When Sociology Disappears
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
At Elmhurst College, I was a sociology major in the fifties. The department consisted of one teacher, Dr. Mueller, who had previously been dean of the college. We regarded him as pretty old, old-fashioned, and curmudgeonly; in the fifties, he continued to drive his Model-A to campus. His lectures were from old, unchanged lecture notes, and he never entertained a question from a student in class. Nevertheless, we sociology majors respected him immensely, took him with great seriousness, and learned a ton from him. I was in his class on racism the day the court ruling on Brown vs. Topeka came down and he, uncharacteristically, did a little jig of joy in class. I have no doubt that it was Dr. Mueller who set me on my way of mature understanding, for he understood that sociology, from its French inception, never purported to be an objective study, but had from the outset a religious tilt toward justice and equality, a tilt that intended to displace God with the good society (Durkheim). Thus his teaching could be in part to give us tools; but it was also an eager advocacy for a better society, exactly as the French founders had intended. I was so taken with sociology that upon graduation from college, I seriously considered graduate study of sociology rather than theology. And I am gratified to report that my son, John, has his doctorate in sociology and is a long-time faculty member in sociology at Skidmore College.
I graduated from Eden Seminary, one of three seminaries of the Evangelical and Reformed Church. The three seminaries had been dubbed Mission House as “the pietistic seminary,” Lancaster was the “liturgical seminary,” and Eden as “the sociological seminary.” That latter accent was due to some great extent to Richard Niebuhr who as dean of the seminary had introduced sociological study into the curriculum, a study continued by my teachers Elmer Arndt and Allen Miller.
The particular accent of my comment on sociology is best and most accessibly articulated in the little book, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1965). (See also John Serle, The Construction of Social Reality, 1995). The thesis of Berger and Luckmann is that sustained social interaction over time generates and then maintains a particular life-world that is transmitted through the words, gestures, and actions of members of the community. Such a life-world is never a given, but is the on-going work of construction that comes to exclude and deny alternative life-worlds and insists upon the absolute ultimacy of a particular life-world. An easy case in point is the way in which a life world of racism and white supremacy is sustained and maintained through a myriad of affirmations, assertions, and intimidations. Berger and Luckmann can readily assert:
It should be clear from the foregoing that the statement that man produces himself in no way implies some sort of Promethean vision of the solitary self. Man’s self-production is always, and of necessity, a social enterprise. Men together produce a human environment, with the totality of its socio-cultural and psychological formations (51).
The accent is upon the generative work of the entire community in sustaining a life world. We grow up accepting the life-world into which we are born. It is a moment of great importance when it dawns on one that there are other worlds and that a different world is chooseable beyond the one we had taken for granted. Berger and Luckmann observe that a “near-total transformation” is possible when the individual “switches worlds” (156-157). The process includes the recognition that our worlds are to some great extent human constructs; because our life-worlds are human constructions, they can be deconstructed and reconstructed in alternative forms. Thus the tilt of sociology, from its inception, has been attentive to the deconstruction and construction of forms of society, and the reconstruction of societies that can be more humane.
This comment of mine is evoked by the fact that my friend, Conrad, teaches sociology at a school where the sociology department consists of two faculty members, Conrad and his colleague. The department is under threat for budgetary reasons, because the department has a dearth of majors that is a measure of the financial support it can receive. Conrad’s circumstance, moreover, is not an uncommon one. In very many schools, the social sciences, not unlike liberal arts, are under duress for lack of students and lack of majors. That lack is the result of students (and their parents) becoming aware that the job market for such majors is most difficult. When the focus of education is on “the job market,” as distinct from personal growth and formation or the nurture of good citizens, majors in the humanities and in the social sciences will always suffer a deficit.
Conrad’s circumstance has led me to reflect on the merits of a program in sociology and what its loss would entail. Positively, a sociology department affirms that the life world is humanly constructed and so is pliable for great change and improvement. Negatively, it is the rejection of any notion that our life world is a given absolute, permanent and beyond question. The loss of sociology and its elemental awareness means the forfeiture of any prospect for change and amendment of the world. By default we may thus arrive at the conclusion that our life world is given beyond change. That it is absolute and beyond change means that it guarantees and limits what futures are available. Thus the persistent voices of various “isms”—racism, sexism, classism– prefer to think that the “isms” are beyond critique or modification.
Thus the loss of sociological imagination readily leads to the absolutizing of a particular life world as a given beyond critique. And “beyond critique” is what every ism craves and covets:
-white supremacy assures permanent social stratification,
-patriarchy assures male primacy on all matters of consequence,
-class significations of haves and have-nots assure the functioning of an unjust economy.
All such arrangements are said to be permanent and beyond challenge. And just to be sure, the verification of God is readily invoked to bless and substantiate such claims. This verification by God, moreover, requires the affirmation of a God who is “beyond change” and who is unaffected by the pain, suffering, and vagaries of the world.
The outcome of such reductionism is that the world is given. It has always been this way, and it must always be this way. And we are left with a life world that excludes elemental critical thinking and that draws a protective curtain around arrangements of privilege and advantage amid the “fate” of the left out and the left behind. We are left with only technical questions, so that the college majors that draw students in great numbers are the majors that yield good jobs in a technological market. The outcome is an educational world in which the accent is upon competence, with an absence of critical thinking that may raise questions about what competencies are most important and what kinds of productivity are acceptable in a good society.
Of course, the great discussion of a technological society freed from critical questions is that of Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (1964). Ellul judges that,
Technique has only one principle: efficient ordering (p. 110).
That in turn means a prefect competence can be safely value-free:
On another plane, the distinction between peaceful industry and military industry is no longer possible. Every industry, every technique, however humane its intention, has military value…Economics demands, in effect, an increasing productivity; it is impossible to accept the nonproducers into the body social—the loafers; the coupon-clippers, the social misfits, and the saboteurs—none of these has any place. The police must develop methods to put these useless consumers to work. The problem is the same in a capitalist state (where the Communist is the saboteur) and in a Communist state where the saboteur is the internationalist in the pay of capitalism (110-111).
Ellul reiterates the points made by W. E. Moore concerning human relationships in a technological society:
1. Human relations must be restricted to the technical demands of their vocational role. They must not become deep relations involving profound ideas, tendencies, and preoccupations.
2. Human relations must be universal; …Human relations must not have an extra-technical basis.
3. The third characteristic of human relations is rationality.
4. These relations must be impersonal, established not on the basis of subjective choice and for personal reasons but on the basis of their optimum validity (pp. 354-355).
The outcome is a “closed world” in which substantive human questions are unrecognized or disregarded.
It is exactly the world of unfettered productivity that such technical reasoning will yield. That world insists that questions of value, meaning, purpose, or relationships can be scuttled in the name of competence. Thus the either/or of sociological or technological (to put it most simply) is the question of whether the world is made or given. If it is given, it is an abiding absolute as it is. If it is made, then the continuing human work is to make and unmake and remake the world with the best outcomes for human life and all creaturely life.
It is for good reason that the church has a deep stake in the prospering of sociology, for the church is committed to the claim that the creator God is at work making, unmaking, and remaking the world:
See now that I, even I, am he;
There is no God beside me.
I kill and I make alive;
I wound and I heal;
and no one can deliver from my hand (Deuteronomy 32:39).
The Lord kills and brings to life;
he brings down to Sheol and raises up.
The Lord makes poor and makes rich;
He brings low, he also exalts.
He raises up from the dust;
He lifts the needy from the ash heap,
to make them sit with princes
and inherit a seat of honor (I Samuel 2:7-8).
I form light and create darkness,
I make weal and create woe;
I the Lord do all these things (Isaiah 45:7).
He has brought down the powerful from their thrones
and lifted up the lowly;
he has filled the hungry with good things,
and sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:52-53).
The thrust of these affirmations is to insist that the world we inhabit is penultimate, a work of the rule of God. This conviction became the organizing principle of the Book of Jeremiah who lived at the break-point of Israel’s history that faced the undoing of its most treasured institutions. These words become a Leitmotif for the book:
See, today I appoint you over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to pull down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant (Jeremiah 1:10; see 18:7-10, 31:28, 45:4).
As a result, in earlier days when we sang the sober realities of our faith, Charles Wesley could pen these lines:
Before Jehovah’s awful throne,*
Ye nations bow with sacred joy;
Know that the Lord is God alone;
He can create, and he destroy.
God the creator can make and unmake and remake in the same way that a potter can refashion clay into a new form (see Jeremiah 18:1-11, 19:1-13). In such a process, the world is not a given. It is a construction that depends upon the attentiveness of the creator.
It is the work of sociology to insist that, not unlike the creator God, creative, generative human agents have as their life work the making, unmaking, and remaking of the life world for the sake of a prospering human community in which no one is rejected for reasons of incompetence.
The church meets regularly to acknowledge that the creator God, embodied in Jesus of Nazareth, continues to be at work making and unmaking and remaking the world. Indeed the work of Jesus in his ministry was about the reality of remaking the world as he performed his great transformative power:
The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them (Luke 7:22).
In the course of his world-making, he was also dismantling the world of exploitative injustice. Just as his adversaries perceived so well and so quickly, he was unmaking their world of great power and privilege, so that they sought to silence and eliminate him. It is a huge theological claim at the center of our faith to see that God can and does make, unmake, and remake worlds. It is a derivative claim from that affirmation that human agents also have a great capacity to make, unmake, and remake worlds. Thus when Jesus empowers his disciples to “cure the sick,” he also authorized them to declare that “the Kingdom of God has come near to you” (Luke 10:9). The declaration of the arrival of the Kingdom of God is the recognition of a new world being generated by God, but being performed by his disciples. His disciples are at the work of world-making that inescapably involves the dismissal of the old world in which some are “naturally” assigned positions of advantage and preference.
The church has a stake in the prospering of departments of sociology that are not preoccupied with “bean counting” but that are about world-making and world-unmaking. We may be glad for such scholarship that, from its outset, has seen that our life world and its viability are entrusted to our hands. We may hope that the department in which Conrad lives, along with many other such programs, will receive the financial support that is essential to their survival and wellbeing. The loss of such study leaves college students ill-equipped for the critical work of world making that must always again be enacted. Along with adequate support for sociology departments, my hope for you, dear reader, is that you are, every day, at the good work of world making and unmaking. Such work is empowered by our singing, by our praying, and in our preaching. The world is not fixed, settled, or closed. It is kept open, by the will of God, for fresh waves of wellbeing, for the shalom of the city and all of its inhabitants (see Jeremiah 29:7).
*In Wesley’s usage “awful” is to be understood as “filled with awe.”
