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CSBS 310 2nd Assignment in reading and understanding social theory.
Questions to explore after reading “Reductionism, When Are the Answers
Too Easy?”
These questions are all based on materials in this essay. Don’t give routine or perfunctory answers. Search you own experience, and make sure you base your answers on that. Even when I ask you to explain something in the text, use your own words and thoughts.
These questions are meant to exercise your skill and imagination in reading social science theory, and analyzing social processes. Real reading of real writing is not easy; it takes practice. Social analysis, likewise, is not in your genetic code, and certainly not available from mainstream journalists or politicians: that’ll be the day. No, it has to be learned, and learned from sources outside of what passes for “the mainstream.”
Just answer the each question in two or more paragraphs, but each time you make a new point, make a new paragraph, as many as ittakes.
Short paragraphs are good. Punchy.
Due Tuesday, October 14, both night and day classes.
1. Is “theory” a difficult term for you? In what contexts (where and from whom) have you heard the term before now? How about outside of class? What was it used to mean there? How is/was it often misused? What’s wrong with saying, “Oh, that’s just a theory”? What does Strange say it means? What does he say is important about theory in the first two paragraphs?
2. Have you heard of ADHD (or ADD) before now? Where and in what context? How were its causes explained to you, or how did you imagine it could be explained? (If you have never heard of it before, say so, and move on to the next Q.)
3. Answer the question at the end of section I about your first critical reaction to the chemical- genetic explanation of ADHD given so far. How does it (the theory/explanation) of ADHD sound to you at this point? Be frank. What other human actions (complex behaviors or traits) have you heard described as having genetic, or hormonal, or biological causes (make a list)?
(The remaining questions, but especially 4, 5, 7, 8, and 10, demand a little more detail, as well as more soul-searching.)
4. a) What are the possible shortcomings stated here (but translate into you own words) with the chemical-genetic explanation of Isabelle’s ADHD? b) What can be said to be missing from the chemical-genetic explanation/theory? c) What is meant by “blaming the victim”? Do you feel the chemical/genetic theory does this to Isabelle? How so, or how not? What is your reaction to the other examples mentioned here of blaming the victim? Do they?
5. a) What is Gabor Mate’s alternative explanation for the problems of children like Isabelle?
b) Show how Mate’s theory/explanation can be applied to Isabelle’s specific case (in other words, translate his general theory into what we know about Isabelle’s social context (meaning her relation to other people and groups, and the history of those relations.) c) Give some features, or processes at work in the social world (social context) in which Isabelle’s parents and relatives operate which might create pressures and stresses on them, pressures that are easily communicated to children. So should we put all blame on the parents?
6. What is your own list of the most pressing problems of our time (my list is on page 18)?
Why do these (sometimes ponderous sounding) issues matter?
7. Throughout this essay (especially section V and VI), a number of other issues or problems are referred to (like the housing bubble, schizophrenia, etc. etc.) which could be explained either reductionistically, or more holistically (by social context.) a) Pick any one of these issues, or one of your own. Explain what the issue or problem is. Show what an explanation that reduces the answer to a biological factor, or to some form of biological determinism, would look like.
b) Where would you look for a more holistic explanation?
8. a) Pick one other issue or problem that is often explained not by something biological this time, but by putting all the weight of explanation on the individual, or to individual or group mental characteristics (or to some other part of a larger social whole, like those shown in the circles just before page 9. What issue have you chosen? b) What would, or does, a more reductionistic explanation look like? What part of what whole is being used to explain something? What is missing from such an explanation? What would a more holistic explanation look like and include? c) What is wrong with explaining our huge wealth gaps in the US by “greed,” or with explaining Iran’s governmental actions by religion (see especially pages 12, 13, and 14)?
9. a) How would you explain to someone else, another college student say, what reductionism means? b) What makes some forms of reductionist explanation more extreme (more heavily reductionistic) than others? c) Looking at the two-sided, one page handout by Neville, “Neuroscience exposes..” and “Race Gap..”, how would you argue that “genes are not destiny.” Why aren’t they? e) What accounts for gaps in test scores between blacks and whites? What would have to happen in order to erase (or reverse) these gaps?
10. a) What makes reductionist (and “human nature”) theories/explanations so hard to resist? How does our cultural/historical emphasis on machines play into this fatal attraction? b) What does this essay suggest is wrong with (or suspect about) “expertise,” and with reliance on our beloved technical (or technological) solutions to current pressing human problems?
11. a) How might the recent dramatic rise in the incidence of ADHD, as well as other childhood personality or developmental disorders be explained? (Remember, slow to change factors like DNA or psychological properties can’t explain more rapid changes in behavior or diagnoses.) Would your explanation be in some degree holistic? How so? What contexts, or social units would you include to explain the rise?
12. In the Neville “Neuroscience exposes..” article, it is theorized that poverty affects things like memory, language skills, and I.Q. scores. a) By what processes do you think this might happen? Be specific. b) Can cognitive (or brain) function be improved after birth, and after environmental damage has been done? How?
Reductionism: When Are the Answers Too Simple?
Frederick Strange
Theory is a word for the different ways we explain how the world works. We can hardly resist the urge to fashion explanations for whatever troubles, surprises, or resists our understanding. But different ways of explaining and understanding things—theories—are not equal. Nor are they emotionally neutral. Some theories flatter us, and give us a sense of release. Usually, this is because they either offer a “quick fix,” or suggest nothing can be done to change the outcome. Either way, they let us off the hook. Another mode of explanation (theorizing) enlarges and complicates. It draws us into a search whose outcome seems uncertain, if not unsettling; it can shake our sense of complacency. For that very reason, such an alternative model of thinking opens up fresh questions and unsuspected relationships.
Critical thinking is about being able to tell the difference between these two styles of engaging the world. And it’s about caring. Perhaps feeling that such differences matter is what is most important. Let me try an example.
I. Explaining Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
Isabelle is just eight years old, but she has a problem. Or perhaps others have a problem with her. On acquaintance you would probably find her lively, smart, a bit of a charmer, rather funny. You might be intrigued by her sharp awareness of what those around her are up to. Yet Isabelle is surrounded by a certain amount of drama and disorder. Those close to her, getting into the spirit of her drama, might call it chaos.
At school her desk is bursting with unfinished work and overdue books. The classroom closet contains a heap of clothes she has forgotten. Even when she has completed a homework assignment, she forgets to turn it in. Worse still from the teacher’s point of view, Isabelle improvises comments that may or may not be sarcastic, and has occasional tantrums replete with defiance, weeping, and quick walking in circles; by then it will have run its course. Friends, by contrast, secretly admire her bite and boldness.
Isabelle’s ambiance and comportment is richly textured and quick to change, but perhaps we should interrupt to ask, who has a problem, and exactly what is it? Maybe it begins with the teacher. Isabelle is not so easy to manage, when compared to other students. With thirty-four students, the teacher feels she can’t give the extra attention Isabelle is directly or indirectly demanding. Other students are amused and distracted.
By the same token, one or both of Isabelle’s parents begins to view her behavior as pushing the envelope too far. The girl is trying, exhausting, takes attention away from her brother. Soon a counselor is consulted, and then a doctor. In time a diagnosis emerges of a syndrome that has been used to label millions of children: ADHD (or simply ADD.)
This syndrome has a history, dating back at least to the 1950’s, under different names and with varying symptoms. But they frequently include a (relative) lack of impulse control, short attention span, and an inclination to dramatize, today called “acting out.” Step by step the behavior has become “medicalized.” What this means is that her actions are treated as a disease-like abnormality in need of a cure, rather than as something falling within an acceptable range of variation. How then is it to be understood?
The medical diagnostic suggestion is that something special is occurring in Isabelle’s brain. An excess or lack of different chemicals (“neurotransmitters,” whose actions are little understood) have been selected as the culprit. To further underscore the biological roots of this condition, a further explanatory step is taken. The reason Isabelle and millions like her have a deficiency in their neurotransmitters is alleged to be the genes they have inherited.
With this familiar approach, we have a chain of causes proposed for Isabelle’s, or anyone’s, ADHD behavior. A gene, or several genes—unspecified and unknown, but assumed—lead to a chemical deficiency (not well understood) in a child’s brain. This brain chemistry results in restless, low-impulse controlled, short attention span behaviors. These behaviors cause spotty and unreliable school performance, and finally, it should be added, they get on adults’ nerves.
If I were to cut it short here, what would you say about this analysis? Where would you locate its weaknesses and stumbling blocks? Give it a try. If you can answer with ease, you may be a born critical thinker, and a gifted scientist of the human to boot. Perhaps you have a gene for sociological imagination. But if there is no gene for it, or if you, like the writer, don’t have it, let me try to develop a critique that requires only the genes and neurotransmitters we all share.
II. Getting a Grip on Reductionism
Reductionism is what I hope is a useful term for penetrating the shortcomings of the kind of explanation for ADHD (or ADD) I have briefly summarized. So how does it work? Reductionism is the familiar theoretical (explanatory) strategy of explaining some complex whole, like Isabelle’s labeled ADHD behaviors, by one or more of its parts. The first part offered up in this example is the child’s brain: something unusual is going on there, we are told. In saying this, the whole has been “reduced,” and then explained, by that one part (the brain) of the whole (Isabelle herself and her described actions with others.)
You can guess this is only the first step. For the brain itself is a kind of whole; its productions are said to be determined (explained), next, by the chemicals within it. This is a second step “down,” so to speak, from the whole (now the brain) to one or more of its constituent parts (complex enzymes like dopamine or serotonin.) And why the deficient chemicals? In much popular science on this topic, a gene or some (unknown) pattern of genes has been proposed. This gives us yet another, third, step by which we have reduced to simplicity Isabelle’s and other children’s array of labeled behaviors: abnormal or special genes.
When we go from children with ADHD in their social and cultural setting to supposed conditioning genes, we have taken not one, but three reductive steps to three “lower,” supposedly more basic levels. One would be enough, but because there are three, critics might call this example a case of extreme reductionism.
But let us admit that we frequently hear exactly these kind of explanations used to explain complex, socially saturated, human actions. Almost weekly, newspapers report scientific breakthroughs in which features of the modern world like stress, anxiety, depression, crime, addiction, intelligence of course, and much more are allegedly caused or influenced by genes, or “genetic factors.” Such discussions are commonplace, and almost hypnotically persuasive. So what, if anything, has gone wrong?
III. The Trouble with Breaking It Down to Its Parts (and Not Putting It Back Together)
Instead of leaping at once to generalities, maybe the best way to explore the trouble with reductionism is to return to Isabelle. Where do the reductionist explanations sketched here leave her? What’s missing? What consequences will follow?
The focus on Isabelle’s individual and internal (biochemical) characteristics leave her dangling in a social vacuum. But that is not where she lives. She has parents and care-givers, one of the many versions of the American family; she has teachers and peers; she lives in a specific social and cultural setting. Shouldn’t those who care about Isabelle have a look both at her current relationships, and at the history of those interactions with others that have brought her to the present moment? I have noted the steep rise in the number of children (mostly boys) who exhibit similar behaviors. Mightn’t this be investigated by the methods started long ago by Emile Durkheim for studying suicide and crime rates, which, like ADHD rates, also change for whole populations, according to time and place? Then there is the ADHD diagnosis itself. How can we be sure someone “has it?” What kind of cultural pressures are on people to apply this diagnosis to children, and treat it with mood-altering drugs?
It may even strike us that shrinking attention spans, edginess, and impulsiveness are pretty general tendencies in our world (American, late capitalist, postmodern, or however you describe it.) In fact, many adults show some behaviors like those described here; maybe even you and me. (If ADD doesn’t fit, try OCD, addictive behavior, depression, or any of the many other labels available1.) What’s up with that?
That’s a lot of questions about Isabelle’s, and our, social worlds. In asking them, I mean to remind you that not a single one of them gets asked in the reductive, brain chemical and genetic, approach. Instead, the people concerned look inside Isabelle, and only consider her as an isolated individual. Like most of us, they follow a well-established cultural model by which we explain a whole—Isabelle and her nerve-wracking behavior—by one of her parts. This is the red flag, the indicator, for theoretical reductionism. It assumes the behavior we have labeled is intrinsic to her, inherent in her constitution. It is the way she is put together.
Perhaps few will say upfront that they blame Isabelle for her problems. Nevertheless, in this reductionist approach, the problem becomes defined as part of her constitution, it is who she is. Therapists have noted that Isabelle, and others like her, are highly watchful of those around them. She is well aware of what is being said and thought about her. Would it be surprising if she were to feel ever more saddled with a stigma, and coaxed to see herself as somehow odd or abnormal? “How did I get so messed up?” she might be saying to herself. This result can be understood as “blaming the victim.” Blaming the victim may not follow from every single case of reductionist explanation, but it is quite common. Frequently the one taking the blame is a person, like Isabelle, or a group—say, an ethnic minority, those out of work, or the working poor. In each case there is something wrong with the person or group who is said to be “having a problem.”
There are three million children in the US who have been prescribed stimulants for ADHD. Another half million are receiving anti-psychotic medication for other diagnosed behavioral disorders (Matè, 2010). These drug treatments often help to put the child’s behavior closer to adult expectations. But sometimes they don’t, and often the results are moot, uncertain. Brain chemistry is complicated, to put it mildly, and the exact effects of stimulants and calmatives (short and long term) are little understood (Rose, 2005, pp. 291-294).
What is certain is that only symptoms are being addressed, and the child’s social relations with others, and the history of those relationships, are being ignored. At the level of solutions, taking pills for behavioral problems is one of our most popular quick fixes, and an ultimate form of practical, everyday reductionism.
Obviously, it is not just ADHD for which reductive biochemical and genetic explanations have been put forward. Parallel understandings have been said to account for alcoholism, obsessive compulsion disorder, depression, and violent and criminal behavior, not to mention stereotypical gender behavior (“boys will be boys.”)
These explanations can be criticized in much the same way I have begun to do for the reductionist theory of Isabelle’s ADHD. Let me summarize those criticisms in a more general way. First, evidence for the processes, that is, the specific steps, linking the part (the individual, the chemical, or the gene) to the complex social whole (ADHD, depression, alcoholism, etc.) is sketchy or absent. Causes are often assumed and asserted rather than subject to tests or comparison. Next, the history of the problem and the many people involved are ignored. Third, no attention is given to the social contexts for the problem and its medical label, their patterns and forms of discourse (the shared ways people define and talk about a subject.)
Fourth, the result of reductive tactics often end up pointing a finger at marginalized groups (e.g., immigrants, the homeless, welfare recipients, those unable to pay their suddenly elevated “subprime” mortgage) or individuals ( unruly kids, lazy people, and supposed criminal types.) Something about their mind-sets and internal workings, are said to be the cause of their own alleged problems. They are stupid or injured, or immoral, or incompetent—or lazy. This is exactly what is meant by blaming the victim. Of course one may do this, and it is most common to do it. But perhaps we should ask ourselves, do I really want to blame people with little power, like those just mentioned, and if so, why? What need in ourselves are we satisfying?
Finally, the solution is often a quick fix which attacks symptoms and punishes the relatively powerless, but fails to touch the enabling or generating social fields in which events have occurred.
IV. Beyond reductionism: Social Contexts, Cultural Patterns, Histories
Once the shortfalls and distortions of reductionist theories are appreciated, where do we go from there? First we might pause, step back and open up our imagination of humans as socially and symbolically enmeshed beings. As noted in section III, Isabelle, and the many like her, are not isolates alone in the world. Like all of us, they live their lives in constant connection and ceaseless interchange with parental figures, sibling, peers, teachers, and those who model our behavior. These relationships are wrapped up in particular, learned ways of speaking about things, and each has a particular history. To give these realities their true importance is to move away from reductionist oversimplification.
What theories that focus on such things should be called is not entirely settled. Some would call them holistic, others, some kind of systems approach. Yet others are content to say that the thoughts and actions of people are always caught up in social structures and cultural frames, or discourses. The jargon quickly piles up. What all of it directs our attention toward is social context. Many of us would argue that binding tie among the social and behavioral sciences is the attempt to place human thoughts and actions in their social, cultural, and historical contexts, and to reveal how we are shaped by them.
Before getting back to a more helpful way to understand Isabelle in her social contexts, let’s try to get an eagle’s eye view of the many different kinds of social context we might need. We can start with social units, the things scientists of the human study. What we study (everything, really) can be divided into parts and wholes, as in figure 1.a. But each part is itself a whole, made up of its own parts, as in figure 1.b. This part-whole distinction can be extended indefinitely in both directions. Particle physicists and cosmologist will tell you so. But some socially and biologically meaningful parts and wholes are indicated in in figure 2. Using these figures, note the following. Every time you try to explain something at one level (say a social class, a corporation, a family, or a person) by moving “down” to a lower level (for example, to an individual, an excluded group, a few “rotten apples,” a neurotransmitter, or a gene), your explanation becomes reductionistic. The more levels through which you descend, the more reductionist your explanation becomes.
By contrast, whenever you try to account for something on the same level (a person interacting with her peers, for example), or on a higher level (a person with her family, a family by its links to a job or working life, a job by its employer or class or ethnic standing) you are becoming more holistic. In other words, you are paying close attention to social contexts. At this point, you can return to the parts, now seen in relationship to some of the wholes with which they are in continuous interplay. Would even just a bit of this help us to better understand Isabelle’s situation?
It turns out that by age eight, Isabelle already has an interesting history of social engagements. At the time of her birth, her parents were forced to struggle with several kinds of stresses. Her father as an Iraq war veteran who, like at least a third of such vets, suffered from PTSD. At this time it was undiagnosed, and its effects made it difficult for him to hold down a job for more than short periods, or to focus for long when he was at home. Her mother had a respiratory illness that debilitated her at unpredictable intervals. They both loved Isabelle, and her older brother, and they did their best to meet their children’s needs. But they were under pressures that made large demands on their time, and on their ability to be completely present, emotionally. Just keeping a roof overhead and food on the table was a time-consuming and stressful challenge.
When Isabelle was three-and-a-half, her parents felt they had no choice but to put her temporarily in the care of a series of grandparents, and more distant “shirttail” relatives, who were willing to help. For the next four years, Isabelle lived in three different homes, each of them with good intentions, but each with different child-rearing habits, and with their own set of insecurities. In the course of these experiences, Isabelle become quite independent, vigilant, and resourceful in getting her needs met. She adapted. In an apparent happy ending, her parents were finally able to take her back and care for her. Of course many of the original strains still had to be borne. It was shortly thereafter that Isabelle was diagnosed with ADHD.
The Canadian psychiatrist, Gabor Matè (1999) argues that similar histories and circumstances, commonplace and often less dramatic than Isabelle’s, lie behind the meteoric rise in diagnosed childhood personality disorders. In order to develop the sort of impulse control and attention span our compartmentalized culture has come to consider proper, certain transactions between the child and others needs to take place. These include what some call bonding or “attaching” with one, two, or more adults. What this really means, Matè explains, is that children have a persistent need to engage in trusting, consistent, emotionally responsive interactions with parental figures. These kinds of reliable interactions with emotionally available adults provide the nurturance all children need, at each stage of their growth.
The bare bones of Mate’s theory of the genesis of ADHD are this. Children need to attach to adults in a nuanced and sensitive way. In the absence or distortion, in some degree, of consistent attachment to emotionally available adults, children will be damaged or slowed down in their developmental processes. As this happens, children will exhibit a range of attention seeking, disruptive behaviors, some of which are easily diagnosed and labeled as ADHD, or other childhood (and adult) psychological disorders.
Furthermore, Matè argues that modern or postmodern society in its present historical moment, imposes conflicts and stresses on adults that make it increasingly difficult for parents to deliver the conditions for that low-stress, responsive bonding to flourish. Downtime, peacefulness, feelings of security, focused attention, adequate and stable income, and support from the larger society—one or more of these too easily comes up missing.
In this way, briefly stated, Matè tries to advance our understanding of Isabelle’s and others’ plight. Surely testable hypotheses spring from these insights. But there are perhaps more important implications. In this non-reductionist style of analysis, Isabelle, or her internal workings are not posited as the cause of
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