Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another: Book Review
Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another, London: Arrow Books, 2024.
This is a book about the way humans behave, but more particularly about the possibility that our behaviour — or at least significant aspects of it — might have “natural” laws, that there could be a physics of society.
Packed with information, ordered in close, coherent arguments, this book needs to be read slowly. I admired it, and I’ll remember many of the observations and arguments I encountered. Oddly, though, the title just didn’t seem right to me. “Critical mass” is — dictionary definition — “the minimum amount, size, or number of people, resources, or matter required to start, sustain, or trigger a significant change, chain reaction, or self-sustaining venture” (Merriam Webster). But this book is hardly ever concerned with quantities, and although there is a quiet ongoing interest in social change in general, it does not focus on any particular change, and so does not even ask what such a “trigger” might be in any specific instance. There isn’t really very much about one thing leading to another either.
What this study does not do — in contrast with a more familiar kind of sociology — is to ask the subjects what they think. It leaves individual minds, e.g., conscious choices, out of the equation. Rather than assuming that people decide, as individuals, how they will behave, it assumes that much of their behaviour is effectively “built-in,” not conscious — or not under conscious control. Some examples include patterns people follow — spontaneously — when walking down the street, attending a sporting event, driving, voting, buying and selling stock — circumstances in which people are interacting with one another without necessarily being aware of it. It suggested to me, as a reader, the kind of study we human beings make about other species — perhaps especially those whose social patterns are, to us, their notable characteristics, such as birds or bees.
A reader is effectively asked to frame an object of study that includes her and the people she knows or has known, and at the same time to step back from them far enough to see it through the “lens” that science requires — close observation, measurement, experiment and verification: she excludes any individual views, including her own, as irrelevant. The underlying question concerns how well the approach “works”: can we find patterns, explain past events, avoid future dangers? For me, and I suspect for many readers, the book effectively imagines or projects or invents a science from existing data: the results of specific experiments that have taken this perspective.
No doubt there are other readers whose encounters with contemporary physics lead them to sometimes wonder whether particles behave a bit like people — bumping into one another, responding in one of a finite number of various possible ways, changing charge and spin in ways that are at best statistically predictable. Particles do not inspire sympathy or empathy. In fact the thought of people as particles gains traction quite steadily in the course of the book. But Ball traces the core idea, namely that people behave in ways that follow natural, possibly discoverable laws – back to the 17th century, well before the advent of particle physics. The diversity of evidence, of sources, is daunting, and implies that the idea of human behaviour as a phenomenon detached from conscious control is by no means new.
If the title “Critical Mass” doesn’t seem to quite get at the central concern of the book, perhaps “Towards a Physics of Society” might serve. Is the prospect alarming? reassuring? Ball is a scientist able to see science as cognitive discipline with both advantages and limitations. In presenting us with evidence of such a science, he invites a reflection on science as a whole, implying its potential for startling insights, solutions to known problems and anticipation of others. But any science finally confronts its own underlying humanity: even a science of society doesn’t guarantee peace among us.