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Transcript
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: 1 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) 2 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. 3