Thinking about society.

If I do ever manage to write a few books I imagine that I will be including a section in all of them that is something like this one. One of the reasons for this is because thinking about society is so dreadfully important to us. When discussing society and culture it never seems to take too long before someone is getting ticked off about some issue or another. Another reason is because I made the unfortunate choice of philosophizing about society and culture and this seems to almost automatically put me at odds with about 97% of the people I meet. Yes this may indeed mean you dear reader. So it is in this section (and it's subsequent generations) that I want to contend that a lot of people make extremely gross mistakes when thinking about human behaviour, especially when said humans are hanging around in groups. And yes even though it can be incredibly hard for us to admit, we should probably all bite the bullet on this one and admit that we are most likely guilty. After all the list of myths we have dreamed up when thinking about ourselves is a long and glorious one, take these few examples for instance:

-people of different races (especially the non-white ones) are less capable of intelligent thought, moral goodness and/or civilized behaviour
-Jewish people are all servants of Satan
-witches live in Salam
-thin people are happier
-women suffer from weird diseases like hysteria and nymphomania (ugh! girl germs!)
-having blond hair and blue eyes really does make you a better person
-everyone is either male or female
-sodomy makes God angry
-when men are aggresive it's because of testosterone
-cartoons are just for kids
-a woman's place is in the kitchen
-the entire war on masturbation at the end of the 19th C
-the entire war on drinking at the beginning of the 20th C
-the entire war on pot-smoking and listening to jazz that came just after that
-the entire war on communism that came after that
-the entire war on terrorism that came after that (is there a pattern here?)
-George W. Bush would make a great president

And I'm sure we could go on. So what are we to do in the face of our rampant fallacies when it comes to thinking about ourselves and the people around us? The obvious thing to do would be to look for whatever is causing our misconceptions and fix the problem. So what is the cause? At this point it is tempting (and in some circles popular) to respond to this question with a well reasoned speech about how it is difficult to understand society while we are located within it (since each of us can only see a small part of it at any one time) and that it is only by attaining a view of society from the outside that we will be able to see it in its entirety and thus gain the holistic understanding we need to tackle our problems. On this view we are very much like Neo, unable to find an answer to his question until he has left the matrix behind and can veiw it from afar. These types of answers might have some merit but these days my intuition is usually leading me to say that such answers are rubbish. I'm more inclined to think that the cause of our generating so many myths about ourselves lies with our understanding (or misunderstanding) of causality, especially when it comes to extending notions of causality to things social and psychological. This is to say that we are regularly making mistakes about what the causes and effects of human behaviour are. This view also leads to the unfortunate conclusion that the remedy to our situation is a lot of hard work (damn it!!). What we need to do is examine each of our beliefs in turn, critically examine the causal relationships that we attribute to them and adjust our view of the world according to the results of our examination. So far it sounds like we need to adopt a very Humean stance when it comes to thinking about society. But don't worry, hopefully I can talk us out of this rut soon enough.