Moritz, Karl Philipp, 21

Morris, Charles William, 115

mortification, 167

Muhammad: prophet, 53, 54, 65

Muslims, 83, 87; axial civilizations, 86

myth, 70, 71, 73

nation states, 30

Navajos: Long Walk, 27

Nazism, 5, 105, 111

Neanderthals, 33

needs, 115

Neumann, John von, 158

New Guinea, 50

news, 157

Newton, Isaac, 7, 20, 35

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 76, 100, 117

nihilists, 105

non-religious morality, 17

normality, 125

Nozick, Robert, 85

Nussbaum, Martha C., 151

opinion formation: rational and emotive choice, 159

opportunism, 120

Ordeshook, Peter C., 158

Orwell,George, 37

Ostler, Nicholas, 51

outer-worldliness, 121, 130, 132

Panafiey, Christine Woesler, 62

Pareto, Vilfredo, 68, 118

Pascal, Blaise, 91

Paz, Octavio, 24

Peirce, Charles S., 61

Periodic System, vii

philosophy of language, 136

physical reality, 5

Pike, Kenneth L., 6, 136

Pindar, 129

Pinker, Steven, 46, 52, 64

Plato, 97, 116, 155

pleasure, 5

plebeians, 128

political science, xii

polity. See body politic

Polo, Marco, 103

Pope, 11, 14, 131

post-materialism, 121

post-structuralism, 94, 95, 139

pragmatism (about values), 119, 120

pragmatists, 106

praxis, 100, 101

pre-language brain: pre-language, 150

private property, 167

proletarian revolutions, 109

proper name, 156

proportion, 169

Propositions, 172

propositions of social science, 47

Propp, Vladimir, 152

psychoanalysis, 76

public opinion, xii

Qu’ran, 87

Quinsai, 103

Qu'ran, 53, 54

Rabelais, Francois, 53

rational choice, vi, 157, 158

rational choice theory, 158

rationality, 80, 84, 85, 88, 89, 95; master trend, 80, 84

reformulations of the pristine, 101

Reich, Robert B., 79

religion, 115; in medieval Europe, 14

Rembrandt, 20

remodelling the pristine, 100

Renaissance, 15, 16, 18, 86, 131

rentier, 118

resentment. See defensive bilge

rhetoric, xii

Roman Catholic Church, 15

Roman culture, 129

Roman Empire, 13, 16, 28

Roman Republic, 8, 9, 10, 16, 128

Rome, 128; bread and entertainment, 13; cultural heritage, 15

Roth, Guenter, 84

Royal Society, 20

rule of law, 22, 23; in a many-splendored society, 27

Russell, Bertrand, 168

Russian Revolution, 28

Saint Francis of Assisi, 131

salvation, 97

Saussure, de Ferdinand, 57, 59, 95, 146

Saussurian symbols, 55, 57, 58, 59, 93, 94, 95

Schopenhauer, Arthur, 65

Schumpeter, Josef, 117

science, 19, 74

script, 46, 47, 60

Searle, John R., 3

Sears, Robert R., 77

Segerstedt, Torgny T., 66

Seminoles, 25

semiotic square, 61

semiotics, xii, 60

sex research, 67

sexual equality, 83, 89

Shakespeare, 151

Sheridan, Philip Henry, 27

simulacrum, 59

Smith, Adam, vii, 73, 88

social democracy, 54

social designs, 154, 155

social mechanism, 47

social reality, 2, 3, 43, 136, 139, 140, 154, 168, 169, 170

social security, 118

societal realms, v, vii, 6, 12, 30, 113; art, 20; economy, 18; morality, 17; religion, 14; science, 19; the polity, 12

sociology, xii, 158

Sontag, Susan, 99

Sorokin, Pitirim, 84, 112, 113, 120

speculator, 118

spuma, 68, 69, 78, 85, 108

Stalin, 38

Stalinism, 5

Stirner, Max, 107

stock market, 156

Stolt, Berit, 52

Strömstedt, Bo, 58

structuralism, 59, 60, 139

suffering, 117

Swedberg, Richard, 27, 47

Sweden, 54, 67, 159, 160, 161

symbolic environments, 126, 144; classification, 132, 134

symbols: definition, 47, 48; Foucault’s view, 94; gossip, 50; ideational (Sorokin), 112; Meadian, 125; mundane, 96, 97, 98, 116; pristine, 96, 97, 98, 99; range of useage, 49; Saussurian, 125; sensate (Sorokin), 112

technology, 4

technology in social change, 110

Thales, 116

The Glorious Revolution, 22

theater, 147

Thomas, William I., 164

Tiananmen Square, 124

Tocqueville, de Alexis, 92

torture, 153

tragedy, 167

tri-section of language: descriptive, evaluative, and prescriptive usages, 146

Tullock, Gordon, 158

uniformity, 125

universalism, 136, 140, 151

values: definition, 115; measured in interview surveys, 123; post-material, 124

ValueScope AB, 124

Venice, 16, 18, 103

vicious confusion, 52, 147

Virgil, 129, 131

virtual reality, 60

viscious confusion, 52

vocabularies: impelling, vii, viii; justifying, vii; minimum, vi

vocabularies of motives, 70

Voltaire, François-Marie, 88

warfare, 38

Weber, Max, vii, 27, 84, 85, 97, 105, 119, 120, 155, 162

welfare state, 2, 118, 128, 165

wertrational (Weber), 119

William of Orange, 22

Wilson, Edmund, 99

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 55, 143

Wolf, Maryanne, 34, 46, 47, 79

working class, 108

Xiaoping, Deng, 106, 124

Yankelovich, Daniel, 126, 159

Yeats, William Butler, 127

yoga, 37

Zeitgeist, 125, 126

Zetterberg, Hans L., 67, 124

zweckrational (Weber), 119

Zwingli, Huldrych, 132

[p 183]

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