Invisible Crisis of Contemporary Society

Reconstructing Sociology's Fundamental Assumptions

Bernard S Phillips, Louis C. Johnston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317257394
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Is there a growing gap in today's world between cultural aspirations and their fulfillment, a gap that is increasing social problems of all kinds? If so, what forces are producing that gap? How can these forces be changed? To answer these questions, Phillips and Johnston employ a very broad approach to the scientific method, drawing evidence from a wide variety of data and sources, including sociologists, psychologists, political scientists, historians, philosophers, educators, psychiatrists, and novelists. They find substantial evidence for a widening gap, suggesting an invisible crisis throughout contemporary society. They also find substantial evidence that a simplistic and static metaphysical stance or worldview is largely responsible for that gap, and that an alternative worldview can work to close that gap.

PART I

Introduction

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour

Rains from the sky, a meteoric shower

Of facts …

They lie unquestioned, uncombined.

Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill

Is daily spun, but there exists no loom

To weave into fabric.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay

Social Science and Metaphysics

Al Qaeda’s assault on the American people on September 11, 2001, accompanied by increasing concerns over the deadly nature of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction, has dramatically increased a sense of insecurity and fear for the future throughout the world. Martin Rees, England’s Astronomer Royal and a professor at Cambridge University, has examined such problems in Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning. Rees claimed that “The ‘downside’ from twenty-first century [biological and chemical] technology could be graver and more intractable than the threat of nuclear devastation that we have faced for decades” (2003: vii). Yet we should not minimize nuclear threats. As we move into the twenty-first century the “club” of nations with nuclear capability will, in all probability, continue to expand along with the nuclear capabilities of terrorist groups. At the same time, there appears to be no corresponding expansion of the ability to understand and control whatever forces are making for an increasingly dangerous world.

At this time in the twenty-first century we appear to be losing a race between biophysical technologies that are unleashing ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction and social science technologies for controlling the use of those weapons. Some would argue that our problems in this century are nothing really new, and that there is no need to be frightened by “prophets of doom and gloom.” For the human race has managed, somehow, to overcome many earlier threats to its continuing existence. This was dramatized by Thornton Wilder in his play, “The Skin of Our Teeth,” referring to the many very narrow escapes throughout human history. Yet science has taught us that what has occurred in the past yields no guarantee as to what will occur in the future. The accurate prediction of future events must be based not on commonsense convictions as to the repetition of phenomena but on scientific understanding. Without such understanding we continue to live in a dream world of unrealistic optimism if we assume that once again we will escape disaster by the skin of our teeth. All the while that we continue to fiddle and avoid confronting the realistic problems we face, Rome is burning, yet our understanding of what is happening to us and what we can do about it remains drastically limited.

Why do we appear to be losing this race between forces that will yield destruction and forces for achieving understanding? Is it inevitable that the former will overtake the latter? Does our basic problem lie with the biophysical scientist? With the social scientist? With human nature? Or does it lie to a large extent—as we believe—with our fundamental assumptions or paradigm, that is, our metaphysical stance as to the nature of reality? In other words, are we to a large extent the victims of our own worldview or Weltanschauung, which provides a foundation for all of our behavior as individuals and societies from one moment to the next, granting the existence of other forces as well? From this perspective, the solution to our contemporary problems would require not merely limited changes in contemporary society but fundamental changes in every single one of our institutions along with corresponding changes in the individual’s patterns of thought, feeling and action.

Suppose, for example, that our present metaphysical stance or worldview as to the fundamental nature of reality builds on the idea that human behavior is not nearly as complex as it actually is. And since our metaphysical assumptions are the basis for our epistemology or methods for discovering the nature of reality, we would then expect that our approach to the social sciences has been far too simplistic. For example, we would not be surprised if social scientists proceeded to divide up the pie of human behavior into distinct pieces to be investigated by anthropologists, economists, historians, political scientists, psychologists and sociologists who generally fail to communicate their findings to one another despite scientific ideals calling for such communication. That would be an example of a metaphysical assumption or worldview as to the simplistic nature of human behavior trumping scientific ideals calling for openness to the full range of phenomena relevant to a given problem. This is assuming that any given problem is sufficiently complex so as to require that we bring to bear on it the range of social science knowledge.

This is in fact what appears to have actually occurred. The situation of a lack of integrated understanding of human behavior is far worse than most of us imagine, all apparently based on an oversimplified worldview or metaphysical stance. For example, there are no less than forty-four distinct Sections—and counting—of the American Sociological Association, with only limited communication across these Sections. But the situation is even worse than this. The five-volume Encyclopedia of Sociology (Borgatta and Montgomery, 2000) lists 397 specialized topics within sociology, and once again the overall situation appears to be one of limited communication across these specialized fields. The result is that sociological understanding—and understanding within the social sciences in general—is based on bits and pieces of knowledge that have not been pulled together so as to provide the comprehensiveness essential to penetrate the complexity of human behavior. This leaves us all relatively helpless in the face of threatening problems such as terrorism. Successes in the far simpler realms of physical and biological phenomena appear to have influenced social scientists to see human behavior in much the same way. And the resulting failure of social scientists to make much headway is not traced back to their simplistic assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality—that is, their worldview or metaphysical stance—which make such headway almost impossible.

Just as there is specialization with limited communication throughout the social sciences, so is there specialization with limited communication dividing all academic disciplines as well as applied fields. Specialization, when it is accompanied by communication among specialists so as not to lose the forest for the trees, can be a most useful procedure. But specialization without such communication can easily yield partial knowledge that fails to address adequately the problem at hand. As the saying goes, a little learning can be a dangerous thing. Particularly important is the separation between philosophy, which is much concerned with metaphysics or worldviews, and the social sciences. William James, one of the founders of the philosophy of pragmatism, put forward his view of the importance of philosophy for all of us, quoting from an essay by G. K. Chesterton:

There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general to fight an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy (1907/1995: 1).

James went on to claim that, within the new philosophy of pragmatism, “Science and metaphysics would come much nearer together, would in fact work absolutely hand in hand” (20). His view of metaphysics was shared by the original founder of pragmatism, Charles Peirce. Peirce claimed that “metaphysics, even bad metaphysics, really rests on observations, whether consciously or not,” contradicting “the common opinion … that metaphysics … is intrinsically beyond the reach of human cognition” (1898/1955: 310–311). Even today the “common opinion” among social scientists is that metaphysics, and philosophy in general, is much like angels dancing on the head of a pin, and that the scientific revolution over the past centuries was achieved by rejecting philosophical “speculation” and substituting concrete evidence for untested ideas. Yet this narrow view of the nature of the scientific method ignores the fundamental role of metaphysical assumptions in shaping how scientists—and everyone else—go about their work. As illustrated above, when we assume that human behavior is no more complex than physical or biological phenomena, the result is our present bits and pieces of un-integrated knowledge, which fail to yield substantial understanding of human behavior and fail to provide a basis for solving problems. To illustrate further, such a simplistic assumption appears to have yielded throughout history what Robert Merton has called “the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action” (1936; see chapter 3). As one of a great many examples, Southern sheriffs using cattle prods and police dogs on civil rights demonstrators did not anticipate the consequence that televised footage of their behavior would help to create a moral outcry that influenced the passage of civil rights legislation. Those sheriffs had adopted an oversimplified view of their behavior, failing to allow for the impact of television.

Apparently, an understanding of our metaphysical stance or worldview is incredibly powerful in yielding insights into our current problems. For this one aspect of our worldview, our assumptions about the simplicity or complexity of human behavior, yields a profound critique of almost every one of the studies in the social sciences that has ever been undertaken. For those very studies, based as they are on a narrow worldview or metaphysical stance, yield partial information, and there is little awareness of this limitation. And in turn that partial information can be a dangerous thing when it comes to using it in efforts to solve the full range of our problems, whether large-scale problems or personal problems. This has to do with the efforts of professionals like politicians, educators, social workers, criminologists and psychotherapists. It also has to do with the understandings employed by the rest of us, including journalists, business people, those in the arts, biophysical scientists, engineers, doctors and nurses, lawyers, and everyone else.

Yet how are we to uncover the nature of our worldview, given the overriding importance of our doing so at this time in history? For example, should we turn to the academic philosophers who have been writing about metaphysics for many years? Karl Mannheim, a sociologist who attempted to penetrate the nature of our worldview, has this to say in an essay he wrote, “On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung”:

Is it possible to determine the global outlook of an epoch in an objective, scientific fashion? Or are all characterizations of such a global outlook necessarily empty, gratuitous speculations? … theoretical philosophy is neither the creator nor the principal vehicle of the Weltanschauung of an epoch; it is merely only one of the channels through which a global factor … manifests itself…. If, on the other hand, we define Weltanschauung as something a-theoretical with philosophy merely as one of its manifestations, and not the only one, we can widen our field of cultural studies … our search for a synthesis will then be in a position to encompass every single cultural field. The plastic arts, music, costumes, mores and customs, rituals, the tempo of living, expressive gestures and demeanour—all these no less than theoretical communications will become a decipherable language, adumbrating the underlying unitary whole of Weltanschauung (1952: 9, 13–14).

Following Mannheim’s argument, philosophers do not have the answers on the nature of our worldview or metaphysical stance, granting their concern with this issue. For it takes very broad studies of “every single cultural field” to uncover assumptions which underlie and shape our entire way of life. Perhaps, then, we should turn to social scientists, who have indeed investigated all of these phenomena. Yet here again we come up against a brick wall. As we have noted, social scientists have shied away from efforts to understand something as broad as a worldview or metaphysical stance. Given their oversimplified understanding of human behavior, they have divided it up into literally thousands of watertight compartments. And the result is that almost all we have are what Edna St. Vincent Millay has called “a meteoric shower of facts” which remain largely unrelated to one another. It would take an alternative worldview that fully recognizes human complexity to begin to link those pieces to one another, a worldview that has yet to be understood and employed.

Our pursuit of the fundamental assumptions guiding sociologists and others should not neglect the work of Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science whose The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) has been having an enormous influence not only on the social sciences but also throughout the academic world up to the present time. His concept of “paradigm” has many meanings, yet one of them points to the importance of the basic assumptions that underlie a given science and that must be challenged by an alternative paradigm if indeed that science is to undergo a revolution. Kuhn saw such revolutions as “changes of world view” and not merely the substitution of one theory for another, suggesting that this process might be extended to basic changes in culture or society as well. Kuhn’s idea here—to be elaborated in chapter 3—is that a basic change requires a new set of fundamental assumptions (or paradigm) which promises to resolve the problems or contradictions within the former assumptions (or paradigm). The widespread attraction of his book can, then, be partially explained as deriving from the interest of academicians in a theory of change as well as their interest in uncovering basic assumptions. Our own rethinking of sociology’s paradigmatic assumptions involves not just the raising up of assumptions to full view. It also involves the presentation of alternative assumptions which promise to resolve contradictions within the previous ones. And it also points toward basic changes in the scientific method along with basic changes in society, since those assumptions are by no means limited to those of us in the academic world.

The Web and Part/Whole Approach to the Scientific Method

There is indeed a way to begin a journey that employs a scientific method for understanding human behavior along with a worldview that confronts the complexity involved. Sociologists need not give up on the possibility of fulfilling the Enlightenment dream of Auguste Comte. The approach we shall adopt builds, first and foremost, on the incredible potential of the human being. Given the range of problems that we humans have not yet been able to solve, and given their threatening nature, it is easy to lose sight of that potential and to adopt a pessimistic view of our future. Our potential is based very largely on our complex language, which sharply distinguishes us from all other forms of life. It is language which twentieth-century research has discovered to be absolutely central to an understanding of human behavior. It is language which has been the fundamental basis for the development of human civilization. It is language that will continue to be the basis for our further development. It is language which is our most powerful tool for solving problems. And it is language which ushered in the creation of our second most powerful problem-solving tool—the scientific method—which has been much of the basis for the industrial revolution and the process of modernization over the past four centuries. In this book we shall focus on both language and the scientific method.

It was the eighteenth-century Enlightenment era which, based on scientific achievements in the seventeenth century, developed the optimism about the possibilities of the human being which became much of the foundation for the development of the social sciences. That optimism and faith in the scientific method influenced Auguste Comte in the nineteenth century to develop his vision of sociology as a new and wide-ranging “science of society.” And it also motivated classical sociologists like Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Simmel to carry that vision much further, proceeding far more systematically and empirically. It is a combination of the breadth of classical sociology—coupled with the breadth of some modern sociologists together with the specialized achievements of contemporary sociology—which is much of the basis for the present approach.

Two twentieth-century sociologists in particular have influenced our own orientation: C. Wright Mills and Alvin W. Gouldner. Although we shall examine their contributions in chapters 6 and 2, respectively, an introduction to their work is in order. Despite Mills’s short life—from 1916 to 1962—and his preference to work alone with no following, his The Sociological Imagination (1959) was rated in a 1997 survey of the members of the International Sociological Association as the second most influential book for sociologists published during the entire twentieth century (Phillips, 2004). It preceded works by Merton, Berger and Luckman, Bourdieu, Elias, Habermas, Parsons, and Goffman. It was in that book that Mills developed his image of the breadth of perspective required to penetrate the depths of human behavior:

The sociological imagination … is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate featur...