Paul,

Your post on top-down emergence makes sense to me. I basically agree with this analysis from top to bottom and back up again! This takes my understanding of the possibilities of emergence for social science to new levels. Thanks.

To cycle back to earlier discussions, so much of social science today is preoccupied with correcting for endogeneity and selection bias so that linear causal models can be computed. But, if what you are saying is a good way to look at social phenomena, then this major statistical industry that has emerged is at risk of producing a lot of wasted energy. My goodness, this is a very disturbing thought! I have feared this might be case for some time, even as I now put the finishing touches on an analysis that corrects for selection bias.

If top-down emergence is critical to understanding how social formations come into being and persist, then we have essentially an alternative to functionalism, whether it is proposed by Durkheim, Parsons or Merton. (I read the piece of Durkheim for last week but then overslept--don't tell anyone!) We also then have an alternative for talking about the relationship of structure to agency. Anthony Giddens’ theory of structuration implies a dynamic relationship between individuals who choose what to do which then collectively produce the structures of society that condition and limit those choices in the future. Yet, top-down emergence provides perhaps a more effective way of parsing how unintended consequences of individual actions get propagated and reproduced to take on structural form that become constitutive of what individuals get to do with the next go round. (This, by the way, raises the possibility that not just Drkheim was a emergence theorist but so was Karl Marx.)

I have talked previously about how gender is an example of this dynamic. But more recently I have been trying to understand how race operates this way. Neither gender nor race relations can be understood as in linear causal terms, but more as self-fulfilling prophecies that thrive on this sort of top-down emergence loopiness. We recreate these artificial distinctions even as we ostensibly work to change them in part because they still circulate as master narratives organizing and signaling how to interpret behavior at the individual level. As a result, the top-down, outside observed distinctions get internalized and feed off the originating differences so that these distinctions get recreated, if in new forms, over and over.

In this way, we can have racism without racists. People who use race as an organizing principle can end up making racial distinctions that, while even against their intentions, recreate differences that people derive meaning from and which then lead people to take to be "real" and which lead them to behave accordingly. Top-down emergence enables race narratives to make themselves real to the point that people can not ignore them because so many other people act according to them.

Racial classification need not be racial profiling, but it is often at risk of quickly becoming that. The next thing you know is that you and others who are classifying by race are making distinctions based on stereotypes rather than seeing people from a particular group in other terms or as individuals. To the extent that racial classification becomes a durable part of how we organize society, people will then behave in ways that account for that, thereby reproducing the role of race as a persistent force in social relations. Top-down emergence becomes another way of talking about Durkheim's social facts or fact-things, that have a hybrid material and symbolic existence (as the reading for last week effectively suggested).

This leads to the debate over "rational racism," something that surfaced in Barak Obama's most eloquent and profound speech here in Philadelphia at the Constitution Center this past week. Is it racist to profile young black men and cross the street to the other side because statistics indicate that would improve your probability of not being mugged? Well, this, of course, is irrational since the odds are incredibly low either way, regardless of the race of the men. Is it racist to live in the suburbs away from black families to protect your investment in housing? This is economically rational and might not be intentionally racist, but it is classifying by race in ways that becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. We end up with racism without racists, recreating racial distinction and dooming us all to a highly racially and economically divided society. It ends up being the kind of society that would condemn Rev. Jeremiah Wright for bemoaning the injustice of such a situation even if he talked about it as a product of top-down emergence.