We could start anywhere. But you’ve got to start somewhere. So we’ll start with the title of our first entry Explanation and Social Management.
For human beings life is impossible without Social Interaction.
We are a We before we’re an I.
But social interaction is inconceivable without Explanation.
Both social interaction and explanation take place in Social Institutions. Social institutions are part of a larger Culture and all of them, social interaction, explanation, social institutions and culture have to do with Human Behavior. Social Interaction, Explanation, Social Institutions, Culture and Behavior are what PRC refers to as The Irreducibles.*
*For more see What Matters?.
Human Behavior = People Doing Things. What we do happens in Time and Space. Space, in regard to the Irreducibles, refers to the culture and Time to history, or Human Behavior and Cultural History.
If human behavior is people doing things, what do we do that makes us different from other species? The behavior that is species-specific to humans is verbal behavior. The most important manifestation of verbal behavior is Language. Language functions by coordinating behavior.
And the behavior that language coordinates is both verbal and non-verbal. As social groups increase in size, and social interaction becomes more complex and unpredictable, language develops into Explanation.
Children go from muttering nonsense syllables, to saying Mommy and Daddy, to asking Why? How the parent responds when asked that question, or any question, will do much to influence their child's interest in explanatory behavior and in the direction that behavior will take.
Explanation functions by organizing our transactions with the world.
Explanation is everywhere. It’s so ubiquitous, so omnipresent in human behavior, that to understand it, even incompletely, is to develop an insight that no other insight can match.
Explanation is found constantly, at all levels of culture, in every kind of social organization, in every human situation.
In education, philosophy, the arts and sciences, and the humanities, people devote their lives to explanation and do little else, certainly nothing else that makes them any different from the rest of mankind. And even in this activity they are merely specializing in and concentrating on a mode of behavior that everyone engages in, whether in the family, business, government, or in our personal lives.
We can’t manage ourselves or others without explanation. We justify our actions and our plans by explaining their importance – their value – to both ourselves and to others. Social interaction without explanation is inconceivable. It’s the very condition of human existence.
For more read Explanation and Power: The Control of Human Behavior by Morse Peckham.
Note: Central to all of this is the primary attribute of the human brain - randomness of response - from which everything else follows. An awareness of this is central to PRC.
An understanding of the relationship between explanation and behavior, or explanation and social interaction, is vitally important and enormously beneficial for any individual or social institution interested in understanding their relationship with themselves and the world. But, to acquire that understanding requires some familiarity with the conditions of explanation.
And, since explanation is essential to any kind of what we call thinking, we can better understand our thinking and the explanations that our thinking produces by understanding words like causality, meaning, rhetoric, logic, mind, intention, stimulus, response, conditioning and reinforcement.
This is what is meant by the conditions of explanation.
And, not only is it true that to understand explanation, even incompletely, is to develop an insight that no other insight can match, but with an understanding of the conditions of explanation we are on our way to an understanding of ourselves and the world we live in that, until recently, would have been unimaginable, let alone possible. Why is this?
Because this understanding of explanation is exactly what sets us free from, and marks the end of, ancient thinking. In other words, we go from thinking constitutively, to thinking instrumentally. From this perspective, it is obvious that few have left the ancient world, and not just traditionalists, but also those who pretentiously refer to themselves progressives.
Neither one is in the habit of questioning their own assumptions or examining the language that goes into the explanations they live by.
On the contrary, both simply "offer" their monolithic explanation of the world, that they dogmatically assert to be true, and let it go at that (though there is no question that the worst offender in this case are the progressives).
In any event, by thinking instrumentally we can better understand explanation’s place in behavior and the relationship between both with the interaction that takes place within the social institutions of our culture.
With a better understanding of our culture we can acquire a better understanding of ourselves and of other individuals and cultures.
The value of this is found in the proposition that, though we are a We before we’re an I, we must eventually become an I to understand and give more life to the We. And because we're products of our culture we can't understand that culture, let alone other cultures, without an understanding of ourselves.
Without an understanding of ourselves we're not just products of our culture, we're its prisoners. In fact, we won't even know we're products of our culture, let alone its prisoners. For this reason Self-Awareness is an important quality at PRC. But self-awareness is not something that comes out of nowhere, or just happens by itself. It has a context.
Self-awareness as an experienced reality is the result of the interaction that takes place in the organized practice of mankind, the social institutions of the culture within which we, as behaving individuals, live.
Because life is dynamic not static, and we are imperfect not perfect, there can never be a fixed and final answer to the many problems that arise from the constant interaction between individual and group, or between stability and innovation. It's the view at PRC International that a life dedicated to continuous learning, change and growth is the most reasonable and practical response to this obvious and unavoidable reality. Why?
Because the reality is that social interaction, explanation, social institutions, culture and human behavior must all be managed, to some extent at least, if the individual and group are to survive.
And now we’re back to where we started, with the title of our first entry, Explanation and Social Management.
Since both of these subjects are of the utmost importance to the survival of any individual and group, they’re a great place to begin, not only for the work we do with our partners, but for the content we provide here for our readers. And why is Explanation and Social Management so vitally important to our survival? Because, Explanation and Social Management bridge the gap between reflective theory and practical action.
In other words, an understanding of both keeps us grounded in reality.
This explains the value of Action Learning, arguably the best method there is for problem-solving in a social context. The effective outcome of Action Learning is the result of making thought the instrument of action, and action the manifestation of knowledge acquired by learning. To do this at all reasonably well within all of its social institutions would be the crowning achievement of any culture. But, before we can even reach this level of development, we have to think humanly, psychologically and emotionally.
We have to consider our thoughts and feelings about whatever it is we're responding to. And to do that we need certain assumptions that we must continuously question and specific methods we must apply.
The assumptions we begin with and use at PRC are, Individual - Explanation - World - Reality. Another way of putting this would be:
The Individual
Their Explanations
The World They're Responding To
The Reality They Live In As A Result
PRC's methods are: Introspective - Experimental - Comparative
Or, Internal - External - Analogical
One way of putting it would be the following:
1. We think about the world, our responses to it and ourselves, and our own thoughts and feelings.
2. We experiment with different ways of responding to see what works best for us.
3. We then compare the results with the results of others and our own previous results to see how we're coming along. When we finish we start over again. Only this time with more awareness and skill, and more joy in the process of everything that we do as both individuals and group.
Concluding Remarks
PRC is a question-based consultancy. So, it's only appropriate that we end this first entry with a few questions of our own.
Since, the whole point of Explanation is that it is central to the organization and regulation of cultural life as it is experienced in our social institutions, in other words, since the whole point of Explanation is its relationship to Social Management, in order to control and direct the brain's primary attribute of randomness of response, and since for this reason both Explanation and Social Management are central to our lives,
How can we know anything about life if we don't know who we are?
And,
If we don't know who we are because we don't want to, what are we so afraid of?
And,
If we don't want to know who we are, not out of fear, but out of indifference, why should anyone care what we think, about anything?
Wouldn't asking the question Who am I?* make our lives more interesting, especially since there's probably more than one answer?
*Maybe this is why Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living. Because without the examined life we'll never be able to answer the quesiton, What is mankind? and, the most important question of all, Who am I?
And
If some of the answers are unpleasant and make us unhappy, couldn't that be seen as an opportunity to accept ourselves as we are?
And
If we can accept ourselves as we are, couldn't we also accept others as they are and not as we want them to be?
Couldn't we then extend that acceptance to life itself?
And finally:
Is it possible that asking and attempting to answer such questions just might have the salutary effect of making us more modest and less murderous?
Such questions are pertinent, and they can be answered, but not by any guru or charismatic religious or political figure, pop culture icon, celebrity, or consultant (or anyone believed to be charismatic; in such cases belief is all that matters, since no one who allows themselves to be carried away by abstractions is going to be able to resist charisma let alone escape from it).
No. Such questions have to be answered by the individual in a quiet moment alone, provided they survive the experience and don't relapse into groupthink. The job of PRC in this respect is to simply direct attention to these matters, offer whatever help possible, and let it go at that.
In any event, one thing's for sure, we'll never know much about ourselves or others until we ask, and attempt to answer, the questions:
Join us for our next entry Emergent Innovation: Cultural Transcendence.
Note: Though Explanation is important, there's something even more important than that - Experience. In fact, the whole purpose of Explanation is to help us understand our Experience.
And, since experience is always somewhat different, the articles and essays in PRC Writings will undergo as much addition and revision as deemed necessary. On the other hand, since repetition is the price we pay for clarity of understanding, any clarity of understanding as it relates to what I have written will be acquired at the price of certain thematic repetitions.
PRC recognizes and celebrates the work of the cultural historian and behavioralist Morse Peckham (1914-1993) professor emeritus of literature at the University of Pennsylvania and later at the University of South Carolina. A man very much at home in the Arts & Sciences. A rarity today. For this reason, much of the material here is either inspired by, based on, or derived from, the work of this extraordinary and astonishingly original thinker and writer.
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