Weber State College Comment, April 1989. Page 6 4 “As individuals are freed from social constraints they have to exercise many more choices. They 4 are supplied with more alternatives without the saving, and often salving, guidance of necessity.” REE Oars ee) <on SINR The “disinvention” of society by Michael Toth Professor of Sociology hroughout history certain unspoken rules of society have guided behavior, but the evolution of modern-day culture has all but eliminated those guidelines, and the result could well be the “disinvention” of our society. Those guidelines—what sociologists call social necessity—have, in effect, told people how to behave. The rules were often unwritten, seldom thought of, and never challenged, yet they formed the basic structure within which societies functioned. Today, however, these forces are in serious decline in the post-industrial West, and their loss is beginning to show. We live in a world that has been altered in fundamental and irrevocable ways by modern technology and social science. Confronted with many difficult issues about how we should conduct ourselves, contemporary society is faced with a new and puzzling problem — that of reinventing those fundamental rules. Sex roles provide an excellent example. Sex roles fete Le Sex roles were once almost entirely rooted in human physiology. Early in human history a sex-linked division of labor emerged. For example, given their capacity for endurance, females were often assigned tasks of carrying heavy objects, while males utilized their upper body strength for throwing or leveraging. Additionally, the almost constant pregnancy or lactation in adult females in early societies led toward their overall care of young children, while the absence of any biological connection to reproduction beyond the brief act of impregnation led males toward tasks, such as hunting and warfare, which required movement away from the domestic scene. There are a large number of similar sexlinked differences, both obvious and subtle. In situations where life was often nasty, mean, brutish and short, any differential advantages given by sexual biology in meeting the demands of the physical environment were fully utilized in order to survive. Things changed, quite radically and in a relatively brief amount of time, with the great transition of the Industrial Revolution. These changes in the way humans worked and lived imposed a whole new set of requirements upon males and females, some of which were congruent with their physical capacities, many which were not. Biological characteristics of sex were still significant in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Upper body strength, for example, was a real advantage for a steam locomotive fireman who might shovel as many as 20 tons of coal during his daily run; rapid and precise hand and eye coordination was a distinct advantage for a seamstress or a manual worker on a small parts assembly line. But the very success of the Industrial — Revolution and the technology which re- ~ sulted has substantially diminished the relevance of suchrules based on biological ~ differences. Today a person does not need any particular sex-linked physical capacity to pilot an 85 ton airliner, to write a 7 computer program, or to manipulate many — large pieces of industrial equipment. Yet in the current post-industrial work place males and females are still dealt with in | ways that reflect the sex-role guidelines of 7 an industrial society. This success in eliminating the signifi- — cance of gender differences has fostered — the dilemmas of the post-industrial phase ¥ of human development. If what it means to be male or female is no longer dictated by ~ either the physical demands of the natural ~ environment or the instrumental demands of industrial invention, what then does it mean to be male or female? With such modern developments as en vitro fertilization and “surrogate wombs”, to say nothing of professional child care, females can now be distanced from their reproductive as well as their maternal roles, and with artificial insemination males can be even further removed from their already distant roles as fathers. Thus in the case of gender, we are no longer confronted by the necessity of having to behave in fixed, delineated ways. We are confronted instead with the needto — — ~ © — : ~ — — —