Holley Sociology

Goodbye to 2020 and the Trump Years

I’m not a specialist in politics, but 2020 is being characterized as the end of some highly political years, terminating in the departure of President Trump. Today (30^th December, 2020) BBC World News on APM Radio interviewed a couple of reporters on how they had been covering the news. To my disappointment, this whole discussion was dismally narrow – filled with serious misconceptions about politics and ignoring the most relevant facts about wider society. I thought to myself, social science hasn’t done a good job if this is how it is being presented by a leading news organization. Even as a non-specialist, I feel compelled to point out some ways that politics, an older part of society, can be better framed and understood more clearly.

Current events have again reminded me that the most relevant feature of politics is its evident long term decline. The political power of states has been in relative decline for centuries, as the economy and, later, our collective sociology have increased their own importance. The Trump years have simply made this decline more obvious. In this context, defining Trump as ‘populist’ and and his term in office as ‘a bid for power by a dangerous man’ misses the broader context of increasing irrelevance of the state. This analysis can be illustrated by recalling that his initial electoral claim to build a border wall amounted, in practice, to nothing and yet this didn’t hurt his support base. Trumpism is better understood as a desperate and narrowly party political effort to rally votes and stay in office by creating endless publicity stunts that entertained his known audience – those who ‘don’t care’ and feel ‘left out of progress.’ This demographic has been pretty clearly identified and is widely recognized. The narrowness of this gambit is easy to see.

Far from being a grab for state power, Trump’s rapid rise and fall reveals a pathetic and doomed effort to retain the appearance of the long vanished strong state. Anyone aware of history can see that the real mechanisms of progress today include the economy and, more so, our shared sociology. (I am aware that a few die hard political academics still cling to the quaint notion that politics is ‘society’s one and only expression of collective purpose.’ While this was plausible in Ancient Athens, most thinkers accept that modern society relies on its economy – and its sociology.)

So my dismay at hearing the BBC tell me that two reporters thought the Trump White House was a fun gig for reporters to cover was disappointingly narrow. It told me that journalism really doesn’t understand what is important. Twenty four hour coverage of elected leaders and, with a straight face, tirelessly reporting their mendacities and stunts was not a helpful contribution to public knowledge. It exaggerated the trivial and offered no understanding of either the limits of central government or the real sources of economic and social change. Actual governments today have to listen; all their lower branches – legislative, state, municipal, and civil service – have to reconcile multiple conflicting interests. The populace, rallied at intervals to become an electorate, doesn’t spend most of its time thinking politically – whatever the Twitter and news reports say. People correctly spend most of their time following other sources of information and entertainment. Better illustrations of men’s collective efforts in teams can be found in professional sports leagues, and go to video blogs if you want to discover new trends – you’ll find reports on consumables and personal relationships. These entertainments are where we find today’s the real ‘influencers.’ The occasional loud-mouthed bully who, for a few years, occupies some buildings of faded power is rightly seen as irrelevant, as evidenced by how quickly after an election both the population’s opposition to and support for a politician disappear.

After hearing reporters describe their political tunnel vision, what is most seriously disappointing is that, in fact, some very interesting social movements did arise, mostly in opposition to the Trump rhetoric and its implications. The #MeToo movement and Black Lives Matter had huge influence, not just in the US but world wide; these present challenges for all people to understand and respond to, including us social scientists. How nice it would have been to have a report on these, the unintended effects of the Trump movement. How much more practical it would have been for news organizations to send well-informed reporters to cover ordinary people’s protests and seek out what galvanized them into action.

Instead, what we got was narrow political coverage and this tells me that news reporting hasn’t caught up with how society has changed. The myth of state power lingers on, despite the evidence that ordinary people now make the crucial judgements about where society is going. Where are people expressing these critical desires and aspirations? The answer will take serious effort in studying people’s economic and sociological action. When will such valuable studies of society be undertaken and reported helpfully? We don’t know, but what the year 2020 has proved again is that the answers won’t be found in the press conferences and Tweets of one elected official.

Youth and the Covid Crisis

I enjoy postings and news items on youth because I learn from them and like commenting on them. Youth is fascinating to me, not for some particularistic concern, but because it illuminates so much about wider society. The sociology of young people reveals our most formative stage of life.

People who don’t care about youth usually dismiss all stages of the life course. In this superficial view, children are relegated to mere dependents, and all adults are regarded as independent grown ups. What this misses is the sociology that creates each new generation. In youth we can witness how individuals connect into relationships, and how these combine into one, shared society.

So when a single topic Tweet or blog describes youth, it opens a door into wider subject matter however narrowly it starts. For example, do university students involved in sex destroy the Covid lockdown? This seems like a narrow concern of the sexologist. But correctly understood, this question opens wider and wider circles of sociological events. For example, have present governments underestimated the significance of courtship for youth? Do the needs of teens necessarily destroy the interpersonal separation intended by lockdown? Does increasing evidence from the United States of partying at universities, and from the United Kingdom of raves involving thousands of people, show that, for young people, lockdown is unsustainable?

This health related policy of government isn’t being undermined by a simple ‘need for sex.’ The reasons are much wider. Government policy is facing the gravitational mass of large numbers of people in one phase of life, a time when sex is only one piece of involvement in relationships and learning about society. These formative years of youth present an entire demographic whose purpose is to meet and discover self and others. Is it reasonable to block these critical years of their essential purpose? Consider the long term consequences. An entire age cohort is being damaged during its formative years, and society is losing its potential future progress by damaging this generation. Do advisors to governments understand how they have failed particular sections of the community? Have they actually factored in the cost of injuring an entire demographic?

It is becoming increasingly clear that lockdown is unsustainable. One reason for this is clearly youth. How sad that policy discussions have not included the sociology of relationships. Countries that have locked-down their populations reveal ignorance of the needs of youth. Simultaneously, other sections of the community, such as the poor, have been ignored too. It is sad that sociological information has not been able to point the way to a better public policy in a crisis.

Coronavirus: Three Sociological Questions

The 2020 virus pandemic raises lots of scientific questions which I am in no position to comment on – no more than any other layperson. But as a sociologist, there are questions about people and organizations which trouble me. When this crisis is over, I want to know if these will be answered by social science. Here are the top three sociological questions on my list.

First, here’s an organizational question. High stress has been reported in workers in hospital Covid intensive care units. This has been described as traumatic and debilitating. There seems to me a sociological cause for this. Hospitals today are unfamiliar with high rates of mortality. Unlike in hospice care, doctors and nurses in these units are unable to discuss death and dying – with each other and with patients. The sociology here concerns the institution, its mission, and what discourse is professionally acceptable. To me, what is going on today looks like a return to what Bluebond-Langner (1978) called the “private worlds of the dying.” In hospitals with high death rates, staff, patients, and family members alike conceal from each other the impending deaths. I suspect this contributes a lot of stress to employees.

My second question concerns generations. Specifically, how have the politicians and policy makers, who have taken most countries into a harsh lockdown, affected young people? Before this virus took hold, there was already noticable feeling against the older generation. An example is the internet phrase OK Boomer, which is part of a rising criticism of older generations during the last decade. Coronavirus has added an intense and personal conflict between parents and their teen children. Awareness is rising generally that locking down friendships, separating girlfriends and boyfriends, and preventing wedding parties, for example, is hurting young people in what matters to them most. Interestingly, Sweden is one country where effort has been made to keep social interactions normal. Tentatively, some claims have been made in Sweden that normality will, in the long run, be better for human relationships. A BBC report by Maddy Savage, 24^th July 2020, quotes Nordenstedt as saying that Swedish “People are not as exhausted as they might be in other countries where the restrictions have been much wider and much stricter.” And economics professor, Karolina Ekholm, is quoted as saying that “There’s been less disruption for the generation now growing up – in terms of learning. That may produce benefits further down the line …” The future of generations is, to me, a sociological question which demands to be studied. What is remarkable, for this sociologist, is that nobody is currently advocating for young people’s relationship needs.

This leads to my third question, the language of social science. Shouldn’t sociologists be able to talk about personal relationships and explain why these are important? Sociologists know friendships, courtship, and associating at events are crucial; parents want these for their own children. But all public speakers fall into an inexplicable silence when it comes to explaining youth. Isn’t sociology what explains young people’s need for friendships, romances, and congregating at peer events? Educators talk about the harm that lockdown does when children are excluded from schools and universities. Economists possess language and data supported facts to show harm being done to national economies. The equivalent task for sociologists is to articulate young people’s need for personal relationships and advocate for this understanding in social policy. Professional silence during these harmful times seems to me inexplicable. Damage is being done to young people, yet no one is pointing out the possible long term effects for an entire younger generation.

Each of these areas gives social scientists something to contribute to ensure that, before the next crisis comes along, we can demonstrate the sociology within youth’s relationships, personal needs, and people’s employment in institutions.

How Students See the World: Inequality or What?

I’ve noticed that, when my students get the chance to write, they don’t focus on inequality, even though their professors understand this as ‘the dominant research paradigm in sociology’ (fabiorojas orgtheory.net April 28, 2020).

Recently, the topics freely chosen by undergraduate students got me thinking about this again. Asked for their own experiences of youth, students in a recent class chose to write about such topics as popular culture, consumer objects, strict parents versus more modern ones, and the transitions between phases of life such as between middle school, high school and college life. These should have given scope for identifying unfair and difficult aspects of their lives. But their papers really didn’t complain about anything they faced.

Those students who did talk about difficulties – for example having been forced to parent younger children, deal with the death or divorce of parents, or having very strict parents – saw these as factual realities which could be dealt with. Adapting to a different sequence of phases in their life, having foreign born parents, being first generation college, or having sports injuries, were all seen as conditions which could be overcome, balanced with their own personal needs, and understood as aspects of personal identity. Children of foreign parents or strict ones just saw this as an opportunity to possess both a foreign and an American identity, and to balance their own needs with the expectations of their parents. There wasn’t a problem here; nobody saw themselves as, in essence, different from other students. All the features they described were seen as the general pattern by which all people grow up.

Looking at these answers, I had to ask whether students were expressing their true feelings. Was it possible that my presence as the instructor was preventing them from complaining? Alternatively, are students generally suffering from some nation-wide ‘false consciousness’? Were they unable to discern the reality of the world around them or recognize the kind of suffering they are living under? These thoughts suggested a ‘hermeneutic’ problem here. How do people learn to understand the world correctly? But the complexity of any hermeneutic analysis is deciding on which side the misunderstanding lies. Which people need help here? Could it be that students are simply occupied with more important concerns than the inequalities that sociologists worry about? Are our students showing us that the real world has different priorities, things more important than the inequalities professional sociologists stress?

It seems certain that somebody is understanding the world incorrectly. But is it the students or their professors in the universities? The hermeneutic says that one of these two sides needs re-educating, but which one is it – the students in their papers or the sociologists in their professional thinking? Definitely, there is a problem here; in this case I cannot see how both sides of this can be right.

Health Care versus Society

The present corona virus crisis gives us lots to think about. Lessons will be learned when it is all over. But right now, why is there no discussion of the “lockdown” policy now used by most countries, including the ones I know best, the US and the UK?

What happens when we ask people to give up their ordinary lives? And is this really the best approach? In hindsight we may know the answer, but shouldn’t we be asking right now if this is really the way we want to go?

Different countries show us alternatives. Ordinary life is still going on in the streets of Singapore; the only people quarantined are those who test positive for the virus. The Netherlands keeps life’s sociology going by letting this virus run its course just as the seasonal flu does. Here are two countries that preserve the precious relationships that wrap around private life and make possible modern society.

So why have so many countries sacrificed social activities in the name of health? And why has questioning of this policy been unreported? Lockdown means putting everybody’s needs beneath those of hospitals. This is a truly weird reversal. The usual purpose of health care is to put people first and ask health care providers to help the sick. Lockdown reverses this logic. It asks all people, healthy and potentially sick alike, to give up their normal lives and rescue hospitals from an embarrassing flood of patients, who in reality need only minimal care.

How did the medical professionals around hospitals, win the policy battle? The university medical reports that turned Prime Minister Johnson around give us a clue. The medical profession’s own sense of prestige, I suggest, is opposed to turning the pinnacle of scientific medicine, the hospital, into what is essentially a medieval fever house. Waiting for patients’ fevers to pass, with a little oxygen to help breathing, adds nothing to a hospital in terms of science, research, grants, publications, professional prestige, and its reputation with the public. It seems to me that the corona virus threatens the hospitals with a return to medieval medicine – before there was science, pharmaceuticals, and technology.

Did America, the UK, and other countries throw their sociological lives into lockdown for this reason? And has the cost of suppressing every single person actually been measured? Let’s look at what is being destroyed here. Stripped away from everybody are their birthdays, weddings, funerals, entertainments, travel, education, examinations, admission to careers, working lives, businesses, the national economy and world trade. From this list of ill effects, those that are economic may be recognized first. But underlying these, and carrying their own hazards and losses, are what we should understand as the living web of sociology – people’s careers, creativity, physical and mental health, life plans, intimate relationships, and happiness in the long term. In a weird reversal, our nations prioritized the prestige of high tech medicine over the needs of ordinary people. And, in the end, will this lockdown prove to have been really necessary? Let’s hope that critical thinkers will look back at this moment in history and find ways for future societies to value their collective sociology.

Getting Your Theory Paper Published

As someone who works on theory myself and would love to have my own articles published, I was excited to read a recent Twitter thread by a journal reviewer who tells us how to correct common faults. Cite previous publications, help build theory, add only one or two new things, and include the empirical evidence that your ideas explain – these are some of the big do’s. This advice is practical, straight forward, and shows us how to give journal editors what they are looking for. So, maybe, all we have to do is follow the rules. But strangely, it seems that authors of papers keep repeating the errors; they start afresh, ignore past theory, are too complicated, and don’t include empirical evidence. Something strange is clearly bedeviling sociological theory.

Could the persistent failures of theory authors be telling us that educated sociologists cannot keep it simple? Why can’t they build on past sociologists? Is there a deeper problem here? Are sociologists wrongly trained or is it just that existing theory is impossible to build on? To me, this situation looks like it needs a ‘reverse hermeneutic’ analysis.

‘Building on past work,’ I twist the ideas of Habermas (1970) and Giddens (1982) around and run the hermeneutic in the opposite direction. Sociologists should not assume that the clients of any institution, in this case the publisher of a journal, are simply stubborn and resistant to learning. ‘Using the empirical evidence’ that writers get things wrong, we can draw a reverse inference. Perhaps theorists, and sociologists generally, cannot get from current theory what they really need. Maybe popular ‘ignorance’ is telling us that current theory, even when added to bit by bit, isn’t delivering for them? Isn’t the real problem that aspiring sociologists need practical explanations of society and how its people connect with it? If adding ‘itty bitty’ to theory is itself the problem, because it doesn’t weave society together conceptually, this may explain why every new article attempts to create, de novo, what is currently absent from theory.

I sympathize with these struggling theorists. I too want to work in a discipline that can define its main macro concept, society. I’m working on the answer myself but I would love to discover that someone else has done the hard work and put together a connected theory. What I am sure of is that this won’t happen by adding a few bite-sized concepts to existing theorists. So, while the reviewer offers us practical advice for getting published, my bet is that authors will continue to submit awkward, complex and non-incremental theory manuscripts. Sociologists evidently want something better from their theory; let’s hope we can soon explain society’s big questions in a conceptually connected way. On that day, authors, journal editors, reviewers, and practical sociologists will all be happier.

Are Sociologists People?

When they are dead they are. Even persons who are men and Marxists can speak touchingly about a deceased colleague’s personal qualities. Consider a recent newsletter obituary in a sociology sub-field. On Twitter, the serious challenges of work-life balance are presented through the sociological head, and the private side remains voiceless.

The rest of the time, what should we consider sociologists to be? Are they personal life deficient mouthpieces spouting structural concepts? Sociology speakers cannot talk about love; it’s non-admissible in our professional vocabulary. What other essential features of life are prohibited when sociologists talk?

For a sociologist, does it matter who you kiss? Does it make any difference who you commit to marrying, how you bring up your children, and what jobs you won’t take because they’re not where you want to live? Do people ‘compose a life,’ evaluate opportunities, and have long term goals? A visitor from another planet reading our published sociology would conclude that these personal activities do not exist or are not relevant to our collective life.

At what cost to our profession do we ignore private life? Is this the reason we leave non-marriage, fertility, and stratification to other professions – economists, demographers, and IQ hunters, for example? Ultimately, is this why sociologists cannot define society? Without love, without marriage, and without society, how much of sociology’s subject matter is actually left?

It is paradoxical that a profession which prides itself on helping others cannot talk about what matters most in people’s lives. Sociology’s vocabulary gap is a huge problem. Are sociologists going to wake up to this any time soon? Or will they go on forever ignoring, what Harriet Martineau declared a hundred and fifty years ago was the core of ‘morals and manners,’ namely what people care about most but talk about least – which is what is in their hearts? Let’s create a sociology that starts with love and then moves on to the hopes and fears about these relationships. The woman founder of sociological methods long ago stated that this is where we should begin. Can we afford to wait another century before this work of reconceptualizing sociology gets started?

Watching “The Bachelor” as a Sociologist

Recently, I heard a mother apologetically admit that, with her tween daughter, she watches “The Bachelor.” Is this something that needs forgiveness because it’s embarrassing? However involving, isn’t this just trash television and watching it a waste of time? Educated people often condemn popular culture, even if they indulge in it privately. I think this is due to people knowing of no justifying reason for it. But looking closer at “The Bachelor,” isn’t this show really about relationship sociology?

Photo Credit: “The Bachelor” ABC Television

The sociology here is romance; it’s about finding your life partner – the end of the show is expected to be a marriage proposal! Seen as evaluating potential suitors, “The Bachelor” discusses an essential life skill. The contestants make revealing choices – which partner to pick and how to deploy their own courtship. Audiences get involved by evaluating the evaluators. Like all reality television, the show is contrived and largely scripted. So it’s not giving us real life. But isn’t any kind of judging people something bad?

In response, I would remind us that the choices here aren’t moral universals or political discrimination. The decisions are profoundly personal; they involve identifying the right person, meaning ‘right for me, personally.’ Half this process requires us to learn about ourselves. Making this romantic decision involves discovering what we ourselves want and imaginatively projecting who would be compatible with us. There is a profound question behind a marriage proposal – “Could I spend the rest of my life with this person?”

Watching “The Bachelor” may be a great way of improving life’s most significant skill – picking the right person to live with. In my view, this is a great way to spend mother-daughter bonding time. And sociologists should be proud of these two watching the show together!

Do Sociologists Know what “Ghosting” is?

I teach a course called “Sociology of Romance” but I wasn’t familiar with the term “ghosting” until my students explained it to me. Class discussion quickly made clear that ending relationships by sudden non-communication was deplored by students; no one would speak to defend it. But for me that raised layers of problems about how sociologists explain courtship behavior.

Why do students continue to use a mechanism that makes them feel bad? A lot of easy explanations fall away when we look at this closely. For example, calling this ‘youth culture’ needs a lot of caveats because courtship changes every decade or so. It isn’t the same culture, indeed different generations find each other incomprehensible. Older people note today’s absence of dating and are suspicious of a “hookup culture” where there is no dinner and a movie Undergraduates today can’t believe older singles “dated people they didn’t know.” Each generation finds its own courtship familiar and acceptable while that of others is baffling.

Two further points on how we study this. First, the scant academic studies that do appear miss important aspects. Early discussions of the hookup dating scene missed the intense “talking to someone” by messaging and “Facebook stalking” which was going on. Young people were still getting to know each other, it was just being done though social media.

Second, the terminology sociologists use is inconsistent and doesn’t fit with broader explanations of society. Was “rating and dating” a tradition or a practice? Is today’s “hookup” best described as a culture, a script, an intimate tie, a fad, or even a social movement? Is a “group chat” something we should study as a formal organization? The difficulty of conceptualizing courtship suggests a broader problem. Perhaps sociologists aren’t much interested in romantic relationships because they aren’t prestigious in the profession. Ghosting cannot influence society; it just isn’t part of the conceptual framework. Sociologists generally dismiss private relationships because they are ephemeral, full of rapidly obsolete slang, and lack any sustained way to influence society. ‘Structural’ explanations have more prestige. So, with courtship outside sociology’s knowledge base, sociologists aren’t able to ‘know’ about dating in a serious professional and theoretical way.

But what if we can show that courtship matters? Does the way we date shape later life choices and indirectly create a cohort-wide understanding? Perhaps the speed with which courtship practices appear, along with universally understood rules, is a model of broader change in society? In this case, ghosting, and things like it, reveal a lot about society’s future.

Just being a professor and listening to undergraduates doesn’t change our profession’s concepts. Personally, we can acquire commonsense knowledge from many sources – as participants in dating, being parents and friends of young people, consuming media entertainment, and working as teachers in a classroom. But none of this theorizes ghosting or adds it to sociology’s professional knowledge. Without concepts, theories and cases that explain its importance, personal familiarity with current dating leaves the discipline of sociology without professionally “knowing” what ghosting is. Without concepts and a theoretical framework, none of us can use it in our writing, our lectures or in our critical assessments of the readings we assign. Hookups continue to be outside how we explain society.

In a recent paper I have tried to fill some conceptual gaps about courtship. I present this at ASA 2019 in New York in August. Please come. You will be most welcome and, with your help, we may all soon have courtship ghosting as part of sociology’s professional knowledge. Then we will truly be able to say that sociologists “understand” ghosting and we will all be able to write, teach and increase public understanding of it.

China, Desire and Progress

People’s Republic of Desire is Hao Wu’s recent film on fan gift giving to live-streamers in China. Often poor, young people are shown spending their scant pay on gifts to online stars like Shen Man, who talks to her fans, or Big Li, a married but vigorously assertive exemplar of masculinity. Behind this fan worship are ideals of gender; young people in China now have a vast media apparatus with which to express their ideals and desires – for feminine beauty, manly assertiveness, and the personal enjoyment of fame.

Shen Man and a Diagram of the YY Entertainment Network

Behind this new industry are owners and investors; they make the big money in this live-streaming industry. The stars are shown struggling, with competition to be number one and with their relationships. Shen Man tries to stay focused because she has to support her parents and their family. And Big Li’s relationship with his manager wife is stressful for both. But beyond the money and stardom, other things are going on. Still authoritarian, the government is letting new desires be expressed; China is tolerating public fandom by millions. It is these fans who are the focus of this film. Millions of ordinary people are now deciding for themselves what they admire and who they want to see. They show this in a serious way, backed by their own precious money. Within themselves there is now space for considering desires and externally these can now be freely shown. This is recognizably progress.

While resisting the protests in Hong Kong, China’s authoritarian government is opening itself up to private life. Hao Wu shows how millions of people can now indulge personal desires and spend their money impecuniously. With government no longer campaigning for people to adopt serious purposes, the desires of private life are now tolerated. Is this because it distracts people from political protest? Or has the Chinese Communist Party glimpsed a deeper, more future-oriented possibility? Are private life ‘vices’ going to result in ‘public benefits’? Is Hao Wu’s film showing us China at its Mandeville moment?

Seen sociologically, private desires could be what is most needed to push society into its next phase. Future personal relationships may transform manners, lead people to expect romantic courtship, and result in a personally timed lifecourse. Does People’s Republic of Desire show China embracing intimate attractions and generational enthusiasms? Are we seeing a future private identity that will become a source of social change? Fantasizing about a star or hero, joining an informal association, and interfacing with the economy by consumption may preview for us what China’s future holds – a more sociological society.