Please read with an American Accent
If a farmer puts ten sheep in a field, they do not distribute themselves evenly or randomly over the area. During the day they crop most parts of the field but they move around it together as a group. A flock of sheep seems to be a social entity of some kind, not merely an ‘aggregation’. Without being a sheep it is difficult to say what the object of this behavior is. The quantity of food available to the sheep is not increased by foraging as a flock rather than individually. The behavior does not help to protect the members against predators. So far as one can tell, the sheep are not achieving anything collectively that they could not achieve individually, except satisfying an apparent predisposition for physical closeness. If a flock of sheep is ‘society’, its organization is minimal and the utility of the organization is not apparent to an outside observer.
Humans are clearly gregarious, but they do not associate with one another in ways that embrace all the members of the species in a particular area. Smaller groups are formed which include some members and exclude others. People like to be close to those who are similar to themselves in certain respects, but the preference to be distant from those who are different; human gregariousness is quite severely limited in its scope. In a world, humans discriminate. They prefer association with others of the same occupation, socioeconomic class or status, religion, language, nationality, race, color, and so on. This is the source of some of the most serious problems facing human societies. Some limited associations are much more important in this respect than others. If the tool-and-die makers of a city form an exclusive recreational association, it creates few, if any, social problems, but if white residents form white-only residential areas or school districts that is a different matter. Man’s limited gregariousness is not, in itself, a social problem, but certain kinds of discrimination are sources of conflict and hostility that are dysfunctional for the collectivity. The study of discrimination, its kinds, its consequences, and its remedies when the consequences are dysfunctional, is a major interest of social scientists.
