A half-century ago, I encountered the phrase that “the difference within a race is greater than the difference between races.”  Experiences since then have tended to support that view – particularly in the field of genetics.  Twenty-three and me assures me that a bit over 2% of my genome is due to ancestral Neanderthals – typical of folks with northern European ancestry, and non-existent in the sub-Saharan folks.

The fossil record in Australia and New Guinea was primed and ready to show the Denisovan component as the genetic record was decoded from a finger bone.  That, plus the Neanderthal remains and tools on a couple of Mediterranean islands show that mankind was going to sea long before the species became H.sapiens sapiens. 

I’m a sociologist – my training is to look at the differences between people being cultural, a result of learned behavior rather than biological.  Color seems one of the least significant differences – we’re products of our upbringing, our culture, our education systems.  Still, we seem to be moving into an era where we will be noticing biology’s effects on human behavior as well as cultural and social influences.

The geneticist folks have it figured that blue eyes showed up somewhere around 10,000 years ago – I figure that actually means the trait showed up and reproduced enough that blue eyes are fairly common today.  Heaven only knows how many traits showed up, were unsuccessful in the mating game, and disappeared.  Light skin color (more or less white) shows up about 6 or 7,000 years ago – whether in Europe or East Asia.  This is 21st Century data – unknown when I started my studies.

Sociobiology (E. O. Wilson) is a field of biology that looks to explain human behavior in terms of genetics and evolution.  The Wikipedia entry says “Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to evolutionary anthropology, human behavioral ecology, evolutionary psychology, and sociology.”  My training is in cultural ecology and sociology, so I am more a student in my reading here – though a student with training in research methodology.  Suffice to say, the concept has face validity.  On the other hand, so does examining behavior as I’ve learned half a century back.  I suspect I have to be cautious in which premises I accept and reject.

Wiki’s entry “Studies of human behavior genetics have generally found behavioral traits such as creativity, extroversion, aggressiveness, and IQ have high heritability. The researchers who carry out those studies are careful to point out that heritability does not constrain the influence that environmental or cultural factors may have on those traits.” seems to support Murray’s observations in Human Diversity The Biology of Gender, Race And Class.

At the beginning of Ch. 14, Murray writes: “I focus on the genomics revolution in this chapter because it will have broader direct efforts on social science than will developments in neuroscience.  To do quantitative neuroscience research, you need to be a neuroscientist and have access to extremely expensive equipment such as MRI machines.  The results of the research will inform a variety of social science questions, but the work won’t be done by social scientists.  In contrast, the products of the genomics revolution, especially polygenic scores, will be usable by social scientists with no training in genomics by the end of the 2020s in the same way that IQ scores are used by social scientists with no training in creating IQ tests.”

He cites Plomin as he explains “Clinical psychology will move away from diagnoses and toward dimensions.  One of the revelations of recent research is that polygenic scores are normally distributed, thereby demonstrating that genetic risk for psychological problems is continuous.  There is no gene that moves a person from normal to psychologically disordered.  In fact, the words “risk” and “disorder” no longer have the same meanings they once did.”

Murray cites three conclusions (p.294):

1. Human beings can be biologically classified into groups by sex and by ancestral population.  Like most biological classifications, these groups have fuzzy edges.  This complicates things analytically, but no more than that.
2. Many phenotypic differences in personality, abilities, and social behavior that we observe between the sexes, among ancestral populations, and among social classes have a biological component.
3. Growing knowledge about human diversity will inevitably shape the future of social sciences.

It’s been a great time for a sociologist.  I’ve been able to stand on the shoulders of giants and see further because of their research, and the next generation, with tools unimagined when I began, will move my chosen science further from the methodologies that granted doctorates and professional powers to folks who developed classification criteria by consensus.

Max Weber developed most of the theory on bureaucracy – he viewed it as a rational method to improve efficiency . . . and in many ways, he was correct.   Still, it was Max who described the final evolution of bureaucracy: “It is horrible to think that the world could one day be filled with nothing but those little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones – a state of affairs which is to be seen once more, as in the Egyptian records, playing an ever-increasing part in the spirit of our present administrative system, and especially of its offspring, the students. This passion for bureaucracy … is enough to drive one to despair. It is as if in politics … we were deliberately to become men who need “order” and nothing but order, become nervous and cowardly if for one moment this order wavers, and helpless if they are torn away from their total incorporation in it. That the world should know no men but these: it is such an evolution that we are already caught up, and the great question is, therefore, not how we can promote and hasten it, but what can we oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parceling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”

As I started reading social theory, I got hung up on Weber – a conflict theorist who was accused of arguing with the ghost of Karl Marx (and Karl’s is not a bad ghost for the sake of argument) who favored the rationality of the bureaucracy, yet recognized the horror it could inflict.

A half century after Max Weber’s widow put his work into print, Jerry Pournelle produced The Iron Law of Bureaucracy: “In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.”  Unfortunately, my experience with bureaucracy has tended to support Dr. Pournelle’s observation.

Current applications of Weber’s approach to bureaucracies and management can be seen at: https://harappa.education/harappa-diaries/max-weber-theory-of-bureaucracy/ and it is probably easier than reading the original Max.  

Still, if we look at the Iron Law of Bureaucracy in terms of local government and services, we can see how it works.  Seventy-five years ago, Lincoln Electric began with people – possibly imperfect people – who believed in bringing electricity to their part of rural America.  It wasn’t just a job, it was a mission.  Just fifteen years later those same believers brought telephones to rural people.  It was a mission.  InterBel developed one more mission – bringing the internet to our rural area, and that cooperative maintains at least some of the mission orientation.  Over at Lincoln Electric, the employee and board focus is more on maintaining the bureaucracy, with the original goals outdated and forgotten – despite the number of neighbors who live off the grid.  It’s a natural bureaucratic tendency – Pournelle’s Iron Law

If we look at the public school system, we see where the local school board has been largely replaced by the professional bureaucrats housed in the Office of Public Instruction.  I have a feeling that there is a sub-species of teacher that lusts after a bureaucratic post.  The old joke, when school boards had more power, went “Be kind to your D students – before you retire, you’ll be working for them.”

It’s not the only joke that suggests the educational bureaucrats – I think it was George Bernard Shaw who wrote “Those who can do.  Those who can’t, teach.”  It didn’t take long for the addition: “Those who can’t teach, teach teachers.”  A while later the harsh phrase came “Those who can’t teach teachers administrate.”  Somewhere in these jests is hidden the Office of Public Instruction.

The Economic Research Service shows that Lincoln County’s economy is government dependent.  I suspect that means we have a lot of bureaucrats.                      

Critical theory is a form of sociological theory.  It’s not my chosen theory – I’m pretty much a positivist, the kind of guy who likes numbers to support his hypothesis.  The basic premise of critical theory is that it isn’t enough to research dispassionately, the researcher must work to change society. 

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.  Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

My goal has been to describe what I studied, possibly to infer causality when I could, but not to change the world.  I have worked with people who want to change the social institutions they study – but despite whatever intellectual arrogance I have, I’m not so confident that my way is the best way for everyone.  I guess that engaging in critical theory just takes more confidence and ego than I have.

There are aspects of critical theory that I accept – Horkheimer wrote of liberating people “from the circumstances that enslave them.”  Critical theory looks at ideology as causing the problems that call for liberation.  I’m not a fan of any particular ideology – I believe that scientific method offers the best way to study the world around me.  I believe I can learn from my students, and I have.  But even the Special Services motto – de oppresso libre – fits in with critical theory.  It’s not a bad approach – it just isn’t the one that best fits me.

Feminism is critical theory – it’s just over a century ago that the 19th amendment gave women the right to vote.  My grandmother would have been past 30 before that happened.  In Marx’ words, “the purpose is to change it.”  I’m not particularly convinced that Karl Marx was much of a feminist – but I can see where my preferred methodology of looking for numbers didn’t provide such solid answers.  Leaving women as second-class citizens was simply wrong – any man who has raised a daughter knows that.  If you look at the war between the states – the historical record pretty much implies that Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson both recognized the wrongs of slavery, yet fought for a system, an ideology if you like, that wanted to perpetuate the institution.   I’m not a critical theorist – but there are aspects to critical theory that I cannot reject – despite the fact that the numbers aren’t there.

Pablo Freiere in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed brought critical theory into teaching – traditionally, teaching is done with the teacher front and center, treated as the authority.  Pablo thought that there were times when the teacher should learn from the students – and I have learned a lot from mine. 

Critical theory starts with the assumption that systems produce an unsatisfactory quality of life, and that the masses are the victims of oppression.  If the masses are happy, it’s because the system has deluded them.  The masses are assumed to be the helpless victims of the system.  The elite are viewed as so powerful that they are responsible for all the social problems. 

Power structures are seen as systems of control.  The dominant ideology is seen as causing all social problems (I can’t really tell how critical theory is distinct from an ideology – it seems to have the same characteristics.

If I look at critical race theory, it assumes that racism is normal and needs to be called out, to be noticed.  As I commented earlier –  if I can’t use numbers, I’m not comfortable using the theory.  I’m not really sure how this theory applies on other continents.  I do believe I could find data to test the theory in the US – taking South Dakota, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Montana data regarding American Indian/Police encounters and contrasting the Black American/Police encounters in other parts of the nation (in Montana, for example, American Indians are a higher percentage of the population than Blacks are in California – the data that can test the theory exists.