The Problem of Social Order

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The Problem of Social Order
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The problem of social order

• Why doesnt our world resemble The Road Warrior?
• Why is social life mostly so predictable?
• Why do people
• Look out for one another?
• Conform to social rules?
• Make and obey laws?
• Make investments in future ventures?

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Social order in insect societies

• Worker ants sacrifice their lives on behalf of
  the colony
• Workers of one North African species of ants face
  virtual suicide in foraging for food
• Ant supercolonies
• In Europe, an Argentine species covers 6000 km
  comprises millions of nests, billions of
  individual workers
• Mechanism high degree of genetic relatedness,
  combined with chemical signaling of this
  relatedness

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Explanation

• Explanation inclusive fitness
• Among social insects, sisters share 75 of their
  genes
• Among most animals, sisters only share 50 of
  their genes

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Critique

• Helps explain mother-child bond in human society
• Cannot account for cooperation among non-related
  individuals

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Two components of social order

• Order as coordination
• Disorder as lack of coordination
• Order as cooperation
• Disorder as lack of cooperation

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Social order, contd

• Coordination
• Predictability allows people to develop stable
  expectations, which in turn enable them to
  coordinate.
• EG driving
• EG the value of money

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Disorder from lack of predictability

• Financial crises

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Examples of coordination

• Traffic
• Everyone drives on the right and passes on the
  left
• Availability of consumer goods
• Food in the stores

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Cooperation

• People do things that benefit others, not just
  themselves
• EG NPR donations, volunteer work
• EG Refrain from taking others property, refrain
  from polluting

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Disorder from lack of cooperation

• Montegrano, Southern Italy, ca. 1950, pop 3400
  (Banfield. 1958. The Moral Basis of a Backward
  Society)
• There is only one voluntary association
• a clubroom where 25 upper class men play cards
• No organized charities
• Churches do not carry out welfare or charitable
  activities
• Hardly anyone puts money on the collection plate
  at church
• People dont understand the concept of
  public-spiritedness says that no one in town is
  public-spirited

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Montegrano political activity is feeble

• Political parties are weak
• People are too individualistic to care about
  mobilizing others for any collective purpose
• Political cynicism is extreme

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Montegrano collective needs are unmet

• Because there is so little collective action,
  most collective needs are unmet in Montegrano
• Amoral familism
• Still characteristic of Southern Italy, as
  compared with Northern Italy
• R. Putnam, Making Democracy Work

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Example of cooperative order

• New York, and the entire U.S., in the wake of the
  events of September 11th
• Volunteers flooded Ground Zero
• NY businesses gave free food to rescuers and
  victims
• Celebrities raised money for the victims in a
  huge telethon

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What makes cooperation difficult to attain?

• People are social
• They need others to be happy and healthy
• People are also individual

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Cooperation, contd

• So, there is tension between the interests of the
  individual and the interests of the group

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Recap

• The problem of social order is a key issue in the
  social sciences and in public policy
• In order to create the world we want, we need to
  have social order

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Recap

• Social order includes two components
• Coordination (predictability)
• Cooperation (overcoming individual self-interest)
• In this course, we will discuss five theoretical
  solutions to the problem of social order