Download Tudor Georgescu

Tudor Georgescu
A Way of Explaining Why Genocides Happen
“The history book on the shelf
Is always repeating itself”
ABBA, Waterloo
Mr. A.C.L. Zwaan, a historian pertaining to Norbert Elias’ school, he affirms in his
courses that genocide is a process planned top-down. While he recognizes that it is not
necessary that it should be there, in first instance, a whole genocidal plan put together, he
affirms that certain political decisions taken by individuals, these leave no other option
than continuation of that state policy till genocide happens (e.g., in first instance a
political decision is taken about the undesirability of an ethnic and/or religious group, and
this begins a process which get accomplished in a genocide).
I understand this as pertaining to the mainstream epistemology of historical sciences,
wherein the lives of leaders and highly important public persons get analyzed, the result
being a voluntaristic-individualistic framework of interpreting world history (this critique
is a common place in postmodern critique of historical sciences).
Me, as a sociologist, one who takes Durkheim seriously, and thinks that Le Bon is
empirically true, I have to challenge this voluntaristic-individualistic perspective, by
putting it in a broader framework and sketching the alternatives for it.
P.
Somerville
and
B.
Bengtsson
write
http://www.cf.ac.uk/cplan/conferences/hsa_sept01/somerville&bengtsson.pdf :
on
“We claim that neither social constructionism nor sociological realism takes actors
seriously.”
R.A. Wallace and A. Woolf, in their book Contemporary Sociological Theory.
Expanding the Classical Tradition, 5th edition, Prentice Hall, 1980-1999, they write on
p. 262:
“Thus, for functionalists, norms and values are explicit and ‘out there’ acting on the
individual; for symbolic interactionists, norms and values emerge from the interaction
process; but for ethnomethodologists, the origin of norms and values is not of primary
interest. Instead, their interest is in the process by which human beings interact and
prove to each other that they are following norms and values.”
There from we infer the following overview of sociological theories:
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society
counts
1. symbolic
interactionism
counts
does not really count
2. ethnomethodology
individual
does not
really count
3. structuralism,
functionalism
4. systemic thinking
Systemic thinking: e.g., Hegel’s self-development of the Absolute Idea, Marx’s relations
based on ownership of capital which determine history and Heidegger’s Gestell. Marx:
“People create history, but not under conditions of their own choosing.”
( http://www.iidb.org/vbb/archive/index.php/t-25938.html ). We may say that individuals
do create the social reality, but not in circumstances chosen by them and not out of their
free will. For Marx, society does not really count, for it got reduced to economy, more
specifically to the (economical) distribution of means of production. It is an economical
reductionism which seeks to comprehend society by bracketing all social phenomena,
besides this economic aspect. From this jumpstart, all the rest of the theory develops on
other social aspects, which are treated as epiphenomena, because they already have been
reduced as originating in some economic variables.
While we may maintain that such an analysis is utterly incomplete, analysis in itself is
nothing else than reducing complex phenomena to analyzable quantifiers, the complexity
of the social phenomena being reduced (correctly or incorrectly) to that kind of simple
models which do not exceed our brain’s capacity of making sense of a theoretical
description.
We see that mainstream history has a perspective similar to ethnomethodology
(ideal type 2), combined with some elements of symbolic interactionism (ideal type 1). I
want to prove that there the systemic approach is also legitimate for historical sciences.
While it may be politically incorrect to say that groups do exist, and not only the
individuals inside them, in the problem of genocides we empirically notice that groups
really exist (“really”, according to the ontology of the Platonic realism).
In my study A Quantitative Proof of an Ancient Qualitative Method, I proposed a study
of group feelings in respect to given statistical parameters. As a way of making sense of
such conclusions, I advanced an explanative algorithm (see attachments).
Briefly, such explanative algorithm says that sometimes scapegoating somebody, it is
rational, as seen from the viewpoint of the policy maker. Therein I meant: scapegoating a
few individuals. At other times, this scapegoating happens for whole groups of people, it
becoming collective, and this is in my view “irrational scapegoating”.
scapegoating
individual
(rational)
collective
(irrational)
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Alas, I am only able to sketch this as a hypothesis, because historical sciences are far
from having the rigor of putting all the here relevant statistical variables into a huge SPSS
file, which could be processed statistically. We may only notice in this context that
Le Bon has a huge predictive validity, by far unequalled by other sociologists,
cf. van Heerikhuizen’s meaning that sociologists almost never satisfied the requirement
of predictive validity.
So, my hypothesis remains here neither confirmed nor rejected by historical sciences. All
we can expect is that my model of collective frustrations gets applied to forecasting
genocides. A further analysis is needed in order to show under which conditions the
rational scapegoating deviates into irrational scapegoating.
But, what is Platonic realism, when applied to social sciences? Spiegeloog, 02/2005, p. 8
says that frustration leads to aggression, and that such a theory is a common place in
psychology. We may reasonably think that collective frustrations lead to collective
aggression.
Be hate expressions a fantasy, a collective one. According to Durkheim, they are
nonetheless social facts, because they compel individuals to behave a certain way. But,
Durkheim’s mistake was not taking into account the individual psyche.
So, we extend his model of social facts in order to include the inner world of the
individuals. From Durkheim’s social facts concept, following W.I. Thomas’
well-known theorem, we infer that utterances, ideas, emotions and fantasies, be they
individual or collective, they can be handled as facts, as substantial objects.
This
substance
is
a
shareable
one,
cf.
my
argument
on
http://members.home.nl/intellect/2questions.pdf . This manner of handling both
individual and collective experiences, we call it factualism (a brand of
sociological realism).
***
If some of the words, concepts and expressions employed here are still unclear to you,
please consult the following resources:
http://www.google.com
http://scholar.google.com
http://www.m-w.com
http://onlinedictionary.datasegment.com
Disclaimer: imho, a test “reading with comprehension” should be mandatory for
admission in universities.
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