Everything Is Obvious (31 page)

That the banks and their allies have instead managed to portray themselves as victims of stifling government intervention and political populism run amok is therefore disingenuous, and not only for the obvious reason that the banks benefited from considerable government largess other than direct loans.
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The real reason is philosophical consistency. When times are good, banks wish to be perceived as independent risk-taking entities, entitled to the full fruits of their hard-won labors. But during a crisis they wish to be treated as critical elements in a larger system to which their failure would pose an existential threat. Whether this latter claim is true because they are too big or too interconnected, or for any other reason, is actually not so important. The real point is that either they are libertarians, who should bear the full weight of their own failures as well as their successes, or else they are Rawlsians, paying their dues to the system that takes care of them. They should not be able to switch philosophies at their convenience.

In his recent book
Justice
, the philosopher Michael Sandel makes a similar point, arguing that all questions of fairness and justice have to be adjudicated in light of how dependent we are on each other—most obviously, on our networks of friends, family, colleagues, and classmates, but also on our communities, on our national and ethnic identities, and even
on our distant ancestors. We are proud of what “our” people have accomplished, we protect them against outsiders, and we come to their aid when necessary. We feel that we owe them our loyalty for no reason other than that we are connected to them, and we expect them to reciprocate. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that social networks play a critical role in our lives, connecting us with resources, providing information and support, and facilitating transactions on the basis of mutual trust and assumed respect. So embedded are we in networks of social relations that it would be hard to imagine ourselves outside of them.
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So far, this view seems uncontroversial. Even Margaret Thatcher, who claimed that “there is no such thing as society,” conceded that families mattered as well as individuals. But Sandel argues that the importance of social networks has a counterintuitive consequence for the notion of individual freedom. Whatever we might like to think, we are never entirely free, nor would we want to be. The very ties that give our lives meaning also constrain us, and it is precisely
by
constraining us that they give us meaning. From Sandel’s perspective, it makes no more sense to reason about fairness or justice exclusively from the perspective of individual freedom than it does to reason about what is fair exclusively by analogy with some imaginary state of nature. Neither is an accurate representation of the world in which we actually live. Like it or not, our notions of justice must deal with this tension between the individual and society as a whole. Yet this can be easier said than done. For example, Sandel argues that one ought not to feel proud of one’s heritage as an American without also feeling shame about the country’s history of slavery. Libertarians might argue that it was their ancestors, not them, who carried out such reprehensible deeds and therefore
they have nothing to apologize for. But surely these same people are also proud of their ancestry, and would rather live in this country than in any other. In Sandel’s view, one cannot simply decide at one’s convenience when to identify with one’s ancestors and when to absolve oneself of them. Either you’re a part of that extended community, in which case you must share the costs as well as the benefits, or you’re not, in which case you get neither.

Sandel’s argument that our individual actions are inextricably embedded in networks of social relations has consequences not only for arguments about fairness and justice, but also for morality and virtue. In fact, Sandel argues that one cannot determine what is fair without also evaluating the moral status of competing claims. And that in turn requires us to resolve the moral purpose of social institutions. We cannot decide whether gay marriage is right or just, for example, without first deciding what the point of marriage is. We cannot determine whether a particular university’s admission criteria are fair or unfair until we have first determined what the purpose of a university is. And we cannot decide if the way bankers are compensated is appropriate without first establishing what it is that banking should accomplish for society. In this respect, Sandel’s view harks back to the ancient philosophy of Aristotle, who also believed that questions of justice require reasoning about the purpose of things. Unlike Aristotle, however, Sandel does not espouse a view of purpose that is determined outside of the social system itself—say by divine decree. Rather, purpose is something that the members of a society must decide collectively. Sandel therefore concludes that a just society is not one that seeks to adjudicate disputes between individuals from a morally neutral perspective, but one that facilitates debate about what
the appropriate moral perspective ought to be. As Sandel acknowledges, this is likely to be a messy affair and always a work in progress, but he does not see any way around it.

What’s particularly interesting about Sandel’s arguments—at least to a sociologist—is how sociological they are. Sociologists, for example, have long believed that the meaning of individual action can only be properly understood in the context of interlocking networks of relationships—a concept that is called embeddedness.
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Even more so, Sandel’s claim that the values by which we judge fairness are necessarily the product of society reflects the idea, first advanced by sociologists in the 1960s, that social reality is a construction of society itself—not something that is handed to us by some external world.
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An important implication of Sandel’s argument, therefore, is that the fundamental questions of political philosophy are sociological questions as well.

How are we to answer these questions then? Certainly thinking about them in the way that Sandel does is one approach, and that has generally been the way that sociologists have approached them as well. But relying on unaided intuition to reason through these sorts of questions can also be limiting. It’s fine to argue, as many people have argued recently, that banks whose actions result in systemic risk ought to be held accountable for that risk, say by purchasing “systemic risk” insurance or being required to increase their capital reserves. But without a sound understanding of systemic risk, it is impossible to measure how much systemic risk a particular action creates, and therefore how much of a penalty ought to be imposed for taking it. Likewise, it is one thing to point out that we place too much emphasis on outcomes when evaluating processes, or attribute too much importance to “special people” in determining those outcomes. But it is quite another to come up with better measures of
performance and a better sense of how complex social systems like companies, markets, and societies actually work. As important as it is to think through these issues, in other words, it is also important to do more than simply argue about them. And on this point it is worth asking what, if anything, social science might be able to offer.

When Alexander Pope published his “Essay on Man” in 1732 our understanding of the world was very different from what it is today. Written just decades after Isaac Newton’s masterpiece,
Principia
, had laid out the mathematical principles of planetary motion, Pope’s essay arrived when intellectuals were still wrapping their heads around a concept that must have been staggering at the time—that the laws governing the motion of everyday objects here on Earth were exactly the same laws as those governing the heavenly spheres. In fact, they were still grappling with the idea that physical “laws” of any kind could be written down in terms of mathematical equations, and that these equations could then be used to predict with uncanny precision the future behavior of everything ranging from tomorrow’s high tide to the return of distant comets. It must have been a magical time to be alive when the universe, so long an enigma, seemed suddenly to have been conquered by the mind of a single man. As Pope himself said,

For the next three centuries, the knowledge of mankind would swell inexorably, sweeping before it the mysteries of the world. The results have been impressive. We have theories of the universe that go all the way back to the big bang, and telescopes that peer across galaxies. We have sent space probes out of the solar system and put men on the moon. We have built bombs that can level an entire city, and missiles that can fly through a window. We have measured the earth to great precision and understood its inner workings. We have engineered immense buildings and bridges, and changed the shape of rivers, mountains, even coastlines. We have clocks that can measure time in billionths of a second, and computers that can search through every word ever written in less time than it takes to write just one. In science, it seems, we can make the angels dance on the head of a pin.

It’s pretty obvious that social science has not kept up, but it’s easy to infer the wrong lesson from this observation. I was reminded of this problem recently by a physicist colleague of mine who complained to me that he’d been reading a lot of sociology, and that in his opinion the problem with the discipline was that it hadn’t discovered any laws of human behavior that were anywhere near as general or accurate as those he was accustomed to in physics. Instead, it seemed to him, sociology was just an endless conglomeration of special cases, when someone did something for some reason one time, and someone else did something else for some other reason at another time. As a physicist, he found this lack of lawlike behavior particularly frustrating. After all, it is hard to imagine how any of the remarkable progress in
physics could have occurred in the absence of laws like Newton’s that apply generally across time and space. So integral to the success of science have these laws been, in fact, that they have come to be associated with the very idea of science itself. Surely, he felt, the inability of sociologists to come up with anything remotely comparable meant that social science didn’t really deserve to be thought of as science at all.

As it turns out, this tendency to judge sociology by the standards of physics is an old one, going all the way back to Auguste Comte, the nineteenth-century philosopher who is often credited as the founding father of sociology. Comte imagined that sociology, which he even called social physics, would take its place alongside mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology as one of the six fundamental sciences describing all of reality. Sociology in Comte’s view would be a “total theory” of all human experience, encompassing all the other sciences and extending them to account for cultures, institutions, economies, politics, everything—exactly the kind of general theory that my physicist friend was looking for. Comte never got around to articulating this theory in any detail, but his philosophy of positivism—the idea that social entities and forces can be described and analyzed in the same way as physical entities and forces—set the stage for all the grand theories that followed.

One of the first such theories was proposed shortly after Comte by the philosopher Herbert Spencer, a contemporary of Darwin’s. Spencer advanced the notion that societies could be understood as organisms, where individual humans could be thought of as cells, institutions played the role of organs, and development was driven by some loose analog of natural
selection. It was Spencer, in fact, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Spencer’s specific ideas were quickly rejected as naïve, but his basic philosophical claim that societies are organized the way they are in order to serve some holistic function persisted alongside Comte’s positivism, and informed the thinking of sociologists such as Émile Durkheim, who is still considered one of the giant figures of the discipline.

The apotheosis of grand theorizing, however, didn’t arrive until the mid-twentieth century in the work of Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons, who advanced a brand of theory that became known as structural functionalism. According to Parsons, social institutions were made up of networks of interlocking roles, which in turn were played by individuals who were motivated by rational ends. At the same time, however, individual action was constrained by social norms, laws, and other mechanisms of control that were encoded in the institutions of which the individuals were a part.
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By exhaustively classifying all the various functions that different sorts of behavior could satisfy, along with the different social and cultural structures in which they took place, Parsons attempted nothing less than to describe all of society. It was a grand edifice indeed, and Parsons’s name is generally listed among the great social theorists of the ages. But as with Spencer and Comte before him, the ink was scarcely dry on Parsons’s “general theory” before the critics tore it apart: it said little more than that “people do things because they want to,” it was not really a theory at all, but just a “set of concepts and definitions,” and it was so complicated that nobody could understand it.
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Looking back on the wreckage of Parsons’s theory some years later, Robert Merton—the sociologist whose work on the Matthew Effect I discussed in the previous chapter—concluded
that social theorists had been too quick to try to emulate the theoretical successes of their physicist colleagues. It wasn’t that Merton didn’t sympathize with the envy that physicists could inspire in others. As he put it, “Many sociologists take the achievements of physics as the standard for self-appraisal. They want to compare biceps with their bigger brothers. They, too, want to
count
. And when it becomes evident that they neither have the rugged physique nor pack the murderous wallop of their big brothers, some sociologists despair. They begin to ask: is a science of society really possible unless we institute a total system of sociology?” Although sympathetic, however, Merton cautioned that “this perspective ignores the fact that between twentieth century physics and twentieth century sociology stand billions of hours of sustained, disciplined, and cumulative research.” In physics, it was only after Copernicus and Brahe and a host of others had conducted centuries’ worth of painstaking observations that astronomers like Kepler sought out mathematical regularities that could account for the data they had inherited. And
only then
was a singular genius like Newton in a position to reduce these regularities to bona fide laws. By contrast, the social theorists Merton was describing had gone about it the other way around, proposing whole systems of thought at the outset and only then worrying about what it was that they needed to measure.
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“Perhaps,” Merton lamented, “sociology is not yet ready for its Einstein because it has not yet found its Kepler—to say nothing of its Newton, Laplace, Gibbs, Maxwell, or Planck.”
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