Society is a reality sui generis;
it has its own characteristics which one does not find,
or which one does not find in the same form,
in the rest of the universe.
sui generis
Mankind has lived 4,110,000 years, we will assume, as a bipedal creature. One hundred thousand years ago, Homo sapiens started to emigrate out of Africa. Serious culture came with agriculture some 10,000 years ago.
If we take the latest 10,000 years to be one millimeter, we left Africa at one centimeter, and rose on the hind legs forty centimeter ago.
Now comes Durkheim who says that the latest millimeter is completely different from the first 41 centimeters. In that, from an evolutionary point of view, extremely short time period, he says a new organism has come to exist, different from all other species that has existed before.
What might we call it, with a nice Linnean Latin name? Perhaps
Organismus monotheisticus.
To follow the advice from Delphi, to get to know ourselves, the scientific literature is full of relevant books and articles. Sociobiologists have deeply studied the social insects. Primatologists compare the big apes who are very close to us in their DNA-inheritance. Anthropologists try to draw conclusions from what we not long ago called "savages", and now, when we know there are no differences between us, discuss as "primitive tribes".
If Durkheim is right, it is doubtful if all these highly popular studies are of any great help in understanding what has happened in the latest ten millennia and the present predicament of mankind.
If so, we might need a new subject, concentrating upon this new organism. Let me suggest the name of "zoopolitology". It comes close to Aristotle's zoon politicon. "Zoo" is Greek not only for animals. It simply means "life" as well. "Polis" is still the city, now extended into nation and similar units. Zoopolitology would thus be the study of the living human society as a biological organism sui generis.
Durkheim went too far in his desire to understand this new animal. He was a monotheist as far as sociology was concerned. His rule was that no biological explanation was ever to be admitted if a sociological was available. To understand sociological repetitions of similar behavior, however, for instance, violence and warfare, it is surely wise also to study biology. This is especially true now, when the Human Genome Project is showing us how almost all physical and mental aspects of man's life have a biological basis.
What is more, as we pointed out in reference to Socrates above, there is in
the physical sciences "no dissent from the proposition that the properties of large objects are consequences of the properties of the atoms of which they consist". The Organismus monotheisticus is surely formed of the atoms of small men and women.
What is common to all higher organisms in evolution? That might be a good question to start with in understanding zoopolitology. The obvious answers are at least two: striving for reproductive success and the evolutionary struggle. What is specific for the new organism is that it has slowly transformed a biological well-known arms race between predators and ungulates, established since sixty million years ago, into an infinitely faster cultural arms race within its own species.
Each cultural step can be explained with the help of sociology. But that these cultural steps have continued for ten millennia, similar to what has happened for sixty million years before, surely demands a biological explanation.
Zoopolitology, wanting to understand the Organismus monotheisticus, must surely combine both biology and social studies.
This is the next step to be taken in our Delphic striving to know ourselves. |