An Essay in Sociology
Preliminary Remarks
I am a philosopher, not a sociologist. Since the late nineteenth century, sociology has presented itself as a science, and sociologists have published thousands of books and articles purporting to give empirically grounded, scientific understanding of human behavior. Sociology necessarily overlaps with psychology, economics, political science, and other academic disciplines. Sociology proper may be regarded as the research background for social work, a separate discipline that aims to apply the insights of sociology to actual human societies, with the goal of improving human interaction.
These definitions of sociology and social work ought to provoke wonder, even astonishment. Think of it. Sociology aims at nothing less than understanding human behavior. Social Work aims at making societies better. Ambitious goals indeed!
Traditionally, of course, the fields we now call sociology and social work, along with many other disciplines, were part of “philosophy.” If we are astonished at the audacity of sociologists, what should we say about philosophers? They seem eager to take on every important question (including the question: which things are important?). Along the way, philosophers have offered explanations of human behavior; that is to say, they have invented various sociological theories.
What excuses can I give for adding to the list of philosophers dabbling in sociology? Three reasons. First, our beliefs about how societies work—that is, our theories of sociology—greatly influence the way we behave. Sociological beliefs influence politics, economics, psychology, education, and religion.
(Notice the recursive nature of my first excuse. Sociology, as defined above, is the science of human behavior. That is, it strives to teach us what we ought to believe about human behavior. My first excuse is the claim that one of the things we ought to believe is that our beliefs influence our behavior.)
Second, philosophers have been proposing sociological theories for millennia. This little essay merely continues a long tradition.
Third, some of the sociological theories proffered by philosophers are clearly wrong, even foolish. To the degree that we act—politically, religiously, economically, etc.—on the basis of foolish theories, we may do ourselves harm. To whatever degree sociology absorbs or endorses mistaken theories it undermines its goal of understanding human behavior.
Timeframes: Sociological and Biological
Human beings have been writing and studying history for three or four thousand years. Before the invention of history proper (historians themselves debate when that happened), people sang songs and told stories of the past. Lumping written and oral “histories” together, modern scholarship tells a tale of perhaps five or six thousand years. To go further back, we rely on the discoveries of archeology, which tells us a little more of our story, perhaps to eight or ten thousand years ago. Before that? Paleontologists and evolutionary biology take over, telling us that human beings lived for perhaps two million years in the stone age; for much of that time “modern” homo sapiens shared the planet with species we can regard as close relatives, now extinct (e.g. Neanderthals).
Pay attention to those numbers. Sociology studies human behavior, with the goal of gaining insight into society. Virtually every bit of sociological data comes from the last five thousand years (or ten thousand, if we count archeological findings). Those few thousand years constitute a tiny blip compared to the biological story of humanity.
In one sense this helps the sociologist. We don’t need to speculate about prehistorical people; it is enough to try to understand human behavior of the last five thousand years. More importantly, since the sociological timeframe is so short when compared to the timeframe of evolutionary biology, we don’t need to worry about physiological differences between human beings in different historical eras. The differences we find will be social and cultural, not genetic. On average, 21st century people (in rich countries) live longer, grow taller, and weigh more than medieval persons did, but this is not because we have evolved; such differences stem from changes in diet, lifestyle and medicine. As a species, our genetic endowment could not change significantly in such a short time. As a species, our brain capacity is no different now than five thousand years ago. (Is that a frightening thought? We are trying to solve international disputes and build spaceships with stone age brains.)
Human behavior (remember, the object of sociological science) varies greatly. Different cultures wear different clothes, eat different foods, worship different gods (or non-gods), and express themselves with dance, music, or drama in forms that often seem bizarre to outsiders. At times sociologists have been tempted to conclude that human behavior is infinitely malleable, that there is no such thing as “human nature.” Rather, some have said, human nature is just “social nature.” But that goes too far. All human societies, without exception, are rooted in our biological nature, which has not significantly changed in the few thousand years that sociology studies.
A Place to Start
All human beings, without exception, are born helpless and unable to survive on their own. Every one of us has been dependent on other human beings. The extent of our dependency becomes clearer if we compare our species to others. Human infants are dependent on other members of their kind for a longer period of time, and for a greater percentage of the normal lifespan, than the offspring of any other species. We call ourselves wise beings (homo sapiens), but we might be better known as dependent beings (homo dependens).
Not only are we dependent as infants, later in life we depend on others when we fall ill or when we suffer accidents (everything from storms to volcanoes or recessions). Unless we are killed or die suddenly, most of us will be dependent on others as we age.
So far I refer to mere survival. But mere survival is not enough. Every conception of a good life for human beings reveals a much greater extent of dependency. None of us invented language or mathematical calculation; these are intellectual tools given to us by others. You could not read these words if you had not been taught to read. You could not understand what you read if you had not been trained, probably over many years of your life, to think about abstract concepts. Perhaps more than anyone else, philosophers ought to acknowledge their intellectual dependency on other people.
Any person can see for herself the facts of human dependency. Why do I take space to stress something so obvious? Because important thinkers have hidden the facts behind their theories.
Consider an example: Jean Jacque Rousseau, in his famous essay, The Origin of Inequality, tries to imagine a world of human beings without dependency. In our original state, Rousseau wrote, all human beings were equal. The goods of life were relatively easy to obtain. Men and women came together for sex without expectation of social bonds. Rousseau fantasizes native women in the Americas or Africa toting babies on their hips while gathering food, at no disadvantage compared to the men. No one needed anyone else. It was a state of complete independence.
Rousseau dreamed up this idyllic picture of the state of nature (idyllic in his mind, anyway) because he wanted to attack the social inequalities of his day in 18th century France. The peasants of France were starving while the nobility lived in luxury. Wealth and power on one side, poverty and helplessness on the other; Rousseau wrote to undermine an unjust social order. In particular, he wanted to refute the idea that social hierarchies are natural or necessary. If the world has not always been this way, it need not remain this way.
I hope that you, like I, applaud Rousseau’s opposition to monarchy (especially of the ostentatious Bourbon variety). We side with him against social systems that grind the face of the poor. Therefore we may adopt a charitable interpretation of his famous essay. Perhaps Rousseau’s real interest was in political and social change. To bring about that change he proposed his fantastic sociology. He had to overturn the widespread 18th century belief that social hierarchies were built into the nature of things.
Nevertheless, Rousseau’s “state of nature” sociology is false. Though we may applaud his political judgment—the Bourbon monarchy needed to end—we should not base our applause on his sociological theory. Human beings are not born free and equal; we come into this world ignorant, defenseless, and dependent. We cannot live at all, nor can we live anything like a good life, without massive gifts of nurture from other people.
A Second Important Fact
All human beings, almost without exception, are the product of dimorphic sexual reproduction. We all have mothers and fathers. From conception until birth, we were all carried by our mothers. In the typical case, pregnancy lasts about 270 days, during which time our mothers experienced significant physical changes: hormonal changes, “morning sickness,” swelling abdomen, enlarged breasts, fatigue, and childbirth.
In addition to physical changes, since our mothers (every one of them, without exception) grew up in society, they also encountered whatever beliefs their societies had about pregnancy and childbirth. Again, there is a recursive element to sociology here. The sociologist knows that every mother, before she could reach the age of childbearing, was dependent on other people. One item of her dependency was knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth. Older people, mostly older women, taught young women what to expect. Therefore, in almost every case, our mothers believed on good authority that pregnancy presented risks to mothers and their babies. For some women these beliefs created significant anxiety or fear, especially as they approached the sometimes traumatic labor of childbirth.
After birth, the new baby is immediately dependent on other people. Since evolutionary biology has prepared the mother to feed the new baby (hormonal changes during pregnancy enlarged her breasts and prepared them to deliver milk), all cultures have assigned at least some caregiver responsibility to the new mother; in almost every case, the greater part of caregiving work was assigned to the mother. Exceptions to this expectation are few, but worth noting. Some women die in childbirth; their societies must either find someone else to feed the baby or lose that new member of the society. Historically, this is by far the most frequent exception to the rule that mothers should provide care for their infants.
Some women are wealthy or otherwise privileged; as a result some cultures have allowed such powerful women to employ wet-nurses and nannies. Historically speaking, few new mothers had this option, but modern capitalism has created such widespread wealth that for many new mothers the question of whether to breastfeed has become optional. We may generalize that until recently (until 1950, let’s say) the vast majority of mothers in every culture were expected to feed their newborns for some months after birth. Doctors still recommend 6-12 months of breastfeeding for the health of the child, but many contemporary women find this difficult to manage when they return to work after maternity leave.
If a society does not produce enough babies to maintain its population, it dies out. Women must give birth to enough girls to replace all the mothers in a society and enough men to impregnate them. Since dimorphic biology produces males and females in nearly equal proportions, each woman needs to give birth at least twice, on average. But that’s only if all the females survived to reproductive age and had children, which they don’t. Statisticians tell us that in the 21st century the replacement fertility rate is 2.1 children for each woman. In earlier times, in societies with higher rates of infant and childhood mortality, women of childbearing age had to average more births—just to maintain population. The world fertility rate, now less than 2.5 births per woman, was at 5 as recently as 1950. In the 19th century and before, the world fertility rate was more than 7 births per woman. If we assume that the average woman needed to birth seven babies, she would spend 8-10 years of her adult life either pregnant or breast-feeding a pre-toddler (longer if all her children actually lived one year). Until the nineteenth century, for most women, adulthood and childbearing began shortly after she began menstruation. Again, we may note exceptions for women of wealthy or privileged classes, but until modern times in every culture the great majority women were daughters of the poor.
The conclusion we can reach from these biological facts is that in the centuries before industrialism (up to 1800, let’s say) most women spent a significant proportion of their adult years either in pregnancy or giving care to pre-toddlers. Up to this point I have only been referring to women’s caregiving during pregnancy and the child’s first year, but obviously children must receive care from adults for several years after learning to walk. Since biology required that most women spend a great deal of time in caregiving to pre-toddlers, it is not surprising that cultures everywhere extended that responsibility (to three, four, or five years) and generalized caregiving as “women’s work.” In all cultures, women were expected to give care to dependent people other than infants—young children, the sick, the aged, the infirm. In history books, of course, the “physicians” were almost always men. That is to say, some men had the social privilege of inventing and studying medical science. Obviously, such men were the exception rather than the rule. Medical science, like other fields of inquiry, were dominated by men. But since most people were poor, most actual caregiving was women’s work.
A Quick Note About Economics
I started with two biological facts which greatly shape human societies: the fact of human dependency and the fact of dimorphic sexual reproduction. Any theory of sociology must acknowledge these facts.
By now, though, the reader will notice that my argument has at various points dragged in a new fact, or range of facts, about economics. I should make these claims explicit.
Material cultures have varied greatly in human history. That is, people eat different foods, wear clothing made from different materials, build shelters (and buildings for other purposes) out of different things. Once again, great variety may tempt us to focus on the trees rather than the forest. But economically speaking, two great revolutions have determined material culture more than any other factor.
First, the rise of agriculture some five thousand years ago increased societies’ wealth to such a degree that some people were freed from subsistence labor. For all we know, social stratification existed before agriculture, but we do know that with the invention of agriculture some persons were given the privilege of leisure time; other people’s labor provided the privileged persons food, clothing, shelter, and other basic necessities. The privileged classes around the world proceeded to use their leisure to invent writing, mathematics, and learning in general. Including history; it is no surprise that most written histories are mostly the stories of the privileged classes.
The second major economic change came in the late 18th century, the industrial revolution. In the last 250 years, capitalist industry has increased wealth to such a degree that as much as six sevenths of the world’s population no longer lives in absolute poverty. I am not denying the enormous inequalities of wealth around the world and in every country. But a huge change has taken place. For most of human history, most people lived as uneducated peasants, never more than one bad harvest or one bad hunting or fishing season from starvation. Now, the explosion of wealth allows the majority of the world’s children to go to formal schools (education out of the home) for at least a few years, more than a billion people own cars, and childhood diseases have been reduced so much that a fertility rate of less than 2.5 births per woman still increases the world population.
Demographers tell us that it took all of human history up to 1800 for the world population to reach one billion people. By 1960 we reached three billion people. Now we have more than seven billion people, of which only one billion live in the absolute poverty that was the condition of most people for most of history. The wealth explosion of the last 250 years has given billions of people material conditions beyond the dreams of their ancestors.
Many writers warn us that this fabulous economic growth cannot be sustained without causing irreparable harm to the natural environment. So population growth needs to be stopped, they say. For all I know, they are right. My whole point is to draw attention to economic facts of human history that must be acknowledged by sociological theory. The first fact (the agricultural revolution) created privileged classes with the freedom to invent literacy and all that goes with it. The second fact (the industrial revolution) created enough wealth to share literacy and learning with the majority of a vastly increased population.
Caregiver Sociology
Like most philosophical dabblers in sociology, I am a man. Nevertheless, the biological and economic facts drive me to the conclusion that societies can only be rightly understood (the goal of sociology, remember) from woman’s point of view. All societies have identified caregiving as women’s work. Since caregiving is essential to the survival of any possible human society, good theories of sociology ought to focus closely on the caregiving role. Therefore, good sociology ought to focus on women.
Reflect briefly on that claim. We can imagine a prehistorical society without literacy which nevertheless enabled people to work, sing, pray, play, create families, and in many other ways live good lives. Similarly, human beings could live flourishing lives in societies before the invention of medical science, geometry, or any other science. People in some societies flourished even without agriculture. But it is impossible for human beings to live, much less live well, without caregiving. The so-called “woman’s role” is essential to any human society.
Freud famously speculated, in response to his own question—What do women want?—that women suffered from penis envy. Freud is, then, merely one of numberless men who have projected their own insecurities and uncertainties onto women.
Rather than asking what women want, we should ask what women need. More precisely, we should ask what women need from men. Since caregiving is essential to any human society, and since caregiving has been categorized as women’s work, women need men to acknowledge, encourage, and support caregiving. Women are doing essential work, so men ought to empower them.
It is in this light that we can appreciate a remarkable saying of Jesus.
Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?”
“Haven’t you read,” he replied, “that at the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female,’ and said, ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matthew 19:3-6)
Bible scholars tell us there was a real controversy among 1st century Torah teachers. Some said that a man could divorce his wife only for specific offenses while others said a man could divorce his wife for any reason whatever. Notice that both sides believed in the authority of Torah. Notice also the patriarchal setting of the debate; it was a question of when a man could divorce his wife, not the other way round. It’s not hard to find passages in Torah compatible with a patriarchal mindset; the Pharisees found their view of women confirmed in history, law, and poetry.
Jesus also believed in the authority of Torah and other OT scriptures. But when the Pharisees questioned him, he picked out two lines from Genesis and gave them his own peculiar “spin.” Not only should a man not divorce his wife for any and every reason, it was not God’s will that a man should divorce his wife at all. In fact, a man should leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife. This reverses the patriarchal practice of 1st century of the Pharisees. It also breaks the norms of most cultures of history.
It seems that on Jesus’ view, the woman is the center of the family. The man leaves his sociological unit and joins her’s. Jesus’ words are all the more remarkable when we realize they do not describe actual family formation as described in the Torah. Consider familiar Bible stories such as Abraham’s servant procuring a wife for Isaac, Jacob’s labor to buy Leah and Rachel, or the “beauty contest” that made Esther consort to Xerxes. As in most cultures, women were expected to join their husband’s family, contribute their children to that family, and be known as members of that family.
I am not claiming that a sociology that puts women and their needs at the center is right because Jesus said so. My argument says that sociology needs to put women at the center, because caregiving is essential to all human societies and all human societies have bought into the notion that caregiving is women’s work. It is remarkable, though, that of all the voices of the ancient world Jesus is one of a vanishingly small number who saw the truth.
