Trust in Science

The current issue of the American Sociological Review has an interesting article by Gordon Gauchat, Politicization of Science in the Public Sphere: A Study of Public Trust in the United States, 1974 to 2010. The abstract provides a nice summary of the content:

This study explores time trends in public trust in science in the United States from 1974 to 2010. More precisely, I test Mooney’s (2005) claim that conservatives in the United States have become increasingly distrustful of science. Using data from the 1974 to 2010 General Social Survey, I examine group differences in trust in science and group-specific change in these attitudes over time. Results show that group differences in trust in science are largely stable over the period, except for respondents identifying as conservative. Conservatives began the period with the highest trust in science, relative to liberals and moderates, and ended the period with the lowest. The patterns for science are also unique when compared to public trust in other secular institutions. Results show enduring differences in trust in science by social class, ethnicity, gender, church attendance, and region. I explore the implications of these findings, specifically, the potential for political divisions to emerge over the cultural authority of science and the social role of experts in the formation of public policy.

Gauchat contextualizes his findings in relation to three different hypotheses present in the existing literature:

• "The cultural ascendency thesis predicts a uniform increase in public trust in science across all social groups. In other words, the special congruence of science and modern institutions increases the need for scientific knowledge and public education, which, in turn, encourages public trust in science"
• "By contrast, scholars have predicted a uniform decline in public trust across all social groups, or the alienation thesis. This decline in public trust is associated with a cultural backlash against technocratic authority and science’s inability to defend itself against its own standards in public discourse"
• "Finally, the politicization thesis predicts that ideological conservatives will experience group-specific declines in trust in science over time. Conservatives’ distrust is attributable to the political philosophy and intellectual culture accompanying the [new right] and the increased connection between scientific knowledge and regulatory regimes in the United States, the latter of which conservatives generally oppose."

Here is the summary of his findings as it relates to the three hypotheses:

(T)his study shows that public trust in science has not declined since the 1970s except among conservatives and those who frequently attend church. Accordingly, the analysis provides negligible evidence for the cultural ascendency thesis, which suggests that trust in science will increase over time. Nor do results support the alienation thesis that predicts a uniform decline in public trust in science. In general, results are consistent with claims of the politicization thesis and show that conservatives experienced long-term group-specific declines rather than an abrupt cultural break.

The study's findings also have interesting implications for the 'deficit model' which predicts that individuals with higher levels of education will possess greater trust in science.

Additionally, one of the key findings here involves the relationship between education and trust in science. In essence, this study greatly complicates claims of the deficit model, which predicts that individuals with higher levels of education will possess greater trust in science, by showing that educated conservatives uniquely experienced the decline in trust. This interesting result may indicate that educated conservatives have been most affected by the NR’s (New Right's) identity work. Moreover, it suggests that scientific literacy and education are unlikely to have uniform effects on various publics, especially when ideology and identity intervene to create social ontologies in opposition to established cultures of knowledge (e.g., the scientific community, intelligentsia, and mainstream media).

While Gauchat's analysis does little to explain precisely why conservatives, and not other groups, have disproportionately lost their trust in science, he does report several tantalizing suggestions:

• One way of thinking about science is as one form of knowledge among others such as common sense and religious tradition. Gauchat found that "conservatives were far more likely to define science as knowledge that should conform to common sense and religious tradition."
• Secondly, "conservatives’ unfavorable attitudes are most acute in relation to government funding of science and the use of scientific knowledge to influence social policy (see Gauchat 2010). Conservatives thus appear especially averse to regulatory science, defined here as the mutual dependence of organized science and government policy."

This latter pattern leads to a speculation about the process responsible for the historical change:

Paradoxically, it is possible that science’s cultural authority engendered politicization, particularly its role in policy formation and regulation of private interests. This assumes that science’s cultural authority has grown—especially among legal, political, and economic institutions (see Jasanoff 2004)—to the point that the scientific community inevitably becomes entangled in polarized conflicts (e.g., economic growth versus environmental sustainability). As a result, science is “increasingly seen as being politicized and not disinterested” (Yearley 2005:121).

Generosity: Real and Imagined

Following up on the holiday theme, lets look at some data related to cultural generosity as manifest in international aid. Using data from a recent World Public Opinion survey, the Washington Post's Ezra Kleen crafted the following graphic:



There is a lot going on here. On the one hand, American's perceive themselves as a generous people and, I think, that sensibility is reflected in the magnitude of the "should spend" allocation. On the other hand, there is a perception that the government is actually spending roughly double what they "should spend." This is remarkably consistent with a
Gallup poll documenting the belief that Uncle Sam wastes 50 cents on the dollar. This sentiment explains the effectiveness of the simplistic political rhetoric claiming it is possible to balance the budget by getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse. Finally, there is the implicit point that Klein constructed the graph to illustrate -- that American's would be willing to give more to foreign aid if they actually understood how little was currently being spent. I doubt that is true. Indeed, if the question were phrased differently I suspect you would get very different results. For example, asking Americans to estimate the amount of money actually spent on foreign aid rather than the proportion of the budget, would, I suspect, yield a number substantially lower than the actual dollars involved.

Foucault as a complexity theorist

I recently discovered the Sociology and Complexity Science blog (now added to the links).

Among the rather interesting items there were references to two papers exploring the links between Foucault and complexity theory. Here are the references and abstracts.

1) Ken Baskin, "Foucault, Complexity, and Myth: Toward a Complexity-based Approach to Social Evolution (a.k.a. History)." (You can preview the paper by opening the cover in Amazon and going to it--it is the first chapter in the book).



2) Mark Olssen "Foucault as Complexity Theorist: Overcoming the problems of classical philosophical analysis." Educational Philosophy and Theory, Volume 40, Issue 1, pages 96–117, February 2008 DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-5812.2007.00406.x

This article explores the affinities and parallels between Foucault's Nietzschean view of history and models of complexity developed in the physical sciences in the twentieth century. It claims that Foucault's rejection of structuralism and Marxism can be explained as a consequence of his own approach which posits a radical ontology whereby the conception of the totality or whole is reconfigured as an always open, relatively borderless system of infinite interconnections, possibilities and developments. His rejection of Hegelianism, as well as of other enlightenment philosophies, can be understood at one level as a direct response to his rejection of the mechanical atomist, and organicist epistemological world views, based upon a Newtonian conception of a closed universe operating upon the basis of a small number of invariable and universal laws, by which all could be predicted and explained. The idea of a fully determined, closed universe is replaced; and in a way parallel to complexity theories, Foucault's own approach emphasises notions such as self-organisation and dissipative structures; time as an irreversible, existential dimension; a world of finite resources but with infinite possibilities for articulation, or re-investment; and characterised by the principles of openness, indeterminism, unpredictability, and uncertainty. The implications of Foucault's type of approach are then explored in relation to identity, creativity, and the uniqueness of the person. The article suggests that within a complexity theory approach many of the old conundrums concerning determinism and creativity, social constructionism and uniqueness, can be overcome.

David Harvey on the Financial Crisis

A wonderful animated summary of the current financial crisis based on a talk by prominent social theorist David Harvey (whose web site has a variety of other interesting things, including a 13 part lecture series providing a close reading of Marx's Capital.



For those who want more, the full lecture on which the animation is based is available here. Another of Harveys' talks, Capitalism and Development, is available as a podcast from the BBC, as described below.

"Capital is the lifeblood that flows through the body politic of all those societies we call capitalist, spreading out, sometimes as a trickle and other times as a flood, into every nook and cranny of the inhabited world", writes David Harvey, the world's most cited academic geographer. He gives Laurie a radical critique of what governs that flow of capital and what causes the crises which, he claims, will increasingly disrupt that flow with alarming rapidity. Modern economics has buried its head in detail but ignored the systematic character of capital flow, he claims, and it is time for a restore an understanding of how capital works.
Also on Thinking Allowed is the Cambridge development economist Ha-Joon Chang. In his analysis the detailed global programmes on international development amount to little more than poverty reduction, and the rich world is keeping the less developed countries poor in the name of free trade.

The Climategate Chronicle

Late last year, climate researchers were accused of exaggerating study results. SPIEGEL ONLINE has since analyzed the hacked "Climategate" e-mails and provided insights into one of the most unprecedented spats in recent scientific history.

The article is interesting not only for its portrayal of climate science as highly politicized relative to other areas of scientific research, but also for the reliance on social science rather than natural science to explicate the situation. Analyzing 15 years of debate between climate scientists and climate skeptics, the article outlines the dynamics of a process of polarization and draws liberally on the insights of sociologist of science Peter Weingart. In particular, Weingart notes that both sides have opted to misrepresent the situation by removing ambiguity and emphazising certainty.

Weingart says the political ramifications only fuelled the battle between the two sides in the global warming debate. He believes that the more an issue is politicized, the deeper the rifts between opposing stances. .... And even scientists are not always interested solely in the actual truth of the matter. Weingart notes that public debate is mostly "only superficially about enlightenment." Rather, it is more about "deciding on and resolving conflicts through general social agreement." That's why it helps to present unambiguous findings.

The Time for Clear Answers Is Over

However, it seems all but impossible to provide conclusive proof in climate research. Scientific philosopher Silvio Funtovicz foresaw this dilemma as early as 1990. He described climate research as a "postnormal science." On account of its high complexity, he said it was subject to great uncertainty while, at the same time, harboring huge risks.

The experts therefore face a dilemma: They have little chance of giving the right advice. If they don't sound the alarm, they are accused of not fulfilling their moral obligations. However, alarmist predictions are criticized if the predicted changes fail to materialize quickly.

Climatological findings will probably remain ambiguous even if further progress is made. Weingart says it's now up to scientists and society to learn to come to terms with this. In particular, he warns, politicians must understand that there is no such thing as clear results. "Politicians should stop listening to scientists who promise simple answers," Weingart says.

An interesting collection of photos accompanies the essay.


Ministers of the Maldives government met on the sea bed to draw attention to the global warming and its effect on sea levels.

Social-ecological systems in classical sociology

Recent scholarship on socio-ecological relationships has focused on the conjoined nature of the socio-ecologial systems. This idea contrasts with sociology's traditional focus as captured by Durkheim's methodological dictum: social facts should be explained only through reference to other social facts.

It turns out, as shown by Dario Padovan's in an interesting article The Concept of Social Metabolism in Classical Sociology, that the separation of the natural from the social was not taken for granted by early sociologists. According to Padovan ....

"Among early sociologists the concept of social metabolism was widely adopted. At that time it was used to describe the same process: the exchange and transformation of matter, energy, labor and knowledge carried out between the social system and the environmental system. But it did have various different meanings. For some authors it was one concrete way in which society was embedded in cosmic evolution, which simultaneously offered models to help understand how the social system functioned; for others it was a way of describing the exchange of energy and matter between society and nature, that which permitted the reproduction of the social system and of the social achievement needed for human advancement, for others again, social metabolism was one way in which society could renew its elite. I would say this concept was the product of sociological organicism and when sociology became more rationalist and individualist, it lost this perspective which linked society with its environment."

The article goes on to discuss the specific ideas of a variety of early sociologists, both known (Spencer, Comte, Ward, Pareto) and largely forgotten (Lilienfeld, Schaffle), and a few biologists (Haeckel).

Human Side of Disaster

The current issue of the Disaster and Social Crisis Research Network Electronic Newsletter has just been released. It is edited by Eduardo Runte, a former graduate student in Sociology at UNB whose MA thesis dealt with the experiences of electrical linemen during the ice storm of 1998. Eduardo is now in the PhD program at the Ecole des Mines in Paris. The contents of his thesis are summarized here and a description of his PhD work, dealing with the social processes involved in the creation of safety, can be found here.

The newsletter has a blurb for a new book by Thomas Drabek, The Human Side of Disaster, which it describes as follows:

When disaster strikes, people react, and usually, fear levels rise. Temporarily, however, one motivation supersedes all others: survival of self and those nearby, especially loved ones. Based on the author’s years of research and teaching experience, The Human Side of Disaster scientifically evaluates human responses in the face of disasters. This examination informs emergency managers and response teams and teaches them how to anticipate human behaviors in-crisis.

The book begins with four scenarios based on interviews and real events that introduce the human side of disaster. The stories examine how attention to, or lack of, preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation affect outcomes. Each subsequent chapter refers back to the original Experiences chapter and provides insights that can be applied not only to events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods, but also to man-made threats including industrial accidents and acts of terrorism. The author explores how people’s responses can be predicted, the long term effects of disaster on the psyche, and the key issues involved in recovery.

A balanced interpretation of research, results, and experience, the book demonstrates how traditional warning methods and high-tech systems can work together to improve communications, evacuations, and reconstruction efforts. It highlights the role of the human element in any disaster situation and demonstrates how to use that element as part of a planned disaster response.

New Book: William Catton Returns with "Bottleneck"

George Mobus, Assoc. Prof. of Computing Software Systems at the Univ. of Washington Tacoma does a lengthy review of William R. Catton's Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse. The book is posed as a sequel to Catton's 1983 book, Overshoot, which has become a classic of literature in environmental sociology. The review is posted at The Oil Drum.

Warning: this book does not have a happy ending.

"In the sequel, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse, Xlibris Corporation, he drops the part about we can evade the worst. The subtitle says it all. Now he concludes that it is already too late to mend our ways and somehow avoid the collapse of civilization. Indeed the main title refers to an impending collapse of the human population. An ecological bottleneck (also called a population bottleneck) is where radical changes in the environment of a species causes a die-off of all but the most hardy of the population; hardy, that is, in terms of the selection pressures arising from the change. Of course there may be no sufficiently hardy individuals left or the ones that manage to survive cannot reproduce sufficiently to produce a new population. In that case the species goes extinct.

Catton's arguments for why this is the most likely outcome for humanity boil down to something I have written about in my blog for several years now. It is the rate of change that matters as much as the degree or magnitude of change when it comes to shocking a population. If we look at the rate of climate change due to anthropogenic forcing, or the rate at which our fossil fuel energy sources are depleting, or the rate of aquifer depletion, or the rate of population increase, or the rate of consumption increase per captia in the developed and developing worlds, or... You get the picture. We are changing the world in ways unfavorable to human survivability more rapidly than we can either adapt or mitigate. And we have already passed the point of no return."

Visualizing Sociology

Many of the posts on this blog have featured stunning visual graphs and images to depict sociological ideas. With the Internet and sophisticated graphics software, this seems to be a growing trend in sociology. So I thought I feature a few sites that specifically address visual images in sociology.

Sociological Images

International Visual Sociology Association

The Gallery at Visual Sociology

This image is from the "Harvesting Stories" collection.

Key Concept: Emergence or Those flocking boids!

One of the great philosophical arguments of all time involves conceptualizing the relationship between different levels of phenomena: does one favor organicism or reductionism? Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? Or can it be reduced to an understanding of those parts?

Sociology, following Durkheim and his 'social facts can only be explained through reference to other social facts' dictum, traditionally favored organicism. One of the more interesting places to explore these ideas is by looking at emergence. How, for example, do we understand the flocking of birds or the existence of segregated neighborhoods in cities?


Craig Reynolds has a mesmerizing page where you can watch an individual based model of boids that mimic the flocking behaviour of birds. In philosophical terms, Reynolds is trying to explain the emergent phenomena of flocking behaviour through a set of individual-level instructions to his computerized agents (the boids). The page does an excellent job of explaining both the assumptions that are programed into the agents and providing links to a wide variety of relevant literature.

This is similar to the famous explanation for segregation provided by Nobel prize winning economist Thomas Schelling in his book Micromotives and Macrobehavior. By positing the existence of individuals (agents in the jargon) with slight-but-not-malicious preference to have neighbors of the same race, Schelling developed an agent based model showing that, over time, the result of people acting to meet these preference leads not to a mixed neighborhood but, rather, to completely segregated populations. There are a number of different simulations of this on the web, for example, here, here and here. A simpler and less interesting version is here.

But, as Russ Abbott has noted, while boids do a good job of modeling flocking behavior, they ignore energy issues. Thus, as currently conceived, most agent based representations of ecosystem phenomena are seriously deficient.

More Blogs for Sociology and Complexity Science

Dr. Castellani, currently a professor of Sociology at Kent State, Ohio, has a blog dedicated to Sociology and Complexity Science. Interestingly, Dr. Castellani's background also includes extensive studies in psychology and visual arts. His Art & Science Factory includes his diverse interests in popular art and the social complexity of public health. The blog itself is loaded with fantastic art. His book on Sociology and Complexity Science looks like a good overview of the field, with a related website that gets into the specifics of complexity theories and models.

A related blog is Aaron Bramson's Complexity Blog that features Agent-Based Modeling.

And don't be embarrassed to take a look at the Wikipedia page on Sociology and Complexity Science. It's really a very good overview of the history of social complexity theory, it's related theories, schools and authors.

Social Thermodynamics

The new Encyclopedia of Human Thermodynamics (EoHT), launched in December 2007, is a wiki of 1,150 articles related to the thermodynamics of human systems.

Within EoHT is a subsection on Sociological Thermodynamics. Under this heading I found a section on Niklas Luhmann and a French co-theorist that I hadn't heard of before, Jacque Ellul. The sociology subsection contains a list of social theorists of thermodynamics. Among these is an American anthropologist, Eugene Ruyle, who developed social thermodynamic theory based on Marx's labor theory of value; Edgar Morin, a French philosopher who developed a "complexity theory" of sociology; and Adrian Bejan, a Romanian-born mechanical engineer at MIT, applies thermodynamics in his "constructural theory" of society.

The author of the EoHT believes that the use of thermodynamic theory in sociology is still fairly new. The wiki was started by Sadi Carnot, aka, Libb Thims.

I had been looking for some connection between Luhmann and thermodynamics. I knew that he had a cybernetic theory, but not necessarily a thermodynamic model. I still think that Luhmann's thermodynamics is only partial, mainly concerned with entropy. But that the fact that he conceives society as an autopoietic system is an excellent place to begin to construct a sociology of thermodynamics.

The page lists some excellent sources, including Douglas White's Thermodynamic Principles for Social Sciences.

Evolutionary Networks

In response to the previous post, here's a story from Guardian UK/America about ongoing research on networks. It features the work of Lieberman and Nowak on evolutionary graph theory. This mathematics, arranged in a grid network, shows the particular ways that networks evolve over time, be they cancer cells or human social networks. Lieberman's evolutionary graph theory [Harvard.edu] describes several features of dynamic networks. It is a general theory of how population structure affects evolutionary dynamics:

• "random" vs. "scale-free" networks [scale-free networks develop larger inequalities]

• the fixation-probability of mutants [evolutionary agents]

• graphs as suppressors or amplifiers of [evolutionary] selection

• frequency-dependent evolution

• the outcome of evolutionary games [scenarios] is dependent on the structure of the graph

• in small populations, "drift" dominates, i.e. random mutations don't trigger an evolutionary path, while

• large populations are sensitive to small changes in selection values

• the higher the correlation between the mutant's fitness and fixation, the stronger the effect of natural selection

Lieberman and Nowak's theories involve replicators. [GDUK] A replicator is an entity that makes copies of itself; it could be a virus or an idea. Network theory predicts where that replicator will go, how successfully it will propagate.

Human organizations have complicated network structures25−27. Evolutionary graph theory offers an appropriate tool to study selection on such networks. We can ask, for example, which networks are well suited to ensure the spread of favorable concepts. If a company is strictly one-rooted, then only those ideas will prevail that originate from the root (the CEO). A selection amplifier, like a star structure or a scalefree network, will enhance the spread of favorable ideas arising from any one individual. Notably, scientific collaboration graphs tend to be scalefree28.

One of the more interesting things that Lieberman notes is that individuals don't evolve, populations do:

Evolutionary dynamics act on populations. Neither genes, nor cells, nor individu- als but populations evolve.

Historically, this concept has been applied to the biological evolution of species. But through graph theory, we can also show that social networks evolve, but not individuals. This supports Luhmann's idea that social systems are systems that take shape beyond the individual level.

Lieberman's paper on evolutionary graphs is short and not hard to understand. Just read the sentences between the mathematical equations and it's fairly clear.

Few and Far Between

I just picked up a copy of John Bellamy Foster’s Ecological Revolution. (This is not a review of the book, not yet anyway.) In the preface, Foster thanks his former graduate student, Brett Clark, who studied environmental sociology with him at the University of Oregon. Brett went on to become a professor of sociology at North Carolina State, and he wrote four of the chapters in Foster’s book.

That really struck me: the idea that a grad student was a continuing source of inspiration to an experienced professor, that a grad student could write four chapters of a widely read book under the auspices of one of the best and brightest in the field. That grad student is now a professor, but obviously a vital link in this very thin chain of ecological wisdom across North America. There are very few us out there, so few that each one of us is critically important to the whole effort, including, and perhaps even especially, grad students.

John Bellamy Foster was recently interviewed on Democracy Now along with Grace Lee Boggs, on September 17, 2009. Boggs and Foster commented on the ongoing financial crisis in the US.

From Environmental Crisis to Class Analysis

Like the Ziegler article below, George Monbiot's recent article in the Guardian UK introduces a class analysis to the debate on ecological issues. Monbiot argues that population growth among the global poor is not the main driver of climate change: it's the consumption of the developed nations, especially, the consumption of the super rich. In "Stop blaming the poor. . .", Monbiot looks at research published by David Satterthwaite in Environment and Urbanization which provides data showing that the poorest populations, who have the most children, make an almost negligible contribution to global carbon emissions; and that the wealthiest in the developed nations, who have the fewest children, contribute the lion's share of global carbon emissions.

Monbiot's environmental advocacy has always had a class analysis, and this research allows him to make a strong case. However, he glosses over the implications of the research for the global middle class: it's not just the super rich, who are less than 1% of the population, who consume the most and contribute the most to global warming, but the middle class of the rich nations, of which he is one. A middle class person in the UK has a lifestyle commensurate with the "rich" of India and China. The OECD middle class consumes as much and contributes as much to carbon emissions as the "rich" of many poor nations. In fact, Satterthwaite's article proposes that the wealthiest one-fifth of the world's population contributes 80 percent of the world's GHGs (564). This one-fifth are not just the super-rich—they are also the prosperous middle class of North America and Europe.

It's unfortunate that one could read Monbiot's article and make the claim that the way to keep emissions down is to keep the global poor as poor as possible, but that's not his intent at all. He's trying to argue against population control programs that target poor people and deprive them of the right to bear children. He's arguing for development policies that bring up consumption among the poorest to the recommended world standard: 2 tonnes carbon emissions per person. He wants to stop the billionaires of the world from blaming the poor for climate change and look at their own consumption habits. Moreover, he's trying to get the environmental movement to stop focusing on the wrong issues and refocus on the real problem: the main driver of global climate change is overproduction and overconsumption for profit, i.e. capitalism. And he's using the typical envy and rage of the middle class against the super rich to fuel that shift in thinking.

I found these two articles by Ziegler and Monbiot posted respectively on The Oil Drum and The Energy Bulletin, two websites that I track on a daily basis. My research on environmental movements has shifted recently to looking at how such movements have changed since the economic crisis of '08-'09. While analysis of the impact of "growth" and capitalism has always been a part of this discourse, my question is whether such discourse has become increasingly concerned with class analysis since the onset of the global financial crisis. Have discussions of the impacts of wealth and capitalism on both peak oil and climate change increased with this economic crisis?

In particular, my plan has been to study the Transition Towns movement in Devon, UK, both as an environmental movement and as a localized response to these crises. The Transition Towns movement is almost exclusively a middle class response. My question now is, "how does an environmental movement deal with an economic crisis?" How are the people of Totnes Transition Towns dealing with the economic crisis? Does this class analysis enter their discussions about responding to peak oil and climate change?

The "black" squares noted in the legend are actually the blue squares. Note that, per capita, Canada emits nearly the same tonnes of GHGs as the United States, among the highest in the world.

Satterthwaite, David, "The implications of population growth and urbanization for climate change," Environment and Urbanization, Vol. 21, No. 2, 545-567 (2009)

Can someone please tell me where to find the system?

[Part 1]

It seems that sociologists don’t study “society” anymore. There’s no such thing. There’s only a “chain of interaction rituals,” or a “network of individuals.” Or to put it another way, the chain of interaction rituals among individuals is the system. So there is basically only one level: the micro-level. If there is a macro-level, it’s just the micro-level writ large. So, micro or macro, there’s really only one level. Ok.

But I still have this nagging feeling that there’s a system. Why? Because we keep talking about it. We still refer to the “economic system” (ooh, that’s a big one), the “educational system”, the “political system,” etc. So the, what do these “systems” consist of? [Silence.] Individuals. In chains of interaction rituals. Aaarrggh! I want to tear my hair out.

This is where I find myself in the discipline of sociology. I have entered a Goffmanian hall of mirrors where the same single object gets repeated over and over into infinity.

The Goffmanian argument goes like this: if all the individual (humans) in the world suddenly vanished, there would be no society. It’s the Social Theory of the Neutron Bomb. Suppose some alien dropped a hundred thousand giant neutron bombs on planet earth and thereby killed all the humans on the planet all at once (and all the plants and animals too, but we won’t get into that). Poof! Society gone. There would be no society.

Pretty convincing and tough to dispute. But, the great thing about the neutron bomb (shiver) is that it leaves all the buildings standing. Just, nobody’s in them. And all the telecommunication systems working, but nobody’s using them. And all the cars running, just nobody’s driving them. (Why can’t they come up with a “car bomb” that only kills cars?) And all the documents stuffed into all the drawers and tacked up to all the walls, mail in the inboxes. The stores would be full of goods, but no one's buying them. And the Internet still humming. All of our Facebook pages would still contain billions of our own words and images, but no one would be looking at them, or adding anything new.

Sociologists almost always ignore the built environment. Except for Foucault—who took into account buildings and spaces like the prison, the asylum, the clinic—and urban sociologists, like myself.

So, arguably, that part of the social system, the built environment, the fabricated environment, the electronic environment, would still be there, all hooked up, ready to go. That conglomeration of objects is at least a significant portion of the social system. But again, without live humans, it’s little more than a smoldering relic.

Out of our decrepit 12 Monkeys landscape, one person crawls out of the wreckage and begins to look around. She had been sheltered in a radiation-protected laboratory deep underground where she had been conducting research with a thousand chimpanzees, who also survived. Once on the surface, she roams the streets, then enters an office building. She wipes the dust and debris off a desktop computer, presses the power switch, and hey, it still works! She sits down and begins to view all the images on the screen, all the stored text , photos, and videos, all the telecommunications sent between hundreds, thousands, millions of people. For her, at least, there is a virtual social system.

She must conduct research. While things are still marginally running, she embarks on a grand scheme of social research to discover one thing: is there anybody out there? In theory, if she can find at least one other human, she has a "social system." But how can she, one human, possibly cover all the territory and search all the places that need to be searched to find other humans?

Ah, thank god, she still has the thousand monkeys! She has trained chimpanzees, and she can send them out to find other humans. It’s the Thousand Monkeys Research. Get one thousand monkeys to randomly do social research for a thousand years, and you might (randomly) come up with something that looks like a social system. So she sends them off—run, fly, go find Society!

This is the state of sociology today, at least as I have found it. Dominated by micro-theories of interaction and Thousand Monkeys research, there is nothing left of what used to be our grand theoretical tradition of social systems. There is no “society.”

I’m discouraged but I haven’t given up. I know there’s a social system out there, somewhere.

[end of Part 1]

The Sociology of Resilience: Panarchy and Post-Katrina

Our planet is faced with an array of ecological crises—in particular, peak oil, climate change, and fresh water scarcity. Scientists have begun in earnest to examine the impacts of these crises on natural and social systems, and how these systems respond. The ability of a system to respond to and survive crisis has come to be known as “resilience.” There are many theories of resilience, but one that has attained great influence recently is the resilience theory of Canadian ecologist Buzz Holling and his coauthor, Lance Gunderson. Resilience theory is part of their monumental work on cycles of transformation in natural systems called Panarchy. Their theory of resilience was developed out of detailed research on the life cycles of forests (including New Brusnwick) and other ecosystems. In Panarchy, they attempt to apply these theories of transformation and resilience to human social systems, in particular, the ability of social systems to respond to environmental crises.

My early study of this work raised questions for me as a social scientist. In the course of their research, Holling and Gunderson had to admit that human social systems were different from natural systems; social systems didn’t neatly fit the model. So they developed a set of “exceptional conditions” for social systems to explain how human systems responded differently. But what I found particularly troublesome was that their theory of resilience seemed to be completely antithetical to the way we experience the human condition. Panarchy’s theory of resilience states that in third stage of transformation, the ecosystem breaks down, collapses, and in the process, releases all the biological “wealth” that was stored during the “wealth-building” and “conservation” (first and second) stages. During the collapse stage, the system’s raw materials, nutrients and species are freed from their former links to the ecosystem. According to Panarchy, it is in the collapse stage that the system obtains its maximum resilience to ecological crises. In the final stage, the materials and species released by collapse can be recombined, new niches are built, and new species, formerly suppressed under the old system, can become the new dominant species.

I found this concept of resilience a little troubling, especially when applied to human social systems. I immediately thought of Hurricane Katrina, perhaps the greatest ecological catastrophe in U.S. history. It was an ecological catastrophe, not just an environmental one, because it was caused by the combined forces and failures of both the natural system (climate change, hurricanes), and the human systems (systemic poverty, racism and a lack of preparedness to respond to disaster). To this day I can still remember the horror of seeing poor people of color drowning in the floods, stranded on roof-tops, imprisoned in hellish conditions in the Superdome, thirsty, hungry, searching for their families, for clean water, food, and a way out. To this day, I can still see the images of families walking down abandoned highways, carrying their few belongings, walking, walking toward they didn’t know where, trying to find a safe place to rest.

I had to ask myself, “is this maximum resilience?” Here you have a perfect test-case: complete collapse of both the natural and human social systems, and yet they these people did not seem to be “resilient” in the sense of "surviving.” More than 1400 people died in the storm. Half a million people left New Orleans and the affected Gulf region, the largest migration in U.S. history. Two years after the hurricane, only one-third of the City's population returned or remained in the area.(1.) Most of the evacuees never returned, and were forced to find homes in other cities and states. Not much is known about the fate of people who were forced to leave and resettle elsewhere, but one thing is certain: they left with little more than the clothes on their backs. Poor, traumatized, unemployed, bereft of connections and support from their former communities, how did they possess the resilience necessary to rebuild their lives? How is it possible that they would eventually be better off than before the crisis? Is this resilience?

These are the questions and concerns that led me to conduct research on the concept of resilience. I am not trying to discredit or debunk Hollings and Gunderson's theory, or Panarchy, because I think there is much in the theory that does work and is highly applicable to human social systems. But there also remains much in the theory that needs to be tested against the realities of the human condition. Human social systems are different from natural ecosystems, and thus we need to develop a sociological theory of resilience that accounts for that difference. And certainly I hope that research into the resilience of human social systems will yield knowledge and strategies that will help us face the many ecological crises ahead.

1. Source: NARAYAN SASTRY: Tracing the Effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Population of New Orleans: The Displaced New Orleans Residents Pilot Study

http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/2007/RAND_WR483.pdf