Fundamentally, humans have been exploring the individual’s relationship to the external world for millennia. Through scientific, philosophical and religious means, we have questioned the place of homo sapiens within the animal kingdom, evaluated the impact of communities on the individual and searched for how The Truth imprints our souls. This rich history of the social sciences marks the exploration of the physical at its highest order. However, these heuristics probe a realm as chaotic and complex as its subjects, people.
So what is the fatal flaw of the modern social sciences? It is not the ideals set by researchers as they valiantly attempt to understand and reconcile the human condition. In many cases, they have witnessed true evils within the world they hope to understand before remedying in acts of selfless devotion. Rather, the err lies in their insistence on equivocating social norms with social rules.
Rules are the forces that hold true for the universe and are often expressed as theorems and laws. These are the steadfast bonds of nature that pre-exist time (as far as we know). Examples of rules consist of phenomena such as gravity, electronegativity, and evolution.
Humans are not constrained by rules. Free will manifests itself in a species surrounded by a deterministic environment. No doubt a culture, idea or conversation can shape an individual, but the end result does not necessitate a change within their personhood. Those in the social sciences focus on social trends, or norms, attributed to the exposure of such forces and aim to measure them precisely.
It is important to note that the previous claim does not assert that humans do not produce rules or are unaffected by rules. The greatest examples of artificial rules lie within laws, or the rules an empowered group dictates to maintain societal order. Within the United States, this group consists representatives empowered by constituents within their jurisdictions; constituents who, on average, believe the elected individual will best represent their ideals in the maintenance of the state. If an American citizen is found guilty of breaking a law, they are punished in some way. In some cases, the convicted individual is imprisoned, totally ostracized and barred from participating in general society.
Breaking the law is a clear example of how a societal force can fail to bend the individual. If a clearly defined law does not determine human behavior, then how can an abstract social force such as culture? In both cases, general social trends are clearly evident, (e.g. most American citizens are not car-thieves; music listened in childhood often influences music preference in adulthood), but neither define the person. That is of their free will to decide.
Why is there an insistence on equating norms and rules? Possible answers may lie within the simplicity of unifying the two which stems from a faulty application of Occam’s Razor, the principle that simpler solutions are more likely to be correct than complex ones. This strategy is key within the physical and natural sciences when all relevant factors are acknowledged (e.g. if a chemist were to note the mixing of two reactants in a controlled environment resulted in the same solution 99% of the time, they would be valid in claiming that the reaction reliably produced the solution). On the other-hand, a single culture that consistently produces characteristics within a population cannot be expected to reliably determine the character of an individual. There are too many factors, both external and internal, to be anything other than a norm to be expected.
So how ought social scientists treat their work? Instead of relying on the steadfast results found within other sciences, sociologists must come to terms with their inability to use their results to define the individual. They should embrace one’s complexity while recognizing how past experiences can contribute to a present state. They should see the person, not the culture they come from.
