I have been using a book published in 1996 by C. Allen Carter for much of what I know about Burke's ideas (citation below). I hope his assessment fairly characterizes Burke's thought. After studying Carter, I discovered that his book has not been reviewed by any text indexed in the JSTOR database, which suggests that it made very little impact on the scholarly community. Either Burke does not interest scholars, or Carter's work does not. One fact that suggests that Carter might not have a complete perspective on Burke is that Barbara Foley described Burke as having two kinds of scapegoat, which Carter does not mention. Carter himself admits that some of the categories he ascribes to Burke (the religious dimension, for example) are not ones that Burke himself explicitly named. So this book is more Carter's synthesis than pure Burke. Carter himself complained that Burke's theories were not systematic, but a bit scattered. Notwithstanding, I press on.
As I mentioned in a previous post (December 2021), Burke saw the language system as a system of moral negatives. I reframed that as the use of language to enact mechanisms within the group to reward pro-social behavior and punish selfish behavior.
According to Carter, Burke saw a language system as striving toward its own perfection, through a dialectic of working through contradictions. To describe this completion, Burke dusted off a term used by Aristotle, entelechy. In English, that word was most commonly used in the seventeenth century, referring to the perfection of anything, but most especially the perfection of the soul. For Burke, it is a perfection of a system of moral rules within a society. "In order to ensure the cooperation of the tribe, a system of commandments develops and is promulgated; it is expanded to cover extensive areas of experience and, eventually, assumes a life of its own" (Carter, 5).
As one can see from this quote, Burke associates a moral system with cooperation within a human social group, which in multilevel selection theory is translated into group selection mechanisms. As Sober and Wilson have pointed out (citation below), any social system that has the effect of rewarding cooperation can be the basis of group selection, so human cultures can vary widely in their belief systems and how they operate.
Burke makes the good point that once a moral system is adopted by the group, it assumes a life of its own. Members of the status hierarchy within the group compete to see who can more thoroughly create a consistent system of rules. The rules originally start as group selection mechanisms, but because the group adopts a culture of belief, leaders of the group compete with each other to add to the rules to build a consistent system.
My point is that Burke sees the language system and its moral rules as a thing in and of itself, out of the control of the people who enforce it. From the point of view of the psychology of multilevel selection, it is the factions within the group that are competing to implement ever more elaborate and complete versions of the cultural system that was originally implemented to promote group cooperation and suppress individual natural selection.
To give an example of entelechy, free market capitalism has been generally very successful in driving the expansion of the global economy, but in its pure form, its entelechy, it creates pathological situations of massive poverty at the bottom of the society and a small circle of people who control vast wealth at the top. A capitalist economic order works well when it is balanced with countervailing policies, such as the New Deal's tax and spend policies, but it becomes dysfunctional when it achieves its perfection, its entelechy. An ideology that supports a social order may have originally succeeded because it fostered group cooperation but then becomes unstable when it reaches its logical conclusion.
The Chinese Cultural Revolution might be seen as another example of within-group entelechy. Around 1900, there was a strong desire among many Chinese to throw off the military and economic hegemony of the western nations. The Communist Party gained what might be called its mandate from heaven when it sent the western powers packing. One can argue that after the dominance of the Communist Party was secure, Mao started the Cultural Revolution to keep power for himself personally and for his faction within the Communist Party. The Cultural Revolution was the ideological perfection of the Communist Party, but continual revolution was dysfunctional and unstable.
This competition among the leaders of a social group toward the logical completion of one cultural system should be contrasted with actions taken when groups represented by two different cultural value systems compete against each other. Each cultural system can become intolerant of cultural diversity within its own sphere as it fights for dominance against its rival.
For example, the Thirty Years War was in part a fight between adherents of Catholicism and Protestantism. Both Galileo's heliocentricism and the mathematics of infinitesimals were attacked by Catholic authorities because they challenged the ideological discipline of the Catholic side. Likewise, the Red Scare of the 1950s in the United States was part of an effort to enforce ideological discipline in the fight between Capitalism and Communism. This competition between cultural systems is different from the competition within a cultural system that can drive entelechy.
Burke may have been blending these two phenomena: within-group competition for ideological dominance and between-group competition between two different ideological systems. I consider the second, between-group competition, to be the basis for what Burke calls dialectical change (see later blog entries). Burke (according to Carter) seemed to think that within-group entelechy advanced through dialectical progression, which suggests that he did not differentiate between the two.
Burke seems to have been heavily influenced by the history of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition when he was developing his theories. One of the common motifs of the Christian New Testament is that the Jewish priestly caste at the time of Christ had purportedly set up so many rules for religious observance, they had lost sight of what God would have considered most important. There is a common Christian argument that the community should follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of the law. If you follow complicated rules about observing the sabbath but you do not love your neighbor as yourself, you have failed. In this way, Christianity can be seen as a critical framework for breaking down status hierarchies based on complex rules for religious observance, a critical stance against pathological entelechy.
To bring this back to Multilevel Selection Theory, a set of cultural norms helps form a group for mutual aid and benefit, but status hierarchies will form within the group. Those hierarchies elaborate on the mechanisms the group uses for punishing selfish behavior. At some point, the complex rules can cease to serve the well-being of the group and its members. I disagree with Burke that the perfection of the rules is built into the nature of language itself. Instead, I think it is built into the social psychology of group dynamics. We humans just happen to use language to create complex social groups, so it appears that it is in the nature of language. Instead, it goes deeper.
Carter, C. Allen. Kenneth Burke and the Scapegoat Process. U. of Oklahoma Press, 1996.
Sober, Elliott and David Sloan Wilson. Unto others: the evolution and psychology of unselfish behavior. Harvard University Press, 1998.
