Ramsay MacMullen Why Do We Do What We Do? Motivation in History and the Social Sciences Ramsay MacMullen Why Do We Do What We Do? Motivation in History and the Social Sciences Managing Editor: Anna Michalska Published by De Gruyter Open Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license. © 2014 Ramsay MacMullen, published by De Gruyter Open ISBN: 978-3-11-041758-6 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-041759-3 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. The Deutsche National- bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. Managing Editor: Anna Michalska www.degruyteropen.com Cover illustration: © Thinkstock/Evgeny Sergeev Ramsay MacMullen writes with courage, authority and effect. Few have had the nerve to ask the large question, few could have approached it with the breadth of a distinguished historian who has reflected at length on the social sciences, few can write with his open- ness and independence of mind, and few have arrived at such an interesting answer. It does MacMullen scant justice to say that he connects what people think with what they feel; relates each to the irreducibly social nature of their lives, and with telling examp- les, suggests how the cultures created by these facts serve also to frame and direct what they do. All who have thought about his question will be in turn informed, assured, and provoked and those who have not before done so could not have a better guide. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Professor of International Politics and Social and Political Theory at Cambridge, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences; ex-Syndic of Cambridge University Press and fellow of Clare College, author most recently of Thucydides on Politics. A wonderful, readable panorama of psychological, materialist, and culturalist theories from a tested master in the History of Antiquity, who has read far and wide well beyond the Ancient World, and always proven himself an original thinker. MacMullen’s ques- tion is, what motivates various humans to act as they do? He discusses and evaluates the answers given by disciplines neighboring that of History, with constant attention, though, to the different agendas of these disciplines, and therefore, to the contours and limits of what they can provide to historians. Philippe Buc, Professor, University of Vienna, Institute for History, author most recently of Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. When we read history or social science, we want to know why people, and peoples, acted in the way they did. Why did they start a war, why did they move to a new land, why did they choose to right a state of oppression? These are fascinating questions, and they are not always asked. In this book, Ramsey MacMullen tackles them head on. Keith Oatley, Professor,University of Toronto,Department of Human Develop- ment and Applied Psychology, author most recently of Emotions. A Brief History. Contents Preface 1 1 Psychology and Individuals 13 2 Anthropology and Small Populations 34 3 Reason and Decision-making 57 3.1 Economic reason 57 3.2 Common reason 64 3.3 Scientific reason 75 3.4 Moral reason 82 3.5 Moral culture 91 4 Culture as Cause 99 5 Conclusions 123 Bibliography 135 Indexes 159 Preface1 Why do we do what we do? How should one describe the mental process that leads from inaction to action in response to some stimulus? And in addressing so huge a question, how and where on earth should one begin? I address it as a historian, imagining a shelf of a hundred modern history books to see what they have to say. They won’t have time for trivial things. They are concer- ned with flows of impulse strong enough to determine what people actually do and on a scale to affect behavior in groups, not just little personal decisions. Such larger decision-making we would commonly call social.2 My sample of books over the decades will also show causal analysis to have had less and less room for people’s emotions, more and more room for people’s calcula- tions and logic. It is an interpretive tendency not so obvious in popular biographies, but it becomes clearer when specialists offer their analysis to their fellows rather than to the casual reader. Regardless of the intended audience, the whole truth should take account of both operations of our minds, the affective as well as the cognitive. It should take account, too, of the past as much as of the future, not simply to oblige historians like myself but in recognition of a quite obvious fact – that the affective and cognitive in combination have somehow shaped and re-shaped the routines of human life for many thousands of years. The interplay of these two elements has often occupied me in historiographical experiments, but clearly they needed theoretical justification.3 It was with this aim in mind that I set to trawling for help in the relevant social research disciplines: psycho- logy, anthropology, behavioral economics, and sociology. As an illustration of what is useful, in behavioral economics I find at the very center our common faith, our conviction of the plain good sense in getting, and then getting more, and then holding on to what one has gotten. Call this “capitalism” for short, a determinant in decision-making millions of times in every day. It is supported as the most reasonable of reasons for common actions, so declared by economists in general or, in the United States, by the Federal Reserve Board and their presiding officer in particular, a sort of priesthood. The truth propounded hardly needs to be defined, only paraphrased, or perhaps defined with no more than trifling if interes- ting qualifications. Is not this “reason” of ours in fact essential to our species? Thus, 1 I take this opportunity to extend sincere thanks to Peter Kiernan, David Brion Davis, Jonathan Dull, Henk Versnel, David Montgomery+, Keith Oatley, and Gerard Saucier, for helping me along the way. 2 As to “social” motivation, I should explain that I do not mean what Geen (1995) 40f. intends, that is, effort increased or diminished by the presence of other people of one’s society. 3 My interest from the 1970s I first tried out in Past and Present 88 (1980) reprinted in MacMullen (1990) chap. 2; later, in MacMullen (2001a), preface; in (2003) chap. 3 and (2003a); in (2011), the book as a whole and especially 115f.; and in (2014). 2 Preface inbred? Are there not economic instincts? For example, acquisitiveness? Yes, it will be answered – acquisitiveness among other determining traits.4 But the belief is false. Such rationality can be shown to be rather a cultural con- struct. An entire civilization, that of the Roman empire over the course of many cen- turies, rested in fact on the contradiction of getting: a contradiction, an imperative, inducing the wealthy to pave their cities’ streets and plazas as a great gift, to line them with colonnades, to build public places for worship, for ball-games, diversions and festivities of every sort; to pay for public rites and spectacles and the supply of good things to eat; to supply water for baths and fountains, and facilities for the marketing of perishables, all as a gift. At the end, the academic lexicon had even to accept a brand new word: “euergetism”. There was need for it at least in learned discussions because the thing it described seemed to the modern world so utterly strange that no term for it in any language had been needed.5 In those ancient times the rewards sought by the Haves were evidently affective not material. Equally striking, an area of many millions of square kilometers, an entire conti- nent, was once made happily habitable for centuries (as it is no longer) by a people living and moving on, and returning, and never acquiring more than they could carry. Such was the genius of their way of life, a remarkable fact, undeniable. That genius under sympathetic study turned out to be a great skill in environmental control, so as to maximize the land’s carrying capacity. Control was possible as observations of detail about flora and fauna accumulated and were transmitted from one generation to another through rote, song and religion, all at the behest of the divine forces that over-arch the earth.6 By belief in these forces, one’s everyday observations of natural life took on special meaning. They were felt as sacred; they were remembered; and they were acted upon. The result was history on a very grand scale. Ancient Australia, however, just like ancient Rome, cannot be understood as we understand modern economics, by our own logic. Way of life, learnt in the family, the clan, the tribe, at one’s mother’s knee with all the attendant loyalties, is seen to have prevailed over material calculation. It is only by historical accident that it may 4 Though not in such a condensed form, the ideas I outline constitute a fundamental consensus, a given. See, e.g., John Coates (below, chap. 3 n. 60), or in Demsetz (1996) 485, 490, 491–95 (“we are an acquisitive species” though we should leave room in our thoughts for the odd ascetic); or Greenspan (2013) in a chapter on “animal sprits”, by which he means what is “inbred” or instinctual and (14) as found in the standard economic textbooks (though to be “modified” by recognizing faults in our cognitive processes).