Commitment and distancing
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In his book Engagement and Distancing, the social scientist Norbert Elias investigates the sociological aspects of his theory of civilization, which he first presented in his main work On the Process of Civilization (1939).
Double binder
People are curious, that means: they want to orientate themselves in their environment . You have to do this in order to survive and reproduce in it. To do this, they have to use their resources and control their dangers. For this you need realistic ideas of this environment.
The threat posed by this environment contrasts with this constant striving for orientation. For the longest time in human history , these have been wild animals, storms, droughts, etc. The more threatened we feel, the more emotionally committed we are to a situation and the stronger our projections are , e.g. B. of wishful and fearful images. So our mental images (= theories) of this environment are all the more distorted, colored by our images of desire and fear. The stronger these projections and distortions, the more difficult it becomes to obtain realistic images of our environment that would enable us to control environmental hazards. Norbert Elias calls this interaction “ double binders ”: Dangers cause fear, and fear makes it difficult to get a clear picture (and thus control) of the dangers.
Imagination content of (everyday) theories
The more distorted a mental image, the stronger its phantasy content. What's the alternative? The better we manage to be emotionally distant from our environment, the more our mental images of the environment are based on observation and logical conclusions instead of fantasies. This makes them more realistic and enables us to better control the dangers of the environment. (Everyday) theories thus differ in their content of phantasies on the one hand and logically ordered observations and conclusions on the other.
There is a spectrum in the emotional relationship with the environment: more committed or more distant ways of experiencing the environment. The extremes (fully emotionally engaged or distant) only occur in infants or the mentally ill. Most adults are in the middle of this spectrum.
Evolution of mindsets
Not only individual people, but also entire societies have certain standards of average experience and behavior. So there are societies with, on average, more committed or those with more distant experiences of the environment.
Humanity began its existence in a situation that was relatively threatened by the environment. Accordingly, for thousands of years the standard of perception / experience was strongly emotionally engaged, the imagination of the mental images of the environment was high. This resulted in poor ability to control environmental hazards. Mankind escaped this trap only slowly, gradually developing more realistic images in small steps, thus pushing back the fantasy content in these images, relying more on observation and logical conclusions, thereby achieving better opportunities to control environmental hazards. This process was very slow at the beginning, but it has a tendency to accelerate, because the more confirmed knowledge people accumulate, the faster they can acquire new knowledge. Ultimately, this knowledge acquisition was systematized and socially institutionalized in the form of the "sciences". There are specialists here whose job is to study the environment (the inanimate, the animate, the human). In these institutions, among others, the most emotionally distant standards within a society are constantly developing; and from these institutions these standards gradually radiate to the rest of society.
At the beginning of this millennia-long process, the emotional standards only allowed highly imaginative mental images of the environment. Some examples are e.g. For example, the idea that lightning is an utterance of a god of thunder, that the rising and setting of the sun are directed by a god of the sun, that the fertility of the earth depends on the will of a mother goddess, and that a solar eclipse is a warning from some prophet. All these images have in common that people "infer others from themselves"; they interpret the environment as they experience themselves: as guided by intentions. For this view, which sees the environment as "animated" by intentional spirits, the term " animism " was coined (from the Latin "anima", the soul). This perspective is based on what Norbert Elias calls primary, childish egocentrism : the projection of self-experience onto the environment, or the experience of the closest environment (family, tribe, village, milieu) onto the wider environment. This primary egocentrism has many variants: ethnocentrism , Eurocentrism or "class arrogance" are just a few of them. In doing so, one measures or interprets the environment on the basis of what one experiences in oneself or in one's closest environment.
The further the millennia-long civilization process progresses, which we u. a. A stronger self-control , so that a more distant perception of the environment and a more precise understanding of cause-effect chains allows, the more we push back these projections and orient our images to (increasingly systematic) observations. In the course of time, the image of reality became more and more "impersonal", the insight that reality is a directed, but blind, uncontrolled process is gaining ground. Instead of intentions, it is based on causal chains .
The sciences in the process of civilization
This insight asserts itself easiest and therefore earliest where it concerns areas of reality that are relatively remote from us: in inanimate nature. A small link to the historian of science Thomas S. Kuhn makes sense here: Physics and chemistry are the sciences that were the earliest to achieve a certain degree of internal maturity, thus achieving practical effectiveness and social recognition. This is what Newton's breakthrough in the 17th century stands for. 200 years later, the science of living nature reached this point with Darwin. The most difficult thing for us is a sober distance in the realm of reality that is closest to ourselves: ourselves. The social sciences have not yet reached this level of maturity of their "big siblings"; they are even more strongly influenced by social conflicts and collective fantasies , an agreement on a subject-internal basic theory ( paradigm ) is still pending . (Perhaps they will achieve this again 200 years after biology, i.e. in the middle of the 21st century? There are indications of this.)
This distance of the object of investigation from ourselves is not the only factor for the different degrees of maturity of the sciences. Norbert Elias points out that the areas of reality are of different complexity. The field of physico-chemical evolution is the simplest in comparison (and slowest if you consider the lifespan of the sun). Biological evolution is already considerably more complex because it contains the elements of physico-chemical evolution and also combines them to form new elements. It also moves much faster when you consider the speeds at which species emerge and evolve. The socio-cultural evolution of humans is the most complex of these three areas of reality, because it contains elements from the first two areas and in turn combines them to form new elements. It also moves considerably faster than this, which is easy to see when looking at the timelines of human history.
Because of this increasing complexity from level to level, which arises from the combination of the elements found, one is dependent on knowledge of the previous levels when researching each higher level, but at the same time one cannot limit oneself to this because each level adds something new. Each stage therefore also requires new methods of research. Just as biology cannot be reduced to physics, neither can the social sciences be reduced to biology. They each have a different object, even if it contains the previous realm of reality. This insight is the foundation on the one hand for the emancipation of the sciences from one another, especially the younger from the older: Only with the methods and thought models of physics or biology one will not be successful in the social sciences. On the other hand, this insight is the justification for the need for interdisciplinary cooperation: without the knowledge of physics and biology, the social sciences will not produce realistic images of our environment either. This is already clear from the ecological debate.
This ecological debate is also an example of the effect of the civilization process: the increasing ability to understand causal chains, i.e. to calculate cause-effect relationships over ever longer distances - even when it comes to phenomena that can no longer be grasped with our senses. This ability is widespread in very different ways in a society, which is one of the reasons for the conflicts around the topic of "ecology".
To summarize Elias' core statement in one sentence: the more self-control, the more “process control”.