Revisit of Blogs Past. Looking for a Pebble on the Beach

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We offer a new commentary on the blog titled “A Pebble on the Beach. Answering the Critique”  posted August 21, 2007.

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The critique of hard science sociology was like a heavy wave hitting a beach. Everything gone except perhaps a pebble. I experienced it as a loss of faith, even though faith seems a contradiction of the scientific attitude. An incorrect presumption is a familiar scientific event. That the requirements of hard science can not be met should just be another fact. There it is. Soldier on.

But the impulse toward sociology includes a desire to make things better in the by and by. Choosing the positivist way is a turning from other paths. A directional decision now revealed to be a serious wrong turn

Two of the responses to a failed ideology: (1) In “When Prophesy Fails” (1956. Leon Festinger and others) the sect members expecting the end of the world shrugged when it didn’t and kept on believing. (2) But in “The God That Failed” (1949, Richard Crossman, Editor) intellectuals committed to the communist revolution finally saw its flaws in action and turned away. The choice: to stay or to go?

But go where? After the fall a large party of sociologists consciously opted for pure faith. The were identified as the politically correct. Since pure social objectivity was impossible why not organize the subject into sectors of preferred ideologies. The teaching now recognized as an act of indoctrination. This had been the submerged way before. What had been denied now became grossly obvious.

But this was not a change. The issue supposedly solved by the method of hard science—the determination of the universal social fact or at the least the conditional social fact—remained. Ideology, consensus, faith, culture, law, social organization are all part of the necessary understanding. And these all carry inextricable values

My motive is salvage. Look for me wandering the beach, searching for the saving pebble. That value and social fact are paired is a difficult limit to accept. The hope of resolution of social conflict by an accepted scientific fact is admittedly lost. I may be on a Don Quixote mission.

But it may be possible to follow the hard science line as best we can, always alert to the necessary bias and blindness that we can not help but introduce. An impossible task but worth the effort. Like the poet strives to say exactly what he/she means, we should strive to report exactly what we sense. That is to describe the game (the governing order), the actions and interactions including the patterns that have an unofficial quality–the short cuts, the edges, the sly and the sneaky, the fix in the situation. But in your scan avoid tampering—keep your own fix out.

Not easy. More. It is impossible. That is the wave. Sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious. Situations where your income and style of life are threatened, where the futures of your children may be in the balance, where the other in the scene poses an active physical and moral threat even at the biological level– these sentence you to a necessary bias.

Hard science confers an honorific. The lab coat, the clip board, glasses, a serious pensive look, absentmindedness—reassure that the result will be valid. The scientific workers–the best and brightest. The science cachet gone the work becomes another form of journalism and history—the method catch-can, partial, non-cumulative, popular. The rain coat supersedes the lab coat but still this is an honorable way in good company. The sociologist in addition has the extra fillip of his clear focus on the plural and brings over a scholarly tradition and a unique conceptual kit. The theories and data lose their connect with the scientific absolute but are still in the relative and continuing cultural life where, in actual practice, they have always been.

A lot of useful, even if imperfect work to do. A contribution still to be made.

One. Deep and continuing studies of special topics. I would include commercial worlds like diamonds, coal, manufacture of shoes, clothing. Illegal trade and actions as with psychotropic drugs, immigration. Collection of studies and books, news articles, visits to sites, interviews with participants and so on—an encyclopedic coverage with emphasis on social organization and order, and change trends. The emphasis has to shift from a pure law and order perspective to what is and has been happening. Critically useful work. Gives a base for policy decisions for anyone interested.

Two. Treating conceptual and theoretical models as events in themselves—not subject to test but treated as abstract objects that exist. These models must always be associated with classes of real events and situations that resemble the model. This is not unfamiliar. The nuclear family, the city, the second-hand market, the game, the crew in transportation, Utopian communities. And so on. Some models may have null cases—no consequences in practice yet–or might have a history of practice now finished, like ancient empires. The model is another kind of analogy. The constructing of models and the search for incidents does not require the scientific method. Yet it is can be very useful work in the study of the plural experience.

Three. Biographies of life and works of significant past workers in the field. An activity analogous to that of the literary critic. Very important work making the past more accessible to the present.

Four. Methods. Everyone working in the field has to constantly test flaws in logic, in the evaluation of ways of observing, acts of analysis, ways of describing. If we are to catch the unconscious bias this is where it might turn up. Some sociologists specialize in this kind of work. It is an important topic among philosophers.

Five. The study of negative spaces. The incomplete, the excluded, the unattended, the hidden. This again is where the biases reside. They are not always obvious. Important work but sometimes involves overkill and error in itself.

Are we downhearted?