behaviour informed by mutual recognition of shared intentions and beliefs. Precise definitions of important concepts are not, luckily, a prerequisite of successful explanation in either the natural or the human sciences; the findings quite often come first and the conceptual refinements later. But misunderstandings which are only about words should be avoided if possible; the important point about roles is that they are at the same time performed and occupied, however confusing a mixture of metaphors that may seem at first sight.
In its most familiar sense a role is, as you will hardly need reminding, a part played by an actor: ‘All the world’s a stage,’ says Jacques in As You Like It, ‘And all the men and women merely players.’ So we can all stand back from our various roles and see ourselves performing as sales executives, lieutenant-colonels, godparents, voters, housewives, mafiosi, university students, or whatever. But there is another aspect to it. If we really were ‘merely’ players, we could sign up for our parts as we pleased, and if we didn’t like the script we could turn it down. But we aren’t and we can’t. Take what is for many people their most important role: as wage- or salary-earners, we are paid for the work we do in accordance with rules which are not of our own making. We may be able to change from one employer to another, and some of us may not need to work for our living at all. But we don’t decide the legal and customary framework within which we and our employers operate any more than churchgoers decide the rituals and doctrines of the religion to which they belong or electors decide the constitution under which they vote their politicians into office. Real-life roles, in other words, are governed by rules which the people who occupy and perform them have no choice but to take as given – even if they would like, and accordingly sometimes try, to change them.
What’s more, these rules are of a special kind. They determine who is in a position to influence who else’s social behaviour because of the roles which they respectively occupy. As organisms with minds belonging to a common culture, we can take from each other whatever ideas, tastes, manners or fashions attract us through a process of individual transmission from mind to mind, and although we may be more strongly disposed to do so if the person learned from or imitated – the ‘role-model’ – is of high prestige or manifest authority, it is still a matter of individual choice. You don’t, unless you’re in a uniform of some kind, have to wear the clothes you’re wearing any more than you have to whistle your favourite tune or read your favourite book. As incumbents and performers of roles belonging to a common society, however, we relate to each other in accordance with institutional rules which place us relative to each other in a social space defined by the boundaries within which the rules apply. Since people can have several different roles, and since boundaries in social space are neither fixed nor impenetrable, the head of the CIA may be a Soviet agent, the President of Pepsi-Cola (Europe) may be an American citizen, and the King of Naples may be a Frenchman appointed by the Emperor in Paris. But within their common groups, communities, institutions and societies, employers and workers, landlords and tenants, officers and soldiers, ministers and officials, chiefs and commoners, lords and vassals, priests and parishioners, professors and students, all behave towards each other in ways which depend on the practices which the rules prescribe for both parties to the relationship. That is what is involved in saying that roles are places to be occupied within a rule-governed system (which all institutions are, or they would fall apart) as well as parts to be played (which can, as on the stage, be interpreted by different actors in different ways).
But we must be careful not to flatter ourselves. Social behaviour isn’t unique to human societies. Patterned interaction between individuals over extended periods of time is a characteristic of anthropoid primates going back millions of years. Admittedly, that’s not the same as what goes on at the golf club or the opera house or the family funeral or the school board meeting. But there are other social animals besides ourselves well able to perceive each other as acquaintance or stranger, friend or foe, owner or intruder, and behave accordingly. And when the smart chimps in the Gombe rainforest start to learn from each other how to make, use and reuse tools and, what’s more, to do so within different and distinguishable stylistic traditions, it doesn’t sound very convincing to talk about the meaningfulness of interaction between mothers and children, or teachers and pupils, as something uniquely human. Yes, we all have our fully-formed languages and they don’t: the linguistic ability of any normal three-year-old human infant is enormously greater than that of even the most carefully trained full-grown chimpanzee. But you don’t have to have language to have culture. Language makes us more social in many ways – more actively social, more self-consciously social, more intensively social, and more effectively social. But we were social already.
Then is our sociability all in our genes? That depends on how you interpret the ‘all’. Many hundreds of thousands of years of natural selection have brought it about that all human beings are born with a set of shared inborn propensities, instincts and capacities of which sociability is one. But along with sociability comes aggression, too, and the ability to bully, cheat and deceive. Hatred as well as affection, betrayal as well as loyalty, and shame as well as gratitude all go back long before the evolution of language. Altruistic and selfish behaviour are everywhere found together and the existence of both is fully explicable, thanks to Darwin and his twentieth-century successors, from within the theory of natural selection. The difference is the enormously greater variation in patterns of social behaviour among human beings – much greater than can plausibly be accounted for in terms of natural selection alone. Take relations between men and women. It is through natural selection that we procreate sexually, with all the consequences for our behaviour which follow. It is also through natural selection that men differ from women in some aspects of psychology as well as physique. But how much that still leaves to be explained! The different forms and degrees of subordination of women to men (or sometimes vice versa), the conditions under which women come to occupy and perform political roles, the success of some and failure of other movements for female emancipation, the range of rules of marriage, descent and co-residence, and the diversity of manners, mores, and attitudes surrounding both heterosexual and homosexual relationships are impossible to account for entirely in biological terms. Yet they are equally impossible to account for on the assumption that biology can tell us nothing about them. In this as in every aspect of our social relationships we are the people we are, behaving towards one another as we do, as the outcome of a continuous interaction between heredity and environment. Some patterns of behaviour are universal: all human societies have gossip and play, punishment and retaliation, exchange and the division of labour.2 But out of that common inheritance from the long millennia of the Pleistocene, there continue to evolve new and different patterns of social behaviour that succeed each other in an open-ended sequence which is impossible to predict. All we can do is wait for them to happen and then, with the benefit of hindsight, explain them as best we can.
The best way to summarize the process by which it all comes about is the phrase in which Darwin summarized his fundamental insight about evolution: ‘descent with modification’. Because, through no fault of Darwin’s own, a lot of fallacious racist nonsense was for a time preached in the name of ‘Social Darwinism’, many sociologists feel uncomfortable about referring to him in a sociological as opposed to a strictly biological context. But there is nothing for them or anyone else to be alarmed at in the notion of ‘descent with modification’. At first glance, indeed, it might be said to look like just another way of putting what we already know. It’s hardly new to point out that since the proverbial Dawn of Mankind human beings and their cultures and societies have been reproducing themselves in forms not identical with their predecessors. But what Darwin saw was that changes of this kind, including the evolution of social behaviour itself, can be explained without reference to an antecedent grand design in the mind of God or anybody else. As he put it in one of his notebooks, ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.’3 Darwin himself couldn’t know just how right he was, because he couldn’t know what molecular biologists now know about the genetic code and the way in which DNA passes down the generations from parents to children. But he was the first person fully to grasp that for the process of ‘descent with modification’ to come about, two and only two independent conditions need to be fulfilled. First, the basic ingredients of the object of study