Grand Strategy Annex

18th January 2012

Post with 23 notes

A Third Temperament

Some weeks ago in Alienation, Class Interests, and Individual Interests I suggested that a division can be made in human temperaments:

I have observed a fundamental difference of opinion between those who believe that individual temperament is definitive in how one relates to the world and those who believe that social, cultural, and ethnic identities are more important and more powerful in creating one’s situation in the world.

This is a pretty straight-forward distinction, though as with all distinctions one should be careful not to claim that it is exhaustive and exclusive unless one has a good reason to make this claim. In regard to my distinction between those who hold individual temperament to be definitive and those who hold social, cultural, and ethnic identities to be definitive in the formation of character and structure of life, I make no such claim.

Not only do I make no claim for this distinction to be exhaustive or exclusive, I want to add another temperament to this classification, and that consists of those persons who temperamentally construe the world so that specifically social institutions are definitive and determinative of life.

In so identifying this additional identity, I need to make a distinction between the kind of social institutions that I mention now and the social identities I previously mentioned. A rough distinction can be made in social identities between those that are biologically based and those that are not biologically based.

A family is an example of a biologically based social institution. In some cases a tribe or a chiefdom is an extended family and therefore a biologically based social institution. A kingdom or a city-state or a nation-state or a republic, while they may have origins in biologically based social institutions, are not essentially biologically based: they can be both conceived and implemented independently of any biological tie among the members of such a society.

So when I now speak of social institutions being determinative and definitive of life, I mean (roughly) non-biologically based social institutions, while most biologically based social institutions I leave in the category of “social, cultural, and ethnic” identities. The tie to the latter kind of institutions (if they are institutions at all) are ties of identity. The tie to the former kind of institutions are ties of membership and citizenship.

It would be very difficult for me to give a sympathetic account of the third temperament – i.e., the person who believes in their bones that it is the social institutions in which an individual has membership that largely define and determine life. This is even more foreign to me to the cooperativist or collectivist temperament, though it is easier for me to imagine how the cooperativist thinks than to imagine how the institutionalist thinks.

Nevertheless, just as Dostoyevsky started off his famous Notes from Underground with the claim that persons such as described in his story must exist, so I will say that persons of the institutionalist temperament must exist. Indeed, the only reason that I am now making this claim is that such a temperament was recently brought to my attention.

I will think more about this temperament, and if I can nail it down better, I will write more about this. In the meantime, think of the institutionalist temperament as the true believer in his country, in his alma mater, in his state, in his county, in his city, in his church, in his bowling league, and in his family. For the institutionalist temperament, these are the defining features of life. 

Tagged: social institutionsinstitutionssociologytemperamenthuman natureindividualismcollectivismcooperativisminstitutionalism