The Saving Lie: Truth and Method in the Social Sciences

Chapter 4. Natural Systems and Moral Systems

Chapter 4 Natural Systems and Moral Systems When I find myselfin the company ofscientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full ofdukes. -W H. Auden, "The Poet and the City" General Equilibrium Theory Herbert Simon's dry comment on his fellow economists (Chapter l's epigraph) contains a succinct description of their "beautiful theory": "general equilibrium theory, with utility-maximization as a driving mechanism."I Few social anthropologists subscribed openly to the second of these god-terms, utility maximization, or made it the founding assumption of their analyses. The reason is obvious. Some of the assumptions on which it rests-what Robbins identified as "so much the stuff of our everyday experience that they have only to be stated to be recognized as obvious"-are not always the stuff of everyday experience that anthropologists noticed in other cultures, particularly those labeled primitive. When they wrote about the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth in primitive or peasant societies they often described conduct that is beyond the reach of the beautiful theory. A chicken sacrificed to an irascible deity in order to safeguard the crop in a rice field in Bisipara is, from a standard rational maximizer's point of view, at best procedurally rational, certainly not instrumentally so: it is a chicken wasted, a resource that might have been more profitably invested elsewhere.2 1. One should take a moment, first to savor the unsurpassable impersonality of these words, and then to recall that the modal interpretation ofSimon's "driving mechanism" had been described by Keynes, a generation earlier, as "the most distasteful of human qualities ... one ofthose semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease." 2. Standard is intended to exclude proponents of catchall definitions of utility. The ethnographic reference is to Bailey 1994. 68 Morality People who do that, Friedman would have said, will not stay long in business, and no doubt he would have thought the same about the relatively vast sums Bisipara people spent on weddings, funerals, and other ritual occasions. In other words, the gross homogenizing involved in the economist's concept utility violates anthropology's prime directive, which is to find out, empirically, how people construe their world, precisely reversing Friedman's "random chance or whatnot" dismissal of businessmen's thoughts and calculations. Or, to put it another way, the anthropologist 's task would be to take apart the term utility, as it applies in places like Bisipara, and identify its many and diverse manifestations. Utility maximization is not a presupposition on which anthropologists theorize , but a problem they investigate. It is their business to unpack expected utility and discover what kinds of utility-moral as well as material payoffs-are being expected. That procedure renders the beautiful theory intractable, but it does provide a more comprehensive representation of what actually goes on in the minds of people in Bisipara than one could get by deduction from a standardized profitmaximizing assumption. The other and more comprehensive god-term, general equilibrium theory, made a better showing in social anthropology. For about twentyfive years, ending in the late fifties, structural functionalism was in vogue, and in that time general equilibrium theory (in a perfecdy nontractable version) came near to having the directive status in social anthropology that it had among neoclassical economists. In this chapter I will discuss the different interpretations put on equilibrium theory at that time, and I will show the direction in which the discipline was pointed when the argument went offthe boil and structural functionalism went out offashion. Structural Functionalism The definition of equilibrium in neoclassical economics is precise: an economy is in equilibrium when, for every good that enters the market , demand and supply are equal. Clearly this is not a state of affairs that ever existed anywhere; rather it is a model that makes it possible to think about how prices are set and how decisions are made about the production or consumption of goods. Equilibrium deals in tendencies ; it implies movement around a position rather than the position itself. When the thermostat is set at seventy degrees Fahrenheit, that figure is notional; the room's actual temperature fluctuates a few degrees above and below it. Equilibrium, in short, is not a physical ac- Natural Systems and Moral Systems 69 tuality, but a mental thing, an imagined norm, sometimes...