From underground to the cloud: Understanding social outcomes

An article in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 24-25, 2011, p. A15) titled, "From Phoenecia to Hayek to the Cloud," the author, Matt Ridley shared his thoughts regarding how cooperation is essential for human development  He asserts trading, exchange and interacting with a large group leads to a "group mind" and results in that much more brainpower contributing to prosperity. Networked intelligence is significantly more powerful than individual intelligence. In fact, one of the insights that I gleaned from over 20 years of teaching graduate courses at a small New England college is that learning is a social process.

This has significant cultural implications. For the societies where individualism, rather than cooperation, is the cultural ethos there is a resulting resource disparity. This was often combined in pre-industrial European societies with the idea of the divine right of kings. In industrial European societies the rationalization and justification of inequality is grounded in the philosophy of meritocracy. In both cases the social theories were used to explain a form of social organization that is socially assigned, exclusive and unearned and requires the many to defer to few while being exploited.

Increasingly American society has adopted and advocated individualism in an attempt to explain and sustain exploitative relationships that require, again, the many to defer to the few. The idea that economic disparity contributes to social dysfunction is highlighted in Wilkinson and Pickett (2010). In their study, entitled The Spirit Level, they look at societies and correlate economic inequality and social outcomes. It becomes clear that the greater the inequality the more dysfunctional the society.

In American society there is a level of inequality structured into the political economy. With people of African descent relegated to a position where they are denied opportunity based on the irrational justification that once was used to justify the rights of kings, and the social theory of meritocracy, that upholds contemporary power and privilege. Combined with the discredited and bankrupt concept of 'race' it ensures that society as a whole will suffer due to the structural inequality in the political economy as a result. It is ironic and tragic that the dehumanization of the African personality in the European imagination continues to work against the interests of its major proponents and to the advantage of the economic elite just as in the days of Bacon's Rebellion.

Ridley's basic premise that cooperation is superior to individualism is reflected in Wilkinson and Pickett's conclusions about inequality. I am suggesting that inequality, individualism and meritocracy are all culturally consistent with ideologies that justify and rationalize the existing social order. The things that many people do not take into account is that the social conceptual superstructure is built on an a priori conceptual infrastructure that when accepted inevitably leads to the preordained conclusions. Everyone is hurt when the misinformation of polygenesis is accepted as fact and the disinformation regarding social reality based on it, called race, is used to explain and try to understand our human experience. We can't make sense out of nonsense.