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Alan Wolfe is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Boston College.

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The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science

University of California Press

Sociology, one of the youngest of the social sciences, may also prove to be one of the most short-lived. The product of a progressive intellectual milieu, sociology announced a faith in the ability of people to control the world they had created. Just as the forces of civilization and culture were beating back the irrationality and wildness of nature, so the forces of reason and science would create order out of what was once a Hobbesian war of all against all. Sociology's optimism stood in sharp contrast to the debunking realism that had prevailed in political thought since Machiavelli and the playful cynicism that Mandeville contributed to the science of economics. To its earlier practitioners, sociology was the queen of the sciences because it was at one and the same time noble, caring, and somewhat imperious.

Begun at a time when the problems of industrialization, urbanization, and bureaucratization raised in compelling form the question of what it means for humans to live together in groups, sociology sought a precarious path between the attractive individuality of liberalism and the equally seductive, but even more dangerous, quest for a return to organic wholeness and unity. Its stance would always be in the middlenot only, in Wolf Lepenies's phrase, between literature and science but also between left and right, realism and romanticism,

the sacred and the profane, and the individual and the collectivity.1 This last ambivalence is worth stressing. Sociology's two greatest discoveries were the self and society, and neither of them had much in common with the individual and the state. Unlike the individual, who in liberal theory was governed by an unvarying human nature, the self was embedded in culture and was plastic enough to develop and learn. Unlike the state, which in theory exercised a monopoly of violence, society was the product of consensus openly arrived at, ruled by the norms created out of the behavior of real people in real life. Sociology was the product of a particular intellectual opening, a periodno one now knows how briefwhen it seemed possible to maintain order without sacrificing liberty.

This precariousness of sociology gives its subject matter a temporality, in contrast with the more timeless concerns of economics and political science. No one doubts that there will always be money, that some will try to get more of it than others, and thus that scarcities of valuable things will always constitute the human condition. Similarly, despite the shock effect he thought he would have on polite opinion, Gaetano Mosca's discovery that there will always be some who rule and others who will be ruled no longer seems especially noteworthy. But that society can continue to exist, that ties of solidarity will continue to link people together as partners in a common projectthis is a riskier proposition. The rise of totalitarian states in this century showed that organic unity can destroy the social self as well as the atomistic individual. The popularity of laissez-faire conservatism in the late twentieth century, two hundred years after its significant flaws were exposed, shows that untrammeled individualism can weaken society as well as the state. Late in arriving, sociology could be early in leaving.

Its departure would be a tragedy. For the very fragility and temporality of the social make it worth preserving. If the social ties that link people together in groups are unappreciated, there is little need for a discipline emphasizing their continued importance. And if such ties are universal and permanent, we need hardly concern ourselves with the ways in which changes in social and intellectual fashion threaten them. Sociology, un-

like the other social sciences, requires constant rediscovery, taking us by surprise at precisely those moments when we forget about its existence. Always vulnerable, it is always changing, critically reexamining itself to account for rapid social transformation. (In contrast, the very timelessness of the economic contributes to the fact that the discipline of economics has changed so little, in all but technique, since Adam Smith.) The more we take society for granted, the more we need to rethink its importance.

And, it seems, we do take the social very much for granted. Modern societies are composed of dense cities, complex bureaucracies, huge industriesall of which are dependent on fragile social ties to function at all. We rarely understand the importance of these ties until their breakdown results in crime, chaos, or lowered productivity; and we all too often rely on models of human behavior that pay little attention to them. The concerns of sociologyespecially ties of trust, caring, and personal knowledgeare in one sense trivial and obvious and in another sense vital and irreplaceable. They are so crucial to our existence as human beings that we can, for long periods of time, forget about them completely.

The classical social theorists of the nineteenth century understood better than we do the potential fragility of the social. For them, the social world was an essential aspect of the human world, and the human world was understood to be a very recent discovery. Indeed, compared to the natural world, which has been with us since the beginning of time, the social world seemed not only miraculous but also improbable. Nineteenth-century sociologists could not take society for granted, because it was all so new to them. Today, surrounded by societies that seem overdeveloped in their density and complexity, we would rather ignore the social than argue for its special role in our existence.

No other aspect of nineteenth-century social theory better captured this sense of society's fragility than the almost automatic anthropocentric assumptions it contained. Sociology was a product of the notion that humans were, and ought to be, at the center of our attention. Its founding thinkers agreed that the line between humans and the worlds surrounding them

was dangerously thin and that, therefore, humans and their accomplishments required a special defense. This sense that the social could at any moment be taken back by other worlds recently conquered gave nineteenth-century social theory its predisposition to view our own species as superior to everything else.

From the perspective of nineteenth-century sociology, two worlds surrounded human creations: the supernatural world above them and the animal world below. At one level, sociology's anthropocentrism represented a long struggle on the part of secular thinkers to turn attention away from superhuman entities to human ones. Asserting the centrality of the human was a way of insisting that the products of people's activity, including religion itself, grew out of the capacity of individuals to make the world in which they lived. Because some of its practitioners, especially Durkheim, regarded sociology as a secular religion, they placed humans at the center, just as theologians placed God at the center. As long as sociology and religion were to some degree in competition, many sociological theorists were not prepared to conclude that the social world was safe from the supernatural one. Indeed, Durkheim could ensure the security of the human and the social only by elevating them to the status of the sacred.

The milieu that led sociology to its anthropocentrism was shaped by sociology's relationship not only to the superhuman but also the "subhuman," the world of other animal species. Sociology separated itself from the world of nature just as vigorously as it separated itself from the world of God. Nearly all thinkers in the sociological tradition regarded humans as a special and distinct species capable of taking control over its destiny. No one doubted that humans were driven by biology, or that some aspects of their behavior were similar to the behavior of other animal species. Obviously, humans lived in nature and therefore were to some degree subject to the laws of natural science. But because humans built culture out of nature, their affairs could not be understood on the basis of laws borrowed directly from the study of the nonhuman world. Different from religion, sociology would also be different from science, at least the biological sciences. It would certainly bor-

row much from science, as indeed it would from religion, but its ultimate calling would be neither prophecy nor taxonomy.

Sociology and religion have settled into a relationship of tolerable coexistence. Since the intellectual turf of both is similar, sociologists soon developed respect for religion, and religious thinkers made their peace with sociology. But if a war ended between the human centeredness of sociology and the God centeredness of religion, no peace exists between the human centeredness of sociology and the challenge to anthropocentrism coming from those who respect nature and other animal species. The contemporary intellectual milieu, which finds little to question in the secularism of sociology, challenges at every turn the sociological separation of culture from nature. It is precisely the commitment to humans and their accomplishmentsan outgrowth of the Enlightenment and its faith in powers of mind and reasonthat marks the difference between the late-nineteenth-century intellectual environment and the late-twentieth-century milieu. Sociology's fragility, in its latest manifestation, is not the result of controversies over method or theory. The challenge is far more serious than those, for it involves the question of whether the subjects of this new sciencehuman beings themselveshave any distinctive features that require a distinctive science to be understood.

The Enlightenment's greatest discovery was ourselves. In the writings of leading eighteenth-century thinkersImmanuel Kant comes immediately to mindthis discovery of the human being took two forms. On the one hand, all humans were assigned equal moral worth. In what was surely a radical point of view for his time, Kant refused to accept the notion that servants, peasants, or menial workers ought to be regarded with any less respect than bankers or aristocrats. For Kant, such equality was more than political. Human autonomya product of the mind's rationality and universalitylinked together everyone as equally capable of engaging in practical reason. Since we all possess potential moral agency, none of us has a right to treat another as a mere thing.

Equality within the human species was, however, accompanied by inequality among the species. Because respect for persons occupied a prominent place in Kant's thought, things lacking autonomy, including other species found in nature, could not exist on the same moral plane. For Kantas for the sociological thinkers who would come laterthe human creature was distinct from all other species. Humanism was literally that. In its strongest form, anthropocentrism was frankly hierarchical: human beings stood at the top, and all other species existed to serve their needs. In its softer forms, disproportionate attention was paid to human beings compared to other living creatures. But in most of these traditions, most fascinatingly in Kant's, people ought to respect nature, not because animals or trees should be treated as moral creatures but, instead! because if we mistreat nature, we are more likely to mistreat one another.2

The first of the Enlightenment's discoveries has survived almost intact for two hundred years. One simply cannot find an intellectually credible defense of inherited inequality in the modern world, so strong is the commitment to the notion that all human beings ought to be viewed as having equal moral worth. Inequalities persist, and often worsen, but those defenses of inequality that remainbased on notions of the market or of just desertsstill tend to contain an argument that all humans are potentially equal, even if forces in the real world prevent such equality from being realized. Because inequality is now more often understood economically than mentally, one of the Enlightenment's discoveries, at least in theory, is secure. The burden of proof is on those who would argue for inherent inequality, not the other way around.

That same sense of security does not extend to the other of the Enlightenment's great discoveries about humans. Anthropocentrism is embarrassing to contemporary readers. The idea that human creatures ought to be at the center of the world has been challenged by two intellectual awakenings. First, we have come to learn so much about the wonders of the natural world that placing humans at the center seems not only morally crude but also scientifically inaccurate, reflecting what has been called "an outdated metaphysic, an anthropocentric evo-

lutionism that uses humanity as the yardstick by which to measure the rest of the animal world."3 And second, confidence in the human project has been unable to survive the political and ecological horrors of recent history: how can a species capable of genocide and total war possibly congratulate itself on its special place? From Martin Heidegger to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the Enlightenment's Faustian bargain with nature is viewed as problematic. Nature, it would seem, is having its revenge.

In contrast to the eighteenth-century consciousness that inspired thinkers such as Kant, a new cosmology emerging in the late twentieth century challenges the notion that people are, or ought to be, the measure of all things. A recent statement by a leading paleontologist illustrates all the major themes that characterize this new awareness. According to Stephen Jay Gould, nothing less than our understanding of life itself, and how it evolved on our planet, is at stake in the way we interpret the fossils found in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia. Painstaking reconstruction of the animal life revealed by these fossils suggests that an earlier metaphor of a "tree" of lifeconsisting of a main branch and subsidiary ones leading off from itought to be replaced by the metaphor of a bush composed of many growths, all of them of equal importance. "Our origin is the product of a massive historical contingency," Gould writes, "and we would probably never arise again even if life's tape were replayed a thousand times."4 We who are human are the result of no purpose, divine or otherwise, but instead a consequence of the random operations of chance.

Gould's controversial points are not about fossilshis refutation of Charles D. Walcott's earlier interpretations is convincingbut about cosmology. Who are we, he repeatedly asks, to think that we are special? The lessons Gould learns from his investigation are the direct opposite of the lessons learned by the earlier worldview in which nineteenth-century social theory once flourished. Then the laws of nature or society revealed rational organization, which our minds were capable of understanding. Now the physical world teaches that, being lucky, we ought to be humble. It is, from Gould's

perspective, hubris on a grand scale to put humans in the center, no different in principle from Europeans' putting Europe in the center. Such imperialism has no place in science. Evolution is not a progress report. It says nothing about worth. There are no moral lessons in nature. Its laws reveal no teleology. Evolution just is.

Implicit in this new cosmology is a reversal of the dualism between nature and culture that formed the core of late-nineteenth-century sociological theory. "It is civilization that has made man what he is," Emile Durkheim once wrote. "It is what distinguishes him from the animals: man is man only because he is civilized."5 Durkheim's frank preference for civilization reads, in the context of today's cosmological assumptions, quaint at best, colonialist at worst. That human beings tear apart nature in order to build cultures capable of satisfying their needs is viewed as a flaw, not an accomplishment. Barry Commoner's "Third Law of Ecology"Nature knows bestexpresses in succinct form the idea that humans are no longer to be trusted.6 From every corner of academic and intellectual lifethe sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences-the human and the cultural are on the defense.

As Commoner's law suggests, ecology is one of the main ingredients in reinforcing the new antihumanistic cosmology. Ecology developed as the study of how organisms interact with each other and with their environment. What made ecology a powerful way of understanding the natural world was the notion that nature generally finds ways to work things out without human intervention. Disturb the food chain, alter the pattern of predator and prey, relocate a species from one habitat to anotherand the whole intricate chain will be broken, with consequences no one can predict. Respect for nature, from an ecological perspective, is premised upon avoiding the Faustian temptation to alter what is found. Although ecology originally concerned itself primarily with nonhuman organisms, such as plants and animals, it was not long before moral lessons dealing with the human world were drawn from its premises. Deeply impressed by the self-regulating character of the natural world, many ecologists began to look with dismay upon the clumsy, awkward, and unplanned character of human affairs. It was a

short step from that conclusion to one that reversed the distinction between nature and culture by assigning a privileged status to the former rather than the latter.

The revolution in ecological consciousness that occurred in the 1970S took place simultaneously with a revolution in feminist consciousness, and it was not long before scholars such as Carolyn Merchant began to point out the similarities.7 The concept of nature as a caring and nurturing mothercentral to an earlier, more organic theory about the worldgave way to the notion of nature as unpredictable and occasionally nasty; and this notion prepared the way for a rationalized, scientific intervention into natural processes. Science emerged in the seventeenth century not only as a set of techniques but also as an ideological system in which "science was a purely male and chaste venture, seeking domination over, rather than commingling with, a female nature; it promised, and indeed helped promote, the simultaneous vanquishing of nature and of female voracity."8

That the scientific quest proceeds by metaphor, and that metaphors can take on a life of their own and affect the results of scientific investigation, seems beyond doubt. But for some writers, the relationship between gender and science is understood more than metaphorically. In their view, the entire process of forcing secrets out of nature and calling the results science produces bad knowledge.9 Science, this way of thinking continues, is a form of narrative, and, once it is understood as such, the subjects of scientific investigation have as much right to have their story told as those who carry out the investigations. Primates, for example, are "active participants in primatology," and the scientist's obligation is "to listen to the practices of interpretation of the primate order in which primates themselvesmonkeys, apes, and peopleall have some kind of 'authorship.' "10 There is no fixed line between our world and that of the other primates, and our understanding of their world is subject to all the limitations of historical knowledge and struggles over power. Therefore, according to these writers, women must be suspicious of any attempt to separate nature from culture. They need to challenge every aspect of the modern, scientific, rational worldview, listening

to suppressed voices buried inside themselves or going "deeper" than deep ecology in rejecting instrumental reason.11 The dualism between nature and culture ought to take its place as one of many dualisms to be rejected or transcended: male/female to begin with, but also subject/object, fact/value, text/reader, being/knowing, presence/absence, noise/silence.

From the perspective of many of the writers just discussed, whether feminist or environmentalist, the evils against nature have been perpetuated by a scientific Weltanschauung containing inherent Faustian proclivities. It is therefore noteworthy that some thinkers working in scientific fields also share the assumptions of this new cosmology. One such field, somewhat ironic given its general opposition to feminism, is sociobiology.12 Impressed by ethological studies of animal behavior, at least some sociobiologists imagine no fundamental break between nature and culture. In their view, humans are driven to a considerable degree by their genetic structures and are limited in their ability to make many of the choices that their excessive pride leads them to believe they can make. At the same time, other animal species possess culture. They are able to reproduce themselves not only through DNA but also by developing tools, communicating, and living in groups. All evolution is a product of both cultural and genetic factors, and the only difference between the human and other species is a matter of degree. What Carl Degler calls the "revival" of Darwinism in American thought, inspired in large part by sociobiology, has altered the intellectual landscape; an earlier belief in the power of culture to explain the world has had to share the stage with theories less certain that culture stands autonomous and distinct from the realm of nature.13

Whatever position one may take on the difference between nature and culture, both biology and sociology deal with living creatures. Imagine, therefore, the importance of the discovery of a brand-new speciesa nonliving creature endowed with intelligence. A once-firm duality between the world of nature and the world of culture has become a trinity with the invention of the computer, and respect for machines has become as important an item in the antihumanist cosmology as respect for animals. There is an irony in this development as well, for

few intellectual trends in the contemporary world seem further removed from the antirationalistic strains of deep ecology and eco-feminism than developments in cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence; Merchantas well as other feminists, such as Susan Bardopoints to Descartes as a central figure in the mechanical view of the world, while the current wave of interest in artificial intelligence is invariably Cartesian in inspiration.14 Yet on one point many of those who work with artificial intelligence agree with those who seem to prefer the ethics and morality of nature: both groups do not join Descartes in believing that humans are a superior species. Artificial intelligence elevates the human over the animal only to turn around and elevate the machine over the human. The computer is one more nail in the coffin of anthropocentrism, an additional discovery that makes it impossible for humans to congratulate themselves on their allegedly special powers. And since the powers in question are powers of mind rather than physical strength, the challenge may well prove the most important to date.

If the times were more sympathetic to humans than they are, one would expect a defense of anthropocentrism from the humanities. After all, the very name by which we describe the study of literature and philosophy indicates a proclivity to put humans at the center of the cosmos. Moreover, the challenge to the centrality of humans has come from such scientific fields as ecology, sociobiology, and artificial intelligencefields that have little in common with aesthetics, poetry, art, and other humanistic disciplines. Yet recent intellectual trends in the study of philosophy and literature strengthen rather than weaken the case that human subjects are disappearing from an emerging contemporary cosmology.

Two philosophers in particular have had an inordinate influence over the way contemporary literary theorists think. Nietzsche, the greatest misogynist of modern times, is the inspiration for those post-modern and post-structuralist sentiments that culminated in Michel Foucault's famous image of man as a figure in the sand about to be washed away by the next severe wave.15 Meanwhile, Heidegger, who has served as a source of ideas for those involved in the deep ecology move-

ment as well as for many who work in artificial intelligence, has also exerted strong influence over recent movements in literary theory that question humanistic premises about the use of texts to reinforce moral meanings.16 Deconstruction in particular strives, as Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut put it, "to be fundamentally more Heideggerian than Heidegger himself,"17 rooting out whatever last vestiges of humanism it can find in Heidegger's thought.

Some of the more extreme versions of the antihumanist cosmology that has assumed such importance in this century consequently come from post-modern professors of literature. Representative of at least one version of this strain of thought are the ideas of Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Like many natural scientists, Herrnstein Smith believes that the distinction between nature and culture ought to be disarmed of its ideological power. There is, she claims, no particular value to the notion that culture gives humans the ability to attribute some permanence to the world. Humans live instead in a natural state of perpetual flux: "With respect to human preferences," she writes, "nothing is uniform, universal, natural, fixed, or determined in advance, either for the species generally, or for any specific individual, or for any portion or fraction of the species, by whatever principle, sociological or other, it is segmented and classified."18 Because nothing is fixed, the value of a work of literature is functionally equivalent to the evolution of life in Gould's account. In both cases, contingency and randomness, rather than inherent worth or special abilities, dictate the survival of cultural products: humans on the one hand; their creative masterpieces on the other. Herrnstein Smith, of course, speaks only for herself and not for any intellectual movement, but the ideas she expresses indicate that at least one important thinker in the humanities is no longer convinced that there is anything inherently of value in things human.

Finally, despite their origins as a specific science of the human, the social sciences have also felt the impact of an emerging cosmology skeptical of the liberating potential of human efforts. In the years after World War II, American social science in particular was based on premises originally developed

by behavioral psychology. If the tools of the natural sciences could not be used to study such slippery matters as consciousness and intention, they could be used for such uncontested actions as how people voted or what groups they joined. The fact that the statistics measuring behavior were generated by human activities rather than the behavior of any other species was viewed as simply part of an intellectual division of labor and involved no sense that the behavior of humans might possess features making rigorous and predictable study of them impossible. Like the founder of behaviorism, John B. Watson, much of behavioral social science recognized "no dividing line between man and brute."19

Even though behaviorism is in eclipse, human beings still have not found their way back into social science. Instead, the replacement of behaviorism in psychology by a cognitive science modeled on the computer is premised on the unimportance of the dividing line between man and his machines. One approach to the science of human behavior takes center stage for a short time, and is immediately followed by another, but all with a shared understanding that a science of human society can be modeled on the study of other than human organisms. This failure to develop a human science based on models appropriate to humans is especially evident in the most contentious debate currently taking place in social science theorizing. In nearly all fields of social science inquiry, approaches tend to be divided into two camps: on the one hand, a structuralism that ignores individuals; on the other hand, an emphasis on rational choice that neglects social forces. Yet whatever their other differences, both have a tendency to believe that insights into human behavior can be gleaned by references to the nonhuman world.

Durkheim's unfortunate comment that "the division of labor does not present individuals to one another, but social functions" is still alive in contemporary social science theorizing.20 Many structuralists, for example, believe that the nonhuman world, with its order and systemic regularity, provides a model for well-functioning, integrated, complexity-reducing human activities. In highly structuralist accounts of social organization, system logic is what counts; specific human characteristics

matter little. Echoing Durkheim, Niklas Luhmann argues that "society is not composed of human beings, it is composed of the communication among human beings."21 What is required, once we grasp this truth, is a "conceptual revolution within sociology."22 That revolution would turn to cybernetics, biology, and other disciplines concerned with the processing and transmission of information rather than to the humanistic disciplines. In the world as imagined by Niklas Luhmann and other hyperstructuralists, systems are all and people merely contingent.

The situation, however, is not all that different among those who begin with the individual and downplay the importance of systems. Rational choice theory stands worlds apart from Luhmann in its emphasis on the voluntary character of individual decisions, but the question of whether it is human individuals who make such decisions is generally answered in the negative. For economists such as Gary Becker, the intellectual overlaps between an economic theory based on self-interest and the Darwinian emphasis on the efficiency and long-term gain of selective evolutionary mechanisms are too powerful to ignore.23 Indeed, so great is the affinity between rational choice theory and the study of evolutionary mechanisms developed to account for species other than the human that even the critics of the theory rarely argue from specifically human premises. Jon Elster has many critical things to say about the limits of rational choice. He suggests, for example, that natural selection, when applied to specifically human affairs, is a more powerful theory than rational choice. But Elster peppers his examples with references to nonhuman choices and concludes that sociobiology offers a "supplementary" rather than a "rival" theory to his own work.24 Robert Frank, an economist even more critical of rational choice theory, and one who emphasizes the importance of altruism and sympathy as fundamental passions, nonetheless relies on experiments with nonhuman animals to make many of his points, as if their social behavior could act as a model for understanding ours.25 It does not seem to matter whether the principles of methodological individualism or its opposite are chosen; in both

cases, relatively little emphasis is placed on specifically human ways of constituting the self and society.

There is, then, a set of ideas that can be found in all fields of contemporary intellectual endeavor, whether viewed as part of the sciences, the humanities, or a mixture of both. These ideas transcend any political identification, sometimes appearing among those on the left, such as Steven Jay Gould, Barry Commoner, and the post-modernists; at other times among those on the right, especially some sociobiologists and rational choice theorists. Some versions are sympathetic to modern rationality; others are critical of it. Some are structuralist; other are individualistic. The contours of this emerging cosmology are anything but fixed, and borrowings across disciplines have recently been noticed. Yet when all the strands are added together, a fundamental challenge to one of the two principles that shaped Enlightenment thought about humanism can be discovered. It is not equality within the human species that is being challenged. It is instead the notion that we ought to accept inequality between the human and nonhuman species. Humans have no special qualities and deserve no special place. Our ideas have finally developed to the point where we can stop assigning fundamental qualities to ourselves. It is time to take our place as one of nature's minor miracles, no different in degree from all the other minor miracles found therein. Any intellectual enterprise premised on the assumption that humans occupy a privileged place in the world begins, these days, with the burden of doubt. Enlightenment thought, with respect to its favorite subject, seems to have come full circle. The intellectual conditions that gave rise to a belief in the special and distinct characteristics of the human self and human society are weaker than at any point in the past century.

Increasing respect for nature is surely one of the most positive developments in societies that are increasingly polluted, disrespectful of the natural environment in which they exist, and unable to sustain themselves in a sensible manner. For this

reason alone, the discovery that other species besides our own merit respect carries forward the Enlightenment trajectory. Although there does exist, among those who reject the anthropocentrism essential to nineteenth-century social thought, a preference for premodern, antirational consciousness (embodied in respect for tribal rituals and organic religions), at least some of the thinkers associated with the defense of nature posit an image of progress, in which rights previously assigned only to white male elites are extended to all white males, to former slaves, to women, and finally to all other species found in nature.26 For anyone whose political principles include both a respect for rights and a belief that they should be spread throughout the population, the notion of an expanding circle of rights seems fully within the progressive traditions of eighteenth-century rationalism. No wonder that the fastest-growing political movements in Western societies are those stressing ecological issues and animal rights.

A certain skepticism toward the special claims made for the human species seems appropriate. Humans can behave arrogantly toward other species and have done so repeatedly. The development of computers has to be viewed as a challenge to the idea that we are masters of computation, or even of chess playing. Ideological, and not purely scientific or humanistic, considerations underlie both epistemological assumptions about the natural world and the definitions of what ought to be included in literary canons. Yet all these points can be accepted and certain questions can nonetheless be raised: Ought we to be so willing to dispense with a sense of ourselves as especially important in the cosmic scheme of things? Do we lose something when we do so, something so important that we ought to continue to hold fast to anthropocentric assumptions, even if in chastened form? If there is no dividing line between ourselves and other animals and machines, can we properly understand our affairs by simply adopting the models and scientific techniques that best explain the evolution of fish or the calculating abilities of computers?

One can, of course, claim that even though humans may possess special or distinct characteristics, these characteristics are not necessarily superior. Humans can be appreciated for

what they are, other animal species can be respected for themselves, and even enough sympathy can be left over for computers. What Christopher Stone calls a moral pluralism that spreads across species is not only possible but probably necessary.27 In theory, we ought to be able to appreciate others even while liking ourselves, but the matter turns out to be far more complex. It was, after all, a major advance in the history of Western thought to discover that humans were capable of reason, that they could join with others to create societies that protected them against the caprice and brutality of living under the sway of forces beyond their control. If we could protect that vision while at the same time appreciating all other species, both living and artificial, there would be no problem. But one major difficulty stands in the way of cross-species pluralism. Those who imagine equality between the species usually do so by lowering the human level to that of all others, not by elevating others to the level of humans. To illustrate why too easy an acceptance of the claims of other species can result in a depreciation of humans and the societies they create, consider three issues raised by the challenges to anthropocentrism we have been discussing: rights, intelligence, and language.

That animals have rightsor, for that matter, that trees can have legal standingseems, at first glance, a notion worth defending.28 (It has also been suggested that computers have rights, that we ought to reverse Isaac Asimov's "Law of Robotics" and protect machines against us rather than the other way around.)29 Yet to accept such notions uncritically is to redefine what a right means. From one point of view, humans possess inalienable rights because they are humans; that is, they are capable of thinking and reflecting about their own nature. This conception of a right is closely connected to a conception of a self. Rights may be out there somewhere in the world, to be asserted and claimed, but they do not mean anything until acted upon. Indeed, it is not the right itself that is, finally, important, but the political and social awakening that emerges out of the efforts of an individual self to discover his or her rights and to act upon them. Rights are not given; they are taken.

Things found in nature are not acting selves, possessing the

capacity to understand the meaning of their acts. To assign rights to animals (or computers) is to say that a being is entitled to rights without understanding what rights are. A right thus becomes a passive thing to be delivered to an object, not part of a subject's self-expression. Some of the same reasoning applies to the notion that a fetus has rights, when the fetus has simply been an unconscious and unthinking product of the sexual activity of its makers. (Of course, the fetus is also a potential human.) In short, from this perspective, I have rights not because I understand the consequences of my actions for the fate of others but because I stand there like a tree. Moreover, not being able to understand myself as a rights-bearing creature, I am totally dependent on a guardian to exercise my rights for me, guaranteeing work for lawyers and judges, but hardly guaranteeing a society in which rights are linked to self-understanding.

Self-understanding is important in the context of rights, because rights have been traditionally linked to obligations: we owe something to society in return for the rights we have won. Yet if humans can extend rights to nonhumans, the latter cannot return the favor. Only members of an understanding species cognizant of its environment and able to take into account situation and context can choose not to exercise a right for the sake of group or communal solidarity. To extend rights to nature is to reproduce a state of nature, in which rights given without corresponding responsibilities eventually create a Hobbesian struggle over claims. Abstract rights for all creatures, in that sense, can easily lead to fewer practical rights for most. Obviously, one might sometimes wish to extend rights to those unable to claim them by their own efforts, such as children or the mentally retarded. But when exceptions multiply to cover creatures who possess neither agency nor understanding, the concept of a human right is cheapened.

Similar issues are at stake in the debate over whether computers, because they can compute, are capable of manifesting intelligence. Obviously, they are, if intelligence is defined as the ability to compute. Long before computers, some philosophers and psychologists believed that human minds worked essentially by reasoning syllogistically. Such perspectives con-

tinue to attract students of the mind.30 Cognitive abilities, such as thinking and speaking, are understood as the result of the logical ordering of internal representations of the world. Indeed, everything the mind does, even its ability to dream, could, in theory, be broken down into a series of calculations. With the development of machines that can process information logically, one of two conclusions about human intelligence can be reached: either such a computational theory of mind must be rejected as an adequate theory of what human intelligence is or computers ought to be viewed as a thinking species.

The latter conclusion is reached by those who celebrate the achievements of machines over humans, believing that robots will usher in a new era in which machines will do most of our thinking for us.31 But in the process they give priority to only one definition of intelligence, just as a theory of animal rights redefines what a right is. There are, in fact, many kinds of intelligence; some apply better to machines, others to humans.32 One particular kind of intelligencethe ability to recognize realities outside the brain by relying on contexts, cues, ambiguities, and conversations to supply what brains themselves cannot generateis specific to humans. It is this kind of intelligence that enables human selves to form societies with richly textured levels of meaning. To downplay its significance in order to elevate the mental power of machines is to achieve equality between our species and computers on terms established by the latter. If that is equality, it hardly seems worth the trouble.33

Language, finally, provides a third illustration of why it makes sense to emphasize the meaning-producing aspects of human selfbood. Some ethologists and linguists have argued that humans have no monopoly on either language or communication, as we shall see in the following chapter. There was a time when enthusiasts for artificial intelligence believed that only technical obstacles prevented the development of computers that could translate from one human language to another, although in more recent years this belief has begun to fade. In short, language can be understood as possessing formal properties and grammars, as structured by the rules

that make it possible to speak (or to think). Speakers do not make language; language makes speakers. When we speak, we rely on rules that are already there. Indeed, in the view of contemporary thinkers such as Jacques Lacan, we speak words that are already there.

If the rules that govern the use of language are hard-wired in the brain, then it is possible to imagine that other animal species or computers can have linguistic abilities. But, as with the question of rights or intelligence, we achieve such correspondence between different species by adopting a very specific definition of what language is. Focusing on the universals underlying communication, we ignore the particulars of specific conversations: the "noise" of real human speech, including mutually understood gestures, irony, definitions of the situation, and other conventions used by human selves to construct the meaning of the words they hear. The languages of all species, including our own, may be structured algorithmically in the most basic sense, but only one species is capable of bringing meaning to words in the real world. Since the meaning of words lies not in the rules that govern their usage but, instead, in the real-world activities of acting human selves, to argue for cross-species equality with respect to linguistic ability is inevitably to undervalue the significance of meaning.

For all these reasons, it is worthwhile stressing that the human self is not the same as any other body or machine. Our specifically human capabilities enable us to claim rights, exercise our intelligence, and enrich our language. Obviously, we can appreciate our special qualities while appreciating those of other species as well. But we need not turn on ourselves with disgust, as some adherents to the emerging anti-human-centered cosmology do from time to time. Moreover, there is also reason to question the claim that we can imagine nonhumans as rights-bearing creatures equal to us in their capacities and still appreciate our own capacities to possess rights and utilize our cognitive powers. Without an appreciation of our special capacities, the equality we achieve with other species is of the most primitive kind: we have rights simply because we exist; we are intelligent merely because we can count; the words we speak do not belong to us; the rules that govern

our affairs are as automatic and self-generating as those that govern the affairs of other species; our motivations are the same as those of rats and pigeons; the morality and justice that exist in human society are not the product of our minds but a by-productan unanticipated consequence, to use one of the most popular terms in functional sociologyof behavior intended for other purposes. We are equal without being autonomous, without exercising judgment, and without governing our own affairs. We exist, but we have no self-identity. If, in the face of this risk, the price we pay for respecting and enhancing our special capacities is a certain immodesty about our species, that price may not be especially high, especially when compared to what we lose by denying those skills and therefore refusing to cultivate them.

However awkward they may seem from a late-twentieth-century vantage point, reflections on the uniqueness of the human species were not just obiter dicta in the writings of nineteenth-century social theorists. Marx and Engels built their entire theory on the assumption that "men . . . begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence."34 Max Weber regarded culture as "man's emancipation from the organically prescribed cycle of natural life."35 For Durkheim, as we have seen, civilization constituted the fundamental difference between the human and the animal world, while George Herbert Mead's reflections on mind and self began with a distinction between the gestures of other animal species and the "significant symbols" used by humans.36 What the Germans call philosophical anthropologythe effort to deal with fundamental ontological questions not by arguing from first premises but by empirically contrasting the responses of human and nonhuman species to different environmental challengeswas crucial to the development of all modern social thought.37 So close is the link between the classical tradition in sociology and philosophical

anthropology that one perhaps could not exist without the other.

But it is not just the classical tradition in sociology that premises its investigations on a distinction between the world of nature and the world of culture. The same distinction has been made by leading anthropologists, such as A. L. Kroeber ("The essential difference between animal and man . . . is not that the latter has finer grain or the chaster quality of material; it is that his structure and nature and texture are such that he is inscribable, and that the animal is not"); Leslie White ("Without the symbol there would be no culture, and man would be merely an animal, not a human being"); and Marshall Sahlins ("The 'distinctive quality of man' is not that he must live in a material world, circumstances he shares with all organisms, but that he does so according to a meaningful scheme of his own devising, in which capacity mankind is unique").38 Contemporary sociological theory has also insisted on a certain anthropocentrism: "We can call men and women, children and adults, ministers and bus conductors 'rational,' but not animals or lilac bushes, mountains, streets, or chairs," Jrgen Habermas has written; "Man occupies a peculiar position in the animal kingdom. Unlike the other higher mammals, he has no species-specific environment, no environment firmly structured by his own instinctual organization," argue Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann; "Human beings make their own history in cognizance of that history, that is, as reflexive beings cognitively appropriating time rather than merely 'living' it," suggests Anthony Giddens.39 Assumptions about special and distinct human characteristics are not, in short, a nineteenth-century artifact.

Even those who seem to reject the notion of human distinctiveness in favor of functionalism and structuralismtheorists such as Talcott Parsons, Robert Merton, and Niklas Luhmannargue at times for such distinctiveness. The inspiration for much of Parsons's theorizing came not only from Durkheim and Weber but also from biologists like L. T. Henderson, who had published important work in physiology and biology before reading Pareto's General Sociology in the late 1920s. (The book was recommended by William Morton

Wheeler, who would become a leading American exponent of Herbert Spencer's theories and whose own work on insect societies would later be revamped by Edward O. Wilson.)40 Yet although Parsons recognized the importance of biology, he also noted "the much discussed 'plasticity' of the human organism, its capacity to learn any one of a large number of alternative patterns of behavior instead of being bound by its generic constitution to a very limited range of alternatives," as well as "the accessibility of the human individual to influence by the attitudes of others in the social interaction process, and the resulting dependence on receiving relatively particular and specific reactions."41 Merton's functionalism, also inspired by his wide reading in biology, was influenced as well by the love of irony and paradox associated with literary critics (and humanists) such as Lionel Trilling and historians like Richard Hofstadter.42 In more recent years, Parsons's structuralism has undergone a rebirth in the theories of Niklas Luhmann, this time aided by developments in ecology, cybernetics, and computers unknown to Parsons.43 Yet although Luhmann's work is premised on a frank antihumanism and a search for self-reproducing modelsindeed, as we shall see in chapter 5, he presents an exemplary version of antihumanistic social sciencehe too notes at one point that "the decisive advantage of human interaction over animal interaction stems from this elemental achievement of language."44 Macro or micro, classical or contemporary, structuralist or functionalist, humanistic or scientific, American or European, social theory without some element of anthropocentrism seems to be impossible.45

Although reflections on the distinctiveness of the human species are a constant in the history of sociological (and anthropological) thought, the features believed to constitute the human difference have varied. Some theoristsincluding not only Marx but also eighteenth-century political economists and the early Durkheim, in his analysis of the division of laborregarded the human difference as a producing difference: we are what we make, and what we usually make is culture. Yet these notions of homo faber no longer seem to provide the best way to understand the potential, as opposed to the actuality, of the human condition. Other animal species make

tools. They also, depending on how the term is defined, possess culture. As I will argue in the next chapter, a recent revolution in ethologywhich provides far more closely grained accounts of how animals actually live in the worldrenders a good deal of nineteenth-century philosophical anthropology obsolete. We share more with the world of nature than we were once prepared to admit.

Even Marx recognized that an emphasis on homo faber was not enough. "A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells," he wrote in Capital . "But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of the bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."46 Although this passage introduces qualities of mind and anticipates a good deal of twentieth-century social theory, Hannah Arendt is correct to point out that "the apparently all-important element of 'imagination' plays no role whatsoever in [Marx's] labor theory."47 What was left out can, however, be put in. Nineteenth-century social theory, in seeking the features of human distinctiveness, added culture to nature. The twentieth-century version of the same quest will have to add mind to culture. For human thought processes are different not only from those of other animal species, which lack powers of interpretation and imagination, but also from the mindsif minds they beof computers, which, for all their powers of calculation, also cannot imagine worlds other than the ones for which they have been programmed. Contemporary theories of human distinctiveness, in short, ought to stress interpretation rather than production: we are what we imagine ourselves capable of being. As Charles Taylor's work in particular demonstrates, any contemporary theory of the human difference is much more likely to emphasize our narrative capacities, our abilities to tell stories that make sense out of the situations in which we find ourselves.48 We are, in Taylor's phrase, "self-interpreting animals," in the sense that what we are is indistinguishable from how we understand ourselves.49

Once the focus shifts to interpretation, social psychology, and not economics, becomes the grounding for social theory. Whether imagined as structured by social class, embedded in

materialist realities, governed by laws, obligated by morality, enlightened by literary texts, or made sacred by religion, interpreting selves possess the capability of self-understanding. Yet this shift from production to interpretation in no way stands in conflict with the principle that distinct human features of the self make necessary a distinct social science. From the interpretative point of view, human beings are different from other species not just because their culture is more complex but because their development is not preprogrammed by their genetic structures. They can bend the instructions given to them in ways that the giver of instructions could not have anticipated; therefore, the rules they follow and the programs that guide their actions are their own. They can alter and shape the rules that govern them because they add mind to culture, in addition to adding culture to nature. Self-understanding makes self-governance possible.

Interpreting selves can create meaningful societies. That is, a species capable of understanding the rules that govern its behavior can direct its social organization to the accomplishment of goals defined by the members of that species as meaningful. As long as sociologists focused disproportionately on the technical skill with which vast forms of social cooperation are organized, as Durkheim did in his Division of Labor in Society, they developed a remarkably coherent theoryfor ants. Indeed, if we examine Edward O. Wilson's later work on ant societies, we might conclude that Durkheim's awareness of social complexity and interdependence was insufficient for ants, whatever its relevance to humans.50 But Durkheim's relevance for ants extends only up to a point. For he was not only interested in understanding the dynamics of social organization; he was also a moralist with a vision of the good.51 In his Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim turned away from a mechanistic theory of the division of labor in favor of a perspective emphasizing the cognitive and symbolic powers of human beings. That change in perspective marks a crucial moment in the intellectual history of sociology, linking, as it does, a theory of the distinctiveness of the human self to a theory of the meaningfulness of human society.

Humans add to the profane worlds they share with other

animal species a sacred world in which meaning, and not just behavior, becomes emblematic. Human society is distinct from all other forms of social organization because, in the well-known words of Clifford Geertz, "man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun."52 An interpreting self imagines possibilities beyond the sensate world. A meaningful society realizes such possibilities. Drop the anthropo-centrism of social theory, and one can still discuss individuals and groups. But having dropped it, one can no longer discuss who we are, how we came to be that way, and how we might be in the future. Durkheim called sociology a moral science, and that is why it was different from biology.

Sociology, for all these reasons, remains a distinct science for a distinct subject. In positing sociology as a science, its founders were distinguishing it from literature and the humanities. But in asserting the existence of a unique human self that made possible a meaningful form of human society, they were also distinguishing it from the existing natural sciences, such as biology. Sociology was Geisteswissenschaft , not Naturwissenschaft . It required a methodology that stressed the need to enter into the minds of its subjects, and this alone made it different from biology; for, as Isaiah Berlin has commented, "one cannot enter into the hopes and fears of bees and beavers."53 Although sociological theorists borrowed Darwin's concept of evolution, they did not borrow his belief that the evolution of man is continuous with that of other animals species. To be sure, there were exceptions, from Herbert Spencer to contemporary sociologists influenced by sociobiology, as Degler's recent account emphasizes.54 But the creed of the field could be summarized in one fairly typical account, from Charles W. Ellwood in 1918: "If we follow the clue which modern anthropologists are giving us," he wrote, "we shall reach a 'human'one might also say a 'humanistic'sociology rather than the biological or mechanistic one which obtains among some social thinkers."55 Distinctive subject suggested distinctive method: if there were nothing unique called the social, biology would be a perfectly appropriate science of human affairs. Because there is, sociology had to be invented.

Despite an emerging cosmology that questions any account

which privileges human beings and their affairs, this is no time to give up the quest for a special and unique social science. It is not because we have liberated ourselves completely from biology that we need special tools to understand and realize our potential; we remain biological beings, we live in nature, and some aspects of what we do (although increasingly fewer and fewer) can be understood on the basis of biological laws. Nor is it becauseas nineteenth-century social theorists believedwe have added the realm of culture to the realm of nature that a distinct social science is justified. To be sure, we have added a realm of culture, one that has dynamics that are different from biological imperatives and that consequently demand a different science. The classic thinkers in the tradition of social theory were trying to develop that science, proposing theoriesoften highly structural theoriesthat sought laws of the cultural realm to supplement the laws of the biological realm.

The more modern people become, the more their affairs are governed by something other than both biology and culture. That something else is mind. Unlike our biological destiny, it enables us to have a say in the rules that govern how we reproduce ourselves. Unlike our cultural destiny, it confronts the way we usually have done things with an imagined capacity to do things in other ways. We cannot, nor should we ever, rule out the biological and cultural sciences as ways of understanding some of what we do. But if we want to understand some of the most interesting things about us, we need to add the interpretative sciences to them. Most animal species are governed only by their genes. Some, at least according to contemporary ethologists, have the rudiments of culture. But only one is subject to the dynamics of three different imperatives nature, culture, and mind. And that species requires a specific social science that can elevate mind to the status of nature and culture.

Excerpted from The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science by Alan Wolfe Copyright 1993 by Alan Wolfe. Excerpted by permission.
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