Category: Social Theory

How good are the social science disciplines? – 3 Psychology

My overview of social sciences concludes with academic psychology.

Lay people suppose that psychologists study human motivation. If they did, we would know a lot more about modern people. Lay people want to know how their future-orientated outlook will take them through their lifetime. Unfortunately for them and for social science, decades ago academic psychology turned instead to studying lab rats, then fruit flies and, currently, brain scans. Confining itself to short term effects, psychology has been criticized for small sample sizes, statistically non-significant findings and non-replicability. Its switch to natural science might be okay if psychologists had given up trying to explain society. But they still try to. Developmental psychology inexplicably stops studying children when they reach some unspecified ‘adulthood.’ Modern people assume that we all grow and continue to learn throughout life. But psychologists can’t study this because they are averse to ‘roles’ because those things are created by society. This leads to the absurdity that children and youth are studied without society but then, suddenly and inexplicably, it’s okay for adults to relate to the people and associations of society! The public, like other social scientists, aren’t going to learn from psychology where lifelong motivations come from. Academic psychology isn’t ready to recognize social time either biographically for individuals or historically as societies change.

In clinical psychology, doctors and therapists have to categorize people’s problems under the current version of the DSM. This handbook’s distinctions don’t inspire confidence when former mental disorders vanish from newer editions of the DSM. Were older diagnoses wrong, or did society change and turn formerly abnormal mindsets into useful features of society? Over the decades we have lost the neurasthenic, the neurotic and the narcissistic. Psychology cannot tell us why its own concepts later become obsolete. Here is an academic study that fails when it faces the problem of time. Professional clinicians have to change historically and healthy human beings continue to grow over their lifetimes. Clearly psychology is unable to explain aspects of its own subject. For social scientists it’s no surprise that human beings cannot be understood simply by natural science; they are actually and irretrievably part of society!

Envy of this discipline is unlikely for anyone who wants to explain our collective social life.

Overall, my review of three disciplines shows none of them to be better than sociology. Political science, economics and psychology are all baffled by some aspect of their own subject. Practitioners in their fields work with concepts that are unknown to their academic counterparts.

So overall nothing in these social sciences looks impressively good. There are no grounds for complacency here. I want a sociology that is able to define ‘society’ and no doubt the other social sciences should improve theirs. The work will be hard but isn’t isn’t trying to really understand the world the most important thing we can do?

How good are the social science disciplines – 2 economics

My second social science is economics. Sociology is not alone in having deficiencies. Economics is another discipline which cannot explain its own subject matter and leaves non-academic researchers to use the most effective methods. The deeper question I am addressing in these comparisons is why the social sciences today haven’t got their act together.

Economists do correlations. They are good at crunching data. They have now taken away what sociologists used to do in stratification. Economists like Raj Chetty publish on upward mobility in America today. But this is done utterly without theory; it is no help to people who need conceptual explanations. Correlations at the individual unit size cannot explain the big changes in society.

The big picture economists’ have is of macro economics. They discuss central bank and government policies and look for measures of how the economy is doing. This is lively and interesting stuff. (See Krugman’s recent https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/20/opinion/monopsony-rigidity-and-the-wage-puzzle-wonkish.html ). But this whole area exists without such theory as micro economics provides and is conducted without any pretense to explain big questions of social change. This is not a new deficiency; economists have never been able to explain how economic growth happens. How the first Industrial Revolution happened remains a mystery despite the efforts of economic historians (See McCloskey). Today’s courses in micro and macro economics won’t tell you how the economies of today grow or fail to do so. One thing economists don’t seem able to do is explain their own subject.

In the meantime, people whose job requires them to study the economy look at ‘industries.’ Researchers in finance and business divide the economy into different sectors, knowing that industries operate under different conditions. Academic economics won’t let economists do this;  theoretically, its all one market and one economy. No theory exists of what an industry is or why industries should exist at all. To my mind, industries are probably created by sociological and demographic factors … and disciplines don’t like explanations from outside their own field!

So it turns out that sociologists don’t have to be envious of economists; they can’t answer the important questions in their field either.

How good are the social science disciplines?

This is the first of three posts I’m going to present comparing sociology with its rival social sciences. I’m arguing that, just because sociologists can’t define society and don’t believe that generations are real, they shouldn’t feel inferior to other social sciences. It turns out that those fields are silent about key features of their own subjects. And they remain silent when related fields use obviously important ideas that should be in their expertise.

The issue here is why social sciences today are all so deeply flawed.

Let’s start with politics.

At this moment of writing the buzz of political reporting can be summarized as “all things Trump.” This was not so previously and it will not be so again pretty soon. Will we be any wiser when things calm down? Does academic political science posses any theory that explains why political fervor pops up and disappears? Seen over the decades, politics never could. And as time passes it appears to have less and less to tell us. Studies of class, race and religious voting which were popular fifty years ago, and studied by sociologists, have largely disappeared – all without political science explaining why or knowing how they occurred in the first place. Society appears to have moved on. But are we any wiser about where voting behavior or activism comes from? Pollers take surveys and report public opinion but it’s bereft of all theory. Political science doesn’t claim to understand anything from one election cycle to the next.

Other social sciences, and the public generally, believe that it is political parties that rally people and the efforts of one party or another wins or loses elections. But political science has never liked party campaigning or the idea of party itself. Political parties are not part of any founding constitution and they are barely touched by political law. What would it take for political science to have an actual theory of how people vote? Do political parties lead or follow public opinion? And, in the end, how much does politics really matter in modern society? Do we even know? Academic political science clearly doesn’t! So sociologists have no reason to feel inferior to this field.

Gopnik versus Pinker: Sociology to the Rescue?

My thoughts on the recent critique of Pinker’s Enlightenment Now by  Gopnik (The Atlantic, April 2018) come in a number of stages. As a sociologist of modernity, I am aghast that psychology and philosophy know so little about modern sociology. It’s completely absent from both Pinker and Gopnik’s analyses even though life in society is clearly a central sociological problem.

Second, I’m sympathetic to the plight of people expected to live in the utterly masculine world of Enlightenment rationality outlined by Pinker. Gopnik does a great job of spelling out the kind of pressing questions any ‘bright young woman’ would ask about life that do not show up in the Enlightenment model.

But third, I am frustrated by the fact that my own professional has so little in print that can show both these non-sociologists where they have gone wrong. Why aren’t we doing a better job of showing the public the real sociology that holds modern life together and makes it attractive?

If Gopnik is right that women are acutely aware that ‘particular connections’ are needed, which surely means ‘love,’ why is she so sure that these can only be supplied by the ‘family, community, place and tradition’ of the past? Sociologists know this as Durkheim’s terrain. He said that solidarity was necessary for both individuals and society, and he felt sure that the only bonds that kept people together were those of the ‘mechanical’ kind found in communities. While this still pops up in odd places, sociologists rightly accept the Enlightenment view that society needs progress. Pinker does a good job of reminding us of what ‘life getting better’ means. One might think this is superfluous except that sociologists have lost sight of society’s progress and need to be reminded that they should be optimistic (Holmes, 2016).

The message that all the parties involved need to get is that modern society supplies great personal relationships and more. Modern people form deep and meaningful bonds in ways that have, inexplicably, not been theorized by previous social sciences. Attraction relationships give people love, caring and excitement. [This paragraph has been edited. Ask me if you want more details.] … People want their celebrity, star quality and excitement as part of growing up and their shared sociology lets young people reshape society. There is collectively progress going on which youth is influential in creating. Any analysis of modern society which omits this sociology has a huge blind spot which makes its analyses obsolete.

How then, can we correct what is missing in the false antithesis between Pinker and Gopnik? First, it is clear that Gopnik’s bright young woman would not want to lose this youthful excitement – which she would if she were forced to stay in a small-town world. She will want the chance to participate in her own generation, make the best possible choices and find the best location for making her own friends, lovers and career. Young people know this activity is crucial. Small towns don’t provide it and young people dream of moving to New York, LA, London and the great cosmopolitan cities where things are happening. Durkheim’s small towns ain’t doing it for modern people. Moreover, parents know this too; they support their children in moving away. They are happy to sacrifice in order to let their children be successful, even when this means being away from their children and grandchildren. Parents understand that this is the only way children will grow up creative and ultimately happy.

Gopnik underestimates people’s connectedness. Facetime and Hangouts, along with air travel, bring families together wherever they live. Parents don’t need traditional community, small towns and neighborhood living to be proud of their children and to enjoy being grandparents. When they want to be, adult children today seem very connected with their parents. In contrast, those who do not want to let their children go or cannot separate from their parents are likely to be considered candidates for counseling. Physical distance works for people because we don’t live in a Durkheimian world; today’s sociology provides people with satisfactions and the infrastructure of communication and travel keeps them close. It is urgent that social science catch up with this. People have long distance relationships and pride in their grandchildren; these are as strong and loving as anything in the past – and possibly purer by being less conflicted.

Modern life isn’t the direct child of the Enlightenment. Our history took us through a romantic revolution that gave us repertoires of attraction relationships and provided sociological arrangements that support these. A modern young woman in a small town does not need to worry that her life won’t have fulfilling relationships; this part of Gopnik’s account doesn’t seem to ring true. Young people expect hard work but they know it will be rewarded with achieved mutual attractions, the excitement of making one’s own way in the world, and the satisfaction of reshaping society along with one’s whole generation. A world confined to small towns and solidaristic communities cannot do this and, in my experience, few people lament the disappearance of the past because modern life offers so much more. Social science could help us all by making clear what is good about modern life and a big part of this challenge surely falls in the lap of sociologists.

The Sociologist in Despair

At university as an undergraduate, I thought that since the founding fathers Marx, Durkheim and Weber said nothing about sociologically important topics like marriage (the family), society being sociological (as distinct from just political-economic), and because it didn’t yet exist, the popular-culture-using generation … because of these absences, I entered this profession believing that it was my job to provide sociological bases for all these things.

I set to work. I studied the economic and social history that created modern society. I theorized and conceptualized, fitting pieces to together and throwing out ideas that didn’t fit. And finally, I had what I considered a worthwhile contribution to the sociology of society – I wanted to talk about all the stuff that was previously missing from our explanations.

But when I lifted my head up from my work and looked around I found that none of my topics appeared in sociology at all. The American Sociological Association* has no sections on society or on generations. Introductory textbooks have nothing constructive to say about wedding and marriage, generations as popular culture are absent, and nothing can be found suggesting that society as a whole is sociologically constructed.

From the absence of these topics in the profession, am I right to conclude that sociologists really aren’t interested in these questions? Do academics not want to listen to something new or to consider what has been left out of the profession? If so, it rather looks as though I have wasted my time. Today, the profession sends the message that my work is irrelevant and useless. Intellectually speaking, this means logically that my work deserves to go unpublished and unnoticed and I should despair. The current anti-Trump and anti-Brexit concerns do not explain sociology’s professional avoidance of love, generations and big sociology. These weren’t discussed under previous presidents or in earlier decades either.

It seems one must despair of sociology. I should add that my personal life and career are going fine; I’m a grandfather and employed at a university. My despair is logical and confined to intellectual endeavours to change social science. Apparently, I was wrong to think that sociology knew it needed improvement. On the contrary, the profession evidently doesn’t want to discuss its own deficits; it certainly presents no forums for doing so.

I’d like to be proven wrong. I hope we soon see throngs discussing new areas of sociological understanding. But at this moment the evidence of our profession makes for despair and, if enthusiasm for new learning ever arises, this seems a long time off in the future.

*The British Sociological Association has no streams on these topics either.