Thinking About Sociology in California and Paris
There is a famous family dispute in cultural evolution between Californians and Parisians.
On one side, the Californians (such as Richerson, Boyd, or Henrich) propose that culture evolves through a competition among different ideas, beliefs, and practices (what they call “variants”). Cumulative culture, as they call it, rests on people (relatively faithfully) copying others, with selection processes doing the heavy lifting in the process. Put differently, cultural evolution is
a process of selection between different variants (e.g. beliefs, ideas or artefacts) or models (referring to people from whom one can copy) (Acerbi and Mesoudi 2015, 483).
On the other side, the Parisians (like Sperber, Morin, or Miton) argue that cultural evolution does not require strong imitation or high copying. Instead, we constantly reconstruct what we learn from other people. And yet, there is still a surprising amount of convergence out there with similar bits of cultural objects, simply because they fit to some of “our mind’s proclivities” (Morin 2016, 450). According to this framework, these proclivities act like gravitational forces: even with noisy copying, ideas keep being pulled in similar directions.1
1 The picture is actually more complicated when you factor in content biases or guided variation (see Acerbi and Mesoudi 2015), but I’ll stick to this dualism because it is rather pretty.
I believe that cultural evolutionary debates carry fundamental implications for the discipline of sociology. You can already see why these two orthogonal axes (what I’ll call transmission and directionality) actually matters for us: the former makes social stability an emergent property of strong imitation; the latter makes it a result of a set of universal cognitive tendencies.
I will argue that this (radically) simplified difference, epitomized as transmission and directionality, speaks right to the heart of the core sociological doxa: the causal primacy of social life.
Looking for the Ghost of Durkheim in California
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, possibly the signature text of sociological imperialism, Durkheim argues that categories—pure concepts of understanding—are, in fact, the product of man. Far from being built into human nature, the argument goes, human categories, even those that help us divide the left and the right2, have their origins in society.
2 Of spatial directions, mind you, not the Left and the Right.
Consider a simple thought experiment to flesh this out. Three toddlers hang out on an island. They have ordinary perceptual capacities, but no shared language, institutions, or instructors. If categories are indeed social in origin, then before a “society” forms, these toddlers will have certain perceptions and proto-concepts, but will lack properly standardized cultural schemas. As interactions deepen, pressures for coordination and disputes over resources will force solutions to emerge. Through ritual and pedagogy, those solutions will be codified into social templates for categories, anchored in a specific place and time, and faithfully preserved across generations.
But what kinds of solutions do we end up with? If we keep mercilessly sending different toddlers to different islands, how do we get a green, a blue or a grue?3 Now, “selective pressures” for having green, blue, and grue, on the one side, and the inculcation of green, blue, and grue via ritual and sanctioning, on the other side, are tight frameworks, but they do not explain why we end up with green, blue, and grue. Why not, say, bleen?
3 I’m using these simply to denote arbitrary outcomes, or, say, the way a color wheel can be carved up. I like Goodman, but not using these in the same sense as him. I am not the only one to blame, though. Thanks to Andrés Castro Araújo, as he got justifiably mad about this.
While the transmission forces for existing schemas show strong rationales, the directional emergence of these schemas are missing from the picture. Keep sending the same toddlers to the same island thousands of time and you may end up with blues, greens, and grues because of path-dependent processes.
The Parisian stance provides a compelling answer to this question. If cultural convergence can emerge from cognitive proclivities that precede and constrain the social, then there might be multiple, but perhaps universal, equilibria, such that certain social patterns are bound to repeat. Large classes of cultural practices may thus not be freely constructible by social processes: intuitions about contamination will make purity persistently salient, heuristics about allocation will scaffold particular distributive ideologies, certain grammars will push narratives toward the familiar plots, or certain value structures will emerge universally across cultures.
Whatever Happens to Sociological Imagination?
The Parisian view poses a fundamental challenge to what we may call sociology’s foundational “doxa,” the notion that society has explanatory primacy over individual psychology or cognitive universals. The sociological imagination as C. W. Mills conceived it depends precisely on the idea that what appears to be individual or psychological is actually social. But if the Parisians are right, we should flip the explanatory hierarchy that we imposed on ourselves: the cognition becomes, at the very least, a strong constraining force on anything social. Hence, if cognitive directionality is indeed powerful, social constructions are much better conceptualized as the socially-selected-realizations-of-cognitively-privileged-structures.
This is a bit funny to think about, as it essentially asks for “social theory” to return to its pre-Durkheimian origins on obsessively thinking about human nature and social determination. The fact that Durkheim changed our focus on these issues was a disaster, as he essentially fully killed the question of how social formations can fundamentally emerge from universal mechanisms. If this is indeed true, it means that sociology’s foundational move toward explanatory independence may have been, paradoxically, a constraint on our explanatory power. Cultural evolution can give us the right tools for a proper return.