on VDay and society and whatnot

Well, Valentine's Day was tougher than I expected. I mostly had myself to blame, for reasons I won't go into here. But being somewhat newly single on Valentine's Day is fairly depressing enough on its own. I won't whine about it (apparently, a lot of people were). As you might have guessed from my being a Christmas humbug (due to its economic deadweight losses), I'm pretty cynical about almost all holidays as being commercialist or related to religions I don't believe in or both. Valentine's Day is no different. In case you haven't seen it, danah boyd has an excellent discussion of it within her commentary on Facebook's new digital gifts:

The gifting feature is fantastically times to align with a holiday built around status: Valentine's Day. Valentine's Day is all about pronouncing your relationship to loved ones (and those you obsess over) in the witness of others. Remember those miniature cards in elementary school? Or the carnations in high school? Listening to the radio, you'd think Valentine's Day was a contest. Who can get the most flowers? The fanciest dinner? This holiday should make most people want to crawl in bed and eat bon-bons while sobbing over sappy movies. But it works. It feeds on people's desire to be validated and shown as worthy to the people around them, even at the expense of others. It is a holiday built purely on status (under the guise of "love"). You look good when others love you (and the more the merrier).

Oh, that cruel status hierarchy (think Ralph Wiggum of The Simpson's who doesn't get any cards and so Lisa feels sorry for him and gives him one with a train that says "I Ch-ch-ch-oose you!"). This is why all us single people feel crappy on this holiday. We're supposed to. It's all about reminding us that we are lower on the hierarchy from those who have found romantic love.

Yes, the number of single people probably greatly outnumber the number of happily coupled people. So that would make the holiday a bad thing if you want to value the holiday's existence based on its overall utility to society. But as discussed in some of the reading for last night's ECON205B class, utilitarianism might not be the way to go. And I bet Christmas might also fall into that boat of making society worse off overall. Even if you count the fact that you get to spend it with your loved ones, compare it to the situation where each family would get the comparable amount of extra vacation days and then could arrange to meet during a part of the year other than Christmas (say, a significant date they want to commemorate with more personal meaning to them).  Families would still see each other as often, only now they wouldn't have to face the crowds. And for what might be an even bigger bonus, families that didn't actually want to see each other wouldn't! Of course, this also means that the holiday loses the universal quality, but I dunno whether or not that's a plus or minus, given the yearly uproar about the "War on Christmas" (geez, I guess I just fired a shot, and it's not even Christmas).

Anyway, back to Valentine's Day. Yeah, we might be better off without it. But that could be said for a lot of holidays. And really, it's not going anywhere. A sociologist once commented, "Sociologists recognize that status hierarchies are pretty common in any kind of social setting - no matter what you do to try and stop it. If there's anything 'natural' about social interaction, it is the tendency for humans to create status distinctions." So you might have as much luck getting rid of the status goods and conspicuous consumption that economist Thorstein Veblen was always whining about. It's possible that we might be better off without hierarchies, but regardless, there's probably something wired into humans to want them (an interesting question for evolutionary psychology, methinks). Or perhaps it's societal programming that's outlived its purpose.

Which brings up another point I've been meaning to make for a while in my 205B class (canceled last night -- thus my writing all this). We've been reading a lot of material which we're supposed to discuss in class (although we've yet to actually do this), and it's included two pieces by Murray Rothbard, an anarcho-capitalist. In both pieces, he makes the rather bold claim that there is no such thing as society -- but then fails to back this huge assumption.

It's an assumption that the Austrian School shares (although I don't yet understand how key it is), which is a major reason I'm a little leery about it. Because I firmly believe that society exists and can be perceived due to its emergent properties. I learned about emergence from my Anthropology Senior Seminar class with Chuck Darrah where he assigns Roger Trigg's Understanding Social Science. Emergence basically means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For example, atoms behave in a certain fashion, and this behavior can be described by our findings within the science of physics. However, when you combine atoms, you get molecules, which behave so differently that we needed another science, chemistry, to study it. Likewise, molecules combine to form DNA and organs and organisms, all of which require biology. And then beings with brains brings up psychology.

And then a funny thing happens. When you have groups of people, you get phenomena and behavior so completely unpredictable from individual psychology that this spawns a whole host of sciences. And these are the social sciences (forgive me if I leave your favorite one out, I'm riffing here): sociology, anthropology, political science, the behavioral sciences, history, and... of course... economics. All of which study how people and groups of people interact. If society didn't exist, all of these sciences would be merely subfields within psychology.

And as you might have noticed, groups of people behave differently from individual people. Network effects are very powerful. Think Tipping Point, which discussed the sociological mechanisms that result in things like blockbuster hits, fads, and memes. A similar idea applied to economics resulted in the excellent book Butterfly Economics by Paul Ormerod (actually, I think he wrote it before Tipping Point). People normally evaluate information to make decisions, as economics assumes. However, when they see a lot of other people making a choice, they are very apt to save the time of the analysis and go along with the crowd. Thus, the tech bubble. Thus, why Enron got away with what it did for so long. Everybody trusted everybody else's judgment. Mob psychology. Furthermore, people's actions are strongly affected by what is expected of them (think Stanford Prison Experiment). And these phenomena are also behind another topic that I mean to return to in the future, why corporations do not behave as moral beings. Again, all due to society having emergent properties.

Without emergence, we also wouldn't have that wonderful tool of the free market. A shining example of spontaneous order (along with the invention of money). A phenomena that would be impossible to predict by merely studying psychology and then "summing the effects," as Rothbard would probably have us do. And heck, the Austrian School was influenced heavily by Max Weber - a German sociologist. Okay, he was a sociologist who also believed there was no such thing as society (who do you think they got it from?), but hell, he also believed that bureaucracy was the most powerful and efficient organization ever devised by humanity (he could've learned a lot from the film Brazil). You take the good ideas, and ignore the bad ones.

Because I think you can plainly see that groups are not merely the sums of individuals. Sociologist Georg Simmel noted that you see a big difference when you add a third person to a pair of other people. When you have just two people engaging each other in conversation, and there's a fairly regular pattern of back-and-forth. When you add a third, a host of possible dynamics emerge. The new person can instigate conflict between the other two, or they can mediate issues instead. They can play the two off each other for their own advantage. Or the two may ally against the third. Or compete with each other for their approval.

A most vivid example is, say, going out to lunch with your significant other (whoops, for you singles, didn't mean to twist the knife that Valentine's Day already stabbbed you with). Only, the two of you are not alone, but there is also a friend of theirs that you dislike, or who doesn't like you. Or maybe just somebody who's shy and only opens up in the presence of their trusted friend. With your significant other there, all three of you are probably able to interact politely, or even in friendly fashion. Once they, say, leave for the restroom, a very different dynamic emerges. Perhaps open conflict, perhaps just tension, or maybe just an uncomfortable silence. But it's a dynamic that is very different, and it probably mostly evaporates when your significant other returns.

Another interesting phenomenon is the critical mass point of a party. Even without adding any additional alcohol, the arrival of just the right person (say, someone who loves being the life of the party) can trigger very large effects that spread well past the people that the person is in conversation with. Furthermore, conversations can affect other independent conversations in subtle ways, both in subject matter and rhythm. Emergent properties at work. To complicate things further, individuals influence the whole which influence the individual, resulting in feedback loops.

Rothbard also quotes Frank Chodorov:

The concept of Society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that Society disappears when the component parts disperse; as in the case of a "ghost town" or of a civilization we learn about by the artifacts they left behind. When the individuals disappear so does the whole. The whole has no separate existence.

But I would disagree with this as well. The ability to separate the whole into its component parts does not mean the whole did not exist. Take a person's atoms apart, and the person ceases to exist. This proves nothing other than that the whole cannot exist without its parts.

Furthermore, social institutions leave imprints upon generations and generations of people, long after the original sources have passed away. Society has to be more than just a sum of individuals. Indeed, this was the reason that Veblen saw economics as an evolutionary science. Darwin's evolution doesn't need biological organisms. It just requires imperfect replication where all the copies do not have an equal chance of survival. Social institutions fit that bill perfectly, surviving long after the original creators have since moved on.

And Valentine's Day is one example.