A theory of nearly everything

I really enjoy sociology books.  I know they're bad for me, but I keep buying them: Barbara Ehrenreich, Louis Menand, Malcolm Gladwell.  These books are suspect for the same reason that I've derided the recent dumbed-down books on memetics, Made to Stick: they build ideas and instruments to explain a very complicated world, a world too complicated to be accurately explained within the confines of a book less than four hundred pages.

Stephen Levitt attributes the general decline of violence in the late twentieth century to the triumph of Roe v. Wade.

Barbara Ehrenreich attributes the human penchant toward war to the days before humans were the dominant species on the planet.

Louis Menand attributes our Darwinistic education system (SAT, GRE, GMAT, GPA) to the Cold War.

Barbara Ehrenreich attributes the decline of "communal joy" to the Protestant work ethic, the industrial revolution and the increasingly authoritarian ways of churches.

These are enormously compelling stories.  Oozing shock and awe, they stake the new ground their stories break.  With $27.95 hardcover editions of these in hand, the reader is promised to learn why no one dances in streets, why we go to war, and why violence is down.  But is it that simple?

All it takes is a single disproving case to invalidate one of these works and because the field of sociology is so marked by uncertainty, it's tough to distinguish disproving cases from outliers.  A simple example: If you believe truth is found in the scientific method, try to prove that the legalization of abortion is why violence declined in the late twentieth century.  Impossible.  So, do these books tell compelling stories that explain things that we didn't understand before?  Yes.  Are they "true"?  No.

Yet I still love these books.  I crave them as much as I crave books on philosophy, theology and religion as a social phenomenon.  Recently I've thought a lot about why I crave these works that, I suspect, are all superficial. 

I know that I hate chaos and disorder.  I know that when I have a problem on my hands, my stress level increases with the amount of uncertainty associated with the task.  As I lay out tasks and form a plan, that stress level plummets.  I know that I closely associate with instrumentalism, believing that ideas and tools aren't to be judged according to their "truth," per se, so much as by their effectiveness in explaining my world.

What I've come to suspect is that I seek these books because I'm looking for a unified theory.  A single mental model that explains the world: why we are as we are, why we behave as we do, why the people around us are as they are.  I'm not naïve enough to think that I'll ever find one that truly does explain the entirety of my world, yet my brain is wired such that I find enormous joy in the pursuit of these theories.

This pursuit has its ups and downs.  I'm way too judgmental and I've started to develop an explanation for why: I look for ways to organize people into convenient little buckets.  There's the neomarxist anti-capitalist bucket (Ehrenreich), there's the hard-charging industrial Darwinist bucket (Skilling, Ellison), there's the -- you get the idea.  I know this, too, is wrong as I fervently resist labels and oftentimes find my assessments of people to be completely wrong.  Yet I still do it.  It's all in the pursuit of a unified theory.

Here are a few schools of thought that have been particularly useful to me in this pursuit:

Darwinism

Instrumentalism

Pragmatism

Anti-realism

Signaling theory  

Memetics and the theory of information cascade

Comments

[Chris Abraham]

Thanks for the great content: http://memes.org/node/98