Battle for the Footnotes
“But Plato's greatness as a sociologist
does not lie in his general and abstract speculations about the law of social
decay. It lies rather in the wealth and detail of his observations, and in the
amazing acuteness of his sociological, intuition. He saw things which not only
had not been seen before him, but which were rediscovered only in our own time
… Another example is Plato's sociological and economic historicism, his
emphasis on the economic background of political life and historical
developments; a theory revived by Marx under the name 'historical materialism'.”
-Karl
Popper, “The Open Society and It’s
Enemies: Vol I, The Spell of Plato
Was
it really not until Marx that this idea was ‘rediscovered’? Compare Popper’s
statement to the following excerpt from De
Regimine Principum of Saint Thomas Aquinas,
“Again, if the citizens devote their
lives to trade, the way will be opened to many vices. For, since the aim of
traders is especially to make money, familiarity with trade leads to the
awakening of greed in the hearts of the citizens. The result is that everything
in the State will be put up for sale, mutual confidence will be destroyed and
an atmosphere favorable to deceit and fraud created. Everyone, growing careless
about the Common Good, will seek only his own advantage.”
Even
this may be compared to the practices found within certain Anabaptist
communities. Some Amish ordnungs
forbid their members from taken out insurance policies, believing the care for
those who fall on hard times must be the responsibility of the community and
not some external agency.
Plato,
Aquinas, and the Amish all share a common theme. Each, along with Marx’s
historical materialism, recognize the way in which the culture is affected by
the economic structure to which it is rooted. And yet, if asked to identify
what school of thought this statement belongs to, it would likely be identified
as Marxist. Now, the point here is not to partake in the ever so fashionable
act of trying to pry every conceivable point of credit away from Marx simply
because it is Marx. Rather, it is to question what kinds of conditions must
exist in order to justify that some bit of knowledge has been ‘discovered.’
This
can be done more easily in the hard sciences, where concepts emerge for which
there are no prior notions for. No ancient philosopher ever conceived of
anything like a mol or Navier-Stokes equation. But this method of citing where
no previous notion existed becomes difficult when the claim is made in the
domain of the social sciences. Marshall Sahlins has described how anthropologists (his own field) are closer to
their own subject matter than, say, a physicist. The more in-depth the
physicist describes the cutting edge of physics, the less that description
becomes applicable to any other area of life. But for the anthropologists,
there is no description of human behavior that an open-minded person could not
understand the reasoning behind.
This
is not to say that any social scientist would claim to ‘discover’ a particular
phenomenon of human behavior any more than a physicist would claim to have
discovered the phenomenon of gravity. However, the social scientists do try to
claim the discovery of certain inborn laws which govern human behavior. But
this is an oddity, one that only hides it absurdity by scale. An anthropologist
could go out and live amongst the so-and-so tribe for a year, write a study of
how the tribe’s marriage customs enable community bonding, diagram this process
through some schematic, and be celebrated for their work. But this cannot be
done at the individual level. If John Q. Public up in the bleachers noticed
that James Harden plants his feet in a certain manner before shooting, and no
one else before had ever really noticed it, he might draw attention it, but no
one would credit John with having ‘discovered’ the motion.
We
give credit for the discovery of notions when they are made in the language of
science. But the problem is, these discoveries aren’t always very scientific.
Schematics and diagrams abound in the social sciences, as do calculations,
which all look impressive, but it is uncertain how much of this work has any
actual validity (although the replication crisis strongly hints that answer is, very little). But this is the bent of
modern society, the endless need to claim ownership. And because science has
been the accepted language of legitimacy from the Industrial Revolution onward
(including the era in which Marx lived), science becomes the way in which these
claims are made. To make a claim in any other manner is to appear backwards. It’s
a neurosis perhaps best summed up by the Taos Chief Ochwiay Biano when he described
the attitudes of Western people, “They
are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want
something, they are always uneasy and restless.” But unlike the hard
sciences, where that restlessness does occasionally produce advances, the
social sciences guarantee nothing of the sort. And so, Marx and
base-superstructure complex, represents one minor skirmish amongst many in the
quest to claim something that may someday have the privilege of becoming a
footnote.
I
once had a college professor who boasted about his ability to crank out papers
in political theory. He was apparently under the belief that this was something
to proud of. I thought to ask how frequently any of these papers were cited, or even read, but decided against it.
My favorite line in those kinds of papers is, “I refer to this process as…”
where then author draws an arbitrary line around some observation and tries to pigeonhole
it onto some new bit of academic jargon. “I
refer to this process wherein a young person ‘dabs’ as socio-normative
signaling method,” or, “I refer to
this relationship between the dog walker and the dog as a sapien-canine
hegemonic complex.” To be fair, I don’t think the scholars themselves
believe this kind of junk, but it’s what they have to do in the world of publish or perish.
Chief Biano's quote appears in Carl Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections"
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