PERCEIVED INTERESTS

SOME SUGGESTIONS ABOUT "INTERESTS" AND HISTORICAL MOTIVATION

What motivates historical action? Powerful biological and physical forces are at work in human behavior. Time passes and people grow up, grow old, and die. The constant need to recruit and replace within any human population is a powerful motivation for change. Bad harvests, inclement weather, poor soil, rich natural resources, these are geo-physical forces for change too. Then there are those cataclysmic events in which groups attack other groups, purges, domestic terrorism, civil and international wars. We discover countless instances of individual and group "irrationalism" in the history of human action. There are other forces that shape change, but the central and enduring principle of human mobilization is perceived interests.

Human interests, the pursuit of goals defined by individual and group interests. Physicists have their vast and impersonal force: gravity. Historians have an equally vast but intensely personal force: interests.

People are best assumed to do what they do, to think and believe what they do, to group together or split apart, to love or fight, because they think it is in their best interests to do so. It may not always be the case that a clear set of interests lie behind human behavior. We are nonetheless best advised to presume that humans think and act according to "perceived interests". Unless we have powerful and clear evidence to the contrary, we are safe to presume that humans act to protect or advance their interests. Perceptions in any given situation vary greatly among any large group of people, and some perceptions may be said to be irregular, irrational, or even wrong. Also, the results of human thought and action can be irregular, irrational and wrong in the extreme. But it is perilous to second-guess or trifle with the historical expression of perceived interests in the behavior of persons and groups. Over time, you cannot go wrong to assume that perceived interests motivate humans.

Influential American social scientist Harold Lasswell once ventured to list "the eight value categories" that "define the culminating outcomes (values) toward which and from which we perceive that events in the social process are moving". Lasswell presented the list and offered the above explanation in a 1958 postscript (p. 202) to Politics: Who Gets What, When, How. Here is the list, in an order of implied weight or significance:

It may be that Lasswell first landed upon this supposedly comprehensive list in his Power and Society: A Framework for Political Inquiry (New Haven: 1950):55, written with Abraham Kaplan. Here the eight "values" were defined as the "goal-events of valuation". Curiously points seven and eight were reversed in this original formulation. Did Professor Lasswell later put more weight on enlightenment as a value, or lose faith in love?

Do we have to use social-scientific language like Lasswell’s in order to get to the heart of matters? We are after all talking about fellow human beings and not sub-nuclear particles. With due respect and gratitude, I would restate Lasswell’s contribution to our thinking in the following way.

Individuals and groups act in accordance with felt or conscious impulses which can be described by one or more of the eight "values" above. Furthermore, the goal or purpose of human action is to enhance one or more of the eight "values". In other words, when Lasswell used the phrases "toward which" and "from which" in the first quote, he combined goals (toward which) with motives (from which). And by calling goals and motives "values" he accented the subjective quality of those interests "from which" and "toward which" humans act. Perceived interests can be thought to combine variously these eight ingredients.

Lasswell's helpful list: does not require us to presume that the concept "interests" implies only simple, greedy impulses. Both altruism and avarice find positions on this list. We often make judgments about people based on our sense of just how all eight ingredients combine in their behavior.

Notice that this discussion is about "perceived" interests. Are perceived interests always "real" interests? What are "real" interests? Answers surely depend on the nature of the person or group, and there is as great a variety of groups as there are perceptions of interests.

CAUSE AND EFFECT

But how do the "taxonomic levels of historical experience" [ID] Lasswell's "value categories"  relate to one another in the dynamic process of "causing" history? Are economies the result of certain ways of thinking? Is it the other way around? Are government actions controlled by economic considerations? Does geography determine economies? Are there no "disinterested" or "bi-partisan" actions in history? First we might want to give brief attention to a ubiquitous but seldom strictly considered concept = causation.

Important events have complex "causes" and often curious "effects" (results). For example, Aristotle defined four different sorts of cause in every process of change or becoming =

The relationship between cause and effect has provided the occasion for much fascinating philosophical dispute. John Stuart Mill said, "The cause then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions positive and negative taken together: the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows". Without getting too far out on the philosophical limb, without choking on the word "invariably", the  historian can still find ways to organize thinking about cause and effect, to reconstruct the complex chain of multiple (and always chronologically preceding) causes that feed into a defined result [TXT]. Remember: causes must precede an effect, but not everything that precedes an effect can be considered its cause. Still, we are often interested in circumstances surrounding an event. The complex web of conditions that cause change, that feed into an event, or result in defined outcomes is the very stuff of historical thought. Judgments about the relative force of various "causes" call for a most delicate touch.

Having considered the taxonomy of historical experience and
the issue of perceived interests and
causation,
it is time to hop to the discussion of
"Dozen Categories of Human Grouping"

 

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